Chapter 421: Walburg Night

Richard finished copying. The old professor slowly reached out and dragged a second stack from the bottom of the windowsill.

The motion kicked up a layer of dust, which settled right into his chipped teacup.

He took one look at it, picked it up, and drank anyway.

"Eleven books in this stack. There are three things hidden inside."

Richard looked up.

"What three things?"

"Find them yourself."

He asked tentatively, "Did you also hide the three items in the first stack?"

"Me?"

Mortimer closed his eyes. "I don't remember."

He said the line far too smoothly.

"Professor..."

"I'm an old man," Mortimer said, the picture of innocence.

"Those are the rules. Find one, and I'll deduct a stack from next week's quota."

"And if I find all three?"

"Find all three, and I'll treat you to tea."

Richard was speechless. That was as good as saying nothing at all.

"...And if I don't find them?"

"If you don't find them... that's even easier." Mortimer smiled genially. "I'll add two more stacks."

The first item was in the third book. It was a rolled-up piece of parchment; unrolled, it detailed the hunting seasons.

When Richard pulled it out, the old professor let out an "Oh" from his chair, sounding distinctly dissatisfied.

"Too slow!"

The second item took an entire afternoon.

Among the eleven books was an agricultural manual detailing crop rotation in several northern counties.

Halfway through copying it, a few pages stitched together with needle and thread tumbled out from the middle.

The pages contained nothing but a grid, with numbers filling each cell.

Richard almost tossed them aside, thinking they were just misfiled scrap paper.

"Professor, is this the second item?"

"Look for yourself. Don't ask me."

Richard held the pages up to the window.

The header column was blank, but he recognized the numbers in each cell.

Wind direction, lunar phases, and an extremely tiny column of specific times at the very end.

Mortimer snorted and picked up his teacup.

The third item took Richard two days to find.

He went through all eleven books, shaking them out one by one.

He tapped the spines and held the endpapers up to the light. Nothing.

He dug out the oldest book with the worst binding.

He spread out his Silent Observation, letting that layer of Still Water shine from the head of the book down to its base.

The final endpaper at the back of the book was a hair thicker than the rest.

That hairsbreadth of thickness came from two pieces of paper pasted together.

After dampening it with a wet cloth for half an hour, he used a small knife to carefully pry open the edges.

Hidden underneath was half a sheet of paper bearing a single line of runes:

"The hunt occurs more than three times, but people only remember three."

"Not bad. That's all three."

"How long ago did you paste this in?"

"I don't know."

Richard looked up.

"I pasted it in when I was young," the old professor said slowly.

"Back then, I didn't even know who would read it in the future."

He set his teacup down.

"Of course, I might have just pasted it in last week."

Before Richard left that day, Mortimer actually poured him a cup of tea. Afterward, the old man chuckled merrily.

"Having an old fossil like me pour you tea—even that book-stealing brat didn't get this kind of treatment back in the day!"

Richard naturally knew exactly who he was talking about.

Rounding up, didn't that make him even better than a Virtuoso?

Over the next two nights, Richard dragged out the burlap sack full of reader letters.

He focused mainly on the stack related to the black dog.

The accounts from the twelve nights of Yule, the three Ember Days, Halloween, and the final night of April were the most complete.

There were also scattered accounts: the eve of a massive storm, the week the estuary dam broke, and the third day after a certain coal mine collapsed.

Where the dead had just begun to pile up, the seams would loosen, and the procession would travel along those loosened seams.

If there were no omens like horns, crying geese, or hoofbeats, and only a dog appeared... this was actually the most common scenario.

Richard paused on this point the longest.

When a dog came alone, it had nothing to do with the Wild Hunt; it was simply a warning that you were about to suffer misfortune.

Major crossing, opportunistic hunt, herald of disaster.

All three scenarios were written down on the paper. Looking at what he had written, even he felt it was a bit absurd.

Items dropped from two stacks of sealed archives, combined with letters written by dozens of uneducated country folk, had managed to piece together this single chart.

But this chart was something the Imperial Capital University's archives didn't have.

........................

There were even more rubbings in that Trinity College office than last time.

The cleared space on the desk could barely fit a single teacup.

"Is it rune coursework again this time?"

Corbin held his magnifying glass, continuing to examine his stones.

"Pronunciation, usage, or origins?"

"Origins," Richard replied. He already knew about Corbin's quirk.

"To be specific, the origins of that procession."

"Which procession?"

"The Wild Hunt."

The magnifying glass dropped onto the desk.

"That term was coined by the Germanic people."

Richard raised an eyebrow.

"In the 1830s, a scholar from Germania wrote a massive tome on mythology.

He gathered the scattered tales from all over the north and gave them this name."

Corbin's rate of speech sped up. Once his own field was brought up, he couldn't stop.

"But if you go through the original northern texts, no one ever called it that."

"Their hunting seasons were different, their rules were different, and the paths they took were different.

For you to broadly refer to it as the Wild Hunt is academically imprecise."

"I used the wrong term," Richard admitted cooperatively.

Corbin was satisfied.

"Besides, right now, it isn't quite appropriate to use a word coined by an enemy nation's scholar anyway."

Just as he finished speaking, someone pushed a cart of lecture notes past the window, its wheels squeaking against the flagstones.

Corbin stood up, pulled two booklets from the stack of rubbings on his right, and began to lecture.

As he pulled them out, seven or eight rubbings toppled to the left, scattering across the floor.

He grabbed the third book from the windowsill. By the time he reached the fifth, Richard's Erudition was still dutifully absorbing the information page by page.

By the ninth book, that familiar dull ache began creeping up the back of his head.

Eventually, he lost count of how many books there were.

Halfway through, Corbin poured himself some tea, then resumed lecturing.

He spent nearly fifteen minutes detailing a textual research segment on the spelling habits of a specific thirteenth-century scribe.

He concluded with, "The academic community still has no definitive conclusion on this point," his tone laden with immense satisfaction.

Richard glanced out the window. It was getting late.

If Trinity College actually offered this class, the students in the first three rows would probably fall asleep ten minutes in.

Anyone in the fourth row or further back likely wouldn't wake up at all.

He finally couldn't help but ask, "Did many students take this course of yours last year?"

"Twenty-one last year. Nine this year."

Corbin closed the booklet.

"All nine are very serious. They haven't missed a single class. They're eager-to-learn, good kids, just like you."

Richard didn't dare reply to that.

"Actually, what I wanted to ask about is the final night of April."

Corbin's hand paused on the booklet.

"Valborgsmassoaften, Walburg Night. From nightfall on April 30th to daybreak on May 1st."

Then, he lectured for another hour.

During that hour, Richard heard at least fourteen different regional tales.

How high the fires on the hilltops needed to be piled, what must be drawn on the cowshed doors with tar;

Why the women in the house were forbidden from spinning yarn that night, why iron tools had to be placed outside the threshold...

There were also six different debates regarding what exactly passed through the sky that night.

For each one, Corbin made sure to thoroughly explain exactly where it was flawed before moving on to the next.

During that entire hour, only two sentences actually made Richard sit up straight.

The first was: "Yule is about gathering, Walburg is about clearing."

"What's the difference?"

"During the twelve nights of Yule, it travels from place to place, picking things up one by one, and taking them back once it has enough."

Corbin picked his magnifying glass back up.

"On Walburg Night, it drives them.

Everything it gathered throughout the winter that still stubbornly refuses to leave—it drives them all together from one end to the other."

The second sentence was even shorter.

"The literature only says that at the very front of the procession are a few who do not blow horns."

The streetlamp outside the window had already lit up.

Richard stood up.

"Thank you, Associate Professor, for taking the time to tell me all of this today. I should head back for dinner."

"Hold on," Corbin suddenly called out, his eyes falling on the long sheet of paper in Richard's hand.

"What is that in your hand?"

Richard handed the paper over.

Corbin read three lines and raised his eyebrows.

By the tenth line, he had picked up his magnifying glass.

"These are transcriptions."

"Yes."

"Sixty-seven firsthand accounts. Where did you get these?"

"People mailed them to me."

"People?"

"Country folks. Miners, gamekeepers, postmen. Half of them had to ask someone else to write on their behalf."

Corbin held the paper, remaining silent for a long time.

"You can't just let this go to waste in your hands."

"I'll organize it."

"Let me take a look when you're done."

Corbin sat back down behind his pile of rubbings.

"No need to include my name. I just want to read it."

By the time he left Trinity College, the sky had grown completely dark.

The gas lamps along the main road of the Academy District were turned down low as usual, their light caught in patches by the puddles on the ground.

As Richard walked down the road, a breeze swept in from behind, lifting the hem of his coat.

For the past few days, the department's doors had remained shut.

Greer's classes had been canceled twice. Another slip of paper asking for personnel was tacked onto the notice board, covering half of the recruitment poster at the very top.

Everyone he bumped into in the corridors was walking briskly, no one having the time to spare him a second glance.

This worked out well. The task he had at hand required precisely that—no one paying him any extra attention.

After eating dinner and returning to his dorm, he cleared his desk.

The Tarot Cards, the Copper Dish, the Runestones, and a small half-bottle of Starfall Sand.

He had laid out this set of items countless times before.

He revised his first question in his head four times.

He couldn't ask about the future, so he could only frame it like this: "On that night, what is the best course of action for me?"

The first card: The Lovers, upright.

A naked man and woman stood apart, a distance separating them.

Behind the woman was a fruit-bearing tree with a snake coiled around its trunk;

Behind the man was a burning tree, flames leaping up from its branches.

An angel with outstretched wings hovered above them both, and above the angel shone the sun.

Both figures had their faces upturned, each looking above themselves.

Mr. Hutton had taught him this card, using it to steer the conversation toward shadows. At the time, he had spoken of dual contrasts.

In other words, on that night, he and his shadow would be separated. If one side fell into danger, it wouldn't drag down the other.

The second card: Eight of Wands, upright.

Eight wands flew through the air, swift and synchronized, slanting downward toward an open field.

The tips of the wands were all sprouting fresh buds.

There were no people on the card, nor were there any hands gripping the wands.

Below lay a river flowing quietly, and beside the river sat a tiny house.

Of the eight wands, not a single one touched the ground.

And that house represented a place to return.

Richard lingered on this card for a long time.

He could not stop; he could not land. A Hunter was not supposed to see the dawn. The shadow had to return before daybreak.

The third card: Five of Wands, upright.

Five youths, each wielding a wand, tangled together in a struggle.

The wands were raised mid-air, two of them already clashing.

All five wore clothes of different colors. It was impossible to tell whether they were fighting or merely competing.

There was no blood on the ground, nor was anyone knocked down, but not a single person on the card was empty-handed.

Richard analyzed this one in detail.

The five people were fighting over the exact same thing, and none of them were willing to let go first.

That parchment scroll had stated it clearly: merit had to be earned by oneself, and the spoils were divided based on each person's merit. Those walking at the very front would receive the largest share.

Therefore, on that night, the shadow couldn't just stand on the sidelines and watch.

The final card, asking about blind spots.

It revealed The Emperor, reversed.

A man sat on a stone throne, resting his hands on the armrests, a short staff laid across his knees. The four ram heads on the back of the throne all faced outward.

Looked at upside down, the stone throne was on top, and the man was beneath it.

The staff across his knees was sliding down his leg, about to slip from his grasp entirely.

As Richard held this card, a chill gripped him.

The rules protected him because that entity was still on the throne.

Richard set this card aside on its own, not returning it to the deck.

Taking all the cards together, the revelation they provided was actually quite clear.

The Five of Wands had made it plainly obvious: on that night, no one would be empty-handed.

The spoils were divided by merit. Anyone just standing on the sidelines wouldn't get a single scrap.

So the shadow needed to walk at the very front to guide that procession, and also sink its teeth into a target when the prey was driven out.

This presented a problem.

Guiding the way relied on Sentinel, spreading the shadow's Perception outward; sinking its teeth into a target relied on Shadow Guard.

One dispersed, the other concentrated. The two forces acted in opposite directions.

Only designations with the same orientation could be stacked. Therefore, he needed a new designation—one capable of accomplishing both tasks at the same time.

Richard set his pen down.

Of the stack of sixty-seven letters at the corner of his desk, the one on top was still spread open. The sender was a gamekeeper from Devonshire:

"When it squatted there, our two hunting dogs lay flat on the ground, not daring to lift their heads.

I didn't think there was anything to be afraid of. It wasn't in any rush."

There was indeed one creature in this world naturally born for this task.

Richard wrote that name down in his notebook.