“None of your business.”
Elias looked mysterious, clearly having no intention of answering.
“My turn to ask.”
He leaned back against the table again, his hand resting seemingly casually on his elemental revolver.
“Why did you keep holding back earlier?”
Severin looked at Livia, who was still pinned to the floor by the wooden stakes.
“Because she is still alive.”
“Since you didn't kill her after gaining control, there was no need for me to turn a theft into three corpses.”
“That actually makes sense.”
Elias nodded.
“I thought your kind fought to the death upon meeting as a form of racial etiquette.”
“That's only in stories,” Severin said calmly. “The longer you live, the more you learn who you shouldn't kill, and what prices you cannot afford to pay.”
Elias raised an eyebrow.
This girl looked seventeen or eighteen at most, yet she spoke of “living longer” without blushing in the slightest.
But then again, she actually did have the right to say it. Who knew, maybe she had already lived for hundreds of years.
“The Welzen family did not lack money or land back then,” Severin said, looking at the moonlight shining in from outside the door, her voice softening slightly. “Some members of the family treated the commoners on our land as food. They even sent living people into the manor's cellars under the guise of unpaid taxes or labor service.”
“When this was exposed, the family elders refused to hand them over. They believed that the lives of a few commoners were not worth putting noble Kindred on trial.”
“And then the Dawn Church came?” Elias asked.
“They came,” Severin nodded. “There was nothing wrong with them executing those people.” She paused, the dark-red spirituality in her eyes settling down. “But burning the rest of the clan alive can't exactly be called right, either.”
The basement fell into a brief silence.
Elias put away his playful expression from before.
Every wrong has its cause, and every debt has its debtor.
The ones who deserved to die died, and the ones who deserved to live should have lived.
This logic wasn't complicated anywhere, but once a fire actually started, many people only cared about choosing sides, not distinguishing individuals.
“Otherwise, why do you think we're so poor?” Livia, lying on the floor, spoke up testily. “Our land is gone, our businesses were burned down, and the survivors still have to buy blood bags. We don't steal, we don't rob, we don't just grab random people, and we even have to spend money just to eat. We're about to become the most law-abiding vampires in all of Hastings Port.”
“Isn't Hastings Port a bit too small of a scope?” Elias was clearly unconvinced. “If we're allowed to use enough qualifiers, I could say I'm the most eloquent person in this basement. And don't forget, you just stole a notebook.”
“That was for the family.”
“Many criminals have families too.”
“It's fine,” Elias comforted her. “At least you've gained the praise of high morality.”
Livia stared at him. “Can that stuff buy blood bags?”
“No.”
“But you see, poverty has allowed us to quickly establish a common language.”
Severin looked at Livia on the floor, then at Elias, who had a perfectly natural expression. Her gaze became indescribably strange.
“It's my first time meeting someone like you.”
“Congratulations on broadening your horizons.”
“Not a single serious word out of your mouth, yet you do things so cautiously, as if you've laid traps under every single step in advance.”
Severin swept her gaze over his gun and trench coat.
“Based on the scale of spirituality you've shown, you're at most at the level of Scale Three, yet you managed to block me and pin Livia here to negotiate a price.”
“Thanks for the compliment.”
“And,” Severin focused her attention back on Elias, “I also sense a trace of a similar aura on you.”
“Oh?”
Elias's eyes flickered slightly. “You mean I also look like a noble?”
“It's not the aura of the Kindred,” Severin ignored his self-flattery. “It's a spirituality that shares some origin with the power of the Kindred. It's very faint and very strange. It only appeared for a brief moment just now when you used the Moon Lord spells and those bizarre tricks at the same time.”
The smile on Elias's face didn't change, but his mind instantly grew alert.
He had felt it too just now.
When Severin had draped the darkness over herself, that power had simultaneously caused the two Rational Circuits in his sea of consciousness to react very slightly.
The one belonging to the Moon Lord was not hard to explain.
There was already some connection between the power of ascetics and the Kindred.
Starting from Scale Three, ascetics of the Warding School had a chance to obtain the 【Curse of the Moon】 from the Origin Web.
At Scale Three, it allowed the caster to transform into a werewolf; when the spell advanced to Scale Four with their Scale level, it could further manifest as a Kindred form.
However, the spirituality of the Moon Lord pathway was ultimately different from a true Kindred.
“But that aura on you...”
Severin frowned, seemingly searching for an accurate description.
“It's hard for me to evaluate.”
“Then don't evaluate it,” Elias cut her off immediately. “Usually, with things that can't be explained clearly, the more you say, the more mistakes you make.”
Though his words were dismissive, his consciousness had already sunk into his sea of consciousness.
The newly appeared Inverted Mirror Corridor still hung quietly above the silver circuit. The nine nodes showed no abnormalities, and they did not respond to Severin's aura again.
But this did not explain why a second Rational Circuit—opened by “Jiang Huan” and filled with street tricks—would share similarities with the Kindred.
Was it because of that godless ritual?
Or was it because the person who left him the ritual had also come into contact with whatever the Welzen family was guarding?
Elias couldn't think of an answer, nor did he intend to continue researching himself in front of two vampires.
The best way to deal with questions that couldn't be figured out for the moment was to remember them first, rather than letting his head explode on the spot trying to think.
“Alright.”
He looked at the translucent membrane in Severin's hand.
The red light on it had stabilized, and the Owl-Head Ruins along with the broken lines around them were completely preserved.
As for the notebook, he had already checked it before putting it into his Gluttonous Stomach; there was no residual blood or abnormal spiritual fluctuations.
“Information exchange complete.”
Elias raised his gun barrel, signaling Severin to step back.
“Now, release her.”
“Let's make this clear first: if anyone suddenly takes a step forward, I will assume the deal is off.”
Severin didn't argue. Carrying the rubbing, she retreated to the stone steps.
Only then did Elias squat down. One hand held the gun throughout, while the other grabbed a wooden stake.
“This might hurt a bit.”
“Why didn't you warn me when you were hammering them in?” Livia asked through gritted teeth.
“We weren't close back then.”
He pulled out the first wooden stake cleanly.
Livia groaned, her pale fingers curling tightly.
Not much blood flowed from the wound, only a wisp of white smoke rising from where the residual pure silver had scorched her.
After the second stake was pulled out, Severin flicked a drop of fresh blood over.
The wound on Livia's wrist quickly closed, and her stiff fingers finally regained feeling.
Elias casually wiped the two wooden stakes clean, retrieving them along with the silver nails in the cracks of the floor and the pure silver wire by the door.
The money had already been spent; leaving them as souvenirs for the vampires would be too wasteful.
“Pleasure doing business with you, ladies.”
He walked to the door and adjusted the brim of his derby hat.
“I didn't find it pleasant at all!”
Livia sat up, rubbing her still-numb wrists.
“At least we didn't fight to the death tonight, did we?”
Elias smiled.
“Farewell, ladies.”
【Moonlight Veil】 fell silently, and his figure quickly faded into the night of Red Post Street.
By the time Severin chased after him out of the broken door, there was nothing left on the street but the wind swirling a few pieces of old newspaper under the dim yellow streetlights.
“Miss, our savings are completely gone,” Livia said, walking up the stone steps while leaning against the wall, her voice filled with pain. “What do we do now?”
“The progenitor's blood is more important than all of this.” Severin tucked away the translucent membrane, her gaze still fixed in the direction Elias had vanished. “Besides, if those three letters he mentioned are real, even if we got the money back, we wouldn't escape being wanted by the Dawn Church.”
Livia fell silent for a couple of breaths.
“Where do we go now?”
“Let's leave here first,” Severin said. “We can't return to the Clock Tower Inn either.”
The two Kindred quickly disappeared into the alleyway on the other side.
Elias, on the other hand, had no time to worry about their predicament.
He switched streets twice, used his 【Cloak of Mediocrity】 to turn himself into an ordinary worker who had just finished a night shift, and confirmed that no vampires were pursuing him before rushing back to the Society of Freemen at his fastest speed.
The night-shift scribe saw him enter from afar and looked up at the clock on the wall. “Less than twenty minutes left.”
“I know,” Elias said, slapping the brass token for the delayed-dispatch letterbox onto the counter. “Cancel the three delivery letters. Don't send a single one.”
The scribe verified the spiritual mark and turned the brass pointer back to its original position.
Three neat mechanical clicks sounded from inside the letterbox, and the letters that had already been sent into different delivery slots were spat back out.
Elias tore off the parts with the Red Post Street address and the vampire descriptions right in front of him, leaving only the blank backs of the paper to stuff back into his trench coat.
The deterrence bought with three gold crowns should be destroyed once used; he couldn't let it turn around and cause trouble for him.
Professor Moreau, who had been waiting in the reception area, had already stood up.
Elias pulled the reddish-brown notebook from his Gluttonous Stomach and placed it in front of him. “Check it.”
Moreau flipped to the Owl-Head rubbing page, then quickly checked the cover, spine, and several pages with personal spiritual marks.
After confirming everything was intact, he let out a clear sigh of relief and tightly shook Elias's right hand.
According to the Society's sign-off rules, the night-shift scribe had Elias fill out a record of the incident.
Elias only wrote: “Clashed with two Kindred, notebook retrieved.” As for names, whereabouts, and the specific transaction, he left those columns blank.
“Impressive, Mr. Constantine.”
“You solved something even Mr. Horne couldn't.”
“Let's not talk about that,” Elias waved his hand. “Can we settle the commission fee now?”
Moreau's gratitude paused for a moment before he let out a helpless laugh. “Of course.”
He signed his name on the sign-off document and confirmed it with his spirituality.
The night-shift scribe then took out several bearer checks from the lockbox, totaling one thousand eight hundred gold crowns.
Elias checked the anti-counterfeiting patterns one by one against the light.
Just as a sense of financial security began to rise in his heart, he remembered the ticket in his inner trench coat pocket for the item that would be permanently forfeited in four days.
One thousand four hundred gold crowns had already grown legs and run off toward the Grey Bridge Pawnshop.
The remaining money still had to be used to buy subsequent materials, pay warehouse rent, and prepare consumables for the Waning Moon Key and that room full of things that ate spirituality.
The one thousand eight hundred he had just received suddenly didn't seem so generous anymore.
“Mr. Constantine,” the night-shift scribe asked while stamping the commission as completed, “you didn't continue investigating those two Kindred?”
“The commission was to retrieve the notebook.” Elias carefully put the bearer checks into his trench coat. “Background checks cost extra.”
The night-shift scribe looked at him. “Is Mr. Constantine very short on money?”
“Let's put it this way,” Elias paused. “Any problem that can be solved with money is a massive problem for me.”
Rate on N.U.
