Opening the box

After saying that, Vera immediately turned and headed into the kitchen.

Her words made Gordon consider a more fundamental question.

Struggling, hunting, fighting for source substance, taking tremendous risks...

Why?

"From an Essence Hunter's perspective," he asked, following her, "why do you pursue source substance?"

GOOGLE search TWKAN

"The Path to Godhood. That's what the Hunter School says," Vera said bluntly.

"If they printed those words on their admissions brochure, the queue to enroll would be longer than the Blackwater River," Gordon said.

"Or to put it another way, hunting source substance is the process of transforming a human body into a Divine Body," Vera said.

Gordon recalled that when he first refined Unbroken Strings into himself, he had indeed received numerous notifications about improvements to his physical abilities.

So this was about transforming the human body, preparing it to become a Divine Body!

"You said Arthur Gray has more than three pieces of source substance?" Gordon asked.

"Definitely. I have three myself," Vera said. "But high-value source substances have to fuse with one another. They only become something stronger if they're compatible. If they aren't, they clash and turn you into an idiot."

She finished Gordon's last piece of smoked meat and still wanted more.

Watching her chew, Gordon finally connected all her symptoms.

So this was the source of her endless hunger, madness, sensitivity, and frayed nerves.

It had nothing to do with a healthy appetite. This was a terminal condition. Incompatible source substances were fighting over the same body inside her.

"If you can successfully fuse more than six sufficiently powerful pieces of source substance... you can become a Demigod living apart from the world..." Vera looked down at her body. "No one talks openly about what comes after that."

"A Demigod." Gordon rolled the word around. "Does such a thing really exist?"

"I believe source substance makes people less and less human," she said. "Whether what's left at the end counts as a god, I don't know."

Gordon understood.

"So we have to pursue source substance," Gordon said.

"If you get a chance to obtain source substance, take it." Vera stared at Gordon.

"Understood."

"...Then get some sleep. Dreams can suppress pain and anxiety, and source substance won't come walking up to you on its own." Vera left the kitchen, leaving Gordon with a completely empty food cupboard.

The last day of March.

Lundenim enjoyed a rare glimpse of sunshine.

Gordon no longer needed to close his eyes and meditate. His ability had become part of his everyday life.

He could avoid crowded staircases ahead of time, catch trays slipping in the dining hall, and predict how many pieces a stick of chalk would break into when it hit the floor.

Early that morning, he first went to the Biomedical Building.

Observation of the Silverfish Casket had been ongoing for many days.

In theory, Peter was supposed to record its weight, temperature, exudate volume, and spiritual reactions every day.

But Gordon still felt uneasy.

If his earlier guess was right, something was gestating inside it, and the process was nearly complete.

He returned to the Dissection Room.

The air inside was too dry. Something was wrong.

The Silverfish Casket sat inside a sealed container.

Gordon opened the outer seal out of habit, then suddenly stopped just as he was about to examine it.

Where was the water?

He had deliberately placed it in a sealed container and soaked it in Womb Amniotic Fluid, giving it a comfortable environment in which to give birth.

But now the container's inner walls were dry, the padding was dry, and even the casket itself bore no trace of water.

It had even stopped weeping.

Compared with the casket in his memory, it felt quieter to Gordon.

It was still exquisite, its lifelike reliefs of fish circling the shell. Every fish had utterly hollow eyes, as though worshipping a sacred place that had long since ceased to exist. The only difference was that it no longer breathed or dripped water.

[Silver Fish Casket. It has burned itself out.]

Gordon was intensely curious.

If this counted as a laboratory accident, he could not afford to pay for it.

If it counted as a supernatural anomaly, he could not explain it either.

Unless... this meant the gestation was over?

Gordon did not open the casket immediately.

He touched it tentatively, activated his ability, and silently sensed the response beneath his fingertips.

Its shell was made of metal and glass, while its interior was a dry cavity.

After scanning it once, he found nothing resembling gears, hidden compartments, or mechanisms.

Nor was there anything alive crawling or resting inside.

But he did sense the outline of something small.

Like a seashell left on the beach after a great tide.

Gordon decided to open the casket. He picked up the Dissection Knife and inserted its tip into the almost invisible seam.

Slowly, he applied pressure...

The lid lifted.

There was not even any mist or a single drop of water inside.

It had dried out completely, as though something had sucked up every last bit of moisture.

All Gordon saw was a palm-sized cavity, with a decayed piece of ancient lining at the bottom, like an empty nest. That was all.

And in the middle of that nest lay something the size of a thumb.

It was brown, shriveled, wrinkled, and extremely ugly.

It resembled dried fruit pulp, or a small piece of fossil.

It looked for all the world like some dirty scrap that had fallen inside at an unknown time.

If Winslow saw it, he would simply tell Gordon to hurry up and throw it away.

"Ah..." But in Gordon's eyes, it was a treasure beyond compare.

First, his tongue inexplicably tasted the salt of seawater.

Then he saw blue, silver-gray, pale gold... colors swirling around one another, sometimes coalescing into an eye that stared at him, sometimes scattering into countless points of light swimming like schools of fish!

The water that had once seeped from the casket, and all the supernatural vitality supplied by the Womb Amniotic Fluid, had now condensed into a single drop of essence.

It was no fruit stone or fossil. It was flawless and exquisitely beautiful, its magnificent radiance quietly rising and falling beneath the dried husk, like an ocean inside a fruit stone.

[Immaculate new source substance-"Newborn Yet to Choose Its Form." Its first cry has yet to sound; it quietly awaits the moment of birth.]

Brand-new source substance! Gordon felt as though his head were about to explode.

A rush of blood surged straight from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, flooding his whole body with exhilarating heat.

This thing was worth far more than a hundred or a thousand gold pounds...

This was a brand-new source substance with limitless possibilities ahead of it!

Without time to think it through, Gordon hurriedly lifted it out with tweezers.

He had to secure it. Now.

He carefully placed the source substance in a brown glass bottle and sealed it properly with Sealing Wax.

Then he tucked the bottle against his chest, feeling as though he had hidden a miniature sun there.

Gordon's gaze returned to the Silverfish Casket.

The nature of the problem had changed.

The key now was how to explain to everyone else why the Silverfish Casket had stopped functioning.

Peter arrived at the Dissection Room carrying a stack of notebooks and found Gordon standing beside the Silverfish Casket with a grave expression.

"Morning," Peter said lazily.

"My dear senior, you're in serious trouble." Gordon turned, his face solemn.

Peter stopped in his tracks.

He always looked miserable to begin with. Now he looked even more troubled.

"I haven't made any mistakes today," Peter said warily. "At least, none you could have discovered."

"The water's gone."

"What water?"

"The water in the container. The Silver Fish Casket's exudate. It was still there last night. I saw your entry: seven hundred and fifty milliliters."

"What?" Peter hurried over.

He looked at the container, then the padding, then the completely dry Silverfish Casket.

"Impossible." Peter tried to deny reality.

"You need to explain this. You're responsible for it," Gordon said seriously.

Peter looked at him, then suddenly remembered that Gordon had already moved out.

"Ah..." Peter reluctantly admitted, "I'm responsible for the Dissection Room's day-to-day upkeep now."

"Congratulations. You've grasped the key point," Gordon said.

"Did someone come and steal it in the middle of the night?" Peter's expression turned distinctly ugly.

"Theft at least means there's a thief. Evaporation out of nowhere means there's a problem with procedure," Gordon said. "For the former, you just need to catch someone. For the latter, you need to find someone to take the blame."

Peter fell silent.

He was clearly beginning to imagine Gordon submitting a report, Professor Winslow reading it, the college office forwarding it to equipment management, and the whole thing finally landing on his own head.

"Don't blow this out of proportion," Peter said quietly.

"That's what I was thinking too," Gordon said.

"Why don't we... hide it?" Peter suggested instinctively.

"An excellent strategy, but I'd like to make a slight adjustment," Gordon said. "First, we define this as the end of a complete reaction cycle. The disappearance of the exudate means the casket has ceased its activity and spiritual reactions. It's no longer acting up. We can ask the professor to take a look."

"Yes, yes. You're the one with ideas." Peter thought that sounded reasonable. "But you just said I was in serious trouble."

"To make sure you listened to me."

"Someone's going to beat you to death one of these days." Peter took a deep breath.

"That's why I hired Vera to protect me."

Professor Winslow arrived shortly afterward.

The atmosphere in the Dissection Room immediately became professional.

Peter laid out a ruler, precipitating salts, a fluorescent lamp, separation fluid, Sealing Wax, and Source Substance Reaction Test Paper in sequence.

The Silverfish Casket lay quietly on the dissection table.

"Professor." Gordon greeted Winslow.

Before looking at the Silverfish Casket, Winslow first thought of the cultists.

After all, Gordon had recently donated a fellow with tentacles on his chin.

"What impression do you have of the Blackwater River's cultists?" Winslow asked.

"They're very mysterious."

"Yes. No names, no identities. No matter how we investigate, we can't find any records of them," Winslow said.

"When you think about it, they're actually very happy. They don't have to worry about renting a room or buying bread," Gordon said.

Peter glanced at him.

"That is one way of looking at it." Winslow calmly accepted the answer. "Furthermore, there has long been a hypothesis within the college: the Deepclaw Demons commonly called 'Water Monkeys' may be among the Aberrants closest to humans. There may even be some form of transformation between the two."

Gordon recalled those hunched, wet, slippery Deepclaw Demons, and a chill ran down his back.

"So," Winslow continued, "some Blackwater River cultists regard Deepclaw Demons as their brothers and sisters, and that is not entirely without basis. If the Silverfish Casket can draw both Deepclaw Demons and those cultists, then its exudate is affecting the same kind of... spiritual imprint."

To Winslow, the Silverfish Casket linked the Deepclaw Demons, the cultists, and the spiritual residue in the Blackwater River.

This could be the key to understanding the anomalous ecology of the entire Blackwater River.

"Also," Winslow said, "your report stated that this casket underwent an abnormal change today."

"Yes." Peter sighed.

"The water disappeared," Gordon said. "When I arrived this morning, I found it had stopped bubbling. I opened it and saw that everything had evaporated."

"If this is a case of volatile dispersal, this room is no longer safe to stay in." Winslow looked around.

"Perhaps we could give it one final comprehensive examination," Gordon said.

Winslow nodded.

"We can open it and look," Winslow observed, "but keep proper records, and be careful."

Standing nearby with his notebook, Peter voluntarily retreated to a safe distance.

Gordon picked up the Dissection Knife again and pried open the lid.

The dry interior lay exposed beneath the fluorescent lamp, emitting the spiritual glow unique to supernatural curiosities.

Winslow leaned forward slightly.

"It's empty," Peter said.

"It was never there to begin with," Gordon said. "Count Montfort said it was already empty when he bought this box."

"Indeed," Winslow said. "The truly good things never get left for the school."

"But, professor, this shape doesn't look like an ordinary collector's box." Gordon pointed to the recess inside the casket.

Winslow's attention immediately shifted to the cavity itself.

He picked up the ruler and measured along the edge of the recess.

"This large recess..." Winslow said. "I've seen similar Holy Reliquaries in Lu Ming's Museum. They usually hold something far greater... such as large, or even exceptionally large, pieces of source substance."

"I also believe the Holy Reliquary once held a piece of Source Substance." Gordon nodded.

And the power it had left behind was so great that today it had given birth to a child with limitless potential.

"Then the findings that truly merit further study are clear." Winslow motioned for Peter to record them.

"March 30, 3E355. The Sample One Container had been continuously exuding a liquid capable of inducing Deepclaw Demons to move in a chosen direction. This activity ceased sometime between last night and this morning. The seal remained intact. Approximately seven hundred and fifty milliliters of the exudate disappeared, with no apparent loss of mass from the container..."

Peter wrote rapidly.

"...No intact Source Substance was found upon opening the reliquary. The recess inside proves that it once held a specific item..."

Gordon looked at the empty recess.

What truly mattered was now in the little brown bottle deep in his pocket.