Chapter 96: The Eye of the Sphinx

He had already judged this to be a textbook standard seal, likely applied shortly after the oil lamp was cast.

A standard seal meant its structure could be analyzed, and anything that could be analyzed could be dismantled.

The problem was the massive gulf between theoretical possibility and practical execution.

He had also considered the simplest, most brute-force solution: smashing the oil lamp.

The copper body was brittle; a few hard strikes with a hammer would easily shatter it.

Once the physical carrier was destroyed, the seal would naturally fail, releasing everything stored inside.

However, he quickly rejected the profoundly stupid idea.

There were two main reasons.

First, he had no idea what was sealed inside.

The lamp's structure used a standard priest inscription seal. The design purpose of such seals was usually singular: to lock something in and keep it from getting out.

If it contained nothing but pure ether deposits, smashing it open would merely cause the ether to scatter and dissipate.

But what if a physical entity was sealed inside?

Mutated species from behind the veil, residual ritual products, deliberately isolated filth... Appendix C explicitly stated that not everything seeping through the veil was harmless.

Smashing the seal was equivalent to tearing down a prison door. Whether it held a cat or a tiger, the occupant would be let out all at once.

Doing that in his own bedroom was no different from committing suicide.

Suicide was one thing, but it would also drag his family down with him.

Second, supernatural items from the Black Soil River Basin rarely circulated on the market.

He had managed to buy this oil lamp for a mere two pounds purely because the unsold auction channels in Clement's hands had happened to spit it out, and no local buyer in Briston had been willing to take it.

Stumbling across one was already lucky; he couldn't count on the same fortune twice.

Therefore, the brute-force approach had been ruled out from the start.

He had to find a way to pry open a controllable fissure without destroying the supernatural item's overall structure.

But how?

The question had been spinning in his head for an entire week without a breakthrough.

That was until tonight, when he had finally deciphered a seal maintenance manual hidden within that pile of raw materials from the Imperial Capital University Library.

Its core content detailed how to determine if a seal was aging and how to perform preventive maintenance before degradation occurred.

Richard organized the deciphered notes into a logical sequence in his notebook.

The manual first explained the general principles of seal aging.

All seals aged. There were no exceptions.

Whether the carrier was silver, copper, stone, or wood, and regardless of how perfectly the inscriptions were carved or how thoroughly the rituals were performed, a seal began to degrade the moment it was set.

Seal maintenance was a discipline of its own. The manual then moved on to focus on the weak links within a structural seal.

This section made Richard's eyes light up.

The author used a vivid analogy.

Seal inscriptions were a closed chain, and the connections between the links were the most fragile points.

In the terminology of Inscriptiology, these connections were called "turning points."

A turning point was where the inscription's direction shifted—where a straight line curved, a curve sharply angled, or where two segments running in different directions intersected.

The maintenance manual recommended regularly inspecting these turning points and repairing them immediately upon noticing any drop in binding force.

The documented repair methods were quite similar to the work Mr. Hutton had previously done in the basement.

The manual specifically emphasized that during repairs, one must absolutely never apply reverse pressure to a turning point.

But what if the goal wasn't to reinforce the seal, but to weaken it?

The manual's author probably never dreamed that while his disaster prevention guide explicitly warned to keep open flames away from flammables, an arsonist would read it as an instruction to place open flames right next to them.

Richard's drowsiness vanished entirely. He recalled the engineering accident case studies his elective professor had discussed in his previous life.

"Class, do you know about the Great Molasses Flood in Boston in 1919?"

"A steel storage tank filled with molasses burst. Over two million gallons flooded the street, killing twenty-one people."

"Why did it burst? Because of stress concentration at the riveted joints."

Stress concentration. The words were like a key sliding into a lock with a crisp click.

Bridge fractures started at the welds, hull breaches at the riveted joints, and aircraft skin fatigue at the rivet holes.

All structural failures began at the weakest point.

The situation with seal inscriptions was virtually identical.

You couldn't snap a steel wire by bending it once. But bend it back and forth in the exact same spot dozens or hundreds of times, and the wire would inevitably break right there.

Richard stood up and paced back and forth across the room.

Excitement made his heart beat faster than usual, but he quickly suppressed it.

A theory making sense was one thing; actually executing it was another.

Richard checked his Pocket Watch. It was 9:40 PM. In this era, where the poor lacked much entertainment, his family had already gone to bed.

He placed the oil lamp squarely in the center of the desk.

What he needed to do next was simple: press his right index finger against the seal's turning point and begin "knocking."

He closed his eyes and entered Fourfold Breathing.

After two rounds of ether conduction, his fingertip sensed an extremely faint change.

It probably wasn't his imagination.

The fourth round, the fifth, the sixth... by the time he reached the seventh round, the change could be clearly felt.

However, when the seventh round ended, he stopped.

Every round of ether conduction consumed his already meager ether reserves.

The seven rounds of probing had proven the method viable.

The seal's elasticity at the turning point was indeed decreasing; the fatigue effect was accumulating.

By his estimation, two or three more rounds of conduction at the same intensity would likely produce a micro-fissure at that exact location.

But his nerves remained strung tight.

During the incident with the Spirit Board, only the candles had blown out.

But this oil lamp was on an entirely different scale.

It was an artifact from the era of priests in the Black Soil River Basin, possessing at least a thousand years of ether exposure, and its textbook standard seal had preserved the vast majority of its ether.

Even before the lamp actually cracked, he could already feel the copper surface heating up.

If the seal actually broke and some strange, bizarre things slipped out...

He didn't know what would happen, but he absolutely could not let it happen in his home.

His father was asleep downstairs, his mother's bedroom was on the other side of the house, and his younger sister's room was right across the hall.

If he ended up provoking something, regardless of whether he could handle it himself, he absolutely could not expose his family to the risk.

After resting for a moment, Richard got up from his bed.

He wrapped the oil lamp tightly in a thick flannel cloth and stuffed it into his coat's large inner pocket.

He also took his probationary inspector's papers from the drawer and placed them in his breast pocket.

If he ran into a patrol officer, those papers would at least save him a lot of trouble.

He opened his door. The hallway was pitch black.

Without turning on the lights, he felt his way along the wall toward the stairs.

The back door was cracked open; the night wind poured in, carrying the year-end chill and the scent of coal smoke.

Richard pulled his coat tight, squeezed sideways through the gap, and gently pulled the door shut from the outside.

Briston at night was a completely different city from Briston during the day.

All the daytime noise was tucked away. The shouts of vendors, the clatter of horse hooves, the factory whistles, the roaring engines of school buses... all were swallowed into the belly of the night.

Occasionally, a dog's bark would drift over from a distance, or the hollow clack of a night watchman's wooden clapper.

He chose not to go to the alley by the flea market, nor did he head to Grafton Street. He picked somewhere farther away.

Heading south along Slag Alley, there was a dead end known as Nail Alley.

At the mouth of the alley stood a public telephone booth. Its red paint was peeling, and two of its glass panes were cracked.

Beside the phone booth was a high wall, and behind that wall lay an abandoned oil refinery.

The refinery had shut down three years ago. The factory windows were boarded up with sheet metal, and the yard was overgrown with weeds.

The end of the alley was a solid wall; aside from the entrance by the phone booth, there was no second path out.

The nearest residences were over fifty yards away, past the mouth of the alley and separated by a row of shops across the main street.

With this distance, combined with the abandoned factory's solid wall acting as a shield, it would be difficult to affect anyone else even if something went wrong.

When Richard arrived at the entrance to Nail Alley, he checked his Pocket Watch.

10:45 PM. It had taken him thirty-five minutes to walk here from home.

The public telephone booth stood on the left side of the alley entrance.

The light inside the booth had broken long ago. Someone had scrawled a few lines of obscenities on the glass, the handwriting mostly washed out by the rain.

Richard didn't enter the booth; instead, he stopped in the space between the phone booth and the high wall.

He took the flannel-wrapped oil lamp out of his inner pocket.

The outline of the Sphinx's human face was faintly visible.

That face was neither smiling nor sad, staring with indifferent apathy at everyone who approached it.

Richard set the oil lamp down on his coat and crouched. He first completed a few full breathing cycles, allowing his breathing method to circulate steadily.

He pressed his right index finger onto the seal's turning point.

He was already extremely familiar with that tiny contact patch between the pad of his finger and the copper surface.

The ninth round began, and an ether pulse was sent out through his fingertip.

The intensity was identical to the previous eight rounds, and the direction was exactly the same.

Compared to before, the decay in the seal's elasticity at the turning point was even more pronounced.

At the end of the ninth round, he stopped to catch his breath.

The tenth round. For this one, he gritted his teeth, squeezing his ether reserves until they were nearly completely drained.

Richard's heartbeat accelerated.

With a crisp crack, a fissure appeared.

Ether surged out from the crack.

It poured out so rapidly that his fingertip was pushed back by a searing heat, forcing him to move his finger away from the copper surface.

The Panel jumped.

[Available Points: 0.22 → 0.31]

The numbers began to climb. 0.31... 0.39... 0.44...

The Panel was absorbing the gushing ether, and the conversion efficiency was faster than with any supernatural item he had encountered before.

But he had no time to stare at the numbers.

The hairs on the back of Richard's neck stood on end. He could feel the surrounding ether field changing.

The first thing to react was the shadow of the phone booth.

It slid away from its original position, gliding across the ground like a water-soaked rag.

Then came the shadow of the high wall. Its edges twitched like a living creature, bulging forward one second and shrinking back the next.

Richard stood up straight and took two steps back.

His vision was experiencing an incredibly bizarre fracture.

Everything physical remained perfectly still. The phone booth was the phone booth, the wall was the wall, and the ground was the ground.

But their shadows no longer belonged to them.

The shadows were detaching from the objects, acting independently.

The Panel's numbers were still jumping. 0.58... 0.63... 0.71...

The absorption was continuing, but the range of the runaway ether field was expanding as well.

Under the impact of the ether field, the display windows of the shops out on the street began to resonate.

Buzz... buzz... buzz... The sound was faint, but distinctly clear in the dead of night.

Richard's heart suddenly tightened.

The diffusion of the ether field had already exceeded the boundaries of the alley.

He hurried to the mouth of the alley and poked his head out to look.

The main street was completely empty, and the shops were all shut tight.

But the row of stores across the street—the bakery, the hardware store, the tailor shop, the pharmacy... every single one had a signboard hanging out front, and every single signboard cast a shadow.

Now, all of those shadows were moving.

The shadow of the bakery's signboard peeled away from the wall and began crawling across the brickwork.

The shadow of the hardware store's advertising board contorted into an impossible angle. The board was standing perfectly straight, yet its shadow bowed like an arch.

Then there was the shadow of the half-body mannequin in the display window...

Richard stared at that shadow, feeling his blood run cold.

The mannequin had no arms, only a torso and a head used to display clothing.

Yet its shadow did have arms. They reached forward across the glass of the display window, trying to grab hold of something.

The buzzing grew louder.

It wasn't just the shops across the way. The shadows of every visible building along both sides of the street were flowing.

The shadows of the entire city block had come alive.