Chapter 395: Arriving in High Spirits

“Let me meet that one first,” MacFie said.

He closed his eyes and began to chant.

“He who sinks in the rift between two seas, who spirals with the gulf stream.”

The water in the shallows beyond the weak point completely turned over. Water from all directions poured toward a single point, emptying into an ever-expanding vortex on the left side of the wilderness.

“He who once swallowed a thousand sails in a single gulp.”

The sharp crack of snapping masts, the muffled thud of breaking cables, and the silent agony of lungs filling with seawater were all ground into a single salty stench.

“The tide has sealed the throat, blood has turned to salt, leaving only the vortex eternally spinning in the sea.”

The moment the honorific name was chanted, that heavy gaze pressed down completely.

Richard felt as though he had been plunged into the far northern sea. A chill seeped outward from his bones, and his throat filled with salt.

His mirror-condensing technique was almost scattered by this salty stench, but he gritted his teeth and tightened the Still Water.

MacFie opened his eyes and gave a slight nod in that direction.

Professor Mortimer held his chipped teacup and solemnly wiped the corner of his mouth with his sleeve.

“The old president is a stickler for the rules. In his presence, having tea dregs on one's mouth is a breach of etiquette.”

He cleared his throat. When he spoke, there was not a trace of the feigned muddle-headedness that usually clouded his dry, hoarse voice.

“He who sits atop tens of thousands of documents, as ancient as the covenant texts.”

As the first line fell, paper materialized out of thin air on both sides of the boundary line.

A sky full of paper—parchment, papyrus, bamboo slips, and clay tablets. Every page crawled with words.

The words swam sluggishly across the pages, not yet completely pinned down by the ink.

“He who once weighed all nations on a single scale.”

The shadow of a scale stretched across the sky above.

Its beam stretched so far that neither end could be seen, bending the sky behind the veil slightly under its weight.

“Blood has turned to ink, bones have become pens, leaving only documents eternally recorded in the world.”

All the swimming words stopped simultaneously, obediently settling back into their proper places.

A ‘person’ sat amid those pages.

Richard couldn't make out the face; he could only clearly see the pen in the figure's hand.

The pen tip hovered an inch above the paper, looking as if it would drop at any moment yet never quite falling.

This old president arrived much more quietly than the other, perhaps due to the difference in their traditions.

Richard looked through the door using his Spirit Vision.

The shallows behind the veil inside the door should have been empty, but at this moment, two massive entities stood there.

“Don't reach out to them with your eyes,” MacFie said, pressing a hand to his shoulder.

“One came out of the Stroma Island vortex. Stare a second too long, and you'll be sucked in.

“As for the other... you'd better not look at all, or it will make a record of you too.”

Richard completely suppressed his Inspiration back into his body.

The Dark Copper Mirror was in his arms, wrapped in a triple shell of lead, salt, and bone, each layer pressing down on the last.

Fenrir's head was kept in a separate wooden box. Those astonished eyes were still peering out through the crack in the lid.

MacFie crouched down and twisted the seals on the narrow door open, section by section.

Ancient inscriptions traced in silver thread lit up one by one, then darkened one by one. The door opened.

There were no stairs or passageways behind the door, only darkness.

Richard stepped inside, diving down using the method he had been taught in Whitcom.

The shallows behind him receded into a distant tidal flat. Looking down, another inverted sky hung suspended in the black water.

“Begin,” Mortimer's voice called from behind.

The old professor stood on the side of the boundary closer to the shallows. Beside him floated a slowly unrolling scroll.

MacFie stood on the other side. The sound of the deep currents turning drowned out the breathing of the slumbering thing beneath the black water.

The weight of two Virtuosos pressed down upon this boundary.

Richard closed his eyes and summoned his shadow from the shallower depths of the veil.

The shadow stood on the boundary line, its mass of darkness even denser than it had been in the training room.

The two old professors guarded their respective sides, not even sparing a glance in his direction.

This posture actually made Richard relax a little.

“Put it on.”

Richard handed over the Mask of Hermes, and the golden-winged twin snakes covered the shadow's faceless visage.

The shadow's outline tightened. The translucence propped open by the mask converged alongside the name Richard handed over.

“The Voiceless.”

Once the name settled in, the slight translucence around the shadow that might attract unwanted gazes was suppressed.

The shadow extended its two pitch-black arms and laid out the Half-Set of Rune Stones, one by one.

In his mind, Richard chanted the true name of each rune as it was placed.

The lord of the hunt used runes to write that Hunting Register, so Richard would use runes to build it a familiar table.

“Fehu.”

Livestock, wealth. The first one lit up.

“Uruz.”

Aurochs, strength.

“Thurisaz (Thorn).”

“Ansuz (Speech).”

“Raidho (Journey).”

“Kenaz (Torch).”

The six runes formed a circle along the boundary line, arranged neatly so that the arriving entity wouldn't suspect he was hiding anything else.

The shadow placed Fenrir's head right in the center of the circle.

The hound's eyes faced the deeper depths of the black water.

With everything ready, Richard stepped back between the two professors.

The last thing he did was suppress his thoughts to the absolute minimum.

He could not think, chant, or write that name.

The letter had been written neither by his hand nor his mind, but by a hand that had no idea what it was writing.

On the night he first divined it, he had laid out every usable item he had on the table.

The Magician, The Moon, the Three of Coins... none of the cards had turned up this fragment of a true name for him.

Because the divination board simply couldn't hold it. Even a slight touch would cause that entity to trace its way back along the connection.

So, during that night's divination, it had never appeared.

But it was the only thing with enough weight to tip the scales.

Richard raised his head and began to chant the honorific name Professor Mortimer had given him.

“He who gallops across the pathless wilds, whose hooves strike in tandem with the wind.”

All the winds in the wilderness ceased simultaneously.

“He who once summoned a thousand armies with a single horn.”

A speck of light flared in the black depths of the Deep Realm in the extreme distance.

The wind rose again, but this time it carried the sound of hooves, crushing its way forward all the way from the horizon.

A horn blared before the charge of the thousand armies, its call drowning out the thunder of all hooves.

“Blood has sealed the saddle, bones have become bows, leaving only hoofbeats to eternally hunt the world.”

As the chant ended, a rift tore open in the inverted darkness.

An endless procession surged out from the rift. Sensing the auras of two Virtuosos of the same tier, the host reined in directly above the wilderness.

The lord of the hunt leaned down and glanced at the hound's head inside the boundary circle.

“...”

Naturally, it recognized its own lost hound.

The lord of the hunt lifted its gaze from the head to the table formed by the Half-Set of Rune Stones.

Then, its gaze fell on the shadow herald standing by the table, holding up the hound's head.

The shadow also held the Dark Copper Mirror wrapped in its triple shell.

Richard's words traveled through the sliver of spirit embedded in the shadow.

“I hereby offer a tribute, in exchange for removing the name Gerard of the Ashford family from the Hunting Register.”

The lord of the hunt's gaze landed on the Dark Copper Mirror.

The shadow lifted the mirror higher, revealing the bone needle first.

The lord of the hunt plucked it up and held it before its face, withdrawing its aura.

Richard's breath caught in his throat.

The lord of the hunt recognized handwriting it hadn't seen in a long time. It flicked the bone needle back.

The tip of the needle nailed into the inky surface in front of the shadow's feet, its tail end still vibrating.

It absolutely refused to accept any superfluous items. To accept was to make an entry in the ledger, and an entry required a corresponding price.

Under its gaze, the three layers of lead, salt, and bone parted on their own.

Within the innermost mirror, the reflection of three syllables was branded.

The lord of the hunt read it and immediately froze.

The hoofbeats stopped, the horn cut off, and even the endless procession behind it hung suspended in that moment.

Richard shrank between the two professors, layers of sweat seeping from the back of his neck.

The next moment, the flow of ether around the lord of the hunt turned incredibly active.

It morphed into something... Richard couldn't think of any other word to describe it except joyful surprise.

The endless procession grew restless above the wilderness. Tens of thousands of mounts pawed the ground simultaneously, and tens of thousands of blurred silhouettes leaned toward the mirror at once.

“He who walks in the lightless lands... who breathes in sync with the shadows.”

It naturally recognized the other party. It was the fickle one hiding deep within the veil, the one who had spent centuries stirring up trouble all over the world.

And now, a true name fragment of this Virtuoso, someone with even more seniority than itself, was actually being offered up right before it?!

“Where did you get this?” The lord of the hunt's gaze nailed Richard to the spot.

“This entry is not on the ledger.”

Richard felt terrible under the pressure, but with the people around him sharing the burden, he could barely manage to hold on.

“You only need to weigh whether this fragment of a true name is enough to cross off the name of a Major Adept.”

The lord of the hunt asked no more. It placed the contents of the Dark Copper Mirror onto the pan of a scale.

The pan sank. One end of the invisible scale dropped all the way to the bottom.

The name Gerard Ashford on this scale was about as light as a leaf.

Immensely satisfied, the lord of the hunt stored the Dark Copper Mirror inside the cavity of its horn.

The moment the horn's opening was sealed, the three syllables sank to the bottom, and no further sound could be heard.

Next, it unfastened a scroll from its saddle and gave it a shake.

An animal skin unfurled, rolling outward with the wind until its ends vanished from sight.

Names were packed densely across the skin, line overlapping line.

The wind flipped the pages for it, stopping at a specific one.

The lord of the hunt pondered for a moment and casually blew out a breath.

The ink faded to an ashy white. As the wind passed, nothing was left on that line.

In the half-circle, the Fehu rune stone trembled slightly.

The rune of livestock and wealth. A ‘head of livestock’ had been removed from the register.

Richard's suspended heart finally relaxed halfway.

But the ledger wasn't balanced yet; the scale still hung overhead.

One end of the beam was heavily weighted down by the hound's head and those three syllables, while the other end held only the newly ashen name. The beam tilted so steeply it was almost vertical.

The seated shadow of the old president holding the pen didn't urge it on; he merely recorded.

The lord of the hunt went through its collection in its mind.

That signet ring slipped from Alexander the Great's finger bone—it couldn't bear to part with it.

That arrow that had shot down something that never should have fallen—even less so.

These were things hunted down night after night over hundreds, even thousands of years. Taking any of them out made its heart ache.

It glanced over in that direction again.

Two Virtuosos were watching, and two Scholar Major Adepts had set up the array flawlessly.

If it tried to swindle them too egregiously, that pen hovering overhead would drop.

Shrinking into the darkness, Richard could sense the entity fretting.

It was obviously extremely reluctant to balance the ledger for a mere Practitioner, let alone place this little bug under its protection.

It was too much trouble, far too troublesome to suit the status of a Virtuoso.

High-tier supernatural items were crucial artifacts even for a Virtuoso. It truly couldn't bear to part with one.

It thought for a long time. Then, seeming to have figured something out, it suddenly laughed.

From the hunting party outside the boundary circle, the wind blew in an object.

It was an antler, wrapped with a loop of extremely fine reins.

The shadow caught it.

Richard pressed his Inspiration against it, and the antler's information automatically parsed out.

The antler itself was second only to a high-tier supernatural item, and it served as a token.

With this token, he had the option to join that procession.

On certain specific nights—Yule, Ember Days, Hallowe'en...

Whenever that endless host passed through, he could use this token to become a member of the Wild Hunt's army as a living person.

Of course, he could also choose not to go. That was his exclusive privilege.

By virtue of this token, he was an alternate for the procession, a prospective member of the Wild Hunt.

Members of the Wild Hunt were naturally under the protection of the lord of the hunt. It had observed the rules perfectly.

This ledger entry was calculated without a single flaw. Overhead, the scale beam slowly leveled out.

Mortimer's gaze swept over the antler, then returned to the scale.

The old professor's mouth twitched downwards.

No one called it out during the ritual, but none of those present—including the two Virtuosos—were fools.

Sure enough, anyone who could claw their way up to the Virtuoso tier was exceptionally shrewd.

From afar, the lord of the hunt dipped its hooves toward the two entities of the same tier.

The mass on the left replied with a wisp of salty stench, and the mass on the right replied with the turn of a page.

Across this vast wilderness, the three Virtuosos exchanged a distant greeting.

“The ledger is clear,” the lord of the hunt said, withdrawing its gaze and wheeling the endless host around.

“I will no longer pursue Ashford's debt. As for whether you join or not... I will be waiting.”

Together, the procession galloped off into the blackness of the Deep Realm, the hoofbeats growing fainter with each passing wave.

Finally, only the wind was left sweeping across the wilderness. The wolf's head was gone, too.

Richard leaned on his knees and panted for a long while.

The shadow collected the rein-wrapped antler tip, the Half-Set of Rune Stones, and his maternal great-grandfather's remains, then retreated inside the boundary circle.