Chapter 2: Situation
Arthur sat motionless, staring at the steady glow of the lamp. Its light carved through the darkness of the room, casting long, wavering shadows across the walls. He remained like that for several minutes, feeling the weight of the silence pressing down on him.
At last, he exhaled slowly and forced his shoulders to relax. He rose to his feet.
"Alright," he whispered. "You can do this."
The words sounded hollow even to his own ears. The instinctual fear of fire still coiled tight within his chest, loosening its grip ever so slightly.
He drew in several deep breaths, steadying himself, then crossed the room toward the desk while angling his body so that most of the illumination fell on the paper rather than directly on him.
The largest envelope was pink, just as he had guessed. It was deceptively plain and simple, marked only by an official-looking emblem pressed into the deep red wax seal. Its A4 size also made it noticeably heavier than the others.
Arthur turned it over in his hand, inspecting it from every angle. After a moment, he picked up a pencil and carefully wedged its tip beneath the wax seal, prying it open with gentle pressure so that it wouldn't tear.
Several documents slid out as he tilted the envelope. He laid them across the desk one by one, the light casting a warm glow over the crisp pages. The more he read, the higher his eyebrows rose, and the wider his eyes grew.
"This can't be…"
He froze.
"I am in Lord of Mysteries!"
The realization hit him like a freight train. In this world, knowledge itself was a dangerous thing. Beyonders, Pathways, Sequences, Potions, Exhibitionist Sage, Goth Mommy, Degenerate Tree Hugger, Discount Thief, Keyboard Warrior, Russian Scientist… and so many more. Every piece of information carried a weight with it, sometimes literally, oftentimes lethally.
"Okay, why is information important again?" he muttered, rubbing his temples.
He knew it was dangerous. He just couldn't remember exactly why. The details were there, but slippery, distorted, like trying to recall a dream after waking up. He remembered bits and pieces with frustrating clarity, yet doubted almost everything.
Don't blame me, he thought bitterly. I was human. Humans aren't supposed to memorize entire potion recipes, honorific names, or centuries of hidden history and lore, and especially me, who wasn't even a genuine fan.
The worst part was how unreliable his own memories felt. He distinctly remembered Klein dying at the end of the first book, an absurd, soul-crushing ending. But then why did he also remember kerosene being mentioned, when the story claimed crude oil didn't exist? That kind of inconsistency made him question everything.
He couldn't even recall the name of the main villain. Or why that blonde person was so important. Faces, titles, and critical plot points all blurred together.
The one thing that stood out crystal clear, ringing in his mind like a bell, was a single honorific name:
The Fool that doesn't belong to this era;
The Mysterious Ruler above the Gray Fog;
The King of Yellow and Black who wields good luck.
Just thinking about it sent a thrill of excitement and dread down his spine.
Arthur decided to sit down on the chair and leaned back, staring at the documents with a mixture of awe and rising panic.
"What the hell… What the fuck… What should I even do?"
He was in a world where looking in the wrong direction could get you noticed by things that should not be known. And here he was, a vampire not even of this world, with demonic handguns and fuzzy meta-knowledge. What was he even meant to do?
His brain latched back onto the kerosene anomaly, its inconsistency driving him crazy. Kerosene is a combustible hydrocarbon liquid, chemically manufactured through the fractional distillation of petroleum, which means crude oil. To get kerosene, you need to heat crude oil to extreme temperatures, separating chemical compounds by their boiling point, specifically condensing the vapors between 302 and 527 degrees Fahrenheit.
If crude oil didn't exist in this world as the lore suggested, how the hell were they burning kerosene? Was it a plot hole? A translation error? Or a clue that his memory might not be as reliable as he thought it to be?
But then again, through a process known as destructive distillation, which is basically burning coal in the absence of oxygen, one can obtain coal tar, coal gas, and coke. Further fractional distillation of coal tar actually provides coal oil, which is very similar to standard petroleum based kerosene.
But if I remember correctly, wasn't coal oil trademarked under the name kerosene by that Abraham Gesner, a Canadian or Australian geologist guy? Maybe that is what they use.
He shook his head, exhaling a frustrated breath. Why could he remember the exact details of industrial hydrocarbon production, but draw a complete blank on the important life-saving plot details?
For a brief moment, he wondered if some higher power had censored his mind to protect him from instant madness.
Arthur paused, staring blankly out of the window, looking at the empty streets and the gas lamp burning below as he reflected on his thoughts and past life.
"No," he groaned loudly as he buried his face in his hands and rubbed it. "No, my mind isn't censored. I just have a bad memory."
It was a pathetic but undeniably true realization.It surprised him and annoyed him to no end how his brain functioned, how it always seemed to focus on survival and information related to it, but entertainment was not something it could remember very well. Because it wasn't just Lord of Mysteries that he couldn't remember properly, but also Shadow Slave and so many more, to the point he couldn't even remember what their names were.
But that shouldn't be too much of a problem because he remembered some important characters like Audrey, Dunn, Daly, Fors, and Huang Tao.
Okay maybe I don't rememberall of them but I still think this are the important ones. But who is Huang Tao? I would most likely need to hit the library, and since I wouldn't be able to go during the morning because of the day-sleep and the general burning in direct sunlight, I still should have enough time in the evening.
Nodding to himself. Arthur pushed the heavy, anxiety inducing documents of the pink envelope aside, as he reached for the second one— the pale yellowish-white envelope.
Unlike the pink one, this was much smaller and resembled something used to send letters in, while also lacking an official wax seal. It felt thick and practical in what it was trying to convey.
Arthur wedged his finger under the flap and tore it open. He tipped it over his palm, and a thick stack of crisp, heavy paper slid out.
Money.
Arthur blinked, before quickly thumbing through the stack under the warm, unsettling glow of the gas lamp. He counted them out one by one. There were exactly 27 banknotes, each with a gray background inked in black. The four corners bore complicated patterns and special ink to prevent counterfeiting. While displayed in the middle was the portrait of a stern, imposing regal man wearing a crown, with a thick mustache, a well-trimmed beard, and a firm gaze. From the look of him, there was a high chance he was blonde. Below the portrait was written Ten Pounds, while at the top, The Loen Kingdom was inscribed, with a 10 in the left corner.
This was the Honorable Founder and Protector, William Augustus I.
"Two hundred and seventy pounds," Arthur muttered, the weight of the paper feeling suddenly more grounding in his hands.
While his memory was terrible regarding the deeper esoteric lore, his basic understanding of Victorian-esque economics and his scrap knowledge regarding Klein monthly salary at the Nighthawks told him this was a significant amount. A working-class family would likely survive for a year or less if they are being extravagant.
But if he wasn't wrong, a beyonder characteristics and mystical items likely costed more than this merely 270 pounds.
I also have the pouch.
Thinking this he picked up the velvet pouch from the desk. It was surprisingly heavy, sagging comfortably against his palm. Previously he has taken exactly one coin from this to power the gas lamp of his room. Pulling the drawstrings loose, he tipped it over the wooden surface.
A cascade of metal clinked against the desk, spilling out into a chaotic, glittering pile under the warm gaslight. Arthur used his index finger to spread them out, his eyes scanning the different sizes, colors, engravings and counting them.
There were exactly 68 coins in total.
Sorting them was easy enough, even with his fragmented memory. He dragged the dull, heavy copper coins to one side, these were undeniably pence, the everyday lifeblood of the working class. Next came the gold coins, gleaming with a distinct, heavy luster. If the paper notes were pounds, these gold pieces were undoubtedly the minted equivalent.
By a simple process of elimination, that left the silver coins sitting in the middle. They were smaller than the gold but held a polished, and ancient edge to them, stamped with their own intricate crests.
"Pence, soli, and pounds," Arthur muttered, stacking the silver coins into a neat little column. "A base-12 and base-20 system, if I remember the short by mad3ud correctly. Twelve pence to a soli, twenty soli to a pound."
He quickly tallied up the metallic towers: three gold pounds, forty-two silver soli, and twenty-three copper pence. Converting the soli and pence, the pouch contained roughly another five pounds and a few odd soli.
And combined with the thick banknotes he has approximately 275 pounds to his name.
Arthur leaned back in his chair, a profound sense of relief washing over him, loosening the tight coil of anxiety within his chest. It wasn't the kind of wealth that would let him buy potion formulas, Beyonder characteristics or mystical artifacts off the hidden markets, those usually ran from five hundred to the thousands, but it was still a massive safety net.
He wouldn't starve. He wouldn't have to sleep in the smog-choked slums of Backlund or take up a grueling factory job coughing up coal dust just to afford a loaf of rye bread.
But then he paused, the relief souring in an instant.
Wait. Those aren't my problems anymore, are they?
He was a vampire. A loaf of rye bread wasn't going to do a damn thing for him.
Instead of worrying about typical human survival, his actual, looming crisis was figuring out how to ethically source fresh blood. He wasn't a monster or at least his soul was still human which meant hunting innocent people in dark alleys or draining an unsuspecting victim completely dry wasn't an option at all. To get fresh blood without turning into a serial killer or drawing the immediate attention of the Nighthawks, he was likely going to have to frequent Backlund's chaotic underbelly. Places like rowdy pubs and low-end brothels, where people were either too intoxicated to notice a minor scratch, or desperate enough to sell a pint of blood for a few silver soli or were just into weird fetishes.
Just the thought of it made his stomach do a sudden, violent flip. A wave of genuine queasiness hit him, but also the thought made him salivate, he swallowed hard, rubbing his chest.
Blood. Actually drinking thick, metallic, warm human fluid... His new supernatural anatomy might crave it on some deep, predatory level, but his thoroughly human mind was still majorly grossed out by the menu. It was going to take a lot of psychological conditioning for him to get over that hurdle.
Wiping a hand across his face to clear the lingering disgust and hunger, Arthur forced his mind back to the immediate task. He needed to know who he was supposed to be before he stepped foot outside this room.
Arthur reached out and pulled the pink envelope back into the light.
"Let's assess our situation."
Arthur carefully drew the stack of papers from the pink envelope once more, spreading them out under the warm, wavering glow of the gas lamp.
The first item to catch his eye was an intimidatingly large, stiff piece of vellum. It was a Letters Patent, the original royal decree that had established his family's noble standing generations ago.
In the top left corner sat a meticulously hand-drawn portrait of what he presumed was an early Augustus monarch, while a massive, heavy wax seal hung from the bottom by a frayed crimson ribbon. As his eyes tracked across the dense, formal legal script, a sudden spark of excitement flared in his chest. He read the final line aloud.
"...to the heirs male of his body lawfully begotten, to carry the name, rights, and responsibilities of the Peerage in perpetuity."
A title. He was officially a noble.
Immediately, Arthur's mind conjured up images of a sprawling country estate with rolling green hills, an army of beautifully dressed maids attending to his every whim, massive agricultural rents and coal mine profits pouring into his bank accounts every quarter, and perhaps a private carriage pulled by dark, majestic horses.
But the illusion shattered the moment he moved to the next set of papers.
He flipped through a grim stack of official certificates issued by the Backlund General Register Office. First was a Certificate of Death for his older brother, Julian Sluridge, listed simply as 'killed in action' with no further details. Given this world, Arthur strongly suspected it involved Beyonder affairs, but he couldn't be certain.
Two more death certificates followed: one for his mother, who had apparently died during childbirth, and another for his father, who had passed away just a few months prior.
Beneath them lay his own civil birth certificate, cleanly linking his name to the late Baron. It was this specific document, alongside the recognizable geography and terminology, that had originally cemented his horrifying realization of where he was. Aside from these, there was a property deed confirming his ownership of this very townhouse in Cherwood Borough.
Then came the documents that popped his aristocratic dream bubble of extravagance and maids, explaining exactly why his inheritance consisted solely of a bare townhouse and a surprisingly modest wallet. It was a terrifyingly thick collection of Chancery Court Foreclosure Notices.
The papers detailed a catastrophic financial collapse. The ancestral Sluridge estate, the grand manor in Empress Borough, the thousands of acres of land, and the lucrative agricultural rents had all been entirely seized by a syndicate of Backlund creditors. They had been liquidated to satisfy compounding mortgages, predatory loans, a string of disastrous investments, and a mountain of other debts Arthur didn't even have the energy to parse.
The picture these documents painted of his new family wasn't good at all, a degenerate father prone to gambling and baseless investments, and an estranged son who had seemingly abandoned the estate long ago to live alone in a middle-class district.
Stapled to the back of the foreclosure notices was his father's final will. It was short and starkly plain.
"To my only remaining son, Arthur. I leave you my name, my title, and my deepest apologies for not being there for you. May the Goddess watch over what remains of our blood."
Arthur stared at the text for a long while. Though it doesn't explicitly state it, he thought, one can easily infer that the original owner of this body had cut ties with his family a long time ago. There was definitely bad blood there.
Sighing, he moved on to the final item in the packet. It was a formal letter written on crisp, high-grade paper from a Backlund legal firm, signed by a family solicitor named Mr. Harrison. The tone was stuffy, clinical, and entirely blunt.
[To Arthur Sluridge, Esq.
Sir,
While it is my unpleasant duty to confirm that the financial ruin of the Sluridge estate is absolute, and that no further liquid assets or country holdings remain, the law of the Loen Kingdom is unyielding. By right of direct birth and the extinction of all prior male claims, you are now legally Baron Sluridge.
The title is yours, unencumbered by the debts that devoured the land. Furthermore, you are hereby requested to present these enclosed certificates to the Committee for Privileges in the House of Lords at your earliest convenience. Your hereditary seat awaits your confirmation, allowing you to officially enter the Parliamentary sessions.
I remain your obedient servant,
Harrison, Solicitor]
"Hah… What can I even say? I'm truly speechless," Arthur muttered, as he let out a humorless laugh.
He leaned back in his chair and stared blankly at the ceiling. "Why is every situation in my life so god damn complicated?"