Chapter 426: A Life Flashing By, the Mole

Richard sat in the chair, unable to move.

Scenes from the past two years began to surface before his eyes.

Richard had always thought a life flashing before one's eyes was just a myth.

Until now, when he saw his mother, Margaret, brushing honey onto ribs.

His father, Rogers, resting a hand on his shoulder: "It's fine if you don't pass."

Mr. Hutton handing him a folded slip of thin paper...

Mr. Holland returning from the "restroom" with two chicken legs...

Old Biggs doing a magic trick with a Copper Penny, telling him to buy peanuts from the old man at the Grafton Street Corner...

Wentworth launching a suicide charge against a giant shadow hand, igniting himself into a living torch...

His aunt with her cheeks puffed out, sucking on a few toffees...

His grandfather standing in the wind of the backyard, his right hand pressing diagonally downward...

Phillips guarding those dozens of teacups, his eyes half in laughter, half in tears...

These scenes flashed by quickly, one after another, yet Richard saw every single one clearly.

Finally, they stopped on a single face.

The little girl had finished the box of pastries, leaving only a layer of crumbs at the bottom.

She stared down at it for a long time, stuck her index finger in to dab at them, and put it in her mouth to suck it clean.

When she finished and looked up to find him watching, her face instantly flushed red.

Hiding her hands behind her back, she stiffened her neck and said, "What are you looking at? I didn't waste any!"

That cute little face stopped right there, unmoving.

Her cheeks were slightly puffed, the saliva on her finger not even dry yet.

Her eyes were wide and round, filled with a lingering craving for more.

Richard stopped in front of that face and pulled his hand back.

The action of pulling his hand back—he did that himself.

The Silver Ring and the Eagle Hook were dead objects.

The old professor was asleep in a house miles away, Madam Marie was sitting in her mirror room on Flower Moon Street, his grandfather was watering flowers at the manor... none of them could reach him.

He pushed his ether fluctuations down from their normal level; even when they dropped to that line, he kept pressing them lower.

Normally, at this step, he would let the Still Water spread out and allow the things outside to reflect in.

This time, he did not.

That sliver of attention inching toward him fell upon the surface of the water.

The attention paused there for a brief moment, then, as if finding nothing of interest, looked away.

The layer of emptiness in the room receded.

Within his Seat of the Sun, the leaves of the tree of light unfurled one by one.

Richard gripped the edge of the desk, sweat dripping from his jaw.

It dripped next to the ink spot on the right-hand page, blooming the ink into a small halo.

The panel only lit up after his breathing leveled out.

[Perception Lv.3, Progress 100%.]

[Perception Lv.3 → Lv.4.]

[Perception Lv.4, Progress 100%.]

[Perception] had instantly jumped from an almost-full Lv.3 straight to a maxed-out Lv.4.

The change came so quietly that, at first, he thought nothing had happened.

He opened his eyes. The room was still the same room.

The desk, the chair, the bed, the gas lamp on the wall burning near its dregs.

Only when he spread out the Still Water did he understand.

Lv.3 [Silent Observation] had given him a surface of water.

Water was a flat plane; it could only reflect the surface.

Over the past half-year, he had read countless things relying on this water, growing more and more proficient.

Now, that water had a bottom.

In the past, the ink bottle would reflect as a dark silhouette; now, it reflected layer upon layer.

The glass was one layer, the structure inside the glass processed by a Minor Adept alchemist was another layer;

the innermost point of ether intercepted from his own body was yet another layer;

layer after layer sank down, deep enough to see the bottom of the bottle.

He spread the water out the window, and the background ether noise of the dormitory building fell into it.

And there was an even deeper layer.

Beneath the foundation of the entire Imperial Capital University lay the sealing layers, stacked heavily one atop another.

Richard hurriedly withdrew the water.

..................

After the gathering dispersed, Hecate was still organizing her thoughts.

She looked out the window at the anchorage, where gray-painted ships sat hull-to-hull.

The coal smoke belching from their funnels trailed southeast close to the water, smudging the sliver of horizon that should have been bright into a dirty smear.

The seagulls cried endlessly, landing on the mooring bollards only to be waved away, then circling once to land right back down.

People were speaking on the street, their language so full of vowels that a single sentence dragged on forever.

She finished the last sip of coffee in her small cup.

Over in the Imperial Capital, the sky should have long since turned dark by this time.

The method Hermes suggested at the gathering was quite good.

Mainly because it was simple and direct: making a move required stocking up on supplies and spending money, which would leave traces on the market.

When twenty or thirty such traces gathered together, the tail would expose itself.

But at the end of the day, he was only a Practitioner; his idea was to go around asking shop by shop.

Naturally, Hecate could not possibly go asking one by one.

She stood up, drew the curtains, and from the patch of shadow in the corner, she cut out a strip of something.

When the cut-out shape stood straight, its gray robe draped to the floor; beneath the brim of its hood, there was nothing.

She cut out another, and another. By the time she cut out the forty-first, there was no room left to stand.

The gray shadows overlapped one another, standing perfectly quiet and motionless.

She assigned tasks to these servants one by one.

Connections would form between buying and selling. The counter, the weighing scale, the paperweights, the stacks of bills counted by fingers dabbed with saliva—all of them would leave traces.

People could lie, change their stories, or burn the ledgers, but a counter could not.

The gray robes phased through the closed window, one after another, until all the darkness in the room had dissipated.

Hecate herself sat back down in front of the upright loom by her bed.

The warp threads of this antique loom hung down, with dozens of ceramic weights dangling at the bottom.

These ceramic weights corresponded one-to-one with the servants she had sent out.

A Practitioner had to take a train to check accounts themselves, while a Minor Adept could dispatch subordinates to run errands.

But by simply sitting here, she could have forty-one threads transmitting information back to her simultaneously without delay.

Seven threads returned on the first night; sixteen returned on the second;

By the early hours of the third night, the final thread squeezed back in through the window, carrying the scent of tar from the southern harbor.

Hecate connected them all to the spun yarn one by one and ran her fingers over them.

On her first pass, she asked for names.

The warp threads pulled taut; the names could not be divined at all.

Hecate was not disappointed. She had long known this would be the result.

Anyone who had truly reached this stage would have their name shielded.

If you reached out to touch it, you would only touch your own hand.

Next, she tried to ask for quantities, but those couldn't be divined either.

How much stock the opposing tables had prepared, how many middlemen they had bribed... these were events that had not yet occurred and thus could not yet fall upon her loom.

This could be considered good news; it at least proved the opposition hadn't fully begun their preparations.

Next, she prepared to ask for direction.

Halfway through pushing, three warp threads on the loom pulled taut simultaneously.

There were actually three distinct directions!

Hecate sat there with her eyes closed, beginning to connect her inspiration threads.

This could hardly be considered a Spell Formula; any medium reaching the level of Major Adept would naturally acquire such an ability.

For anyone in the world, as long as they harbored a genuine, lethal intent toward you or those connected to you.

The moment that intent took shape, the inspiration thread would begin to tremble.

This thread was never wrong, which was its greatest advantage.

Hecate traced the direction and found that the first tremor came from the north-northwest.

This trail was thin and cold, carrying shards of frost. It was the Nordic table.

Hecate felt a bit puzzled.

Her information channels had told her that this particular table had just been completely upended by a Moon-Hunting Major Adept Scholar.

They had lost a Minor Adept, and the rest were severely injured. They shouldn't pose any threat in the short term.

But how much time had even passed? Yet this malice was already beginning to unfold around her own table.

She wrapped that thread around her finger for an extra half-turn to trace its exact path.

This malice wasn't aimed at her. It brushed past her and hooked toward somewhere further away. Someone wanted to use her table as a crowbar.

Hecate made a mental note of this thread, but for now, she couldn't decipher what exactly that crowbar was trying to pry open.

The second inspiration thread's tremor came from slightly east of due south.

When she followed the trace over, there was nothing there.

The ether in that direction was entirely quiet, without the slightest stir.

Her hand paused in midair, and then she did something she rarely did: she snipped that thread directly off the loom.

As she cut it, the severed end tried to reach toward her, only dropping limp halfway there.

This belonged to the Black Earth River table.

Still feeling uneasy, Hecate stood up, detached the corresponding ceramic weight, and tossed it into the fire.

She stood before the hearth until the crackling sounds completely faded, then walked back to the window.

Hecate had absolutely no desire to reason with that guy; she planned to stay as far away as possible.

The third inspiration thread came from the south-southeast. Even before reaching out, she knew what this one was.

It was the Pantheon over in Rome. Hecate smiled.

Nineteen hundred years ago, the Romans had wholesale lifted the entire pantheon of gods from across the sea, merely giving them new names.

The Messenger was changed to Mercury, the God of War to Mars... and after the changes, they turned around and claimed, "These have always been ours."

For this reason, the genealogy tables of ancient Greece and Rome were natural enemies.

She had plucked and analyzed all three of these inspiration threads with absolute clarity.

Then, she realized the inspiration threads were still trembling.

Her first reaction was that she had miscalculated, or that some corrupted thread hadn't been fully retracted.

She loosened all the remaining silk threads on the loom.

She slackened them one by one, all the way to the end, until there was not a single ounce of tension left on the entire loom.

All the gray in the room had dissipated, and not a single one of the forty-one messenger threads remained, yet the trembling persisted.

It was coming from very close by.

The inspiration threads were never wrong.

And based on this person's direction, they seemed to be holding the very token she had personally handed out.

Hecate pulled her hands back from the loom and rested them on her knees.

Outside the window, someone at the anchorage began pulling the steam whistle—one long blast, two short—the sound rushing far into the distance before fully dispersing.

Sitting in the dark, she slowly went over the six people at her table in her mind.

Heracles was the newest addition. He had the shallowest background and was the easiest to suspect.

Precisely because he was the easiest to suspect, she set him aside for now.

An answer laid out in plain sight, reachable simply by extending a hand, was usually calculated for you by someone else.

Dionysus's wine cup had just stabilized; his ability to intoxicate people was currently quite rare.

And Demeter guarded that field, pressing down on an ancient weak point.

This was the only pocket her table had left in the homeland that was still continuously producing things.

Prometheus had only recently become independent. Although he had just become a Minor Adept craftsman, the Major Adept master craftsman behind him was far more valuable than he was.

Nemesis had a Major Adept Scholar from the Moon-Hunting tradition backing her—someone who had recently overturned an entire table single-handedly.

Then there was Hermes.

Hecate tapped her fingertips against her knee.

That child's skills in deciphering, appraisal, and his network of connections were heavily relied upon by everyone at this table.

If she were to pick any of these six and cut them off right now, it would result in a massive hemorrhage no matter who she chose.

Hecate stood up and walked to the windowsill.

A row of clay pots sat on the sill, all planted with twigs picked up from elsewhere.

A few had sprouted white roots in the water; one was still completely bare.

She changed its water daily as usual, with a pair of scissors resting right next to the pot.

She reached out, picked up the scissors, weighed them in her hand, and put them back down.

Hecate remembered how harmonious everyone had been when the last gathering disbanded.

They had agreed that each had their own channels and would use them to trace the clues.

This table had only just developed a sense of unity. If she were to raise her hand at the next gathering and declare that one of them was dirty, that hard-won good atmosphere would completely rot away on the spot.

Perhaps they wouldn't even need the three outside tables to strike; internal infighting would tear their own table apart.

Hecate sat back down at the loom and pulled the warp threads taut once again, one by one.

She thought of another method. The next gathering was in mid-June. Before then, she would divide the intelligence in her hands into six different versions.

Six versions with the same framework, but with slightly varying details.

She would cast all six out. Someday in the future, a detail would leak back from someone else's mouth or from another faction's territory.

Whichever version echoed back would reveal exactly who held that token.

Hecate turned this method over in her mind, scrutinizing it repeatedly until every detail fit together flawlessly, before preparing to execute it.

She didn't even use the word 'mole' in her own thoughts.

By the time she finished sorting all this out, the sky was already growing bright, and the seagulls were crying out once more.

Over at the anchorage, people were lowering dinghies. Figures began moving on the ships, popping out from windows and hatches onto the decks one after another.

It was unclear which ship started it first, but then a second and a third followed suit.

Thousands of men were singing the same song—that song everyone knew how to sing, about how they still had a long way to go before reaching home.

Hecate stood by the window and listened.