By unspoken agreement, neither of them continued discussing "going home" or "Sequence Two."
For Klein, those things were simply too far away from where he stood now. Since he had hope and a goal, he could take his time moving forward. People needed light. Even a sliver of daylight in an endless night was better than complete darkness.
He had the Gray Fog and Lin Chuan's help. Given a few hundred years, he ought to reach Sequence Two eventually. They could talk about it then. Besides, Lin Chuan hardly looked like someone fleeing desperately from his enemies.
Even if he did have enemies, anyone at Sequence One was beyond the concerns of an ordinary person like Klein right now. Since worrying would accomplish nothing, there was no point fretting over possibilities.
As for Lin Chuan... teasing Klein a little was entertaining. Taking the conversation any further would be both unpleasant and boring.
Klein pulled out the chair at the desk and sat down again. Lin Chuan materialized the diary and held it out. This time, when Klein reached for it, his fingertips made solid contact with the rough cover.
He glanced down at the diary in his hands, then looked up at Lin Chuan. He said nothing, but his eyes plainly asked, Weren't you unable to touch things?
"I just figured it out. I can only touch things wrapped in my own spirit body." Lin Chuan spread his hands. "I still can't touch anything else."
Klein did not press him. As for the real reason those objects had disappeared, Lin Chuan had not stored the diary and handgun in the Boundless Void. He could not even contact that place at the moment.
More precisely, his knowledge of mysticism was insufficient to enter and leave his own Sefirah as easily as Klein entered and left Sefirah Castle without forcing his way through the barrier.
In fact, before the Oldest One awakened, it could not even be called entering or leaving his own Sefirah. The Sefirah was Lin Chuan's true body. How could there be any question of entering or leaving it?
Now, separated from it by the barrier, he was like someone caught between sleep and wakefulness. To "wake up," he would have to break the barrier. Only then could he return to that state akin to being "everywhere at once."
In the end, his ignorance had come back to bite him. If he could devise even a single prayer ritual directed at himself, his reception would never have been this bad... In fact, aside from the Loenese he inexplicably knew, he did not know a single language with mystical power.
That only strengthened his resolve to pursue one of the two "knowledge" pathways-he did not want to endure even one more day of being a mysticism illiterate. Once he made contact with his Sefirah, he would have to rummage through the junk pile to see whether he had left himself anything useful.
As for how Lin Chuan had actually hidden the objects... it was almost embarrassing to admit, but he had put the handgun and diary in Sefirah Castle.
When he was near Klein, he seemed able to connect to Sefirah Castle through either Klein's connection to it or the Luck Enhancement Ritual fixed upon him. He could even casually open a passage and stash a few things there.
Klein laid the notebook flat on the desk. Before darkness fell completely, he hurried to look through any clues his body's original owner might have left concerning the suicide. Any later, and he would be too reluctant to spend money on gas for the lamp, leaving him no choice but to wait until morning.
As he read, trying to fill in the gaps in his fragmented memories, he chatted with Lin Chuan:
"Right, you said earlier that you came down from the Gray Fog. What was your situation up there before that?"
Floating beside him, Lin Chuan glanced down at the writing in the notebook and answered casually, "I'm not sure either, but I was definitely there before you went up. Before you performed that ritual, I suppose."
Klein's hand paused as he turned a page. "...You were already there then?"
"Yes." Lin Chuan sounded as casual as if he were discussing what he had eaten for dinner. "Later, when you made 'an attempt' on the Gray Fog, I was watching from the sidelines too. It went pretty well."
Klein fell silent for two seconds, then turned another page. "...So everything 'Temperance' said at the Tarot Club was improvised on the spot?"
"What else? Did you think I'd written a script beforehand?"
"What about all that 'common knowledge' about Beyonder Pathways?"
A subtle hint of smugness crept into Lin Chuan's voice. "That was to make you look more impressive."
Klein stopped what he was doing and looked up at him with a complicated expression. "...So you were doubling as my hype man?"
"You can put it that way." Lin Chuan readily accepted the description.
Klein took a deep breath and decided to keep a mental tally of that for now. He turned another two pages, let his gaze wander over them for a moment, then suddenly asked, "How did you get to Above the Gray Fog, then? And why were you there?"
This time, Lin Chuan did not answer immediately. He floated to the window, his translucent figure outlined against the twilight. After a moment, he turned back, his voice a little softer than before:
"Not long after you transmigrated, I opened my eyes one day and found myself in another world. Just like you, I arrived in an unfamiliar place, in an unfamiliar body, at an unfamiliar time."
"But my circumstances were a little different from yours. The moment I arrived, I was in a boundless void."
Klein stopped turning the pages altogether. He raised his head and looked at Lin Chuan intently.
"That void was enormous. There was nothing in it, just a gray haze, like a place where even time couldn't be bothered to move. I could move around freely inside it, and I could observe the outside world from a strange perspective, but that was all. I couldn't get out."
"You couldn't get out?" Klein repeated.
"Right." Lin Chuan nodded, his tone so matter-of-fact that he might have been talking about someone else.
"I couldn't truly descend into this world. All I could do was stay in that void. I didn't need to eat, at least. It was as though I had merged with nothingness. I could only watch the world outside, unable to touch anything."
He paused, then smiled with a hint of self-mockery. "I originally thought I would spend the rest of my life in there. Maybe a few hundred years, maybe a few thousand, watching the world outside keep changing... Anyway, without a frame of reference, you don't really feel time passing."
Klein remained silent and did not interrupt him.
"Then one day, I noticed something suddenly seeping into that void. Gray fog."
A little interest entered Lin Chuan's voice as he said those words. "It was very thin at first, like moisture seeping through cracks in a wall. I thought I was hallucinating. Then it gradually grew thicker, until it seemed as though I could follow that fog out."
"So I followed it in. Then I found myself standing in an endless, gray space."
Klein's breathing unconsciously grew a little quieter.
"My first thought was, This thing looks so much like my void."
The corner of Lin Chuan's mouth lifted, as though he were smiling. "My second thought was, Could this be another transmigrator's home?"
Before you continue