Before leaving, Elias took another detour in the Arcane Black Market.
Instead of heading straight for the exit, he ducked into a narrow alley lined with signs for vacant warehouses and found an anonymous storage office.
Behind the counter sat a clerk who looked too lazy to even open his eyes fully, a thick ledger spread out next to his hand containing no names, only numbers.
“East bank of Hastings Port, near the docks,” Elias said in a low voice, stowing the wooden box of alchemy equipment into his Gluttonous Stomach. “Give me an unattended warehouse.”
The clerk flipped through a couple of pages in the ledger.
“Twenty-five gold crowns with a real name, forty for anonymous.”
“What?” Elias's eyebrows shot up instantly. “A name is actually worth fifteen gold crowns?!”
“Not asking what you put inside is worth fifteen,” the clerk said, finally looking up at him.
“No names, no addresses, no checking the source of the goods. If anything goes wrong with the warehouse door, we only recognize the warehouse token.”
Elias fell silent for two seconds, then nodded. “Makes sense. It's so expensive I can't even argue.”
In Hastings Port, fifteen gold crowns could buy quite a few things. Among them, it apparently also bought the phrase, “I've never seen this person.”
He counted out forty gold crowns and pushed them over.
The clerk verified the money and retrieved a palm-sized copper token from a slot behind him. Its edges were polished bright, with two lines stamped on the front:
East Bank Pier Seven.
Warehouse Forty-Seven.
“Another token with the same number is nailed to the warehouse door,” the clerk said, handing him the copper token. “The deliverymen only look at the numbers, to avoid sending coffins into wine cellars or moving rum to where dead bodies are kept.”
“Your usual cargo seems quite diverse.”
“We don't ask.”
“Excellent. Your professionalism is admirable.”
Elias slipped the warehouse token into the inner pocket of his trench coat, his thumb rubbing against the indented numbers.
He hadn't rented this warehouse because he planned to develop a storage business in Hastings Port.
The previous 【Mist Navigation Port-Return Ritual】 had brought the 【Moon Gate】 to the West Bank Third Supply Depot using only a supply manifest stamped with the Hastings Port harbor seal.
That manifest was tied to the entire port; the direction was sufficient, but the exact landing spot was somewhat down to luck.
But this pair of warehouse tokens was different. One belonged solely to Warehouse Forty-Seven, and the other was nailed directly to its door.
As long as he pressed it into the center of the ritual next time, from an associative standpoint, it should be far more precise than a manifest pointing to an entire city.
Of course, this was merely a deduction.
More importantly, there was no name of Elias Rockland here, nor was there the name John Constantine.
If the Ascetic Society was indeed targeting him, as long as he wasn't caught red-handed when opening the door, even if they followed the rental records afterward, they would only find an empty warehouse rented for forty gold crowns.
As for the island reef twenty nautical miles away, it would obviously be best if it wasn't exposed.
Elias wasn't sure if powerful ascetics could sense the 【Moon Gate】.
Logically speaking, that was a Scale Eight divine-tier spell; it shouldn't be like a roadside gaslight that anyone passing by could tell was lit.
But lately, he didn't dare to fully trust the phrase “logically speaking.” Any single event on this island could ultimately tell him with cold facts that logic was only meant to comfort people before things went wrong.
Elias pulled out his pocket watch. There were less than thirty minutes left before the 【Moon Gate】 closed.
“Crap.” He snapped the watch cover shut with a click and turned to leave.
This was no time to study new landing spots. The current door was still at the West Bank Third Supply Depot.
If he couldn't make it, he would have to find a bed for himself in Hastings Port and pray that Jack could feed the Waning Moon Key back to full with that crate of spirit restoration potions.
Rather than trusting the speed of Jack chugging potions, Elias preferred to trust his own legs.
As he passed the mouth of the alley, he bought a coarse cloth cloak commonly worn by dockworkers from a secondhand clothing stall.
The cloak carried a smell of coal ash that couldn't be washed clean, and there were dried fish scales on the cuffs.
But the advantages were also obvious. Once he put it on, even if he carried a wooden crate down the street in broad daylight, passersby would only think this dockworker had a lot of work today.
Elias wrapped the cloak around himself and left through another alley in the black market.
Meanwhile, a street away from the Society of Freemen, a carriage bearing the crescent holy emblem of the Ascetic Society remained parked by the roadside.
Inside the carriage, Raymond Sage leaned against the back row, his fingers tapping his knee one after another.
He had already gone over his meeting with “John Constantine” tonight twice in his mind.
The first time, he was looking for where the other party had slipped up. The second time, he suddenly realized that he might have thought of the sequence in reverse.
“His suspicion of me is only one aspect,” Raymond said, looking up.
The accompanying ascetic sitting opposite him stopped organizing the documents. “Bishop?”
“Before he even began to suspect me, he was already checking his pocket watch repeatedly,” Raymond spoke slowly. “He refused to wait for the church's people to arrive.
“With those two unconscious people, he preferred to haul them onto a public carriage with Vesper just to send them back to the relief shelter immediately. After the commission ended, he didn't go to the Society of Freemen to collect the money, and instead had that untraceable messenger collect it on his behalf.”
The accompanying ascetic thought for a moment. “He was worried we were waiting at the Society of Freemen?”
“That's only one of the reasons,” Raymond's finger stopped tapping. “He wasn't simply avoiding me. He was in a rush.”
The carriage fell silent for a few breaths.
Outside on the street, a night-shift public carriage rolled over the gravel, the rumble of its wheels filtering through the curtains.
“What could he be rushing for?” the accompanying ascetic asked.
Raymond suddenly let out two dry chuckles.
The laugh was stiff, sounding like someone who had just learned the skill and hadn't had time to practice.
“Then it can only be a door that is about to close.”
The accompanying ascetic froze. “You suspect it's a spatial spell of the Moon Lord pathway?”
Raymond did not answer.
“Bring the church's Moon-Folding Plate,” he ordered.
“But the oracle does not allow us to locate the target.”
“So we are not looking for a person,” Raymond adjusted his monocle, his tone as calm as if he were correcting a ritual record.
“We are looking for which area of space in Hastings Port was folded by a spell of the Moon Lord pathway tonight.”
The accompanying ascetic opened his mouth, then closed it.
Literally speaking, this indeed wasn't looking for a person.
As for whether the Archbishops would accept this explanation, that would have to wait until Raymond actually found that space first.
A few minutes later, a night-shift church ascetic delivered a sealed black-silver disc to the carriage.
The Moon-Folding Plate was originally used to calibrate the Ascetic Society's 【Moon Aperture】.
It could not distinguish the caster, nor could it tell the user where the door led; it could only identify residual lunar creases in space.
Raymond placed the disc flat on his lap and broke the seal.
The silver needle in the center of the disc immediately began to spin.
First, it pointed southeast. Then, it swung violently to the north. Before it could even settle, the tip swept through another half-circle.
On the night of the sea beast invasion, multiple spaces in Hastings Port had been damaged.
Chaotic echoes overlapped, like a crowd of people knocking on a wall at the same time.
Raymond did not rush it.
Based on the spiritual properties within the creases, the accompanying ascetic crossed out the areas that did not contain the Moon Lord's aura one by one.
In the end, only a faint echo from the West Bank remained on the disc.
At the same time, Elias had already boarded an eastbound public carriage. This was naturally not the direction back to the West Bank Third Supply Depot.
He sat by the window, the hood of his cloak pulled down very low.
After the carriage passed three intersections, he suddenly pulled the bell to get off and ducked in front of a still-lit grocery store.
Elias did not look back.
He merely used the reflection in the shop window to scan the carriage from earlier, the street corner, and the crowd behind him.
No one got off to follow him. No carriages suddenly pulled over either.
He continued forward, turning into a narrow alley without streetlights.
The 【Moonlight Veil】 unfolded silently. The occasional glances passing over him slid off naturally.
Elias activated his Wind-Chaser Boots, leaped over a low wall, and landed in the yard of a warehouse behind another street.
A freight carriage heading back to the West Bank just happened to drive out of the yard gate.
Elias took a few quick steps, climbed onto the back of the carriage, and handed a coin to the driver.
“West Bank. Drop me off along the way.”
The driver tossed the coin in his hand and didn't even look back. “Hold on tight. If you fall off, it's not on me.”
“Don't worry. Right now, I value time even more than you do.”
The freight wagon rolled over the uneven stone road, the sacks at the back continuously bumping against Elias's shoulders with each jolt.
For the first time, he activated 【Moon Vision】 to inspect his cloak, the soles of his shoes, and the warehouse token, finding no spiritual marks.
The second time, he checked the street corners the wagon passed through, and still saw no abnormal spiritual traces persistently following him.
The third time, Elias even waited until the wagon turned past two streets before scanning behind him again.
Still clean. No one had followed him past two intersections.
No messenger was hovering in the air. Nor had any tracking spells landed on him.
Yet the cleaner it was, the more uneasy he felt.
Anyone who could actually be discovered by his three checks probably wouldn't be worth the Ascetic Society sending out in the first place.
Elias pulled out his pocket watch again. Thirteen minutes.
Each tick of the watch hands seemed to remind him that the most expensive thing he had tonight was not those materials, nor was it the anonymous warehouse.
It was this path home that was rapidly expiring.
He put away his pocket watch.
“Hey, can you go any faster?”
“Any faster and the horse will have to rest tomorrow.”
“Let it rest, I'll pay overtime.”
The driver finally glanced back at him, then cracked the reins.
The wagon accelerated abruptly, slamming Elias's back straight into a pile of sacks.
At the same time, the Moon-Folding Plate inside the Ascetic Society's carriage suddenly vibrated.
The silver needle, which had still been drifting between several blocks of the West Bank, suddenly stopped as if it had finally bitten onto something.
The tip of the needle pointed firmly at a single location.
The accompanying ascetic immediately spread out the city map and compared it with the scale on the plate.
“West Bank Third Supply Depot.” His voice tightened slightly. “The echo there is still strengthening.”
Raymond had already stood up.
“It's not a residue.” He stared at the motionless silver needle and picked up his cane. “The door is still open.”
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