Hill watched Evan's anxious expression and remembered how she had felt back then.
Then she smiled and nodded. "Once you've fully digested it, you can control your Demon Hunter state at will. The switch is in your head."
Evan pointed at the top of his head.
"It won't keep getting pointier, will it?"
Hill's expression turned peculiar. Her mouth twitched.
"You actually care about that?"
She stepped closer and studied Evan's face, her blue eyes narrowing as though she were inspecting a delicate piece of porcelain.
"No hallucinations? No memory loss? No blood in your urine? No blindness? No trouble breathing?"
Each question sounded more alarming than the last, yet she rattled them off smoothly.
With the pretty young woman examining his face at such close range, Evan felt his ears grow warm and instinctively took half a step back.
"Isn't this just a Beyonder Characteristic? Why do you make it sound like poison?"
Hill fell silent for a few seconds, then sighed.
"You really are a monster. For an ordinary person, the Demon Hunter Potion is dozens, even hundreds of times more toxic than a normal poison."
She straightened and patted Evan on the shoulder.
"Don't worry about the mutation."
"Once the transformation is complete, you'll be able to hide all your Beyonder traits."
"Your head getting pointier means your body has good flexibility. It's a localized mutation caused by the memories merging, and it generally won't be permanent."
Evan let out a long breath. Only then did he remember what he should have asked.
"Wait, ma'am. How did you get in?"
Hill lifted her chin smugly.
"This ramshackle house of yours has drafts everywhere. I could get in a hundred different ways."
Evan glanced at the wooden bathroom window, which let in enough cold air to freeze the pipes in winter, and swallowed his retort.
There really was no arguing with that.
Hill leaned against the doorframe, her tone turning serious again.
"At the rate you're digesting it, I'd say your transformation will be complete in another five or six days."
"The changes will be quite obvious over the next few days."
"Your organs will be reshaped, your body will go through a second growth spurt, and you might even get a little taller."
"So try to see people you know every day."
"Otherwise, if they don't see you for several days, the change will look abrupt and might raise suspicions."
Evan's eyes lit up.
Taller.
For an eighteen-year-old who stood 177 centimeters tall, that word held an appeal beyond the Beyonder Characteristic itself.
"Got it," he agreed at once.
Then he thought of something more important.
"By the way, Master, how should I contact you if I need anything?"
Hill pulled a business card from an inside pocket of her jacket and handed it over.
"This is my public identity."
Evan took the card, pinching the cream-colored cardstock between his fingers.
It was good quality, with a small library emblem printed in the upper right corner.
Beneath it was a line of elegant script:
Bolton Public Library · Librarian: Hill Feng Reinhardt Adolf
Halfway through reading it, Evan's mouth twitched.
"So you're from the Feng family! Allow me to pay my respects, my lady."
He made an elaborate half-bow.
Hill waved a hand awkwardly.
"All right, all right. Nobody does that anymore."
"Nobility doesn't count for much in the United States these days."
She pulled down the brim of her hat, hiding that brief moment of discomfort.
"You seem fine, so I can stop worrying."
With that, she turned and headed out of the bathroom.
Evan thought she would leave through the door. Instead, she crossed the bedroom in a few quick steps and opened the window.
She climbed through as nimbly as a cat and vanished into the morning light outside.
She didn't even say goodbye.
Evan went to the window and looked down.
Only a milk delivery cart rattled along the street below. Hill was nowhere in sight.
"I really do need to seal these windows shut."
His mind was made up.
The cramping in his abdomen returned right on schedule. He took the bottle of Copper Pills from his jacket pocket, tipped one out, and popped it into his mouth.
[You have taken a Test Copper Pill. Duration: 10 hours.] [Effects: Powerful pain relief; permanent reduction in pain perception; your Blood Quality permanently increases by 0.1%.] [Copper Plague: 0.1% → 0.11%] [You have reversed the side effects of the Test Copper Pill.] [Your Liver Damage has eased: 40% → 39%.] [Your kidney function has improved. Constitution permanently +0.001.] [Your Bone Strength has increased. Constitution permanently +0.002.]
After breakfast, Evan went out and took a rattling streetcar to school.
The school was the same as ever.
It was just missing someone who had bullied him.
Lebon's parents weren't waiting for him at the school gates.
It seemed McRae's story about "a misunderstanding" had worked.
Or perhaps, after losing his son, the respectable importer simply had no energy left to pursue talk of a "Beyonder curse" that sounded like the ravings of a lunatic.
The first class on Monday morning, November 12, was chemistry.
The much-anticipated interschool football game on the nineteenth was drawing closer, and the students were growing restless.
Talk of tactics and wagers filled the corridors more each day. Even some of the most diligent pre-med students had begun passing the match schedule around in secret.
But Professor Mons remained as stern and rigid as ever at the front of the room, as though the classroom were an island cut off from the rest of the world.
"Quiet."
His voice was not loud, but the tap of his chalk against the lectern silenced every whisper.
"Who can explain why Dalton's atomic theory was initially questioned?"
"And how Berzelius resolved the dispute through experimentation?"
He paused and tapped the chalk twice against the blackboard.
"Also, calculate how many grams of water can be produced when 32 grams of oxygen react with sufficient hydrogen. Come up and write out the full calculation."
The familiar silence settled over the classroom.
Several students who had reviewed the material bent over their books, trying to check their memories one last time.
Before any of them could open their mouths, Evan stood up.
"Professor."
His voice was steady and clear.
"The central dispute over Dalton's atomic theory concerned the relative standard for atomic weights."
"He initially assigned hydrogen a value of one, but he could not explain the ratios of elements in complex compounds, particularly the multiple atomic ratios found in complex oxides."
"Through a vast number of precise chemical analyses, Berzelius determined the composition of more than two thousand compounds and established a new atomic-weight standard with oxygen set at sixteen. This gave relative atomic weights a common reference."
"He also introduced a system of Latin abbreviations for element symbols, providing the data foundation for Mendeleev's later periodic table."
Professor Mons nodded with satisfaction.
"Well learned. Come up and do the calculation."
He turned and called three more names.
"Morales, Habini, Bruno. Come up as well."
The four of them went to the blackboard one after another.
Evan picked up a piece of chalk.
Its tip struck the blackboard in crisp, rhythmic taps.
His handwriting was neat and firm, each stroke sharp. He wrote out the chemical equations line by line, placing every number and arrow exactly where it belonged.
He balanced the equation.
He substituted the molar masses.
He arrived at the answer: thirty-six grams of water.
From start to finish, it took less than two minutes.
The Evan standing at the blackboard no longer looked anything like the frail, sickly boy he had been.
The dramatic changes of the past few days had only strengthened his resolve: he would show what he could do. He needed to earn the professor's recommendation and his classmates' regard.
His own experiences over those days had taught him one thing.
In this world, the Beyonder and the industrial had long since become inseparable.
He could not afford to neglect his studies.
Without money or knowledge, he wouldn't even know how to make his way as a Beyonder.
Gaining Beyonder powers would not make him smug or arrogant. He would not imagine himself some kind of superman who could use those powers to get everything he wanted.
Beyonders were still human, in the end.
Cut off from the web of human society, even the strongest Beyonder could not last long.
That was the lesson he had slowly drawn from every encounter with Pulis, Hill, Nun, and Yuri over the past few days.
The stern, rigid Professor Mons studied Evan's elegant handwriting and precise calculations on the blackboard and gave an approving "Mm."
Then he turned to the other three.
Their letters were awkwardly formed. They wrote chemical formulas, erased them, and wrote them again.
One had even remembered oxygen's atomic weight as seventeen. When his answer failed to work out halfway through, his face went bright red.
All three young men were well dressed.
Laundered shirts, exquisite cufflinks, tailored waistcoats.
Every piece was expensive and fit perfectly.
Unfortunately, none of that helped.
Fine clothes did not give a person a clever mind.
And they certainly could not pass on knowledge.