Chapter 123 - 121 The Last Secret of the Chains

Chapter 123: Chapter 121 The Last Secret of the Chains

Sebastián remained motionless among the riches.

The emergency lights continued burning above his head, covering the chamber with a red glow that turned the gold into bloodstained metal and made the diamonds return cold flashes from inside their cases. The rows of boxes stretched out before him with the precision of an accounting built upon bodies that could no longer claim anything.

He did not observe the value, but the possibility.

There was enough money to buy wills, buildings, weapons, and silences. Ingots capable of crossing borders without losing their usefulness. Jewels torn from families, buyers, corpses, or shipments whose origin could probably no longer be reconstructed.

But among all of that, another kind of accumulation also existed: ancient objects, stones extracted from distant territories, and gems that had perhaps passed through too many hands, too many places, and too many deaths before ending up locked beneath the white room.

Sebastián advanced to the first row of cases, but still did not touch any of them.

He closed his eyes.

His breathing descended until it became almost imperceptible. The movement of the blood beneath his skin stabilized, and ordinary perception began to withdraw, not because it stopped functioning, but because it opened space for something that did not depend on flesh.

The Naked Spiritual Consciousness awakened.

The change produced no light nor physically altered the chamber. The boxes remained there. The lamps stayed lit. The gold did not disappear, and the concrete retained the same hardness beneath his bare feet.

However, a second reality emerged over the first.

It was not hidden behind things.

It passed through them.

The air filled with stains.

Dark residues covered the bundles of money like grease clinging to the paper. Some bills were wrapped in thin filaments that twisted between the bands and extended toward the floor, where they ended up becoming incomplete handprints.

The gold ingots remained almost inert. The metal contained no spiritual energy of its own, but foreign impressions had remained upon its surface: fingers closing in desperation, blood that no longer physically existed, anxiety, greed, and fear.

They were not complete memories, but residues.

Emotional fragments too weak to preserve thought, but persistent enough to stain what they had touched.

Sebastián opened his eyes.

The crimson spirals continued turning around his pupils, but now they contemplated something the red light could not reveal.

The chamber was full.

A figure remained kneeling beside the boxes of money. It looked like an adult man, although his torso ended in an irregular opening beneath the ribs. He had no legs. From the waist downward descended a viscous shadow that dragged itself across the concrete and disappeared beneath the stored bundles.

His hands continued counting bills he could no longer touch. His fingers passed through the paper once, then again, always beginning from the start.

Farther away, a woman remained bent over a jewelry case. Her head was twisted backward at an impossible angle, while her body retained the posture of someone who had once tried to cover herself. A dark mark surrounded her neck, thick and uneven. Every few seconds, she opened her mouth, but no voice came from it.

Sebastián did not hold her gaze.

Not because he feared the apparition.

The Naked Spiritual Consciousness was still an ability he was learning to interpret. Looking directly at a presence could be enough to recognize it, and recognizing it could become a form of contact.

He had no intention of initiating one.

He shifted his attention toward the objects and picked up one of the bundles of money.

The spiritual presence clinging to the plastic reacted immediately. Several dark strands stretched toward his fingers, drawn by the movement. Sebastián watched as they tried to touch his skin without managing to pass through his body’s natural resistance.

He felt no energy of its own within the paper. Only contamination: residues of those who had possessed, stolen, transported, or lost it.

He returned the bundle to its place and picked up an ingot.

The gold was different.

Its spiritual structure remained almost completely empty. The stains covering it did not originate from the metal, but from what had happened around it. They were accumulated external layers, like dried mud upon a stone that had never understood the blood spilled because of it.

Sebastián turned the ingot between his hands, but found nothing.

He returned it to the box.

The nearby presences began to move.

Not all of them retained human form.

Behind a shelving unit appeared a childlike figure. It walked slowly with its head tilted toward one shoulder, held in place only by a dark strip around the neck. Its arms hung too low, and its nails scraped the floor without producing any sound.

It was not looking at Sebastián.

It was looking at a small bracelet kept inside a transparent bag.

It advanced toward it, passed through it, and then returned to the same point. Again and again.

At the back of the chamber, several spiritual bodies were piled between two rows of containers. Adult faces emerged and disappeared from a dark mass in which arms, backs, and legs could no longer be distinguished. Some mouths opened at the same time. Others remained sewn shut by black lines that extended toward the nearby boxes.

They were not evil beings by nature.

They had been people.

What remained of them had been deformed by death, confinement, and the inability to move away from what had surrounded their final moments. Accumulated resentment had destroyed part of their forms, and fear had ended up blending them with the objects that represented the cause or result of their suffering.

Sebastián continued walking.

A pregnant woman was sitting against the wall. Her face had no eyes, only two dark cavities from which lines resembling hardened tears descended. Her hands surrounded a spiritually opened womb, inside which moved a small form that never completely separated from her.

When Sebastián passed nearby, the woman’s head rose. The silhouette within her also moved.

He did not stop.

He had not descended to judge the dead or to free them. Nor did he yet possess enough knowledge to intervene without altering something he did not fully understand.

His purpose was another: to practice, distinguish, and learn to separate a conscious presence from an emotional residue, and both of those from the spiritual energy contained within an object.

The bundles of money showed contamination.

The ingots retained external impressions.

The jewels began to offer more varied responses.

Sebastián opened the first case. There were necklaces, rings, and earrings arranged upon a surface of black velvet. Most contained nothing of their own. Some were covered by residues of attachment, greed, or loss. Around a gold ring remained a faint figure, resembling a female hand trying to close around it.

Sebastián touched it.

The spiritual hand reacted. The incomplete fingers closed over his own, but passed through the skin without finding an entrance. The apparition raised its face from the other side of the shelving unit. It had no mouth, only a smooth surface beneath the nose.

Sebastián released the ring, and the hand returned to its previous position.

There was no energy stored within the jewel. Only a persistent relationship between the object and the one who refused to abandon it.

He moved to the next case.

It contained diamonds.

Most remained spiritually silent. The light passed through their physical structures and broke into reflections, but the Naked Spiritual Consciousness found nothing within them. They were compact, ancient matter, incapable of remembering by themselves.

He picked one up and examined it from several angles.

Nothing.

He picked up another. A gray layer covered it, but detached slightly when he moved it away from the case. It did not belong to the gem. It was an environmental residue accumulated during years of storage.

He returned it and opened a small box containing rubies.

The physical red of the stones overlapped with the glow of the emergency lights, but spiritually only two showed any difference. One retained an intense emotion, similar to panic. The other seemed to have absorbed small amounts of vital energy over a prolonged period.

Sebastián held the second between two fingers.

The energy was minimal and did not originate from the gem. It had been deposited there, probably through repeated contact with blood or some process its owners did not understand. When separated from the others, the vibration began to weaken.

It was a stored residue, not a true spiritual property.

Sebastián memorized the difference and continued.

Emeralds, sapphires, opals, and cut stones whose physical value would have been enough to buy entire houses. Most were nothing more than matter surrounded by the traces of the living and the dead.

Some objects reacted strangely. An emerald maintained a dark green halo around itself that disappeared when touched. A sapphire was connected by a spiritual filament to the spectral corpse of a man sitting several meters away. A pearl necklace emitted small echoes of other people’s breathing each time Sebastián lifted it.

None of that was what he was looking for.

He did not want to find a gem pursued by a dead person. He was looking for a stone whose energy belonged to it: an internal source, something capable of existing spiritually even after separating all the stains, memories, and attached presences.

As he advanced, the spirits began to recognize an anomaly.

He could see them.

Not all of them understood it at the same time. The childlike figure was the first to stop its repetitive path. Its twisted head slowly shifted until it faced Sebastián. Then, the legless man stopped counting, and his hands remained suspended inside a box.

The woman with the broken neck turned her torso without correcting the position of her head. More presences raised their faces.

Sebastián felt the attention gathering over him like a cold layer.

He did not react or return their gazes. His breathing remained stable, and his movements maintained the same rhythm. Recognizing the pressure did not mean accepting contact. As long as he did not respond, the apparitions would have fewer reasons to distinguish him from a material presence incapable of perceiving them.

At least, that was his hypothesis.

A childlike shadow approached from behind. Its long fingers tried to touch Sebastián’s pajamas, but before reaching the fabric, they deformed against the boundary of his spiritual presence and recoiled like smoke struck by the wind.

The child opened its mouth, and the torn neck widened, but no sound came out.

Sebastián opened another case.

Inside were small labeled bags, each containing unset stones. Some were transparent; others, opaque. There were mineral fragments that had not yet been polished, probably obtained as part of payments, stolen shipments, or exchanges with organizations that did not use only money.

The first bag showed nothing. The second was covered in resentment. The third contained several black stones that partially absorbed physical light, but possessed no spiritual response.

Sebastián examined them one by one.

Nothing.

As he extended his hand toward the next box, he stopped.

Not because of something he had seen, but because of something he had stopped seeing.

Amid so much contamination, there was a clean point.

Not empty.

Clean.

The spiritual stains covering the shelves drew away around a small case located at the bottom. The filaments of resentment did not touch it. The spirits’ incomplete hands avoided passing over it, and even the shadows accumulated on the floor seemed to curve before reaching it.

Sebastián crouched as the apparitions’ attention focused even more intensely on him. He removed two boxes placed in front and found a rectangular case covered by a layer of physical dust that contrasted with the absolute absence of spiritual residues.

He picked it up.

The surface was cold.

There were no marks, inscriptions, or complex mechanisms. Only a simple metal clasp that yielded beneath the pressure of his thumb.

Sebastián opened the case.

A single gem rested inside.

It was small, irregular, and of a color difficult to define beneath the red lights. At times, it appeared transparent. Then it took on a bluish-gray tone, as though mist were trapped within its structure.

Physically, it was not the most valuable stone in the chamber.

Spiritually, it was the only one that seemed alive.

It was not covered in energy.

It produced it.

Faint pulses emerged from its center, extending to the edges and returning, forming a closed cycle. Each beat pushed the nearby residues back a few centimeters. It did not depend on any spirit, attached emotion, or death that had occurred beside it.

The energy belonged to it.

Sebastián kept the gem inside the case. For the first time since he had activated the Naked Spiritual Consciousness, the entire chamber seemed motionless.

The dead had stopped repeating their movements.

Dozens of deformed faces watched the stone.

Sebastián did as well.

Among a fortune built with lives turned into merchandise, he had found something that did not belong entirely to the material world.

He held the case open for a few more seconds. The gem continued pulsing inside. Each emission was weak, but perfectly distinguishable through the Naked Spiritual Consciousness. The energy originated at the center of the stone, traveled through its structure, and returned to the same point without dissipating completely.

It was not a residue, nor the trace of a dead person or an emotion attached to matter.

It was an inherent property.

Sebastián closed the case.

The deformed presences filling the chamber followed the movement with their incomplete faces. Some remained motionless. Others moved slightly closer, drawn not by him, but by the gem that had remained inside that place for years without allowing itself to be contaminated by everything surrounding it.

Sebastián paid them no attention.

The dimensional ring on his hand emitted a faint red glow, and the case disappeared. It produced no sound and left no visible trace. Space folded around the object for a fraction of a second and transferred it into the ring, separated from the rest of the goods he was about to store.

Sebastián raised his hand.

He did not need to walk through the chamber again or touch every box. His perception extended over the material objects he had selected: ingots, bundles of money, jewelry, precious stones, coins, watches, valuable metals, and the containers in which they were stored.

The ring responded.

The air in front of his hand distorted.

No visible portal opened. The distance between the ring and the first row of boxes simply seemed to compress. The straight lines of the shelving units curved for an instant, as though the chamber were being observed through glass subjected to too much pressure.

The first boxes trembled and rose a few centimeters. The metal clasps vibrated. The ingots struck against one another inside the wood, producing a succession of dense impacts. The bundles of money shifted in complete blocks, still wrapped in plastic and organized by denomination.

Everything began to move toward Sebastián’s hand.

It did not do so violently.

The boxes shrank as they passed through the spatial distortion. A structure capable of occupying the width of several men was compressed until it disappeared inside the ring’s small glow.

An entire row ceased to exist.

Then the next.

The black cases closed from the movement and were absorbed along with their contents. Diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires disappeared without mixing together. The watches, ancient coins, and pieces of jewelry followed the same path.

The shelving units were left bare.

Within the Naked Spiritual Consciousness, the process looked different.

The stains attached to the objects stretched as the matter was transferred. Some residues disappeared along with that to which they were bound. Others detached before reaching the ring and remained floating in the air like shreds of blackened smoke.

The filaments connecting certain jewels to the dead tightened.

The spirit of the man sitting at the back convulsed when the sapphire connected to his chest began to move. The thread lengthened until it crossed several empty rows. For an instant, it seemed that it would also drag his form toward the ring.

It did not happen.

The bond broke.

The spiritual strand snapped without sound and dissolved from both ends. The man remained seated in the same place, staring at his hands as though he had forgotten what he was supposed to repeat with them.

The female figure connected to the ownerless ring extended her fingers when the jewel disappeared. Her hand passed through the emptiness left by the case and remained closing around nothing.

Other spirits reacted more violently.

The shadows piled between two containers opened their mouths at the same time when the boxes began to rise. Their incomplete bodies tried to cling to the wood, but the matter passed through their arms and was absorbed without resistance.

Sebastián did not interrupt the process.

He had not activated the ring to free them or harm them. Their bonds with those objects were a consequence that was not his responsibility to resolve at that moment.

The absorption continued.

First, the boxes of gold disappeared. Then, the containers of money. After that, the unset stones, ancient objects, and precious metals.

The glow of the ring remained stable. Its interior space received each element without altering the order Sebastián had established. The anomalous gem remained isolated. The rest of the fortune was distributed in another section, where it could be examined, classified, or used later.

Within a few minutes, the chamber changed completely.

Where riches capable of sustaining an entire organization had once accumulated, only metal shelving units, dust, rectangular marks on the concrete, and a few empty boxes without value remained.

Sebastián lowered his hand, and the glow of the ring disappeared.

The spiritual presences were still there.

Some had lost what kept them repeating the same movement and now remained motionless, confused within a death that offered no new instructions. Others continued bound to the chamber, the walls, or the memory of what had happened beneath that house.

The pregnant woman remained beside the wall. The childlike figure kept its head tilted. The legless man no longer counted.

Dozens of deformed faces watched Sebastián among the empty shelving units.

He closed his eyes.

The Naked Spiritual Consciousness withdrew.

The forms disappeared. The residues stopped covering the walls. The incomplete hands, open throats, and piled bodies were removed from his perception, not from the place where they continued to exist.

When he opened his eyes again, the chamber contained only concrete, metal, and red lights.

Sebastián turned toward the point through which he had descended. The irregular hole was several meters above. The white light from the room passed through the opening and fell in a narrow strip over the lower floor.

He did not head toward the staircase.

He bent his legs slightly.

The concrete received the pressure of his feet for an instant. Then, Sebastián jumped.

His body rose in a straight line, passed through the opening without touching the edges, and emerged once more into the white room. He landed beside the column with a light, controlled impact that barely made the loose fragments around the hole vibrate.

The room remained empty.

The destroyed bed was still in the center. The bloodstains had darkened on the floor. Nothing indicated that, several meters below, an entire fortune had just disappeared.

Sebastián walked to the column where he had left his footwear. He put it on without haste and then left the room.

He encountered no resistance along the way.

The industrial chambers had been secured and abandoned. The guard’s corpse remained in front of the deformed ballistic door, waiting for the final cleanup teams to remove it. In the display-case corridor, the cells were open and empty. Only metal containers, forgotten blankets, and stains that time would not clean on its own remained.

Sebastián continued forward.

He climbed the restricted staircase and passed through the door that connected to the public hall.

Club Vesper had lost its appearance of excess.

The music was off. The fluorescent lights remained on above the empty bars, illuminating broken glasses, overturned tables, and the remains of the intervention. The smoke had almost completely dispersed. No customers, workers, combatants, or captives remained.

Only the building.

A shell filled with signs that, a few hours earlier, hundreds of people had believed themselves to be inside a place protected by money, connections, and fear.

Sebastián crossed the hall without stopping.

The main doors were open.

Outside, the night remained closed over the neighborhood. The false barriers continued blocking access, but most of the Empire’s forces had already withdrawn. Some vehicles disguised as police units remained at the intersections while the final teams finished erasing the traces of the operation.

Administrator Wendy was waiting beside the light-blue family van.

She was alone.

When she saw him come out, she put away the communication device and walked a few steps to receive him. Her posture remained professional, although the night had left visible signs on her clothes and on the accessories that moved faintly over her chest.

—Emperor.

Sebastián stopped in front of her.

Wendy did not ask what he had found inside the building. If he had remained behind, it was because he did not consider it necessary to share it yet.

—The main operation is over —she reported—. The customers were removed and distributed among different bars under our control. When they wake up, the prepared scene will explain the condition they are in.

She added no details.

The objective was not to convince them of a complex story, but to prevent them from clearly reconstructing what had happened inside Club Vesper. Alcohol, loss of consciousness, fragmented memories, and different locations would be enough to make their testimonies contradictory.

—The two albino women are already on their way to a medical center —Wendy continued—. The interrogations have also begun.

Sebastián nodded once.

Wendy waited for a moment before asking the final question.

—Do you have any other orders for me, emperor?

—No.

The answer came without delay.

—You may leave.

Wendy cast a brief glance toward the van. She had arrived there driving Sebastián and, out of operational habit, seemed prepared to accompany him on the return journey.

He spoke before she could offer.

—You do not need to return with me. I will go back to the mansion alone.

Wendy looked at him again.

She did not ask why he preferred to return on foot or how long it would take him. Sebastián did not need transportation to cross the city, and any insistence would have been useless.

She inclined her head slightly.

—As you command, emperor.

Sebastián turned and began walking down the empty street without looking toward the van or the building he was leaving behind. The false lights of the police vehicles cast intermittent flashes over his dark pajamas, making his silhouette appear and disappear among blue and red reflections.

Wendy remained beside the vehicle.

She watched him walk away as he crossed the first checkpoint without being stopped. The Empire’s agents stepped out of his path with brief, almost imperceptible movements and resumed their duties once he had passed.

Sebastián continued forward.

Behind him remained Club Vesper, emptied of captives, members, and riches. The House of Chains had lost its facilities, its leaders, its fortune, and the possibility of rebuilding itself.

He did not turn his head to confirm it.

The lights of the perimeter gradually stopped reaching him. First, the dried blood on his hand disappeared. Then, the outline of his clothing. Finally, only the faint sound of his footsteps remained as he advanced toward an unlit street.

The darkness eventually swallowed his figure.

Sebastián would return to the mansion alone.

________________________________________

END OF Chapter 121 The path continues...

New Chapters are revealed every

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