Chapter 246: Please Come In

Richard had been to the outer thoroughfare of Flower Moon Street once before with Vincent.

Number seventeen sat right at the bend at the very end of the lane, marked by a faded wooden signboard.

A single eye was painted on the timber, beneath which ran a line of script: "Madam Marie, Medium."

A flight of stone steps led down beneath the sign.

During his visit last year, a black cat's incarnation had been curled up on these very steps. It had stared at him for quite some time, long enough to send a chill creeping up the back of his neck.

Today, the stone steps were empty.

Richard stopped at the bottom of the flight.

The door beneath the signboard was nothing like the wooden doors belonging to any other shop along Flower Moon Street.

Its brass panel was polished to a mirror finish, reflecting the stone steps underfoot.

Yet as he stood before the threshold, the brass reflected the entire street behind him, capturing everything except his own reflection.

Richard slowed his breathing.

Embedded right in the center of the brass panel was a short phrase: "Please Come In."

Richard stared at those words for a long moment.

"Please Come In," yet the door offered nowhere for a person to actually enter.

It lacked a keyhole, a handle, or even a seam. The entire door was sealed tight.

Was he supposed to smash his way inside?

He extended his Spirit Vision over the surface, only to find it as utterly indecipherable as Hecate's Ebony Box.

That wasn't particularly surprising. Richard drew his hand back.

Gazing at the brass panel that refused to reflect him, a thought stirred in his mind.

He could divine this door.

The moment the thought surfaced, the Silver Ring against his chest turned ice-cold.

Richard immediately snuffed the thought out.

The Silver Ring was warning him that this approach was a dead end.

However, he clearly remembered a particular annotation in Madam Marie's handwritten copybook.

"You cannot peer to the bottom of a well, but you can see your own hand reaching down into it.

If you cannot question the subject directly, question around yourself."

Taking a roundabout path—an indirect divination.

He wouldn't question the door. He would question himself.

Richard took a step back, moving out of the street's direct line of sight.

He rested his Copper Dish on his knee, pinched a small amount of Starfall Sand, and sprinkled it in a circle along the rim.

He had thought the first question through thoroughly in his mind.

"In what capacity should I pass through this door?"

The subject was "I."

He grabbed a handful of Runestones and cast them into the Copper Dish.

The stones rolled across the metal a few times before settling.

Richard leaned over to read them.

The stone closest to the center was a double circle: Relationship.

Right beside it sat a crescent: Change and Growth.

Up to this point, the meaning tilted toward "identity" and "relationship."

Meanwhile, the hammer—Action—had rolled straight out of the Copper Dish and onto the stone steps.

Following right behind it was a spiral: Repetition.

Richard stared at those two stones lying outside the dish for a while, slowly coming to understand.

Action was out.

Prying, pushing, or forcing his way through with ether had never been part of the answer.

Repetition was out as well.

Endlessly pondering the door's structure or repeatedly testing its pivot points would only make it harder to enter.

What remained at the center of the dish was relationship, identity.

Richard gathered the Runestones without casting a second handful.

The meaning was already clear enough.

He stood up, put the Copper Dish away, and stepped back in front of the brass panel.

Only now did [Speculation] truly exert its power.

The collective human consciousness behind the veil, along with that phrase: "The recession of the mysterious..."

Things on the mystical side existed exactly as you defined them.

This door was no different.

If he defined it as a locked door, his own definition would seal it shut.

She was the host who had said "Please Come In," which made him the invited guest.

Richard let go of every bit of resistance in his mind.

He reached out and pressed his palm against the spot on the brass panel where a door handle ought to be.

The brass softened, slowly morphing into a door handle.

Richard pressed the handle down, pulled the door open, and stepped inside.

Inside, the entire room was filled with mirrors.

Full-length mirrors, wall mirrors, hand mirrors, round mirrors—they layered the room in endless reflections, yet not a single one showed a human figure.

Richard stood in the middle of the room, absent from every mirror around him.

An upright piano stood against the wall, its lid closed and covered in a thin layer of dust.

Further inside, two high-backed armchairs were arranged before a marble fireplace, separated by a small tea table draped in a lace cloth.

A woman sat in one of the armchairs. She wasn't in the mirrors either.

Richard looked over at her.

Her facial contours were clear; her eyebrows, eyes, nose, and lips were all right there.

[Perception] gave him excellent eyesight, yet he simply couldn't see her features distinctly.

"Sit."

The woman spoke.

Richard sat down across the tea table and brought out his leather case.

"Madam Marie."

He offered the book forward with both hands.

"I've come to return the book and to offer my thanks. This volume was a tremendous help to me."

Madam Marie took the book.

She raised a hand and flicked her fingers toward a corner of the room.

An automaton standing in the corner straightened up.

It had wooden joints and a porcelain-white face entirely devoid of features.

Lifting a tray, it began to brew tea.

The entire process unfolded without the slightest sound.

Looking at the cup of tea placed before him, a thought surfaced in Richard's mind.

There wasn't a single living person in this mansion even to brew tea; everything relied on a faceless wooden automaton.

Just how lonely did someone have to be to keep a house in this condition?

He didn't voice the thought aloud.

"Drink your tea." Madam Marie picked up her own cup and took a sip.

Richard also lifted his teacup and took a drink.

This was probably the finest tea he had ever tasted in his life.

If Phillips ever found out about it, he would likely figure out some way to beg for a sample.

The two of them drank their tea for a short while, chatting casually.

Madam Marie asked about his family, and Richard answered each question.

The woman listened, nodding occasionally. The atmosphere was remarkably gentle.

An elderly lady sitting in her own home, brewing tea and making pleasant small talk with a visiting youth.

But Richard didn't want to make small talk forever. "Your home is... very quiet."

"Quiet is a good thing," Madam Marie said, setting her teacup down.

"The longer I work in this trade, the more I feel that living alone carries its own distinct peace."

Richard didn't reply.

Old Biggs had said the exact same words to him at the autopsy department in Briston.

Master and apprentice—they even spoke identical phrases.

"That book of yours."

Madam Marie saw through his thoughts and pulled the handwritten copybook from the corner of the tea table.

"Have you finished reading it?"

"I have," Richard replied.

"I flipped through the first three chapters quickly, but I gnawed through the later chapters slowly, just as Mr. Bigelow instructed."

Madam Marie opened the book.

She turned to a certain section and paused.

At the bottom of that page, Madam Marie had personally blacked out the footer with ink.

"When you reached this chapter, you couldn't understand it, could you?" she asked.

"I couldn't," Richard admitted honestly.

"Everywhere else, I understood every single word, and putting them together gave me a clear meaning.

Only in this chapter—I recognized every word, but once put together, I had no idea what it was talking about."

"That's because you aren't there yet."

Madam Marie turned the page to face him. "Today, I will explain it to you."

Richard sat up straight.

"This chapter speaks of how to deal with an entity stronger than yourself without being rewritten by it."

"Last night, you ran into something much stronger than yourself, didn't you?" Madam Marie asked suddenly.

Richard held his teacup.

"...I did."

"A massive disturbance broke out in the city. I shut down all my outward-extending [Inspiration], and it brushed right past me."

"You did the right thing," Madam Marie said with a nod.

"Nobody looks at an unlit candle. That is the safest method."

She closed the book. "But you can't keep yourself extinguished for a lifetime."

"One day, you will have to stand face-to-face with something stronger than you and speak to it.

When that time comes, you won't be able to stay extinguished or hide away—you will have to open your mouth.

This chapter explains how to speak when that moment arrives."

"Things on the mystical side," Madam Marie continued.

"However you define them, that is how they exist."

Richard listened with utmost concentration.

"If you call it a 'monster,' it will bite you according to the rules of monsters."

"If you call it a 'riddle,' it will wait right there for you to solve it according to the rules of riddles."

When Professor Mortimer had dismantled that Ebony Box, he had explained almost the exact same principle.

"If you give it a 'name,'" Madam Marie added, "you bind yourself to it."

She lifted that indistinct face and looked toward Richard.

"A name is a two-way street. Once you name it, it recognizes you."

"And so the core secret of this chapter"—Madam Marie set the book down on the tea table—

"to put it plainly, is this: when dealing with something stronger than yourself, you must seize the 'power of definition' in your own hands."

Richard sat on his cushion, pondering these words.

Today's trial at the door followed this exact principle.

He had defined "Please Come In" exactly as written, and the door had opened.

"That student of mine." Madam Marie suddenly shifted the topic.

Richard's heart jumped.

"The one who disappeared—you've probably heard Bigelow mention her."

"I've heard a little." Richard could only nod.

"She wanted to accomplish something."

Madam Marie lifted her tea but didn't drink, merely holding the cup.

"She wanted to prove that 'the mystical can be designed.'"

"Other practitioners are led by the nose by the things behind the veil."

"She refused that. She wanted to define things herself and build her own 'divine temple.'

She learned a set of rituals from somewhere and pushed 'how to deal with an entity' all the way to 'how to create an entity.'"

Richard's fingers tightened around his teacup.

"What did she use to create it?" he asked.

"People." Madam Marie set her cup down. "She used people as bricks and stones."

"She wanted to take a group of people who had crawled out of the structured system—people who fancied they had found a shortcut—assign each of them a divine name, and stack them up one by one.

Once they were stacked high enough and that divine temple was complete, she would have proven that the mystical could be designed."

"I could never do that," Madam Marie said, shaking her head.

"Everything I've learned in my life is about how to survive under their hands, how to understand them, and how to avoid being rewritten by them. I never once thought about 'creating' one."

"Nor would I ever permit her to do such a thing under my tutelage."

She paused, staring intently at Richard.

"She sent out many invitations."

"Whoever received an invitation and accepted it would have to start carrying bricks for her."

"They had no idea that from the very moment they accepted that invitation, they became raw material in this deification experiment."

Richard sat motionless, his heart sinking.

Madam Marie didn't continue the topic either.

"The book says your Micro-circulation needs to remain stable for a full year before you can reach Signature. You know that, right?"

Richard nodded.

"A year is a conservative safety margin."

Madam Marie resumed flipping through her handwritten copybook.

"It's meant for people whose circulation stumbles along, people who lack any real confidence in themselves.

It gives them a round number so they can feel at ease."

"Your Micro-circulation is exceptionally stable; Mr. Gerard must have tested you."

"After your summer seminar, you can consider directly achieving Signature to become a Practitioner."

Richard was tempted.

Although the book said a year, and Mr. Hutton had said a year, the person speaking before him right now was a Major Adept.

"I will go back and ask my grandfather and aunt. I'll listen to their opinions before making a decision."

He replied. When it came to Signature, it was still safer to verify it through multiple channels.

Madam Marie nodded. "Good. Only the cautious live long in our line of work."