Chapter 121: Chapter 121

It had all gone smoothly. Jenkins glanced at his pocket watch in the moonlight. Barely a minute and twenty-one seconds had passed since he'd slipped into the cemetery, and now he stood before the modest burial plot of Pryor Jones, an apprentice makeup artist from the Silver Jasmine Opera Troupe.

The tombstone, nestled in the grass, bore the unfortunate soul's dates of birth and death, along with the cause: influenza. An inscription from the opera troupe's director followed, a sorrowful tribute praising the poor girl's life.

According to the kingdom's burial customs, for a plot of this standard, the coffin should lie directly beneath the headstone.

"Am I really going to dig up someone's grave?"

Jenkins raised his thin sword, pointing its tip toward the damp turf, but hesitated.

"Every man for himself!"

Gritting his teeth, he screamed the words in his mind, then tossed the sword aside. He knelt, pressing both hands flat against the earth.

"If this doesn't work, I'll have no choice but to dig up your grave," he muttered. "I'm sorry. I'll avenge you if I ever get the chance... Wait, how did you die again?"

Muttering to himself, he closed his eyes, cleared his mind, and activated [Soul Departure from Dream]. The moonlight tonight felt eerie and cold. His physical body slumped to the ground as his spiritual form sank deep into the earth.

But he couldn't allow that. The moment his spirit touched the divinity, it would begin to passively burn and consume it, and he couldn't afford to waste it here.

His spirit slowly withdrew from the earth, returning to his body, but something from underground gave chase. Jenkins had just scrambled to his feet when he heard a soft pop. A tiny, golden object erupted from the soil beside him, glowing faintly. It looked exactly like a musical note.

He yelled inwardly, deftly unbuttoning his coat. His hands rummaged beneath it, pulling off seven or eight small cloth pouches. From these, he retrieved various metals that had been pressed into specific shapes and assembled them into a crude cube. With a flick of his thin sword, he nudged the glowing golden note inside and sealed it.

He pricked his finger with the sword's tip and smeared a streak of blood across one face of the cube.

The metal plates, which had seemed on the verge of falling apart, fused together.

He rotated the cube and coated a second face with silver powder blessed by Bishop Parrold.

"By silver's purity!"

The seams where the different metals met began to shimmer as if melting.

He turned the cube again and placed a blade of grass, plucked from the ground at his feet, onto the third face.

"By the leaf's spirit!"

Through his Eye of Reality, he saw a faint golden light begin to emanate from it.

He turned it to the fourth face and smeared it with a white streak—the spiritual powder he had obtained after vanquishing the evil spirit at the hospital.

"By the spirit's malevolence!"

All six faces contracted inward at once, their surfaces smoothing over.

Turning it to the fifth face, he left it bare, letting it bask in the moonlight.

"By the moon's light!"

The metal cube in his hand began to tremble violently.

He rotated the cube one last time. On the final face, he used a piece of pale blue ritual chalk to draw the holy symbol of the Legacy Sage.

All the strange phenomena ceased. A palm-sized, perfect black cube rested in the palm of Jenkins's left hand.

The sealing ritual was complete.

It was a most peculiar ritual. The key was not the metal itself, but the six seals applied to its faces. Aside from the first, which must be the caster's blood, and the last, which must be the holy symbol of their faith, the materials for the other four faces were entirely dependent on what the caster had on hand, what they could touch, and what they understood in their heart.

For anyone other than the sealer to break the enchantment, they would need to prepare and perform a specific counter-ritual for each of the six faces. The holy symbol on the final face, for instance, could be negated with a special kind of paper, but undoing the first seal of blood required killing the one who had cast it.

The very fact that Jenkins had obtained that first drop of divinity meant its original sealer was long dead, and the other four seals had been broken for some unknown reason.

Any conscious preparation beforehand would cause the ritual to fail, yet performed impromptu, it was guaranteed to succeed.

All of this was knowledge that had flooded into Jenkins's mind as he performed the ritual.

Given the ritual's niche and impractical nature, very few within the Church of Knowledge and Books had ever made use of it. Only after completing it did a cold sweat break out on Jenkins's forehead.

"A moment ago... was I even in control of my own actions?"

In a daze, he realized that this 'special seal' must hide a profound secret. But why would knowledge of it be located on the first floor of the Secret Trace Library?

He hastily gathered his belongings and prepared to make a run for it. Chocolate had been utterly silent the whole time. It was only after they were clear of the cemetery that the cat began to paw insistently at the pocket holding the metal cube.

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He chided her softly, "When we get back, I'll prepare a dose of Animal Intelligence Awakening Potion for you."

The cat instantly grew docile. But as she settled into Jenkins's arms, she cast a long glance back toward the groundskeeper's cottage.

He retrieved his luggage, made sure no one had spotted him, and cautiously returned to the patch of woods near the Shire City station. There, he huddled in a tree with Chocolate, waiting. Just as the sky began to lighten, a loud train whistle echoed in the distance. Jenkins checked his pocket watch against his unused ticket, then scrambled down with Chocolate and hurried away.

He wasn't skilled enough to hop a moving train, so he slipped into the station ahead of time, blended in with the crowd, and then simply walked out with the passengers arriving on the morning train.

The serious accident caused by the appearance of the Mysterious Realm had, of course, been discovered. It would have been impossible to miss—after all, when Jenkins had fled, he'd left half a train car sitting on the tracks.

Jenkins pulled up his collar and pricked his ears like a cat, eavesdropping on the chatter around him. The trains arriving from Nolan City all had to pass by the site of the incident, so passengers were buzzing about the crowds of soldiers, police, eccentrics in strange outfits, and grim-faced priests from the Church gathered there.

The air in Shire City was cleaner than in Nolan, and visibility was decent in the early morning light. Playing the part of an ordinary traveler wary of being swindled, Jenkins walked a full block from the station before hailing a carriage.

The carriage ambled along, overtaking lines of workers heading to their morning shifts. It turned left at a five-way intersection in the waking city, wheels crunching over gravel, and passed another carriage going the opposite way. Finally, following the address on the note from Papa Oliver, Jenkins found the herbal medicine shop tucked away in a remote corner of the city.

The common view was that herbalism, much like sorcery, was nothing more than the quackery of island savages from beyond the continent. While there was some truth to this perception, a few of those 'savages' were true masters of herb lore, and their 'sorcery' was, in fact, a genuine form of spellcraft.

The owner of this particular shop was a man named Old Jack. Before this trip, Jenkins had never even heard his name.