Chapter 549. Nobody Said the Fifth Name Out Loud, Which Is Great for My Blood Pressure

Chapter 549: 549. Nobody Said the Fifth Name Out Loud, Which Is Great for My Blood Pressure

Then the silence shattered, not with a sound, but with the collapse of Albert’s composure.

The lantern in the old man’s hand began to swing.

At first, William thought it was a conscious gesture, a nervous tic born of old age, but as the seconds stretched into agonizing minutes, he realized the horrifying truth: Albert was not moving the lantern.

His fingers had simply lost their grip on reality. The old man was shaking deep, convulsive tremors that started in his core and radiated outward until his bones seemed to rattle within his skin.

Under that restless, sickly yellow light, shadows writhed across the ancient shelves like black water sloshing in a tilted basin. The darkness seemed alive, creeping closer to the table as if drawn to the horror laid bare upon it.

Catherine didn’t move to comfort him. Instead, she leaned forward, pressing two fingers against the edges of the brittle parchment, holding it flat against the wood as if she could physically pin the truth down, preventing it from evaporating into the stale air.

Minutes passed. The silence in the archive became a physical weight, crushing the air from William’s lungs.

It was so quiet that the microscopic, dry sound of dust settling onto the oilcloth folder sounded like footsteps on gravel.

’This is too much,’ William thought, his mind screaming behind a wall of numb shock. ’This is a conspiracy written in blood and ink.’

’Ellie isn’t a child... She’s a legacy.’

’She’s a weapon that has finally been unsheathed.’ His stomach churned with a violent revulsion, the same feeling he had when he watched the glass shards tear through Ellie’s flesh.

This wasn’t just magic; it was cruelty made manifest.

Albert was the one who finally broke. He didn’t look at William.

He didn’t look at Catherine. His eyes remained fixed on the fourth name, Ellie Von Synthia staring at it with the hollow gaze of a man looking into an open grave.

Then his gaze drifted to the wall, then to the darkness beyond the lantern’s reach, seeing things that weren’t there.

"I have held the key to this room for twenty years," Albert whispered.

His voice was hoarse, stripped of its usual scholarly authority, sounding like wind passing through dead leaves. "Twenty years of walking past this door..."

"Twenty years of hearing the faint echo of this vault beneath my feet. " A bitter, self-loathing laugh escaped his throat. "I never opened that chest."

"Every day, I lied to myself... I told myself it was nothing but old accounting records."

"Dust and tax ledgers from a dead era."

William finally found his voice, though it sounded foreign to his own ears—low, dangerous, and laced with accusation. "Weren’t you curious, Albert? You’re a scholar... Curiosity is your nature."

Albert finally turned his head, his eyes bloodshot and swimming with a lifetime of repressed terror. "Terribly curious, William."

"That is exactly why I never opened it." He gripped the lantern tighter, though his hand continued to betray him. "A curious man with a key is a dangerous combination."

"Curiosity leads to questions, and questions lead to truths that can destroy a man’s soul."

"I have always known myself well enough to stay away from my own temptations... I chose ignorance... I chose peace."

Catherine let out a long, shuddering breath through her nose, the sound sharp in the cramped space. She looked at Albert with equal parts fury and exhaustion.

"Albert," she said, her voice cracking slightly despite her attempt at sternness, "you can be the most irritating person alive at the worst possible moment."

"We are standing over the evidence of a nightmare, and you’re talking about your own self-discipline."

Albert’s lips twitched into something that might have been a smile in another life, though here it looked more like a grimace of pain.

"It is a gift, Catherine," he murmured, his eyes sliding back to the blood red slash on the fifth name. "A gift that has finally run out."

A short, tired laugh rippled between the three of them, a sound that was hollow, brittle, and utterly devoid of humor.

It wasn’t a happy sound, but it served its purpose; it acted like a crack in a sealed room, allowing a sliver of oxygen to rush in where the air had grown thick with unspoken horror.

It was the kind of sound people make when they realize they have crossed a threshold from which there is no returning.

Albert reached down, his movements unnaturally precise, almost reverent, as he folded the oilcloth back over the documents. His hands trembled less now, but there was no recovery in his expression.

The usual keen, scholarly twinkle that lived behind his eyes had been extinguished, leaving behind two dark pits of weary understanding.

"Not here," Albert said, his voice regaining some of its gravelly authority, though it remained hushed. "Not in this tomb... My office."

"I have something to confess, and I suspect I will need tea for it."

"Much stronger tea than I normally allow myself, the kind that burns the throat and numbs the nerves."

...

They began the ascent, climbing the spiral stone stairs in single file. The lantern light danced grotesquely, throwing their elongated shadows up the curved walls ahead of them like ascending specters.

William took the rear, his boots scraping against the stone with each labored step. He walked slowly, his body protesting every movement.

His muscles felt like frayed rope, his legs wobbly from the night’s violence, but his mind was far beyond physical pain.

His thoughts were locked on the folder that Catherine now clutched against her chest like a sacred, cursed relic.

He had said nothing about the fifth name.

It wasn’t that he wanted to hide the truth. It was that the truth felt too dangerous to voice aloud.

He had glimpsed three, perhaps four letters through that violent red stroke, and those fragments had landed in his gut like molten lead. But three letters were not a name.

They were a phantom. A shape. A suggestion.

’Don’t be a fool,’ he commanded himself, the inner voice harsh and unforgiving. ’You have been awake for nearly twenty hours.’

’You have nearly burned your mana core to ash.’

’You have watched glass erupt from the spine of someone you care about.’

’Your mind is playing tricks... It’s seeking patterns where there are only shadows.’

He knew how the human psyche worked; he had studied it, fought it, and lived it. A tired, traumatized mind is a desperate thing; it seeks to fill the gaps in information with its own deepest fears.

If he spoke that name now, if he named a ghost and it turned out to be wrong, he would be igniting a fire that could consume everyone in this academy. He refused to point a finger at an innocent based on a hallucination born of exhaustion and blood loss.

But there was another detail. A smaller, stranger detail that his instincts refused to let go.

As the lantern light had swung away from the page moments before they left, something had caught his eye. The brown ink of the names on the list of the ’subjects’ had faded to the color of weak tea, brittle and ancient.

But the red ink that had slashed through that fifth name... it hadn’t faded. In the brief flare of lamplight, he had seen a faint, sickly gloss clinging to the edges of the stroke.

It looked fresh.

The realization sent a new kind of chill down his spine, colder than the morning air. That stroke hadn’t been made decades ago when the ledger was first written.

Someone had come to this archive recently.

Someone had taken the quill and violently struck that name out not years ago, but perhaps days, weeks, or months before they arrived.

The archive wasn’t just a record of the past. It was a crime scene that was still being tended.