Coming to the Door

"Dinner is ready, Gallo."

Lily placed the prepared dinner on the dining table. Tonight, she had made braised pork in tomato sauce, along with a plate of vegetable salad and pan-fried dried fish.

The black bread they used to eat had been replaced with buttered white bread, which was softer and tasted much better.

However, the price of a pound of buttered white bread was three times that of black bread.

"Gallo... ever since you started working... our living conditions have become... so good!" Lily said to Gallo while stuffing food into her mouth.

"I feel like I should be mostly recovered in another month. By then, I'll go back to work at the factory and strive to let you resume your middle school studies by the beginning of next year," Aisha said softly from the side.

Gallo just nodded without saying much; for the poor, the pursuit of material comfort was perhaps best reflected at the dining table.

He wondered if he should tell them about his plan to move—to leave Valen Street, which was far from being a decent environment, and move to a residential area in Tin City where true middle-class citizens lived.

It would have an independent kitchen, a washroom, a bedroom, and a fireplace in the living room. It wouldn't be like where they lived now: an attic with drafts on all four sides, partitioned by curtains, with no washroom and a kitchen on the balcony...

But for now, he still needed to resolve the danger brought by that notebook, as well as the group of people secretly tailing and monitoring him.

He had to wait until he resolved the current danger before he could consider the subsequent plan to move.

Dinner ended in a warm atmosphere.

Gallo helped clear the dishes, walked to the narrow balcony kitchen, and submerged the tableware into a basin of water.

His gaze swept casually across the cluttered street of Valen Street, and finally, his sight locked onto the third floor of a relatively tall residential building on the west side.

"That's the place."

The keen perception brought by [Inspiration Lv1], like an invisible spider web, clearly captured the source of the familiar surveillance hidden in the dark.

The source of the peeping was no longer blurry or unsettling to Gallo as it had been before; at this moment, the opponent's position was as clear as a torch lit in the darkness within his perception.

He withdrew his gaze calmly and finished putting away the washed tableware.

Sitting at his old desk, Gallo took a deep breath and decided to investigate further.

Through the Subspace knowledge he had acquired, he knew that Psionicists with powerful inspiration could learn to use abilities like clairvoyance, causality prediction, and spiritual fluctuation perception.

They didn't even need to borrow divination tools when divining or predicting a certain matter, such as how he had previously used coins for divination.

He had used his small amount of inspiration through the heads and tails of the coins to learn the future results of the Law of Causality.

When his inspiration was powerful, such predictions and judgments would not require divination tools; his inspiration would naturally give him the answer.

As for clairvoyance, it was the ability to project scenes from very far away into his consciousness, allowing him to observe what was happening in the distance as if he were there. Even future scenes from divination could be projected onto his own will through clairvoyance to view the future.

These were all abilities that Psionicists with powerful inspiration could learn and master.

Through the Subspace knowledge obtained from the Wisdom Path, Gallo clearly knew how to use a Psionicist's clairvoyance.

He closed his eyes, gathered his focus, and used the position he had just located as a coordinate, concentrating his inspiration on that spot. His mental power was like a stone thrown into water, rippling out in invisible circles and extending toward the target direction.

He imagined that the next time he opened his eyes, he would be inside the third floor of that building.

Then, he thought silently in his heart that he had already opened his eyes—not his physical eyes in reality, but a pair of eyes focused through his inspiration.

The scene slowly emerged in his consciousness, as if observing through a layer of frosted glass, carrying the haziness and unreality of a dream, before gradually becoming clear.

It was a room on the third floor of that residential building. The interior furnishings were simple, but the environment was much better than the three-story attic of Gallo's home.

If viewed from another visual angle, a pair of huge, phantom eyes that seemed to be filled with oil paint appeared out of thin air in the middle of the room!

This pair of illusory eyes was entirely composed of Gallo's own spirituality, coldly watching the three people in the room while connecting with Gallo's inspiration!

But the three people in the room were completely unaware of this. They were ordinary people, not Psionicists, and could not perceive the existence of these eerie eyes at all.

Malcolm was indeed there. He was sitting on a wooden chair, reading a book under the light of a gas lamp; it looked like a novel.

There were two other men in the room. One was sitting opposite Malcolm, closing his eyes to rest.

The other was currently standing by the window, carefully lifting a corner of the heavy curtain, his gaze piercing through the gap and looking toward the direction of Gallo's attic.

They were still monitoring him? Even though he had already returned home, could this guy's eyes see through walls to see what he was doing at home?

A surge of anger ignited in Gallo's heart.

A sudden sharp pain between his brows caused Gallo to break the connection of his clairvoyance, and the pair of illusory eyes dissipated without Malcolm and the other two knowing or sensing a thing.

"My current spirituality is too low; I can't maintain the clairvoyance connection for long. The sharp pain between my brows right now is proof that my spirituality has been exhausted."

He could not hesitate any longer; he had to master more information as soon as possible and find a way to break the deadlock.

He forcibly suppressed the agitation in his heart and turned his gaze back to the dark red, spiritually-fluctuating human-skin notebook on his desk.

There was no way to escape for now, and avoidance wouldn't solve the problem. Since the other party needed him to translate, the process of translation might also be the process for him to understand their purpose and find their weaknesses.

He took a deep breath and opened the notebook.

Relying on [Learning Lv3] and [Memory Lv2], as well as the foundation laid by the Jeffrey research materials he had previously obtained from Professor Vanason, deciphering these ancient hieroglyphs was not a difficult task.

But the process was extremely mentally taxing. Because Gallo's current inspiration was high, every hieroglyphic symbol on this notebook carried the pain and madness of Jeffrey before his death, attempting to erode his will.

He had to focus on restraining his inspiration at all times to keep his mind clear.

He struggled to block out the intrusion brought by every symbol on this notebook.

"Knock on the door between the rift of reality and delusion."

Offer the wreckage of reason as a sacrifice, Crown thyself with the diadem of madness.

Let thy blood boil and thy bones serve as the stairs, Construct the foundation for our descent amidst a hymn woven from screams.

Thirteen prayers that defy logic must be chanted by a throat at the brink of death, Each syllable seasoned with the shards of a soul.

When the white moon is stained with blood and the iron star weeps tears, Draw the sigil of endless hunger upon the land where hatred congeals.

Three rings devour one another, their teeth meshing with truth, The center must be adorned with the eye of sacrifice, reflecting the conscience thou hast forsaken.

Finally, open thy rusted heart-core, And call out my true name—

"The Eternal Vanguard of the Blood River Crusade, Blood-Howl Gorak."

I shall tread upon thy shattered perception to arrive, Forged in true blood, to grant thee eternity.

A cold, inhuman frenzy flowed into the inspiration of Gallo along with the text, as if countless invisible needles were attempting to pierce his soul.

He slammed the notebook shut, cold sweat already soaking his back.

The content here was a summoning ritual, pointing toward a terrifying entity in the Subspace that hungered to tear through reality and descend into the mortal world, an entity existing within the Subspace.

But at this moment, he saw blood mist suddenly rising within the attic; this was something only Gallo, with his extremely high inspiration, could clearly perceive, and the flow of time began to slow down drastically, his own thoughts even beginning to stutter.

"Damn it! It's... because of the uniqueness of a Psionic... by reading the content of this ritual... even if only silently in my heart... I've been detected by that Subspace entity!"

This situation was akin to Gallo making a psionic phone call to the other party, and the latter was tracing the signal to find him directly.

What was even more fatal was that this leather-bound notebook already contained residual fluctuations of Subspace energy contamination from that entity.

"My thoughts are getting slower and slower!" Gallo summoned his attribute panel through sheer willpower, then focused his intent, arranging to allocate his final attribute point to another sub-option of the Psionic path: [Spirituality]!