Chapter 327: Elemental Dignities

The Sacred Ibis Scepter was the core of the sealing array.

At its cry, nine silver threads shot up from the ground to form a cage.

Dark red hearth fire seeped from the silver threads on the floor, while golden sunlight pressed down from the dome.

The two preset attacks activated simultaneously.

Enveloped by the golden light and hearth fire, Donald hunched over inside the cage. Propped up by a shadow, however, his shell held together.

Richard quickly weighed his options.

He probably wouldn't make it past the scepter this time.

He was out of time, he lacked the right conditions, and his cover was blown.

The cage had fallen, the sealing array had sounded the alarm, and the two Virtuosos were already rushing back.

Defeat was certain either way, so there was no point in holding back.

Richard made a split-second decision, unleashing all the strength he had conserved along the way.

He first turned back to deal with the fuse he had been avoiding.

The double brand on the ninth relic was set to detonate upon touch.

He hadn't dared touch it before, but now it didn't matter.

He raised his arm and drew the Enchanted Blunderbuss from his waist.

With a Silver-Lead Bullet in the chamber, he pressed the muzzle against the fuse and fired.

The Silver-Lead Bullet struck the fuse's outer layer, blasting the brand to pieces.

The relic beneath the fuse was revealed: a small bronze scarab.

Richard pressed the "mirror" against it, and its true name appeared.

Deep within the veil, the side belonging to the Virtuoso's true body thickened by another layer.

The stone stele, the wooden coffin, the Gold-Gilt Mask, the Canopic Jars, and now this scarab.

The true names of all five relics had been transmitted to the true body.

Out in the open sea beyond the Harbor, the mummy caught in the crossfire of golden light and hearth fire gained a second wind.

Inside the cage, the Sacred Ibis Scepter did not stop for a moment.

It continuously poured the sealing array's golden light and hearth fire onto Donald while shrieking ceaselessly on the veil's side.

The shrieking made Richard's heart pound, but he was powerless against the scepter standing at the core of the seal.

Left with no other choice, he pushed his Spirit Vision to its maximum range before the Virtuosos could return to defend.

He stopped trying to touch the core relics that could neither be moved nor taken, spending all his remaining time observing.

The entire Storeroom's ether field was turned upside down by the collision of three forces, churning up everything usually hidden in the depths.

The sealing structure, defense logic, and joint defense channels of the two defending Virtuosos...

The node distribution of the synergistic link between the hearth fire and the sun...

And the network pathways the Sacred Ibis Scepter mobilized when sounding the alarm...

Richard's [Erudition] was pushed to its absolute limit.

His eyes watched, and his brain recorded.

He also controlled the mummy vessel heading toward the Harbor, completely abandoning the sea surface mirror to charge toward the city at full speed.

The mummy leapt up from the sea, bounding across the mastheads of dozens of merchant ships to plunge deep into the Harbor.

With every bound, the mast beneath its feet snapped, leaving the tattered flags of various nations fluttering in the sea breeze.

It bought him a final window of distraction before it finally shattered.

The golden light returned first.

The light cleaved down from the dome, illuminating the Storeroom brighter than high noon.

The shadow inside Donald's shell began to twist under the direct glare of the golden light.

The hearth fire followed close behind, waves of heat surging up from the silver threads on the floor.

The two Virtuosos had returned.

With both the open and hidden lines failing, a disappointed sigh echoed from behind the veil.

The inverted pyramid flipped entirely; the Virtuoso's true body had entered the fray.

The veil's side of the entire Imperial Capital shuddered.

The moon's reflection on the canal waters below shattered into hundreds of pieces before piecing itself back together.

Every cat in the city leapt up at exactly the same moment, their fur standing on end.

A three-way battle erupted once again behind the veil.

Inside the museum Storeroom, the Black Soil River Virtuoso used the five relics whose true names had been read as anchor points, clashing head-on with the two defenders.

The two defending Virtuosos, in turn, relied on the sole remaining Sacred Ibis Scepter in the Storeroom and several other locked core relics as their bulwark.

Bolstered by the five relics, the Black Soil River Virtuoso was significantly stronger than in the previous two trials.

He spread that flipped mirror over the airspace of the entire museum.

Every shadow in the museum came alive.

Everything that could cast a shadow saw its shade lean toward the inverted pyramid.

The two defending Virtuosos combined their strength, pushing the Sacred Ibis Scepter to maximum power.

The golden light transformed into a sun disk, hovering directly over the museum.

The hearth fire morphed into a furnace, encircling the museum.

The sun disk shone down as the furnace baked inward.

Caught in the middle, the Black Soil River Virtuoso's power began to wane.

But backed by the five relics, the decay was extremely slow.

Richard's Inspiration caught onto something approaching from afar.

A new power was closing in.

A gust of wind blew in from the northeast of the Imperial Capital.

There was also a flow of exceedingly deep, heavy water coming from due north.

A wisp of fire arrived from the west—sharing the same origin as the hearth fire Virtuoso in the museum, yet not entirely identical.

Sure enough, they had called for backup.

The Imperial Capital was the Empire's heartland. Trouble in one quarter drew aid from all directions.

The wind was the first to arrive.

It did not join the battle, merely laying down a barrier around the museum's perimeter.

The barrier acted much like the overturned bowl above the Harbor, sealing the commotion on the veil's side within and preventing it from leaking out to ordinary people.

The water arrived next.

Surging up from underground, it completely activated the entire sedimentary network beneath the museum's foundation.

Originally, only the Sacred Ibis Scepter was assisting the defenders; now, the entire foundation had become their bulwark.

The Black Soil River Virtuoso's mirror was pushed up from below, spiderwebbing with cracks.

The third power arrived.

The wisp of fire from the west, coated in a layer of gold, immediately joined the siege upon arrival.

The Imperial Capital was the Empire's heartland. Trouble in one quarter drew aid from all directions.

If you beat two, they called in four.

If you beat four, eight more would be on the way.

Winning by brute force was forever impossible in this city.

Richard's consciousness was yanked out of the trial.

Back in the stone chamber, Thoth did not hand over any Papyrus.

He simply stood there, his Reed Pen resting on the Writing Slate, perfectly still.

Richard stood before him for a moment.

"No new clues?"

Thoth raised his Reed Pen, wrote a line of text on the Writing Slate, and turned it around for him to see.

"Sesh en maat, iu er khet."

(Scribe of Truth, reaching the end.)

It was exactly the same phrase as before he exited last time.

This time, however, there was a line of extremely small annotations at the bottom of the board.

"Nodes hereafter may be freely selected."

Richard's eyes lit up.

At the bottom of his mind, the Panel surfaced with a row of options.

[Entry Point Selection]

1. Open Sea Anchorage Area (Starting Point)

2. Imperial Capital Inner Harbor

3. Museum Logistics Tunnel Entrance

4. Museum Storeroom Outer Perimeter

5. Museum Storeroom Depths (Sealing Array Area)

He could skip the earlier segments he had already run flawlessly and start directly from the museum Storeroom.

There was no need to repeat the stages he had already "cleared".

The Seed skipped all the prerequisite stages for him.

All he had to face now was that final hurdle—the scepter.

And now, he held all the intelligence gathered from three consecutive trials.

Building upon this intelligence, he needed a complete plan.

Could he find a way to bypass the scepter without provoking Thoth?

With one final chance left tonight, Richard first exited the stone chamber and lay on his dorm bed to think.

He had accumulated too much from the three trials, stuffing his brain to the brim. Going back in without sorting it all out would be no different from running blindfolded into a wall.

He had already grasped the crux of the scepter's trial.

The Sacred Ibis Scepter rejected substitutes; it judged forged ledgers, and the Black Soil River Virtuoso was exactly the person who had tampered with the entire book.

Hitting the scepter with the Virtuoso's power only made it angrier the more force you used.

But as for how to bypass it, he didn't have an answer yet.

The Seed trial was a purely ether-constructed environment.

He could take nothing out when he left, and bring nothing in when he entered.

But he could always perform divination on the outside.

He was well-practiced in this routine: when in doubt, divine.

Acting on the thought, Richard took a wooden box from his nightstand drawer.

He had bought the box at "Silver Branch Hall" on the Imperial Capital University campus.

Silver Branch Hall was a storefront nestled in a narrow alley beside the Department of Classics, specializing in conventional, non-alchemical ritual implements.

Prices ranged from a few shillings to dozens of pounds. The items were not generally cheap, but their quality was guaranteed.

He didn't have the money for alchemical items, but he had bought almost all the standard tools.

Richard opened the wooden box.

Inside lay a brand-new deck of Tarot Cards, stacked face down.

The card backs were deep indigo, centered with a spreading sacred ibis holding a crescent silver moon in its beak.

The world at large knew of Tarot Cards, but few knew that the tarot also had a Thoth series.

Madam Marie and her disciples taught the classic Rider-Waite, the most widely circulated deck.

The Thoth series was far more obscure.

Its designer was a great scholar from Franc over a century ago, who combined classical tarot with the hieroglyphs of the Black Soil River Basin.

Beneath the imagery of every Major Arcana card was a line of Black Soil River hieratic inscription.

When Richard first picked this deck, the shop owner told him they had only sold two in the past five years, making his the third.

"Most people can't use this series," the owner had said.

"The card meanings are heavily skewed, and the entry barrier is high."

Richard hadn't chatted with him for long; he just paid and left.

After returning, he spent two whole weeks familiarizing himself with the deck.

It had two fundamental differences from the Rider-Waite series.

The first was the inscription at the bottom of the cards.

The hieratic inscription at the bottom of each Thoth card layered an additional meaning beneath the card's original one.

The order of life and death, weighing and recording, the opposition of shadow and light... Using the Thoth series for divination naturally brought him closer to what he was facing than conventional Tarot Cards would.

The second was the lack of upright and reversed positions.

The Rider-Waite series judged fortune and misfortune by the card's orientation: one meaning when upright, another when reversed.

The Thoth series did not take this route. It used "Elemental Dignities".

Each card corresponded to an elemental affinity. A single card only possessed its original meaning, with no upright or reversed state.

A card's fortune, misfortune, and strength were not determined by its own orientation, but by the elemental relationship it shared with adjacent cards.

Elements of the same origin placed together lifted each other up, pushing the meaning toward its strongest aspect;

Clashing elements placed next to one another suppressed each other, sinking the meaning toward weakness;

Those caught in between—neither generating nor clashing—maintained their original meaning, neither increasing nor decreasing.

This was the true reason the Thoth series had such a high barrier to entry.

You couldn't just read them one by one; you had to spread the whole group out and look at the relationships between them.

Richard took the cards out of the wooden box, then fished two items out of his shoulder bag's side pocket.

The Sacred Ibis Bronze Paperweight, and the Small Bronze Balance.

The resentment in these two items had mostly faded away.

They were originally Thoth's implements.

The paperweight pinned down the records, while the balance weighed out the measure.

As soon as the two implements were placed on the desk, the ether concentration in the air grew palpably thicker.

His question this time was: Synthesizing all existing information and items, how can they be effectively used to break this deadlock?

He shuffled the deck for the seventh time, then stopped.

He cut the deck and drew.

The first card was flipped over.

The card art depicted a person standing between two stone pillars, each hand holding up an implement.

Suspended upside down above his head was a caduceus.

The line of hieratic inscription beneath his feet surfaced with a wisp of cold light under Spirit Vision.

Richard recognized this one: Major Arcana Card 1, The Magician.

But the Thoth series' Magician had a minute difference from the Rider-Waite version.

The Rider-Waite Magician had an infinity symbol hovering over his head, representing the mastery of tools and the utilization of all things.

The Thoth version featured a caduceus overhead, and the inscription beneath read: "iri en rekh (By the hands of the Knower)."

Elemental affinity: Air.

He stared at this card for a long while.

The Magician held tools in his hands, tools that were already laid out on the table, ready to go.

But the tools did not work on their own; they required a Knower to wield them.

And who was the Knower?

Only himself.

He placed this card on the left side of the balance.

The second card was flipped.

The card art featured a veiled priestess sitting between two pillars.

A half-unrolled Papyrus scroll was spread across her lap.

Major Arcana Card 2, The High Priestess.

Thoth series inscription: "seshet (Writing)".

Elemental affinity: Water.

The High Priestess guarded knowledge and secrets, but she sat motionless.

If you wanted that Papyrus scroll on her lap, you had to walk over and take it yourself.

He placed this card on the right side of the balance.

When the third card leaped out, Richard's fingers paused.

A familiar half-naked woman stood beneath the celestial canopy, her left hand raising a large pitcher to pour water into two rivers.

One river flowed down to the earth, while the other flowed up into the sky. Above her head was a massive eight-pointed star.

Major Arcana Card 17, the Star Card.

The Thoth series inscription at the bottom was blurry; he leaned in to read it with his Spirit Vision.

"maat renpet (The Year of Truth)".

Elemental affinity: Air.

He lingered on this card for a very long time.

The Star Card in classical tarot represented hope, Inspiration, and Healing.

But the underlying meaning padded into it by the Thoth series was completely different.

The so-called Year of Truth in the Black Soil River faith was the first year a departed spirit entered the "Field of Reeds" after passing judgment.

In that year, the departed spirit was granted its new name.

He placed the third card between the two implements.

Three cards lay spread across the desk: the paperweight on the left, the balance on the right.

Now it was time to read the Elemental Dignities.

[The Magician] and [The Star Card] flanked the ends, both belonging to Air.

Two Air cards lifted each other up, pushing the two layers of meaning—the Knower and the Granting of a Name—to their absolute zenith.

[The High Priestess] belonged to Water, wedged between the two Air cards.

Air and Water neither generated nor clashed with one another; they were neutral.

Writing was neither weakened nor strengthened, resting quietly in the center.

The conclusion of the spread was clear.

The Knower takes up the writing tools to complete the work of granting a name.

The tools wouldn't help you, nor would they stop you; they simply existed there.

Whether or not you could reach the end depended entirely on the two extremes... who you were, and the exact name you were going to grant.