Chapter 48: One Wall Away

Approaching the latter half of the street, Richard slowed his pace.

On his right sat a small storefront draped with a faded cloth curtain. A door plaque read "Malcolm Astrology." The curtain hung half-open, but the interior was pitch-black, hiding whatever lay inside.

The shop itself was completely unremarkable, but the ether concentration there was noticeably higher than its surroundings.

It was faint, like an undercurrent at the bottom of a stream. Without careful perception, it would be entirely drowned out by the noise of the street.

Richard took a few more steps forward. Two storefronts down on his right, at the mouth of a narrow alleyway, the ether concentration spiked again.

Further down, near the corner at the end of the street, two pots of withered mint sat before a tightly shut gray wooden door. The ether concentration there was the highest on the entire block.

Three points, scattered unevenly across the latter half of Flower Moon Street.

They were like three independent springs beneath a riverbed, steadily seeping upward.

Richard committed the three locations to memory. This was where the dividing line between real and fake was drawn.

Ninety percent of this street was a performance; ten percent was the real deal. They shared the same pavement, the same smokescreen, and the same oblivious customers.

He scanned the door numbers on both sides.

At the street entrance, the numbers had started in the thirties and decreased the further in they went—twenty-eight, twenty-six, twenty-three... yet even here at the very end, he saw no numbers below ten.

Flower Moon Street's numbering began at eleven. The first ten numbers—including the number seven he was looking for—did not exist at all.

"There is no number seven on Flower Moon Street." Richard stopped in his tracks.

Vincent smiled, his hands stuffed into his coat pockets. "Isn't there?"

"The numbers start at eleven."

"True. On the surface, they don't."

His cousin pulled a hand from his pocket and tipped his chin toward the gray wooden door at the corner of the street.

"Follow me."

Beside the gray wooden door was an old brick wall.

The bricks were stained black by years of rain and soot, with dead clusters of moss clinging to the crevices.

From the outside, it was just an ordinary old wall, indistinguishable from the side of any other decaying building on Flower Moon Street.

But as Richard approached, the warmth within his Seat of the Sun trembled.

The ether concentration before the brick wall spiked drastically, jumping from a stream's undercurrent to the level of river-mouth rapids.

"This is it." Vincent pulled down his scarf, exposing his neck.

"The method for passing through the wall varies from person to person," he said, rolling his shoulders. "Mine is relatively simple and crude."

He took a deep breath, his breathing rate accelerating from a normal rhythm into outright hyperventilation.

His face rapidly turned ashen, and the veins on his temples bulged.

Richard recognized the exact same state shift from that morning's training. The only difference was the lack of an ice-water bucket.

A second later, the young man stepped forward.

His body hit the brick wall, but the shattering bricks or violent rebound that Richard had expected never materialized.

The moment Vincent's shoulder touched the wall, it sank straight in, as if he were wading into waist-deep mire.

The brick surface rippled around his body, quickly swallowing him whole. His heels vanished last, and the ripples returned to calm.

The wall returned to normal. The blackened bricks remained black, and the dead moss remained exactly where it was.

Richard stood there for a few seconds.

He reached out with his right hand, palm facing forward, and slowly pressed toward the brick.

About three inches from the wall, he met resistance.

The air grew viscous, much like plunging a hand into cooling, semi-solid syrup.

At the same time, a chaotic wave of sensory interference washed over him.

His sense of direction was disrupted first. He knew he was standing facing the wall, but the signal his brain received was: You are spinning in circles.

His equilibrium began to protest, and the breakfast in his stomach flipped.

Static appeared at the edges of his vision; his brain was generating scrambled data as it tried to process the contradictory signals.

This was the Fog Wall Spell, but countless times stronger than what the stalk of Ashcore Grass in his possession could produce.

If an ordinary person without an internal ether circulation hit this interference, their first reaction would be severe dizziness and nausea, forcing an instinctive retreat.

Even if they stubbornly pushed forward, their scrambled sense of direction would leave them unable to distinguish front from back or left from right. They would simply wander in a circle right back out onto the street.

They would just assume they had suddenly fallen ill and needed to see a doctor.

Richard pulled his hand back and retreated a half-step.

Vincent used a burst of blood ignition to force his way through, using an ether infusion to crush the interference field.

It was like charging headlong through a hailstorm while wearing a thick down jacket.

The hail still hurt, but as long as the jacket was thick enough, you could push right through.

He had no such jacket.

His Ether Micro-circulation had only just formed. Compared to a quasi-Practitioner-level Hunter like Vincent, his total ether capacity was several orders of magnitude lower.

If he tried to brute-force it, the interference field would likely knock him out before he even made it halfway.

He needed a different approach. Wearing a down jacket was one way to cross a hailstorm; slipping through the gaps between the hailstones was another.

Richard closed his eyes and initiated his Fourfold Breathing.

Inhale for four beats. Hold for four. Exhale for four. Hold for four.

The chaotic warmth within his Seat of the Sun stabilized, condensing into a single point of light the size of a copper button.

He used the rhythm of his internal circulation to combat the chaos of the interference field.

The interference field fundamentally worked by feeding scrambled signals into a target's sensory system, whereas the core of Fourfold Breathing was establishing an extremely stable internal order.

Order against chaos.

As long as his internal order was solid enough, any external scrambled input would automatically be filtered out.

He reached out a second time. The moment his fingertips touched the viscous layer of air, the sensory interference flooded back.

His sense of direction skewed, and the static returned to the edges of his vision... but this time, he wasn't swept away.

The rhythm of his Fourfold Breathing cycled steadily within his chest, and his Seat of the Sun acted as an anchor, pinning his consciousness in place.

The interference signals crashed against him, only to be deflected by the rhythm of his internal circulation.

It couldn't deflect everything. It blocked roughly seventy percent of the noise; the remaining thirty percent still induced a mild dizziness.

But seventy percent was enough. Richard opened his eyes and took his first step.

The brick surface softened in front of his palm, and his fingers sank in.

The sensation was completely different from what he had imagined watching Vincent pass through the wall. His hand felt like it was pushing aside an incredibly thick cotton curtain.

The cotton curtain squeezed in from both sides of his body, bringing a damp, icy chill. The tactile sensation of ether seeped in from the outside.

Every inch of his skin was receiving information.

The distance was only about two steps, but walking it felt like a long time had passed.

On the final half-step, the curtain's resistance suddenly vanished. Richard's right foot struck solid stone flooring, and his left foot followed.

The air here was cool and dry. The buzzing in his ears stopped.

He opened his eyes. Flower Moon Street was still Flower Moon Street.

It had the same street width and the same old two-story buildings, but everything else was different.

The sky overhead was shielded by a semi-transparent dome. The number of storefronts lining the street had dropped by more than half, and every remaining shop was quiet.

There were far fewer pedestrians as well, walking down the stone pavement in twos and threes.

Their attire varied—some wore long robes, others suits, and some draped themselves in cloaks and hoods.

But no one spoke loudly, and no one stopped to look around.

The people who came here all had very clear goals.