Chapter 205: External Interface

His dorm room was a small cubicle.

A camp bed, a small desk, and a gas wall lamp.

Richard dropped his satchel at the head of the bed, took off his coat, and hung it over the back of the chair.

He went to the bed, intending to lie down and catch his breath.

But the moment he lay down, he felt wide awake.

He closed his eyes, only for fragments of the day to crowd his mind.

The crushed grain of salt beneath his tongue, the serene smile on the Chief Responder's face, and the pool of blood Mrs. MacNeil had drawn.

He lay there for a moment before sighing and putting his coat back on.

Sometimes, the more exhausted the body, the harder it was to sleep.

Richard pushed his door open and headed down the stairs.

Reaching the first-floor lobby, he spotted Old Biggs walking from the far end of the hall toward the underground passage.

"Old Biggs."

Startled by the sudden call from behind, Old Biggs's shoulders jumped.

He relaxed only when he turned and saw Richard.

"Brat, you're still awake?"

"I can't sleep."

"How can you not? With the amount of energy you burned today..."

"I'd like to," Richard said with a wry smile, "but my brain won't stop."

Old Biggs looked him up and down and clicked his tongue.

"I've been there. The longer you lie awake, the more wired you get."

"Normally, I'd stay and chat with you, but I've got things to do tonight."

He jerked his chin toward the underground passage.

"Senior Sister and I are going to process the Chief Responder's corpse.

If you can't sleep, why not go read a book in bed? Handling corpses isn't exactly..."

"I want to watch."

Old Biggs's lips twitched, swallowing the rest of his warning.

"...You aren't scared?"

"I saw plenty during the day," Richard said, feigning innocence. "Night won't make much difference."

Old Biggs chuckled and clapped him on the back.

"Fine. I could use the company anyway. You can tag along, but on one condition..."

He held up a finger.

"Whatever Senior Sister says, you do.

If she says don't look, close your eyes. If she says don't ask, shut your mouth. It's an industry rule, and it keeps you alive."

"Understood."

The two of them descended the underground passage to the lowest level.

Stopping before the heavy wooden door of the autopsy room, Old Biggs knocked three times.

"Senior Sister, I brought young Richard."

Mrs. MacNeil's voice drifted from inside.

"...He wanted to come?"

"Yeah, he couldn't sleep."

Silence lingered for a few seconds behind the door.

"Come in, then. It'll broaden his horizons."

As Richard pushed the door open, Old Biggs went to change into his autopsy gown.

"Change into one too, Richard," Mrs. MacNeil's ghostly voice called out. "There's one hanging on the hook behind the door."

Richard did as told, glancing around the room as he dressed.

The Chief Responder's corpse lay on the table, covered from head to toe in a gray cloth dusted with salt.

Mrs. MacNeil stood in the far corner, laying out her array of tools.

To her left rested a shallow Copper Dish holding a finger's depth of "revealing fluid," with fine silver powder suspended within it.

"Come here once you're dressed." She didn't look up.

"Stand behind Bigelow to his right. Half a step from the table."

Richard walked over.

Pulling on his gloves, Old Biggs drew back the gray cloth.

There was no nauseating stench of decay. After all, the human parts of the Chief Responder had been almost completely hollowed out.

Even so, looking at it up close made Richard's breath hitch.

Wentworth's blade had pierced from his back straight through his chest, cleaving the sternum wide open.

Inside the exposed cavity, absolutely nothing was right.

"First step," Mrs. MacNeil directed. "Remove everything he was carrying."

Wielding a pair of long forceps, Old Biggs extracted items one by one from the corpse's pockets, belt, and inner linings.

Eventually, three items lay on the workbench.

The black medium, two small steel tubes, and a piece of paper folded down to the size of a palm.

The two steel tubes were the most conspicuous; both ends had been machined.

One end bore a screw cap, while the other tapered into an incredibly narrow slit, designed to let something be "spit" out of it.

Beside the tubes lay the fragment of black medium that had been clutched in the Chief Responder's right hand, woven from some unknown material.

It was neither cloth, nor hair, nor the fur of any animal.

It rested quietly in the enamel tray. When the wall lamp's light struck it, the surface yielded zero reflection.

After looking at the fragment once, Richard instinctively resisted looking at it a second time.

Mrs. MacNeil unscrewed the cap of a steel tube.

Packed inside was a compressed, dark gray herbaceous material with the texture of wind-dried moss.

The medium pinched a small tuft with her forceps and dropped it into the Copper Dish of revealing fluid.

A faint mist slowly rose from the water's surface.

"Multi-Eyed Black Moss. A product of the nearshore transition zone."

She pinched out another tuft, this one a dull green.

"I recognize that one," Richard volunteered. "Products Behind the Veil mentions it. Silent Fern."

"Correct," the medium nodded. "Silent Fern grows deeper in. It's near the edge of the deep frontier."

She set the forceps down.

"Our prior guess was right. The Echo Society has a stable harvesting channel into the deep frontier."

She set the forceps down again, her brow knitting tighter than before.

"...This is much more troublesome than we initially estimated."

"How so?" Old Biggs leaned in.

"The name Echo Society..." Mrs. MacNeil directed this at Richard. "The files the Northern Branch Office holds on them barely make up a thin stack.

"Franc, Germania, Sami, the Rus Empire... Over the years, cases involving them have cropped up across the major nations of the Western Continent. The intelligence was shared from over there.

The dossiers contain fragments of their doctrine and post-incident analyses of a few attacks. That's it.

As for live specimens, the entire Western Continent combined hasn't captured more than a handful over the years."

"The higher-ups previously judged their presence within the Empire to be minimal: at most, a few insignificant liaison points at coastal ports facing the Western Continent. Not even a true branch."

She pointed at the two herbs.

"Being able to stably harvest Silent Fern from the edge of the deep frontier means they've set up a complete supply line right here within the Empire.

You don't support an operation of that scale with a handful of port liaisons."

"Our previous assessment was entirely wrong."

"They've been lying dormant in the Empire for God knows how many years, waiting until tonight to pull off something this massive."

"Bring that paper over here," Mrs. MacNeil signaled to Old Biggs.

The palm-sized paper had been retrieved from the innermost lining of the man's clothes. Blood had soaked through more than half of it.

"That's a lot of blood." Old Biggs leaned in and gave it a sniff. "And not just his own."

"It's mixed with someone else's," the medium confirmed. "The Western Continent dossiers mentioned that the Echo Society uses their own people's blood as ink.

In the past, it was just a line in a report. Tonight is the first time we're seeing the real thing."

She gently unfolded the blood-soaked paper.

Richard recognized it at a glance: it was a map of Briston's municipal canal system.

But the map's original lines were almost entirely obscured by blood. Only at the edges, where the blood hadn't soaked through, could he faintly make out a few abbreviations written in miners' slang.

Of those abbreviations, Richard recognized two without even having to think.

"Seventh Alley" and "Blind Shaft".

The medium carefully scanned the blood-soaked map.

"The blood is covering the main body. I'll have to use channeling to redraw the original map."

Fetching a small copper box from her leather case, she opened the lid to reveal several finely sharpened charcoal pencils.

The medium drew one out and dipped it into the revealing fluid in the Copper Dish.

She slowly set the pencil against a clean sheet of white paper.

Richard watched her work.

Without a single moment of hesitation, she was calling the original map hidden beneath the blood back from across the veil, inch by inch.

He could hear the incredibly faint murmurs trapped in the back of the medium's throat.

Old Biggs flashed him a hand gesture, meaning: Don't look, don't listen, don't memorize.

Richard averted his gaze, turning around to face the corpse.

The only sound left in the autopsy room was the soft rustle of the medium's pencil gliding across paper.

Soon, the complete map manifested on the white page.

Above each point, the medium had written the corresponding codename in minuscule letters.

Seventh Alley, Blind Shaft, Blackstone Mine Pit.

The three minor blood-soaked locations mentioned in the Underground Taboo Songs were all there.

Richard counted them down: thirteen points in total. Scattered along Briston's municipal canal system, they connected into a web that, while sparse, covered a massive area.

"They've established nodes across the entire city."

"Mhm." Mrs. MacNeil set the pencil down.

"The Western Suburbs were just a window. What they're truly doing is on this map."

"Half the intel shared in those dossiers doesn't match what we're seeing tonight."

Old Biggs leaned closer.

As he scanned the thirteen points, his expression steadily darkened.

"Senior Sister, two of the points on here... fall under my jurisdiction."

"Which two?"

"North District Second Parish over there," he pointed. "And the Northern Section of the North District Canal."

"From last year to this year, the number of corpses registered from those two areas was noticeably higher than in previous years."

He took off his hat and rubbed the back of his neck with the back of his hand.

"The death registry I signed this winter was thicker than any winter I can remember."

"The corpse count in the North District crawls up every year. At first, I assumed it was the smog, the bitter cold, the poor just not surviving..."

Old Biggs waved his hand, dismissing the thought.

"I'll dig up the registries from the past few years and sort through them."

Richard held it in for a moment before probing hesitantly.

"Sorting through all of that... by yourself. Will you be okay?"

Old Biggs laughed heartily.

He fished out the Copper Penny he usually used for magic tricks and rolled it across his knuckles.

"What could possibly happen to a coroner?"

"I'm the safest man in Briston. Dead men don't bite."

The coin flipped over his fingertips.

"I've been in this line of work for years. The clients I've opened up number at least eight thousand, if not ten, and every last one of them lies nice and quiet on my table.

If this job were truly dangerous, Teacher never would've dumped me here to be a coroner all those years ago."

He pocketed the coin, shifting his tone.

"Besides, if I do end up on this table one day, I won't have to worry much."

"No need to worry?"

"Senior Sister will have to collect my body, won't she?"

Old Biggs glanced in Mrs. MacNeil's direction.

"She channels spirits. I'm sure she'll be able to ask who did me in."

"Bigelow." Mrs. MacNeil spoke up from the other side.

"One more word out of you, and I'll put you on this table right now."

Old Biggs immediately snapped his mouth shut.

Mrs. MacNeil looked up at Richard.

"According to the rules, absolutely none of these items can be taken outside."

Richard nodded in agreement; he hadn't expected to take anything with him anyway.

Old Biggs got back to work, pushing the enamel tray to the side.

"We'll deal with the things on his person later. Let's start the autopsy."

"Look here." Using the back of his scalpel, Old Biggs prodded a mass inside the corpse's chest cavity.

It was right where the heart should have been.

Yet there was only a suspicious, dark red lump of flesh, its surface riddled with dense, tiny holes.

"What about the lungs?" Richard forced down his nausea and kept observing.

Old Biggs shifted the scalpel's tip upward.

"The lungs are gone. Replaced with this."

Where the two lungs should have been, two incredibly thin, membrane-like sheets clung to the inner walls of the ribcage.

The membrane was translucent; under the light, countless black fibrous veins could be seen within.

Even now, those veins were still contracting and pulsing, despite the man having been dead for hours.

"They're still moving." Richard heard his own voice run dry.

"Yes," Mrs. MacNeil said from the side. "The connection from beyond the veil hasn't been entirely severed yet."

With a finer pair of forceps—their tips wrapped in silver wire—Old Biggs gripped the joint connecting the two membranes and pulled gently outward.

As the membrane separated from the inner ribcage, a wet, sickening tearing sound echoed.

Red fluid dripped down the forceps, blooming into a faint patch of mist.

"An external interface," Mrs. MacNeil said. "I suspected as much before, but today I finally get to see the real thing."

Old Biggs furrowed his brows.

"What the hell is an external interface?"

"It's mentioned in the literature. This is my first time seeing it with my own eyes too."

The medium explained. "A Practitioner's Micro-circulation is naturally a closed system. From the moment they form their Signature, that entire circuit belongs solely to them."

"An external interface means that someone from across the veil plugged a wire directly into this man's circuit."

"Plugged in to do what?"

"To input commands. Or... input power."

Mrs. MacNeil was clearly not entirely familiar with it either:

"The Chief Responder managed to unleash Minor Adept level Spell Formulas in the mine, but his actual Rank was probably just a Practitioner.

Every legitimate breakthrough to Minor Adept is officially registered. Tonight's man was nowhere on that roster."

"He was hijacked."

"Meaning?" Old Biggs asked.

"Exactly what it sounds like," the medium continued.

"The sliver of spirit bound to his signature artifact might not have belonged entirely to him from day one.

The Echo Society could control what he did in the mine, what he said, and what he didn't say.

Even the way he died was likely orchestrated."

"What about the registry?" Old Biggs asked. "Can't they just investigate everyone on it one by one?"

"The roster records Ranks, not allegiances." Mrs. MacNeil shook her head:

"There are at least hundreds of registered Minor Adepts across various paths within the Empire. You can't tell who's a sleeper agent for the Echo Society just by looking at a list.

Not to mention, this external interface system is specifically designed to bypass official rituals... The person who lent the Chief Responder all that power is probably completely off the books."

The autopsy room went quiet for a few seconds.

Richard suddenly remembered the Harmonizer they had captured alive yesterday—the one who could only answer, never initiate speech.

That guy hadn't been hollowed out. He had never been full to begin with.

"When he was alive, did he know he'd been altered like this?" Richard asked.

"Hard to say." The medium shook her head.

"Maybe he didn't know at first, and by the time he did, it was too late to change back.

Or maybe he willingly let them slice him open and alter him, piece by piece, right from the start."

"That's what the Echo Society does best. They make you believe that surrendering yourself is exactly what you want."

Old Biggs, meanwhile, tossed the extracted external interface into the cremator by the wall and shut the lid.

"These have to burn."

"It's a tag written by the other side of the veil. Keeping it is like holding onto a tracking beacon—wherever it goes, trouble follows."

The furnace activated with a low hum.

The pulsing of the two harvesting membranes finally ceased altogether.

Mrs. MacNeil walked to the other end of the corpse, retrieving several items from her leather case and laying them out.

"Alright. We've lost our live target for interrogating the Chief Responder, so I'll just squeeze what I can out of the corpse."

Confused, Richard asked, "He's dead. Can you actually interrogate him?"

"The man is dead and his flesh rots, but some things are carved into the ether layer. They don't decay."

The medium prepared for divination as she spoke.

"Especially a tool whose commands were 'written' into him.

The directives he executed leave 'ruts' in his circuit. The man is gone, but the tracks remain."

"All I need to do is run the tracks again."