Chapter 318: Black Sun

The golden light arrived.

From the far end of the breakwater, the light swept over every docked ship.

The beam was not as broad as sunlight. It was a comb, sweeping through the ships one by one.

The golden light swept over the fast Greek merchant ship.

It combed the hull. No anomalies.

It combed the deck. No anomalies.

It combed over the substitute sailor.

The golden light stopped.

It paused for about two seconds.

In those two seconds, Richard felt a massive power rake over the substitute twice.

The golden light was reading.

Reading for any traces from beyond the veil.

The substitute himself was an ordinary person with no ether circuit.

But the wisp of shadow severed from the Black Soil River Virtuoso was wedged between this ordinary man's "shell" and "form."

The golden light had not detected this ether film on its first pass.

Extremely thin and nearly transparent, it was hidden in the gap between shell and form.

On the second pass, the golden light read much deeper.

It read not just the "person," but the "shadow."

The light of the Solar Tradition was a natural enemy to shadows.

Even if it failed to illuminate a flaw in the person, it could illuminate a flaw in the shadow.

A wisp of shadow that did not belong to the sailor was dragged out of the gap by the golden light.

Two hundred yards away, a jolt of alarm shot through Richard.

Damn it. Exposed!

But only the one on the Greek ship had been found.

Richard's first instinct was to sever the connection and discard the shadow, sacrificing a pawn to save the king.

He never got the chance.

The golden light abruptly flared.

It did not just illuminate the Greek ship; the golden light hit maximum intensity across the entire Harbor at once.

With a blinding flash, it was as if a hundred thousand flares had detonated across the Harbor district all at once.

From the breakwater to the docks, and from the docks to every vessel in the inner Harbor, the golden light washed over everything like a torrential downpour.

In that instant, the remaining two substitutes were flushed out.

All three were exposed simultaneously.

The two Virtuosos had been waiting for this from the very beginning.

The golden light had been intentionally suppressing its intensity.

The first sweep was deliberately shallow. They were fishing.

They sent a shallow sweep just to see which ships reacted.

The moment the shallow light touched the substitutes, that layer of shadow film instinctively contracted.

The contraction was minuscule, but it was enough.

The Solar Tradition Virtuoso had marked the locations of the fluctuations at that exact moment.

Then, once the full inspection was complete, they exposed all the marked locations together.

Simultaneously, a dark red furnace fire bore down from within the city.

Waves of heat spread along the docks and crashed over the three ships.

The shadows inside the substitutes were pierced by the golden light and incinerated by the flames.

The backlash of the shadows turning to ash traveled down those three silken threads straight into the mummy vessel.

Richard felt a violent shudder at the back of his neck.

Although the three wisps of shadow were small, the destruction of each one felt like a bite taken out of him.

One bite was not fatal, but too many would hollow him out.

Out at sea, aboard the Black Soil River merchant ship, the mummy vessel was naturally exposed as well.

The moment the golden light illuminated the shadows, it also severed the three connecting threads.

When the threads snapped, they produced an extremely faint recoil.

The recoil pointed directly toward the open sea.

The golden light shot out from the far end of the breakwater, sweeping over every merchant ship waiting to enter the Harbor...

It swept over the Black Soil River merchant ship flying the vulture flag.

"Iw-i rekh ren-ek."

(I know your name.)

The voice cascaded from the horizon, bearing the judgment of the Solar Tradition.

The golden light pierced straight through the ship.

Richard felt the linen wrapping his body turn translucent under the glare. The priest's inscriptions were read out word by word, as if examined under a magnifying glass.

His "form" was illuminated.

The furnace fire rushed in from the other side.

Dark red waves of heat surged directly beneath the hull.

The two forces converged on a single point.

The golden light and the furnace fire pinned the vessel between them, peeling it apart layer by layer.

Inside the shell, Richard came to a stark conclusion.

With the vessel exposed, his position on the open sea was completely locked down.

His trial mission had failed.

Richard was violently yanked backward, instantly shifting from active control to a spectator's perspective.

On the other end of the mummy's thread, the Virtuoso's true body awakened.

A profoundly deep region beyond the veil began collapsing steadily toward the ship.

The sea level dropped.

The merchant ships lined up to enter the Harbor on the periphery of the anchorage collectively sank lower into the water.

Dozing sailors were jolted awake; rubbing their eyes, they crawled onto the decks and began cursing.

The shadow cast on the sea by the Harbor's breakwater bled into the water like black ink.

Richard observed in silence.

From his spectator's perspective, he caught a glimpse of a corner spilling out from beyond the veil.

It was a colossus compressed from countless death knells and offerings.

Its image beyond the veil was an inverted pyramid, scoured repeatedly by sandstorms and moonlight.

The pyramid had no doors.

It opened itself from the inside.

First came a blurry, humanoid silhouette.

Broad-shouldered and thick-backed, it had no human head where a head should be—only a double-plumed crown.

It was a pharaoh's crown, narrow in the front and wide in the back, flanked by upward-curving plumes.

The face beneath the crown coalesced no features; inside hollow sockets sat pupil-less eyes.

At that exact moment, from the end of the breakwater all the way to the top of the Harbor lighthouse, every surface capable of reflecting the sun lit up in unison.

The Solar Tradition had condensed daylight's authority of judgment into a mirror.

Sunlight refracted off the mirror's surface and smashed into the shadowy colossus.

The entire world lit up.

The sailors in the anchorage could see nothing... White, pure white—even the outlines of the ships and the sea vanished in a blinding glare.

Men stumbled on the decks, while others clung to the masts and howled.

On the closest merchant ships, timber splintered and exploded under the white light.

The first mate of an armed merchantman gripped the helm, muttering prayers.

The white light receded.

The shadowy colossus remained.

Only its surface layer had been burned away by the light.

Those pupil-less eyes slowly shifted within their hollow sockets.

The furnace fire followed immediately.

The seawater began to bubble.

Subterranean furnace fires superheated the seabed. The heat seeped upward, boiling the seawater into a thick fog.

Richard's consciousness was thrown high into his spectator's vantage point.

Only then did he clearly see the full scale of the battlefield.

To his surprise, the Harbor district suffered almost no substantial damage.

The golden light and the furnace fire looked overwhelmingly destructive, yet their area of effect was strictly confined to this patch of open sea just outside the Harbor.

The two defending Virtuosos had confined the battlefield strictly to the Harbor from the very beginning.

Aside from the customs officials, there was not a single pedestrian on the docks.

Richard could feel something shrouding the sky above the Harbor district.

The layer was extremely thin, covering the entire district like an inverted bowl.

This was likely a pre-arranged shielding spell formula.

The two defending Virtuosos had known all along that a massive fight was highly probable tonight.

Richard's Inspiration swept across the urban areas on both sides of the Harbor, spotting people moving around several warehouses in the dock's unloading zone.

Their movements were extremely covert, restricted entirely to blind spots and dark alleys.

However, from Richard's high spectator vantage, the trajectories of these shadowy figures were obvious at a glance.

They were scattered across different posts in the Harbor district.

A customs clerk, a warehouse watchman, a barge sailor, and a night watchman patrolling with a lantern.

On ordinary days, they did their own jobs, none of them knowing the others.

As these hidden moles emerged, the furnace fire Virtuoso's dark red heat wave incinerated them in passing.

But it was a step too late; the moles had already chanted their incantations, fueling the Black Soil River Virtuoso's power.

In the fog, the now much more corporeal shadowy colossus began advancing toward the Harbor.

With every step forward, the shadows of the nearby Harbor buildings prostrated toward it.

On the other side, the veil was ripped open, similarly revealing two colossi far beyond human scale.

The golden one was a burning sun.

It had no face. It simply hung there, judging all shadows with its radiance.

The red one was a furnace without walls.

Inside its hearth melted iron, copper, and tin, alongside countless lives that had been cast into the flames.

Lives were melted into alloys within the furnace, the alloys forged into weapons, and the weapons returned to the furnace to be recast.

The golden rift in the sky grew wider.

The boundaries of day and night were drawn anew.

Amidst this judgment, the Black Soil River Virtuoso spread itself wide open.

The massive silhouette split down the middle, becoming a book cracked open by its spine.

Once opened, its pages were revealed to be densely packed with names.

Departed souls were summoned from beyond the veil, flooding into the material realm.

The furnace fire Virtuoso responded.

The chimneys in the Harbor district uniformly belched fire. The flames converged into a river, making the shepherds on the distant mountains think the Harbor had been set ablaze.

The river of fire smashed onto the shadowy colossus's spread "pages."

For every name burned away, the shadowy colossus shrank a fraction.

The Sun Virtuoso pressed down from above, and the furnace fire Virtuoso burned from the flank.

The two defenders joined forces in a strangling assault.

The Black Soil River Virtuoso finally opened its mouth to declare:

"Sheut-i her wedj!"

(My shadow blankets the earth!)

The moment the phrase was spoken, the sea turned as smooth as a mirror.

The stars in the firmament were reflected perfectly on the mirrored surface, matching the stars in the sky one for one.

The two layers of starry sky, above and below, completely sealed off this stretch of sea.

The ships and seawater sealed within, the powers the Virtuosos projected into the material realm... everything was trapped between the two layers of stars.

This was the true manifestation of the Black Soil River Virtuoso's mystery.

Name, Mirror, Substitute.

Mirror: turning the sky and sea into each other's reflection;

Name: reading the opponent's origins;

Substitute: swapping the opponent's position with... its own.

Richard's Inspiration reached its absolute limit at that moment.

He vaguely sensed that the entity was attempting something utterly insane.

It was trying to drag the Sun Virtuoso down from the sky and stuff it into the seabed's mirror image.

While simultaneously flipping itself from the sea's reflection into the sky.

Above and below, swapped.

Light sinking to the bottom of the sea; shadow flipping to the sky.

If successful, a sun replaced by shadow would hang over the Imperial Capital.