Inside the Igwynt Charity Show venue, the sweet and innocent voices of children singing reverberated through the theater, immersing everyone in the purity of the melody.
Wearing a half-mask and dressed in the uniform of theater staff, Bill walked slowly along the edges of the venue, his eyes scanning the numerous audience members, as if searching for something.
Bill was searching for a scent—the one he had committed to memory at the gruesome scene of the Buck Mansion’s massacre.
Bill was a Beyonder of the Chalice pathway, but with a twist. His advancement ceremony had been personally overseen by the lord he was loyal to, and the ritual differed from the conventional process of advancing to the Craver.
In the mysticism world, even when the same spirituality accumulates, the outcomes can vary depending on the advancement ritual.
By paying an additional price, Bill advanced into a branch of the Craver, known as the "Taster."
The Taster is a branch of the Craver. While their physical attributes and vitality also surpass ordinary humans, they are slightly inferior to the Craver in these aspects. Instead, the Taster gains sensory representations of the Chalice.
The Craver, who embody the Chalice in material aspects—specifically through flesh—become stronger and more resilient. In contrast, the Taster’s embodiment of the Chalice is not as robust but is compensated by heightened sensory representations.
The sensory embodiment of the Chalice includes heightened smell, taste, and even physical pleasure.
Through his advancement, Bill gained an extraordinary enhancement in his sense of smell, enabling him to detect and remember scents undetectable by ordinary people.On the day of the Buck Mansion incident, although Bill did not take action himself, he knew someone had hidden in the darkness of the study. Before leaving, he committed that subtle scent to memory.
Due to the overwhelming scent of blood from the many casualties at the scene, his ability to fully analyze the scent was impaired. He could barely determine that it likely belonged to a woman, but beyond that, he could glean no further details. Nonetheless, he had firmly remembered that disrupted scent.
Unexpectedly, today he caught a whiff of it again.
Bill paced along the edges of the venue, circling the perimeter of the audience seating, trying to recapture that scent. However, he was unsuccessful. The scent information he had memorized was fragmented due to the interference at the previous scene. To identify the source, he would need to get close enough to sniff directly.
But such behavior would be too conspicuous. Even as a staff member of the theater, walking back and forth among the audience to sniff individuals one by one would be extremely inappropriate and would likely alert his target.
Thus, Bill needed another method to confirm the target’s location without alarming them.
After pondering for a moment, Bill came up with an idea.
He quickly walked to the main entrance of the venue, found a floor supervisor, and removed his half-mask.
"Ah, Mr. Bill, is there something you need?" The supervisor smiled upon recognizing Bill. Without hesitation, Bill gave his instructions.
"Gather all the staffs and have them collect the audience’s invitations under my directions. Say there was an issue with the invitations, and we need to retrieve them for re-checking."
...
Inside the venue, the children’s singing gradually came to an end. Amid thunderous applause from the audience, the children, as innocent as lambs, bowed in unison as the red curtains slowly closed once more.
Among the audience, Dorothy clapped along with the crowd, her face adorned with a faint smile. However, her heart was heavy.
"’Song of the Lamb’... The song Anna and the others sang is a mystical knowledge—a mystical knowledge in the form of a song... Why is this happening?"
Only after the system’s prompt did Dorothy realize the choir’s performance was a mystical knowledge. Though heavily fragmented and seemingly adapted, stripping away much of its mysticism, it was unmistakably a mystical knowledge.
After hearing the song, Dorothy had instinctively extracted its spirituality. Although the spirituality was so faint it didn’t even reach one point, Dorothy could still discern that it belonged to the Chalice.
In other words, ’Song of the Lamb’ was a mystical knowledge tied to the Chalice. However, the version performed by the children had been drastically abridged and modified, likely to minimize contamination and avoid arousing suspicion.
Had it not been for Dorothy’s system precisely identifying it, even she wouldn’t have noticed the problem with the song.
"Why are the children from Charity Orphanage singing a Chalice mystical song at a charity show? And based on the host’s earlier remarks, they seem to perform a choir piece every year. Could all of them have been like this? Is there something wrong with Charity Orphanage? I’ve spent so many days teaching there, but I never noticed anything unusual!"
Dorothy mulled over these questions, her heart not just puzzled but also tinged with concern.
"To publicly perform a mystical transmission of the Chalice on stage… Regardless of the truth behind this, there’s clearly a major issue with this charity show. While I mainly came to watch Anna perform, this situation now feels a bit risky…"
With this thought, Dorothy grew increasingly cautious, a faint suspicion creeping into her perception of everything around her.
She reached into her pocket and retrieved a gold coin. One side bore the image of the sun, while the other was engraved with the insignia of the Radiance Church. It was a spiritual storage item she had acquired from Brandon, associated with Lantern spirituality. With it, she could perform divination.
Now, she needed to use it to assess her surroundings.
In the basic divination techniques she had learned from Aldrich, many rituals required prior preparation, which was impossible at the moment. However, there were a few simpler forms of divination that didn’t require elaborate setups.
One such method was coin flipping.
"Am I currently in danger?"
Reciting the divination query silently in her mind, Dorothy tossed the gold coin as discreetly as possible, covering it with her hand as it landed. After feeling the spirituality drain slightly, she slowly removed her hand.
The coin had lost its shine, and the side bearing the sun was facing up. It was the "positive" outcome.
"Phew… so it’s true…"
Seeing the result, Dorothy exhaled deeply, shaking her head as she ignored the host introducing the next act on stage. She began to think deeply.
"Danger… danger… What kind of danger? Where is it coming from? What form will it take… and when?"
She pondered, realizing how little information she had to work with. Closing her eyes, she began to sift through her memories.
From the moment she arrived at the theater to the present, Dorothy started reviewing every detail. Her ability as a Cognizer allowed her to retain all sensory information for up to half a day. Every blade of grass she passed by could be recalled. This super-memory would gradually fade after half a day, unless she expended spirituality to preserve key fragments permanently.
Thus, Dorothy meticulously scanned through her memories, examining every detail of the theater, every corner, every person she had glanced at, and every word she had overheard, searching for useful clues among seemingly trivial data.
Thanks to her ability to process information at incredible speed, Dorothy quickly found something important in her recent recollections.
It was a memory from when she had first entered the theater, walking through the hallway behind the main entrance with the crowd.
Upon carefully reviewing her visual memory from that moment, Dorothy noticed a vaguely familiar figure in the crowd walking directly toward her.
It was a young man, a staff member of the theater, wearing a half-mask that only revealed his jaw.
Examining the figure closely, Dorothy felt a strong sense of familiarity. The man bore a striking resemblance to someone in her memory.
That person was Bill—the young man who had rescued Buck during the Buck Mansion raid.
At the time, hidden in the shadows, Dorothy had carefully observed Bill. Using her Cognizer ability and expending spirituality, she had committed his features to memory with the precision of an ultra-high-definition photograph.
Now, Dorothy felt that the half-masked man she had encountered in the hallway looked eerily similar to Bill.