The snowline of a high mountain, over 4,000 meters above sea level.
A biting wind howled across a scree slope piled with countless pebbles and boulders, stealing away the last trace of warmth.
A snow leopard—gray-white all over, speckled with black spots—crouched soundlessly atop a protruding rock.
It kept its body low to the stone, forelegs slightly bent, thick tail hanging down and lightly touching the rock face. Its gray-blue eyes were locked on something not far ahead.
There, a rare lone bharal was foraging in a crack between rocks.
The wind shifted.
The predator's ears flicked.
Now!
Its hind legs tensed and exploded with power. Like a streak of gray lightning, it sprang.
Claws snapped out, fangs bared—about to clamp down on the prey's throat.
And then—
In that split second, the crisp, cutting mountain wind and snow vanished without warning.
In their place: a yellow-green fog thick with coal smoke, sulfur, and rot.
The hard, icy scree underfoot disappeared too, replaced by a filthy, rigid street paved with slick, wet cobblestones.
The once-open skyline was now blocked by towering red-brick warehouses, spired churches, and massive smokestacks belching black smoke.
"Hrr?"
The snow leopard landed on the unfamiliar street, bewildered, having pounced on empty air. The bharal trembled violently, its hooves slipping.
"HYAH—!!"
Before either animal could understand what was happening, a black, two-wheeled carriage drawn by a single horse burst out of the fog.
"Damn it! Where'd a leopard and a sheep come from?!"
The driver on the high rear seat yanked the reins hard. The startled old horse screamed and reared, its front hooves nearly coming down on the bharal.
"Those bastard swine in the West End! Why don't they keep their livestock penned in their mansions?!"
Snap!
The whip cracked.
The snow leopard and the bharal finally reacted. Driven by instinct, they forgot about predator and prey and started crashing through the narrow, crowded street, triggering screams and curses from the pedestrians.
And not far away—
In the shadow of a dark, damp alley—
A black-haired, delicate-looking boy stood there, staring blankly at everything around him.
"Enormous red-brick warehouses… that Thames-specific fishy dampness… and this signature pea-soup fog…"
Shane lifted his head, staring at the huge clock tower faintly visible through the thick fog. His eyes were full of disbelief.
"This time's Heroic Spirit vision… is here?"
He stepped out of the shadows and ran his fingers along the rough wall beside him.
It was a typical cheap subdivided tenement—ramshackle, built from a messy mix of timber and low-grade brick, on the verge of collapse.
To cram in more tenants, the landlord had slapped illegal add-ons onto the backyard and the sides, making the whole place even more chaotic.
Shane wiped the wall with his thumb. A thick layer of greasy black coal soot smeared onto his skin, revealing the dull yellow brick beneath.
"Old and new overlapping… chaos and order coexisting…"
"For the rich, it's ultimate splendor and indulgence. For the poor, it's an abyss of despair and degradation."
He murmured, and the name was practically on his tongue.
"This is the heart of the empire where the sun never sets… Victorian London!"
And this was only the first random summon's vision!
Yet the change was already this extreme!
Shane stomped hard. Mud and dirty water splashed up—so real he could feel it.
"There's no 'memory' haze at all… it's like I actually traveled here."
He scanned his surroundings, even more confused.
"So… where's the Heroic Spirit this time?"
Just then, a commotion erupted behind him.
"GRAAAH—!"
A beast's pained roar.
The snow leopard that had been panicking in the street was now dragging the unlucky bharal and, in blind desperation, had squeezed into this dead-end alley as well.
Shane's sharp eyes caught a deep lash mark across the leopard's once-beautiful coat. It was bleeding—clearly a "souvenir" from the driver.
"…" Seeing a real wound on the leopard, Shane's heart sank.
The thing he feared most had happened.
The visions produced by his summoning weren't just visual overlays or mental hallucinations anymore.
They could ignore the Heroic Spirit's "depth" level and overwrite reality—and worse…
They could cause real harm to living creatures in the real world.
"Well… that's a bad sign."
His first experimental goal had been achieved in minutes: confirming how deeply the vision could intrude on reality.
But Shane couldn't smile.
"If one day…"
He stared at the yellow toxic fog hanging over London, a chill rising in his chest.
"If I stockpile enough depth privileges and summon a true god… and the battlefield from its legends manifests…"
"How much damage would that do to the real world?"
Would all of Magnolia—or even the entire Kingdom of Fiore—be dragged into a mythical warzone and reduced to ash in an instant?
"...Hah."
Shane forced himself to calm down.
"One step at a time."
He gritted his teeth. "I'm already on this ship. I can't stop using the Hero's Book. Since it hasn't happened yet, I can't waste myself on paranoia."
"The urgent thing is to do what I'm here to do—figure out who this Heroic Spirit is!"
He refocused on the environment.
From experience, the initial location of a vision always tied to the Heroic Spirit's life, experiences, or obsession. It never appeared at random.
He studied the alley.
Narrow, filthy, overcrowded. The air reeked of alcohol, sweat, and the stink of unknown waste. Black sewage ran through the gutter.
"This kind of chaos and poverty… should be London's East End."
He combed through his history knowledge.
"It's packed with Irish immigrants, and Jewish refugees who fled Eastern Europe because of antisemitism."
"So which modern-era Heroic Spirits were active in London?"
"If I'm in the East End slums, then Queen Victoria herself is obviously out."
He rubbed his chin.
"I don't even know what year it is…"
"If it's after 1880, then there's a chance it's the 'Lady with the Lamp,' Florence Nightingale—pushing modern nursing reform and building community care networks…"
As he thought, he looked around for a newspaper or anything that could confirm the date.
Suddenly—
From the shoddily stacked ruin beside him came a muffled, urgent rhythm—suppressed and intense, with a crude, numb kind of vulgarity.
"Hm?" Shane raised an eyebrow.
With absolutely no moral burden, he walked up to a grime-smeared window and shoved it open.
Inside was dim and cramped. On a broken wooden plank bed, three figures writhed.
Shane's face didn't change. He swept a quick glance, then immediately slammed the window shut.
Bang.
"Prostitutes?"
Not surprising.
In that era's London—especially the East End—there were at least sixty to eighty thousand women forced into sex work just to survive.
"But…"
Shane's fingers tapped his chin, his gaze sharpening.
"The vision's starting point being right here—outside a prostitute's room…"
"That can't be a coincidence."
Click.
At that moment, the door to that room opened.
Another woman stepped out.
She wasn't a Moulin Rouge dancer in stockings and corset, nor a refined West End courtesan.
She was a typical East End working-class woman.
Her figure was thick and worn down. She wore three shabby, stained petticoats, and a huge coarse-cloth pocket was sewn at her waist.
Her round face was smeared with coal dust and exhaustion. In her hand was a basket of laundry waiting to be washed.
In this cruel age, even selling your body often wasn't enough to eat.
Most women still had to take extra work—laundry, flower-selling, or the match-factory labor that could rot your jawbone.
"Is the focus of the vision… her?"
Shane instinctively stepped forward, wanting to follow her.
But—
Before he could take another step…
Hummm—
The scenery warped and faded again.
That choking pea-soup fog receded like a tide. The Thames stink, the factory roar, the woman's silhouette—everything dissolved into nothing.
The next instant—
The mountain wind screamed again.
The world snapped back to the white, endless scree slope.
"Rrrow…"
Not far away, the snow leopard—now safely in the mountains—was sprawled on the scree, happily tearing into its prey.
"So… we're back already?"
Shane stood in the freezing wind, staring toward where the woman had vanished, deep in thought.
"That prostitute… really was the 'anchor point' of this vision?"
That era. That location. That identity.
And the sudden, bizarre connection to "prostitution."
Shane already had a growing suspicion about who this Heroic Spirit might be.
He looked down at his palm.
Sure enough, a warm, dark-gold card lay there, quietly glowing.
Shane flipped it over.
On the card was a twisted figure holding twin daggers—its face obscured by a skull mask.
~~~
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