Chapter 265: Embers of Mystery

Wetherby knew better than anyone that the supernatural items filling this Storeroom belonged to no one.

They had been unearthed from the temples and tombs of the Black Soil River Basin, changing hands countless times over the millennia.

Once behind the veil, anyone who extended their ether into them could borrow a sliver of their power.

But there was a hierarchy to this borrowing.

This cloud of smoke had been torn from that Black Soil River Virtuoso.

The items filling the Storeroom were relics from the temples and tombs of its true body's homeland.

In terms of affinity, they were far more obedient to the remnant than to anyone else present.

So the moment it turned hostile, the room full of supernatural items instantly sided with it.

The inverted judgment hall was its hall; the gaping monster was its monster.

The curator, a Scholar nearing Major Adept, could never wrest control by sheer force.

He needed to borrow a higher power.

The curator closed his eyes, his white beard stirring without a breeze.

He chanted the honorific of a different lineage:

"He who sits at the shadowless noon, sharing the same source as the light."

As the words fell, a faint thread of gold pierced the night sky projected across the Storeroom dome.

"He who once parted day and night with a single glance."

The golden thread widened. The ether of darkness and replacement filling the hall was suppressed by this single streak of gold.

"He whose eyes have burned to ash, whose flesh has become a torch, leaving only his eternal light to shine upon the world."

With the final line, the shadow beneath Richard's feet abruptly sank.

Every shadow in the Storeroom slanted toward that thread of gold.

Richard's heart skipped a beat. This was a Virtuoso of the Solar Tradition.

The curator had invoked that entity's honorific.

That entity, residing in unreachable depths, had previously arranged a sliver of "order support" specifically prepared for tonight's lesson.

This single sliver was enough.

Light was order. It was the boundary between day and night, the impartial fulcrum between the scales.

The moment this sliver of order descended into the hall, the authority of every supernatural item in the room was suppressed.

They no longer answered solely to the cloud of smoke. They answered to "order," acknowledging the weighing and accounting in the curator's hands.

"Everyone," the curator's voice echoed across the yellow sands.

"How do the people of the Black Soil River Basin guide the dead through that trial?"

"By weighing the heart," Richard answered from nearby.

Wetherby stood beside the scales, steadily sustaining this domain of yellow sand.

"It wants to swap your true names. It wants you to accept the new names it assigns."

"We are going to do the exact opposite."

"We will weigh its heart."

Montagu had not been idle.

When the cloud of smoke turned hostile, the resulting disturbance caused it to loosen and warp.

Montagu stood before the array, his charcoal pencil moving ceaselessly.

He was retracing and locking down its deforming outer shell, stroke by stroke.

"It's trying to transform,"

Montagu said grimly, his pencil flying. "It wants to swap out its 'form' to break free from this shell."

"Suppress its form," the curator said. "If it can't swap its form, it can't escape this array."

"Understood."

Montagu's charcoal pencil never stopped moving across the rubbing paper.

Wherever its form shifted, he traced and suppressed it.

His rigorous mastery of reading and structuring seals became the hand firmly pinning down the smoke's "form."

Edith crouched in front of the array.

"Curator, its innermost root is loosening. It wants to 'forget' that it's a remnant and become something else."

"Pin down its root," the curator said. "Read what it is out loud, sentence by sentence, and it won't be able to forget."

"Yes."

Edith lowered her head and began to recite.

With every sentence she chanted, the smoke's innermost root was nailed down a fraction tighter.

But the one who truly had to read it completely, weigh it accurately, and banish it was the white-bearded old man in the center of the array.

The students were merely support, freeing up the curator's hands.

The curator was the sword poised to fall.

Amidst this commotion, the progress bar for Richard's [Perception], which had been stuck for a long time, finally reached its end.

[Perception Lv.2, Progress 100%.]

The conditions for advancement had already been met that night at the Western Suburbs Unresponsive Pit.

He had enough points, too.

With a thought, Richard invested a point into it.

[Perception Lv.2 → Lv.3.]

[Perception: Calm Observation: While remaining completely still, the range and precision of Inspiration increase simultaneously, and it is highly resistant to reverse detection.]

The change occurred silently.

Richard didn't move, but he suddenly felt as if he had sunk through a pool of muddy water to the calmest layer at the bottom.

The surface remained as noisy as ever.

The pulsing of the smoke, the humming of the supernatural items, the low thrum of the silver threads at Mr. Pritchard's fingertips... he could hear and see it all, even more clearly than before.

But these disturbances could no longer stir him.

As long as he stayed still, his Inspiration acted like a thin layer of ice spreading across still water, silently expanding outward, reaching further and illuminating the finest details.

And this thin layer of ice reflected outward.

If anything else tried to trace his Inspiration back to him, they would only feel a stretch of undisturbed water, revealing nothing of the person hiding beneath.

Richard felt reassured.

On the other side, ever since the veil flipped and chaos erupted, the cloud of smoke had actually been searching for someone.

It could effortlessly toy with the dozen research students, but there was one figure standing right there whom it simply couldn't touch.

It could sense the young man was there; the force of him "reading" it hadn't yet dispersed.

Yet whenever the remnant probed the area, the space felt like a bottomless pool of still water, revealing nothing of what hid beneath.

Unwilling to give up, it circled that still water.

It "looked" over, but what it saw wasn't the young man.

It was an old, faceless figure who had died long ago.

The Eagle Hook had misdirected its gaze.

It tried again, attempting to track the sliver of "ignited" fire on the young man's body.

But that flame was dim, as faint as if seen through frosted glass.

The Silver Ring had suppressed the lighthouse's glow to its absolute minimum.

He couldn't be seen, identified, or smelled.

The cloud of smoke swirled around Richard for a long time, yet ultimately, it couldn't even pinpoint exactly where he stood.

It was forced to settle for the next best thing.

It gave up on the physical body it couldn't lock onto and instead set its sights on the faint, wavering shadow beneath his feet.

Over the past few days, Richard's shadow had been working tirelessly day and night behind the veil.

Even with [Healing] sustaining it, the shadow was currently exhausted into a blurry mass, making it the closest and most vulnerable target in the room.

The remnant intended to rise through this shadow and become Richard's shadow.

Then it would tunnel through the connection between the shadow and the true body, replacing the untraceable young man from the inside out.

Standing beneath the stone pillar, Richard saw through the scheme with crystal clarity.

He almost laughed aloud.

'You searched for me all this time, failed to find me, and now you're going after my shadow?'

That played right into his hands.

Swoosh.

The smoke had just risen halfway through the shadow.

With a single thought from Richard, the shadow sank, shifting back into the material realm.

It had wanted to "rise up and become Richard's shadow," but upon looking down, the spot where the shadow should have been was completely empty.

It struck nothing but air.

The remnant froze in place.

It had tried to tunnel through that narrow channel, but halfway in, the shadow on the other end vanished, severing the connection entirely.

It hung there, unable to advance or retreat.

It looked exactly like a child reaching for a pastry on the counter, only for an adult to quietly snatch it away.

The space beneath Richard's feet was perfectly clean; there was not a trace of a shadow.

It couldn't replace him, it couldn't pinpoint him, and now, it didn't even have a foothold.

And right in that instant when the remnant struck air—when the tether between them hadn't completely severed...

Richard read something.

The moment it reached out to grab him was the moment it was most "exposed."

Riding the layer of still water spread by [Perception: Calm Observation], Richard followed that tether and caught a glimpse of the root of its name.

He touched the embryonic form of that name.

It wasn't a string of letters; it was a conceptual mass of "what it is."

Rising from reflections, born without light, swallowing the names of men, stealing their forms—a thing that should have entered sleep-return yet refused to rest.

Richard understood.

This cloud of smoke was a fragment torn from that Virtuoso.

It had its own name... but this name wasn't the honorific of the Virtuoso's true body.

The honorific of that true body was an entirely different matter.

It was on the same level as the honorific of the Solar Tradition Virtuoso the curator had just invoked.

If even half a syllable of it were spoken in this fully awakened Storeroom, it would draw that Virtuoso's gaze.

If it were actually chanted, the situation they had painstakingly suppressed would immediately spiral out of control again.

What Richard had read was only the name of this remnant.

A name used to clarify "what exactly this sliver of a shadow is."

Shadow, Replacement, Name—three keywords flashed across his Inspiration.

Richard mentally stabilized that structure.

Reading up to this point, he saw something else curled beneath it: an eye devoid of pupil and iris.

The same eye that had peeled open on the back of the Chief Responder that night at the Western Suburbs Unresponsive Pit;

The same eye behind the thirteen locations marked with corpses on the canal map;

The same force behind the Echo Society—the organization that promised people "power" and "escape from their present suffering," only to hollow them out slice by slice, exploit them, and finally carve away their true names...

The entity standing behind it all was this very Black Soil River Virtuoso—the one who had walked the narrow path and been crushed to death between two local Virtuosos.

A layer of cold sweat beaded on Richard's palms.

The weight of this intelligence was terrifying.

Yet he couldn't speak a single word of it aloud.

He dared not touch that eye. He only intercepted the "load-bearing pillar" of the remnant's name.

"Curator," his voice was hushed.

"The name of this remnant... its essential name. I followed the tether when it tried to seize my shadow, and I glimpsed its load-bearing pillar."

In the center of the array, Wetherby, who was straining to read the true name, faltered for a moment.

What he had been trying to decipher was precisely the name of this remnant.

When the people of the Black Soil River Basin weighed a heart, they were weighing the "ledger" of the deceased; the entire process was about clarifying what this shadow was and what it owed.

The curator knew better than anyone that the true body's honorific couldn't be touched.

But this layer of the remnant's name was a burden he was supposed to bear entirely on his own.

This young man didn't just possess the unique skill to shift his shadow—he could actually reverse the flow, tracing the tether of its attack to read its load-bearing pillar.

And he knew his limits; he only extracted the remnant's name, strictly avoiding the true body.

The old man didn't ask, "How did you read it?"

"...Report," the curator said grimly, his left hand pressing back onto the rubbing.

"Report the segment you glimpsed to me. I will receive it."

Standing beneath the stone pillar, Richard relayed the load-bearing pillar of the remnant's name, stroke by stroke.

The curator received it.

Through his Spirit Vision, Richard saw a line gleaming with a dull gray light appear on the rubbing.

That line was the embryonic form of a verdict.

"Form, shell, root, name... all four are gathered." The curator stroked his white beard over his chest.

He raised his head and looked at this judgment hall.

"Weighing of the heart, begin."

He began to recite the verdict, speaking in the ancient tongue of the Black Soil River Basin.

This time, standing in this judgment hall, he used the power of his scepter to draw upon the authority of the entity who held the pen and kept the ledger.

The curator chanted the first line.

"Ink Djehuty."

(I, by the name of Thoth.)

"Sesh maat en pesedjet."

(The Scribe of Truth for the Ennead.)

As those words were spoken, the sacred ibis-headed god Thoth, seated at the highest point, raised his pen.

Richard saw it clearly from beneath the stone pillar.

The curator had slotted himself into Thoth's role as the "ledger-keeper."

In the eyes of the people of the Black Soil River Basin, the weighing of the heart had always been dictated by Thoth's ledger.

Whatever was written in the ledger, the heart of the dead would reflect exactly that.

The curator chanted the second line.

"Sekher-i ib-ek er mekhat."

(I shall place your heart upon the scales.)

In the center of the judgment hall, the jackal-headed god placed the smoke's "heart" on one end of the scales.

On the other side rested the feather from the head of the Goddess of Truth.

"Iw-i rekh ren-ek."

(I know your name.)

The curator hung this overarching hook of the verdict right at the front.

"Sheut pu."

(You are a shadow.)

The cloud of smoke pulsed.

"Mes em kekui."

(Born in darkness.)

This line corresponded to the shell Montagu had read; its essence was the part untouched by light.

"Iry kheper em ky. Wenem ren, ashesh tut."

(He who takes the form of another. Devourer of true names, stealer of forms.)

This line matched the fracture Catherine had read.

What its true body had done for its entire life was to copy others and replace them.

"Sheut en mut pu. Aq er imenet, sedjer."

(You are the shadow of the dead. You should have returned to the Underworld to rest.)

This line aligned with the root Edith had read.

It was originally a remnant shadow meant to walk the Underworld in place of its true body. It should have entered sleep-return.

With every sentence the curator chanted, a section of the judgment hall lit up.

As the smoke was weighed sentence by sentence, its "heart" pressed heavier and heavier upon the scales.

"It's trying to escape!" Mr. Pritchard shouted sharply.

The cloud of smoke lunged toward the rows of still-humming supernatural items.

It wanted to use the supernatural items as relays to spread outward.

"Stop it!" The curator didn't even turn his head, his recitation of the verdict unceasing.

Pritchard's nine silver threads tightened, corralling it once more.

The curator had already spoken the sentence that finalized the weighing of the heart.

"Maat er ges. Ib-ek er ges."

(Truth is on one end. Your heart is on the other.)

"Djehuty her sesh."

(Thoth holds the pen to record the ledger.)

Inside the judgment hall, the scales slowly shifted.

The "heart" of the smoke sank heavily to one side.

The Goddess of Truth's feather remained perfectly motionless.

The curator proclaimed the final verdict.

"Ib-ek dens er shut nt Maat."

(Your heart is heavier than the feather of Ma'at.)

"Nen aq-ek er sekhet hetep."

(You cannot pass; you shall not reach the Field of Peace.)

Inside the judgment hall, the scales completely tilted to one side.

Beneath the scales, the monster Ammit—half-crocodile, half-lion—opened its massive jaws.

The curator spoke the final line.

"Tem-ek, sheut."

(Your end has come, shadow.)

Inside the judgment hall, the very last remnants of the smoke's form began to dissolve.

Its "heart" couldn't pass the trial.

Its "ledger" had been recorded as a debt that could never be repaid.

It was devoured by the monster, dispersing completely.

This was the "second death" believed in by the people of the Black Soil River Basin.

This was a procedure established long ago by the two local Virtuosos.

Once Scholars had thoroughly read it and accurately weighed it, it would naturally dissipate.

The remnant had always been intended for destruction at the conclusion of this lesson.

The curator had weighed it accurately, and the cloud of smoke began to collapse into the deepest void.

But in the very instant it dispersed:

Richard's Panel silently activated.

What scattered from the cloud of smoke was the ember of that narrow-path Virtuoso's mystery.

The Panel floated to the surface.

[Structured ether core detected... Analyzing...]

[Core Nature: Seed.]

[Seed Source: Ember of Virtuoso's Mystery.]

[Trait Tags: Name, Mirror, Replacement.]

[Extract?]

Richard's heart skipped a beat.

He selected [Yes].

He intercepted that sliver of the mystery's ember, sinking it into his Panel.

[Seed extracted.]

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