"Dinner's ready, Gallo."
Lily set the meal she'd prepared on the table. Tonight, she'd made pork braised in tomato sauce, along with a plate of vegetable salad and some fried dried fish.
The dark bread they used to eat had been replaced with softer, tastier white bread made with butter.
But a pound of buttered white bread cost three times as much as dark bread.
"Gallo... ever since you started working... our living conditions have gotten... so much better!" Lily said, stuffing food into her mouth as she spoke.
"I think you should be almost fully recovered in about another month. Then I'll go back to work at the factory, and we'll try to get you back to your middle school studies early next year," Aisha said gently.
Gallo only nodded and said nothing more. For the poor, the dining table was perhaps where their longing for material comforts showed most clearly.
He wondered whether he should tell them about his plan to move—to leave Valen Street, which was still poor and run-down, and relocate to a residential district where Tin City's true middle-class citizens lived.
He wanted a separate kitchen, washroom, and bedroom, and a fireplace in the living room. Not like the place they lived in now: a drafty attic with curtains dividing up the space, no washroom, and a kitchen out on the balcony...
But first, he still had to deal with the danger the notebook had brought him, as well as the people secretly following and watching him.
For now, he would have to wait until he'd dealt with the danger he was facing before he could think about moving.
Dinner ended in a warm atmosphere.
Gallo helped clear the dishes, then carried them to the cramped balcony kitchen and submerged them in a basin of water.
His gaze swept casually over the disorderly street below, finally settling on the third floor of a relatively tall house to the west.
"That's the place."
The keen perception granted by [Inspiration Lv1] was like an invisible web, clearly catching the familiar source of the surveillance.
The source of the spying no longer seemed vague and unsettling to Gallo as it once had. Now, its position was as clear to him as a torch burning in the dark.
He calmly looked away and put the washed dishes back in their place.
Sitting at his old desk, Gallo took a deep breath and decided to investigate further.
From the Subspace knowledge he'd acquired, he knew that psionic users with powerful inspiration could learn abilities such as remote viewing, precognition through the Law of Causality, and sensing spiritual fluctuations.
They didn't even need divination tools to foresee the outcome of something through divination. For example, before, he'd used a coin to divine the future.
He'd used his small amount of inspiration to learn the future outcome of the Law of Causality through which side of the coin landed faceup.
When his inspiration grew powerful, he wouldn't need divination tools for such predictions. His inspiration would naturally give him the answer.
Remote viewing, meanwhile, allowed him to project images from far away into his consciousness, letting him observe distant events as if he were there. Even future images revealed through divination could be projected into his mind through remote viewing, letting him see what was to come.
These were all abilities that psionic users with powerful inspiration could learn to master.
Thanks to the Subspace knowledge he'd gained through the Wisdom Path, Gallo knew exactly how to use a psionic user's remote-viewing ability.
He closed his eyes and cleared his mind. Using the location he'd just pinpointed as a coordinate, he focused his inspiration there. His mental power was like a stone dropped into water, sending invisible ripples toward the target.
He imagined that when he opened his eyes again, he would be inside the third floor of that building.
Then he silently imagined that he'd opened his eyes—not his physical eyes, but a pair of eyes opened through his focused inspiration.
An image slowly formed in his consciousness, like something viewed through frosted glass, hazy and unreal as a dream. Then it gradually came into focus.
It was a room on the third floor of the house. The furnishings were simple, but the room was far better than the attic where Gallo's family lived.
From another angle, a huge pair of eyes suddenly appeared in midair, seemingly filled with swirling oil paint!
These illusory eyes were made entirely of Gallo's own spirituality. They stared coldly at the three people in the room, connected to Gallo through his inspiration!
But the three people in the room had no idea. They were ordinary people, not psionic users, and couldn't sense the existence of these eerie eyes.
Malcolm was there, just as Gallo had expected. He sat on a wooden chair beneath the gaslight, reading what looked like a novel.
There were two other men in the room. One sat opposite Malcolm, resting with his eyes closed.
The other stood by the window, carefully lifting a corner of the heavy curtain. He peered through the gap toward the attic where Gallo's family lived.
They were still watching him. He was already home—could the man really see through walls and watch what he was doing inside?
A flare of anger rose in Gallo.
A sudden stabbing pain between his brows forced him to break the connection. The illusory eyes vanished, unnoticed by Malcolm and the other two.
"My spirituality is too weak to maintain a remote-viewing connection for long. This stabbing pain between my brows means my spirituality has been completely drained."
There was no time to hesitate. He had to learn more and find a way out as soon as possible.
Forcibly suppressing his unease, he turned his gaze back to the Human Skin Notebook on his desk, its dark red spiritual fluctuations swirling around it.
There was no way to avoid this, and avoiding it wouldn't solve anything. Since the other party needed him to translate, the translation might also help him understand their purpose and find a weakness.
He took a deep breath and opened the notebook.
With [Learning Lv3] and [Memory Lv2], along with the foundation he'd gained from Professor Vanason's research materials on Jeffrey, deciphering these ancient pictographs wasn't difficult.
But the process was exhausting. Gallo's inspiration was now high, and every pictograph in the notebook carried Jeffrey's pain and madness from before he died, trying to erode Gallo's will.
He had to keep his inspiration tightly contained and his mind clear.
He did his best to shut out the disturbance brought by every symbol in the notebook.
"Knock upon the door between reality and illusion.
Offer up the remnants of reason as sacrifice,
and crown yourself with madness.
Let your blood boil, your bones become a staircase,
and build the foundation of our descent amid a hymn woven from screams.
Thirteen prayers defying logic must be chanted by a dying throat,
each syllable seasoned with shards of the soul.
When the white moon runs red and the iron star weeps,
draw the emblem of endless hunger in a place where hatred has congealed.
Three rings devour one another, their teeth gnawing at truth;
at the center, place the eye of sacrifice, reflecting the conscience you have cast aside.
At last, open your rusted heart,
and call my true name—
'Eternal Vanguard of the Blood River Conquest, Blood-Howl Gorak.'
I shall come, treading upon your shattered understanding,
and forge you anew in true blood, granting you eternity."
A cold, inhuman frenzy flowed through the words and into Gallo's inspiration. It was as if countless invisible needles were trying to pierce his soul.
He slammed the notebook shut, cold sweat soaking his back.
The text described a summoning ritual, one that called to a terrifying Subspace entity longing to tear through reality and descend upon the mortal world—a Physical being from Subspace.
But just then, Gallo saw blood mist suddenly rise inside the attic. Only he, with his exceptionally high inspiration, could clearly sense it. Time began to slow to a crawl, and even his thoughts started to stutter.
"Damn it! It's... because of the special nature of psionic users... Even just reading the ritual silently in my mind was enough for that Subspace entity to notice me!"
It was as if Gallo had made a psionic call to the entity, and it had followed the signal straight to him.
Even worse, the Human Skin Notebook already carried traces of contamination from that Subspace entity's energy.
"My thoughts are getting slower and slower!" Gallo summoned his status panel with his mind, gathered his will, and assigned his final attribute point to another subdivision of the Psionic Path: [Spirituality]!
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