Chapter 694: Beams of Light
After Roland fell asleep, Nightingale stepped into the Mist and left the castle.
In the Mist, the world reduced itself to black and white: every surface simplified, every edge softened into gradients of grey, every magic power visible as the only color the place permitted. She moved through it the way she had always moved — leaping the distorted distances the Mist made navigable, crossing the courtyard wall around the Foreign Affairs Building in a few strides, coming down on the top floor without sound.
Roland had named this way of moving Flash. He’d described it the first time with that particular relish he reserved for things that pleased him technically — a masterstroke of mobility, he’d said, requiring no buffering time. She had liked the name immediately, liked the way it described the thing exactly, and had not mentioned that she wasn’t entirely sure what buffering time was. She had grown accustomed to those gaps. The words he used that didn’t quite map to anything in the world she knew were, by now, as familiar as his other habits.
The Foreign Affairs Building stood four stories, concrete, wedged between the Castle District and the uptown streets. It had been built first as a prison — Duke Ryan’s family had occupied the dungeon below until Roland had moved them somewhere less unpleasant than they deserved. After that it had become the default accommodation for guests who warranted care but not full trust: the alchemists from King’s City, the Astrology Association sages, the Fjord sea-traders who came and went with the seasons. Most of the upper rooms sat empty. The central heating didn’t reach this far, so the building ran on tap water and fireplaces, and Roland kept a few guards posted to signal respect without fully relaxing it.
Nightingale did not use the corridor.
She passed through the walls of the top floor, moving from room to room, looking.
The afternoon examination had given her nothing conclusive. The Wolfheart witches’ Magic Cyclones were stable and unexceptional — ordinary abilities, solidly formed, the kind that belonged to witches who had been using their power long enough to know its shape. In the inquiry, they had withheld things, but she had expected that. She had seen enough witches who’d been hunted and sold and turned out of their homes to recognize the difference between concealment and dishonesty. The silences in their answers were the kind that came from things they couldn’t yet say aloud, not the kind that came from things they were hiding with purpose.
She could have accepted them without reservation.
It was No. 76 that she kept coming back to.
No magic glow. No unusual bearing. Nothing you could point at and name. The woman had answered every question with what appeared to be complete honesty — and that was precisely what Nightingale couldn’t let go of. Most people, when frightened or desperate or trying to make a good impression, withheld at least something. The shape of the answer gave the shape of the fear. No. 76 had offered everything she asked for, clean and unguarded, as though she had considered and decided there was nothing worth hiding.
That was, in Nightingale’s experience, almost never true.
She couldn’t call it a lie. Everything No. 76 had said appeared to have been authentic — corroborated by Yorko, by Amy, by Annie. The woman had served as a guide for the underground exhibition called Black Money. She had been bought by the ambassador after the witch auction. She had come to Neverwinter with the others through the standard channels.
None of that was false. And yet.
Nightingale found the room and went through the wall.
The other witches were asleep. No. 76 was not. She sat on the bed in the candlelight, the ring from this afternoon held up between two fingers, turning it slowly. Her expression was the expression of someone who had found something beautiful and was still deciding how much to let themselves be pleased by it.
Nightingale watched.
The Magic Cyclone visible in the Mist was the same it had been in the afternoon: absent. No glow at all from the woman herself. The ring had a faint emission — which made sense; Black Money auctioned relics from ancient ruins, and a guide who worked there long enough would inevitably acquire one. There was nothing Nightingale could point to and say: here.
An hour passed. No. 76 turned the ring. Looked at the stone in the candlelight. Her eyelids grew heavy. She drooped slowly to one side, the ring still clasped, eyes closing, and slept with the boneless completeness of someone exhausted.
Nightingale stood there a moment longer.
I’m being too cautious, she thought.
She reached out and extinguished the candle, then turned and stepped back through the wall into the snowstorm.
The ring’s warmth faded.
No. 76 let out a breath that had taken some discipline to suppress.
Soul Transfer granted something that ordinary sleep could not match. By disconnecting consciousness from body, she could rest in two to four hours what others needed eight to recover. She had chosen to spend the evening’s surplus studying her fellow witches through the ring — legitimate, unhurried, in no particular hurry to sleep.
She had not anticipated a visitor.
Through the colorful Magic Stone, the arriving witch had appeared as a beam of orange light, thick as the trunk of a mature tree, rising straight from floor to ceiling. No. 76 had barely kept still. She had held the performance of sleepiness in place by main force while her mind processed what she was seeing.
The orange beam sat at a level she had not expected to find here. It exceeded the remaining Senior Witch of Taquila, Pasha. It sat near the range she associated with the Three Chiefs of the Union — not quite at that summit, but in the approach to it.
Whatever the invisible witch’s ability was, it was not simple invisibility. The complexity of the Key indicated something layered, something that had evolved well beyond its origin form.
Anna? Leaf? Those were the names Nana had mentioned. She filed both, assigning them no certainty yet.
She sat up when she was sure the witch was gone. The room was dark, the candle extinguished. She didn’t bother relighting it.
The rooftop was four flights up and she reached it in the kind of quiet that came from years of practice. Outside, the snowstorm drove against her face without sensation — the absence of cold was something she had made her peace with a long time ago, the way you make peace with a word becoming meaningless through repetition. She raised the ring and pointed it toward the castle on the hill. That was where Wendy had said the witches lived.
She waited for it to settle. For the stone to find what was there and show her.
The ring began to shake.
Not the mild vibration it produced in the presence of ordinary magic. A resonance. The kind she associated with proximity to something the stone was calibrated to recognize.
Through the Magic Stone, light bloomed.
It was not a beam. A beam implied a column of light, bounded by edges, containing itself. What appeared in the stone’s field was something else — wide as a wall, high as the sky from ground to cloud, as though the limitation of the image was not the source but the ring’s own frame. Half the visible sky, filled.
No. 76 stood in the snow and stared.
She had carried this stone for centuries. She knew its range. She knew the scale of what produced each gradation of light.
Her hand was not entirely steady.
The Chosen One.
Chapter 694: “Beams of Light”
Translator: TransN Editor: TransN
After Roland fell asleep, Nightingale entered the Mist and quietly left the castle.
Her destination was the Foreign Affairs Building.
Even at night when the land was cloaked in darkness, in the misty world, she could still see everything clearly in black and white. Taking advantage of distorted outlines, she could jump several meters in one leap. With merely a few steps, she passed through the courtyard wall around the building.
Roland had called this way of moving ‘Flash’. He described it as a masterstroke to move with super speed, which required no buffering time. She liked the name ‘Flash’ the first time she heard it. Just as it implied, such a movement was as quick as a flash of lightning and as quiet as a shadow. She could come out and disappear anywhere in a sudden, making it hard for anyone to predict her movements.
She liked such a description but did not quite understand what the buffering time meant.
But she did not mind it, as she had already got used to this old talking habit of his. It was not a rare thing for her to hear some strange words from him.
After getting out of the Castle District, Nightingale did not follow the ramp that she often took to descend the hill, but directly leaped high above the hillside and walked in the air. She followed the lines that appeared in the air, and after several strides, she landed straight on the top floor of the Foreign Affairs Building.
The building was located in the area between the Castle District and uptown, a four-story structure as high as the upland where the castle stood. It was the second concrete building after the Witch House.
Initially, it had been built to detain some important prisoners, such as the family of Duke Ryan, who had been kept in the dungeon. As far as Nightingale could see, Roland treated them with much more respect than what they deserved. Although they were given the titles of prisoners, this new place was much better than the previous dungeon, and they were also offered the chance to walk outside to relieve themselves.
Maybe His Majesty thought he would not have many enemies to detain here, so he used the rooms overground as the first place to temporarily accommodate the new-come honored guests, such as the alchemists of the Alchemist Association of the King’s City, the sages of the Astrology Association, as well as sea traders from the Fjords, who had lived here for some time.
Since most of the rooms in the Foreign Affairs Building were unoccupied and the location was quite far from the central heating system, it was merely supplied with tap water. As the residents in the building had different backgrounds, His Majesty had deployed some of his guards here in order to show his respect for the guests, as well as keep an eye on them.
Nightingale, of course, would not take the corridor in case of alarming the guards. She passed directly through the walls of the top floor, heading for the bedrooms where the witches from Wolfheart lived.
She did not find anything strange about the witches in the afternoon examination. The Magic Cyclones they showed were very stable, and their capacities were quite ordinary, which meant that they belonged to the most common type of witches. In the inquiry, she knew that they basically told no lie except for some vague, subtle answers they offered about their past. With her derivative skill, she captured those details, but she thought that this kind of concealment was reasonable. These withes were tortured, hunted, and even treated in ways they were simply unable to speak of. All they had suffered had become shadows in their hearts, which they were unwilling to talk about.
If they were the only ones coming to Neverwinter, she probably would accept them as new sisters at once.
But they came with the ordinary woman called No. 76, and she was the one arousing Nightingale’s suspicion.
She had no magic glow or different demeanor, but Nightingale could still sense something strange about her. When she recalled afterward, she realized that it was the woman’s attitude in answering all her questions that bothered her. She had hidden nothing from her, which was really weird.
Nightingale had seen that many people tell everything they knew when they were dying. Yet, this woman who had once served as a maid for the underground Chamber of Commerce, told the truth about herself to a stranger she met for the first time. This was indeed a rare attitude.
But Nightingale could not judge whether the woman was using a fake identity or not based on what she knew now.
After all, No. 76 did not lie.
That meant that by now, what she said about her past and background was authentic. In addition, the testimonies of Yorko, Amy, and Annie could corroborate that. She indeed was a guide who had served the exhibition ‘Black Money’ and been bought by Yorko because of getting involved in the witch auction.
That’s why Nightingale decided to visit No. 76 at night and watch her behavior in the Mist.
If No. 76 harbored any malicious intentions, this would be the easiest moment for her to show some flaws.
She went through the bedrooms one by one, and soon she found the room where her target was.
Most of the witches had fallen asleep, but No. 76’s room was still lit up. She was sitting on the bed, playing with a ring in her hand by the candlelight, eyes
full of joy and intoxication.
“Is it because of the fair gemstone on the ring?” Nightingale wondered.
She walked close to the bed, quietly watching No. 76.
But she saw nothing suspicious about her behavior, all she did was play with the ring, like a lucky woman who was too excited about harboring a treasure to sleep.
The ring was glittering with a faint magic glow, but it was not a rare thing for a guide in the exhibition, which often auctioned relics of unknown origin, to have such a Magic Stone.
One hour later, she was tired and sleepy, drowsily dropping her arms and closing her eyes. At this moment, Nightingale gently sighed.
She thought, “It seems that I’m over-scrupulous.”
After giving No. 76 one last glance, Nightingale reached out her hand to extinguish the candle and turned to pass through the wall, entering the howling snowstorm.
The heat of colorful Magic Stone subsided, showing that the one who used magic power had left the bedroom.
No. 76 slightly let out a sigh of relief.
Even if they had gained infinite life by the way of Soul Transfer, it did not mean that they could stay awake overnight. When she disconnected her soul from her body, she could rest far more efficiently than taking an ordinary sleep. In this way, it would only take her two or four hours to rest every day to fully recover herself.
Given that, she went to bed much later than the witches.
But she had never expected something incredible to happen because of this habit.
No. 76 opened her eyes, looking at the empty bedside where the visitor had stood. Through the magic stone on the ring, she had seen a bright beam of orange light there just now. It had been as thick as an adult’s trunk, directly rising up to the ceiling. No. 76 had been surprised to find that this ‘Key’ had surpassed the remaining Senior Witch of Taquila, Pasha, and was on par with that of the Three Chiefs of the Union. Although she had not been able to see the visitor, she knew that her ability must be very complicated, rather than a simple invisibility skill.
She wondered if the visitor was Anna or Leaf mentioned by Nana.
Judging from the light, she knew that there was still a certain gap between the visitor and the Chosen One, but that strong beam of orange light was enough to thrill her.
It was very simple to activate the colorful magic stone ring. As long as someone nearby was performing some magic, the Magic Stone on the ring would absorb a small part of the surging magic power and indicate the complexity of the magic skill through the beam of light she could observe through Magic Stone. The thicker and stronger the beam was, the more complicated the ‘Key’ was.
No. 76 became increasingly excited as she thought of it. She simply walked out of the room and went to the top of the building.
The snowstorm was blowing against her face, but she was not able to feel cold at all. This lack of feelings usually made her sick, but now as her heart was filled with excitement, she felt vigorous standing in the wind and chasing the last glimmer of light.
She raised the ring and pointed it at the castle, according to Wendy, that’s where the witches lived. Now that the first Senior Witch had appeared, would the Witch Union give her more surprises?
She was looking forward to it.
However, something abnormal happened in a sudden.
The ring in her hand started to shake, as if it was resonating with something.
Through the Magic Stone, she saw a beam of light she had never seen before. It was almost like a wide high wall, filling half of the sky.