Acting()

Old Neil froze at those words. Lin Chuan did not look as though he was joking. Old Neil opened his mouth. "Then you..."

"Do you have a guest room?" Lin Chuan asked casually, then added after a moment's thought:

"If not, do you know any well-known hotels in Tingen? Or I could sleep on the sofa."

Do spirit bodies need sleep too? Old Neil was puzzled, but that did not stop him from moving briskly.

"Yes, yes, I do," he answered hastily as he led Lin Chuan toward a guest room.

There were rooms on both floors. Lin Chuan chose the one in the northwest corner of the downstairs living room, directly opposite the stairs to the second floor.

After settling Lin Chuan in, Old Neil carefully closed the door and leaned against the wall, overwhelmed by complicated emotions. All he could think was that today's experiences had been truly... fantastical.

He did not lean there for long, taking only a minute or so to clear his head. Throughout that time, there was not a sound from inside the room.

Still, since He had said it was late and they should rest, staying awake outside His door would be an utterly terrible choice.

Old Neil turned, crossed the carpet in the middle of the living room, and headed for his upstairs bedroom. His steps were still a little unsteady, but much firmer than before.

At the turn in the staircase, he stopped and glanced back downstairs. Lin Chuan had added plenty of coal earlier, and the fire was still dancing brightly.

The door stood at the boundary between firelight and shadow, more than half of it gilded in gold. It looked warm.

Old Neil watched for a few seconds, then slowly went upstairs.

He lay in bed and closed his eyes, feeling his steady heartbeat and even breathing. Only one thought refused to leave his mind:

He said... the Life Alchemy ritual is real.

Rekindled hope burned like a fire in his chest.

Although he still did not understand why Lin Chuan had sought him out, or why He needed a demigod-level Life Alchemy ritual, Old Neil warned himself not to presume to fathom a god again.

He lay in bed, unaware of when he fell asleep.

All he knew was that before his consciousness sank into darkness, he heard a very faint sound from downstairs, almost drowned out by the crackling fire.

It sounded like someone humming a tuneless little song.

The melody was unfamiliar, yet vaguely familiar, like a song he had heard long ago and since mostly forgotten.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, in Klein's lovely dream.

"Mr. Welch lost a revolver. I believe I should be able to find it here, correct, Mr. Klein?"

Dunn Smith swept his gaze around the room and leisurely questioned the unfortunate university student before him.

"Fuck..."

Klein now understood where the revolver had come from, but he could only struggle to control his expression and keep the corners of his mouth from twitching wildly.

When the police had searched the place earlier, Lin Chuan had helped hide the revolver along with the Diary to keep them from being discovered.

But that bastard only gave me back the Diary, not the gun! Where's the revolver? Helped himself to it, did he?

Thoughts flashed through his mind like lightning, and Klein made his decision in an instant. He looked straight into Dunn's gray eyes and answered without hesitation:

"I don't know."

"You don't know?" Dunn was somewhat surprised. Welch's gun was either here or it was not. What did he mean, he did not know?

With a serious expression, he continued his questioning. "In that case, is there anything you would like to add?"

"Yes!"

The bedroom's rear window

A middle-aged man with dark blond hair, one blind eye, a deep blue pupil that was nearly black, a high nose bridge, tightly pressed lips, and sharply sculpted, wrinkle-free features frowned at the notebook before him.

(The following is the Taiwanese version's description.)

(The following is the official description.)

"..."

"Puzzlingly, and without sufficient reason, Klein did not subsequently commit suicide, but survived."

An antique quill wrote on it of its own accord, with no one holding it. Though it had not been dipped in ink, it produced clear words:

"The Tingen Nighthawks team visited the Moretti Family to investigate Welch's case. Klein told Dunn Smith that he did not know where the gun was, but in fact"

At this point, the previously smooth lines of ink in the notebook began to twist and turn chaotic, as though an invisible force were pinning the nib down.

The Quill seemed to have encountered some kind of resistance, but its pride would not allow it to stop updating. Its shaft trembled slightly as it desperately tried to keep writing.

And so it trembled even harder.

Ince Zangwill stared fixedly at the Quill, which had suddenly begun shaking violently.

The Quill scraped madly against the paper with an ear-piercing squeak. In the end, it forcibly changed the direction of its strokes and continued in crooked handwriting:

"...but in fact, the gun had long since mysteriously disappeared, and Klein truly knew nothing about it."

"This was merely an insignificant coincidence. Dunn Smith did not grow suspicious. This was perfectly reasonable."

"Yes, all of this was perfectly reasonable."

This sentence occupied a line of its own. The last stroke of the word "reasonable" dragged on so far that it tore across the entire notebook page.

After finishing this passage, 0-08 seemed to have exhausted all its strength and fell onto the notebook with a clatter.

Tiny beads of dark red ink even seeped from its nib, like a cold sweat of fear.

A flicker of horror crossed Ince Zangwill's remaining eye.

As a former senior member of the Church of Evernight, one of its mere thirteen Archbishops, he knew all too well how proud and terrifying this Quill was.

The information on 0-08 was highly classified. Even Archbishops and senior deacons could access only part of its documentation, but that was already enough.

For the records stated that 0-08 had once caused an Angel's death! Yet just now, when it had tried to discover the gun's whereabouts, this unprecedented situation had occurred.

That could mean only one thing:

Behind that gun might lie a legendary Sequence One "Archangel," an existence recorded in the Church's religious scriptures!

Ince Zangwill took a deep breath, his palms beginning to sweat. He glanced at Tingen's pitch-black night outside the window and instinctively felt an immense unease.

He had a vague suspicion about that existence. Not long ago, an extraordinarily terrifying upheaval had suddenly erupted in the depths of Tingen's Spirit World, only to subside in an instant.

But how could an Archangel like that possibly become entangled with a mere Sequence Five like him? Even if it was a Grade 0 Sealed Artifact...

Well, looking on the bright side, perhaps it really is just as 0-08 wrote: an insignificant coincidence.

Ince Zangwill understood his situation very well. For now, he could only assume that the existence was passing through. He murmured to himself:

"This is my only chance."