Chapter 171 - 154: The One Who Stole the Young Man’s Shadow

Mrs. MacNeil began to arrange the final tasks:

"Tomorrow, we’ll go door to door and ask them to come stay in the village center for one night."

"Will they listen?" Theodore asked.

"Yes. The people around here have been accustomed to our ways for generations."

The evacuation did indeed go very smoothly.

The first house belonged to a shepherd who lived half a mile southeast of the mill. It was the same old shepherd Richard had met at the top of the slope on his first morning.

The old man was sitting by his hearth, and Mrs. MacNeil spoke a few words to him in the Gaelic Language.

After listening, the old man nodded. He fetched a woolen bag from his home, packed a pot, matches, and a few strips of dried meat inside, then shouldered it and left without asking a single question.

At the doorway, the old man turned and glanced back at Richard.

He touched his own chest with his free right hand, then drew a diagonal line in the air toward Richard’s chest.

Richard thought for a moment, then copied the gesture.

The old man smiled.

The second house, the third... The entire evacuation was completed in less than half a day.

After the evacuation, Mrs. MacNeil led the four Newcomers back to the inn.

The fireplace in the inn’s main hall was burning brightly. She took a small cloth pouch from a leather case.

Inside the pouch was a very old deck of Tarot Cards.

"Tonight," Mrs. MacNeil said, placing the pouch on the table, "I will perform a proper Divination for you before the Crossing Veil."

"How is a ’proper’ Divination different from what we’ve learned before?" Theodore asked.

"What you’ve learned before is Stone Reading or Wax Reading."

Mrs. MacNeil gestured to the Wax Sticks and the Talisman Stone Bag that were also in her tool kit:

"Those are only suitable for small questions, like ’Will it rain tomorrow?’ or ’Should I buy this item?’ They can give you a sense of direction."

"And Tarot?"

"Tarot is suited for asking about the outline of major events."

She untied the pouch’s drawstring.

"Specifically, before a major ritual like the upcoming one, the advantage of Tarot is that it can lay out all the potential ’nodes’ that may appear during the process."

"A complete Crossing Veil process passes through several key nodes.

Problems can arise at any node. It’s better to have a rough idea of how to respond beforehand than to be caught completely unprepared."

The pouch opened.

Seventy-eight cards were poured from the pouch, spreading across the tabletop.

The faces of the cards were in the style of hand-drawn prints, their colors faded with age.

"This deck was passed down to me by my teacher. She herself advanced to Grand Mastery and no longer needs external tools for Divination."

Mrs. MacNeil didn’t even need to look at the images on the cards; she knew which one she was holding just by the feel of it:

"She had already used it for twenty years when she passed it to me, and I’ve been using it for another eighteen years."

"...Thirty-eight years in total," Edmund said softly.

"Thirty-eight years. Each card has been turned over thousands of times."

She stacked the cards.

"With a tool like Tarot, the older it is, the more accurate it becomes.

The traces of Ether from every reading are carved into the cards themselves. The deeper the imprints, the more precise the resonance between the cards and me."

"Can’t other people use them?"

"Others can’t draw out what I can with them."

Mrs. MacNeil wore an enigmatic expression. "This is what the Secret Direction calls the ’union of person and instrument.’ An old master’s tools are not for lending."

The Spirit Medium placed her left hand over the deck and began to shuffle.

Her hand rested on the cards, unmoving, but the deck itself began to spread out in four directions before reassembling, one card at a time.

This was a "shuffle" on the Ether Layer.

Richard activated his Spiritual Vision and could see that each card was enveloped in a wisp of gray mist, a mist that wove itself into a web across the table.