Back at the Zoutenberg Restaurant.
Vincent didn't go to disturb Vivienne. He hadn't forgotten the strange behaviour the negative side effects had produced last time — and tonight, he'd used both the Demoness Ring and the revolver. The revolver's side effect was a powerful emotional state triggered every time it was used.
Sure enough, the moment he sat down, his mood plummeted straight into the depths. A creeping gloom settled over him without permission — everything he looked at felt wrong, everything about himself felt worse.
Other transmigrators spend seven or eight years building kingdoms or becoming unstoppable, and here I am — still nothing. Swap bodies every few days, can't even control my own life. And that Land of Chaos is obviously some high-level entity's scheme — and I was out here congratulating myself like an idiot, thinking it was some kind of cheat code.
As they say: every gift from fate comes with a hidden price tag.
Someone like me — alive and wasting air, dead and wasting soil...
"Wait — what?"
Vincent suddenly stopped. The self-loathing vanished as quickly as it had arrived, and his sharp mind reasserted itself. "That's the powerful emotion? That wasn't just sadness or joy — that was active self-rejection. Self-contempt."
He'd half-expected it to just be falling into melancholy or an overexcited high. Not this.
"This thing..."
Vincent looked at the revolver. "This side effect is no small matter — especially in a drawn-out fight where there's no quick way to end it." He then looked at the Rose Bishop's Beyonder characteristic. A Sequence 6 characteristic — that shouldn't come cheap.
The moment the thought formed, a faint, indistinct whisper reached his ears.
!!!
He startled and immediately dropped the characteristic. "That whispering just now — don't tell me that was the True Creator's muttering?"
Was it something every Aurora Order member's Beyonder characteristic did — or had it been triggered because the man had begun to invoke the True Creator's name at the moment of death?
Either way, this thing was dangerous.
After a moment's hesitation, he found a small tin box, sealed the characteristic inside, and only relaxed once the whispering had stopped.
He closed his eyes to recover, and while his energy slowly returned, he replayed the fight in his mind. This skirmish had made one thing clear: for now, unless the enemy happened to be the kind that physical force couldn't kill — like a Rose Bishop or a Wraith — his greatest asset in combat was not any Mystery Pryer ability, nor any Broker ability, but Bernadette's body.
However flashy the setup, the question was simply whether you could take the hit.
My approach should be: project the image of a long-range caster first, then find the moment to close in and finish it in an instant.
"Simple, brutal, and exactly my style."
Vincent stretched contentedly. When the fatigue had faded and his spirituality had begun to recover, he directed his thoughts inward and entered the Land of Chaos, making his way to the desk in the sitting room.
"There's a reply!"
He spotted new writing on the notebook at a glance and hurried over to pick it up. Below his own question, in a different hand, were several large words: It's me.
He read on:
"That I'm able to enter what you call the mysterious room — it surprised me too."
"I had assumed I wouldn't be able to relay this to you until the exchange ended. It didn't occur to me that you'd thought to bring in pen and paper — which means you must have gained considerably deeper control over this place."
"As for why I can enter — I can't say for certain yet. Only that after reading your message, I found myself thinking of this room, and simply came in."
"...At the time, I saw the door handle turn, and felt an irresistible force of rejection push me out. The person who opened that door was you."
"For some time after that, I was unable to re-enter at all... until roughly twenty minutes later, when I managed to get back in — only to be pushed out again almost immediately."
"From this I've drawn a conclusion: I can only enter when you are not in the sitting room. The moment you appear, I am expelled at once."
"Perhaps it is because you are the true owner of this place. My access is derived from your presence — but the moment you, the 'rightful occupant,' appear, I lose all permissions and am unceremoniously removed."
The message ended there.
You could tell her mood had darkened while writing — the handwriting was noticeably more forceful and jagged than usual.
So we were only separated by a single door?
And yet that single wooden door had been enough to make them completely invisible and inaudible to each other.
There was still so much about the Land of Chaos — about the two worlds — that remained unexplained. Perhaps when he advanced to a certain Sequence, the issue of this rejection could be resolved.
Whatever the case, being able to communicate in real time through the Land of Chaos was a genuine step forward. Going forward, if he ran into problems, he could ask the other party at any time.
Hold on!
Vincent suddenly thought of something.
Wait — if I had Bernadette recite my three-segment Honorific Name in the Harry Potter world... could I receive her prayer? And could I respond?
He picked up the pen and began writing quickly.
"I've made some new discoveries about the mysterious room these past few days. Let me bring you up to speed..."
...
Harry Potter's World.
After days of relentless study and brute-force memorisation, Bernadette's grasp of Chinese had improved considerably. She still couldn't really speak it, but she could now parse relatively simple sentences well enough.
And that was sufficient — she hadn't learned Chinese to hold conversations; she'd learned it to read her father's journal.
Homeland...
Bernadette wrote the two characters on paper, her expression complicated. She'd wondered countless times what those two characters meant — the ones that haunted her father's writing more than any other.
Now she finally knew.
It almost certainly confirmed that her father had come from this world — and that once he'd gone to that other side, he had never returned.
That's why he missed home so deeply.
She'd always assumed she was a visitor to this world, an outsider passing through. She hadn't expected to discover that, in some sense, she was almost half a local — sharing a hometown with that man.
The world truly does play strange tricks on people.
She could only wonder how her father had made the crossing in the first place. Could it have been the same way as herself and that man? In which case, was she now... following in her father's footsteps?
She shook her head with a faint, wry smile, set down the quill, and silently repeated the words in her mind: Enter.
She'd entered the mysterious room first thing that morning and found the pen and paper that had appeared on the desk. After leaving her message, she'd been slipping back in at intervals, checking for a reply as soon as it arrived.
She stepped up to the desk. The new writing on the notebook made her pause. She picked it up and read:
"The past few days..."
Vincent's message wasn't overlong. He'd left out his awareness of the concept of Astral Essence — but everything else had been shared.
He explained the three-segment Honorific Name, noting that it had been prompted by the ancient Scale and had only been a trial attempt to begin with — he hadn't expected it to actually work.
The core of the message was a request for Bernadette to try reciting the Honorific Name in this world and see if they could establish contact that way.
After reading it, Bernadette was quiet for a long while.
He always managed to surprise her — but this time the surprise was rather on the large side.
First he'd been targeted by an evil god, joined an evil god's organisation — and now he'd apparently gone and become an evil god himself. A hollow one in name only, without any real power to back it up — but the sheer audacity of the move alone was enough to cow a great many people.
Land of Chaos...
Bernadette murmured the name. She recognised it — her father had mentioned it repeatedly in his later years. It was one of several entities spoken of collectively as Astral Essences, said to contain secrets that even gods coveted.
How had such an existence become bound to that man?
Father's compass?
The connection came quickly. According to what the man had said, he'd touched the wishing compass and that was what had led him into the mysterious room — the chain of events that followed had all grown from there.
So — had the Land of Chaos been something her father left behind? And could the mystery of her father's whereabouts be connected to it?
After a long while, Bernadette pressed her hand to her forehead and stilled her thoughts. Over-speculation was pointless. For now, she should cooperate with the man and run the experiment.
If they could genuinely establish contact across worlds, communication going forward would be far easier — as things stood, the pen and paper worked well, but there was still a delay.
She left the sitting room quickly, returned to reality, closed her eyes, and murmured in Hermes:
"Ruler of the Realm of Entropy, Arbiter of the Unbalanced Scale, Shadow Between Order and Rules."
To be continued…
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