11: Chapter 11 The Choice Behind the Door

The seal on the Chanis Gate finally stabilized before midnight.

Old Neil had been working continuously in the Potion Room for nearly nine hours.

When he finally set down the sealed staff, the surface of the dark crystal at the top was covered in fine cracks, like a layer of ice under excessive internal pressure, on the verge of shattering.

The three warning talismans extinguished one by one, and when the final dark purple glow vanished, the low-frequency vibration that had persisted in the stone corridor for several hours finally fell silent.

He leaned the staff against the corner, took off his sweat-soaked deerskin gloves, and revealed a pair of hands trembling slightly from the prolonged output of spirituality.

The skin on his fingertips was pale, as if it had been soaked in water for too long.

He looked down at his hands, remained silent for a moment, then pulled the spirit body resistance formula that Lu Li had given him from his chest pocket, looked it over, folded it back up, and put it away.

"Ince has run away."

His voice was so hoarse it was almost inaudible, as if sandpaper had been rubbed against his throat, "The three secondary barriers on the periphery of the seal were all lifted by him using internal clearance, and the resonance node of the main seal has been half-activated."

"If it weren't for the fact that Dunn found evidence of seal fragments during that patrol at the Textile Factory—"

He didn't continue.

But the meaning was already very clear.

If Dunn hadn't discovered Ince's betrayal in advance, and if the seal hadn't been reinforced tonight, this internal attempt to break the seal would likely have been completed before anyone could react.

"Where is Dunn?"

Lu Li leaned against the doorframe of the Potion Room with his arms crossed, his gaze passing through the corridor toward the direction of the upstairs office.

Klein had been dragged away by Daly half an hour ago to organize the records of seal fluctuations.

At this moment, only Lu Li and Old Neil were in the corridor; the flame of the gas lamp burned quietly inside the shade, casting their shadows, one tall and one short, onto the stone wall.

"Still sending telegrams to the Church headquarters."

Old Neil gave a wry smile, folded the deerskin gloves and placed them on the workbench, and pressed his temples with two fingers, "The news of Ince's defection has been reported, and the headquarters has requested an internal review of the entire Tingen squad."

"All field missions will be suspended during the review, and even the daily maintenance of the Chanis Gate will have to be conducted under the supervision of an auditor."

"The pursuit of a traitor requires going through internal procedures before it can be initiated, and by the time the process is finished, the person will have long since run away."

"Where could he run to?"

"I don't know."

Old Neil closed his eyes, the deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes looking like dried-up riverbeds under the gas lamp, "Ince's understanding of Tingen is no less than mine."

"He knows every secret passage, every safe house, and every seal node."

"He has been in the Nighthawks system for fifteen years—fifteen years is enough for a person to memorize the weaknesses of an entire city better than their own palm prints."

He opened his eyes and turned to look at Lu Li.

In those gray eyes, there was no longer the impatient focus from his usual lectures, only a frankness bordering on exhaustion.

"You asked last time if you could take the night shift if help was needed."

"Now I want to tell you something."

"If the cultists use a more complete ritual to attack the seal next time, I will take the Sealed Artifact into the core area of the Chanis Gate—do not follow me in."

"You guard the perimeter. Some forbidden zones are only for old guys to trespass in."

Lu Li did not respond immediately, only flipping the brass key he was toying with, letting it spin slowly between his fingers.

In the original work, it was precisely behind this door that Old Neil lost control.

He went alone into the depths of the Chanis Gate, taking a Sealed Artifact, attempting to sacrifice himself in exchange for the stability of the seal.

But his mental defenses were ultimately disintegrated by the corruption within the Sealed Artifact, his humanity eroded away in a short time, and he finally turned into a mass of alienated flesh that even Dunn could not recognize.

That Sealed Artifact, codenamed "key of life".

It appeared as an ancient silver key with the power to repair all spirit body damage—the price being that, while repairing, it would absorb the user's vitality and humanity, causing the user to gradually lose their self-boundaries and eventually become a puppet of the key.

On the night Old Neil collapsed behind the Chanis Gate, Ince Zangwill took away quite a bit of evidence, but this particular Sealed Artifact was left behind as a scapegoat.

The backlash of the key therefore accelerated the collapse of his remaining humanity.

Lu Li thought to himself, at this moment, Old Neil was still standing here, and had not yet chosen to walk into the deepest part of that door.

There was still time.

"Mr. Neil, that formula from last time," Lu Li turned his palm upward, as if holding a heavy object in front of him, "Have you tried it?"

Old Neil looked back at him, the fatigue in his tone briefly covered by a layer of confusion: "Not yet. I've been busy with the seal, I've prepared the materials, but I haven't had time to compound it."

"If you go through the extraction process in your notes one more time for a few of the auxiliary ingredients in that formula, you can increase the spirit body resistance by another third."

"The price is that the effect changes from immediate to a half-life type—you need to take the medicine four days in advance, once a day, accumulating in the blood."

"There are less than four days left until the Elliott Hoy Festival, the time is just enough."

Old Neil was silent for a few seconds.

The confusion in his eyes gradually turned into something deeper—not wariness, but the kind of scrutiny an old pharmacist would show when discovering that their student had suddenly proposed a plan that even they needed to think about to digest.

The scrutiny ended quickly.

He pulled over the old armchair at the edge of the workbench, sat down, and briefly unloaded the weight of his fatigue onto the back of the chair.

"Four days. You know the Elliott Hoy Festival is in four days?"

"Daly said so. I calculated it."

He was silent for a while longer, then gave a short grunt, and used the back of his hand to push back the gray hair stuck to his forehead by sweat.

The chair tilted forward, and he fished out a polished old copper medicine pot from the drawer, saying without looking up: "Running through the extraction process one more time means you have to watch the fire the whole time while brewing. Do you have time, kid?"

"Night shift tonight, I'm not busy."

The smell in the Potion Room had become very thick over the past few hours, filled with the scent of aged herbs that had been heated repeatedly.

Bitter almonds, camphor, caramel, and dried chamomile flowers mixed together, wafting over in waves from the squeaking distiller.

Old Neil placed the medicine pot on the electric stove, dug out the pre-weighed bags of dried medicinal materials from the depths of the drawer, and pressed his fingers on each bag before handing them over—the steps were exactly the same as when he usually demonstrated extraction, only his hands were slower, with a very slight pause between each movement.

The two began to compound the medicine in silence.

Old Neil was responsible for the main ingredients, and Lu Li was responsible for the auxiliary ingredients.

Moonstone powder was ground bit by bit into a fine, silvery-gray dust in the mortar, the slices of black mandrake root made a crisp snapping sound under the blade, and the Outer Deity moss soaked in lye glowed with a faint blue light in the dark.

The whole process lasted nearly two hours.

During this time, there was only the sound of the pestle rubbing against the mortar walls, the humming of the distiller, and the whimpering of the heavy rain that had been falling all night outside the window, beating against the windowpane in the wind.

When the medicinal liquid was finally poured into a thumb-sized crystal bottle, Old Neil held the bottle up to the light, examining the dark blue vortex slowly swirling inside the bottle, and used his thumb and middle finger to hold the bottle and spin it gently.

"Looks right."

He placed the medicine bottle back on the workbench and pushed it to Lu Li, his voice gentle but steady, "Take the formula back and make a backup. This thing might become part of the standard maintenance procedure for the Chanis Gate in the future. Your name will be listed in the formula contributor column."

Lu Li held the medicine bottle in his hand, feeling the slight warmth from the glass surface, then put it into his inner pocket.

This bottle of medicine could not be given to him now.

If he handed it over directly, he would be suspicious, and would repeatedly ponder in his heart why a newcomer knew so precisely that he would need it.

He needed to decide to take it himself.

When he faced that door, when he faced that "key of life", if he happened to have this bottle of medicine in his pocket, he would drink it.

Not because he trusted Lu Li, but because he trusted his own professional judgment.

Lu Li suddenly realized that the hardest part of saving someone in the Lord of the Mysteries world was exactly this—you can never change a person's destiny with preaching.

You can only make the right choices, put the right tools where he can reach them, and then keep your mouth shut and wait for him to choose.

Especially when his self-esteem and sense of responsibility refuse for others to share any risks for him.

Before dawn, the rain stopped.

Lu Li pushed open the door leading to the rooftop and found Leonard already sitting by the railing, his feet dangling outside the eaves, holding a steaming cup of coffee in his hand.

He was clearly also just off a night shift, the tips of his dark brown hair still wet, unsure if it was from rain or sweat.

"That direction, the Textile Factory."

Leonard gestured with his chin toward the east, "The factory building you stayed in last time, someone saw lights outside it last night."

"Did the patrol go to check?"

"They went. They didn't find anything. But the guard said the light wasn't a hallucination—someone lit an oil lamp in the ruins of the factory, kept watch for the entire night, and left before dawn."

Lu Li put his hands in his trench coat pockets, his fingertips gently touching the fragment of the worm of time that was still vibrating slightly in his pocket.

So the cultist hadn't retreated, but was just waiting for the night of the full moon.

He was waiting for blood of the same origin, and what Lu Li was waiting for was the moment these fragments were pieced together.

Leonard drank the last sip of coffee, placed the cup on his knees, and looked at the gray-blue night sky gradually fading on the distant horizon, shaking his head with a wry smile.

"The captain said that after this internal review is over, he will officially issue the announcement of Ince Zangwill's defection to the entire squad."

"When he realizes that such a character was hiding right under his nose, I'm afraid he'll feel guilty for quite a while."

"What I care about is another matter."

Lu Li looked along his gaze toward the fading night sky before dawn, "Ince sold the seal nodes to the cultists."

"But the twelve sigils needed for the Spirit Descent Ritual, there are still two or three that we haven't found yet."

"The missing silver ritual vessels, the last few fragments of the Antigonus letter, are all still in someone's private collection room."

"Once they fall into the hands of the cultists and are engraved with the sigils, the anchor points will be automatically completed."

"Whether it's an informant or a scapegoat, he must have taken those last few coordinates with him when he defected."

At dawn, Lu Li returned to the Potion Room and locked the backed-up formula into his own locker.

Outside the window, the outline of Tingen City gradually became clear in the lead-gray morning light.

The sound of the church bell standing quietly in the distance sounded more like a slow but unstoppable timer at this moment.

The time Old Neil took his first dose of medicine was exactly two days earlier than the night he later walked toward the "key of life".