Chapter 544: A Virtuoso of Broken Promises?

The 27th was the longest of these five days.

Mortimer had not returned all day, and the letter MacFie dispatched had received no reply.

In the evening, Isabella measured the Sphinx Lamp once again.

After closing the calipers, she stared at the markings for a long time before calling MacFie over.

"The third notch. It's over halfway."

"And before?"

"I checked it before the winter solstice. It was only at a third."

"Even when he was awake and nourishing it daily, it would only grow this much in a month. Now, he's only been lying there for a few days, yet it has evolved at a pace he might not have achieved in several normal months."

MacFie bent down, looking at the bronze cast of the human face from a palm's width away.

The eyes on the lamp were half-closed, their lids raised slightly higher than they had been a few days ago.

"A Hunter's blade only transforms after seeing blood. I've never heard of a master lying in bed while his knife sharpens itself," MacFie said.

"There's no record of it in the Classics, either," Isabella replied.

Isabella gripped the calipers tightly in her hand.

"A supernatural item is the yardstick of one's art. If the yardstick is moving, his art is improving."

The young aunt turned her head, looking at her nephew's motionless face.

"He's just lying here. Could he possibly be studying and doing fieldwork in his dreams?"

No one could answer her.

December 28th. It wasn't even dawn yet.

Mortimer returned unexpectedly at four in the morning, his overcoat damp with mist.

MacFie was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs. He looked up at him.

"Did the talks go through?"

"They did."

Mortimer sat down in the chair by the bed.

He had already made a rough guess as to what exactly was going on with the boy. On the night of the 26th, he had gone to the Royal Anthropological Institute, where the old president had told him to wait.

All through the 27th, he sat in the Institute's underground archives, researching.

The manager had a pencil tucked behind his ear. Upon entering, the old professor had stared intently at that pencil—stared so hard the man had reached up to check his ear three times to confirm it was just a pencil—before he finally sat down and began leafing through the records.

The Compilation of Abnormal Sleep Events, 1890 revised edition, held eleven similar cases that matched.

In 1695, a great scholar copying a catalog in the Trinity College Library fell asleep over a long table. That slumber lasted twenty-two years.

For the first eight years, his mother watched over him. For the next fourteen, it was a caretaker hired by the College.

In the spring of the twenty-second year, the bedsores on the back of his shell of a body rotted down to the bone, and the College had no choice but to hastily arrange his funeral.

The editor had added a note beneath the entry:

In 1814, someone spotted his name on an old library collection card. The corner of the card bore a stamp: "For In-Library Use Only."

In Edinburgh in 1749, a clerk at a law firm slept for nine years.

By the time he woke up, of the two older sisters who had taken turns caring for him, one had died of exhaustion and the other had married and moved to Glasgow.

The man's own legs had withered like dried kelp, and he only lived for two years after waking before he too was laid to rest in a coffin. In 1802, there was another case in Leiden; this time the man only slept for seven months, making it the shortest recorded instance.

The first thing that man did upon waking was return all the books he had borrowed back then.

In 1838, the case in Dublin involved a sleep that lasted a full fourteen years.

Three successive caretakers changed shifts by his bed. The last one had begun treating him as furniture, wiping him down in passing whenever they dusted the cabinets.

The most recent was in 1881. The man in the domed reading room of the Albion Museum slept for three years; this was the one mentioned earlier by Hale when he came to treat him.

A few other cases in the compilation contained only a single line: Fell asleep, never woke, died.

Of the eleven cases, the shortest was seven months, while the longest slept until death, and more than half of them had lasted over three years.

Mortimer closed the compilation and sat in the archives for a long time.

He had already prepared for the worst.

The boy had some regenerative ability, but how long could that possibly last?

He had to save up for three months just to have enough to treat his mother once. If he used it to sustain his own motionless, bedridden body, how many days could that buy?

Then he had to consider the people in the house. His father, Rogers, had to work. His mother, Margaret, would likely sit by his bed indefinitely, staying until she completely collapsed.

Gerard had a body full of hidden injuries at his age; no one could say during which year of keeping night vigils he might simply slump over in his chair.

Evelyn would have to resume school in the spring. Grey's family ships were still out at sea. Clara had just become a lecturer, and Isabella was an associate professor—she was busier than ever.

Human patience is like lamp oil. He had told the boy that back then, never expecting the words to ring true so quickly.

Finally, there was himself, this old man.

Three years. For an eighteen-year-old, it was just a brief span of time casually squandered during university. For him, it might be the entirety of his remaining life.

Mortimer had considered laying it out directly for the knowledgeable few in the house.

On the evening of the 26th, right after Hale had left, he had stopped Isabella in the corridor.

"The boy is currently..." he'd started to say.

But the moment the words left his mouth, they changed.

"...A two-hour borrowing limit. We won't wait if it's overdue."

Isabella had stared blankly at him, even caringly asking if he was delirious from staying up all night.

Mortimer had shut his mouth right then and there.

It was just as well he couldn't say it. To explain it clearly meant telling a room full of people: 'Even though he won't die, he might just lie there for three years, or maybe thirty.' If he said that, the lamp oil of their patience would only burn out faster.

Besides, even hiring a Virtuoso wouldn't fish him out.

Are you joking? Try using brute force against a Master of the Classics?

Old MacFie wanted to call upon Vortex. But if Vortex charged in and knocked over a bookshelf, the first person that entity would settle accounts with would be the noisemaker. The boy trapped inside would only be punished by having to sit there even longer.

Hale had been right. No one who knocked on that door was going to get a good result.

Mortimer had never planned on fishing Richard out; he merely wanted to know exactly how long they had to wait.

If it was three years, then they would wait three years.

If it was thirty years or even longer, then he could at least make all the necessary arrangements while he was still capable of walking.

That was why he had made an appointment with the old president. He wanted this Virtuoso of the same tradition—someone with enough weight—to go and ask on his behalf.

......

Richard's consciousness had barely cleared when he heard the breathing of quite a few people in the room.

Someone was peeling an orange. Someone else was stirring tea. Those who spoke kept their voices exceedingly low. It wasn't even dawn yet, but the room was packed with people.

The commotion of the professor returning had drawn a roomful of restless sleepers up the stairs.

He first glanced at his panel to check the results of his exams over the past few days:

[Learning lv.5 (General Knowledge), Progress 19% → 31%.]

[Speculation lv.5 (Morphostructuring), Progress 20% → 27%.]

At the very bottom, an extra line had appeared:

[Luck: Credited · Ashford (Strong)]

He stared at that "Strong" and slowly realized why he had been able to get out so quickly.

The paper for Bonus Question Four had been handed down after the final bell rang.

The administrator had invited the old gentleman in mourning clothes from the innermost room to sit beside him. He and Richard had answered the exact same question regarding the great plague of Justinian from over a thousand years ago.

This was the old gentleman's own history. He had come to the examination room after his descent into chaos and had begun answering it, giving the exact same response every time for hundreds of years, never changing a single word.

Richard had nearly scratched his scalp raw at the time, and when he finally turned it in, he still lacked any confidence. The question was simply too difficult; it was an incredibly complex proposition involving philosophy, sociology, psychology, pathology, and numerous other fields.

When it came time to grade the papers, the administrator held a red pencil and gave a simple verdict: "Could pass, could fail."

The tip of the pencil had hovered right there. Yet in that exact moment, the administrator reached out to steady the ink bottle, caught another glimpse of a particularly brilliant paragraph he had just read, and let the red pencil tap down.

...Passed.

At the time, Richard thought it was just a fluke, but looking at this strong luck now, he understood.

What if he hadn't passed?

The administrator had said that if he failed this time, there would be a makeup exam in March. In the meantime, he would continue rushing out his drafts right there in His library.

If he failed in March, there was still June... postponed infinitely down the line.

But if he sat in that room for a few more months, half a year, or even longer, he feared he would emerge to face an utter mess.

The luck the lord of the hunt had granted him this time was truly impeccable!

Richard let out a long mental sigh of relief, feeling no different from a student who had just finished their university entrance exams.

Once his emotions relaxed, his mind grew active. Right now, he desperately wanted a dignified way to wake up: first twitching a finger for the closest person to notice.

Then slowly opening his eyes and asking, "What time is it?"—ideally while smoothly asking for that lemon tart on the bedside table.

But his fingers couldn't move at all, so he had no choice but to listen for now.

"Professor, you've been running around all day." It was his young aunt's voice.

"What did the president say?"

Mortimer paused for a moment before answering.

"He said it can't be rushed."

"Just that one sentence?"

"Just that one sentence."

The room went quiet before Isabella sighed softly.

"Then we need to set up a schedule."

Holding a notebook, she flipped to a blank page and started drawing a grid.

"What schedule?" Evelyn was sitting on the rug at the foot of the bed.

"A shift schedule to look after your brother from now on," Isabella said, continuing to draw her grid. "That gentleman mentioned the day before yesterday that the case at the museum slept for three years.

"In case... I mean, in case he has to lie here for a while longer, we can't always have this many people crowded in the room. Everyone will have to take turns."

Gerard hurried to speak first. He was likely the person most plagued by guilt over this incident.

"I'll take the night watch. I don't sleep much."

No one argued with him. Isabella wrote "Dad, Night" in the first box, drawing a question mark after it.

"I'll take the mornings." Margaret clutched her chest.

"He's always woken up early since he was little... If the day comes, I want to be the first..."

Before she could finish, she began coughing uncontrollably again.

"I'll handle the food."

Evelyn gently patted her mother's back and held up her own notebook.

"I've got it all listed out. I'll bring a freshly baked pastry every day to tempt his appetite. He might just wake up on his own."

The people in the room couldn't help but smile, the previously gloomy atmosphere diluting slightly.

"I'll help Evelyn." Grey lifted her head.

"We'll put them on the nightstand so he can smell them."

Grey spoke with complete seriousness. "If it smells good, he won't want to sleep anymore."

Richard's nose twitched pathetically.

Rogers hadn't said a word the entire time. Now, he suddenly pulled out a side-view diagram of a modified bed.

"If our son lies here for a long time, he'll definitely get bedsores."

"I found time last night to draw up a blueprint. Books say he needs to be turned every two hours. I'll build a frame to crank this handle, tilting the bed surface fifteen degrees to one side, and cranking it back will tilt it to the other."

Isabella stared at the drawing for a long moment.

"Brother-in-law, are you... building a roasting spit?"

Richard couldn't help but picture a roasting suckling pig turning on a spit at a country market.

With that thought, his body betrayed him.

His stomach let out a loud, drawn-out grumble that rolled all the way up from its depths.

Everyone's low chatter ceased instantly.

"...That must be the heating pipe!" Sophia smacked her fist against her palm.

Rogers' professional instincts flared up.

"The heating pipe in this room is on the north wall. It wouldn't sound from over by the bed."

"Then it's a mouse," Isabella said, wrinkling her nose.

Gerard cast a sidelong glance at his daughter.

"...You've been gone for too long. Our house couldn't possibly have mice."

Richard had imagined many ways to wake up, but none of them involved his stomach speaking up first.

If he opened his eyes now, Evelyn would recount this incident to every guest who visited for the next few decades:

'My brother is a pig. He slept for five days, and the very first sound he made when he woke up was his stomach growling.'

Fortunately, his eyelids were still too heavy to lift. He couldn't have opened them even if he wanted to.

The people in the room waited for a while, but no one heard a second sound.

Margaret's voice was very soft. "He still gets hungry when he sleeps. That time the year before last..."

"All right, we'll go with this schedule."

Seeing the atmosphere turning grim again, Isabella quickly interrupted her sister and stood up.

"It's still early. Everyone go back and get some rest."

The people in the room filtered out one by one.

Clara lay in the guest room until five o'clock without falling asleep.

Sophia was sprawled out next to her, one leg dangling off the edge of the bed as she mumbled, "No raisins," in her sleep.

The Ashford House certainly didn't lack for guest rooms, but Sophia had claimed the covers were cold in winter and insisted on squeezing in with her.

Clara stared at the ceiling, thinking: 'The school is on break for the holidays. Q&A sessions for the freshmen won't start until after the New Year, and the two extra classes I took on won't begin until spring.'

Feeling that this reasoning was sufficiently sound, she threw off the covers, got out of bed, and pulled on the old sweater her mother had left behind.

The third-floor corridor was pitch black. The only light came from the sliver slipping beneath that room's door.

Clara lifted the hem of her skirt and stepped over, glancing back at the stairs to make sure no one had followed her up.

Only the bedside lamp was lit in the room. Grey's pastry basket sat on the nightstand.

She sat in the chair beside the bed, looking at that sleeping face.

"...Your grandfather finally agreed to go to sleep," she said.

"Your mother threatened him with a handkerchief. It was the first time I've ever seen someone threaten a Major Adept Hunter with a handkerchief..."

Richard, who had drifted back into a daze, was awakened by Clara's rambling.

'Senior Clara?'

'Sitting alone by my bed in the middle of the night?'

"When your Mentor advises you, you nod. When the professor advises you, you nod. But once you're done nodding, you turn right around and go exactly where you shouldn't."

Richard sincerely reflected for a second and realized she hadn't wronged him in the slightest.

He planned to wait until his senior finished scolding him, and then he would twitch his finger.

"That ear you healed has done nothing but listen to you breathe for the past five days."

Richard's pinky could already move by now.

But he suddenly felt it would be inappropriate to twitch it just then.

"I wanted to keep my distance from you."

"I'm almost six years older than you, and you're my Mentor's nephew..."

She took a breath.

Richard didn't dare move a muscle. 'Was this something I shouldn't be hearing?'

"That paper slip, the girl humming in the dream... Do you know what she was singing?"

She didn't wait for an answer, nor could she have gotten one.

"The Golden Dream. That was the song my mother used to sing to me."

She softly hummed two lines, stopping at the beginning of the second verse.

"My mother always stopped right here. She'd say the bow hair on the cello needed changing."

"That winter, when she and my dad went out, the bow hair still hadn't been changed."

"I sat on a chair at home, waiting for the door to open. When the door opened, it was a messenger who walked in."

"Since then, I haven't been very good at waiting for people. I'd rather be the one going out and making others wait."

Richard stopped making up jokes in his head.

Clara reached out and tucked the corners of his blanket in.

"So, I'm making an agreement with you."

"If you can wake up, next time you go anywhere, tell me first."

"If you tell me, I'll tell you where the real tuning fork is hidden."

Richard's heart gave a violent jolt. A Minor Adept's signature artifact was essentially half their life.

"I'm only saying this once."

Her voice dropped even lower. "If you're awake, if you heard me, just treat it as..."

Grumble-rumble-rumble-rumble!!!

The stomach growl went on for far too long; there was absolutely no way to blame it on a heating pipe or a mouse.

Richard's mind went completely blank.

Clara raised an eyebrow, staring intently at the face on the bed.

He hurriedly suppressed his breathing, desperately locking it at its previous pitch, and realized that the Mirror Condensation technique worked wonders for faking sleep.

But a moment later, Clara casually picked up the lemon tart from the bedside basket and held it right under his nose.

"Grey just baked this. It'll get cold if it sits any longer," she said.

Grumble!

His stomach was painfully honest.

The corners of Clara's lips curled up.

"It's a lemon tart. Your favorite sweet and sour flavor."

Richard's Adam's apple bobbed. He really couldn't be blamed for being starving after five days.

Clara let out a sudden laugh and shoved the lemon tart right into his mouth.

Richard chewed twice before opening his eyes. The light from the bedside lamp stung his vision.

"...A little dry."

The smile on Clara's face slowly faded away.

"How long have you been awake?"

"Just woke up."

His senior didn't believe him for a second. Her face instantly flushed bright red.

She took a deep breath, forcefully suppressing the blush.

"If you heard it, you heard it. I stand by what I said."

"Next time you go anywhere, tell..."

"Tell you first," Richard said, swallowing the pastry.

Clara smiled in satisfaction. She was just about to speak when she heard footsteps outside.

"Someone's coming up."

Richard clamped his eyes shut almost on reflex.

"What are you closing your eyes for..."

Clara started to hiss, but her expression shifted halfway through.

"Your mouth!"

Crust crumbs were still clinging to the corner of his lips.

With no time to find a handkerchief, Clara leaned down and tried to wipe them away with her thumb. The first swipe didn't get it clean, so she leaned in closer, changing the angle.

Her long hair brushed against Richard's face, tickling him so much he wanted to sneeze.

Right at that moment, the sound of the doorknob turning rang out.

Richard started cursing loudly in his head.

'Where is my luck? Where's that 'Strong' Luck from the Ashford House?'

'It could help me pass a Master's exam smoothly, but it couldn't rust this doorknob shut just this once?'

There was nothing.

The door opened incredibly smoothly. Not even the hinges squeaked. The servants were exceptionally diligent, taking the oiling and maintenance of the doors very seriously.

Grey stood in the doorway. She saw Lecturer Farfield leaning over the bed, her face pressed right up against Richard's, her fingers resting directly on his lips.

The young girl's fingers loosened, and her basket plummeted to the floor.

Clara jolted upright, looking as panicked as if someone had just cracked a whip at her.

"I..." Grey's throat tightened. "I came up to get the basket. The new batch is ready."

She looked at the basket on the nightstand. The linen cloth was pulled back, and one piece was missing from inside.

She looked back at the face on the bed. Half a crust crumb was still clinging to the corner of his mouth.

Grey's brow slowly furrowed.

Clara opened her mouth. "He said it was a little dry..."

"Of course it's dry!" Grey's voice spiked instantly.

"I said we couldn't eat the batch from the day before yesterday anymore! The butter got soggy..."

She stopped mid-sentence.

"...He said?"

Mortimer poked his head in from behind Grey's shoulder and took one look at the bed.

"If you're awake, open your eyes."

The old professor looked thoroughly disgusted. "People who are faking sleep move their eyeballs. Yours are darting around like abacus beads."

Richard opened his eyes.

Grey stood in the doorway looking at him, tears streaming down her face.

She spun around and shouted down the stairs, her voice echoing through the entire house:

"He's awake—!"

The study door slammed open first.

Gerard charged upstairs and stomped right on the spine of the blade lodged in the threshold, sending the Silver Blade spinning halfway around on the floor.

The old man skidded to a halt at the foot of the bed. He stared down at his grandson, his Adam's apple bobbing several times, before he whirled around and bellowed into the corridor:

"Margaret!"

Evelyn rushed in next, throwing herself barefoot onto the edge of the bed and burying her face in her brother's neck.

Margaret reached out to touch her son's face, stroking it over and over again.

Isabella ran up the stairs, her hair a mess. "Where did you go!"

"I..." Richard's throat was so dry it felt like it was smoking.

"I was taking an exam."

The room went dead silent.

"...An exam?"

"He's talking nonsense." Rogers understood.

His hands were still covered in sawdust; he had just been staying up late rushing to finish that modified bed frame.

Off to the side, Clara was staring intensely at the ceiling.

Sophia squeezed through the door and spotted her immediately. She leaned close and whispered, "You weren't in bed in the middle of the night. I thought you sleepwalked off to the department office to hand in an application."

"Shut up!"

MacFie was the last one up. When he entered, he bumped his head against the doorframe.

With everyone chattering at once, the white-haired giant squeezed up next to Mortimer and lowered his voice.

"The boy woke up this fast, but didn't you make an appointment with that old president? What do we do now?"

Mortimer's beard twitched. "...The appointment is for a week from now."

"Should we break the appointment?"

"Break an appointment with him?" Mortimer turned to look at him.

"If you break an appointment with a Virtuoso who manages ledgers, he'll mark it down in your account. He'll charge daily interest and keep charging it until you die."

"And it doesn't get written off when you die, either. It gets transferred to your students."

MacFie thought about his own students and fell silent.

"What day... is it today?" Richard asked this first.

"The 28th, you pig!" Evelyn sniffled.

Richard felt a little regretful. "The 28th. I missed Christmas."

"You didn't miss it," Margaret said.

"We haven't celebrated it yet," Evelyn added from the side, speaking very quickly.

"The candles on the tree haven't been lit, the pudding hasn't been poured with brandy, and none of the gifts have been opened... Mom said we'd celebrate when you woke up."

Richard looked at his mother, somewhat lost for words.

Gerard stood firmly at the foot of the bed. "We can light the candles today."

......

It was only after the crowd had dispersed that Richard had time to sort out his current situation.

Shadow no longer possessed even a trace of Ether, let alone moved about on its own.

His heart felt entirely hollow.

It was truly a shame... He honestly missed the little fellow who had run errands for him, practiced skills on his behalf, and clung relentlessly to his wrist.

He now understood his mother's hardships. The moment he breathed even slightly too hard, his chest would spasm in pain.

His attention span had also plummeted drastically. The slightest bit of overexertion sent his consciousness into a daze.

This trauma was caused by just a single wisp of his spirit shattering. He didn't even dare imagine what would have happened if all three wisps had been broken.

Spirit-shattering injuries were incredibly difficult to nurse back to health. He estimated that in his current state, it would take half a year at the very least.

Furthermore, until his spirit was completely healed, he couldn't engage in any actions related to the mystical side, otherwise it would only extend his spirit's recovery time.

If Shadow were to return, it would have to wait for that wisp of spirit to grow back.

Physically, he had only been fed some thin gruel over the past few days, causing him to lose a considerable amount of weight. But this aspect was actually the easiest to fix.

Just as Richard was staring at the ceiling and worrying, a line of text flashed on his panel.

[eating lv.4, Progress 100%.]

[All advancement conditions met. Required points: 2.]

He had almost forgotten about this. Back at the wedding, his eating had maxed out, but he had held back from upgrading it.

After that, meeting the Blackburn Family's Virtuoso ancestor, Matthew making him compose a poem in seven steps, the disaster in the carriage, and the string of preparations for entering the Spirit Realm on the winter solstice—it had all made him nearly forget that eating could advance.

He tallied up his points from the beginning.

Before going down the well, he had completely absorbed the layer of Ether that had saturated the Smoking Mirror for hundreds of years.

He had only absorbed that outer layer, leaving the Mirror itself completely untouched, otherwise the mirror's own curse effects would have been ruined.

That instance had yielded 0.52 points, taking him from 3.23 to 3.75.

The trait for eating lv.5 was Decay Digestion, which allowed him to ingest bone and flesh from behind the veil and metabolize the substance within.

And in the produce found behind the veil, nutrients and Ether were mixed together.

He tapped it.

[Available Points: 3.75 → 1.75]

[eating lv.4 → lv.5]

This lv.5 advancement involving the Body category brought changes even greater than those in the Intellect column. Richard was extremely thankful he hadn't tapped it during the wedding.

He felt as though his entire body were on fire. He writhed in bed for a while before discovering that the ball of fire at the bottom of his stomach had grown even fiercer. It felt as though anything he threw into it would be roasted straight into nutrients.

Richard dragged the Frost Branch Box out from under his bed.

More than half a box of the coagulated material Shadow had left half-eaten before the winter solstice remained:

The batch his grandfather had given him in December was the cleanest.

The batch Demeter had used to offset her appraisal fee carried the scent of freshly turned soil.

The small pouch from Heracles smelled of the acrid grit of trenches even through the oiled paper.

He had processed and purified all of these in advance. Even if he truly couldn't digest them, he could immediately induce vomiting.

Richard mentally prepared himself and picked out the scrap with the lowest Ether content. 'Here goes nothing! Bottoms up!'

He pinched his nose and tossed the scrap directly into his mouth.

Hmm... It wasn't as terrible as he'd imagined. It crunched much like hard candy.

First came the taste of rust and coal ash, but after that, it tasted like nothing at all.

Once the piece hit his stomach, the fire inside blazed vigorously, working hard to pump the nutrients throughout his entire body.

His wrist immediately warmed up, and his fingers stopped trembling.

The warm current flowed back into his circuits, repairing an incredibly minuscule fraction of the damaged area.

He fished out a second piece. Just as he brought it to his lips, his stomach let out a muffled groan.

Richard hastily put the second piece back.

Decay Digestion could eliminate waste, but he couldn't be too greedy.

The jar of Underworld Narcissus that Demeter had given him was also in the box.

He glanced at it and crossed it out in his mind: 'This stuff doesn't nourish a person. Eating it will make my Inspiration shoot up, which will invite an equally sharp rise in attention from beyond. I'm already fragile enough right now; I can't withstand any scrutiny.'

Just as he was thinking this, the brisk patter of small, running feet echoed from outside the door.

Evelyn stood in the doorway, carrying a glass of hot milk.

The little girl's nose twitched. "Brother, what are you eating? It smells..."

"Uh... hard candy," Richard continued to lie without batting an eye.

"I want some too!"

"This has a much stronger kick than regular mints!"

Richard hurriedly tried to dissuade his sister.

Evelyn placed the milk on the nightstand, leaned in close, and took a deep sniff.

"It smells like coal ash."

"...It's Grandfather's mints. He left them by the fireplace for too long."

Evelyn squinted at him for a moment before turning and heading downstairs without another word.

At the lunch table, she announced in front of the whole family, "My brother sneaked lumps of coal to eat this morning."

His grandfather's fork paused in mid-air.

Margaret scooped another spoonful of oatmeal into her daughter's bowl without even batting an eye. "When he was four, he gnawed on the windowsill and chewed a corner off."

"Mom!"

"It's true. Your dad patched it with putty later. To this day, that windowsill at the house in Briston is still missing a chunk."

Richard lowered his head and drank his porridge, saying nothing.

The next morning, he was awakened by Wild Sleep.

Another column on his panel was flashing as well.

[sleep lv.4, Progress 71% → 98%.]

Those drafty cabins they had stayed in while crossing the snowy mountains had pushed it just past seventy percent. It had barely moved for over a month after that.

In these past five days, he had slept his way straight into a Master's reading room and spent the entire time taking an exam in his dreams.

It was probably the deepest sleep in the world, and the most vivid dream.

He checked the remaining two skills:

[sleep lv.4, 98%]

[walking lv.4, 85%]

Of the four aspects of Body, only sleep and walking were left before they all reached lv.5. sleep would max out in a few more nights of rest, and it would take 2 points once it did. walking was still short by fifteen percent; given that he currently needed help just to walk downstairs, that fifteen percent wasn't going to budge anytime soon. Once it did max out, that would also take 2 points.

He needed 4 points in total. Then he could plant that seed of "Measure, Bound, Bestow."

He pushed open the window and let the cold wind blow over him.

There was nothing in the morning mist of the Imperial Capital.

No Horn, no hoofbeats, and certainly no wind pressing down from Cloud Ridge.

Those tens of thousands of riders were probably still galloping across some expanse of the North Sea, making their final run of the year.

He closed the window, sat back on the edge of the bed, and began to calculate his final tally.

The lord of the hunt had already paid out the Luck. All that remained was the promised messenger and two spoils of war of his choosing.

The lord of the hunt had said at the time that he would have to pick the messenger and the spoils himself once he woke up.

But how would they be delivered?

The Antler Token had been stuffed into the young hound's mouth, and the slip reading "He who holds this acts on behalf of the lord of the hunt" had been stuffed in there as well. Both were now in Skadi's hands.

He no longer had a single item in his possession that could connect him to the lord of the hunt.

Furthermore, the lord of the hunt had decreed that within a solar year, the Honored Envoy had to remain shattered and could not seek him out.

Richard considered the worst-case scenario. That miser might weigh the pros and cons and come up with something like: 'The Honored Envoy is shattered. The debt is cleared with the man.' What then?

He thought of that display cabinet, remembering how the lord of the hunt had leaped sky-high in the Spirit Realm after speaking that word of truth.

If he truly refused to hand it over, Richard really had no way to deal with the lord of the hunt right now.