Chapter — 5

  The City of Etherium

  A refined carriage rolled through the main gates of Etherium, its lacquered panels catching the pale morning light. Emblazoned on its side was a crest of two crossed swords, a single drop of blood depicted at their center.

  Through the carriage window, a middle-aged man with an unremarkable face sat in quiet observation of the passing streets. His only distinguishing feature was a small scar tucked at the corner of his mouth — a faint, crooked thing that seemed to curl into a permanent smirk. As the carriage wound through the city, his gaze drifted across the crowds, and whenever it fell upon the peasants shuffling along the roadside, a flicker of contempt crossed his eyes.

  He exhaled slowly and closed them, retreating inward.

  Though he held the rank of a First-Tier Knight, that title had been his since youth — and it had not grown since. In a world where fate was largely dictated by talent, he had been dealt a meager hand. From his earliest years, he had dreamed of becoming a legendary knight, a name spoken with reverence. Yet no matter how relentlessly he trained, how fiercely he pushed himself, the threshold of the Second Tier remained an unbreachable wall. Thirteen years he had stood before it, unchanged.

  And so the rumor had ignited something dangerous in him.

  Even the mere sight of a Second-Tier knight had long been enough to hollow him with envy. That envy had become a fever — one that drove him to seize every opportunity, regardless of the risk. He could have lived comfortably in Etherium, managing the modest holdings of House Arven without worry. But obsession is a cruel master, and it had never allowed him to stand still.

  Then, at last, when despair had nearly swallowed him whole, he heard it — a whisper passing through the shadows of the black market. An elixir had surfaced during the last night of trading. One that, according to those who dared speak of it, could forcibly propel a person beyond their current tier. The warnings that accompanied it were equally bold: failure could bring devastating side effects. Death was among them.

  He had not cared in the slightest.

  The very possibility of advancement was enough. That fragile thread of hope had wound itself around his throat and refused to let go.

  When he investigated further, he discovered the price — five hundred magic crystals. A staggering sum. Had he learned of this even a month earlier, he might have gathered it in time. But recent seasons had been spent in idle excess, and his reserves had dwindled to barely four hundred crystals.

  That was when the old contract surfaced in his memory.

  Years ago, he had signed an agreement with the director of a newly established academy. It was not something he had valued at the time, but now it represented his only viable leverage. Even if it meant lying — fabricating promises of contract extension — he was willing to do it.

  Interfering with the contract was possible, in theory. Without tangible profit, however, House Arven would not alter it on his behalf, regardless of his nominal status as a royal envoy. Status, after all, was not the same as influence. House Arven had already secured the academy's building, its grounds, and its maintenance — effectively for nothing. What they received could have fetched a considerable sum at auction, coveted by powerful figures, particularly those of magical persuasion.

  Getting involved carried little personal risk for him. The current director was, by all accounts, as talent-poor as he was.

  But today's reply had planted a seed of doubt.

  He had not seen the young man directly. And surely — surely — someone of no remarkable power, occupied with students and lectures, could pose no real threat. The academy was a cage of sorts, and its keeper was no lion.

  And yet — it was the confidence in Arlin's voice that lingered.

  "Is it possible he has a reserve of crystals? Beyond that, I can't quite understand how he could have accumulated so many in so little time. I only meant to press him, test his footing — and yet the outcome was something I didn't anticipate."

  He had approached Arlin intending nothing more than a small swindle — a handful of additional crystals through clever misdirection. Something had gone sideways.

  "Tsk. Even if he finds a way to gather the funds, the contract will still be void the moment its conditions go unmet."

  A slow smile crept across his face as a thought surfaced.

  "Attack me? He has neither the power nor the backing for it."

  At that very moment, a handful of silhouettes stood motionless atop a tall building, their gaze tracking the carriage as it wound through the streets below.

  Among the clones, one pair of eyes held a sharper, more concentrated light. Arlin had taken direct control of that body, using it as a vessel to observe Ganm from a distance.

  "He's scheming something."

  "That smile gives it away — calculating."

  "Where do we find two hundred crystals?"

  "Through the Harn family..."

  One by one, the shadows behind Arlin offered their assessments, thinking aloud alongside him in a quiet, analytical rhythm.

  If Ganm's words held any truth, time was already bleeding away. Arlin needed to gather the crystals quickly — not out of desperation, but to buy himself room to maneuver before the threat of the academy's closure became irreversible.

  The contract his father had signed was the deepest complication. In this world, there was no concept of duplicate copies for both parties. His father had signed it, and Ganm had walked away with the original. A magical contract was no fragile document — ordinary mages and knights could not dissolve one by force. But the more pressing problem was that Arlin did not know the precise conditions written within it.

  That uncertainty was exactly why he had displaced himself here — to think clearly, to plan directly.

  "Split into groups. Shadow him carefully — leave no trace. One of you is to locate the contract and learn its exact terms. Another is to track Ganm's movements and gather intelligence.

  Stay cautious. The knights are still on high alert following the incident. As for the location where the mistake was made — keep one observer at a distance, watching.

  The rest of you, encircle the Harn family. Our priority is finding the crystal mine. That discovery opens every door."

  With his orders spoken, Arlin withdrew his awareness from the clone and settled back into his own body.

  He was sitting at his desk, alone in the office.

  "...Sigh."

  A long, slow exhale. A faint heaviness settled over him — not quite fatigue, but something close to it, pooling behind his eyes.

  "Hmm. It seems that transferring consciousness strains the mind... The more I use this ability, the more I come to understand it. — Caldrin!"

  He raised his voice toward the door. Silence answered him.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Ah. He must not be here."

  Just as he was resigning himself to rest, a returning signal pulsed faintly at the edges of his awareness. One of his clones — the one he had tasked with retrieving the alchemy primer — was making its way back.

  He summoned it, and moments later the shadow arrived, placing the book of basic alchemy into his hands.

  Arlin opened it immediately.

  The opening pages were a monument to self-congratulation — lavish descriptions of how rare and irreplaceable the volume was, followed by several more paragraphs praising the author's magnanimous spirit for making the secrets of alchemy available to all.

  With thinly veiled irritation, Arlin began flipping forward at speed.

  It was not until he reached the halfway point that anything of genuine value appeared. He had come dangerously close to hurling the book out the window.

  Slim as the volume was, having half of it composed of decorative nonsense made him feel as though he'd been cleverly swindled.

  He exhaled, reined in his annoyance, and refocused.

  What followed was worth the wait. The text opened with a foundational magical circle designed for the deformation of physical objects — weak in raw power, but precise in application. It moved on to the essential base components, the principles of material interaction, the conditions under which transmutation became stable.

  Time passed without him noticing. He could have assigned a clone to read it on his behalf, but there was something in this text that held him — the strange interplay between a written language that should have been foreign and his inexplicable ability to comprehend it. The knowledge itself was unlike anything he had encountered before.

  He read on, and the hours slid quietly past him.

  Evening descended over Etherium, draping the city in amber and shadow.

  Unlike the usual rhythms of the night, the streets were alive with far more guards than was customary. Patrols moved in measured formations, lanterns swaying in their hands, eyes sharp and searching.

  Through this heightened vigilance, the shadows moved like whispers.

  Two of the clones assigned to track Ganm crept toward the building that belonged to him — a structure that, while part of House Arven's holdings, served as his personal residence in the city. They advanced with extreme caution, reading the patterns of the guards, timing their movements with practiced precision.

  Whenever their five-second intangibility began to run thin, they slipped into the earth itself, tunneling forward in silence, surfacing only when they found a shadowed crevice to wait out the recharge. In this way — patient, methodical, invisible — they slipped past every checkpoint and into the building.

  The interior was lavish in a self-important sort of way. Servants moved through the corridors on quiet, unhurried feet, attending to the final tasks of the evening. The clones pressed themselves into the darkest corners and waited.

  Gradually, the sounds of the household wound down. The warm glow of the magical stones dimmed one by one, until the building breathed with the stillness of deep night.

  The shadows emerged from their alcove beside the staircase and began to ascend.

  Moving methodically from room to room, cloaking themselves with intangibility as needed, they combed the upper floor with silent thoroughness. After considerable searching, they identified Ganm's study and the adjacent bedchamber.

  One clone positioned itself to observe Ganm as he slept. The other slipped into the study to search.

  The room was austere in its arrangement. A broad writing desk dominated the center, surrounded by shelves lined with books and documents. Against the far wall, a full suit of knight's armor stood assembled, weapon in hand, like a sentinel frozen in time.

  Having mapped the space, the clone began its search — shelves first, then the desk, then every likely hiding place in between.

  Nothing. Not a single document that resembled a magical contract.

  The situation was relayed to Arlin. His instruction was simple: remain concealed and continue watching Ganm.

  While the two clones held their position in Arven's residence, others had taken up posts around the Harn family estate.

  Though Ganm was affiliated with House Arven, the family itself was largely absent, residing in the royal capital. In their place, the Harn family's estate stood as the dominant presence — and it showed. The grounds were conspicuously grander, the architecture more deliberate, the air of wealth more carefully maintained.

  Even at this late hour, servants moved through the estate preparing for the following day. The guards here were more numerous than at Ganm's residence, and noticeably stronger.

  None of that was an insurmountable obstacle. The shadows, stripped of clothing, were nothing more than darkness given shape — pure black silhouettes with white-lit eyes that could be dimmed to near-invisibility. Even with their eyes shuttered, their perception remained intact.

  Through careful use of intangibility and earth-passage, several clones infiltrated the estate. Others took up watchful positions outside, monitoring the perimeter and the movements of the Harn family members.

  Inside the estate's main receiving room, only two figures remained by the dying warmth of the fireplace. The rest of the household had long since retired.

  Ernie Harn sat in a broad, cushioned chair, slowly rocking before the amber glow of the flames. Beside him, his son Shen Harn listened in comfortable silence, the two of them speaking in low tones about the family's various affairs.

  Neither of them noticed the dark shape that passed silently through the wall and merged with the shadows pooling in the corner of the room.

  Ernie's gaze moved to his son — a man who appeared to be nearing his late twenties — and his expression sharpened with the particular weight of a father who has been patient too long.

  "When are you finally going to commit to an engagement? You need to understand something, my son. On one hand, you must think about inheritance. On the other, a well-chosen match is among the most powerful tools available to us — for strengthening our standing in this city, and perhaps in the capital as well, if the right opportunity presents itself."

  He held his son's gaze without blinking.

  Shen Harn was, by any measure, a man of considerable distinction. A Third-Tier Knight, possessed of influence, strength, and striking looks. But somewhere along the way, his position had curdled into complacency, and his reputation in Etherium was built less on his accomplishments than on his conquests. Rumors about him circulated freely — tales of women charmed and discarded, of charm wielded like a weapon with no particular aim.

  Ernie had grown tired of waiting for it to resolve itself. He had begun pushing directly — proposing a formal betrothal to the daughter of a noble family whose interests aligned neatly with his own. But alignment of interests between fathers did not translate into willingness between the young. The noble daughter regarded Shen's behavior with visible disdain. And Shen, for his part, had no appetite for the chains of obligation.

  After a long silence in which his son continued staring into the fire without a word, Ernie let out a quiet, resigned breath.

  "Fine. Leave it for now. — How are things with the mine?"

  The moment those words passed his lips, the shadow in the corner went still.

  It had arrived at exactly the right moment. Critical intelligence was unfolding before it. Every word had to be absorbed — the plans, the precautions, and above all, the location.

  Shen's dark green eyes shifted from the flames to his father. Two pairs of nearly identical eyes regarded each other across the firelight.

  "Haah — it's moving slowly, father. The mine was only recently discovered. The yields so far are well below what we anticipated. We need to send more workers."

  He paused.

  "But the more people we send, the greater the risk that others will notice the activity and trace it back to us. That could cause us real harm."

  His father gave a slow, measured nod.

  "You're right. We need volume, but security cannot be compromised. Fortunately, we've already reached an arrangement with the royal envoy — a portion of the extracted crystals will go to him in exchange for reduced taxes on our end.

  As for the additional labor — there's no need to rush it."

  "Agreed. Smaller batches, carefully vetted workers. Random timing, strict secrecy. Better to move slowly than to invite exposure.

  I'll send the next group out tomorrow. And fortunately, we've already had a tunnel constructed beneath our shop — it exits on the far side, away from any obvious scrutiny."

  Shen smiled at his father, easy and assured.

  In the corner, the shadow had heard everything. Without delay, it transmitted the full exchange to Arlin.

  The response came back swiftly: identify the shop. Follow them. Find the mine.

  If the mine could be secured, everything that followed became possible.

  Outside the gates of Etherium, Captain Maro stood facing the outer wall, studying it with the steady attention of a man trying to understand something that refuses to be understood. Beside him, Pam observed in silence, equally focused.

  "So — what do we know?"

  Maro crouched and picked up a slender branch from the ground. He drew a rough figure in the dirt as he spoke.

  "The creatures have the ability to pass through solid obstacles. Their appearance is entirely black. Eyes are white. And their shape — broadly speaking — is human."

  He scratched two small dots for eyes atop his crude drawing and studied it.

  "The city has been quiet since. No further sightings. The only anomaly is an uptick in theft reports — oddly specific ones. Clothing, of all things."

  He straightened slowly, scanning the treeline beyond the wall.

  "They haven't harmed anyone. But that absence of violence reads less like restraint and more like deliberate patience. They're planning something."

  His gaze drifted toward the dark edge of the forest.

  "What lies in that direction, Mr. Pam?"