Well, the next part was entirely up to Alice. My job? To put on a show. But how in the abyss was I supposed to track down his shredded corpse? Some brand-new form of divination? Ooh, this was delectable. Intriguing. I shot Alice a look filled with blatant anticipation. Quickpaw did the same to me, mirroring my energy like a pesky little echo.

  The sooner I found this poor bastard, the sooner I could pass Whisper’s test and prove my worth. And, hah, I managed without her too. The original plan had her tagging along, but Quickpaw wasn’t the worst alternative.

  ...She still felt like a gremlin cosplaying as a fox-kin, though.

  “Please get a sturdy stick first, Mistress.”

  Oh. “Quickpaw, get me a sturdy stick first.” No reason she shouldn’t pull her weight.

  She saluted, vanishing downstairs. Returned brandishing a lacquered cane carved with lewd wood nymphs. “Ta-da! Former owner’s either a aristocrat or a very ambitious brothel manager.” She thwacked a merc’s rear, jolting a groan from his coma.

  “Sturdy and stylish!” she beamed, punctuating her statement with another smack to his backside.

  I flicked a glance at Alice, who only offered a casual, “It works, Mistress.”

  Fair enough. I took the cane and, under Alice’s guidance, bound a mana stone to its tip with some makeshift wrappings.

  Still, I had questions. Why a mana crystal? This wasn’t the meticulous process of enchantment, no painstaking etching of runes to siphon magic efficiently. This whole divination business was slowly unraveling everything I thought I knew about magic—like peeling back the seams of a well-stitched lie.

  Magic had rules. It was methodical, structured. Spells functioned like a language, enchantments even more so. Even the grand Thunder Verdict spell, with its labyrinthine web of runes, followed the same fundamental laws. But divination? This thing tore those rules to shreds and set them ablaze.

  And I had the sinking suspicion it was about to get even wilder.

  And I was weirdly… into it.

  Once the setup was done, I straightened, cane in hand. Alice slithered up onto my shoulder, her blindfold dissolving like mist, and pressed her fingers to my neck. Once again, I slipped into that peculiar, heightened state.

  The world blurred—not drastically, but enough to make everything feel slightly unmoored. Quickpaw still shimmered periwinkle, Alice a deep cerulean. Even the mercs had their own glows—one a subdued crimson, another yellow, and one even a murky brown. But their auras barely flickered compared to Alice and Quickpaw.

  Even mine, which burned a muted gold, lacked the sheer intensity of theirs.

  I shook my head. First things first.

  “What’s the play with these chuckleheads?” I jerked a thumb at the unconscious mercs.

  Quickpaw kicked one’s boot. “Let ‘em nap. Why? You wanna tuck ‘em in? Sing lullabies?” Her tail swished, a metronome of mischief.

  “She gauges your moral calculus, mistress,” Alice murmured, her voice velvet smoke.

  “Just weighing if they’ll come sniffing with backup later.”

  Quickpaw snorted. “Snitches need stories. Report what exactly? We gave ‘em fake names dumber than a bag of wet mice.”

  Even if that was true, divination was always a looming threat. I had an anti-divination charm— formed with runes that Lotte had taught me—but she still warned me to stay cautious. And cautious, I was.

  “Diviners don’t need names,” I muttered, scanning the room. “Gimme two minutes to cleanse this dump.”

  Quickpaw shrugged, unconcerned.

  Once again, Alice did all the work while I played my part, making vague gestures to keep up the act for Quickpaw. And just like that, the scene was wiped clean. No lingering traces, no threads for some prying diviner to latch onto. Even if someone did try tracking us, they’d need far more than a messy crime scene to work with. And even then, my charm would throw them off.

  Fun.

  “Crime scene’s now a crime clean,” I announced. “Diviners’ll have better luck tracking a fart in a hurricane.”

  Instead of using the stairs, we vaulted out the window to avoid any lingering eyes at the door. We had stirred up quite the commotion, after all.

  The cane quivered in my grip like a dowsing rod allergic to water. Quickpaw leaned in, breath fogging the mana crystal lashed to its tip. “Sooo… stick magic. Is this the part where it turns into a snake? Please say it turns into a snake.”

  Alice’s voice hummed through my ears. “The rod seeks resonance, mistress. Greg’s essence clings to these strands—faint, but sufficient. Like iron drawn to lodestone, the crystal will pull toward his remains.”

  I parroted her explanation aloud, tossing in some theatrical jargon. “It’s a… sympathetic resonance lattice. The hair’s residual bio-signature creates a thaumic vector. The rod aligns to it. Like a compass, but for corpses.”

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  Quickpaw squinted suspiciously. “So it’s a fancy corpse-pointer.”

  “Yes.”

  “Booo. Thought it’d be spookier. Where’s the chanting? The goat blood?”

  “Next time I’ll let you pick the props,” I muttered, clutching the filthy hair-clump. Ugh.

  Alice’s threads tightened around my thoughts. “Focus, mistress. The connection is tenuous.”

  Three repetitions of the query—“The location of Greg’s corpse.”

  The cane wrenched sideways. It hovered at a thirty-degree tilt, trembling like a hound catching scent.

  Quickpaw let out a whoop. “Look at Granny Stick’s arthritis acting up!”

  I shot her a glare. “It’s working.” Then, before turning my gaze, I murmured, “Southwest trajectory. Hmm?”

  She arched a brow. “Something wrong?”

  “Just that I saw trees. Pines, shrubs—an entire forest, from the looks of it. Know of anything like that within city walls?”

  Quickpaw’s grin slipped into a frown as she thought. “Actually… yeah. There’s a stretch of forest down south in the lower district. When they built the walls, they never cleared it out, and now it’s just a—” she waved vaguely, “—a feral patch where things grow wild. Folks avoid it.”

  I didn’t need to ask why. “Then lead the way.”

  Quickpaw set off ahead, and we followed her into the depths of Varkaigrad’s southwest quarter. Alice, ever the perfectionist, insisted on repeating the divination along the way, and each time, the cane pointed true.

  The lower district’s grime-stained sprawl began to thin as we advanced. Brick tenements packed shoulder to shoulder gave way to sagging warehouses draped in ivy. Even the air shifted—no longer choked with the acrid stench of the slums but something crisper, earthier.

  That only made me more suspicious. Varkaigrad was a titan of a city, its population stretching into the millions. So why was this space left untouched? Why hadn’t the land been leveled for something profitable—tenements, factories, even a refuse dump?

  Crumbling stone walls marked where the city begrudgingly yielded to the encroaching wilds. A half-feral woodland, ensnared within the fortifications like an old wound the city had stopped trying to cauterize.

  More unsettling than the trees, however, was the absence of people. No squatters, no drunkards, no desperate souls scraping out an existence in a forgotten corner of the city. Even my Air Sense, normally picking up every cough and shuffle nearby, found nothing.

  Quickpaw scaled the rusted iron fence with ease, its once-menacing spikes long since corroded into dull nubs. Beyond it, the forest sprawled unchecked, loping hungrily over what remained of civilization.

  Weird.

  Still, Alice tried the divination again. The cane tilted forward.

  It didn’t take long to find him.

  Quickpaw whistled, sounding more impressed than disgusted at the sight of Greg’s body—or what was left of it. Ripped open, rotting, a banquet for maggots.

  “Hot damn, someone really hated this guy’s face!”

  Alice, ever unfazed, gave a nod. “This should be enough, Mistress. We can attempt to divine the cause of death.”

  We could do that? Well… I wasn’t surprised. The corpse was right in front of us—divination should be simple now. More points for me when Quickpaw reported back to Whisper.

  “You wanna know how he died?” I asked, feigning nonchalance.

  Quickpaw’s eyes widened. “You can do that?”

  “Should be easy.” Of course, I had no clue how easy. Alice always made it look effortless.

  Same procedure as before. Same ink-black vortex swirling in my vision as I repeated, “Cause of Greg’s death.” Three times.

  Then—

  Nothing.

  Darkness. Eerie whispers.

  And just like that, my mind slammed back into my body, my vision snapping to normal.

  Alice’s voice was calm. “Mistress, the divination failed. Please check his body for his core.”

  “What’d you see?” Quickpaw asked.

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I dug my hand straight into Greg’s chest without hesitation. A normal humanoid’s core formed around their heart—stateless at first, solidifying as their power advanced.

  But Greg had nothing.

  He was reported as a low yellow core. Powerful enough to warrant something solid in his chest.

  Instead—emptiness.

  Alice exhaled. “As expected. Someone already extracted his core. And his soul. Not only that—this space has been sanitized. No lingering energy. Specifically designed to counter divination.”

  I frowned. That was ominous.

  I relayed the surface-level findings to Quickpaw.

  Quickpaw twirled a dagger between her fingers, utterly unfazed by the maggot-riddled corpse at our feet. “Relax, Worrito. You’ve already earned your keep. Mercs. Money trails. Thibault’s greasy fingerprints. Whisper’ll stitch this into a noose faster than a drunk tailor.”

  The forest loomed around us, its silence sepulchral. I feigned contemplation, scanning gnarled branches that clawed at the sky like arthritic fingers. “So… what now?”

  “We bounce,” Quickpaw chirped, stretching like a feral housecat. “Let Whisper work her special brand of paranoid origami.”

  But before I left…

  “You go ahead. I want to try a few more attempts at gleaning information from his corpse.” A lie, smooth as silk.

  Quickpaw’s ears twitched. “Oho! Playing rot raconteur? Need a bone saw? A soup ladle? Dramatic lighting?”

  “I need solitude.”

  Originally, I had planned to perform Belle’s ritual in an abandoned warehouse at the edge of the lower district—isolated, but not ideal. If I’d known a forsaken place like this existed within the city walls, I would’ve chosen it from the start.

  No matter. Fate had handed me the perfect stage, and I wasn’t about to squander it. Parda’s essence would linger here, and by the time any sharp-nosed mage caught the scent, I’d be long gone.

  The only problem? One grease-stained gremlin.

  Quickpaw planted her fists on her hips. “Not that I’m clingy, but I make a fantastic chaperone. Sure you don’t want a living shield? Murder loves company.”

  If murder came, I’d set a place for it at the table.

  “I’ve survived worse playdates,” I said. “Just brief Whisper. Efficiency.”

  She squinted at the corpse, then the canopy. “Tick-tock, corpse-whisperer. How long’s this séance take?”

  “An hour. Maybe two.” The lie hung sweet as cyanide. Lotte promised five minutes—plenty to burn divinatory breadcrumbs and bolt.

  Quickpaw snorted. “I’ll give you sixty minutes before I come back swinging. Whisper’s orders: ‘Keep the new meat breathing.’ And wow, look at you! Still inhaling!”

  “Send her my undying gratitude,” I deadpanned. “Now shoo.”

  “Aye aye, temp-boss!” She vanished in a blur of cobalt fur, tails fluttering like middle fingers made of mischief.

  I tracked her exit with Air Sense—a gremlin-shaped void darting through the trees. Only when her aura dissolved beyond a half-mile radius did I unclench.

  Returning to the site where Greg’s tattered remains lay, I reached beneath my cloak, pulling out the carefully gathered ingredients. Belle dangled from the fabric straps across my back, stirring at last with a lazy yawn.

  “Squeeee?” Her yawn morphed into a squeak of anticipation. Ritual time?

  “Ritual time.” I nodded, emptying my pockets of the expensive components I’d spent a month collecting.

  One by one, the ritual pieces fell into place.

  Time to begin.

  Time to make Belle my supplicant.

  Why it required tampering with the fabric of reality…?

  I had no idea.

  But I was about to find out.

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