Chapter 277: Words of the Masters

Among the striking crowd in the Western Suburbs, a few faces did not belong to this strike at all.

They wore worker overalls and identical gray cloth flat caps, carrying crowbars.

The way they positioned themselves was entirely different from the genuine laborers who only wanted their back pay.

They scattered along the edges of the crowd, pressing up against the military and police barricades.

At a specific moment, they exchanged glances.

One of them lunged at a young guardsman, and the two tangled together as they crashed to the ground.

Immediately after, a crowbar rose and fell.

A puddle of blood instantly spread across the ground.

Blood splashed onto the faces of the nearest workers.

An elderly miner in the front row was shoved from behind.

He stumbled into a picket guard's pickaxe handle. His forehead cracked open, blood streaming down his graying temples.

The crowd exploded.

“They're hitting us!”

“They've killed someone!”

The shouts rang out from the back rows, clear and unmistakable—someone had prepped the words long in advance.

The swept-up laborers were already furious; the moment they saw blood, whatever reason they had left burned away.

The barricade collapsed, and the human tide surged north.

From this moment on, the striking crowd was no longer a strike.

They were an unstoppable tide propelled forward by blood and roars, a flood that no one could call to a halt.

The military and police defensive line shattered on that street.

The first spark had fallen into dry kindling.

Beside the Black Trench in the North District of Briston.

Richard's [Perception: Calm Observation] unfurled beneath his feet.

That layer of still water had originally only been enough to submerge both banks of the Black Trench.

In the space of a single breath, the water's surface expanded outward toward both banks of the canal at a speed barely discernible to the naked eye.

His Inspiration was certainly not that potent, nor could its coverage area ever be this vast.

It was the Anchor Network beneath the water—stretched to its absolute limit.

The water of the Black Trench lost its color.

That pool of ink-blackness began to recede from the central flow line. The pigment retreated toward both banks of the river, and upon reaching the edges, it sank deep into the soil.

Through the veil, Richard saw another river beneath the water, inverted.

The “Black Trench” that the workers had cursed for decades was, on that side of the veil, a roofless water dungeon packed full of those who refused to rest in peace.

They had once been nailed to the riverbed to serve as anchors.

Now that the Anchor Network had reached its boiling point, they rose from the bottom of the water, one by one.

They rose in the final, struggling postures of the drowned.

Heads breaking the surface first, shoulders following close behind, their chest cavities bloated and waterlogged.

They wore the faces they had possessed in life.

On every single one of those faces, there was no hatred, and no sorrow.

They were entirely hollow.

Old Pastor Hawkins stood beside the procession, clutching the Holy Water Bottle tightly.

Having presided over funerals for thirty years, he recognized the majority of these faces.

Richard heard the old pastor squeeze out a few words through clenched teeth.

It sounded like he was saying, “My God,” yet it also sounded like “My children.”

The veil flipped.

This time, the inversion did not stop at this patch of land by the river.

It shrouded the entire district, encompassing every single area linked to this grand ritual.

Three streets west of Slag Alley, a sleeping mother heard a baby crying in the drainage ditch.

It was her son, who had died before reaching a month old.

She sat up in bed and walked barefoot toward the door.

The moment the door opened, her own shadow stood up from the floor, rising to greet her.

In a small shack by the canal, an old man heard someone calling his nickname from down the well.

It was his younger brother, who had drowned when they were children.

The two brothers had been swimming in a country river back then, and the younger brother had never surfaced.

After all these years, that voice had not aged a day.

The old man leaned over the edge of the well and called back down, “It's me. Your big brother is here...”

The moment he answered, his shadow rose from the ground before him.

It wore the old man's face and walked toward him.

Richard stood by the Black Trench, watching the North District. The areas where gas lamps should have been shining bright were going dark, block by block.

One lamp extinguished, then another.

The darkness spread faster than a person could run.

“Stop looking,” Mrs. MacNeil said beside him.

In the lamplight of the sluice gate, it was already impossible to tell whether her dress was gray or black.

“We proceed as agreed.”

..................

Margaret stood by the living room window, clutching a half-knitted bundle of woolen yarn.

Her husband sat on the sofa, and Evelyn sat at her father's feet, hugging that sack of flour.

She had originally thought they would simply sleep one more night in their own home.

When the gas lamps went out, Margaret's vestigial circuit lit up.

The violent shift in the ambient noise forcefully slammed into her Inspiration, jarring awake what should have long since ceased functioning.

“Rogers.” Margaret spun around. “We leave right now.”

Rogers looked up.

“Now?”

“Right now.”

Rogers took one look at his wife's face and didn't ask another question.

“Evelyn, put your coat on.”

“Dad...”

“Put your coat on,” Rogers repeated. “Hold onto the flour sack.”

Evelyn swallowed back the questions resting on the tip of her tongue.

She glanced at her mother and hugged the sack of flour tighter.

Rogers grabbed a Hunting Rifle, while Margaret's close-fitting cloth pouch held the Daisy-Marked Tin Bottle.

The three of them hurried out the door.

South of Slag Alley lay the southern district shelter.

The instant Rogers locked the door, the light burning in a household east of Slag Alley went out.

The lady of that house called out from the window, “Anne!”

“Anne! You're back?”

Rogers squeezed his wife's hand.

“Go.”

Across the entire North District, shouts rose one after another.

With every single cry, a shadow stood up.

Every single shadow followed the curbs, windowsills, and drainage ditches, walking toward the Black Trench.

The entire North District of Briston was turning into an enormous water dungeon.

“We go according to plan.”

Mrs. MacNeil stood by the edge of the Black Trench's old sluice gate.

“Release the anchors one by one, starting from the nearest.”

Mr. Hutton delivered the first verdict.

“Audite, mortui aquae.”

(Hear me, dead of the waters.)

The old gentleman used Latin, the language he had spoken from his student days to the present.

“Nomen vestrum jam scriptum est.”

(Your names have already been recorded.)

“Domus vestra parata est.”

(Your resting place is already prepared.)

When the old man chanted the third line, his expression changed.

After those three lines of Latin went out, they did not nail into the veil as they usually did.

They traveled out over the surface of the Black Trench and were blocked right back by an invisible wall of water.

A burst of laughter echoed back, along with the sound of counting.

“...One, two, three, four...”

The floating corpses rising from beneath the water picked up the sequence, one after another.

“...One, two, three, four...”

Those newly reaped shadows were counting along as well.

The entire river was counting along.

Mr. Hutton's voice went hoarse.

He readjusted the cadence of his Latin.

“Pax vobiscum.”

(Peace be with you.)

“Requiem aeternam.”

(Eternal rest.)

“In nomine Patris, et Filii...”

(In the name of the Father, and of the Son...)

Before he could finish chanting, the hundreds of floating corpses rising from beneath the water tossed that segment of Latin back word for word.

“Pax vobiscum, sir.”

(Peace be with you, sir.)

“Requiem aeternam, sir.”

(Eternal rest, sir.)

“...Please give us back our bread, sir.”

Laughter mingled with the counting beneath the water.

Mr. Hutton staggered.

“Sir!”

Richard reached out and caught him.

The old man's face went pale, and without warning, he coughed up a mouthful of blood.

“...Latin will not work. I chanted it wrong.”

Richard frowned heavily.

Every book he had ever read, every teacher he had ever studied under, every inscription he had ever deciphered... all told him that the Sleep-Return Ritual required ancient, sacred, encrypted languages.

Ancient Celtic, sacrificial inscriptions of the Black Soil River, annotated texts of the Alexandrian School, Church Latin... lineages passed down one after another, centuries of accumulation, a system supported by the spines of countless generations of Scholars.

Yet the pastors of the workhouses had prayed for the poor using Latin.

Before receiving that single mouthful of relief gruel, it was read to them as part of the humiliation.

The power of a verdict had always lain in whether the dead recognized its authority.

If you spoke to them using the words of the masters, they would only bury their faces into the water—burying them deeper.

All the learning of the Scholars completely failed before a river of the poor.

At the other end of the sluice gate, Mrs. MacNeil, acting as the anchor of the ritual, was likewise slammed by the backlash.

She spat a mouthful of blood.

Before she could swallow down a second mouthful, the floating corpses rising from beneath the water stretched their arms out toward her.

The Anchor Network was flooding backward.

They wanted the host of this Sleep-Return Ritual.

Her shadow and her true name were about to be stripped away.

Mrs. MacNeil made her decision through a mouthful of blood.

A wolf shadow materialized out of thin air behind her. It lunged forward on its front paws, spewing several strands of golden silk from its throat.

The golden silk wove into a net in front of the sluice gate.

That net blocked the hundreds of arms reaching from beneath the water, keeping them back.

In the brief span of this interception, the outline of the beast's shadow faded by half.

Immediately after, Mrs. MacNeil ripped the Coral Earring from her right earlobe.

The Coral Earring dropped into her palm.

She blew a breath onto it.

The earring hummed.

The ears of every Practitioner along both banks of the Black Trench, as well as the Hunters from the Civilian Guild—everyone's ears were muffled by an invisible layer.

The “Ear-Covering Song” had begun.

The eardrum-piercing sounds of counting, laughing, and name-calling that hooked into a person's throat demanding an “answer” slid right past that ear-muffling layer.

Richard felt the taut string in his heart that had been continuously hooked finally loosen.

But in the very next instant, the Coral Earring began to fracture in the medium's palm.

Over by the beast's shadow, the golden silk also began to unravel.

It made one final lunge in front of the sluice gate before the golden silk snapped into frayed threads.

The beast's shadow turned its head and bowed slightly to Mrs. MacNeil.

It was the posture of a servant finishing their final shift, bowing to take their leave of the master.

The beast's shadow dispersed.

Next was the Coral Earring.

The earring shattered into granules in Mrs. MacNeil's palm.

Right before it shattered, a faint, delicate wisp of a woman's humming drifted from the earring.

Both spirits were gone.

Mrs. MacNeil dropped to her knees by the edge of the sluice gate.

Blood dripped into the filthy water seeping up beneath the hem of her skirt.

The force of the Anchor Network's reverse flood smashed through her outermost layer of defense.

A mass of water wrapped around Mrs. MacNeil's ankle.

Her shadow was yanked from the ground by the water before her body even moved.

“Madam!”

The moment Richard's Spirit Vision opened, he reacted instantly.

Once a shadow was taken, the person became a hollow vessel.

A true name left together with the shadow. In the next moment, there would be one more dead person wearing Mrs. MacNeil's face over on Mr. Reeve's side.

Mr. Hutton wanted to cast a Spell Formula to help, but his body—having just suffered the backlash—could not hold up, and he slumped into the mud.

Richard's shadow had already moved before he did.

The trained shadow was more than twice as capable as its previous clumsy self.

It detached from Richard's heel and dived beneath the water of the Black Trench.

It plunged headlong past the shallows, into that thick, cloying middle layer.

Within that middle layer, it reached out and grabbed Mrs. MacNeil's shadow as it was being dragged down.

The shadow lasted a mere three seconds inside that middle layer.

But those three seconds were enough.

Mrs. MacNeil's Bone Bracelet lit up.

Madam Marie reached her hand deeper, and with a gentle pull, anchored her disciple right back.

Mrs. MacNeil slowly straightened up from the mud.

“...Thank you.”