More than half the bookshelf had collapsed, books scattered across the floor. Several had been pierced by branches, their pages tangled with gray-green twigs.
Franz flipped through every book he could still open. When he reached the fifth, he paused, leaned closer to inspect the gray-green powder stuck to its pages, scraped off a little with his fingernail, and sniffed it.
He frowned.
"It smells sweet," he murmured. "Not like a normal plant."
Lu Yuan inspected the desk remains and cabinets.
Ledgers, family letters, mineral trade records, and irrelevant social correspondence.
The sealing wax on the letters bore an eagle pattern, the family crest.
He opened several. They were all ordinary business letters.
Nothing unusual.
There was a small locked iron box on the mantel.
Lu Yuan took out Copper Needle and picked it open in a few seconds.
Inside was a stack of receipts.
There had been multiple large transactions over the past three months, each for a different amount. Every recipient used an alias; not one real name appeared.
There was also an empty leather wallet.
Lu Yuan examined it. There were indentations in the lining where cards or stiff slips of paper had once been kept, but they were gone.
Someone cleaned this place out beforehand.
They searched for around twenty minutes.
Aside from the plant-fiber Fragments from the basement and the receipts in the study, there was no direct evidence pointing to the Grey Covenant.
Nor was there anything that could explain the source of the woody mutation.
Hogger looked at what they had found, his expression icy.
"It's too clean. Either he cleaned it himself, or someone helped him."
"Interrogate that nephew," Lu Yuan said with a frown. "The one who handled the accounts."
Hogger nodded.
"Let's go."
First-floor hall.
Six people had been forced