“Alright, now we can exchange information.”
Elias slipped the pawn ticket into the inner pocket of his trench coat, then lifted the money bag on the table to confirm that the gold crowns inside hadn't been damaged or lost in the brief scuffle. Satisfied, he looked up at Severin.
“Release her first,” Severin said, pointing at Livia, who was still lying on the floor.
“No can do.”
“What?!”
The anger Severin had just managed to suppress flared up again.
“I already gave you the items!”
“I know,” Elias nodded. “Which is why I promised she would leave here alive.”
“Then why haven't you pulled out the stake yet?”
“The price paid guarantees the transaction, not my early release of the safety,” Elias said, gesturing with his gun barrel between the two Kindred. “How do I know that the moment I let her go, the two of you won't team up to take the money and pawn ticket back?”
“Once the information exchange is over and the spiritual transfer is confirmed to have left the notebook undamaged, I will naturally remove the stake,” he added. “Until then, she is both a hostage and collateral. Considering your track record tonight, I think it's only prudent to keep both.”
Livia gritted her teeth and said, “The Welzen family does not go back on completed deals.”
“Oh? Your family was just trying to steal a notebook that didn't belong to you a moment ago.”
“That was different!”
“How so?”
“...”
Livia couldn't come up with a response right away.
A flicker of frustration crossed Severin's beautiful face. Just as she was about to speak, Elias pulled out his pocket watch and glanced at it.
“Besides, ladies, our time is limited.”
He snapped the watch shut with a soft click.
“You wouldn't want the Dawn Church showing up to knock on the door before we finish our exchange, would you? Though I still don't understand why you two are so timid.”
The door to this basement had already been blown to pieces by him anyway. If the Church really came, they wouldn't even need to knock; they could just walk right in and make the arrest.
Severin stared at him for a few breaths before finally squeezing a word out from between her teeth.
“Fine.”
“That's more like it.”
Elias retrieved the reddish-brown notebook from his Gluttonous Stomach, flipped to the page containing the rubbing of the Owl-Head Ruins, and laid it flat on the table.
He didn't holster his gun. His right hand remained resting on the grip, while his left hand pressed down on the edge of the page.
He had even connected the spiritual threads of 【Sleight of Hand】 to it. The moment Severin's blood showed any untoward movement, he would instantly snatch the notebook back and tuck it into his trickster pocket dimension.
Severin noticed his wariness but didn't comment.
She pulled a translucent membrane from her coat pocket. The blood seeping from her fingertip spread slowly along its edges, quickly saturating it. The dark red blood gradually faded across the membrane, leaving only a faint, lingering red glow.
“Now it's your turn,” Elias said.
“What do you want to know?” Severin hovered the membrane over the rubbed page, hesitating to press it down. “Tell me where you got this gun.”
We were back to this.
Elias had long suspected she wouldn't let this question slide, but his face didn't betray even a hint of hesitation.
“An inheritance.”
“Whose inheritance?”
“A good brother of mine gave it to me.” At this, his tone suddenly grew somber, and his gaze drifted down to the Midnight Owl on the gun's grip.
“But he's already dead.”
The basement was already cold and damp, and a draft from the shattered doorway swept in at that moment.
Elias lowered his head slightly, his thumb gently brushing over the grip, looking as though he had suddenly fallen into a painful memory he wished to forget.
“Before he passed, he handed this gun to me and urged me to find the origin of the Midnight Owl.”
He fell silent for a couple of breaths, barely holding back from squeezing out a couple of real tears.
Strictly speaking, this wasn't entirely a lie.
Galahad Midnight was indeed dead, and Elias had indeed met him.
The black-armored knight had a Midnight Owl emblem on his breastplate, his surname was Midnight, and this gun also bore the Midnight Owl. No matter how one looked at it, they were linked.
Furthermore, before that conscious space collapsed, Galahad had indeed gripped his shoulder, snapping him out of the Soul Screams for a brief moment, and left him with the parting words: “We will meet again.”
Elias didn't know much about him, but he couldn't say he felt absolutely nothing for the dead man.
As for the "good brother gifting the gun" and the "deathbed entrustment," those were merely minor artistic embellishments that didn't affect the overall truth.
What was a person's most important quality?
Honesty.
And Elias just so happened to possess this precious trait.
Seeing his grief-stricken expression, the wariness in Severin's eyes softened slightly. “My condolences.”
“Thank you,” Elias replied with a heavy nod, but immediately looked up. “Your turn. Tell me everything you know.”
His sudden recovery from his brief bout of grief was so swift that Severin felt something was slightly off, yet she couldn't pinpoint exactly what.
Ultimately, she lowered her head and pressed the blood-soaked membrane onto the rubbed page.
A faint red spirituality seeped into the paper's fibers. Tiny indentations that couldn't be distinguished by ink alone began to emerge, caught perfectly by the membrane like faint shadows.
As she maintained the spiritual transfer, Severin spoke:
“The family only passed down a single sentence.”
“‘The owl returns with the old item; do not ask their name, do not take their things, do not block their path.’”
Elias waited for a moment.
“That's it?”
“That's it.”
“Does ‘owl’ refer to a person, a group of people, or anyone carrying this design?”
“I don't know.”
“And what is the ‘old item’? Does this gun count?”
“I don't know that either.”
Elias's eyelid twitched.
“Your family sure did a thorough job passing down the phrase itself, while leaving absolutely zero explanation to go with it.”
“It is already a miracle we managed to preserve the exact words,” Severin said. “When the Welzen family migrated to the west, we lost far more than just a gate. Many ancient texts only survived as a sentence or two quoted by later generations.”
“Then why did you ask for my name earlier?”
“I asked where the gun came from. I didn't ask for your name.”
“Fine, I'll give you that loophole.” Elias pointed at his Gluttonous Stomach. “But you still tried to steal my things and block my path.”
Severin looked up, annoyed.
“How was I supposed to know if you were the ‘owl’ mentioned in the ancestral teachings?”
“Our family has already declined to this point. Why should I strictly adhere to a rule that no one can even explain?”
The basement fell silent.
Her argument was so reasonable that Elias found himself momentarily speechless.
They were so poor they could barely afford blood bags, yet he was expecting them to follow rules set by ancestors thousands of years ago. It was indeed a bit hypocritical of him.
He could only turn to look at Livia.
She avoided his gaze, focusing entirely on studying the cracks in the floor tiles.
Clearly, having just violated all three rules—asking, taking, and blocking—she had no intention of joining the conversation.
“That's really all you know?” Elias asked, still somewhat unwilling to accept it.
“That's all.”
The membrane in Severin's hand had already fully absorbed the indentations from the rubbed page, and a ring of previously invisible, broken lines was gradually appearing around the Owl-Head Ruins.
Elias stared at those lines for a few moments before asking, “Then do you know of the ‘Midnight’ family?”
Severin's hand visibly paused.
She looked up, recalling for a moment while staring at the ceiling.
“I've heard of them.”
Elias had only been testing the waters, but upon hearing her answer, he immediately sat up straighter. “You really know of them?”
“Our family's ancient texts have records of them.” Severin looked at him. “The Midnight family was a house during Arnova's Second Epoch.”
“The Second Epoch?!” Elias blurted out in shock.
That was way too long ago!
Velen's history had two concurrent calendar systems.
The one most familiar to commoners was based on the formal establishment of the faith of the Seven Orthodox Gods, dividing history into BC and AC. This was the system used in newspapers, official documents, and daily life.
However, the churches, nobility, and ancient literature still preserved a far more troublesome alternative: the ancient calendar system.
The ancient calendar system divided the vast stretch of history into three great epochs.
The known records of the First Epoch spanned only a single millennium, while the Second Epoch lasted for two.
The Third Epoch, which they currently lived in, had just transitioned from its first millennium into its second.
To make matters worse, documents from different regions often mixed the two systems.
The same war might be recorded as a certain year BC in the kingdom's archives, while in the church's surviving fragments, it would be written as a specific year of a specific millennium in the Second Epoch.
Elias had suspected more than once that whoever invented this system did so purely to prevent future generations from ever understanding history.
However, since he had previously assumed ancient calendars had nothing to do with removing his curse, he had never wasted any energy on these confusing conversions.
His original self had touched upon it during university, but those memories were about as useful as obscure dates memorized for a literature class. If no one asked, he could pretend he remembered, but the moment he actually had to calculate it, his mind only came up with a jumble of conflicting numbers.
But things were different now.
The Second Epoch.
Galahad Midnight wasn't someone from a few decades or even a few centuries ago.
He had been dead for thousands of years, so long that the current nations, churches, and families might not even resemble what he once knew.
A man who had been dead for millennia had appeared in the depths of Elias's consciousness when he was on the verge of death, recognized his pathway, told him to drink his second potion, and asserted with absolute certainty that they would meet again.
Elias was utterly dumbfounded, and he suddenly felt that every word Galahad had left behind was significantly heavier than before.
Severin slowly peeled the membrane off the rubbed page.
The original page remained undamaged, but the pale red membrane now bore a far more complete illustration of the Owl-Head Ruins.
Elias carefully felt the paper, confirming no blood or residual spirituality had been left behind, before closing the notebook and stuffing it back into his Gluttonous Stomach.
She had been inspecting the results of the transfer, but upon hearing Elias's gasp, her gaze slowly shifted from the membrane to his face.
“You actually know of the Midnight family?”
“Isn't that what I've been investigating all this time?” Elias quickly masked his emotions, returning to his usual nonchalant demeanor.
But the look Severin gave him grew increasingly strange.
She glanced first at the Gluttonous Stomach at Elias's waist, then at the elemental revolver, her brow furrowing tighter and tighter.
Velen and Arnova had contested the sovereignty of the White Tide Strait, the Emerald Sea Archipelago, ancient ruins, and the dominance of the churches of the Seven Orthodox Gods for centuries. Many archives involving ancient houses were not even publicly accessible within Velen.
Yet this man before her, who called himself John Constantine, not only carried a gun bearing the Midnight Owl, but could also instantly connect "Midnight" with a vanished Arnovian house upon hearing mention of the Second Epoch.
“You are researching ancient Arnovian families in Velen?”
“How on earth did you manage that?”
Rate on N.U.
