Chapter 381: The Bell and the Hunting Ground

The Chief Inspector strode forward, the ether parting automatically to make way for him.

The space around him began to shudder.

Fully unleashing his power, the Major Adept Hunter became a Bell sunken into the mortal world.

The bones of everyone present trembled. Teeth, shins, knuckles, and skulls all hummed at a maddeningly slow frequency.

Montagu bent over and clutched his knees, while Phillips chewed up the last two tea leaves in his mouth and swallowed them.

The Chief Inspector's gaze passed over Javier, locking dead onto the Serpent Mother's body. He was looking for the resonance point.

A High-Tier Evil Entity also had its own frequency. In fact, any structure did—bridges, towers, ships, humans, even spirits.

The vibration locked onto the Serpent Mother. Just as she tried to struggle upward, her body began to vibrate from within.

Richard watched the Serpent Mother's husk of a body shudder from the inside. Old Phillips had found the natural frequency of her corpse, forcing her to resonate from within.

The scales on the head Javier had cracked open began to tremble and shatter, piece by piece.

She opened her mouth to roar, but the sound was caught by the Bell's frequency, amplified, and reflected right back into her body.

The louder she roared, the heavier the hammer struck the Bell ringing inside her.

The harder she fought, the faster she would die. Every struggle was just another strike of that fatal Bell.

Realizing that making a sound meant death, the Serpent Mother clamped all her mouths shut.

All seven heads closed their maws at once, even holding their breath. The resonance frequency dropped.

The Chief Inspector's face was expressionless. Silently, he forced the frequency down an octave.

The Serpent Mother could stay silent, but her bones could not stop.

Her bones would ring on their own at that frequency, completely independent of her breathing. The cracks continued to spread.

Phillips stood far away from his father, both hands shoved into his overcoat pockets.

His face showed absolutely no emotion, a stark contrast to his usual lazily punchable demeanor.

For the first time, Richard saw an utterly cold, calculating stare in his eyes.

The Chief Inspector pushed the resonance frequency to its absolute limit, the tolling Bell crushing the Serpent Mother so hard she couldn't even lift her heads.

Unwilling to accept defeat, she simply began to exploit her home turf.

The inverted city answered her.

The figures walking along the upside-down streets—eighteenth-century fishermen, nuns in black-and-white robes, fur-clad Vikings—began falling from the dome in droves.

As they plummeted, the fishermen's oilskin coats split open down the back, scales tearing through the fabric.

The hems of the nuns' robes morphed into serpent tails, thrashing in midair.

The Vikings opened their mouths, their teeth sharpening one by one.

Their faces still held human outlines, but beneath the surface, they had already become serpents.

A dense horde of serpent-men rained down from the inverted ceiling, dropping directly between Old Phillips and the Serpent Mother.

A hand settled onto Richard's shoulder.

"My turn."

Gerard let go and stepped forward.

Richard had always known his grandfather was a Major Adept, but he had never seen him fight.

Yet he had also vaguely sensed that his grandfather's ether field was slowly declining, sinking lower with each passing year.

The moment Gerard exerted his power, the ether field surrounding him warped this space into a hunting ground.

The distance beneath Richard's feet scrambled.

One moment, he clearly saw the Serpent Mother just a few steps away, close enough to touch.

The next glance, her seven heads felt as though they were beyond the horizon, separated by hundreds of miles of wilderness.

Space was being stretched and compressed by the Moon Hunting Tradition's ether field.

Richard had read the relevant records in the Ashford House's study.

This was the method a Major Adept Hunter used to frame their prey within range, ensuring that no matter how the prey fled, they could never escape the marked distance.

A layer of cold, moonlight-like radiance spread from Gerard.

Sunlight was violent and dispelling; an evil creature had nowhere to hide within it.

Moonlight was cold and penetrating. An evil creature could stand perfectly still, and every layer of its disguise would still be pierced.

Wherever the cold radiance touched, the things there were marked.

To be marked meant this: you are in my hunting ground, you are my prey, and you cannot run.

The essence of the Moon Hunting Tradition was marking and purification. First, mark the prey into a damned shape, and then purify them, slash by slash.

Richard saw it clearly; this was damage calculation at the field level.

Anyone who failed to pass this calculation would suffer a slash from Gerard every single second.

In an instant, over half of the dense, falling sea of serpent-men was wiped out.

Everything in the karst cave was pinned to the ground by that moonlight, utterly immobilized. The Serpent Mother was pinned as well.

Realizing her sea-of-snakes tactic wouldn't work, the Serpent Mother simply began devouring the serpent-men she had transformed in massive gulps.

With every one she swallowed, her injuries visibly healed.

Richard watched the main head—split open by Javier and then cracked further by Old Phillips' resonance—regrow its scales, piece by piece.

Gerard drew his hunting knife. It was an extremely old Crescent Silver Blade, the leather strips wrapped around its hilt polished to a shine from use.

Richard recognized it. It was the same blade that hung on the back wall behind the main seat in the study, the one he glanced at every time he went in.

The Crescent Silver Blade flashed, slashing into the Serpent Mother's largest head.

All the sound and corruption built up inside that head receded like an ebbing tide beneath the strike, scattering into the moonlight.

Seven heads were instantly reduced to six.

The Serpent Mother let out an almost soundless wail. Her remaining six heads lunged at Gerard all at once.

Gerard stood in the dead center of his hunting ground, letting those six heads plunge into the deepest part of the cold radiance.

In that instant, all six heads were marked.

Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish!

His grandfather swung the blade so fast it didn't even leave a shadow. With a single spin, he carved out six streaks of cold light.

Richard couldn't even see how the blade moved. He only saw the six lunging heads split open simultaneously the moment Gerard turned.

Old Phillips seized the opening, driving the Bell's toll deeper into the natural frequency of those six heads.

The Colonel propped himself halfway up from the ground, igniting a blade of light that burned straight through the lower jaw of one head.

The three traditions meshed perfectly in this moment.

The Solar Tradition illuminated the true form, the tolling Bell resonated from within, and the Moon Hunting Tradition stripped and marked.

No matter how the Serpent Mother struggled, she was being burned, shattered, and flayed all at once.

If she retreated into the shadows, the sun exposed her.

If she tried to put distance between them, the hunting ground yanked her right back.

And every time she roared, she added another strike of the hammer to the tolling Bell.

Truthfully, Richard had always thought that the Hunter path was the most useless of the three.

They didn't have as many tricks as Secret practitioners, nor could they make the final, decisive call like Scholars. On the battlefield, they mostly just served as meat shields.

Perhaps they were just anti-human specialists, gods of civil war?

The battlefield he witnessed today changed his mind.

Just as he thought this, Gerard stumbled while slashing the second head.

Richard's heart leapt into his throat.

Fortunately, the Serpent Mother only had four heads left, and her body was riddled with holes from the resonance.

She knew she couldn't hold on much longer. The inverted Whitby began spilling out from inside her.

Before dying, she intended to dump all the voices she had held in her stomach for twelve hundred years out into the material realm.

The upside-down houses on the dome detached one after another, plummeting toward the rift that leaked the scent of the living.

That eleven-year-old boy was still running through the inverted streets.

The street beneath his feet was collapsing.

"Mom?" He pushed open another door, only for the wall behind it to crumble. "Mom, can we go home?"

"That's about enough, Corbin," Old Phillips ordered in a deep voice.

"This thing has been weakened enough for the Sleep-Return Ritual to take effect."

Hathaway had long since drawn seven arcs around the stone throne. Each arc corresponded to one of the Serpent Mother's mouths, which in turn corresponded to a door.

"It's time for our work."

Corbin distributed a stack of rubbings to Richard, Montagu, and Phillips. "Claim your respective doors."

Corbin himself chanted in Church Latin.

"Sanctimoniales, capilli vestri redditi sunt vobis."

(Nuns, your hair is returned to you.)

He returned the seven locks of hair Hathaway had untied, one by one.

Pale gray, dark gray, almost black.

With every lock returned, a figure in a black-and-white robe in the inverted city would stop and turn around.

"You have stood guard long enough." Corbin switched back to the plain Albion Language.

"Return to your own halls."

The figures of the nuns walked toward the inverted spire of Whitby Abbey, one by one.

The final shadow to step forward was very thin and small.

Wildflowers were embroidered along the edge of her robe. As she crossed the arc, she paused and looked down at her cuffs.

Then, she dissipated.

Montagu was in charge of the door of the plague.

"Lime."

The ether of the Solar Tradition spread out alongside his judgment, perfectly suited for the task.

During the years of the Whitby plague, the dead were thrown into lime pits, leaving not even a name behind.

Montagu's light shone into that door, slowly drying and smoothing out those nameless voices of the dead.

"You were not remembered, but today, someone is making a record for you."

Hathaway oversaw the ones for the drowned fishermen.

She hummed a tune—an old fishing shanty from the Whitby docks, where one person would lead and the whole ship would answer.

Hathaway had kept watch on this sea cliff for nearly twenty years; she knew the tune well.

"The sea gave, and the sea has taken."

She translated the shanty into spoken words, singing a line and then speaking a line.

"Tonight, we send you back to shore."

The fishermen mending their nets on the inverted docks lifted their heads, one after another.

The man who had yelled to turn the helm followed the song, walking toward the shore.

Phillips watched over the door of the Norman knights.

Borrowing the lingering resonance of his father's Bell, he caught the clanging frequency of the knights' armor, forcing it to slow down and sink.

"Those who have fought their whole lives should rest."

When it was Richard's turn, he spread out the Condensing Mirror technique.

As the surface of the Still Water reflected into the door, he heard the sounds of the Viking warriors—war cries, the splashing of oars, and the muffled thuds of waves crashing against ship hulls.

They had died at the bottom of a sea cliff a thousand miles from home, and they hadn't been back in twelve hundred years.

In that instant, Richard figured out how his judgment should be read.

He had understood it since that night in the Black Trench. The power of a judgment never lay in how ancient the language was or how deep the encryption went—it only mattered if the dead recognized it.

Vikings recognized runes, they recognized Old Norse, and they recognized Valhalla.

But just having those wasn't enough. What these warriors who died at sea wanted was the exact same thing the hundreds of thousands of living people wanted on Christmas Eve—to go home.

Corbin helped him focus it first.

"Heyrithér, daudirí djúpinu."

(Listen, departed of the river of death.)

His Old Norse carried a distinct academic accent.

Fehu—livestock and wealth.

Raidō—journey and return.

Hagalaz—hail and destruction.

The three Rune Glyphs floated up one after another, forming a line in midair.

Richard called up the runes from his Erudition, tracing them stroke by stroke in his mind.

Othala—homeland.

"Heiman fórtu." (You set out from home.)

The fur-clad figures in the inverted wooden palisade stopped.

"Heim skaltu fara." (It is time for you to go home.)

Richard reflected a second rune.

Laguz—water.

They came from the sea, so they had to return by the sea.

"Hafit barthik hingat." (The sea brought you here.)

"Hafit berrthik heim." (The sea will carry you home.)

As the Viking warriors departed, the rusted axes at their waists fell to the ground one by one, crumbling into rust.

They didn't need axes anymore. People going home don't carry weapons.

The hardest ones were the dead from the seventeenth century to modern times—fishermen, dockworkers, jet carvers, and boatmen.

These people hadn't been dead for long. Some for less than a century, others separated by only a single generation.

Their judgments needed to be read in the local Albion Language dialect, and Corbin was stuck on this level.

His academic accent had worked on the earlier ones, but it was useless here.

"Let me." Hathaway stood up.

She walked to the very front of the arc and spoke in a thick Whitby accent.

"Aal reet, lads."

(Alright, lads.)

"Time t' gan yam."

(Time to go home.)

The figures of the fishermen in their oilskin coats looked at one another.

One man threw aside the broken net pole in his hand, a pole that had never caught a single fish.

He walked up to the arc and gave Hathaway a nod.

Then he turned around and bellowed at the group of hesitant companions behind him.

Richard only understood the first half of the dialect in that shout.

The general meaning was "What are you dawdling for, let's go," followed by curses that only local Whitby fishermen could understand.

One by one, they walked through.