Vincent blinked.
From his memory, divination was a speciality of the Seer pathway — the Clairvoyant at Sequence 9, with the Astrologer at higher sequences gaining even stronger prophetic powers. The Seer pathway's famous Sequence 3 was the Prophetic Astrologer, though prophecy and divination were technically distinct things.
In practice, though, divination wasn't exclusive to the Seer pathway.
At its core, divination worked by accessing the layered streams of information woven through the spirit world — some traces from the past, some impressions of the present, some whispers of possible futures. That was the wellspring of all divination. What you received, however, were always impressions and symbols, which required interpretation to extract any concrete meaning.
This meant any Beyonder could technically learn to divine. The catch was that most pathways were unreliable at it. Only the "Survival Trio" — the Seer, Apprentice, and Marauder pathways — were genuinely skilled, with the Seer pathway standing head and shoulders above the rest.
The Seer pathway was one of the few non-Survival-Trio pathways that also had a real talent for divination — Klein's own introduction to it had come from old Neil, after all.
Vincent had simply never needed to use divination before, and had completely forgotten about it until now.
"Oh," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Right, I can divine."
"..."
"Teach me how. Walk me through it."
Following Bernadette's instructions, Vincent found paper and a fountain pen, wrote down "What happened in this room today," and then began silently repeating the divination mantra:
"What happened in this room today."
"What happened in this room today."
At the same time, he entered a Cogitation state, letting his spirituality rise and fall, allowing himself to briefly drift into a dream-like trance. Through the haziness and blur, he saw six or seven men forcing their way into the flat, then scattering in different directions to ransack the place.
But watching their movements, something was off — they weren't actually searching for anything. They were destroying for the sake of destroying.
The vision shifted. The flat was now as he'd found it when he came home. One of the men dropped a piece of paper on the sofa, and then the whole group left in a hurry.
A few seconds later, the dream shattered. Vincent opened his eyes.
"A group of men of unknown origin."
He walked out of the bedroom to the sitting room sofa, where he found the note they'd left: "You filthy bitch! If you don't want to end up dead, stay out of Conris's business!"
In an instant, Vincent felt Bernadette's emotions surge.
He suspected she had never, in her entire life, been called something like that to her face. Even in her current state — her human nature and divine nature unseparated — there was no chance she was letting this pass without consequence.
He cleared his throat. "This is a warning because of the Conris warehouse case — because we went there as Ellie's bodyguard a few days back?"
"This," Bernadette said flatly, "is provocation."
"For us, it does read more like provocation, honestly. Shall we go have a look at Conris?"
The Conris factory wasn't hard to find in the East Borough. All you had to do was flag down a cab, give the address, and the driver would take you straight there. In under twenty minutes, the carriage was pulling up near a factory surrounded by high walls, with several massive chimneys belching black smoke into the air.
A foul smell hung over everything. The air felt thick with soot, and the visibility was noticeably worse than elsewhere.
Once the cab was gone, Vincent slipped into a Shadow Jump and quietly infiltrated the factory, then chained a few more jumps together, activated his Invisibility, and walked directly toward the main office at the far end of the complex.
The moment he stepped inside the room, he caught a faint trace of blood. But the room was completely empty. He activated the Clairvoyant Eye immediately, overlaying everything with its luminous, colour-layered spirit vision.
It didn't take long to find an anomaly — tucked away in an unobtrusive corner, behind what appeared to be an ordinary cabinet. Opening the cabinet door revealed a hidden entrance leading down underground.
Vincent, still invisible, crouched at the entrance and switched to the Witch's spider-thread ability. A flick of his fingers sent thin filaments fanning silently through the entire hidden chamber below. Anything lurking inside would trigger the threads instantly.
A moment later, he used a Shadow Jump to drop down, then walked forward for about ten seconds before emerging into a dim underground chamber — brick and stone on all four sides, sparse and utilitarian. Beyond the chamber, a dark tunnel stretched ahead.
Slumped against the tunnel entrance, eyes wide open and unseeing, was a blood-drenched corpse with a hole the size of a baby's fist in his throat — still seeping. This was Dall Corey, the owner of Conris.
Vincent stopped short. "He's already dead."
"Clearly silenced. Set up to look like suicide. His residual spirit is still faintly present, though, which suggests whoever did this wasn't a very high-sequence Beyonder — or perhaps a low-sequence one at most. Try a spirit communication."
"Right."
He found it faintly surreal — divination and spirit communication were both entry-level skills, yet somehow he was only encountering them for the first time today.
He followed Bernadette's instructions one step at a time:
"I beseech the power of the Night;"
"I beseech the power of the Hidden;"
"I beseech the grace of the Goddess."
"I beseech You to allow me to commune with the residual spirit within this vessel."
Murmuring the ritual words, he entered Cogitation and slipped briefly into the dream-state. Through it, he "saw" a translucent shade hovering vaguely near the body.
"The cause of Dall Corey's death."
"The cause of Dall Corey's death..."
He reached out with an ethereal right hand and touched the remnant spiritual energy around the corpse. In an instant, a flare of light and shadow erupted before him — a cascade of images.
Dall Corey sat with his legs crossed in his own office, lazily puffing a cigar, when several heavily-built men walked in. The same men from the ransacking.
Corey looked up, waved a casual greeting — he clearly knew them: "You're earlier than usual this time. I haven't got the next batch ready yet — blame that damned detective. The man was carrying explosives on him!"
He was still droning on when two of the men lunged. One pressed a handkerchief over his mouth and nose; the other restrained his body.
Corey struggled for only a few seconds before going limp.
The image shifted to the underground chamber. The men propped Corey's unconscious form against the wall, then wrapped his hand around the revolver. They held smelling salts under his nose, and the moment his eyes flickered open, they pulled the trigger.
Dall Corey died instantly.
The dream shattered. Vincent surfaced, eyes open. "He was definitely silenced. The same people who 'warned' us killed him. Time of death looks like sometime last night."
"Oh?" Bernadette's voice held a note of genuine surprise. "Dead as of last night, then. That explains why Ellie got hold of those Conris leads so easily — he was already being used as a scapegoat. Someone set him up to take the fall."
Vincent said, "Looking at it that way, the fact that those people came to our place to 'warn' us feels off. It's almost like they were deliberately drawing us here."
He quickly tidied away the ritual materials, then frowned. "...We just did something rather foolish."
"???"
"I just used a prayer to the Evernight Goddess for the spirit communication, didn't I? Given our situation, isn't that basically jumping on someone's face?"
Bernadette's tone was unruffled. "Do you think the gods have their attention fixed on every single person who prays to them at any given moment? Do you have any idea how many people conduct spirit communications in this world every second?"
"What if?"
"Then it's our bad luck."
"..."
It probably won't come to that. The little snake gave me two rounds of good luck blessing, after all... but wait, the Evernight Goddess represents misfortune. Can a Sequence 1's good luck overrule a Sequence 0's bad luck?
Probably not.
Well, I've already done it. And I've already been noticed by the True Creator. Whatever happens, happens.
Just then, a shout echoed through from somewhere above: "Captain! There's an entrance leading underground here! There's blood near the entrance!"
"Surround the perimeter — don't let anyone escape. The rest of you, step back. Don't obstruct our investigation."
Vincent and Bernadette shared a long, silent look. Perfect. Now they were the ones holding the bag.
Vincent eyed the tunnel stretching away into the dark. "Want to follow this tunnel and see where it goes first?"
He wasn't actually worried. Between his full arsenal of abilities and mystical items, he could hold his own against a mid-sequence Beyonder, and escape from any he couldn't beat — he simply refused to believe a demigod was going to pop out of a glorified sewer tunnel.
"Bring that revolver."
"On it."
He pocketed the revolver, then pulled out a handful of powder and scattered it into the dark tunnel. A bright flare of light shot forward, spreading rapidly along the passage. He followed at a quick pace, tossing more powder each time the flames began to die, keeping the tunnel illuminated. He walked for over ten minutes before reaching the end — a makeshift dock.
Looking at the underground river stretching away into the unknown ahead, Vincent said, "No wonder they weren't worried about us escaping through here. This is what's at the end of the tunnel."
"A dock?"
Bernadette turned it over quickly. "Smuggling? Arms trafficking? Or... human trafficking?"
Human trafficking?
Vincent's mind caught on the thought. "Why does that come to mind?"
To be continued…
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