Chapter 456: The Mass Getting-Lost Incident

Richard stood there for a moment.

[Inner Awakening] quickly helped him piece it together.

It came down to the old saying: a Virtuoso might be a lunatic, but they were never a fool.

The man might act completely indifferent, but Richard's next move would likely dictate how Matthew treated him going forward.

"Sir, I have two more questions."

"Ask."

"Does this count as using supernatural means in public?"

Matthew stared blankly for a second, then doubled over in laughter.

"Kid, I've walked this path for twenty years, and you're the first person to ever ask me that."

"I'm not a 'means'." He stomped on the flagstones beneath his feet.

"I'm a road."

"If a road turns people around, that's the road's business."

"If the Branch Office comes looking, tell them to find me."

"I'll even leave them an address: head west from the central mountain range on the New Continent and walk for thirty days."

Matthew was highly amused by his own joke, but Richard didn't even crack a smile.

"One more question. Will they remember who did this to them?"

Matthew looked at him for a moment.

"No."

At that, Richard adjusted his coat collar.

"Then I must trouble you."

"I'll count to three. Don't blink."

"One."

Richard didn't blink.

"Three!"

...Though he'd expected as much, Richard still cursed inwardly.

The first person to appear before him was the man who had marched at the very front of the mob, hauling half a church fence.

He had put in the most effort and smashed the hardest. The blows that struck Donner's hands had been his doing.

The man was currently sitting in a tavern in the East District, a pint of beer someone else had bought him resting on the table.

A circle of people surrounded him, listening to his story.

"...I brought the iron bar down, and the display window shattered!"

Standing at the base of a wall across the street, Richard applied the Mirror technique.

A watery surface spread out, reflecting the man layer by layer.

The man was thirty-nine years old. He had been fired from the docks last winter for stuffing two handfuls of coffee beans down his trouser legs.

He hadn't told his family on the day he was fired. Since then, he continued to leave home at seven every morning, only to sit on the streets until dark.

Yesterday afternoon was the first time in his life he had walked at the head of hundreds of people.

For that half hour, whatever he shouted, the hundreds behind him shouted too.

Richard curled his lip as he watched this unfold.

The man hadn't been tricked by anyone. He knew perfectly well he had no grudge against his targets.

He simply couldn't let go of that half hour; it had been the most glorious moment of his life.

The [Chronicler's Pen] lit up, its effect falling upon the man.

The name Richard wrote was: "Loudmouth."

Halfway through his story in the tavern, the man's voice suddenly amplified like a megaphone.

"I brought the iron bar down—"

The booming shout made everyone in the tavern turn to look at him.

He froze for a second, then tried to lower his volume and continue.

But his next sentence came out even louder than the last, escalating from a megaphone to a bomber plane.

"I WAS FIRED FROM THE DOCKS!"

The tavern fell silent.

The man's face flushed red, and he hurriedly slapped both hands over his mouth.

He covered his mouth, but the sound forced its way through his fingers, not a single syllable muffled.

"I WAS SHAKING THE WHOLE DAMN TIME!"

"MY HANDS WENT WEAK ON THE FIRST STRIKE!!"

"I OWE SEVEN WEEKS OF RENT!!!"

"MY SON ISN'T MINE!!!"

The man who had bought him the beer slowly removed his hand from his shoulder.

Matthew chuckled without comment and shifted Richard to the vicinity of the second target.

The second target was the man who had handed out pamphlets during the march yesterday. The others passing them out behind him had all been following his lead.

This man was thirty-one and worked as a clerk at an insurance firm. His handwriting was beautiful.

He was currently sitting at a desk in his living room, copying an address onto a card.

The card bore a line of small print: "Call for Submissions: Do you have a neighbor like this?"

Richard spread the Mirror over him.

This one was much cleaner than the man in the tavern, but far uglier.

He had never been in a fight in his life; yesterday, he hadn't so much as picked up a wooden stick.

Over the past three weeks, he had mailed a total of eleven letters.

The first was about the lady downstairs who took in laundry, reported because he couldn't understand the tunes she hummed;

The seventh was about his wife's brother, simply because the man had commented last month that the war shouldn't be fought;

The tenth was about the manager of his own insurance firm.

The reason was that the manager had promoted someone else last year and passed him over.

Richard wrote down: "Informer."

The moment the word landed on him, Wade finished filling out the card and pulled out another, then finished that one and pulled out yet another.

By eleven o'clock that night, over forty cards were stacked on his desk.

His wife brought tea into the room and saw her own name written on the topmost card.

Matthew didn't laugh this time. He only said, "Kid, you're smart."

Driven out of his house the next morning, Wade carried the stack of cards to work.

He went to the insurance firm and read the manager's card aloud in front of the entire office.

Then he went to the police station on the corner and reported all seventeen households in his alley, one by one.

When he reached the ninth household, the older police officer put down his pen.

"Sir."

"The tenth household, the cobbler. His son last month..."

"Sir, you have already reported seventeen people, six of whom are your own relatives."

Wade wanted to shut his mouth, but he couldn't.

He reported his father-in-law, the milkman, and the old gentleman who had taught him to read.

Finally, he reported himself. By that time, a crowd had gathered outside the police station.

Later, Richard heard that the publication, "Neighborhood Chronicles", had been discontinued.

No one had officially shut it down, but no one was willing to mail letters to that address anymore.

The third target was a woman. Yesterday, she had been shrieking "I've been cursed!" from the middle of the crowd.

Richard spread the Mirror over her, but stopped after observing for less than ten seconds.

"What's wrong?" Matthew asked from the side.

"She was hired."

The woman washed and starched clothes for a living, and both of her sons were on the front lines.

Last week, someone had handed her two pounds on her doorstep.

That person gave her three sentences and told her to memorize them.

She was told to cry when reciting them, and to keep her voice shrill when shouting.

The name Richard wrote was: "Parrot."

Once the name was written, the only words she could say were the three sentences she had been taught.

Word for word, with the exact same tone.

This included the gentleman's final instruction: "Remember, dive into the crowd as soon as you finish shouting. Don't stay where you are."

The next morning, standing at her own door, she repeated those three sentences and the final instruction over twenty times to the inquiring neighbors.

Someone in the neighborhood realized something was wrong and hurriedly called the police.

That afternoon, operatives from the Branch Office visited a hotel in the south of the city and escorted out the gentleman who had paid her.

Richard only learned of these developments later. After finishing his task, he had Matthew send him back to his dormitory.

After classes the next day, Richard was walking down the street when he saw Matthew drop from an overhead beam, landing without a sound.

"Not bad. This lead is enough for the teacher to trace up the chain for quite a while."

"Kid." He circled halfway around Richard, appraising him from head to toe.

"When the teacher mentioned you to me, I just thought you were an honest kid."

"And now?"

"Now..." He slipped his hands back into his pockets.

"Now I think your mind is sharp. Sharp enough that I'm half-tempted to snatch you away to the New Continent right this second."

Richard took a half-step back.

Matthew burst out laughing.

"I'm joking. With your current Rank, if you went over there, you probably wouldn't come back."

He held out his hand.

"You still have that leaf, don't you?"

Richard took the leaf out of his inner pocket.

"Last time, I told you this thing was just for bragging."

Matthew's playful grin vanished.

"It isn't anymore."

Richard suddenly felt a long road extending beneath the withered leaf—a road so long that even his Mirror couldn't reflect its end.

Matthew tapped the leaf.

"If someone walks into a place they can't come back from, say their name and the name of that place."

"They will be able to walk themselves out."

The street was very quiet.

"I don't have to go get them?"

"You can't." Matthew shook his head.

"I build the road, but the person still has to walk it themselves."

"Listen closely to the restrictions."

He held up a finger.

"First, that person has to actually want to come back."

"If they don't want to return, building a road is pointless."

"Furthermore, you have to be able to say the name of the place. If you can't name it, you can't find them."

"You have to know where the place is, what it's called, and what it is."

"Finally... it doesn't save the dead."

"The dead have a different road, and that road is managed by someone else."

"If you force a dead person back, you'll be terrified of whatever it is you drag out."

Richard held the leaf between his fingers.

"...I understand."

"It doesn't matter if you don't." Matthew lowered his hand.

"It's best if you never have to use it. Leaving this thing buried at the bottom of a trunk for your entire life would be a tremendous blessing."

"I've made and stored quite a few of these leaves, but I've only ever used them twice."

"On whom?"

"One on myself."

He took two steps forward.

"The other was used on someone who didn't want to come back."

The sound of footsteps faded into the distance across the flagstones.

Richard looked down at the withered leaf in his palm.

The veins branched outward from the center, splitting again and again as they neared the edge.

And in the end, every single vein snapped at the leaf's edge.

......

Matthew handled the rest of the aftermath on his own.

A total of four hundred and seventeen people had squeezed into the inner reaches of Flower Moon Street that day.

At 9:40 PM, people around the Imperial Capital East District slowly began losing their way home.

They would walk and walk, only to find themselves right back at the intersection they had just passed.

One man walked south from a bridge for forty minutes, only to look up and realize he was still standing at the foot of the bridge;

A family of five went out to see a play, only to end up walking in circles outside the theater doors for three hours afterward.

Eventually, they sat down on the steps, and the father took off his coat to drape it over the youngest child.

Two people crossed paths in the same alley eleven times.

The seventh time, they nodded to each other. The eleventh time, one of them sat down and cried.

By daybreak, all four hundred and seventeen people finally found their way to their own front doors.

After that, more than half of them never took shortcuts while walking at night again.

The "Imperial Capital Morning News" published a report on the "East District Mass Getting-Lost Incident".

The report stated that on the night of May 19th, heavy fog and a lighting outage caused by gas pipeline maintenance in the city's East District temporarily caused hundreds of citizens to lose their bearings.

Subsequent investigations reported no casualties.

Beneath the report was an expert interview discussing how pedestrians should stick to the right side of the road in foggy weather.

Later, someone on the street began selling a new one-penny booklet titled "One Hundred Mass Getting-Lost Jokes".