Chapter 329: The Slavs

Deep behind the veil lay a region light had never reached.

An inverted pyramid hung silently in the center of a black tide formed of condensed necrotic sound.

The pyramid had no doors; it was the door itself.

The interior space was vastly larger than the exterior. Geometry held no sway here.

In the deepest stone chamber, a faceless humanoid figure crouched in the dark.

Time in the depths of the veil was a viscous river, flowing sluggishly.

For entities that had reached these extreme depths, there was little difference between a year and a day.

It was waiting to heal. It was waiting for the impending conflagration on the Old Continent to deliver fresh nourishment to its mouth.

At that very moment, a string in the deepest part of its essence began to vibrate.

The string had not snapped or warped. It had simply... been plucked by something.

It had not felt this sensation in many years.

The last time it felt this, it had still been human.

A young priest in a small mud-brick temple along the Black Soil River, guarding an increasingly desolate sacrificial hall for the dead.

Back then, its greatest fear was someone calling its name in the dead of night.

If the name was called, the soul would follow the sound and slip away.

With the soul gone, the body became an empty shell.

Once that shell was occupied by something else, you could never return.

Children of the Black Soil River Basin were taught this from birth:

"If you hear someone call your name at night, do not answer."

It had feared this in life, and it feared it in death.

After reaching the rank of Virtuoso, it thought it no longer needed to fear.

It had discarded everything related to humanity piece by piece, leaving only a shadow.

You could not grasp a shadow's name, because the shadow was just the projection of the name cast upon the veil.

For so many years, no entity had touched its true name.

Even those two fellow Virtuosos guarding the Imperial Capital had only driven it from the material realm; they had never touched that string.

But now, the string had resonated.

The inverted pyramid slowly rotated in the black tide.

It was searching for whoever had plucked it.

...Time quietly slipped by. After exhausting its own methods, it made a decision to seek outside help.

This act in itself was a humiliation.

But the string had resonated. That meant someone knew where it was.

Knowing its location meant they could pluck it again at any time.

Next time might not just be a pluck—it might be a yank. It could not afford to wait.

It rummaged through a pile of sundries for a long time before pulling out a bronze mirror.

"It's been a long time."

After injecting Ether into it, a woman's voice drifted over from the other side of the mirror.

"The last time you sought me out was before the plague.

"What year of the New Calendar was it again? Sixteen sixty-something?"

"Sixteen sixty-five." The Black Soil River Virtuoso did not need to speak; the veil itself spoke on its behalf.

"Over two hundred years," the woman on the other side of the mirror said.

"You came to me this time because your string resonated."

The woman sounded somewhat gloating.

"You must have checked yourself before coming to me."

"I did."

"Shadow threads, mirror surfaces, proxy networks, necrotic sound divination, and severed-line tracing."

"I checked them all. I found nothing."

"Which is why you came to me."

Frost patterns began to spread across the mirror's surface, creeping past the bronze rim and snaking up the chain from which it hung.

"Elena," it said, speaking her name.

"I need your deep dive."

Elena Savolova.

A Major Adept medium of the Abyss Tradition, she had walked out of the permafrost at the northernmost reaches of the Rus Empire.

Counting from that year, she had been in this world for over three hundred years.

This was not a normal lifespan for a Major Adept. A typical Major Adept should have died of old age at a hundred and fifty or sixty.

But Elena was not burning her own oil.

"You know the price of a deep dive," Elena said.

"I can afford it."

"Fine." Elena did not haggle over the price. "I'll take a look for you first."

The frost on the mirror began to retract, condensing in the center into a minuscule, spinning vortex.

Spirit Vision in the Abyss Tradition looked downward, peering into the facets of things that least wanted to be unearthed.

Following the resonant memory provided by the Black Soil River Virtuoso, Elena's Perception drilled all the way down through the various layers of the veil.

Layer after layer.

Transitioning from the shallows to the middle layer, and piercing from the middle layer into the deep realm.

The Ether in the deep waters was as thick as glue. A normal Major Adept would have turned back by now.

Elena continued downward.

About fifteen minutes later, the vortex stopped.

"I've found a trace."

"Where?"

"I can only trace it to within the borders of the Albion Empire."

Elena's voice slowed.

"I tracked it to the final point of contact after your wisp of residual ember was destroyed.

"Someone was at the destruction site. They intercepted a wisp of your dispersed mystery."

Inside the pyramid, the crouching humanoid shifted its posture.

"And the person who intercepted it?"

"I can't track them," Elena said, sounding somewhat helpless.

"The only certainty is that the interception occurred at the Imperial Capital Museum, within a week after your residual ember was officially destroyed."

The Imperial Capital Museum had two defending Virtuosos keeping watch, and the museum's sealing array had remained active.

For someone to intercept its dispersed mystery in that environment without being discovered by anyone present... the Black Soil River Virtuoso felt a chilling terror the more it thought about it.

"There's one more thing," Elena added.

"Traces of Thoth appeared in your divination. I can confirm this as well."

"Thoth does not help anyone."

The Black Soil River Virtuoso inherently clashed with Thoth's power, even though Thoth's power originated from its homeland.

"Thoth doesn't help people, but Thoth recognizes people," Elena corrected it.

"The path walked by Scholars shares an origin with Thoth."

"You mean the one who intercepted the seed was a Scholar."

"Highly likely."

"What Rank?"

"I don't know. Someone capable of silently intercepting the seed in that setting, with concealment methods so profound that even I can't track their full trajectory—a Minor Adept absolutely couldn't achieve this."

"But if they were above a Minor Adept, the two Virtuosos in the Imperial Capital couldn't possibly have failed to notice."

Elena was quiet for a moment.

"There is another possibility."

"Speak."

"Someone shielded them."

Elena's power withdrew from the depths layer by layer, and the vortex began to shallow out.

"There's another matter I'd like to ask you about. Several small circles have sprung up on the Old Continent in recent years."

"These circles have low barriers to entry. They range from four or five to seven or eight people, and the leaders are generally relatively young Major Adepts."

"The way these circles operate is highly uniform.

"The leader assigns a title to each inductee, and the titles are entirely from the Old Gods pantheon."

"Your hidden network has been lurking in the Empire for over a decade. Have you discovered anything?"

The Black Soil River Virtuoso didn't hide the intelligence it possessed.

"What you're describing sounds somewhat familiar. Within my network, there are indeed gatherings using the mythological lineage of my homeland."

"I have intelligence on four locations."

Elena exchanged information with it.

"Marseille in southern Franc, Cologne in western Germania, and Kyiv and St. Peter within the Rus Empire."

"I had a student mingling in Marseille for two years.

"She told me she knows someone calling themselves 'Hecate,' walking a path of Tri-Phase Superimposition."

Tri-Phase Superimposition, the Black Soil River Virtuoso pondered silently.

Anyone capable of achieving that was either born with a unique gift or had dismantled themselves into three parts and glued them back together.

"Are all these circles controlled by the same person?" it asked.

"I'm not sure," Elena replied honestly.

"The leaders' titles are all different, and their Ether signatures aren't entirely identical.

"It might be one person using different shells, or several students taught by the same teacher."

"But one thing is identical."

"What?"

"The forging method of the masks—the underlying logic is exactly the same."

"The title is the bait; the pipe is the hook.

"The inductees think they're climbing upward by borrowing a divine name, but in reality, they've welded themselves to a structure that hasn't yet revealed its full shape."

"What kind of structure?"

"I don't know. But judging by the scale, all these locations combined have swallowed up at least forty people."

"Among those forty-plus people are several Major Adepts and countless Minor Adepts. That's no small force."

The Black Soil River Virtuoso was quiet for a long time.

"Does what you're saying have anything to do with my string being touched?"

"It might. It might not."

Elena's voice returned to a flat calm.

"But if the one who intercepted your seed happens to be in one of these circles..."

"Could the mask they wear be the reason they hid so cleanly?"

Even as she said it, she wasn't certain herself.

"This is as far as I can go."

"I can't pierce the blockade over Albion. I can't give you the answer you seek."

"Your payment." The Black Soil River Virtuoso didn't haggle.

A wisp of exceedingly dense necrotic sound separated from the bottom of the pyramid, flowing along the inner wall of the veil toward the bronze mirror.

To practitioners of the Abyss Tradition, the purer the necrotic sound, the more valuable it was.

The purity of the necrotic sound extracted by the Black Soil River Virtuoso was something Elena couldn't buy through her regular channels at any price.

On the other side of the bronze mirror, Elena caught the wisp of necrotic sound.

"This account is settled."

She added one final remark.

"Old friend, your string was plucked—it didn't snap, and it didn't warp.

"Which means the person who touched it is still of insufficient Rank."

"But a resonating string is a resonating string. That person knows where it is. They will return eventually."

"You're huddled in the depths recovering from your injuries, banking on that war in the Old Continent to extend your life.

"But if that person yanks the string before you heal..."

Elena didn't finish her sentence.

The vortex dissipated, and the bronze mirror went dark.

The Black Soil River Virtuoso crouched in the deepest stone chamber of the pyramid.

It had sat in this position for so many years and had never felt uneasy.

Tonight, for the first time, it felt the walls of this pyramid weren't thick enough.

Then there were those circles Elena had pointed out.

It had lurked in the Empire for decades, catching only the scent but never seeing the people.

Now it knew the source of that scent was far larger than it had imagined.

Someone was out there on the map of the Old Continent, using divine names as bricks and living humans as mortar, building something piece by piece.

As it crouched in the pyramid pondering these matters, another thought flashed through its mind.

Elena's surname was Savolova. The person on Flower Moon Street also had a Slavic surname.

Their directions were completely different, yet they shared certain similarities.

For instance, both lived in seclusion somewhere, both had taken in a slew of students, and both had expanded their business extremely far and wide.

What troubled it most was another coincidence.

The face of that medium on Flower Moon Street could not be seen clearly.

The one behind the bronze mirror had the exact same quirk.

If there truly was some connection between these two women...

Then how much of the intelligence Elena had just shared was actually true?