"Strange. I clearly heard footsteps, so why is there no sound at all now?"
Lorne was puzzled. He had distinctly heard unusual noises coming from this alley earlier, but now it had become eerily quiet.
"Come to think of it, this lightness I'm feeling... could it be..." Lorne carefully recalled everything that had happened that day.
"So that's it. As long as I do things that match the potion's name, I get a corresponding response."
The changes in his body that day had conclusively confirmed his earlier conjecture. The names of potions definitely held a deeper significance.
"Is this... blood?" Lorne, who had been thinking as he walked, suddenly stopped.
He saw large quantities of dark red liquid on the ground and walls around him.
"That's a corpse!" He looked up and saw a body lying in a pool of blood a short distance away. For a moment, he froze.
"Stay calm. Stay calm!"
Lorne, who considered himself a man who had seen a thing or two, steadied his emotions and suppressed the urge to turn tail and run.
He activated Spirit Vision and began examining the scene.
"Definitely dead."
"This feeling isn't something an ordinary person could have. He was a Beyonder, too." Discovering a Beyonder's corpse left Lorne somewhat shocked.
"The spirituality around here is a mess, too. Did some criminals turn on each other?"
If the corpse belonged to a Beyonder, the person who had killed him was probably a Beyonder as well.
However, judging by the fact that the body was still lying there, had not been dealt with, and there was no cordon around the area, it probably had not been the work of the authorities.
To Lorne, the most likely explanation was that unaffiliated Beyonders had turned on one another.
"The Beyonder world really is dangerous. Someone with bad luck like me needs to be extra careful." Looking at the corpse before him, Lorne sighed.
"Still, if this was criminals turning on each other, nobody should care about what's on the body, right?"
His gaze settled on the strange, transparent substance on the corpse.
Lorne had not been interested in a dead man's belongings, but for some reason, he kept feeling that the transparent substance emerging from the corpse held a peculiar attraction.
"Why do I feel like a tomb raider?"
After some deliberation, Lorne decided to follow his intuition and reached for the transparent substance.
"Sorry, friend. You can't blame me for your own bad luck."
"I'm just recycling, really."
"What exactly is this? Why is it so slick?" After picking it up, Lorne studied the strange, transparent substance in confusion.
"Just my luck. Of all days, today I didn't bring that monocle."
He had gone out that day because he had earned some money selling a potion formula and wanted to treat himself to a good meal.
He had never expected anything like this to happen, so naturally, he had not brought the monocle with its appraisal function.
If he had the monocle, he would surely be able to find out what this thing was.
And how could he describe its texture... It felt a little like the crystal slime he had played with as a child, but even smoother, with a sense of seamless natural perfection.
"It's so slippery it feels like it could slip away at any moment." Its peculiar texture left Lorne at a loss.
"H-how am I supposed to carry this?"
Simply holding it in his hand would be rather awkward, and with its unusual texture, he might not be able to keep his grip on it for long.
"It feels like it'll fall out of my trouser pocket, too."
After considering his options, Lorne tucked it into the inner pocket of his coat. He had specifically had this pocket altered to make it large and deep.
Feeling the slippery sensation against his chest, Lorne experienced an indescribable sense of strangeness.
Once he had put everything away, Lorne stood up to leave. After taking two steps, he seemed to remember something and turned back toward the corpse.
"May Steam watch over you, and, uh... may you have better luck in your next life." After cobbling together a eulogy, Lorne turned and walked straight out of the alley.
A few minutes later.
"Captain, the disturbance came from that alley up ahead," Leonard told Dunn beside him.
"Huff, huff, huff."
"Finally back."
With an unidentified object in his inner pocket, he had hurried home, jogging the entire way.
Lorne first took off his coat, then pulled the leather suitcase out from under his bed and retrieved the monocle fashioned from polished crystal.
"This monocle's appraisal function is pretty powerful. Identifying that thing shouldn't be a problem, right?"
As he spoke, Lorne put the monocle over his right eye, then stood up to fetch his coat.
"Wh-what!"
"Where is it? Why is it gone?"
Lorne turned the inner pocket inside out, but there was still no sign of the transparent substance.
"No, why does this feel so familiar?" Lorne remembered the day he had lost his notebook.
"Could it be because I was running too fast? Did that thing bounce out along the way?"
"That shouldn't be possible. This inner pocket is really deep." Lorne lowered his head in thought, his expression turning grim.
"Could that thing have soaked into my coat?" Remembering its semiliquid texture, Lorne wondered whether it might have seeped into the fabric like water.
He held his coat under the light and inspected it, but no matter how he looked, he could find nothing.
"Strange." He infused spirituality into the monocle over his right eye.
Trench coat Material: cotton-linen fabric Value: extremely low Age: 2 years Beyonder ability: none
"There's nothing unusual about the coat..." Lorne studied the appraisal results in confusion.
"Did it really fall out on the way home? Or was it some kind of liquid gel that evaporated on its own?" Lorne could only guess.
"Ah, forget it." Although he felt it was a shame, Lorne still managed to take it in stride.
"If I get it, I'm lucky. If I lose it, that's fate."
"Unlike the notebook I paid for, this was something I picked up in the first place. If it's gone, it's gone. No point ruining my good mood over it."
With those thoughts, Lorne gradually calmed down. He stood up, intending to take a bath and get some rest, only to suddenly feel something strange in his body.
"That's odd. Why do I feel so hot all of a sudden?"
"It feels like there's something extra inside my body..."
Above the Gray Fog.
Klein sat at the Bronze Long Table, his head lowered and a hand pressed to his forehead.
Even after entering this space that belonged to him alone, he still felt a wave of embarrassment.
"Humiliating. Absolutely humiliating."
Whenever he recalled being watched by that crowd that afternoon, he felt himself falling apart.
He did not even know how he had managed to leave under all those stares.
"It's over. I'll never be able to show my face at the Divination Club again."
"But that strange flash... I feel like I've seen it somewhere before." Once his embarrassment eased a little, he began thinking about the matter at hand.
"Right, it was that star from before." Klein remembered the earlier incident when a flash had struck him full in the face above the gray fog.
"Could that person be..."
After thinking for a moment, he decided to put his expertise as a Seer to use and perform a divination.
"The person I met at the Divination Club this afternoon..."
Before long, an image appeared before his eyes.
Even in spirit form, Klein instinctively closed his eyes, afraid of being blinded by another flash.
"I-is it safe this time?" Finding that his eyes were unharmed, Klein slowly opened them.
He saw a young man with brown hair sitting on the edge of a bed.
Looking closely, he could also see a monocle on the young man's face.
"Strange. What's going on?" Lorne was puzzled by his condition.
"What!" He suddenly sensed something watching him and instinctively looked up at the sky.
"What!"
Klein saw the young man's gaze abruptly turn toward him, meeting his own across the distance.
For some reason, the instant he saw the monocle on the young man's face, Klein felt his heart clench.
Before you continue