Chapter 397: The Horn and the Boundary

It was past eleven by the time he returned to the dorm.

Richard deadbolted the door and drew the curtains tight before taking the item out from his coat and setting it on the desk.

The tip of an antler, about a palm's length.

A loop of reins wrapped around its base, thin as a single strand of hair.

Richard gave it a squeeze; it felt warm against his fingertips.

[Available Points: 1.11... 1.43... 1.71...]

[Available Points: 2.03]

Once it reached two points, Richard quickly stopped absorbing them; gathering enough to light up Lv5 [Breathing] was sufficient.

He had probably drained close to half of it just now.

Richard sat in his chair for a moment.

This thing was a token, and a token's value did not lie in the meager ether inside it.

If it lost too much ether, would the lord of the hunt still acknowledge it?

He didn't know and had no way to test it, let alone a second horn to experiment on.

At that moment, the shadow beneath his feet moved.

Richard looked down.

The mass of black had floated over to the table leg at some point. Seven or eight extremely thin tentacles extended from its edges, layered over one another, all reaching toward the horn.

The foremost one had already hooked onto the edge of the desk.

"...Don't even think about this one."

Richard reached out and moved the horn half a chi closer to himself.

The tentacles followed, shifting half a chi as well.

"You can't eat this."

The tentacles drifted in the air for a moment before retracting with extreme reluctance.

The core's oscillation frequency dropped from "hungry" back to "standby"—much slower than usual.

Richard massaged the space between his eyebrows.

He fished out a low-concentration scrap from a hidden compartment and tossed it onto the floor.

"Eat this."

The shadow's tentacles latched onto it and chewed it down begrudgingly.

Only after the shadow finished digesting the scrap and sank back behind the veil did Richard activate his mirror condensation method.

He held his breath and pressed down, lowering the ether fluctuations layer by layer.

Once he reached that line, the Still Water spread out.

The horn was reflected within.

The outermost layer was still warm. It was from tonight.

It was the moment that figure had leaned down to look at the dog's head.

Further in, layer pressed upon layer, each one representing a single night.

There was snow in the second layer, kicked up into a white fog by tens of thousands of hooves.

The third layer held a harvested wheat field full of stubble. An overturned cart lay across the earth, its wheels still spinning.

The fourth layer was a seaside. A row of things lay neatly arranged along the receding tide line.

He didn't understand the fifth layer; he only saw a person turning their head.

The turning motion was only half-completed, and there was nothing but emptiness after that.

The sixth layer, the seventh layer...

Richard counted to the seventh layer before his Inspiration began to sting. He quickly withdrew the Still Water.

He opened his eyes, a thin layer of sweat clinging to the back of his neck.

Hundreds of years, with a harvest every year.

This horn was the ledger hung by that figure's saddle. Every harvest was an entry, and there were hundreds of entries recorded.

Even if it wasn't a high-tier supernatural item, it wasn't far off.

It made sense when he thought about it. Even though the two professors were dissatisfied with it, it was still an item the scale judged as barely breaking even. It held plenty of value worth digging into.

The next afternoon, Richard signed the requisition form for a training room.

After sliding the iron door's bolt shut from the inside, he held the horn in his hand.

He started his breathing method and ran it through three complete cycles.

Then, he tried pushing the ether from the Seat of the Sun along the inside of his right arm into his palm, and finally into the horn.

He had done this step hundreds of times.

It was the same path he used for the Silver Needle and the Soul-Devouring Beast Tooth Needle.

The moment the ether pushed in, Richard felt as if he had poured a glass of water into a river.

The ether was swept away by that river, swirling until it took on the river's color.

A nail condensed at the tip of the horn.

A Moon Nail was supposed to be the size of a grain of rice, white tinged with cyan. This one was gray.

Richard raised his hand and fired it at the copper disc target on the east wall.

The nail struck the second ring line, slightly off-center.

Then the copper disc began to fade.

Starting from the point of impact, the coating of coarse salt and refined silver turned ashen gray, spreading outward ring by ring.

Richard withdrew his ether, but the coating kept fading.

He waited another seven or eight seconds before the fading finally stopped on its own.

Richard walked over and rubbed his fingertip against the ashen ring. The bite taken out of it could never be restored.

The Wild Hunt wasn't about cleaving you in half with a single strike; it was about hunting you down, sinking its teeth in, and never letting go.

This horn had poured that exact trait into his Spell Formula. The Moon Nail had been rewritten into a "bite."

Richard wrote in his notebook:

"Horn as a Spellcasting Medium: Extremely corrosive. The nature of the Spell Formula is skewed by the medium;

Persists on its own for about seven to eight seconds after release; must not be tested on a living person."

For the final test, Richard pushed a sliver of ether into the horn, truly "activating" the trace of aura the lord of the hunt had left inside it.

The entire training room went dead silent.

The ether field flattened against the floor, pressing down so completely that it didn't dare to move.

On the other side of the veil, the shadow froze in the shallows.

Richard withdrew the ether, and the aura retreated back into the horn. The ether field in the training room slowly crept back up.

Anything below a High-Tier Evil Entity would be terrified by this scent. This was the suppressive power of a high Rank.

The same went for Practitioners and Minor Adepts.

If a Minor Adept smelled the aura of a Virtuoso on the battlefield, their first reaction would undoubtedly be to stop and assess who it was, why they were there, and whether they needed to run.

That pause—one to two seconds—was enough time for him to fire off six Enchanted Bullets.

To spit out a Silence, and shift the shadow from behind the veil right under the enemy's feet.

Of course, he could also recite those three lines of the honorific name, but he wasn't sure what the lord of the hunt's attitude was, nor was he prepared to test it.

On February 13th, Richard lit the stove in his dorm and first glanced at his panel.

[Sealed Entity: Incomplete (One segment extracted)]

[Extraction: Exhausted.]

"Single segment"—when the panel first offered this operation, he had treated it as a restriction.

His Rank wasn't high enough, so he was only allowed to take one segment while the rest was locked away for him.

Now, he looked at this restriction from the other side.

What if the panel had allowed him to pull out the complete true name that day?

If he handed the complete true name to the lord of the hunt, only one of two things would happen.

Either the lord of the hunt would devour the one from Black Soil River entirely on the spot.

Everything that figure had hoarded behind the veil for hundreds or thousands of years—the mysteries, the collections, perhaps even that unfinished crown—would all go to the lord of the hunt.

That wasn't a scenario Richard wanted to see.

The mirror condensation method he was currently walking, [Shadow Inversion], and even the shadow beneath his feet were inseparable from the Tradition of Change.

If he really reached that step in the future, he should be the one to devour it.

There was another possibility: the lord of the hunt might not be willing to kill him.

Holding the life of a Virtuoso in hand meant keeping a useful hound.

Fehu—livestock and wealth.

If that happened, there would be a lord of the hunt behind the veil walking another Virtuoso on a leash.

By only offering up one segment, he had given the lord of the hunt a massive advantage, but not enough to let him utterly devour the target.

So now, the Black Earth River Master had to spend all his energy hiding, constantly moving between every conceivable fold behind the veil.

He couldn't manage the Echo Society, nor any other hidden moles that likely existed.

With two Virtuosos tearing each other to pieces behind the veil, neither had the free hands to deal with a Scholar who had only recently gained his Signature.

This was the best window for growth he could buy for himself.

Richard leaned back in his chair, watching the glowing embers in the stove.

Fight. The fiercer they fought, the better. It would be best if they beat each other's brains out.

...

February 14th was Valentine's Day.

Richard headed over to the public telephone booth, intending to make a call to Briston.

Before he even stepped inside, the phone started ringing.

"Williams, phone call for you!"

Richard's heart skipped a beat. Tucking his textbook under his arm, he hurried inside.

"Hello."

"...Richard, it's me."

It was Grey's voice.

Her voice was softer than usual, carrying a hint of indescribable awkwardness.

"What's wrong?"

The other end of the line went quiet for a moment.

"Nothing," Grey said. "It's just... I remembered today is the fourteenth."

What about February 14th?

Richard thought about it for a moment before he realized.

"Oh." For a moment, he didn't know how to respond.

"Cunningham and the others," Grey explained over the phone, continuing to use her classmates as a shield.

"They all received gifts from people this afternoon."

"Flowers, cards, and those little boxes of chocolates."

"They opened them one by one, and then compared them in the classroom."

Richard leaned against the wooden wall of the booth as the wind crept in past the back of his neck.

"Did you get anything?" he asked.

He regretted it the moment he asked. It was too weird a question.

The line went quiet again.

"...No," Grey said.

"We're a girls' school. Boys can't come in."

She paused, her voice growing even softer.

"Even if someone did send something, I wouldn't accept it."

Richard didn't say anything. He wasn't very good at handling these kinds of situations.

Only the faint sound of Grey's breathing remained over the telephone line.

"Um..." Grey sounded as if she had made up her mind. "I made something today."

"You baked some pastries?"

"Yeah," Grey said. "Heart-shaped."

"I used more butter than usual, and I mixed in some cardamom."

"I wanted to..." Her voice trailed off. "I was thinking of seeing if I could mail it to you."

"But with wartime express delivery right now... they'd probably be crushed to pieces by the time they reached you."

"It's the thought that counts," Richard said.

"Really?"

"Really." Feeling his response was a bit too dry, he added another sentence.

"Whether they melt or get crushed, they'll end up in my stomach anyway."

Grey gave a soft laugh, and some of the awkwardness faded away.

"I'll make an extra batch next time. When we both have time, I'll give them to you in person."

"Sure," Richard said. "Give them to me in person, and I'll finish them all in one bite."

"Don't eat them all at once... They're heart-shaped, at least look at them first."

"Why?"

"Because..." Grey didn't seem to have thought of a reason herself.

"Because you have to look at pretty things first!"

Richard laughed.

That excuse was right up there with Evelyn's twisted logic that "only the ugly ones are limited editions."

The two chatted back and forth about nothing in particular for a few more minutes.

Grey mentioned that they had to bring their own cakes for afternoon tea at her school. Richard talked about the margarine in the Imperial Capital University cafeteria, and the limited-edition roast beef that was too tough to chew.

As they spoke, Richard remembered his actual business.

"Grey," he said, lowering his voice.

"Yeah?"

"It would be best if you and your family left the Imperial Capital for the next few days."

The other end of the line went silent.

"Leave the Imperial Capital? Go where?"

"The surrounding countryside," Richard said.

"The fewer people, the better."

"Why?"

Richard couldn't explain the reason clearly.

"Anyway," he could only say, "for the next two days, crowded places won't be safe."

"Trust me. Take your family and hide out for a bit. Come back after the day of mourning has passed."

The telephone line was silent for a long time.

Then Grey spoke, her voice much more solemn than before.

"I trust you."

"Actually... my family has received a few warnings these past few days as well."