Raelis moved quietly across the rooftops. The city was dim below, with only a few scattered lights still on. After a while, he reached a large three-story manor.
There were several carriages parked out front. A few people walked around, mostly servants doing their tasks, and a couple of guests talking near the entrance.
But in the face of Raelis’s stealth, they were just props.
He slipped down beside the fence, then disappeared into the shadows, moving along them until he reached the manor itself.
Rather than heading for the front door, he climbed up to the roof and made his way to the northern side.
As he reached the edge of the northern rooftop and prepared to drop down, a wave of mana surged up from below. His instincts screamed at him to move back, so he did.
Shortly after, the strange sensation faded.
Inspection magic? Raelis mused. It could also be alarm magic. How convenient.
Though trivial, he had never practiced avoiding such spells, making it a bit troublesome.
He approached the ledge, and like before, that familiar energy appeared.
But instead of panicking, Raelis took a deep breath and took a single step off the edge, falling down onto one of the manor’s railings.
Just as the energy reached him, he stopped moving, breathing, and controlled his heartbeat to the point where even those standing in front of him wouldn’t realize he was there.
And like that, the wave of energy passed over him, not triggering any alarms.
He proceeded downward and soon reached the second floor, then navigated his way over to the giant window.
Once he arrived, he slipped inside the shadows and peeked into the room that belonged to Baron Ingram.
It was a brightly lit office, and as expected, a brown-haired Baron Ingram sat at a desk. There were a few documents on one side, with ink and quill on the other.
Strangely enough, there was some ink on Baron Ingram’s cheek, and even a few droplets on the ground beside his chair to the left.
It seemed strange, but Raelis dismissed it as a simple mistake, then continued observing Baron Ingram for a little while longer.
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An hour had passed in the blink of an eye, and by now, Raelis had grown suspicious.
In the span of an hour, Baron Ingram hadn’t moved from his seat.
He did, however, fill up two small documents before putting them aside.
As Raelis thought it couldn’t get any stranger, Baron Ingram opened one of his drawers and pulled out a heavy six-shot revolver. The gun was slightly worn, and two bullets were missing from the cylinder.
This is... Raelis’s eyes widened. The Varekan Empire forbade all weapons from existing, yet he managed to get his hands on one?
It was even more surprising because it wasn’t a Magitek weapon, but a simple, old-school industrial weapon once used before magic was discovered.
But that part of history was unrecorded, with only tales of the age before mana remaining.
It was known as the Forgotten Age.
The recipes were lost, but after carefully dismantling the tools left behind by the people of the Forgotten Age, that was when history moved forward.
After that was the Age of Magic, where the demons first descended onto the world, sparking the people to find ways to fight back however they could.
That was how the Age of Magic got its name, since in the end, humans managed to figure out a way to reverse the process the demons used to wield mana.
This led to the emergence of two types of mana.
Demonic Mana, and regular Mana, which was free of the impurities that plagued Demonic Mana.
And finally, the current age Raelis was in, the Golden Age.
Humans had a fair chance at winning against the demons, and after the discovery of Magitek, the entire world had begun to change drastically.
Though... the Golden Age started not even that long ago, Raelis thought, scratching his cheek.
The Golden Age began in year 1689, and now, it was the year 1862.
Aside from that, Raelis’s attention remained on Baron Ingram, who picked up a piece of cloth and wiped the gun gently.
Then he halted, set the gun back on the desk, and stared blankly into space.
Raelis couldn’t see Baron Ingram’s expression from this angle, but what he did manage to spot were ink drops that began to drip from his left ear.
The ink drops landed precisely where the earlier drops had dried on the floor.
Raelis’s eyes widened, but soon narrowed in unease.
Is he cursed...? That looked eerily similar to what happens when humans break demonic contracts.
When ink falls, it marks the breach in contract. The side responsible begins endlessly bleeding memories in the form of ink until all that remained was their soul.
And in the end, the soul was the price for breaching the contract, just with the added torture demons were so fond of.
Raelis took a deep breath and glanced around. Eventually, he spotted an open window just three rooms down.
He gave Baron Ingram one final glance, and then he moved along the shadows and through the crack in the open window, arriving in a room where only a single piano was present.
Raelis took a step forward. At the same time, a maid walked into the room, then calmly sat down by the piano.
She began playing a beautiful melody, and in the meantime, Raelis made his way to Baron Ingram’s office.
The piano notes rang through the air as Raelis jumped into the shadows and slipped underneath the door, arriving on the other side.
And that was when he finally saw Baron Ingram face to face, causing a shiver to run down Raelis’s spine.
He looked like a lifeless husk, and his brown eyes had long since turned a darkish purple, with ink dripping down all his orifices.
Raelis traveled along the shadows and reappeared behind Baron Ingram, prepared to end his suffering here and now.
But as he unsheathed his daggers and held them close to Baron Ingram’s neck, Raelis halted, spotting something peculiar on the parchment.
It was a strange symbol of a dark hand with a single crimson eye in its palm.
On each of its fingers stood tiny, faceless silhouettes.
One held a quill. Another held scales. A third held a flame. The fourth held a cracked mirror. And the fifth held nothing as it kneeled in silent prayer.
Before Raelis could process what he was seeing, Baron Ingram suddenly flinched and, without warning, grabbed hold of his revolver.
He put it against his right temple and held the trigger before muttering a few words.
"I... I give my life for the Eternal Scribe..."
And like that, he pulled the trigger. Once, twice... three times.
"I took out the shells when I got inside the room," Raelis said, his voice distorted because of the Black Lotus mask. "I have a few questions for you—"
His words were cut off, when all of a sudden, Baron Ingram’s head exploded, sending ink all throughout the room.
Raelis dodged the ink with all his might, but even so, a single drop managed to land on his chest.
It wriggled slightly as if it were alive, but before things could get out of hand, Raelis burned the ink with his fire, causing it to vanish.
But when he brought his gaze back onto the room, he realized the ink that had just splattered everywhere had disappeared, along with Baron Ingram’s body.
The only things left were the unloaded revolver and the strange symbol on the parchment.
Raelis stared at the two for a few moments. Then, the maid a few rooms away finally stopped playing the piano, and from what Raelis could hear, she was slowly approaching this room.
Without wasting a single moment, Raelis stashed the revolver inside his pocket and grabbed the piece of parchment before fading into the shadows just as the door swung open.
"Hmm? Sir Ingram?" the maid muttered, glancing around. "Where could he be..."
She extended her mana forward, searching for Baron Ingram.
Upon noticing he wasn’t anywhere in the manor, her expression hardened. "Guards! Sir Ingram has disappeared! Alert the city guards!"
Raelis inwardly sighed and made his way out of the manor, going completely unnoticed.
However, the event sparked a deep concern.
He knew how Demonic Contracts looked, and what became of those who broke them.
But what had transpired shortly before Baron Ingram’s death, and right after, was nothing like he had ever seen before.
He mentioned the Eternal Scribe right as he was about to kill himself, Raelis pondered, jumping the fence of the manor and swiftly making his way back toward the center of the city.
He glanced at the parchment with the strange symbol on it, and especially at the five people that it portrayed.
I’ll have to look into who they are tomorrow.
It didn’t take Raelis long to arrive in a particular alleyway, but unlike last time, he wasn’t going to jump down into the sewers. Instead, he stood in front of a reinforced steel door with a narrow sliding hatch at eye level.
Raelis tapped the door once, then exactly five seconds later, he tapped three times.
A deathly silence ensued for a solid minute until eventually, the hatch opened up and a single gloved arm reached out, holding a small sack of coins.
Raelis accepted the sack of coins and the arm retreated behind the sliding hatch, then swiftly closed it shut.
He took a deep breath, and then slightly pried open the sack. Inside, he spotted 5 silver coins. He didn’t get the bonus, but it was still a fair amount.
Raelis stashed the sack of coins in his pocket, and with a slight smile, he made his way back to the dormitory.