Chapter 548. Albert Said Don’t Touch Anything, So Naturally I Read the Entire Folder

Chapter 548: 548. Albert Said Don’t Touch Anything, So Naturally I Read the Entire Folder

Catherine took his hand without another word. Her grip was firm, a steadying force against the tremors that still threatened to wrack William’s frame.

Together, they moved through the empty, cobblestone streets toward the academy, two shadows cutting through the bluish-grey haze of the pre-dawn world.

With every block they traversed, the sky grew fractionally lighter, revealing the grim reality of their surroundings: the frost-covered rooftops, the abandoned market stalls, and the hollow silence of a village still asleep while its foundations were crumbling.

By the time they reached the imposing oak doors of the headmaster’s residence, the first tentative birds had begun to sing a sound that felt grotesquely cheerful given the weight pressing down on William’s chest.

His legs felt like they were made of wet clay, each step a conscious battle against exhaustion and the phantom ache of the mana burns still stinging his nerves.

When Albert opened the door, he looked every bit the elderly scholar, his nightcap askew and his eyes blinking against the dim light.

But William didn’t give him time to offer pleasantries. He spoke with a raw, unfiltered urgency, recounting the nightmare: the golden veins, the glass shards tearing through flesh, the terrifying, mechanical precision of Ellie’s transformation.

Albert listened for less than sixty seconds. The transformation in the old man’s face was instantaneous and devastating.

The sleepy confusion vanished, replaced by a hollow, haunted expression that mirrored William’s own. There was no lecture about propriety.

There was no indignant question about why they were waking him. There was only a grim, silent understanding.

He simply nodded, retreated into the darkness of his home, and returned moments later. In one hand he carried a brass key suspended from a tarnished chain; in the other, a tarnished iron lantern.

"Follow close," Albert whispered, his voice carrying a tremor he couldn’t quite hide. "And do not touch anything."

The staircase beneath the library was ancient, carved from stone that seemed to sweat with dampness. It spiraled downward into a darkness so profound it felt physical, a darkness that smelled of centuries-old dust, decay, and the sharp, metallic tang of cold iron.

Their footsteps echoed up the spiral, each one sounding like a hammer blow in the oppressive silence. The lantern light was weak, casting long, wavering shadows that danced like specters against walls that no human hand had touched in decades.

At the bottom of the spiral stood a door of reinforced metal, its surface etched with faded, intricate wards that seemed to pulse with a residual, dying magic.

Albert inserted the key, and the sound of the lock turning was a grinding shriek of ancient metal that set William’s teeth on edge.

The chamber beyond was small, cramped, and unnaturally quiet. It felt less like a room and more like a tomb.

Shelves lined three of the walls, packed with brittle, crumbling ledgers and sealed glass tubes containing substances long forgotten by the surface world.

In the center of the room stood a plain wooden table, its surface scarred by time. A single, modest wooden chest sat atop it, looking deceptively ordinary.

Albert approached the table with reverent dread. His hands shook as he lifted the lid, revealing a flat folder wrapped protectively in oilcloth.

He drew it out and laid it on the table between them.

William reached out, his fingers unsteady as he unwrapped the protective layer. The first sheet of parchment was brittle, threatening to disintegrate at his touch.

The ink was brown, faded by age, but the illustration at the top remained startlingly vivid.

His breath hitched. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.

It was the woman. A young woman with flowing hair and a pair of slender, terrifyingly beautiful wings that looked as though they had been carved from translucent glass.

A web of delicate, branching veins ran through the crystal membrane, glowing in a pattern so precise, so identical to the one he had seen pulsing beneath Ellie’s skin in the lamplight only hours before, that he felt a wave of nausea roll over him.

This wasn’t a coincidence.

This wasn’t magic gone wrong.

This was a blueprint.

Below the drawing, written in a neat, clinical hand that lacked any trace of human emotion, were three lines of text that froze the blood in his veins:

’VESSEL SERIES. SUBJECT THREE.’

’GROWN TO COMPLETION UNDER OBSERVATION.’

In the upper corner of the brittle page, pressed into the parchment with the finality of a brand, was a symbol that made William’s skin crawl.

It was a circle, a symbol of wholeness, of unity, but it had been violently cracked straight through the middle, as if something powerful had been forced to break it from within.

William froze. His lungs felt seized, his heartbeat a deafening hammer against his ribs.

Beside him, Catherine drew a slow, measured breath and held it, her entire body tensing like a bowstring drawn to its breaking point.

On his other side, Albert had gone unnaturally still; even the lantern in his aged hand did not so much as tremble, though the light it cast flickered like a dying pulse.

’This isn’t history,’ William thought, his mind racing through a thousand terrifying possibilities. ’This is a ledger.’

’This is a manifest... This is a list of inventory.’

His eyes burned as he turned to the second page. Underneath the clinical drawing lay a column of names, written in that same detached, surgical handwriting, each one stacked precisely beneath the other like soldiers lined up for execution.

The first name was foreign to him, a string of syllables that carried no meaning, no history. His finger began to trace down the column, the parchment crinkling under his touch like breaking bone.

He passed the second name.

The third.

His pulse quickened with every millimeter his finger moved.

When he reached the fourth line, his finger stopped dead. The blood drained from his face so completely he felt lightheaded.

Ellie Von Synthia.

The ink was disturbingly crisp. It lacked the faded quality of the other entries, yet the handwriting was identical, with the same precise loops and the same cold angles.

It was as if this name had been etched into destiny years before Ellie had ever taken her first breath, long before she had ever walked the halls of this academy or smiled at anyone.

The floor beneath William seemed to tilt, the stone chamber spinning on its axis. The room felt smaller, the air thinner, as if the oxygen were being consumed by the sheer horror of the revelation.

’She wasn’t born,’ the realization screamed in the back of his mind. ’She was manufactured.’

’She is a... product.’

Desperate for confirmation or perhaps hoping to prove himself wrong, he forced his eyes downward to the next line.

The fifth name had been obliterated. A thick, violent stroke of crimson ink slashed across the parchment, applied with such savage force that the nib of the quill had torn through the paper fibers.

The red stain looked like dried blood against the yellowed page. But the strike had been imperfect; the ink had missed a single letter at the beginning, leaving the first few characters of the name exposed beneath the carnage.

William read them once, his mind refusing to process what his eyes were seeing. Then he read them again, slower this time, each letter landing like a guillotine blade.

Something cold and impossibly heavy dropped through the pit of his stomach, anchoring him to the floor in a state of pure, unadulterated dread.

The name underneath the red slash did not belong to a stranger. It did not belong to some forgotten experiment from a century past.

It was a name that haunted his own dreams. A name that belonged to someone he loved.

A name that was far too familiar for this cursed place.