24: Chapter 24 Key and Price

The sound of the explosion in the depths of the Pumping Station spread throughout Iron Cross Street before midnight. It wasn't a gunpowder explosion—it was a directional release of spiritual pulses after being compressed to the limit in a confined space. The shockwave pushed outward along the main drainage pipes, causing the iron grates at all six sewer entrances to hum in unison.

Leonard, guarding the main entrance of the Pumping Station, was pushed back two steps by the blast, his ears filled with sharp buzzing. He did not loosen his grip on his short staff.

"Old Neil!" he shouted toward the depths of the Pumping Station. There was no response.

Daly ran over from the other side of the main entrance, holding a compass. The compass needle was spinning crazily, having completely lost its pointing function. She put the compass into her pocket, looked up at the depths of the Pumping Station, and said, "The sealing nodes are all stable. But the peak value before stabilization exceeded the record from the night at The Dark Channel."

"What about Roy King?"

"He won't survive. The rune was reverse-injected by the key from the inside; his spiritual circuit will be completely burned out within a few minutes." Daly put the compass back into her pocket, her fingers pausing on the edge of the pocket for half a second. "But the key didn't stop operating after sealing Roy King."

Leonard was about to speak when the iron grate at the main entrance of the Pumping Station was pushed open from the inside. Old Neil walked out from the Darkness, his staff broken in two, his left arm covered in blood, but his gait remained steady. Daly stepped forward quickly to support him, but he gently pushed her away with his right hand.

"No need to support me. My legs aren't injured." His voice was hoarse, but every word was enunciated clearly.

"Your left arm—"

"A superficial wound. Splashed by fragments of the rune." Old Neil placed the broken staff against the wall and pulled the silver snake key out of his pocket with his right hand. The tip of the key was still emitting a very fine white smoke, and the snake relief on the handle gleamed with a dull metallic luster in the moonlight. "The rune inside Roy King was burned out after being reverse-injected. The key's energy was consumed by about sixty percent, with the remaining forty percent still in the key. Is there any spare spirit body resistance potion in the Potion Room?"

"Yes, it was just prepared yesterday," Daly said.

"Help me get a bottle. Then ask Lu Li to bring the copper piece that Ince gave."

The gas lamp in the Potion Room made a slight hissing sound at the end of the corridor. Daly helped Old Neil sit in an old armchair, rummaged through the first-aid kit for bandages and disinfectant alcohol, and began to treat the burn-like laceration on his left arm that extended from his wrist to his elbow. The edges of the wound were very clean; it didn't look like an injury from flying fragments—it looked more like a thin line of high temperature had traveled a dozen centimeters under his skin, scorching the blood vessels along the way until they turned white.

"rune fragments wouldn't leave a wound like this." Daly used tweezers to pick up an alcohol cotton ball and wiped it gently along the edge of the wound.

"It's not fragments. It's the recoil of the key's pulse." Old Neil spread his right hand to show her. There was a similar burn mark in the center of his palm, running across the entire palm from the base of his thumb, ending exactly at the start of his life line. That was when he inserted the key into the rune in Roy King's body; the key's spiritual pulse had surged backward along his right hand, which was holding the key, into his arm, burning a complete spiritual circuit under his skin.

Daly stared at the wound on his palm for a long time. "You said before that the backlash from the key was within a controllable range."

"The range is controllable. The depth was about an inch more than expected. I'll correct the calculation formula later." Old Neil unscrewed the medicine bottle, poured the dark blue liquid down his throat, and set the cup down with a frown.

Footsteps came from the corridor. When Lu Li pushed the door open, Old Neil was pressing his right thumb against the garnet at the snake's eye position on the key handle. That garnet was burning hot—even through Old Neil's thumb, one could see a ring of extremely fine dark red halo leaking from the edges of his finger.

"Ince's copper piece is here." Lu Li placed the copper piece on the workbench and pushed it over, then rummaged through the first-aid kit for new bandages. "Three backup anchor coordinates, the flushing Sequence is marked on the back."

Old Neil picked up the copper piece and examined it under the phosphorescent stone lamp for a moment, then placed it back in the center of the tray. Lu Li stood on the other side of the workbench, watching Old Neil's face—the gray iris of his right eye looked exceptionally clear in the light, not stained red by spiritual erosion, nor had it become cloudy. The key was still in the second stage and had not yet begun to absorb his humanity. But Lu Li noticed that when Old Neil switched the silver snake key from his right hand to his left, his right thumb remained in the pressing position without letting go, as if that action had already been memorized by his muscles.

He placed the newly prepared concentrated holy water on the workbench and then took the old, empty medicine bottle from his pocket and placed it next to the concentrate. Old Neil glanced at the old bottle, took the formula notebook from the drawer, turned to the latest page, and began to read the calibration data.

"Extraction temperature?"

"Sixty-eight degrees, constant temperature."

"Stirring frequency?"

"Forty revolutions per minute."

"Color?"

"Deep blue with a hint of purple, with silver-white foam on the surface of the liquid, dissipation time is about twenty seconds."

Old Neil pulled a pencil from the pen holder, jotted a few notes in the formula book, and then set the pencil aside. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. "It was right to do an extra extraction of the potion. I told you before that the efficacy would last for four minutes—it actually lasted for nearly six minutes. The first three minutes after the key started were the critical period for sealing Roy King. If it weren't for those six minutes, my hand would have been burned through by the backlash before I even inserted it into the rune."

There was a moment of silence in the Potion Room.

"Ince Zangwill is still alive." Old Neil suddenly spoke. "He used whole blood to inject the rune in the stone chamber and used holy water to flush it clean from the inside at the moment the rift closed. That operation needs to be completed within an extremely short window—one second early and the rune would have drained him dry; one second late and the rift would have dragged him in. This is not something a person who is afraid of death could do."

"What he fears is the Snake of Fate."

"Of course he's afraid. He carved the rune, but he also left us the coordinates for the three anchor points. He is already useless. Since he survived this time, what does he plan to do next?"

Lu Li was silent for a moment. "Does he want to come back?"

"He won't open his mouth." Old Neil opened his eyes and moved the handle of the broken staff to his lap. "I've been a Nighthawk for fifteen years; I know his character. He doesn't admit his mistakes, he doesn't regret them, but he also leaves himself a way out. Those three anchor coordinates are his way out. He needs to use them to prove that he still has value—not to the Church, but to himself." He gathered the crystal fragments of the staff in his palm, took a look at them, and then put them into the drawer.

Daly cut the last piece of bandage and bandaged Old Neil's left arm. Old Neil moved his left fingers, the movement very slow, as if re-verifying whether the flexion and extension of each finger joint were still under his control.

Daly threw the blood-stained gauze into the waste bin, and the lid made a soft sound. "Why didn't you let Klein follow when you were sealing the passage in the Pumping Station just now?"

"The spiritual interference after the key is activated is too strong; those with insufficient Sequence will be drawn into the range of the backlash if they get close."

"So you went in alone."

"I brought a whole bottle of potion and a staff. That doesn't count as alone."

Daly did not continue to ask. She rolled up the remaining bandages and put them back into the first-aid kit, picked up the cup of black tea that had already gone cold from the workbench, poured a fresh hot cup, and placed it by Old Neil's right hand. Old Neil picked up the teacup and took a sip, resting the broken staff handle on his lap. The shattered crystal at the head of the staff only had a few small pale blue fragments left, and deep within the fragments, a trace of extremely weak spirituality was still flickering.

"The spirit body resistance potion formula that I asked you to take in advance needs a complete efficacy test later." Lu Li found the recording table from the drawer next to the first-aid kit and placed it on the workbench. "During the process where you used the key to seal Roy King, the potion's peak value was extended by nearly two minutes. This shows that after doing an extra extraction, the peak efficacy does indeed extend, but the decay is also steeper."

"How steep?"

"After the peak ends, the efficacy will drop to the bottom in a very short time. Your right eye is still gray now, which means the key is still in the second stage and hasn't entered the third stage. But if the peak decay window happens to coincide with the key entering the third stage, your spiritual reserve won't be able to withstand that steep drop." Lu Li pushed the table over. "So you need to take this opportunity while the key is still under control to make a complete data record. From the potion's onset to the peak to the decay, you need to measure the spiritual baseline at each stage."

"I'll do it tomorrow."

Daly stood up from beside the first-aid kit. "Do it tonight. If you don't do it now, the key will still be in your hands tomorrow—if there's another new situation that triggers a backlash, you won't even know how fast it decays, and you won't even have time to adjust."

Old Neil was silent for a moment, pressing his index finger against the corner of his right eye, as if checking if the eye could still focus properly. Then he sighed, put his hand down, and said, "Fine. Tonight it is."

He put the silver snake key into the lead tray, picked up the bottle of concentrated holy water Lu Li had prepared from the workbench, and examined it under the phosphorescent stone lamp for a moment. "The formula ratio is correct. Next time you prepare it yourself, shorten the soaking time of the moonstone powder by one-third. The standard procedure is one hour, but with your spiritual output frequency, soaking for too long will actually reduce the precision of the purification."

Lu Li nodded, keeping this tip in mind. Outside the window, the bell tower of Saint Selena Cathedral chimed midnight. Old Neil moved the lead tray to the center of the workbench and began to test the spiritual baseline item by item according to the recording table. The low hum of the distiller filled the Potion Room again, and the cold white light of the phosphorescent stone spilled onto the bottles and jars covering the walls.

In the corridor, Daly leaned against the wall outside the door, arms crossed, looking down at her dust-covered boots. Lu Li walked out of the Potion Room and gently closed the door.

"When he was sealing the passage with his staff just now," Daly said, looking down, "I tried to use spirit mediumship to sense his spiritual state. The spiritual interference was too strong after the key was activated; I could only sense a fragment."

"What fragment?"

"The thought in his mind at the last moment before the staff shattered—'This key has locked it for fifteen years; today it's time for it to pay back what it owes.'" Daly finished saying this, then stood up straight, tucked a stray lock of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes behind her ear, and turned to walk toward the archives. Her silhouette was stretched long by the gas lamp in the dim corridor.

Lu Li leaned against the wall outside the Potion Room, holding the copper whistle Old Neil had given him in his palm. The whistle still carried the body heat from when he had guarded the back door of the Pumping Station all night. At the end of the corridor, Klein walked over with a pot of freshly brewed black tea. Seeing him standing outside the Potion Room, he placed the teapot on the windowsill in the corridor.

"Is Old Neil still inside?"

"Yes. Doing an efficacy decay test. The key is still in his hand, so he won't be taking it off for a while." Lu Li took the teacup Klein handed him and took a sip. The hot tea rolled down his throat, washing away a little of the chill from having crouched at the back door of the Pumping Station for several hours.

"Those three anchor coordinates that Ince gave," Klein leaned against the other side of the windowsill with his teacup, "when do you plan to go flush them?"

"Tomorrow. The order cannot be wrong, otherwise it will trigger a chain resonance. The three anchor points are distributed in different branches of the underground drainage network of Iron Cross Street, and flushing them all will take at least a day."

"I'll go with you." Klein blew on the steam rising from the rim of his cup. "I can sense the spiritual fluctuations of those anchor points above the gray fog—although they are already very weak, their positions can still be confirmed. In case there is an error in the coordinates Ince marked, I can use paper figurines to perform real-time divination for calibration."

Lu Li nodded. The bell tower finished chiming the last stroke of midnight. Through the crack in the Potion Room door, the cold white light of the phosphorescent stone shone through, and the rustling sound of Old Neil's pen tip across the paper on the recording table was vaguely audible. The silver snake key lay quietly in the lead tray, the snake relief on the handle glowing with a gloomy luster under the light. The key was still in the second stage; it was still waiting.