Chapter 550. Albert Fought a Cat for a Cardboard Box, and Honestly the Cat Was Winning

Chapter 550: 550. Albert Fought a Cat for a Cardboard Box, and Honestly the Cat Was Winning

William kept that thought—that chilling, glossy red stroke—folded away in the darkest corner of his mind, tucked beside the memory of the page he had secretly lifted and hidden under his pillow.

He followed the flickering lantern light up from the bowels of the academy, emerging into the pale, unforgiving light of morning.

Albert’s office was exactly as chaotic as William remembered: a physical manifestation of a brilliant mind left to decay in disarray. Reports stood in unsteady, precarious towers on every flat surface, threatening to collapse at the slightest breeze.

A row of mismatched mugs sat along the windowsill like a graveyard of abandoned thoughts, each one holding tea at a different stage of evaporation and mold.

In the center of the chaos, the academy cat, a fat, indifferent creature, was sprawled across the desk directly atop what appeared to be a very important international treaty. The cat didn’t even blink as the three of them entered.

Albert tried to shoo it with a polite gesture. When that failed, he tried a firmer one.

Finally, with a sigh that seemed to age him another decade, he gave up and slid the treaty out from under the feline with the exaggerated caution of a man defusing a landmine.

The old man moved to the kitchenette with surprising purpose. When he returned, he carried three mugs of tea so dark they looked like liquid obsidian.

The steam rising from them carried a bitter, medicinal tang; he had brewed it black enough to dissolve a silver spoon.

Without another word, Albert knelt before the lowest drawer of his filing cabinet. He grunted with the effort, his joints popping audibly in the silence, and pulled out a thin paper folder tied with a faded, frayed ribbon.

He carried it to the desk and set it down in front of William with an almost fearful delicacy, as though the papers themselves might detonate.

"Ellie’s admission record," Albert said, his voice hollow. "I read it many years ago, shortly after she arrived."

"At the time, I told myself it was not my business..."

"I told myself that an orphan’s past was irrelevant to her potential." His eyes met William’s, and they were full of a terrible, belated clarity. "I was wrong."

William’s fingers felt numb as he untied the ribbon. The paper crinkled beneath his touch.

As he began to read, a cold numbness spread from his chest to his fingertips. The emptiness of the records was more terrifying than if they had been filled with secrets.

There was no mention of parents. No names for a mother or a father. No lineage, no family history, no bloodline.

There was no village, no town, no region of origin to ground her in the world. Even her date of birth was a fiction, a mere estimate scribbled in faded pencil with a note beside it that read, "approx."

"She turned up at the royal orphanage when she was about five years old," Albert said, his gaze fixed on the steaming black tea. "A man brought her..."

"He didn’t look like a beggar or a traveler... He looked like... someone who belonged everywhere and nowhere at once."

"What did he say?" William asked, his voice barely a whisper.

"He claimed to be a temporary guardian... A distant relative who couldn’t take her in due to... complications." Albert’s jaw tightened. "He paid her upkeep for six years in advance."

"A lump sum so massive, so staggering, that the matron still speaks of it as if it were a fairy tale... Enough money to buy a small estate."

"And then?" Catherine pressed, her voice sharp with restrained fury.

"Then he vanished... Poof. Like smoke in a gale... No trail, no name, no trace."

William stared at the empty lines on the page.

The guardian.

The benefactor.

The architect.

"And the academy?"

"A few years later, an anonymous benefactor wrote to us," Albert continued, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand as if trying to scrub away the guilt. "The letter was precise... almost professional."

"It suggested that the girl possessed a remarkable, almost frightening talent for healing a rare magical affinity."

"The benefactor offered to fund her entire education, her housing, everything... All he asked in return was that her education proceed without interference."

"We were thrilled," Albert said, a self-loathing laugh escaping his lips. "A gifted orphan with unlimited resources."

"A donor who wished to remain in the shadows... Who would ask questions?"

"Who would dare question a gift that seemed too perfect to be true?"

"I didn’t even ask for a name... I didn’t even ask for a face."

He looked up at William, the shadows beneath his eyes deepening. "That is my fault, William."

"My scholarly arrogance, my desire to see talent flourish without the burden of bureaucracy... it allowed them to plant her."

"I helped them plant her."

A hot, molten anger surged through William’s chest, a sudden, violent expansion of heat that made his vision blur at the edges. It was a raw, instinctive reaction to the violation of everything he believed in.

But as the fury crested, he realized there was nowhere for it to land. He couldn’t strike at Albert; the old man wasn’t the architect of this nightmare, merely its unwitting caretaker.

The anger was aimed at something far more insidious: a conspiracy built piece by piece, brick by brick, while good people like Albert simply chose to look the other way.

It was the anger of realizing that the world wasn’t just cruel by accident; it was cruel by design.

"You couldn’t have known," William said, though his voice lacked conviction.

The words felt hollow, like throwing pebbles at a fortress.

"I could have suspected," Albert countered immediately.

The confession came out sharper than intended, cutting through the steam of the tea. "I saw the lack of records."

"I saw the suspicious timing of the funds."

"I saw the way the ’benefactor’s’ correspondence read like a contract rather than a letter." He stared down into his obsidian tea, his reflection distorted in the dark liquid. "And I chose not to look."

"I chose the comfort of ignorance because the truth would have required me to become something I wasn’t ready to be." He looked up, his eyes wet and ancient. "And now there is a young woman in the dormitory with glass wings tearing through her spine."

The room fell silent again, the weight of Ellie’s suffering pressing down on them like a physical shroud.

Catherine moved then. The usual steel in her posture softened as she pulled her chair closer to Albert.

She reached out and laid a steadying hand on his shoulder, a small, rare gesture of vulnerability that made William realize just how deeply shaken she truly was.

"Regret is a luxury we cannot afford tonight, Albert," she said, her voice quiet but carrying the authority of a commander. "Guilt will not stop whatever is happening inside Ellie’s body."

"What will help is that we finally have a direction... We know where to dig."

Albert nodded slowly, a jerky, mechanical movement. He stood up, his joints protesting with audible cracks, and moved toward the highest shelf of his towering filing system.

He reached for a specific box but stopped mid-motion. The cat, having apparently grown bored with the treaty, had migrated from the desk to the exact cardboard lid Albert needed.

The old man let out a sigh, a sound that seemed to come from somewhere impossibly deep, carrying the exhaustion of a century.

"Even the universe conspires against progress," he muttered.

He began the undignified, delicate negotiation of trying to lift a limp, utterly unwilling animal off a box without sending papers flying across the room.

William watched the spectacle for several seconds, using the distraction to steady his own breathing. His mind was already moving past the guilt, past the horror, toward the mechanics of retribution.

He needed actionable intelligence. He needed weapons.

"Albert," William asked, his voice cutting through the old man’s struggle with the cat. "Do you still have the original donation records?"

"The actual correspondence?"

Albert stopped mid-lift, one hand supporting the cat’s belly, the other gripping the shelf. He looked at William with a grim understanding.

"Only a summary. The full correspondence was... archived separately, under stricter protocols." He finally freed the box, depositing the cat onto a nearby cushion with an exaggerated display of dignity on both sides. "But the summary contains the crucial data."

"It lists the specific financial institution the bank the benefactor used to transfer those funds." He wiped his brow, leaving a smudge of ink there. "That should be enough for Olivia to begin pulling threads."

"If she can access the old merchant ledgers, she can trace the source."

William stood up, the chair scraping harshly against the floorboards. The time for mourning and questioning was over; the time for the hunt had begun.

The fire in his chest had crystallized into something cold, sharp, and deadly.

"Then that’s where we start," William said, his eyes fixed on the distant horizon of the conspiracy. "We find the money... We find the man."

"And then we burn it all down."