Chapter 319: Thoth's Room

At the most critical moment, Richard's consciousness snapped.

The swaying deck vanished from beneath his feet.

The air smelled of old Papyrus and aged limestone.

Richard opened his eyes.

He stood in the center of a sealed stone chamber.

The mummy was a piece torn from the main body; its destruction equated to a "mission failure."

But the seed mechanism allowed a reset.

Wipe the slate clean, and he could begin again.

Dense inscriptions covered the walls, extending from the floor to the vaulted ceiling.

Their stroke style was older and more primitive than any Black Soil River rubbing he had seen at Imperial Capital University.

Something stood in the dead center of the chamber.

Calling it "human" was a stretch.

It had a human body roughly eight chi tall, so gaunt its ribcage showed clearly through its white robe.

But it had the head of an ibis.

A long, curved beak rested beneath a silver, moon-shaped headdress.

It held a Reed Pen in one hand and a Writing Slate in the other.

The god Thoth?

But in almost the exact same instant, Richard realized something was wrong.

The ibis head was actually a polished Bronze Mirror.

Richard's face did not reflect in it.

Standing before Thoth, he saw only the stone chamber's walls and inscriptions reflected in the glass.

Thoth spoke, using Richard's own voice.

"This ship must sail from the dark of the west to the light of the east.

Twelve gates. Those who cannot pass will remain in the dark forever."

As it spoke, it handed over the roll of Papyrus it held:

"This scroll is a clue for you."

Thoth's ibis head tilted slightly toward Richard.

Richard took the Papyrus.

Deciphering encrypted text was what he did best now.

The Papyrus was half a person's height, but rolled up, it was only as thick as a thumb.

Unrolled, the ink marks on the surface were broken and faint; some characters only had half their strokes remaining.

Richard started reading from the first line in the upper left corner.

The text was in the Black Soil River priestly script.

He had studied some of it in an elective course, so it wasn't entirely unfamiliar.

The first line contained seven complete characters, followed by a heavily moth-eaten annotation.

Richard carefully identified them and realized the text explained the concept of a "Day Name."

The people of the Black Soil River Basin firmly believed that a true name was one's essence.

Whoever grasped your true name held your lifeblood.

They never wrote down their true names.

The names written on tomb walls, sarcophagi, and sacrificial documents were all "Day Names."

This was a safe, public substitute meant for the living and the gods to see.

The string of text written on the Papyrus was a series of Day Names.

Richard read on.

The second line was far more fragmented than the first. It took him a long time to piece all the characters together.

This line recorded the Harbor's defensive layout.

It detailed the respective coverage areas of the two defending Virtuosos, down to exactly which piling on the dock marked the boundary.

The third and fourth lines... were the "names" of the two Virtuosos.

The one from the Solar Tradition was named Helio Montague;

The one from the Hearth Fire Tradition was named Christian Nefer.

These names held no power in themselves, just like the Day Names.

Speaking them aloud wouldn't grant control over the Virtuosos.

But they were the labels those Virtuosos had left in the material world.

Richard continued translating.

Lines five through seven were even more damaged, taking him several full minutes to piece together.

The translated content made his brows relax, then furrow.

They relaxed because this passage explained the root cause of his initial failure:

"The shadow lodges in the human shell. The golden light does not illuminate the person in the shell, but the shadow within.

Between shadow and shell lies a seam, and this seam is a foreign flaw. A first sweep reveals nothing; a second sweep lays it bare."

He had fallen right into this trap during his first attempt.

The golden light had swept shallowly the first time, then drawn the net tight on the second.

The shadow membrane inside the replacement body instinctively contracted after being touched by the shallow light, and that contraction left a trace.

This was standard practice for the Solar Tradition: never pierce everything at once. Force the shadow to move first, then illuminate the movement.

His brows furrowed because the next section explicitly detailed the countermeasure:

"The golden light illuminates the sky, not the water.

The sun wheel shines above all things, not below them.

The sea is black, and shadows can hide in the black."

The golden light did not illuminate water.

The power of the Solar Tradition shone upon the sky and the ground.

Beneath the sea's surface, the golden light could not pierce the dark depths forever churned by the waves.

If the shadow traveled underwater, the golden light couldn't catch it.

But taking the underwater route only solved the problem of "how to sneak the shadow into the city."

His previous failure had already proven that the combined sensory precision of the two Virtuosos was incredibly high.

Trying to slip in covertly through shadow replacement meant it was only a matter of time before he was caught.

Richard needed something that could hold those two Virtuosos' attention.

Something massive enough that they would be forced to split their focus to deal with it.

For the next three lines, the encryption method changed to a shift cipher.

A few minutes later, he deciphered the content.

"When the sarcophagus opens, play the old song; the song summons a myriad of shadows to pay court.

Read the inscription within the coffin seven times, and the power within the shell will fill to seven-tenths."

Richard thought in silence.

The inscription within the coffin.

This passage had to be referring to the priestly inscriptions carved into the mummy.

Naturally, the inscriptions weren't just for decoration.

They were "fuel" accumulated from thousands of years of offerings.

Under normal circumstances, the inscriptions lay dormant, and the mummy could only tap into a tiny fraction of their power.

But if the inscriptions were chanted in the manner of the ancient Black Soil River priests, following the sequence of the burial rites, and read from beginning to end seven times...

The inscriptions would be activated.

The dormant fuel would ignite, and the vessel's power would skyrocket from ten or twenty percent to seventy.

Seventy percent was already close to this mummy's absolute limit.

A Black Soil River Virtuoso's avatar wielding seventy percent of its power could hold out against those two defending Virtuosos for a considerable amount of time in a head-on clash.

They would have to deal with it.

Because if a Black Soil River Virtuoso unleashed its mysteries in the Harbor with seventy percent of its power, the entire port would be churned into chaos.

Therefore, the mummy fragment was bait.

Its mission was to firmly pin the two Virtuosos' attention on the Harbor's front line.

Meanwhile, the shadow would travel underwater and enter the city.

It would replace the crew members of the neutral fleet who had already entered the port and docked.

The golden light and the hearth fire would be drawn away by the mummy.

A blind spot would appear in the city's Perception net.

The shadow would complete the replacement during this window.

The remaining clues consisted of only the final few lines of text.

The first paragraph was a list of names.

Customs third-class clerk Muhammad Fahd, West Harbor Warehouse night shift guard Saeed, barge sailor Rohe...

These sleeper agents had been planted by the Black Soil River Virtuosos over a decade in advance.

Some of them didn't even know they had become sleeper agents.

Richard looked further down.

The encryption method for the second paragraph changed again.

This time it wasn't a shift cipher, but a nested structure he had never seen before.

The outer layer was the ancient Black Soil River priestly script, while the inner layer consisted of even older, nearly illegible symbols.

He spent a long time deciphering it, chewing through it character by character.

The translated content turned out to be the honorific name of a Black Soil River Virtuoso.

First verse:

"He who walks in the lightless lands, breathing as one with the shadows."

Second verse:

"He who once reflected the names of all things in a single mirror."

Third verse:

"He whose flesh is sealed, whose bones are inscribed, leaving only his shadow to blanket the world eternal."

Richard stared at these three lines, comparing them silently in his mind.

The structure matched the three-verse incantations of other Virtuosos perfectly.

The first verse spoke of their origin, the second of their great deeds, and the third of what they left behind.

This Virtuoso had dismantled himself even more thoroughly than the one from the Gale tradition.

The Gale Virtuoso had left a single breath, but this one hadn't even left that; only his shadow remained.

Mr. Hutton had instructed him before:

"The incantation of a name is, in itself, a call.

Speaking that esteemed name is equivalent to gently calling out toward that direction from this side of the veil."

But in this seed trial, the rules were different.

The priestly inscriptions on the mummy were the fuel, and chanting them was the ignition.

Yet the maximum power the inscriptions could ignite was only seventy percent.

The remaining gap of over ten percent was made up by the honorific name.

Eighty percent was no longer merely on the scale of "bait."

At the very end of the Papyrus, there was an extremely small annotation.

"The honorific name must be chanted immediately after the seventh repetition of the inscriptions is completed.

The interval must not exceed three breaths. Should that time pass, the inscriptions' power will recede, and the name will be called in vain."

The window of opportunity was only three breaths long.

Read the inscriptions for the seventh time, and in that split second when the power peaked and hadn't yet receded, hammer the honorific name in.

Too early wouldn't work, and neither would too late.

Richard nodded. The upcoming plan was perfectly clear.

The overt operation: activate the mummy in the Harbor to take them on head-to-head.

The covert operation: the shadow infiltrates the city underwater, using the replacement trait and the help of the sleeper agents to slip into the museum.

Richard rolled up the Papyrus and gripped it in his hand.

He looked up at Thoth with his mirrored ibis head.

"Can I go in again?"

Thoth did not answer.

It merely raised its Reed Pen and wrote a line on the Writing Slate.

Once finished, it turned the Writing Slate around for Richard to see.

The board read:

"Maat merer rekh. (Truth favors those who know the answer.)"

The stone chamber began to darken.

His consciousness once again sank into the dark.

The swaying of the deck returned beneath his feet.

Everything had reset.

The galleon was still on that same sea, the sun hung in the exact same position, and the sailors were the exact same crew.

Dozens of merchant ships formed a loose queue on the surface of the sea, waiting for the tide to let them pass.

The two Virtuosos, one golden and one red, still stood guard at opposite ends of the breakwater.

It was exactly the same as the first time.

Richard didn't hesitate.

This time, he split his approach into two steps.

Step one: the covert operation went first.

He split a shadow off from the mummy.

Just one, but thicker and more solid than the three wisps from his previous attempt.

This was a complete "shadow avatar," carrying enough "Mirror" and "Replacement" origin essence to act independently.

The shadow slipped into the sea from the bottom of the ship.

Clinging to the hull below the waterline, it moved toward the Harbor.

The seawater swallowed the golden light's cursory sweep.

The shadow was far more agile underwater than on the deck.

Water flowed, and the shadow found a familiar rhythm within the currents.

In the thousands of years of belief within the Black Soil River Basin, water was the medium through which shadows walked the Underworld.

Traveling through water was like a fish returning to its pond.

Armed with the defensive layout, it deliberately took a detour when passing the breakwater, threading its way through the gaps in the foundation.

The covert operation was in position.

Step two: initiating the overt operation.

Richard began chanting the inscriptions.

Starting from the oldest inscription right in the center of his chest, he used the chanting cadence of the ancient Black Soil River priests.

It was a low, guttural sound, halfway between speech and song.

The first repetition.

The voice scraped from his desiccated throat like sandpaper rasping against dry bone.

The sailors on the ship uniformly stopped their work and turned to look at him.

That melody, handed down from funerals millennia past, made the hairs on the backs of their necks stand on end.

The second repetition.

The faded inscription symbols on the linen wrappings lit up one by one, spreading from his chest out toward his limbs.

Every shadow on the ship began to converge upon him.

The third repetition.

The fourth repetition.

The mummy's joints no longer creaked.

He could feel the power surging upward.

By the sixth repetition, the distant golden light suddenly flared brighter, confirming his direction.

The dark red hearth fire also roiled.

They had noticed him.

In the Perception of a Virtuoso, a disturbance like this was akin to someone setting off a string of firecrackers right on their doorstep.

But it was already too late to stop it.

The deck of the ship trembled, and the tattered flag on the mast was ripped into shreds.

The sailors were terrified; some bolted for the cabin, while others threw themselves onto the deck, clutching their heads.

On the final repetition, every inscription on the mummy glowed, and the power reached its absolute peak.

Richard didn't hesitate.

With the reverberation of the final syllable still trembling within the mummy's chest, he immediately spoke.

"He who walks in the lightless lands, breathing as one with the shadows."

The moment the first verse left his mouth, all the light upon the sea was drawn away.

The sun still hung in the sky, yet not a single gleam reflected off the water.

The ocean turned into a mirror of pure black.

The inverted pyramid behind the veil began pouring its power through, blocking the golden light from shining down.

"He who once reflected the names of all things in a single mirror."

With the second verse, the Harbor's reflection appeared upon the pitch-black mirror of the sea.

Every ship, every piling, every person in that reflection was illuminated in razor-sharp detail.

The Mirror was established by illuminating shadows.

Through the mummy's Perception, Richard clearly saw that the "forms" of the two defending Virtuosos had also been cast into this mirror.

The golden sun, the dark red furnace.

Beneath the mirror's reflection, their power was slightly weakened.

The sun sank to the bottom of the water, and the furnace was overturned onto the surface of the sea.

"He whose flesh is sealed, whose bones are inscribed, leaving only his shadow to blanket the world eternal."

With the final verse, all the linen wrappings on the mummy ruptured.

In the spot within its chest cavity that should have been empty, a sphere of black light ignited.

It was a contradiction in terms, but Richard couldn't find any other words to describe it.

The mummy stood on the deck.

The entire ship groaned beneath its weight.

Every sailor on the deck had already fainted.

"Helio Montague!"

Richard shouted the name of the Solar Tradition's Virtuoso through the mummy's throat.

"Christian Nefer!"

He then roared the name of the Hearth Fire Tradition's Virtuoso.

Day Names carried no power, but they carried the weight of a declaration.

Calling out their names was a formal challenge to battle.

I know who you are.

And here I come!