“A measuring tool...”
Ms. Cecil turned the word over in her mind, her gaze still fixed on the dismantled delivery valve.
Forty-seven wear marks of varying depths overlapped deep within the valve core, ultimately stopping neatly at the exact same position, as if someone had used forty-seven different bodies to repeatedly calibrate the same ruler.
She suddenly raised her hand.
【Mage's Hand】 pulled a file from the stack of dossiers at the edge of the desk and flipped to Oliver Brown's autopsy report.
A blue spiritual glow swept across the paper, and a translucent projection of a human body appeared over the evidence table.
On both sides of the spine, the artificially expanded spiritual circuits resembled several metal rings that had been forcibly pried open. Several sections were already torn, and the charred marks left by foreign spirituality still lingered on the edges.
Without being asked, Taylor brought up more than ten circuit diagrams of the sanatorium patients.
A row of projections lit up one by one in the dim evidence room.
The patients' ages, pathways, and spiritual capacities varied, and their expanded circuits were of different thicknesses.
Yet the auxiliary structures used to receive foreign spirituality all extended downward along the spine, merging into the exact same three nodes.
An identical structure existed within Oliver's body as well.
The only difference was that the delivery records of the sanatorium patients all stopped before reaching the stability scale, whereas Oliver's three nodes seemed to have been blown open simultaneously by a force far exceeding their upper limit of endurance, even burning the circuits originally used for shunting into charred scars.
Ms. Cecil stared at the charred blackness, recalling the report after the explosion at the office.
A mutated person losing control, a public disaster, and a report swiftly submitted to the council by Wayland to prove that Hastings Port desperately needed heavy firepower protection.
The experiment had already been conducted forty-seven times.
The stability line had also been measured long ago.
In that case, Oliver's loss of control might never have been a failure.
Was this what Wayland called a “win-win”?
First, use him to test what would happen when the safety line was crossed, then let his explosion speak on behalf of the Octowin.
In a single stroke, they had won twice.
“They could both verify what happens during excessive delivery and turn the explosion into evidence to secure firing clearance,” Sir Vere said, his voice growing even colder as he clearly reached the same conclusion. “They managed to use a single person twice.”
“At the moment, this is only a speculation,” Taylor said, refusing to let himself be carried away by anger. “The autopsy can prove they deliberately expanded Oliver's circuits, and it can prove he was injected with foreign spirituality before his death, but it cannot prove that the spirituality was delivered through this pipeline system.”
“I know,” Ms. Cecil said, closing several patient projections and leaving only Oliver's ruined circuit. “So we start by investigating who he came into contact with before entering the office.”
She looked at Sir Vere.
“The carriage driver, the doorman, the staff who received him that night, and the office's Origin Web access logs. Trace back twelve hours. Do not use public dispatch; only use people you currently trust.”
The mole within the branch had not yet been ferreted out. This order could not appear on official paper.
Sir Vere nodded but did not leave immediately. Instead, he took out a flat paper bag from the evidence he had brought back.
“And this.”
A palm-sized copper plate slid onto the table. Its corners were blackened by smoke and fire, and the back was still sticky with sealant.
Next to three curved scales, the words were written in sequence: Tide Level, Pendulum Variance, Acceptance Error.
“It was hidden on the back of the valve body,” Sir Vere said. “If the black box's mechanical feet hadn't ripped off the casing, we might not have spotted it.”
Taylor switched to a thinner alchemical probe, slowly sweeping its tip along the three score marks.
Faint golden light spots lit up one by one. However, instead of merging into a straight line like they did when measuring spiritual flow, they split into two offset curved tracks.
He scanned them again, his brow furrowing.
“This is not a flow scale.”
“Then what is it?”
“It's the deviation between three sets of data.” Taylor adjusted the probe, and the three curved lines in the projection shifted relative to one another. “Modern delivery equipment does not record the tide level. They only record pipeline pressure, spiritual concentration, and valve opening, plus a pipeline loss margin at most.”
Sir Vere looked at him. “We are only a few streets away from the sea. Is it so strange to consider the tide level?”
“Pipelines consider pressure,” Taylor said, tapping the top two words with his probe. “Only rituals consider the tide level.”
Taylor enlarged the projection, and many fine lines, barely visible to the naked eye, immediately appeared between the three scales. They were not independent of each other; rather, they centered around the “pendulum variance,” with one end connecting to the tide level and the other to the acceptance error.
“If they were simply sending spirituality into a storage tank, measuring the flow and loss would have been enough. A container's capacity is determined at the moment of its creation. Only when the delivered spirituality needs to be caught by another end—and that receiving end's carrying capacity undergoes changes—would they need to constantly correct the acceptance error.”
Sir Vere stared at the forty-seven wear marks from earlier. “So the scale slot that was carried away was not the endpoint.”
“At least, it doesn't look like it,” Taylor said, leaving room for doubt. “It resembles a balancing device. It first corrects the spirituality passing through the human circuits to a certain stable range, then sends it along the pipeline to the true receiving end. The patients had different spiritual capacities and circuit structures, yet the delivery ultimately stopped at the exact same position because the thing waiting on the other side to receive it only accepts that specific range.”
Ms. Cecil looked down at the copper plate.
The sanatorium was not an experimental ground for strengthening patients, but a dismantled delivery apparatus.
The hospital beds, the circuits, the scale slot, and the underground pipelines were all components.
Wayland had experimented on forty-seven people repeatedly just to let a certain force pass stably through the bodies of living humans and reach another location.
“The black box crawled into the pipelines not just to escape,” Sir Vere said, lifting the section of the valve covered in mechanical feet scratches. “It also wanted to read the remaining delivery parameters inside the pipeline.”
“The Secret Gold Reclamation Institute wants the technology; they aren't here to clean up Wayland's mess,” Ms. Cecil analyzed. “They will snatch the core and the parameters, but they won't waste effort destroying this criminal evidence for Wayland. Leaving the valve behind was likely because it was never within their scope of reclamation.”
Halfway through her sentence, she suddenly recalled Mireya's previous explanation regarding the Moon Bay pendulum.
The pendulum would convert the spiritual feedback from inside the seal into pendulum traces, and the trajectories left by natural decay and external intervention were entirely different.
And on the copper plate before her, “tide level” and “pendulum variance” happened to appear as well.
With the calibration records from two thousand years ago having just been burned to ashes, treating this similarity as a mere coincidence would be far too generous to Wayland.
Ms. Cecil did not make an immediate judgment.
She fetched a sheet of imprinting paper and laid it over the copper plate, then used three spirit-insulating strips to cover all the actual scales, leaving only the copper plate's structure, the path of the curved tracks, and the three terms.
Taylor watched her press silver powder across the paper. “Are we sending this to the Storm Inquisition?”
“No,” Ms. Cecil said, returning the original to the evidence case and resealing it with her private seal. “Let the Storm Judges come here to see it.”
“Only giving them this?”
“It's enough for them to answer our questions.”
She closed the case lid.
“Until I confirm who is trustworthy, I do not intend to let any side have both the questions and the complete answers at the same time.”
The verification team from the Storm Inquisition was still in the temporary reading room upstairs.
In less than fifteen minutes, Mireya walked into the evidence room carrying a waterproof leather case, with Joshua following behind, holding a thick folder of files under his arm.
Mireya took the imprinting paper. After a single glance at the neatly erased scale positions, she furrowed her brows and looked up at Ms. Cecil. “You are only showing me half?”
“Because I only need half of the answer,” Ms. Cecil said calmly.
The two women locked eyes across the evidence table for a brief moment. Joshua silently opened the file folder, clearly having no intention of joining their staring contest.
Mireya finally withdrew her gaze and laid the imprinting paper at the bottom of her instrument.
Three tiny storm crystal needles rose from the leather case, hovering respectively above the three terms.
As spirituality was injected, the originally static curved lines on the paper were projected into the air, rearranging into two parallel trajectories that maintained a slight, persistent offset.
Although the actual values had been removed, leaving segments of blank space in the projection, the correspondence between the trajectories remained clearly visible.
The dissatisfaction on Mireya's face was gradually replaced by solemnity.
“An old-style dual-track tidal calculation.”
Joshua's pen paused mid-note. “Are you sure?”
“The structure is unmistakable,” Mireya said, raising her hand to nudge one of the trajectories. “In the past, large-scale maritime rituals would use a fixed pendulum to record the spiritual cycle of the ritual's location. Tides, moon phases, and changes in the sea area itself would all leave pendulum traces on the first trajectory.”
She pointed to the second trajectory. “At the same time, every time the receiving end accepts spirituality, it sends back a feedback pulse, forming the second trajectory. The two trajectories are supposed to remain within a fixed range. Any deviation that appears between them is the pendulum variance.”
Taylor looked at the sealed scales on the copper plate.
No wonder this apparatus had to record both the tide level and calculate the acceptance error.
It had never been measuring how much spirituality passed through the pipeline, but whether the delivery end and another receiver could maintain a constant balance.
“Is it related to the Moon Bay pendulum calibration records of 657 BC?” Ms. Cecil asked.
Mireya showed no surprise at the question.
She stared at the two value-lacking trajectories for a moment, then shook her head decisively.
“It could be related, or it could come from other ancient maritime rituals. Dual-track tidal calculation was once used in many large-scale rituals. A similar structure does not mean they point to the same place.”
She turned off one of the crystal needles, and the projection immediately dimmed. “Without the original pendulum traces of 657 BC, and without the actual scales of this copper plate, anyone who claims they can be certain is lying.”
Ms. Cecil was not disappointed. She had removed the data not to obtain an indefensible answer.
“However, one thing is certain,” Mireya suddenly said.
She dragged the “acceptance error” alone to the center of the projection.
Unlike the tide level scale that recorded the local cycle, this curved track was not a fixed-ratio correction line; its structure left several pre-designed slots that could reverse-correct the baseline.
“The thing on the other side changes its own carrying capacity.”
Taylor asked, “Could it just be internal wear and tear of the storage device?”
“Wear and tear only accumulates, or recovers according to a fixed cycle; it doesn't require modifying the acceptance baseline in reverse,” Mireya pointed to several slots. “An ordinary container would not produce this kind of error. Even if it were an alchemical storage tank with self-repair capabilities, the changes should be calculable from the preset circuits.”
Joshua's pen paused once more. Only the faint hum of the operating instrument remained in the evidence room.
Sir Vere stared at the constantly shifting trajectory and asked slowly, “Then what would be on the other end?”
Mireya did not answer immediately.
She superimposed the two trajectories once again, as if ruling out the final possibility.
Only after several breaths did she look toward the copper plate sealed in the case.
“Something with an independent spiritual cycle.”
She paused.
“Perhaps...”
“A living thing?”
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