Chapter Ninety-Two: Reunion

Misfortune is always followed by more misfortune.

That was the thought that naturally arose in Amy’s mind when, on the road to the Wall of Sighs, he came upon the boy standing before him.

“What are you doing here?” The Radiant One’s gaze lingered briefly on the unexpected visitor. There was little emotion in those dark pupils; in a calm, even indifferent voice, he spoke the boy’s name. “Dick.”

“There’s no need to be so distant,” the Apostle of the House of Dice said with a shake of his head. “We did, after all, work together once. True, there were a few unpleasant incidents in between, but they didn’t affect the bigger picture, did they?”

“Maybe,” Amy replied offhandedly. He had no desire to waste time on meaningless conversation and cut straight to the point. “Say it. What do you want from me?”

“It’s not really anything major.” The beautiful youth smiled, and even the sunlight seemed to brighten with him. “I simply wish to ask you—”

A deliberate pause.

“To save the world.”

“Save the world?” The Radiant One arched a brow. Dick’s words, admittedly, happened to align with his present course of action, but he had no intention of being led by the nose. “I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in becoming a savior. Besides, I have more important matters to attend to right now.”

“For example?”

“None of your business.” Amy brusquely ended the conversation and set off.

“If I’m not mistaken, you’re planning to head to the Upper Quarter,” the Apostle of the House of Dice said, refusing to yield. He blocked their path outright, and even in the face of Mia’s murderous silver-white greatsword, he did not take a single step back. “But the roads leading there are already sealed. Even if you truly had wings, or managed to find some secret passage, crossing the Wall of Sighs would still exact a heavy price.”

“Move.”

The Radiant One gave no answer. The sword wielder began the count in a cold voice.

“Three—”

“Wait!”

At the cry of “two,” Dick hurriedly explained, “I know a way for you to bypass the Wall of Sighs and go straight to the Upper Quarter.”

“One!”

And then the countdown cut off abruptly, as the cross-shaped greatsword came down without mercy.

It struck only empty air.

“Hey, hey, hey—” The Apostle of the House of Dice looked shaken. “You really can bring yourself to strike, can’t you? This is the way to reach the Upper Quarter by bypassing the Wall of Sighs, you know. Aren’t you even tempted?”

“Mia, let’s go.”

Indeed, Amy was interested in a way to slip past the Wall of Sighs and reach the Upper Quarter directly. But if it meant becoming the House of Dice’s high-level errand dog as before, then no, thank you. Besides, he was not without other options now. With the edge of the short sword Darkblood, he could carve his own path—costly in both time and effort though it might be, it was still far better than becoming someone else’s puppet.

“It seems you won’t listen properly unless I bring out some ruinously expensive bombshell,” the beautiful youth, left hanging to one side, sighed and brushed back his slightly disheveled golden hair. “Amy Ulysses, do you think the price of using a quenched weapon is merely the blood of Ulysses? I’m telling you, you’re dead wrong. What you pay is not only your blood of glory, but your very essence.”

“Essence?” The girl halted in her tracks.

“Don’t mind him,” the Radiant One said with a shake of his head. He truly felt nothing unusual; the sacrifice required was indeed only the blood of Ulysses within his body. “Nonsense.”

“Power always has a price.” Dick’s voice grew calm. “What made you think that the cost of wielding a blade forged by the ancients to cleave through darkness was merely a bit of insignificant blood?”

Amy’s steps faltered slightly.

“I said it already: what you must pay is your essence.” The Apostle of the House of Dice paused, his emerald-bright eyes reflecting the boy’s figure. “Blood is the currency of life, but that is not essence in the abstract sense. Put more plainly, it is the ancient blood inherited by the Radiant One. Every time you use that mythic power, which even the oldest kings of the distant past could not comprehend or fathom, the order within you grows weaker by a degree. In the end, you may even fall from the rank of Radiant One and truly become an ordinary person.”

The black-haired, black-eyed boy finally stopped walking.

“If all this is meant to frighten me, you needn’t bother.” The eldest son of the Ulysses family turned back to face those jade-green eyes. “Until I see evidence that truly moves me, I won’t believe a single word you say.”

“Let me make this clear in advance: I don’t have the ability to produce a ready-made example,” Dick said, shaking his head. “But if you want relevant records, I know where to find them.”

“Where?” Amy asked. Even knowing it might be a trap laid by the House of Dice, he could not remain unmoved.

“In your memory.” The beautiful youth with golden hair and blue eyes touched a finger to his own head. “When your family elders passed down the quenched weapon that cleaves the ancients and rends darkness, they should have told you, should they not? Unless it is a matter of life and death, you must never remove the seal time has placed upon it.”

The Radiant One said nothing.

Indeed, to this day he still remembered the solemn expression on his father’s face when Darkblood was placed into his hands.

And that almost unreasonable, severe restriction.

Absolutely—absolutely—one must not covet the extraordinary power that mortals ought neither to understand nor to use.

“Very well,” after roughly twenty breaths, Amy lifted his head, his dark eyes deep and unfathomable. “I don’t know how you learned the secrets among the Radiant Ones, but you’ve convinced me.”

“Then, shall we say we have a deal?” Dick smiled and extended his hand. But the Radiant One did not take it. He only looked at him coldly and said, bluntly and directly: “At the most basic level, a transaction requires honesty and fairness. I won’t expect much from you on the honesty front, but at the very least you should tell us what we need to do, what risks we’ll face, and how we can make sure that you, or the House of Dice, won’t cut the bridge once we’ve crossed it.”

“To sav—”

“Don’t tell me it’s to save the world. I don’t believe your House of Dice has that kind of moral conviction, and I certainly don’t believe that what’s happening in the Lower Quarter can be tied to the end of the world.” The black-haired, black-eyed boy cut off the words that were about to leave the Apostle’s mouth. “So don’t brush me off.”

“Fine, fine, I surrender. What an excessively serious person you are.” The beautiful youth with golden hair and blue eyes raised both hands. “As for what I need you to do, it’s actually very simple. That is to say... enter the interior of Obadiah and kill Ignati.”

“Ignati?” The Radiant One blinked, then caught on. “You mean to move against the Traveler!”

“The title of Traveler is not a talisman,” Dick said with a shrug. “His spirit and will have already suffered irreversible distortion and contamination in the depths of the Deep Night. Though he still clings to lofty ideals, the means by which he seeks to realize them have been twisted in a rather subtle way. He does not merely refuse to awaken the original fireseed of the lost royal city of Prometheus; even more, he intends to build a false world in which order and chaos coexist peacefully.”

The Apostle of the House of Dice’s green eyes were full of mockery.

“And the Lower Quarter is the proving ground he has chosen.”

“Very well, I understand.” After a brief silence, Amy made his decision. “So how do we get to Obadiah?”

“To get to Obadiah?” Dick shook his head. “You don’t even know what it is. It is a strange creature that lives in the dimensional fissures beyond human observation. Without being guided there through physical means, you won’t be able to enter its body—let alone even find it.”

“A strange creature from the depths of the Deep Night?” As for such beings, the Radiant One was not wholly ignorant. It was the long-standing human name for that which exists in the world, yet cannot be understood by humankind.

“Exactly. Ignati conquered this creature, and thus gained the right to command it. Through this monster dwelling between dimensional seams, the Home of the Lost can teleport freely throughout the Lower Quarter and even across all of Hemtica.” The beautiful youth from the House of Dice sighed. “To be honest, many may not believe this, but with Obadiah and Ignati, the Home of the Lost is actually the strongest of the Three Pillars. It’s just that Ignati has always been focused on his plans, lying dormant for years in the shadow of Michelangelo, which is why people came to assume the Emperor was supreme and unchallenged.”

“Get to the point.” Amy frowned. “What exactly does Ignati want to do?”

“He wants to tear down the boundary between the Lower Quarter and the Mistlands, and build a world in which humans and demons coexist in harmony.” Dick gave a sneer. “That is, of course, a pipe dream. Any sane person would know what a terrifying shock this would bring to an already fragile human society. If handled poorly, Hemtica may not only lose the protection of the Mistlands, but also the Lower Quarter—the last barrier it has left.”

“We can’t just stand by.” The sword wielder voiced her opinion.

“But how do we get to Obadiah?” The Radiant One made no objection. Whether or not this was a lie woven by the House of Dice, once they met the dark traveler Ignati, none of that would matter anymore. “If everything is as you say, then we won’t even have a chance to contact Ignati, let alone kill him.”

“Don’t worry about that.” Since the House of Dice dared to move against the Home of the Lost, it naturally would not do so without preparation. “Obadiah is not an omnipotent divinity. The secret to its ability to move the members of the Home of the Lost anywhere, anytime lies here.”

The beautiful youth with golden hair and blue eyes opened his palm, revealing a tiny, transparent, unremarkable bead to the Radiant One and the sword wielder, and explained: “After our investigation, we confirmed that this is a part of Obadiah’s body. Through it, Obadiah can determine the coordinates of the target to be transferred, thus achieving instant relocation.”

“There’s one problem,” Amy suddenly interrupted. He lifted the bead with two fingers and examined it closely, then posed his question. “Obadiah, the creature you’re talking about—it’s alive, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.” A simple, clear answer.

“Then how can you be certain that, during the transfer, it won’t decide we’re enemies and toss us into the seams of space like garbage?” The Radiant One pointed straight to the heart of the matter. “Frankly, I don’t intend to take that risk.”

“There is no risk.” Dick said, “What is formed through the subsidiary body is a link, a passage. No authentication is necessary, and Obadiah’s very nature means it cannot effectively distinguish impurities entering its body during the transfer process.”

“So,” he paused, “all we need to do is this.”

Then he crushed the bead.

In the next instant, orange-red flames surged through the void.

“Do not resist.”

Having left those words behind, the Apostle of the House of Dice vanished into the fire.

The sword wielder followed immediately after.

At last, when Amy gave up resisting, his consciousness was wrapped in a warm flame, then swallowed whole.