36: Chapter 36 Backlund

The steam train arrived in Backlund at dusk.

When Lu Li stepped out of the carriage carrying his suitcase, the smell of coal smoke on the platform was more than twice as strong as in Tingen.

The steel dome overhead was stained yellow by steam, and the rivets on its framework glinted with a dull light in the twilight.

Porters pushed luggage carts through the crowd, the wheels making a rhythmic clicking sound as they rolled over the seams of the stone floor.

Everywhere there were footsteps, steam whistles, and the shouts of strangers greeting each other.

It took him a few minutes to find the correct direction to the exit.

The scale of the city of Backlund far exceeded any imagination he had built from photographs and maps.

The streets were twice as wide as those in Tingen, and the streetlights were not gas lamps but electric lights, their glare blindingly white.

The buildings along the street were so tall that one had to crane one's neck to see the roofs, and the walls were plastered with various advertisements, with faded church notices pasted next to the latest steam locomotive advertisements.

In addition to coal smoke, the air was mixed with the fishy smell of water drifting from the direction of River Bay District, the charred aroma of a fried food stall on the street corner, and a fainter, almost completely masked scent of spiritual metal oxides.

He hailed a rental carriage near the platform exit.

The driver was a thin man in his fifties, with snuff powder on his mustache, who opened his mouth to ask in a Backlund accent: "Where to, sir?"

"River Bay District. Green Parrot Street."

The driver looked him up and down, his gaze lingering for a moment on his suitcase and the badge on his coat sleeve. "New here?"

"Transferred from Tingen. Church field agent."

"Got it." The driver asked no more.

The carriage drove along Kings Avenue towards River Bay District. Lu Li observed this strange city through the carriage window.

The density of Beyonders in Backlund was much higher than in Tingen.

The Fate Anchor emitted a continuous low-frequency hum when entering the city limits—not a warning, but a dense perception.

It was so overwhelmed by the large amount of scattered spiritual fluctuations in the surrounding environment that it had to actively restrain itself to remain quiet.

Just along this stretch of Kings Avenue, he sensed at least three Sealed Artifact nodes belonging to the Church, the remnants of an ongoing Beyonder ritual, and a low-Sequence Beyonder who had just walked past the carriage with the residual scent of potions on them.

He silently adjusted his assessment of Backlund in his mind.

Tingen was a quiet little town strictly guarded by seals and the Church, while Backlund was a composite entity that had been repeatedly cut, stitched, and cut again on a spiritual level.

Every corner could hide a running Sealed Artifact node, and every building's basement could hide a Beyonder in the middle of preparing a potion.

Here, "secrecy" is not a choice, but a survival strategy.

The carriage stopped in front of a four-story brick and wood apartment building on Green Parrot Street.

The driver helped him move his suitcase to the curb, tipped his hat after taking the fare, and then cracked his whip to leave.

Lu Li stood on the side of the street, looking up at the apartment building—the outer wall was made of old dark red bricks, the paint on the window frames was mottled, but overall it was quite tidy.

The Landlady was a middle-aged Backlund woman with a round face; after taking his prepaid rent, she handed him a copper key and introduced the location of the public kitchen on the first floor and the bathroom on the second floor in a very fast tone.

Then she added: "The room at the end of the third floor used to be occupied by a Nighthawks member. He said this apartment was close to the church, and he could hear the bells in the morning. Later, he was transferred to the East Borough."

"Thank you."

The room was not large, but it was enough to live in. He put his suitcase at the end of the bed and pushed open the window.

The spire of the St. Hillan Cathedral stood out from the opposite bank of the River Bay District, gleaming with a cold white stone luster in the night.

The clock on the bell tower was chiming the hour, the sound heavy and distant, one octave lower than the bell of the Saint Selena Cathedral in Tingen.

Early the next morning, he went to the diocesan headquarters attached to the church.

The Backlund diocesan headquarters was a three-story gray granite building with four Ionic columns standing at the main entrance, and the holy emblem of the Church of the Evernight Goddess carved above the lintel.

The Sealed Artifact warehouse was in the underground area behind the building, and a pass needed to be exchanged at the main entrance registration office.

Lu Li handed Old Neil's letter of recommendation to the clerk on duty at the registration office and waited for nearly half an hour before being led to the waiting area to sit down.

A young man wearing a gray priest's robe walked over from the other end of the corridor and introduced himself as Mr. Moran, the administrator of the Sealed Artifact warehouse.

Klein was right. Mr. Moran had a gentle temperament but was extremely slow in doing things.

He read Old Neil's letter of recommendation carefully from beginning to end twice, took out the registration book to verify Lu Li's identity information, and then asked him to fill out a temporary transfer application form for a Grade A Sealed Artifact.

During the filling process, he repeatedly confirmed the purpose of the transfer three times. After Lu Li answered each time, he would nod slightly and then continue to turn to the next page of the form.

The whole process dragged on for nearly two hours. Finally, Moran turned over the last page of the form, signed his name at the bottom, and said that the transfer approval would take three weeks, during which the jiaowei would be temporarily listed as "pending transfer."

At that time, an audit team would come to evaluate the priority of the transfer application, and the priority would depend on the applicant's Sequence level and internal mission records of the Church.

The anchor point purification records that Lu Li had retrieved from the Nighthawks archives should be enough.

Lu Li nodded in agreement. Three weeks was exactly as he had estimated. That afternoon, he started looking for materials.

The official market for Beyonder materials in Backlund was located in a closed corridor specially set aside on the east side of the diocesan headquarters.

There was a registration desk at the entrance of the corridor, and an access permit needed to be presented.

After he handed in the access application that came with the recommendation letter, the clerk on duty checked it for a few minutes and stamped the form.

The official market was at least five times larger than the storage room of the Tingen Potion Room.

Rows of glass counters displayed well-categorized Beyonder materials, each with a handwritten label indicating the product name, source, Sequence level, and stock quantity.

The supply of pituitary extract from adult Transformation Lizards was very sufficient this week; the price was nearly half as expensive again as the Tingen black market, but the purity and sealing process were better.

He signed a purchase order and booked a bottle first. The powder of the Deceiver's hyoid bone was indeed out of stock.

The material administrator behind the counter was a middle-aged woman wearing a monocle; she flipped the inventory catalog from beginning to end, and then from end to beginning, finally took off her glasses and placed them on the counter, saying that this was a niche item that was only stocked once every six months, and the last time it was stocked was four months ago.

She suggested he try his luck at the underground market, then took out a folded map from the counter drawer and pushed it over—it was a distribution map of shops in the Underground Commercial Street, with the main business categories of each fixed shop marked in pencil.

The entrance to the Underground Commercial Street was hidden in the back alley of an old bookstore at the end of Water Pump Street.

The bookstore's frontage was extremely small, sandwiched between two red brick factory buildings; a faded copper sign hung above the lintel, the handwriting was blurred and difficult to distinguish, but the Hermes script characters for "Old Eye" could still be vaguely recognized.

Lu Li paused at the bookstore entrance and turned into the back alley.

Deep in the alley was an iron door embedded at the base of the wall, with several extremely thin copper wires stretched across the door frame, the ends of which were connected to several rusted copper bells.

This was the same type of early warning network as the one at the entrance of Old Coppersmith's workshop; the wiring habits were similar, and it was likely from the hands of the same craftsman.

He avoided the copper wires, pushed open the iron door, and walked underground along a narrow stone staircase extending downwards.

The scale of the Underground Commercial Street was far beyond the Tingen black market.

The main passage was about three meters wide, with a phosphorescent stone wall lamp hanging on the walls on both sides every few steps.

Dozens of narrower branch alleys extended from both sides of the main passage, and spiritual light of different colors shone at the end of each branch alley.

The air was filled with a complex scent of mixed Beyonder materials—dried ghost moss, Outer Deity vines soaked in lye, freshly ground apatite powder, and a deeper, sweet, fishy smell of damp soil and rotten wood that seemed to drift from a great distance.

He spent an afternoon walking from one end of the main passage to the other, marking four fixed shops specializing in materials related to the Marauder Pathway.

The first shop mainly dealt in main potion materials, and the back of the counter was hung with various Transformation Lizard organs sealed in glass jars, but there was no hyoid bone powder.

The owner of the second shop was an old man with fingers covered in silver powder, who said he had the powder of the Deceiver's hyoid bone, but the sample did not look right at first glance; the color was grayish, and the density was low.

The owner argued that a small amount of anticoagulant was mixed in during the grinding, but Lu Li did not argue with him, just put the sample back on the counter and pushed it back.

The third shop was closed, and a handwritten sign hung on the door: Suspended business due to an emergency at home; resumption time to be notified later.

The fourth shop was at the end of the deepest branch alley, the storefront was only half a room, and the owner was a thin, dry woman wearing a leather apron.

"Powder of the Deceiver's hyoid bone?" She flipped the inventory record book to the last page and shook her head. "This kind of niche material is only stocked once every six months. The last batch was stocked four months ago and was bought out by someone on the same day."

"All of it?"

"Four bottles, cleared out at once. The buyer left a name but no contact information, saying that they were also a purchasing agent buying for a friend." She hesitated for a moment, flipped the record book back a few pages, and stopped at a record from a few months ago. "The buyer's signature only had one letter—A."

Lu Li kept this letter in his mind and did not ask any more questions.

It was already night when he returned to the apartment. He took out the imitation Antigonus notebook from the interlayer of his suitcase and placed it on the table along with the few auxiliary materials he had bought in the Underground Commercial Street today.

The bell tower of the St. Hillan Cathedral outside the window was chiming the hour, the sound spreading through the night, deep and distant.

He opened the title page of the imitation notebook, and his gaze fell back on the line of Hermes script on the title page. The positions where the letter spacing was uneven were all concentrated in the latter part of the line of letters.

He copied this line of words onto a piece of white paper, marked the positions where the letter spacing was larger one by one, and then rearranged the letters in these positions according to the alphabetical order.

The result was a word he didn't recognize. It was not Hermes script, not Giant language, not Elvish language.

But he had seen the structure of this language—when he was reading the research materials on Roselle's diary in the archives, a small sample of Roselle's self-created characters was attached to that research report.

This language could only be automatically translated above the gray fog; on a spiritual level, it required a specific way of interpretation.

He found a portable spiritual detection lamp, opened the lampshade, and let the pale blue spiritual light shine through the back of the paper.

The positions where the letter spacing was larger showed a layer of extremely faint silver fluorescence under the transmitted light—the ink had been infused with a trace amount of Moonstone powder after drying.

This powder could only be activated by the Alchemist's Fire, and after activation, it would produce a fluorescent reaction to a specific spiritual frequency.

In other words, this line of words was not written with ordinary ink, but with special ink mixed with Moonstone powder, and he had seen the formula for this kind of ink once in Old Coppersmith's workshop.

He turned off the projection lamp and sat in the dark for a while thinking.

The title page of the imitation notebook used the same font as the original Antigonus notebook; the writer had seen the real thing.

The writer also knew the formula for the moonstone fluorescent ink—this formula could usually only be prepared by Beyonders of the Artisan Pathway. The retired church copyist brought this book when he moved from Backlund to Tingen.

This book had been on the copyist's bookshelf for at least twenty years. The three conditions superimposed together pointed to only one target—the owner of that old bookstore, the retired Beyonder, Old Eye, who specialized in imitations of fourth epoch documents. He was the only person who might know the original source of this line of words.

He decided to find time to visit that old bookstore during the three weeks of waiting for approval.