5: Chapter 5 Welch's Legacy

Three days later, a gold-embossed, wax-sealed letter of commission was delivered to the front desk of the Blackthorn Security Company.

Lu Li happened to be organizing last week's patrol logs in the reception hall when Rozanne opened the envelope.

She unfolded the letter and scanned it, her brow furrowing, her lips pressed into a thin line. Then, holding the corner of the letter with two fingers as if handling a dead cockroach, she handed it to Dunn, who was just walking down the stairs.

"The Welch Family," Rozanne said, "has commissioned us to investigate a burglary."

Dunn took the letter and his gaze swept quickly across the lines. His expression didn't change, but his fingers tightened slightly on the paper—a detail that perhaps only I, who was pretending to organize the logs while actually observing him from the corner of my eye, could have noticed.

"Welch." Dunn folded the letter and put it in his pocket. "The Welch from the university?"

"That's the one," Rozanne said. "Sir Old Welch's only son, just graduated from the history department. His apartment was burglarized last week, and several personal collections alleged to have 'high historical research value' were lost. The police investigated for three days without finding anything, and now the case has been transferred to us."

"Personal collections with historical research value," Dunn repeated, his tone as flat as if he were reading a laundry list. "The kind of 'historical research value' that makes the police voluntarily push a case to the Nighthawks usually isn't below the standard of a Grade 3 Sealed Artifact. Did he say exactly what was lost?"

"It wasn't written in the letter. It only said it involved Fourth Epoch literature, and the specific list needs to be confirmed in person."

Dunn was silent for a moment, then turned to look at me. His gaze held a worldly caution, as if weighing whether it was appropriate to send a Sequence 9 who had only just started a few days ago on this job, but in the end, only a business-like calmness remained in those gray-blue eyes.

"Lu Li, you come with me. Welch is a graduate of Tingen University, and you're about the same age, so communicating should be smoother than with these old bones of mine. Also—bring your standard equipment. If the stolen item really involves the Fourth Epoch, there's a high probability that traces of Beyonder contamination still remain at the scene."

"Understood." Lu Li closed the patrol log and took his coat from the coat rack.

The standard equipment of the Blackthorn Security Company wasn't much.

A pair of anti-contamination leather gloves, a portable medicine kit containing basic antidotes and hemostatic powder, a copper whistle that could transmit emergency signals over a short distance, and a standard-issue short cane for Sequence 9—the shaft was made of ordinary ebony, and the head was embedded with a small fragment of moonstone, which could cause limited physical damage to spirit-type entities.

For the Marauder Pathway, this short cane was more of an identity marker than a real weapon.

Our weapons were our fingers, our sense of distance, our judgment of timing, and the audacity to take things from others' pockets.

Dunn and Lu Li took the Nighthawks' patrol carriage across half of Tingen City, arriving at Welch's apartment around ten in the morning.

It was a small red-brick building on the edge of the university district, decent in appearance but not ostentatious, very much in line with the financial status of a newly graduated history student.

The apartment was on the third floor. There were no police at the door, only a middle-aged man in plain clothes who looked like a butler. After seeing Dunn's holy emblem, he bowed slightly and opened the door with a well-maintained brass key.

Welch's apartment was not large, but it was packed with things. Every wall in the living room was occupied by bookshelves, stuffed with historical documents of various formats, academic journals, and bound manuscripts.

On the desk lay an open book, "Folklore of the Northern Loen Region in the Fourth Epoch," with the ink bottle next to it still open, the fountain pen resting on the rim of the ink bottle, its nib already dried—clearly, the owner hadn't sat at this desk for several days.

The windows were tightly closed, and the curtains were only half-drawn. The morning sunlight cut a diagonal beam of light through the dust-filled air, illuminating an empty wooden display shelf in the corner.

Welch himself sat on the sofa in the center of the living room, his hands clasped on his knees, in a posture as if he were visiting an unfamiliar distant relative.

He was very young, in his early twenties, with short, light brown hair combed meticulously, regular features, and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.

But the whites of his eyes were slightly yellow, there were deep, dark blue-black shadows under his eyes, and his lips were cracked and peeling—these were typical signs of long-term insomnia and nervous tension, which I could see without needing Apothecary perception.

"Mr. Welch," Dunn sat down opposite him, speaking in that routine tone used within the Nighthawks—neither quite an interrogation nor quite a consolation. "I am Dunn Smith, captain of the Tingen City Nighthawks squad. This is my colleague, Lu Li. We received your commission and would like to understand some specifics."

Welch nodded, his movements slow, as if the muscles in his neck were not obeying him well.

When he spoke, his voice was hoarser than he appeared, and the end of every word seemed to drop slightly, as if something in his throat was pulling his vocal cords downward.

"Thank you both for coming. I'm not sure if this falls within your jurisdiction, but the police suggested I contact your organization. Among the stolen items, there is one—I'm not sure how to describe it—a rather unusual thing."

"Tell us the specifics," Dunn said. "When was it discovered stolen? What was lost?"

"Last Thursday. To be precise, early Friday morning. I was awakened around three in the morning by a dull thud, as if something heavy had hit the floor. I got up to check and found the study door open—I had definitely closed it before going to sleep—and some things were missing from the display shelf." He frowned and corrected himself, "Not a few things. Two things. A silver amulet and a notebook of the Antigonus Family."

Antigonus.

When these four syllables were spoken by Welch, Lu Li felt the air suddenly become a bit thicker.

It wasn't a real physical change, but my Marauder perception sounding an alarm—it had captured a certain ominous aura carried by the name itself, like a spider sensing the vibration frequency of a silk thread on its web suddenly changing.

Dunn's expression didn't change at all. He just leaned forward slightly and asked in a tone lighter and slower than before, "The Antigonus Family. Do you know the meaning of this name?"

"A noble family from the Fourth Epoch. I study history, Mr. Smith, and I am not unfamiliar with the noble lineages of the Fourth Epoch. But this notebook—"

Welch paused, as if considering whether to say what came next.

Then he took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Without the lenses, his eye sockets appeared even more sunken. The expression wasn't fear, but a mixture of confusion and anxiety peculiar to a scholar hitting the boundaries of their own knowledge.

"This notebook was something I stumbled upon while organizing documents left behind by my mentor. It is very old, and its binding style does not fit any known historical period. I tried to translate the content, but I only succeeded with a small part. The notebook repeatedly mentions a concept—'Snake of Fate.' I'm not sure what this represents. But after I started translating this notebook, some things that are hard to explain began to happen."

"What kind of things?" Dunn asked.

"Dreams," Welch said. "The same dream, for seven consecutive days. In the dream, I am standing in a gray mist, with no ground beneath my feet and no sky above my head. Something is moving in the fog—a huge silhouette, larger than the entire Tingen City, its shape changing every moment, but I can feel it watching me. Not just watching me; it is waiting for me. Waiting for me to find it."

He stopped, his lips trembling, not out of fear but out of exhaustion—having that kind of dream for seven days in a row, anyone would be drained to their limit.

Dunn didn't speak. He let the silence linger for a while, then glanced at Lu Li. The meaning of that look was clear: Do you have anything you want to ask?

Lu Li thought of many things, but could only ask one.

"Mr. Welch, that thing in the dream—" I looked into his eyes, "Did it ever speak?"

Welch slowly raised his head. His eyes appeared abnormally hollow behind the gold-rimmed glasses, and his voice suddenly became very soft, so soft it was as if he were afraid of waking some ghost taking a nap in the room.

"No. But it laughed."

The apartment fell into a heavy silence.

The curtains swayed gently in the breeze blowing through the window cracks, stirring the dust in the light beam into countless tiny vortices. Lu Li subconsciously repeated Welch's words in his heart.

Snake of Fate.

The massive silhouette within the gray fog. The Antigonus Family notebook. Piecing these fragments together, there is only one possibility: an ancient entity hidden deep in history is casting its gaze back upon this world through this notebook.

Dunn stood up, walked around the coffee table, and approached the empty display shelf.

He crouched down and lightly touched the thin layer of dust remaining on the shelf with his gloved fingertips, then brought the dust to his nose to sniff—that was the sensory method of a "Nightmare," tracking traces of Beyonder power through the "aura" left on objects.

A moment later, he stood up and pulled a small brass compass from his pocket.

That compass was not an ordinary compass. Its needle did not point north or south, but instead swayed slowly and irregularly between various directions, like a hound sniffing for prey in the air.

This was a standard Nighthawks contamination detection Sealed Artifact, Grade 3, codenamed "Hound Pointer," capable of detecting fluctuations of residual Beyonder characteristic within a fifty-meter radius.

The needle vibrated violently when it pointed at the display shelf, then suddenly jerked toward the direction of the study.

It did not just deflect when pointing toward the study—it rotated, spinning clockwise three times at an impossible speed before suddenly stopping. The needle pointed straight at a spot behind the study door, motionless, as if welded there by some invisible force.

Dunn put away the compass, his expression darkening by two shades.

"Search this room and see if you can discover anything," he said to Lu Li, his voice kept very low. "Use your Marauder perception—there is no need to touch anything, just feel. Feel if there is anything in this room that does not belong here."

I nodded, closed my eyes, and focused my attention on my palms.

The Sequence 9 ability of the Marauder Pathway—"Nimble Hand," is essentially a perception of "belonging."

A well-trained thief can know by intuition whether a wallet contains anything worth stealing without needing to open it to check.

Once this intuition is amplified on a Beyonder level, it becomes a more abstract ability: sensing the connection between an item and its owner, and perceiving the subtle fissures created in silence between "items returning to their rightful owner" and "items lost from their rightful place."

Lu Li opened his eyes again, his gaze sweeping inch by inch along the bookshelves, the desk, and the corner lines of the walls. His fingers were slightly splayed at his sides, using the sensation of airflow in his palms to capture the remnants of aura invisible to the naked eye.

Then Lu Li saw it—not with his eyes, but captured by a perception somewhere between vision and intuition: on the left side of the third shelf, there was an extremely faint, blurry outline, shaped like the aura imprint left by an open notebook. Beside it was an even fainter sliver of silver light, roughly the size of an amulet.

And between those two residual auras, I sensed the traces of a third-party intervention.

It was not a person, nor was it contamination left by a Beyonder, but something weaker and more ancient—as if some power had precisely "cut" these two items out of the air, along with cutting away a small segment of continuous space and time.

Lu Li opened his eyes and turned to Dunn.

"The person who came in to steal the notebook was not human," I said, "at least not an ordinary Beyonder. The method was like cutting through space—the thief is very likely a Sequence 8 of the Apprentice Pathway, a 'Trickmaster.' But the technique that left this trace is far too clean compared to an ordinary Apprentice. Perhaps there is someone of a higher Sequence behind them teaching them."

Dunn was silent for a moment, then turned to Welch: "Where was the notebook taken? Have you received any ransom notes, threat letters, or any form of contact?"

"No," Welch said, "there has been no contact. They came in, took what they wanted, and left. It is as if—"

He stopped. His lips were parted, but no sound came out.

"It is as if they did not need to ask any questions at all to know the notebook was with me," he said slowly, watching Dunn's eyes brighten bit by bit. "And when I first discovered this notebook three days ago, I only wrote to tell my classmate who is also in Tingen."

"The classmate's name?"

"Klein, Klein Moretti. He is also a graduate of the History Department at Tingen University."

The room went quiet again. Outside the window, pigeons fluttered past, their shadows falling on the windowsill and disappearing in the blink of an eye.

Dunn wrote down the name in his notebook, closed it, and put it back in his pocket. I stood by the bookshelf, lowered my eyelids, and hid all of my expression from that moment beneath them.

Klein Moretti? This name being mentioned at this point in time is of great significance.

Klein is the only person who knows of the existence of this notebook, and he is also the one most deeply implicated by this notebook in the original storyline.

The thief precisely stole the notebook and the amulet but did not touch any other valuable ancient books, indicating they knew what they were looking for.

And behind this thief, it is very likely that the Aurora Order, the Psychology Alchemists, or even an agent of some hidden entity stands.

Regardless of who it is, if they dig down following the clues of the notebook, they will soon dig their way to Klein.

I need to cut off this clue before Klein is dragged into the water—at the very least, make it veer off in another direction.

Dunn did not know what was running through Lu Li's mind.

He simply turned to Welch and used one sentence to conclude this visit: "I will send people to protect you and your apartment. Do not go out alone during this time, and do not receive any strange visitors. If you have that dream, record every detail, even if it is just a fleeting fragment; write it all down."

Welch nodded, put his glasses back on, and rubbed his temples with his palms. His shoulders were slightly hunched, like a hare curled up in its burrow before a storm.

His discomfort was written in every detail, stemming not only from the loss of the precious document but more from exhaustion—a depletion seeping out from the depths of his spirit that even sleep could not alleviate.

Dunn and I left the apartment in the evening twilight and stood side by side by the street lamp downstairs for a moment.

Dunn gazed at the crowd coming and going on the street, one hand inserted into his trench coat pocket on the compass, and said to Lu Li without turning his head: "I will investigate the name Klein. Return to the Potion Room tonight and organize the abnormal fluctuations detected today into a brief report."

"Should I send the report to you alone, or circulate it to the whole team?"

"Only to me."

After saying this, Dunn turned and walked toward the carriage, his figure drawn out long in the dim yellow light of the street lamp, blending into the gray-blue twilight mist of Tingen.

Lu Li watched his figure disappear at the street corner, then tucked his hands into his coat pockets and began to walk in the other direction.

When returning to the Blackthorn Security Company, the lights in the Potion Room were still on. Old Neil was sitting at the workbench reading a copy of "Beyonder Mineral Spectroscopic Analysis" that was thick enough to be used as a brick. Seeing me push the door open, he merely raised an eyebrow and continued flipping through his book.

The distiller was still clanking in the corner.

Lu Li spread the detection records on the workbench and began writing the brief report. After finishing the part with objective facts, Lu Li left a blank line at the end, hesitated for a long time, and finally inserted a subjective assessment.

"It is recommended that headquarters assign a specialist to directly protect Welch: the thief did not act alone but came prepared, and possessed precise spatial movement abilities, likely having received direct guidance from a high-Sequence member of the Apprentice Pathway. Welch's current mental state is nearing a breaking point; it is recommended to initiate psychological intervention as soon as possible."

Old Neil had stood behind Lu Li at some point, finished reading this passage over my shoulder, and then gently placed a document enclosed in a cowhide envelope by Lu Li's hand.

The wax seal on the envelope was still fresh, but the paper was slightly wrinkled, as if it had been folded several times under someone's scrutiny beforehand. "Good analysis. By the way, that Klein you wanted to investigate—this is the information just retrieved from the archives. The captain asked me to give it to you."

He put down the envelope, turned, and returned to the armchair in the corner to continue flipping through his spectroscopic analysis, never once asking Lu Li why he wanted to investigate Klein from beginning to end.

Lu Li did not open the envelope.

Instead, he tucked the envelope into his bosom, the inner pocket resting right against his heart. Through his sternum and a thin layer of cloth, I could feel the paper trembling slightly with the vibration of my heartbeat, as if it were turning the pages of a future not yet read by the world for me.

Outside the window, Tingen City sank into an ever-deepening midnight, while in the distance, that mass of gray fog belonging to Antigonus was slowly gathering amidst some irreversible, ancient ritual. There was not much time left for me.