Chapter 112: Concealed

Once the glow of the system faded, a second window unfolded in front of my eyes.

[Status]

Name: Edmund Rhys

Title: N/A

Core Stage: Bronze

Affinity: Thief

Talent: S-Rank

Vitality: 41

Strength: 83

Endurance: 40

Dexterity: 35

Spiritual Power: 250/250

Weapons Equipped: None

I read the last number twice, then a third time, just to be sure my eyes were not lying to me.

’Two hundred and fifty.’

Before the experiment it had been forty-eight. A thin, nervous candle flame that I had to ration like a miser. Now it sat in my chest like a furnace with the door left open, warm and heavy, humming softly against my ribs. I flexed my fingers and felt it answer, eager and obedient.

’Good. Very good. But a power like this is a bright lantern in a dark house.’

It would be noticed. Culex’s captains were Inferior Awakened, and any one of them passing through a corridor might feel the pressure rolling off me like heat off a stove. Peter was supposed to be a trembling boy, not a walking beacon.

’I have to pray to Ouroboros. Now.’

I glanced around the narrow stone chamber, at the dripping sink, the hole in the floor, the damp walls sweating in the dim red light, and winced.

’I hope he does not mind that I am doing this in a bathroom.’

It was not a flattering location for a conversation with a supreme angel. But I touched the locket resting against my chest, felt the Serpent of Luck sit warm against my skin, and the worry eased a little. Luck had carried me this far. It could carry a prayer the last few steps, too.

I stepped across to the bath, a wide stone basin with a shower head hanging above it, and sat on its edge. The stone was cold through my trousers. I reached into my pocket and drew out the candle I had pocketed in the room, a short, stubby thing bound with twine.

I set it upright in front of me on the lip of the basin.

There was no match. There was no flint. I did not need either. I gathered a little of my spiritual power into my fingertips, rubbed it against the candle’s head, and felt the wick shiver.

A small flame woke up. It was thin and steady, a pale gold tongue that leaned toward me as if it recognized something. I took a slow breath and folded my hands.

"The Supreme Angel of Fate;

You are the Grace of Destiny;

The Spirit of Time;

I, Edmund Rhys, your devoted servant, pray that you bestow upon me concealment."

Nothing happened for a moment

The flame did not flicker. The sink went on dripping. From beyond the door, I could hear the muffled sound of Hazel laughing at something Theodore had said. A long, stretching heartbeat passed, and then another, and I began to feel the first cold seed of doubt.

Then the candle changed.

The golden flame shuddered, as if somebody had breathed on it, and then it flared.

It turned scarlet at the root and neon blue at the tip, two colors twisting around each other like a pair of serpents, and it surged upward in a violent column. It crawled up past my face, past the shower head, and sprayed against the stone roof in a shower of sparks, almost licking the ceiling.

I did not move. I did not dare.

Then I heard a rustle.

Beside the sink, in the angle where the wall met the floor, there was a small gap, a crack no wider than my palm that I had barely noticed earlier. Something was moving inside it.

Leaves...

They poured out of the hole in a dry, whispering stream, green and fresh, far too many to have come from such a narrow space. They swirled across the floor, spiraled up the wall, and gathered in the air in front of the burning candle, thickening into a hovering cloud. They drifted, rearranged themselves, and pressed together, edge to edge, until a pattern emerged.

They had formed some words.

If you want concealment, I would need your blood, mixed with some amount of your spiritual power. Also, the payment I want in return is the Sovereign rank gift that Culex holds. You may sacrifice it to me in the form of a ritual.

I read the words slowly, and a calm, almost amused feeling spread through my chest.

’A Sovereign rank gift. From Culex himself.’

It was a large price. A price that matched exactly what I had been planning to take from him anyway.

I was ready for this.

I had known, from the moment I boarded the road up the mountain, that a being like Ouroboros did not give blessings for free. A supreme angel’s help came at the cost of an offering, and a promise was a debt that could not be forgotten.

’Very well. I accept.’

I lifted my right thumb and set it between my teeth. A quick, sharp pressure, a spark of pain, and the skin split open. Warm blood welled up along the cut, bright against my skin, and I held my hand over the candle.

Inside the Spirit Temple, the part of me I had left behind responded at once. I felt it stir among the pillars. A bright, thin thread of spiritual power reached out from the fog, flowed through my body, along my arm, down my thumb, and poured straight into the blood.

The blood thumped.

It was not a pulse. It was something deeper and stranger, as if the red bead on my thumb had grown a heart of its own and was learning how to beat. It trembled, swelled, and glowed faintly from within, like an ember in a dark room.

I raised my voice once more.

I prayed to Ouroboros again, softly and clearly, and the candle answered.

The scarlet and neon flames surged, spiraling into one another, twisting upward and sideways until they bent against the air itself.

In the space above the candle, something opened.

A hole, round and blackish, torn into nothing. It was not simply dark. It looked as though it stemmed from the cosmos and the soul world at once, a place where stars were born and ghosts were buried, and where the walls of the bathroom no longer applied.

I stared into it, and the stillness stared back.

Then the void unleashed a force.

It was invisible, and strangely pleasant, like a warm cloth being drawn around my shoulders on a winter night. It coiled around my body, gentle but absolute, from my ankles to my head. There was no pain. There was no pressure. Only a soft, deep hush, as if the whole world had lowered its voice.

Soon after, I felt it settle.

A barrier.

Thin as breath, vast as a sky, closing around my spirit and my body like a second skin.

I reached out with my senses, testing it, and found that nothing could pry through. No gaze. No pressure.

No searching, sniffing, probing sense of any captain stalking the halls.

I was fully concealed.

The black hole closed. The candle sank back into a small, gold flame, and then, with a tiny sigh, it went out. The leaves collapsed into a drift on the floor and slithered back into the crack, leaving only a faint scent of green in the damp air.

I sat there on the edge of the bath, my thumb still smarting, and let out a long, unsteady breath.

’A power like this,’ I thought, ’is far beyond the mind of a mortal like me.’