Klein looked at Maric, whose face was deathly pale and whose body was half covered in charred marks, and asked:
"How bad are your injuries?"
Maric weakly shook his head. "They're not life-threatening. I'll live."
Klein nodded slightly, then said:
"We should get out of here, too. That sudden lightning strike made a huge commotion. I'm guessing the official Beyonders are already on their way."
"Okay."
Sharron nodded slightly and tossed Klein a translucent brown bottle and something dark green that looked like a large canine's fang.
"Here. That Book of Secrets is already on the table in your living room."
After a brief pause, Sharron added:
"That man just now was dangerous. He killed Steve using the contamination inside him. More precisely, Steve died when he collapsed after the contamination within him erupted."
"Within the Rose School of Thought, only a child of the Chained God can manipulate so precisely the powers left behind by the Chained God and the Mother Tree of Desire."
"He's very likely a Blessed of some evil god."
A Blessed!
Whose Blessed was he? Adam's?
Did Miss Sharron tell me all this because she realized I knew Cyril, and was subtly warning me to stay away from him?
As his thoughts stirred, he asked curiously, "What contamination?"
A hint of fear, difficult to detect, flickered across Sharron's pale face. Then she shook her head slightly and said:
"I don't know. My spiritual intuition warns me not to look at it, not to think about it. Otherwise... I'll die."
"Perhaps it has something to do with the paintings. The ones he showed us were very strange. The figures in them were alive. I've never seen a Beyonder like him. It seems..."
"It seems he doesn't belong to any of the twenty-two known Beyonder Pathways. At