Chapter 377: Cornflowers and the Chief Inspector

It was already past dinnertime when he returned to the Ashford Residence.

The butler warmed up some soup and bread for him, and he took his bowl out to the stone table on the back porch to eat.

A breeze curled in from the garden, carrying the scent of pruned rose branches and damp earth.

After eating, he went inside and called Briston first. The phone rang six times before someone answered.

"Hello?"

"Mom, it's me."

"Have you eaten?"

"I have."

"What did you have?"

"Soup and bread."

"Only soup and bread?"

"And a piece of cheese."

His mother muttered something about "what good is cheese" on the other end, then changed the subject.

"Evelyn completely smoked up the kitchen today. She was trying to make a meringue cake using that recipe that swaps white sugar for honey."

"Did it turn out?"

"Halfway," Margaret said, a wry smile evident in her voice.

"The egg whites whipped up fine, but it collapsed when she put it in the oven. She crouched in front of the oven for twenty minutes, watching it shrink down bit by bit."

"And then?"

"And then she took the collapsed cake out of the oven, cut it into pieces, and called it a 'flat cake.' She claimed it was a new variety she invented."

"Your dad tried it and said it tasted good but was just too flat. She glared at him."

Richard almost laughed out loud.

"Mom," he said, returning to the main topic. "Has anything strange happened around Slag Alley recently?"

The phone line fell silent for two seconds.

The scrape of a chair came from his mother's end; she was probably shifting her posture.

"People on the streets are acting like maniacs looking for mediums."

Margaret's voice darkened.

"Mrs. Weir spent one shilling and sixpence on a channeling book last week. She dragged me to her house to 'summon spirits' together, saying she wanted to talk to her late husband."

"What did you say?"

"I refused."

His mother's tone was decisive.

"I told Mrs. Weir that if she really wanted to speak to him, she should just go to the church and light a candle for him, and to stay away from that occult nonsense."

Richard breathed a small sigh of relief.

"Did she listen?"

"She called me superstitious."

Margaret herself sounded speechless.

"Someone trying to summon a spirit calling me superstitious."

Richard leaned against the wooden panel behind the telephone.

"Mom, try to hold Mrs. Weir back a little. Don't let her actually follow the steps in that book."

"Don't worry. The old lady is actually quite timid; she flipped through two pages, claimed she couldn't understand it, and put it down. The woman who sells smoked fish at the alley entrance, though..."

He heard her sigh over the phone line.

After Richard hung up, he stood in the hallway for a moment.

He instinctively wanted to call Wentworth, his hand already reaching for the receiver.

Then he pulled his hand back, suddenly realizing that Wentworth had been gone for a long time.

Richard dialed the public number for the Branch Office. It rang three times before someone answered.

"Briston Branch Office, duty desk."

The voice was young, carrying a northern accent. It wasn't anyone Richard recognized.

"Hello, this is Richard Williams, Probationary Inspector, non-permanent staff."

"Oh... hello, sir."

The duty officer's tone grew a bit warmer.

"What can I do for you?"

"Have there been any increases in spirit-channeling activities in the Briston city area recently?"

"Ah, about that. The Branch Office has already noticed."

The duty officer shuffled through some papers.

"A few civilian spirit-summoning incidents were indeed reported around Christmas. There was one over by West Alley, two on Black Trench Road, and someone near Slag Alley has been doing it too."

"Did you intervene?"

"Not for the time being. They were classified as civilian superstitious activities and didn't meet the threshold for intervention."

The duty officer paused, seemingly making sure his phrasing was accurate.

"No ether anomalies have occurred," he stressed.

"Alright," Richard said. "If any anomalies arise, please notify Lieutenant Colonel Ord."

"Understood, sir."

Richard hung up the phone.

Briston was a small city. That massive battle had thoroughly purged the Unresponsive Pit and the Black Trench, and the entire city's ether field was kept completely subdued by two Virtuosos.

In the short term, Briston was unlikely to see any trouble.

But the Imperial Capital was different.

The Imperial Capital possessed a centuries-old sealing network, with the subterranean pipes laid out even more densely than the streets above.

If the channeling activities in the Imperial Capital continued to spread, the loopholes torn open by those amateur seances would eventually resonate with the dead who had awakened on Christmas Eve.

Richard went up to the second floor and closed his door.

He sat down at his desk without turning on the lamp.

A sliver of moonlight slipped through the gap in the curtains, falling perfectly across the lid of the Frost Branch box on the desk.

Aside from the copper buckle, there was also that identification tag inside the box.

Heracles had said that there were people surviving in no man's land.

Those deserters, clad in patchwork military uniforms, huddled in craters and ruined bunkers during the day, coming out at night to drag away the corpses of the dead.

January 6th, the start of the early school term.

The sky over the Imperial Capital had not yet fully brightened when Richard walked into the Petrie Building with his canvas bag slung over his shoulder.

The corridors were empty, and his leather shoes tapped against the stone slabs, echoing hollowly with each step.

A new notice was posted at the first-floor corner:

"Due to wartime adjustments in the teaching schedule, this semester will begin one week early. All students must complete their registration by January 6th."

He didn't go to the classroom. Instead, he headed straight up to the second floor and turned into Room 314.

Before he even pushed the door open, he caught the scent of citron tea—the signal that his aunt was inside.

"Close the door," Isabella said without raising her head.

Richard shut the door behind him, walked over to the desk, and looked down at the map.

"From Christmas to yesterday, there have been thirty-one spirit-channeling accidents in two weeks."

His aunt moved her teacup aside.

"Before the war, the Imperial Capital barely saw a dozen in a whole year."

Richard instinctively used [Speculation] to perform a spatial comparison.

He plotted out all thirty-one map locations in his mind one by one, then drew lines connecting them.

Finally, they formed three sweeping arcs, their extensions all converging toward the same direction.

Southeast, toward the channel. The direction of the front lines.

"Aunt Isabella," Richard said, furrowing his brows. "This probably isn't spontaneous."

"Someone is taking advantage of the seance craze."

Isabella looked over the red markers on the map one last time before speaking.

"Right, there are also two things I'd like you to take a look at."

Richard opened the Frost Branch box, placing the small sealed lead cylinder and the cornflower copper buckle onto the desk.

"Where did these two items come from?" Isabella asked first.

"A Hunter friend on the front lines had someone bring them back."

Richard already had an answer prepared.

"He was clearing out a bunker ruin in Flanders that had been flipped over by an artillery shell, and dug them out from inside. He couldn't make sense of them himself, so he asked me to help appraise them."

Isabella took a pair of cotton gloves from the drawer, slipped them on, and turned the lead cylinder over in her hands.

"Did you use any methods to examine it yourself?"

"I probed it once with Inspiration. It bounced off as soon as I touched it. The ether concentration inside is extremely high."

She pressed down on the lead cylinder, weighed it in her hand, and then set it back on the desk.

"The lead walls are too thick. You won't get anything out of it by forcing a probe."

Isabella took off the cotton gloves, walked over to the old bookshelf by the window, and bent down to rummage for a long while.

She pulled out a flat cowhide pouch. Unrolling it revealed a set of silver tools.

A blunt silver needle, an exquisite vernier caliper no longer than a finger, three small glass vials filled with different liquids, and a Bronze Mirror no bigger than a fingernail.

"When people from the Classical Records Tradition dismantle something, they copy its structure from the outside."

His aunt stood the Bronze Mirror upright, its reflective surface facing the lead cylinder.

Richard sneakily swept his Spirit Vision over it.

The Bronze Mirror glowed. Projected onto its surface was the inner wall of the lead cylinder, peeling back the layers to reveal what lay behind the lead shell.

By the third layer... the complete outline of a token appeared on the mirror.

The token was octagonal, just slightly larger than a Copper Penny.

Its surface was heavily scored with vertical lines and slanted, short knife cuts—they were Rune Glyphs.

Engraved right in the center of the token's front face was a main glyph, with the phonetic value of P.

The corresponding entry popped up automatically from Richard's [Erudition] database: in the Norse tradition, this rune was called Pertho. Its meaning was widely debated, but in ritual contexts, it was usually associated with "fate," "dice cups," and "hidden things."

More importantly, there was a small floral pattern in the bottom left corner of the token's face.

Five petals surrounding a central dot—it was also a cornflower.

Sealed inside the token was a segment of ritual instructions. It was an Anchor.

Isabella put the Bronze Mirror away, her expression already as cold as frost.

"No man's land is hundreds of miles long. If one of these Anchors is buried at set intervals..."

"The entire corridor becomes a pipe. One end of the pipe is the dead on the front lines, and the other end..."

Richard's gaze shifted to the map of the Imperial Capital on the desk, dotted all over with red markers.

"The other end is the spirit-channeling activity in the Imperial Capital."

"Cornflowers combined with a master Rune Glyph," Isabella said, sharing what she knew.

"The Germanic military's 'Rune Brigade.' I've seen this unit designation in the intelligence summaries from the Imperial Capital University's exchange database."

"Auntie." Richard placed the lead cylinder back into the Frost Branch box.

"Does the top brass know about this intel?"

Isabella was noncommittal. "What do you think?"

Naturally, Richard didn't believe he was the only smart person in the world.

Any clues he could discover and piece together, the people higher up the chain would have undoubtedly figured out a step ahead of him.

Isabella packed the Bronze Mirror back into the cowhide pouch.

"I'll have the appraisal report for the lead cylinder written up by tomorrow, and I'll submit it alongside that distribution map of the Imperial Capital's channeling accidents."

"Let your grandfather submit it. His words carry more weight than both of ours combined."

That same afternoon, after Gerard submitted the report, a secretary for Chief Inspector old Phillips called, arranging a meeting at an old-fashioned gentlemen's club near the Department of Internal Affairs.

Richard followed his grandfather there.

The club's leather sofas were worn to a polished sheen, and the air was thick with the scent of cigars.

Old Phillips was already seated in a corner booth.

Compared to his son, old Phillips was quite thin, and his hair was cropped extremely short.

Richard noticed that the Chief Inspector was also greying at the temples. He could barely be considered the same generation as his grandfather, making it apparent that he had his son late in life.

"Gerard." Old Phillips stood up and shook his grandfather's hand.

Then his gaze shifted to Richard.

"Richard is here too."

The three of them took their seats, and a waiter brought over some tea.

Old Phillips opened the report, read through Richard's appraisal conclusions, and stopped at the section on the Rune Anchor Talisman.

"An Anchor from the Rune Brigade..." He closed the report and leaned back against his chair.

"I saw something like this in an intelligence summary three years ago. Back then, Germania had just formed this unit. Our internal evaluation concluded that 'its countermeasures are limited, and it does not pose a threat at this time.'"

Old Phillips shifted his gaze back to Gerard.

"Gerard, this grandson of yours isn't bad."

"He's alright," Gerard said, holding his tea with a completely unruffled expression.

"He does fine in his studies, but as for the rest... he barely scrapes by."

"Barely scrapes by?" The corners of old Phillips's mouth turned down.

"You've met my youngest son."

"I have." Gerard nodded. "He's a good kid."

"Good?" Old Phillips gave a dry chuckle.

"I hired tutors for him starting at age six. He learned Latin at eight and memorized conjugation tables at ten. I paved the entire way for his academic advancement."

"During the summer seminar assessment, twenty out of thirty passed. He didn't."

"I have a pile of materials in my study, yet he'd rather read a copy of Ovid than flip through a single page of them."

Gerard took a sip of his tea, not a hint of smugness showing on his face.

"He's young. Give him time."

He said that, but Richard noticed that his grandfather's micro-expressions were slightly off.

His grandfather usually kept a stern face no matter who he met, yet right now, the wrinkles on his face had practically smoothed out.

Whether old Phillips noticed or not, he merely sighed.

"This grandson of yours doesn't just excel in his studies; he's outstanding in field missions too. To be able to write an appraisal report like this at seventeen, dismantling cursed objects piece by piece with absolute clarity."

"My son is eighteen, and all he's ever brought back is a belly full of tea and several boxes of outdated books that other people threw away."

He pushed the report back to the center of the table.

"Forget it. I won't mention it."

The group chatted a while longer about official business and the arrangements for going to Whitby. Then, old Phillips tucked the report away into his briefcase.

"I'll pass this document up the chain."

He stood up and tugged at the hem of his coat.

"But let me state this upfront. I can submit it, but whether or not it gets approved isn't my call to make."

Gerard stood up as well.

"I know."

The two men shook hands, and old Phillips's gaze finally settled on Richard one last time.

"Next time you see my son, could you try and talk some sense into him for me?"

"Please go ahead."

Old Phillips frowned in thought for a moment, then shook his head.

"Never mind. Don't bother. He wouldn't listen anyway."

He picked up his briefcase and left, his pace brisk.