Chapter 363: Frost Bean Fruits, Multi-Headed Serpent Mother

Nemesis accepted four commissions in one go.

Heracles's seven rubbings counted as one, and Richard's Ancient Gaulish Inscriptions as another.

Dionysus pulled a heavily folded piece of paper from his coat.

Prometheus hesitated a moment before handing over his own—an alchemy manuscript.

With the four commissions stacked in front of her, Nemesis was visibly pleased. "Thanks."

Richard nodded. His Mask of Hermes was reacting again.

Evidently, soliciting business for his companions so they could all profit also fell under the domain of commerce.

Demeter made her move last. She started by paying the fee for her previous appraisal—two pieces of medium-concentration Ether Condensate.

Then she brought out two items.

The first was a bundle of wheat ears.

The golden ears were so plump they looked ready to burst, their grains a full size larger than normal wheat.

A face was reflected in every single grain—blurred and featureless, leaving only a barely distinguishable human outline.

But the faces were numerous; the thirty or so grains were densely packed with them.

"They grew in my field on their own."

Demeter sounded slightly hesitant as she spoke.

"It started recently. I haven't seen anything like it before. When you pluck them and place them in your hand, they get lighter, yet they still feel solid."

She pushed the wheat toward the center of the table.

"I can't tell if it's a good omen or bad, so I'd like Hermes to take a look for me."

Richard picked up the wheat, turned it over, and gently ran his fingertip across the surface of the grains.

Beneath his fingertip, the miniature faces opened and closed their mouths. It was incredibly eerie.

"I accept the commission. I'll get you the report later."

Demeter then pulled the second item from her cloth bag.

It was a section of branch as thick as an index finger, entirely covered in frost. Three fruits hung from it, their skins ashen white.

"I managed to grow your Divine Throne Frost Pod."

"I tended it in my cold zone for months, and it grew into a small tree about a palm high."

"It's covered in frost, and it hasn't shed its leaves even with winter setting in."

"Within about a ten-meter radius of the frost tree, the ether layer is dead."

"Dead?" Prometheus turned his head.

"A vacuum," Demeter offered, using a more precise word.

"When I probe it with my Inspiration, I can't feel a thing. The space there has been scraped completely clean, leaving no residue behind."

Richard thought of his own Silence Spell.

Silence was artificial; it dispersed a short while after being projected.

The frost tree was natural. It didn't require a caster to constantly supply ether; it sustained an area of dead silence all on its own.

Richard stared at the ice crystals forming on the Frost Branch.

The thing was called a Divine Throne Frost Pod. But why was the throne of the gods above the snowline?

"You provided the seed in the first place, so you take the Frost Branch and the Frost Beans."

Demeter pushed the Frost Branch and the three newly formed beans toward Richard.

"Its properties are too bizarre. After it grew into a tree, several ridges of wheat around it completely stopped bearing grain. Even after I moved it to a separate area, it took a long time for those ridges to slowly recover."

Richard tucked the Frost Branch and the pods into his canvas bag, his mind already racing.

A natural static-field plant.

The Silence Spell he was practicing had already reached the point of mediumless casting. He wondered if using a Frost Bean as an aid would amplify the spell's effect. That would require testing.

If the wood of the Frost Branch was crafted into a box, it would completely sever both ether leakage and outside perception—countless times stronger than a salt seal.

He had used salt and silver to seal items up to this point, but salt seals were only a temporary measure.

A box made from the Frost Branch would be the equivalent of locking those items inside a soundproof room on the ether layer.

"I'll get you that appraisal report later, along with an analysis of the Frost Beans and the Frost Branch."

"If it grows new branches and fruit in the future, we can trade for them normally," Richard told Demeter.

"Alright." The terracotta mask nodded.

"Information sharing." Hecate tapped the table.

The people around the table put away the items they had just traded.

Nemesis's scales lit up first.

"The southern Gaelic Highlands, Edan Village."

"Last month's statistics came in. Every single man in the village between the ages of eighteen and forty died in battle at Ypres."

"Were they in the same battalion?" Heracles asked.

Words continued to scroll across the scale's tray.

"The same Highland regiment battalion. When they enlisted, the recruiting officer organized the companies by village. They went in as a whole village, and they came out as a whole village."

Dionysus set down his wine glass.

Nemesis continued.

"What we're discussing at this table isn't military matters."

"In the traditions of the Highlands, when a man dies in battle away from home, his male relatives must sing a Gaelic dirge to send him off."

Richard had heard from Maggie that the ancient Gaelic funeral songs had an actual function on the other side of the veil.

They were a folk variant of a sleep-return spell.

Hit the right tune and sing the right lyrics, and the death echoes of the deceased would disperse along with the song, passing on cleanly.

"The old women of Edan Village tried to sing it, but the tune was wrong."

"They sang for three days, but the dead wouldn't accept it."

The left tray of the scales sank heavily.

"The death echoes are accumulating in the skies above the village. They grow thicker with every passing day."

"After winter set in, people started smelling blood at the village entrance... the stench of churned-up frozen earth from the frontline trenches."

"The water drawn from Lake Edan by the oldest woman in the village was red."

Nemesis stopped there.

No one at the table responded.

Richard recalled that night at the Black Trench.

The ritual ultimately succeeded because the song was right.

The song at Edan Village was wrong. The only ones who could sing the tune the dead recognized were their brothers, sons, and husbands.

Death echoes recognized people.

No matter how brilliantly you chanted the judgment, if the dead didn't recognize your voice, it was nothing more than a string of words.

Just as Nemesis's glowing words dimmed, Hecate raised a hand, cutting off the room.

"At eight o'clock this morning... the east coast came under artillery fire."

"Hartlepool, Scarborough, and Whitby."

"I know those three towns," Heracles spoke up.

"Hartlepool has a naval port and harbor docks, so shelling there makes sense, but Scarborough and Whitby are resort towns..."

Hecate lifted her index finger from the table.

"An artillery shell hit the ruins of Whitby Abbey."

Whitby Abbey was home to a seventh-century saint named St. Hilda, who legendarily turned the snakes invading the area into stone.

The ammonite fossils found on the beach were called the "Serpents of St. Hilda" by the locals, as they looked like snake bodies coiled into spirals and frozen in the rock.

During the peak tourist season, locals would carve snake heads onto the ammonites to sell to tourists as souvenirs.

Hecate glanced around the table.

"Some of you must know the story of St. Hilda."

"I do," Richard said.

"Legend says she turned a swarm of snakes into ammonites."

"It's not entirely a legend." Hecate placed heavy emphasis on the word.

"Back then, St. Hilda sealed a multi-headed evil creature, a Serpent Mother. And it's still alive."

"The ammonites are scales that collapsed from the primary seal. They scattered from that thing's body across the entire coastline, acting as secondary anchors."

"The abbey ruins serve as the manifest layer of the seal, and they've stood for over twelve hundred years."

"A single artillery shell shattered the manifest layer."

"Starting that same afternoon," Hecate continued, "anomalies have already appeared in the coastal fishing villages."

"After the tide went out, coiled drag marks appeared on the beach, winding inward from the shoreline toward the land circle by circle."

"The ammonites passed down for generations in the fishermen's homes have gone soft to the touch."

"The church bells rang three times on their own."

Prometheus chimed in.

He had been wearing his mask for less than half an hour, yet his speaking rhythm was already changing.

"During our gathering last year, I said something."

Eyes around the table turned to him.

"If someone could get their hands on the complete ledger of the national sealing system, they could draw a countdown map."

The flame of foresight, which had only just lit up, flared violently. Astoundingly, this too counted as a successful premonition.

"At the time, I thought it was just a thought experiment."

When Prometheus had mentioned it in passing back then, everyone at the table had treated it as an academic discussion.

The artillerymen operating the naval guns might not have known why they were firing at that location.

But whoever provided the coordinates to the warships definitely knew, which was why the strike landed squarely on the seal's anchor.

This meant that the Albion Empire's map of sealing nodes had already been leaked across the strait.

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