Chapter 214: Mistbell

The traded items were largely packed away, but Richard still had two questions.

He folded his hands on the edge of the table.

"Does anyone have a reliable channel for Multi-Eyed Black Moss and Silent Fern?"

Prometheus answered first.

"Multi-Eyed Black Moss can be harvested right in the nearshore transition zones."

The voice beneath the red-gold mask was unhurried.

"There is a 'Natural Specimen Dispatch Station' north of Manchester, affiliated with the Royal Botanical Society.

Nominally, it supplies specimens to naturalists, but laymen can buy from them too. You just have to register."

"They classify Multi-Eyed Black Moss under 'Bryophyta: Anomaly Group.' The price isn't too steep."

Richard committed the detail to memory.

"And the Silent Fern?"

Prometheus did not immediately provide a source.

He tilted his mask toward the head of the table, confirming Hecate had no intention of interjecting before he turned back.

"For that ingredient, I'll give you direct advice... do not try to find it anytime soon."

Richard waited.

"Silent Fern touches the edges of the deep realm."

"The few aboveground avenues that sell it are backed by different networks, each with their own agendas.

There are legitimate guilds, gray-market middlemen, and... those from an even lower layer."

"Cultists use Silent Fern the most aggressively.

Sealing the living, rewriting true names, performing rituals that transfer the price onto others—none of these can be done without it."

Richard frowned.

Transferring the price onto others.

That phrase perfectly matched a deduction he had been turning over lately, one he had never dared commit to paper.

"A lone person running through underground channels asking about Silent Fern..."

Prometheus trailed off.

Asking for it would likely draw the attention of one of those networks. What would happen next was something everyone at the table understood perfectly.

"Understood." Richard swallowed back his prepared follow-up questions.

Nemesis took over the topic.

"If you must use Silent Fern, you can find a substitute."

"A substitute?"

"In the Moon Hunting Tradition, there is an herb called Mistbell."

"Mistbell grows along the edges of old battlefields in the highlands. Its properties are similar to Silent Fern, and it can hold its own in most sealing and barrier-type Spell Formulas for a time."

"Silent Fern isolates the target and renders them deaf.

Mistbell simply swallows the sound."

Nemesis kept her explanation brief.

"The two methods lead to the same result. It works well enough as a replacement, though the sealing effect will be slightly weaker."

She added the most crucial point.

"The herb isn't cheap, but it isn't as rare as Silent Fern either, so there is plenty circulating in the civilian market."

Richard thanked her earnestly.

The original Silence Spell required Multi-Eyed Black Moss paired with Silent Fern.

He now had a legitimate source for the Multi-Eyed Black Moss, and he could use Mistbell as a substitute for the fern.

The effect would be diminished, but that was better than handing his name over to those underground networks.

"I have one last question."

He glanced around the table.

"Can any of you introduce me to a legitimate channel for supernatural items?"

Ares spread his remaining right hand, a short breath leaking from beneath his red copper mask as a laugh.

"Supernatural items... Hermes, you are asking the wrong people."

"How so?"

"Genuine supernatural items are hard currency. The moment they hit the market, they are snatched up."

He hefted his purse of Sovereigns, the gold coins clinking dully inside.

"For people like us, there is only one reliable way to acquire supernatural items.

We go on field missions and swipe them from evil creature nests, altars, or dead colleagues."

He lifted his empty left shoulder.

"And you can see the price."

Prometheus offered a more general route.

"Aside from fieldwork, your only option is to fight over them at the major markets.

The Imperial Capital occasionally hosts internal auctions run by a few established auction houses.

You need connections to get in, and once you do, you must burn real silver and gold. The starting price for a mid-tier supernatural item is easily in the three digits."

Unwilling to give up, Richard asked, "Are there no chances to pick up something overlooked?"

Prometheus nodded.

"Chances to pick up an overlooked piece... exist, but they are extremely rare.

It usually happens when an item is misidentified as an ordinary antique and falls into the hands of someone who does not know its worth. You will only hear of that a few times a year."

Richard nodded silently.

This information largely matched what he had figured out on his own over the past half year.

He thought back to the very beginning, at Donner's antique shop on Flower Moon Street, where he had bought the copper coin and the incense burner for ten pounds.

If not for the letter of introduction from his grandfather Gerard, he would not have even gotten through the door to Donner's back room.

Ultimately, acquiring supernatural items relied on background, luck, or seeking wealth amidst danger.

"Thank you all for the guidance." He wrapped up his questions, not lingering on the subject.

At the head of the table, Hecate finally moved.

Beneath the mask of the Triple Goddess, those two sets of overlapping eyes fixed upon the fully divided spoils in the center of the table.

"The trading concludes here."

Three voices overlapped into one; listening to it for too long sent a chill down the spine.

"Next, we share intelligence according to the old rules."

Ares did not wait for anyone else to speak, pressing his lone right hand flat onto the table.

"Then I will share my experiences from this trip as a warning to you all."

He had gone to the Ash Belt and lost an arm, but the intelligence he brought back was just as substantial.

"The publicly available files vaguely categorize the threat of the Ash Belt as a 'high-risk evil creature cluster.'

But from what I saw on the ground, things have already begun to quietly change.

Those evil creatures are becoming increasingly organized."

Hecate's knuckles paused against her armrest.

"They have a hierarchy and a command structure. They have units solely responsible for defense and units solely responsible for pursuit, divided with absolute clarity."

Ares shifted his empty left shoulder.

"What still chills my spine is... they have a complete set of countermeasures against our conventional Spell Formulas.

It worked when I cut down the first one with my enchanted blade. But by the second and third, they were slowly figuring out the rhythm of my strikes.

It wasn't until later that I realized the first one was just sent to test my moves."

His voice grew heavy again.

"My two brothers... were ambushed and killed by a detachment.

They sent out a few weak ones first to drain our ether and Enchanted Bullets. Once we ran empty, the real squad flanked us."

No one spoke.

Even Hecate showed a hint of surprise.

"According to my files, the Ash Belt is just a relatively large high-concentration ether zone."

"The concentration is high," she said, "so the density of evil creatures is greater and they hatch faster. That was supposed to be the extent of it."

"If there truly is an organized, intelligent presence out there..."

Within her threefold voice, the crone's timbre turned grim.

"Then our understanding of that region has a massive blind spot."

Prometheus brought up his own intelligence.

"Over the past year, three colonies on the New Continent have seen their populations drop off a cliff under non-war, non-plague circumstances.

All three are situated on the edge of the interior, the kind of small towns established only a few years ago.

The official reports chalk it up to population outflow, claiming the residents migrated to coastal cities to survive."

"According to the internal data I accessed... they vanished. The people simply disappeared.

The houses remain, the furniture is perfectly arranged, and clothes are neatly folded in trunks.

The pots on the stoves still hold half-eaten, moldering stew."

"The people are just gone."

Richard thought of the news articles he had seen on the periodical stand in the library.

The lost expeditionary force, the captain of the Gloucester dropping dead in a hotel, the Admiralty repeatedly delaying the recruitment of a relief team.

Viewed alone, each was an ordinary piece of bad news, but strung together, they formed a net slowly drawing shut.

Nemesis shared a related piece of intelligence.

"In the northern part of the Gaelic Highlands, guild internal statistics show the number of roaming evil creatures has increased by about thirty percent over the past half year."

"Roaming?" Ares asked.

"They aren't exhibiting normal territorial behavior," Nemesis replied.

"Normal lower-tier evil creatures guard a single weak point and do not abandon their nests easily.

This batch is different. They have no fixed habitat, and they are heading steadily south."

"It is as if something further north is driving them down."

"Once driven down, they didn't naturally disperse. They followed the old belt of weak points, moving south section by section.

Moving toward the Industrial Belt."

Prometheus narrowed his eyes.

"The weak points in the southern Industrial Belt are expanding, and the northern entities are being driven down to fill them."

The red-gold mask slowly tilted toward Nemesis.

"These two matters... connect."

It was Richard's turn.

He could not speak about the Western Suburbs Mining Area.

But among the deductions he had compiled all winter, one piece avoided the Unresponsive Pit entirely while perfectly linking to the accounts just shared.

"I have a deduction," he began.

"The industrial cities themselves might be reshaping the weak points in the veil."

Everyone at the table turned to look at him.

"Traditional weak points—forests, rivers, mountain peaks, isolated islands, ancient sacrificial grounds—were naturally formed, steeped in hundreds and thousands of years of death and rituals."

Richard traced a perimeter on the table.

"But over the last century, new sites have sprung up."

"Massive factory chimneys pump smog into the sky from dawn until dusk.

There are dense industrial accident zones where workers die in droves—collapsed mineshafts, burning textile mills, workshops with exploded boilers.

There are vast, interconnected sewer systems beneath the cities, and abandoned, unfilled tunnels in the mining districts."

With each example he listed, the others pictured it clearly.

"All of these places accumulate death, fear, and ether pollution at an unprecedented speed."

"If my deduction holds up, future sealing work must be updated.

Our current maintenance manuals are written entirely for natural weak points.

How to seal a forest, how to seal a river, how to seal a mountain peak—not a single page teaches you how to seal an operational factory."

At the head seat, Hecate fell silent for quite some time.

"Hermes, you have hit the mark."

She raised her hand and gently tapped the armrest.

"The times are changing. Surface factories, mineshafts, railways, and steamships... they pile up in the human world year after year.

The shape of death is changing, the shape of fear is changing, and the way people gather is changing as well."

"The 'thin places' on this side of the veil are, at their core, shadows fermented by humanity."

The crone portion of her face slowly darkened.

"As humanity changes, the shadows naturally change with it."

"Decades ago, scholars already proposed similar arguments in internal publications.

...But most of those articles were suppressed and never made it into mainstream academia."

"The reason is simple. Following this logic to its conclusion, the entire sealing system built upon the foundation of natural weak points would have to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up."

"The cost is too great. No faction is willing to take the initiative and bring it to light."

The mask of the Triple Goddess slowly turned, sweeping past everyone at the table.

"Yet everyone seated here today has noticed the anomalies in their own surroundings."

Through Hecate's words, the four isolated accounts merged into a single thread.

From the Ash Belt to the New Continent, from the Gaelic Highlands to the Empire's domestic Industrial Belt.

They spanned nearly every layer of the world the attendees could reach.

Hecate folded her hands on the table.

"I will share one last piece of information, so you know what to expect."

"...The Old Continent is going to war."

At those words, everyone's expression changed.

War. This would upend the very sky hanging over countless lives in the Surface World.