Chapter 191: Entrustment

Chapter 191: Entrustment

West Borough, Calpensa Hotel.

Fors helped Lawrence into his room and eased him down onto the bed.

It was a relatively luxurious hotel. Except for the washroom, every part of the room was covered in thick, soft, grayish-yellow carpet, while the walls were hung with reproductions of famous oil paintings.

Lawrence caught his breath and said, “Thank you, Miss Wall. Please forgive a dying man for being unable to bow.”

“No, Mr. Lawrence. Your condition has eased. As a former practicing physician, I can tell you without any doubt that you can still survive. Once you rest a little, we’ll go to a clinic or a hospital,” Fors comforted him.

Lawrence smiled. “I know my own physical condition very well. You don’t need to comfort me. Besides, as a hobby, I am an astrologer. I have already foreseen that I will die in Backlund, in this very hotel.”

Apart from the surface embellishment, everything he said was true. He was already nearly eighty, no longer the sturdy, energetic young man he had once been. If not for the enhancement to his physical constitution brought by his Sequence potion, he might already have been buried in some cemetery.

Originally, Lawrence had believed he could live another ten years. Who could have expected that he would encounter the rebellion stirred up by the former Traveler, Botis, and suffer fairly severe injuries at the hands of the Aurora Order? The remaining descendants of his family had all died in that disaster as well.

This struck him with enormous force, nearly preventing him from recovering at all. After that, his journey to Backlund in search of his two brothers and their descendants had yielded only the result that they had long since passed away, inflicting yet another wound upon his spirit.

With all those things added together, Lawrence clearly felt that his life had reached its end.

His original plan had been to visit the graves of Lauro and Anlisa one more time and offer them flowers, then immediately return to meet the other members of the family council and make arrangements for what came after. But the condition of an old person was such that, once it failed, it failed very quickly.

Before Fors could speak, Lawrence struggled to take a palm-sized notebook from the inner pocket of his half-open clothes.

The hard paper cover of the notebook was copper-green, giving it an extremely ancient feel.

On its surface, a line was written in ancient Feysac:

“I came, I saw, I recorded.”

Lawrence placed the notebook on the blanket over his chest, inhaled, and said, “Miss Wall, if I die here, could you help me deliver it to Pritz Harbor?”

“Mr. Lawrence, nothing will happen to you,” Fors emphasized.

At the same time, she subconsciously glanced at the notebook and discovered that it was not thick. It contained three kinds of paper. One type was a parched, brittle-looking scorched yellow, and there were very few sheets of it. One was yellow-brown parchment, of which there was a moderate amount. The last was ordinary white paper, which made up the majority.

Lawrence smiled with difficulty and said, “I’m saying if, Miss Wall. Will you help?”

“Pritz Harbor isn’t far. It hardly counts as travel. If it’s urgent, with the steam train, I can even make a round trip in half a day.” Fors nodded.

Lawrence let out a breath. His spirits seemed to recover a little.

“After I die, wait ten minutes. Then take a glowing object from my corpse and deliver it together with this notebook to Dorian Gray of the Fishermen’s Association in Pritz Harbor. My wallet, and the 42 pounds in cash inside it, are my payment and thanks to you. As for these clothes of mine, let them accompany me into ash.”

“No. You don’t need to give me anything. No, nothing will happen to you, Mr. Lawrence,” Fors said sincerely.

Lawrence seemed not to hear what she was saying. He muttered to himself, “Perhaps Dorian will give you some additional reward, but that will depend on your own thoughts… I trust you. From Anlisa’s matter, I could tell that you are a good girl…”

He abruptly regained clarity and said to Fors, “Miss Wall, could you go downstairs and fetch me a bottle of hot water? I don’t know when the attendant will come.”

“No problem.” Fors did not think too much of it. She picked up the hot-water bottle and left the room.

After taking only a few steps, she suddenly felt that something was wrong, because the bottle in her hand was heavy. Clearly, quite a bit of hot water remained inside.

Fors was about to turn back and ask when she abruptly sensed intense spiritual fluctuations coming from the room.

This is… Fors froze at first. Then she understood Mr. Lawrence’s intention.

As death approached, he had clearly sensed that something had begun going wrong with his body. He was afraid that he would lose control and turn into a monster.

He wanted to die as a human, not as a monster. And so, he had chosen to end his own life.

This was the last dignity of a Beyonder.

Of course, if he became a monster, all of his arrangements would fall apart.

Thinking of this, Fors was overcome with sadness. She stood outside and waited nearly ten minutes before pushing the door open and going in.

She saw Lawrence lying silently on the bed, without breath. He seemed to have aged greatly all at once. Beside him lay a “diamond” the size of an eye.

The light from outside the window shone in and refracted endlessly through the “diamond,” creating a scene as beautiful as starlight.

Phew… Fors exhaled and carefully examined him, only to discover that Lawrence’s cause of death was the most ordinary cardiac arrest.

…

Cherwood Borough, 15 Minsk Street.

After returning home, Klein rested for a while, then went above the gray fog, intending to divine Will Auceptin’s matter.

He had the paper crane fly out from the pile of miscellaneous items in the corner and land on the long bronze table before him. Then he removed the citrine pendant wrapped around his cuff.

While holding the pendulum in his left hand, Klein used meditation to adjust his state and recalled the scenes he had witnessed in the woods outside the cemetery.

There were details he might not have consciously noticed, but his spirituality would not have missed them. This divination was mainly meant to take advantage of that point, while relying on the gray fog to eliminate interference.

Once prepared, Klein conjured a new sheet of parchment and wrote down the divination statement:

“Will Auceptin is completely dead.”

Then he pressed the paper crane beside the divination statement and let the citrine pendant hang so low it nearly touched the words.

Entering a meditative state and completing all the steps of pendulum dowsing, Klein opened his eyes and looked at the result.

The citrine pendant was rotating counterclockwise, and both its speed and amplitude were considerable.

This indicated a negative answer.

This indicated that Will Auceptin was not completely dead!

This… Klein felt astonished, yet at the same time he felt that it seemed within expectations.

After some thought, he changed the divination statement:

“That corpse belongs to Will Auceptin.”

This time, the pendulum gave an affirmative revelation.

That corpse did indeed belong to Will Auceptin!

Klein vaguely formed an idea and once again wrote a new divination statement:

“Will Auceptin’s corpse will revive.”

After a calm round of work, Klein saw the revelation:

Counterclockwise rotation, at an extremely fast speed.

This meant Will Auceptin’s corpse would not revive. In other words, there would be no corpse mutation!

It seems Will Auceptin, whether actively or passively, abandoned his previous body and is surviving in some other form… Is this matter related to the Mercury Snake? Klein attempted to divine other information, but every attempt failed. Among them was “Will Auceptin’s current state.”

However, when he repeated an earlier dream divination and asked “Will Auceptin’s current location,” he still obtained a similar image: a pitch-black room and the rushing sound of flowing water.

Yet the feeling it gave seemed slightly different now.

Forget it. There’s no need to waste time. It’s not as if I plan to get involved… Klein put away the pendulum and prepared to return to the real world.

From the divinations just now and everything that had happened earlier, he had a vague guess about Will Auceptin, but he could not verify it.

He suspected that Will Auceptin was another Mercury Snake!

As a Sequence 1, the Mercury Snake was not unique. At most, three “snakes” could exist at the same time!

The Mercury Snake, which governed fate, would naturally be able to locate Allen’s astral body with a simple paper crane, manufacture false revelations for him, and without question possess the ability to change a person’s fate with a single sentence.

For some unknown reason, Will Auceptin had grown weak and was now enduring the threat of a second Mercury Snake. Everything he had done was for the sake of shaking off the other party.

As for the reason behind their conflict, the answer was simple:

When there was no Sequence 0, three Sequence 1s could exist at the same time. But once there was a Sequence 0, there would be no Sequence 1s!

The potion formula for the Black Emperor explained the true meaning of that line.

One of the main ingredients for that formula was:

The Beyonder characteristics of two Prince of Abolition.

Prince of Abolition was precisely the Sequence 1 of the Black Emperor pathway!

As a Sequence 1, if one wished to advance to Sequence 0, one had to obtain all the Beyonder characteristics of the other two Sequence 1s of the same pathway!

It was precisely because of this guess that Klein became even more afraid to get involved in Will Auceptin’s affairs.

If my deduction is correct, then this is a genuine “battle of immortals.” I can’t afford to provoke that, I really can’t… Klein’s spirituality sank, and he vanished from the ancient palace above the gray fog.

…

Queen Borough, inside a house that did not stand out much in this district.

The Beyonder gathering convened by Mr. A was taking place as scheduled.

Fors and Xio had changed into different outfits and accompanied Viscount Glaint, who wore an iron-black mask, into the hall. They casually found a place and sat down.

Before the gathering officially began, Viscount Glaint took the initiative and wrote his request to the attendant, praying to the Goddess that someone would respond later.

As usual, Fors seemed languid. Rarely, she had also put on a hood, using its shadow to cover her face.

She was still thinking about Mr. Lawrence.

The eye-sized “diamond” was something she understood very clearly. It was the Beyonder characteristic he had left behind, though for the time being she could not confirm which Sequence it belonged to.

As for the notebook, Fors had flipped through it casually and discovered that many of its pages were still blank. The written portions, however, were filled with all kinds of strange, odd, mysterious symbols and magical marks. They far surpassed the limits of Fors’s knowledge.

What it is doesn’t matter. What matters is that I must honor my promise… Fors reminded herself.

At that moment, seated in a single armchair and wearing an exaggerated hood, Mr. A spoke hoarsely.

“I have a mission.

“Help me find some people who believe in the so-called Fool.”

Huh? Fors instantly snapped out of her thoughts.