Chapter 11: A Mysticism-Type Detective

Chapter Eleven
A Mysticism-Type Detective

A thin veil of pale-red moonlight lay across the dim room, making every object indistinct, every outline blurred.

The three men in black coats slept soundly in different places. On the set of small sofas, Klein sat with his eyes closed, half melted into the night, as though he too had sunk into deep sleep.

His dream was a gray, distorted world through which flashes of light occasionally passed.

In the end, those flashes fixed into a single image.

It was a sinister corner. Sewage flowed over the ground. A man with short yellowish-brown hair, a white shirt, and a brown waistcoat leaned against the wall, surrounded by dense clusters of gray rats.

Half of the man’s lips had been gnawed away, exposing yellowed teeth and rotting gums within. His nose was nothing but a smear of blood mixed with a few short hairs. Patch after patch of flesh had disappeared from his face, clearly revealing eerie white bone. Pale, fat maggots burrowed in and out everywhere, writhing continuously. At his throat, it seemed as though some beast had torn a bite from him; at least half of it was missing.

Klein barely recognized him as Zeriel Victor Lee. He could no longer connect this corpse with the mature, handsome man in the black-and-white photograph Ian had given him.

Zeriel is already dead. In a few more days, he will probably be gnawed down to bones. Perhaps not even a complete skeleton will remain…

Klein pulled free of the dream and recalled the image he had just seen.

After one experience after another, he was already able to witness such corpses with relative calm.

Looking at the crimson moon outside the window, Klein pondered for a dozen seconds and decided to attempt spirit channeling—channeling the man in black beside the sofa.

He had already concocted, over the past few days of preparation, a bottle each of the corresponding Amanda hydrosol and Eye of Spirit potion. As for Tranquility potion, Klein did not need it. He himself could remain calm and rational when others invaded his dreams or forced spirit channeling upon him.

After arranging a simple altar and letting a quiet, peaceful fragrance spread through the room, creating a half-waking, half-dreaming state, Klein prayed to himself—to “The Fool that does not belong to this era.”

Then he entered above the gray fog and used more than two-thirds of his spirituality to respond.

“Once I advance to Sequence 7, similar prayers should be like summoning and sacrificial rituals. They should be able to slightly stir the power of the mysterious space above the gray fog…”

Klein looked around, made a rough judgment, and swiftly returned to the real world.

He passed through a sky and earth like the starry heavens, passed through a chaotic, clamorous storm of thoughts, and entered the mental layer of the target man. He saw the man’s illusory figure floating in midair.

“Who sent you to Zeriel’s home?” Klein glanced over and asked in a deep voice.

The man’s shadowy form replied with dull, unfocused eyes, “Meursault. Meursault sent me here to wait for a boy named Ian.”

Light and shadow shifted within his mind world, revealing a lean, capable-looking man with darker skin. It was precisely the leader of the group that had chased Ian on the steam underground, the one Klein had encountered before.

As expected, it was him…

Klein had consumed too much spirituality while responding to the prayer. At this point, fatigue had already begun to overtake him. He hurried to seize the time and asked, “And who ordered Meursault?”

“I do not know… He is the Executor of our Zmanger gang. No one can order him except the boss,” the man said blankly.

Zmanger… the Highland word for “warrior”…

Klein, a pseudo-historian and true mysticist, suddenly felt a stab of pain in his head. His body involuntarily flew out toward the storm of thoughts.

Before long, he escaped the spirit-channeling state and felt only an empty throbbing in his skull.

He did not rush to leave. In an orderly manner, he packed up the materials and the yellowish-brown hair, then opened the oriel window outward, allowing the cold night wind to blow inside and disperse the scent of Amanda hydrosol and Eye of Spirit potion.

During this process, Klein returned to the balcony, locked the main door from the inside, and wiped down every place he had touched.

Only after Zeriel’s bedroom had returned to its previous state did he press a hand to his chest and bow to the three still-sleeping men.

Straightening, Klein put on his gloves, braced himself, leaped, and nimbly flipped outside the oriel window. He stood steadily on tiptoe in the extremely narrow space.

He lifted the vertical latch upward, blocked its bottom with a tarot card, and used his Clown ability to sense the details and adjust the balance.

After several seconds, Klein slowly withdrew the tarot card. The vertical latch actually remained steadily in place, not falling down.

Swish!

He first shut the half of the window without a latch. Then he flashed across, abruptly thrusting his right hand inward and pushing the other half closed.

The motion was so swift that the latch did not fall until vibration reached it. It dropped precisely into the matching iron hole.

Clang! A sound that was difficult to eliminate rang out, as though a strong wind had slapped the glass surface.

Klein knew that the three men in the bedroom would slowly wake. He delayed no further and jumped directly toward the street.

A second-floor height posed no danger to him now, but when he landed, he could no longer keep completely silent. He also made a faint, not especially obvious sound.

Klein quickly left the area, left Rose Street, but did not directly take a rental carriage back to Minsk Street in Cherwood Borough.

He turned through several corners and headed toward the neighboring East Borough.

The night was cold. Wind, cool and damp, seemed to stab into his bones. Klein shivered and decided that future operations would require an added sweater. He also decided that over the next few days he would buy charcoal and let the fireplace perform its proper function.

After an unknown length of time, relying on intuition without a map, he entered Backlund’s East Borough.

Gas streetlamps were scarce here. Only one or two could be seen from afar. If clouds had covered the crimson moon that night, Klein believed many sections of road would have been so dark as to be utterly invisible.

As he walked, he suddenly saw pairs of eyes appear within the deep gloom ahead. Hunched figures emerged one after another.

They swayed out from the blurry distance, silent and soundless.

Living corpses?

Klein abruptly stopped. He reached for the Requiem Charm and tarot cards, swiftly activating spirit vision.

He saw unhealthy, extremely weak aura colors. He also saw the appearances of those figures.

They were all living people. Normal living people. Only, their expressions were numb, their eyes empty, their movements powerless. There were men and women among them.

It is almost past midnight. Why are they still walking the streets?

Klein, puzzled and wary, moved to one side, bypassing this group from the edge of the street. But very soon, he encountered a second wave, then a third. They had the same numbness, and within that numbness, the same pain.

His brows furrowed slightly. He was about to step forward and ask when he suddenly heard shouting and curses from ahead.

“Get up! All of you, get up!”

“You sons of whores!”

“The streets and parks are not places for people like you to sleep!”

…

Klein froze. Immediately, the words Poor Law surfaced in his mind, and he understood what was happening.

He himself had suffered the same treatment.

Hoo…

Klein exhaled, quickening his steps toward the one-room apartment he had rented on Black Palm Street in the East Borough.

There, he slept for two hours, initially recovering his spirituality. Then he went out again, broke off a withered branch, and used it as a dowsing rod.

“Zeriel’s corpse’s location.”

“Zeriel’s corpse’s location.”

…

Through divination again and again, using that yellowish-brown hair again and again, Klein walked for a long time until he reached a corner of the East Borough. There stood a sewer entrance.

After the great plague twelve years ago, the Loen Kingdom had gradually built an advanced sewer system in the capital, surpassing the “Roselle legacy” of the Intis Republic in one stroke.

Moving aside the cover, Klein held his breath and climbed down the vertical metal ladder.

Because he was not wearing specially made clothes, did not have many pockets, and could not carry too many items, he had abandoned the Kragg Oil he had learned from Frye to make—the Kragg Oil that refreshed the mind and eliminated foul smells. At this moment, he regretted it immensely.

A dozen seconds later, Klein’s feet touched the ground, and he felt the sticky texture beneath him.

The filthy sensation made dense goosebumps rise across his arms and body, but he could only force himself to endure and continue walking forward through the empty, silent sewer.

A fork appeared ahead. One passage was relatively hidden, and from it drifted a thick stench even more nauseating than the rest of the sewer.

Klein turned into it and walked all the way to the end. There, he saw densely packed points of spirituality and aura colors.

No candles were needed. In his eyes, with spirit vision active, the sinister corner was directly reflected, as was that rotting corpse, gnawed to tatters.

It was exactly the same as the image he had seen through dream divination.

Squeak!

The dense masses of gray rats scattered and fled in every direction. Some, however, remained where they were, unwilling to leave, reluctant to part with the food.

After confirming that it was Zeriel, Klein hesitated for only a moment before swiftly arranging a spirit-channeling ritual.

Mm… if Ian’s description is correct, then Zeriel has only been dead for a few days. Spirit channeling should allow me to obtain some amount of shallow information…

He thought this with considerable confidence.

Woo!

As wind circled, as the wall of spirituality formed, all the rats fled. Klein carried out the ritual step by step, just as before.

“Zeriel’s cause of death.”

“Zeriel’s cause of death.”

…

Through repeated low recitations, Klein’s eyes turned black. His pupils vanished. The whites of his eyes disappeared. With the help of meditation, he quickly entered the dream.

Yet within that foggy illusory world, nothing appeared at all.

Klein opened his eyes and, with a slight frown, made his judgment:

“Spirit channeling failed…”

“Someone has ‘handled’ Zeriel’s spirit…”

“This matter involves Beyonders.”

“And the fact that someone could disguise themselves as Zeriel and fool one detective after another also proves that from the side.”

After pondering for a while, Klein made his decision: stop here and no longer involve himself any deeper. In any case, he had already completed the commission beyond expectations.

“Let Ian call the police.”

He murmured, put away the materials, and removed the wall of spirituality.