Chapter 1910: Chapter 1910

Having found the Greed disguised as a gravedigger, Jenkins once again asked his question directly. He scrutinized its attire; without his Eye of Reality, he would have never been able to tell it was an impostor.

“There is a special soul in the crypt. I want you to capture it for me.”

The lantern-bearing Greed explained that their demands weren't always for physical objects; on rare occasions, they would ask for a task to be completed.

Jenkins nodded. He glanced at the closed entrance to the crypt, and seeing no dark spiritual aura, he pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The underground crypt had originally belonged to a prominent local family, serving as the final resting place for all its members. But after the family fell into decline, it became a public crypt for the town, available for a fee. The long, narrow corridor was lined with square niches carved into the walls to hold urns. Occasionally, the passage would fork, leading to larger chambers on either side, which were also used to store cinerary urns.

Cremation seemed to be a local tradition, a fact Jenkins appreciated. He wandered through the crypt, his purplish-blue miner's lamp—the symbol of his [Mechanical Light]—cutting through the gloom. At the end of a long, straight corridor, he came upon a rusty iron gate, chained and locked, looming in the darkness.

The chamber behind the gate was the largest in the town cemetery, the place where the ancestors of that prominent family were interred. After the family fell, the last heir sold the crypt and left town for good. The gravedigger who took over then gathered all the urns, which had been scattered throughout the various corners of the underground crypt, and consolidated them in this final, large chamber.

Since there was no one left to pay their respects, and no new family members would be using the crypt, the chamber had been locked away forever.

The cat’s eyes glowed with an eerie light in the darkness. It stretched out a small paw and pointed to the left.

Jenkins said, but as he spoke, his right hand shot out to the right. A dim, cold green light flared into existence there. The glow wasn't coming from Jenkins, but from the soul whose neck he now held in an iron grip.

He thought, preparing to drag the soul away. But just then, faint green lights flickered to life in every corner of the chamber. One by one, souls with vacant, listless eyes materialized along the walls, forming a circle around him.

“What is the meaning of this?”

The soul in his grasp couldn't speak, as Jenkins was actively suppressing it. Instead, the most ancient-looking of the spirits lining the walls answered him, its voice halting and laced with a thick local dialect:

When a mortal dies, their soul splinters. The fragment that represents their very essence travels to the realm of the Ancient God of Death to pass on. That, however, is merely a sliver of the whole. The larger portion lingers in the material world, destined to dissipate completely over a shorter or longer period of time.

For various reasons, some of these remnants retain their intellect and consciousness, their minds as sharp as they were in life. These are what people call ghosts. The old spirit was clearly one such entity, and Jenkins counted five or six others like it in the crypt.

Of course, the one Jenkins had captured possessed no such intelligence.

“The family left some of its fortune behind, here in this crypt. You may take the jewels, but do not take away one of our members.”

The old spirit continued.

Jenkins shook his head.

“I can tell the soul I’m holding is special. He must have dabbled in the supernatural during his life, yes? What exactly did he do that led to your family’s complete ruin?”

“How could you know...? Alas, the family has indeed fallen completely.”

What followed was a story from three hundred years past, which Jenkins and his cat listened to intently.

A family on the verge of collapse welcomed home one of its own, a disillusioned young scholar returned from afar. Determined to restore their name, he stumbled upon an anomaly beneath the town. His obsessive digging drove not only himself but the entire family to madness, ultimately unleashing a mysterious power from the depths of the earth.

The Orthodox Church eventually suppressed the incident, but the family was too deeply implicated. Most of its members were executed, and the house began its final, irreversible decline.

The young soul in Jenkins’s grasp was that very scholar. Whatever he had touched, it had warped his spirit, a corruption that had endured for three hundred years without fading. In fact, this very distortion had strengthened his soul, preserving it against the ravages of time. Content orıginally comes from novel✶fire.net

If Jenkins didn’t deal with it now, it was only a matter of time before it became a menace to the town.

“Let me put it this way.”

Having heard the story, Jenkins gave them his ultimatum:

“Either I make every last one of you disappear for good, or you let me walk out of here with him. I’m going to count to three. If you haven’t decided by then, I’ll take it you’ve chosen the first option.

The old spirit made the wise choice. With no reason left to unleash his power, Jenkins turned and walked out, the soul still clutched in his hand.

But just before he stepped through the ruined doorway he had created, he turned back with one last question:

“By the way, what exactly did your family find beneath the town all those years ago?”

He quickly returned to the surface and traded the soul to the shovel-wielding Greed. In exchange for the spirit, the creature revealed its clue: the so-called treasure was hidden inside a small plaster statuette.

It was a remarkably clear clue, yet Jenkins didn't head to the next town. He put his treasure hunt on hold for the time being.

The souls had told him that two or three centuries ago, on the very first night the young scholar returned home, he heard a strange click-clack sound from beneath the family mansion. That discovery had led to the digging, and ultimately, to the family's doom.

If this had happened anywhere but the Nolan region, Jenkins wouldn't have thought much of it. But this was Nolan. He had ample reason to believe there was more than a one-in-three chance that the fallen family had encountered the Difference Engine—or at least a part of it.

The family was now extinct, and the soul of the key figure involved was in no condition to answer questions. However, the Church had dealt with the incident. And while it wasn't the Sage's Church, any of the churches in the Nolan diocese would certainly have preserved records from that time.

With that in mind, he put the treasure hunt aside and sought out the local church of the Nightwatchmen in Honeywood Town. It was another small chapel, but because of the day's incident, two Enchanter squads from the Evergreen Forest were currently stationed there.

Reverting to his own identity, Jenkins went to the church and inquired about the case files related to the incident, hoping to learn whether they were kept locally or had been transferred to the Church of the Unlit Moon cathedral in Nolan.

His luck was quite good. There were files in both locations. The one left in town was merely a hand-written copy, but that made no difference to Jenkins.

Photography hadn’t been invented yet—or at least, it hadn’t reached this small town. So, when Jenkins was handed a slightly moldy file folder in a cramped archive room, he found only a thick stack of documents inside, no revealing black-and-white photographs.

According to the file, when the local church first noticed something was wrong, they immediately sent to Nolan for aid. The problem hadn’t seemed severe at first—just a foul black smoke rising near the fallen family’s old estate, accompanied by a strange, grinding metallic noise. However, any townsperson who went near the manor mysteriously fell unconscious.

Nightwatchmen from Nolan rushed to the scene and delved into the old mansion. In the basement, they discovered a fissure that seemed to lead into an abyss. They ventured in, slew a previously undocumented metallic monster, and upon their success, the unconscious townspeople awoke. By then, however, everyone inside the estate was already dead.

A few members of the family had not been in the residence at the time. Under interrogation, they revealed the history of the family's subterranean explorations. Following the investigation, everyone involved was arrested by the Orthodox Church. The fissure, after a thorough inspection, was permanently sealed.

Judging solely from the written account, the handling of the case and its final outcome seemed perfectly normal. There were no procedural violations, nor was there any attempt to conceal the facts of the investigation.

From Jenkins's perspective, however, the story was full of holes. He suspected that perhaps three hundred years ago, the Difference Engine had attempted to contact and collaborate with the humans on the surface. But then something had gone wrong. The collaboration was aborted, its human partners eliminated, and the Difference Engine had simply tossed out a mechanical monster to serve as a scapegoat before retreating deep underground to continue its plotting.

It was a bold theory, and perhaps he was just being paranoid. But Jenkins had always been cautious. Now that he had the three-hundred-year-old files, he decided he had to see the old estate for himself.

The mansion stood on a western hill just outside Honeywood Town, commanding a panoramic view of the settlement below. Three hundred years ago, while settling the family's affairs, the last heir—a distant relative—had sold the estate to a high-ranking noble from Nolan for use as a vacation home.

The estate had changed hands several times since then. With the mayor's help, Jenkins consulted the town's notarized records and confirmed that its last owner had been a merchant, some thirty years prior.

The man had been in the honey business. Thirty years ago, he had taken his family to Cheslan and never returned. Reliable reports stated that the entire family had perished in the undead plague of that time.

In any case, when Jenkins followed the path, long since swallowed by weeds, up the hill, what he saw was a mansion that had fallen into complete ruin.

The estate was enclosed by an iron fence. Though the main gate was still dutifully secured with a rusty chain and lock, several gaping holes in the fence suggested that thieves and vandals had visited many times over the years.