Chapter 438: After Dawn

Richard returned to his room, locked the door, and pulled the curtains tight.

He placed the Brass Fragment in the center of the table. Before he could even sit down, the black mass beneath his feet floated up on its own.

The shadow was so thin it was almost transparent.

Richard dug out all the coagulants he had accumulated over the past three months from a secret compartment.

The quarterly batch delivered by Demeter, the small bag Heracles used for every settlement, the black stone Coleman had sent back...

He paused with the black stone in his hand, then put it back into the box.

He poured the rest onto the table, piling it into a small mountain.

The shadow's tentacles practically pounced on the pile.

One overlapping another, they threw themselves at the medium-concentration piece at the very top, coiling around it and sucking it in.

It fed so urgently and loudly that Richard threw a glance at the door.

"Slow down."

The shadow ignored him.

As the second piece went down, the black mass swelled outward.

By the third piece, its dissipating, jagged edges retracted completely.

When it devoured the fifth piece, Richard reached out to gather up the rest.

The tentacles snapped up, winding tightly around his wrist and refusing to let go.

"...Let go."

The tentacles tightened another half turn.

"I didn't say I wouldn't give them to you."

Amused and exasperated, Richard patted the black mass with his other hand.

He pulled his hand free and pushed the entire pile over.

"Eat up. Eat as much as you want, there's plenty."

While the shadow gorged itself, Richard sat back at the table and picked up the Brass Fragment.

Even after passing through the hands of the lord of the hunt, it still contained a considerable amount of residual infused ether.

He pressed his palm against it, and the ether flowed in along the conduction pathway.

[Available Points: 0.11... 0.34...]

This time, he held nothing back.

His rule for all supernatural items over the past year was to stop draining them at ninety-five percent; the residual ether acted as camouflage.

This piece needed no such cover. He feared the newly promoted Virtuoso might track him down through whatever lingered on the artifact.

He drained it to the absolute bottom.

[Available Points: 3.17.]

The fragment grew cold in his palm, turning into a piece of pure, empty brass.

Richard was just marveling at the potency of a Virtuoso's signature artifact fragment when the panel stirred again.

[Structured ether condensation core detected... Analyzing...]

[Core Nature: Seed]

[Seed Source: Arcane Ember (Ungrounded)]

[Trait Tags: Measure, Boundary, Bestowal]

[Extract?]

Richard steadied himself. Feeling a thrill of anticipated surprise, he selected [Yes].

[Extraction complete.]

[Planting Conditions: All four [Body] attributes reach Lv.5.]

He finished reading the line and scrolled down.

[Notice: Maximum core capacity is three. Current: 3/3.]

[To accept a new core, existing cores must be fused.]

[Fusion requires the holder's Rank to reach Major Adept.]

Richard leaned back in his chair, looking at the rain-washed sky outside the window.

A maximum of three, and it was already full.

The first was carved from the seal of the Sphinx Lamp, granting him [Shadow Inversion];

The second was extracted from the embers of the Black Earth River Master, granting him [Chronicler's Pen];

And this third one lay there, locked behind the condition that all four [Body] attributes reach Lv.5.

Right now his breathing had reached Lv.5 and his sleep Lv.4, but eating and walking were still lingering at Lv.3. He was a long way off.

He turned those three keyword tags over and over in his mind.

Measure, Boundary, Bestowal.

Measure was how much; Boundary was where it stopped; Bestowal was giving it away.

He recalled the deadlock with his eating attribute: to unlock Lv.5 [Decay Digestion], he first had to actively ingest and fully metabolize a product from beyond the veil.

Without [Decay Digestion], he hardly dared to eat such a thing.

How much of a substance served as nourishment, and how much became poison?

The same substance might be medicine to one person, and fatal to another.

Where that line was drawn had always been decided by the rules.

Richard set his pen down, cutting off his train of thought.

Deducing this much was enough. Overthinking it was useless; he just had to wait.

Another line appeared on the panel.

It wasn't under [Body], wasn't under [Mind], and wasn't under [Spirit].

It hung alone at the very bottom, with nothing before or after it.

[Fortune: Uncredited · Unclassifiable]

Richard tried to use it as points, but it wouldn't budge.

He tried to pour it into his Spiritual Capacity, but it wouldn't go in.

He tried pushing it outward like he did when nurturing the Sphinx Lamp; it hovered over his palm for an instant before slipping right back.

In the afternoon, he went to the third floor of the Petrie Building.

Professor Mortimer was nestled in that old armchair as usual, a half-cut newspaper spread on his lap.

"You're here."

"Professor."

"Which stack are you copying today?"

"The top stack."

Richard sat down by the window and arranged his ink bottle.

Halfway through copying the third volume—an agricultural text—he pulled out a few pages stitched together with needle and thread.

"Professor."

"What is that column of times under the wind direction and moon phases on these pages used for?"

"I don't know," the old professor said. "I'm getting old."

"Then I'll ask a different way." Richard put his pen down.

"Something claimed from the Wild Hunt, which cannot be used directly—where should it be placed?"

The scissors stopped.

Mortimer pushed his reading glasses up the bridge of his nose and gave him a slow look.

"You've been copying books for so long, and this is the only question you came up with?"

"Yes."

The old professor placed the scissors on his lap.

"The folks up north call it 'carried fortune'."

He didn't speak the actual word, nor did he write it down.

"It's not like money; put it in a bank and it won't accrue interest. Nor is it strength; it is so intangible you can't even hold it. You must find something to anchor it to."

"What exactly can anchor it?"

Mortimer listed them off.

"Bloodline. It follows you—while you live, it stays; when you die, it scatters, letting everyone who shares your blood reap the benefits."

Richard stood up and screwed the cap on his ink bottle.

"Professor, I'll make up for today's stack tomorrow."

"As you wish."

Reaching the door, he heard that dry, hoarse voice behind him slowly add one last remark.

"You can slow down your copying."

Returning to his dorm, Richard pulled up the Condensation Mirror Technique.

The line at the bottom of the panel floated up at this moment.

[Fortune: Uncredited · Unclassifiable]

He cupped it in his hand.

The thing he held had no shape and no weight.

Richard silently recited that surname twice.

Williams. Nothing happened.

His circuit came from Ashford blood. To credit it to the ledger of his bloodline, he had to use that surname.

After he recited Ashford, the "Fortune" sank.

It didn't settle into Richard, nor into any object on the table.

It sank down along Richard's blood, plunging into the thread passed down from his mother, and before her, his maternal grandfather.

It even sank toward the other end of the thread... toward those yet unborn, whose names had not even been thought of yet.

As it sank, the flame of the lamp in the room shrank briefly before flaring back up.

Fortune does not appear out of thin air.

A hunter steals their prey's fortune, and a prey's dying breath of unwillingness is also fortune; whoever catches it gains a share.

Richard thought about the portion in his hands—it was stripped from 4,967 people.

The next day, he went to Chelsea Road.

"I need a list."

Gerard was loosening the soil for a row of holly. His trowel remained planted in the dirt.

"Which one?"

"The casualty list from the night of April 30th, for the sector from Langemark to Willow Stakes. The one that includes birthplaces and addresses for the next of kin."

"What do you need it for?"

Fortune is zero-sum. The portion he received was taken from those five thousand people.

Richard used Ashford House's channels to compensate the families of the deceased.

A certain widow's compensation was inexplicably approved;

A certain child was taken in by a relative they had never contacted;

A certain old veteran who had never won a prize won seven pounds at the race track...

...

On May 2nd, the lilacs in the Durham District bloomed at their peak.

The legal official stood firmly in the center of the yard.

He held the paper up to his eyes and read it through first, going over the three lines in his mind before speaking.

"One who lies in the windless hollow, breathing with the stagnant air."

As the first sentence fell, the wind on the entire street stopped.

Over by the courtyard wall, the leaves of an ash tree hovered in mid-air, hanging for a long time without falling.

The air refused to move.

The legal official moved the paper down a line.

"One who once drowned an army of ten thousand in the earth with a single breath..."

This passage and the title "one who causes people to cough out their lungs in a single night" bestowed by the Black Earth River Master referred to the same event. The difference was that the latter described a gruesome death, while the former praised a deed.

It turned out the vilification carried out by the Black Earth River Master had been erased.

After reading the middle line, the legal official's knees buckled slightly.

He gripped the paper tightly, a coppery taste welling up in his throat.

He spat out a mouthful of dark red that splattered into a small puddle on the stone slabs.

"One whose body has been offered up completely, whose bones have become an urn, with only toxic fumes remaining to forever sink into the world."

Ten seconds later, the cluster of lilacs still stood there, its shape perfectly intact. It simply wasn't green anymore.

After dawn, a neighbor of the Hohenheim family was the first to realize something was wrong.

His cat had spent the night perched on the wall, but before dawn, it bolted south and refused to return past the street corner.

The police officers arrived very quickly, tying handkerchiefs over their faces before entering the house.

After coming out of the cellar, the youngest one squatted by the flowerbed and vomited for a long time.

The investigation report was brief: no signs of forced entry, doors and windows intact.

Under the personal effects column, the officer registered everything one by one according to protocol.

Then two trucks arrived.

Eight people got out of the first truck, wearing gray-green rubber suits with lead-lined aprons over them, their hoods only having two small windows open at the eyes.

They didn't say a word after stepping out; they immediately sealed off the intersection.

Those who got out of the second truck were all Inscription Masters.

They scattered salt first, trailing a circle along the courtyard wall and over the threshold, entirely encircling the entrance hall, kitchen, and stairwell.

Then they hammered copper nails, stringing them together one by one with silver thread.

After stringing them, an Inscription Master squatted at the stairwell and chanted a passage.

The young officer couldn't understand what was being chanted.

He only knew that after the chanting finished, the scent of lilacs in the whole house was gone.

A gentleman from the special department called him out to the yard and handed him a piece of paper.

The top line on the paper was bolded in black ink: Those who have not crossed the Practitioner threshold are not allowed to enter.

"Sir, we haven't finished our records yet."

"Stop the recording for now."

"I don't understand."

"You don't need to understand," the gentleman said.

"You just need to know that if you walk into the house now, your mother will be arranging your funeral tomorrow."

"What about you?"

The gentleman held his hat in his hand, perfectly calm.

"I'll stand outside the door. I'm not qualified either."

...

After the matter spread, the Empire Evening News printed a line of small text at the bottom of its seventh page.

"Family member of a certain Germania chemist committed suicide; police classify it as a nervous breakdown."

The paper for that page was very thin, the ink pressed lightly, and the equestrian competition results on the back could be seen through it.

A gentleman waiting for someone in a café read this line, and flipped the newspaper over.