Because of the [Last Genesis]’s surprise gift, I didn’t even get to relax after shutting down Cynara and Linden’s questions and chasing them away. I went to the library to learn how to hatch and raise butterflies.

Apparently, butterfly eggs usually needed the right environment and temperature, and they typically hatched in one to four days. I didn’t know how to set up a proper environment for the [Last Genesis]’ eggs and was paranoid that the eggs would be eaten by something while I wasn’t looking, so I resigned myself to camping out in KP-04’s cave systems until they hatched.

I took some of the supplies I’d stored away in my dorm room and set up camp inside the Cagzol Caverns. There, I opened the lid of the box of butterfly eggs and placed it near a blue flower, similar to the place where I’d first emerged in KP-04. The environment here should be suitable for them, right?

Then, since there wasn’t much interesting about watching eggs that weren’t hatching, I sat down to take care of other business.

First of all, my last will. Better take care of this fast in case another act of political terrorism blew up the school.

I opened the Record of Authority, went to the Inheritance Rules section, and wrote down, “KP-04 must be passed down to someone who is willing to and capable of taking care of the Kalos butterflies. If at any point the inheritor is no longer willing and capable, they must pass it on to the next candidate.”

After a moment of thought, I added, “Luka, if you strike out this rule, we are definitely enemies.”

I dismissed the Record and took out a notebook from my backpack, flipping to an empty page. This time, having my eyesight, I concretely wrote everything down and ensured that it was legible.

I’d be in for a lot of awkward questions if anyone ever found this thing, but if I died, I couldn’t let everyone’s names die with me, right? Maybe I should look into the Secret-Keeper’s temple some more, and check if they had services for sealing documents until death or something. How did they handle entrustments and wills in this world, anyways?

I tapped the pen on the page.

I guess… As long as I was trying to leave a proper record, it was time to start writing down stories from my life again.

I didn’t like writing that much, but I’d been the only one left to remember things. So even though it was dangerous if anyone found out who I was, I’d written down what I could. I didn’t even know who I wanted to read them. I just thought, I didn’t want the world to forget all the people I had known. If I left behind my records, then there was always a chance that someone would preserve them.

In the end, it was hard to say if that project had kept me sane or ensured that I would never stop feeling crazy. But I couldn’t just not do it again, right?

I couldn’t help laughing at myself.

A whole new world, a whole new life, and here I was, still living the same way.

It was just that this time, instead of pretending to be my sister’s killer, I’d taken the face of someone who’d tried to kill me.

In the end, I didn’t write anything more that day.

---

Instead of writing, I spent some time working my way through a book about the Tripartite, or more specifically, its chapter on the Hierarchs.

According to legend, each member of the Tripartite, or Triarch, had created Hierarchs that governed over some part of their domain. Abilities granted by the Tripartite were known as fundamental powers, while those derived from the Hierarchs were known as first order abilities.

The Signifier’s Hierarchs were dragons, and they each ruled over one emotion. There were currently seven in the world, ruling over joy, desire, fear, sorrow, rage, ego, and repulsion.

The book said that the dragons could control someone’s cognition to affect how strongly an emotion was attached to certain ideas. For example, the Dragon of Fear once cursed a nearby kingdom’s ruler so he became deathly afraid of the concept of “taking things into his body.” First he stopped eating, and then he stopped drinking, but before he could die of starvation or thirst, he decided to stop breathing and suffocated himself to death first.

I wasn’t sure what the Dragon of Sorrow’s curses might look like, but since it had taken up the position of Iyiria’s venerated Great Dragon, maybe it had a more benevolent nature. I certainly hoped that was the case.

The Secret-Keeper had fewer Hierarchs than the Signifier, with only three in total: the Phoenix of Observation, the Phoenix of Reason, and the Phoenix of Mystery. Because they affected aspects of knowledge, they were difficult to spot and track. The Phoenix of Observation, for instance, could control any sense that directly gathered information from the outside world. If the phoenixes didn’t want to be perceived, they wouldn’t, but they would occasionally interfere with the world’s affairs on a whim.

As for the Scribe, its Hierarchs were chimeras that usually exhibited both dragon and phoenix traits. Each chimera ruled, rather abstractly, over some portion of Kosmonymia’s recorded history. What that meant, exactly, was uncertain; however, a conversation with one Hierarch had revealed that at least one chimera was using its authority to ensure the complete eradication of a certain frame from history. Should any record of this frame enter someone’s awareness, the chimera would appear to destroy its traces.

It was currently unknown how many Hierarchs of the Scribe existed.

The more I read, the tinier and more insignificant I felt, and the crazier the people of Kosmonymia seemed. Seeing everyone living daily life in merry oblivion hadn’t seemed so bad when I thought the standards of living were good and life-threatening danger was fairly rare. But now, on top of all the Tiziris and Oziases of the world, there were also the Hierarchs, casually shaping the world on their moody whims. How could anyone feel secure knowing that?

I really wasn’t strong enough to protect myself at all.

Anyways, I put the book down and occupied myself with some physical and magical training after that. It would probably be a good idea to keep up my training sessions with Etienne too. At least, if I could afford it.

I slept overnight in the Fantasm World, rousing every couple hours to check that nothing had happened to the box of butterfly eggs. The next morning, though, a desire for fresh food drove me to exit the Fantasm World to go to the cafeteria.

As such, I discovered that Cynara and Linden hadn’t made good on their promise to keep everyone from disturbing me. There were two letters slipped under my dorm room door.

One was a paper crocodile. When it saw me, it flew itself up into my hand and unfolded into a letter.

Heard about what happened. I’m glad you’re okay. Is there anything I can help with?

Don’t ignore me this time!

– Z

I still didn’t know what Zaire saw in Acacius, or how to use this thing to respond to him. However, when I threw the letter away, it folded itself back into crocodile form and grabbed a pencil from the table between its jaws. It brought the pencil over to me and emphatically unfolded itself in my hand again.

I guess Zaire really wanted a reply from me this time.

I thought about how much information I should share before I wrote a response.

Busy raising bugs. Won’t be around.

The letter, having received my reply, transformed back into crocodile form and slid away under the door, disappearing from sight.

I picked up the second letter to inspect. This one was from Professor Raoul.

Acacius,

Congratulations on solving KP-04. What an achievement to have under your belt at such a young age! Take the time to rest and recover. You pushed yourself quite far.

I’m sure you are quite busy with the aftermath. Unfortunately, I also have other matters to pass along. The Ministry of Security and Investigation wishes to question you about the appearance of Tiziri in KP-04. If you do not respond soon, they will escalate the matter. Please contact me when you can, and I will connect you with the person in charge of this case. I will answer, day or night.

Regards,

Raoul Sattari

At the end of the letter, he’d written down what looked like a phone number.

What the hell. I hadn’t even heard of this ministry contacting me. As for the number… Acacius didn’t have any communication devices that I knew of. What was I supposed to do?

After treating myself to breakfast at the cafeteria, I used [Honest Man’s Deception] to disguise myself as Chen Xiarui and went to the library. Along the way, I carefully folded the top and bottom of Professor Raoul’s letter to hide everything except the contact information at the bottom.

Miss Bakhta was there at the library’s front desk. She nodded at me in greeting as I walked up.

“Hello, young man. What can I help you with today?”

I showed her my suspiciously folded-up letter and pointed at the number. “I need to get in touch with someone.”

Miss Bakhta raised an eyebrow. “No seam of your own?”

A seam? I shook my head.

“And here I was, thinking everyone had one these days… Come along, we have an older model in the back.”

I followed her behind the desk, past the cart of returned books and through a door labeled “Employees Only.” In the break room, the eating area had been crowded into the corner by rows of floor-to-ceiling racks, each packed with electronic devices and machines. Some resembled the computers I knew; others took the form of slim laptops, boxy towers, discs, cubes, and glass-thin plates. Many of them had been at least partially disassembled. On a workstation by the wall, a collection of metal tools had been left out on a grid-lined mat under a set of magnifying glasses, obscured by a thin carpet of crumpled scratch paper.

Miss Bakhta shoved aside a chair stacked with thick academic texts to unveil what was unmistakably a telephone on the wall. It was black, sleek, and vintage in style, with number keys delicately repainted where the original ink had worn off.

“Go ahead, you can use this one.”

I stared at it for a moment before I managed my next sentence.

“Say, Miss Bakhta, where do you think the term ‘seam’ came from, anyways?”

“It might be an inside joke.”

“From who?”

She just chuckled and moved on.

“‘Seam’ is naturally a colloquial shortening of the prefix ‘sema,’ from ‘semacell,’ which itself derives from ‘semagraph,’ or ‘that which transmits signs across long distances.’ This in turn comes from ‘semaphoros,’ an old name for signal-bearers who communicated information through the waving of flags. At least, that is what the scholars of the SL frame hypothesize.” Miss Bakhta leaned in with a conspiratorial whisper. “Between me and you, I don’t know if any of the alleged ‘records’ of that Fantasm are worth anything — they might have all been doctored by their world-destroying AI.”

So to summarize, the people of Kosmonymia had solved a Fantasm World with an evil rogue AI so that they could make telephones.

Okay, sure, whatever. It might as well be true. “As long as the same thing doesn’t happen here…”

Miss Bakhta smiled. “Those who break the circle of history bear the responsibility to ensure the same path is not walked again. The architecture that seams run on today has been engineered to work in a decentralized, distributed network whose nodes can be easily isolated and detached from each other. There’s no need to worry so much.” She peered at me over her glasses. “Perhaps that can be saved for when you finally master your algebra books, hmm?”

I gave her a sheepish smile. She had me there.

Miss Bakhta considerately left the back room while I made my call. I waited until she’d closed the door before transforming back into Acacius and dialing the Professor’s number. I needed to use a voice he would recognize, after all.

After a few rings, the Professor picked up. “Hello, this is Professor Raoul speaking. How may I help you?”

“It’s me,” I said.

“Acacius?”

“I got your letter. You said something about the Ministry wanting to find me?”

“Yes. Have you not been checking your mail? They’ve apparently tried to contact you through your student seammail as well, but there’s been no response.”

A seammail? Like, an e-mail…? Kosmonymia really had all kinds of things, huh…

No, the important thing to keep in mind was that Acacius had contact information that I didn’t know and couldn’t use. Because I didn’t know any of his accounts or passwords.

Sometimes I felt like the problems in my life were really stupid.

“I haven’t been checking anything,” I said. “Can you tell me what you know?”

Professor Raoul and I arranged to meet at his classroom in the afternoon. He said he would be bringing the chief investigator with him, and the process might take a few hours, depending on my answers. He also told me to look up a few legal rights terms related to what information I could choose not to disclose.

When I asked him what his relationship with the investigator was, he avoided giving a direct answer.

After we ended the call, I put my disguise back on and asked Miss Bakhta about the legal terms Professor Raoul had given me. She raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment, instead pointing me to a couple reference books in the back.

I took some notes from the reference books before getting food from the cafeteria and heading back to KP-04. The butterfly eggs remained untouched and unhatched.

If the Ministry’s goal was getting information about Tiziri, I probably wasn’t alone in this mess. I took out the Record of Authority and wrote a message.

—Have you been questioned by the Ministry of Security & Investigation yet?

I got a surprisingly quick answer from Luka.

—Not yet. Why?

I contemplated ignoring him since he didn’t know anything, but even though I wasn’t exactly happy with him right now, we’d still been through a lot together.

—Meeting the chief investigator today. They want testimonies on Tiziri.

—When and where?

—Why?

—I should take care of matters with them too.

I guess that made sense. I wrote down the meeting details and closed the book.

As a result, when I went to our classroom in the afternoon, Luka, Veric, and Roxana were all waiting outside the door.

I was momentarily speechless.

Judging by their relationships, Luka must have told Veric, and then Veric must have told Roxana. So in the end, the root problem was Luka.

“Is there nothing secret between you two?” I said, gesturing to him and Veric.

She cleared her throat. “Hi, Acacius. You look a lot better. Thanks for helping with Luka’s… um…”

“Attempted murder,” Roxana suggested.

“Don’t mention it,” I said flatly. “What’s a little bit of murder between friends?”

“You’re… friends now?” said Veric.

“No.”

Roxana snickered. I guess after slapping me around a couple times, she’d decided to drop her nice girl act around me altogether.

“Thank you for all the help,” said Luka. “And I’m sorry for what happened.”

I glanced at him, not changing my expression. “Sorry for which part, exactly?”

Luka paused.

“The attempted murder.”

“Yours or mine?”

He gave me a blank look that told me everything I needed to know. I didn’t feel like getting into it with him here, though, so I snorted and turned my attention back to the others. Veric was shifting her weight awkwardly, and Roxana was watching us with interest. “Do you know what to expect from a questioning like this?”

Roxana brushed a strand of hair behind her ears and blinked demurely at me. “Actually, that was what we wanted to ask you. We thought you would know. Given your family and all.”

Were the Duvals famous for getting investigated a lot or something? That was surprising. I’d thought that any law enforcement would exist to serve the nobles’ interests of power, not oppose them.

“I don’t usually cooperate with people who want to ask me questions,” I said.

A cool voice floated down the hall. “Then I suppose I should thank you for cooperating with me.”

I turned around. Appearing around the bend of the hallway was a tall woman with shoulder-length black hair, dressed in a dark blue uniform that was a cross between old-timey police uniforms and military wear. Her ice-blue eyes were sharp and hawk-like. Strapped to her belt were an old black baton and a pair of polished pistols.

Hadn’t Dalileh said that guns were widely considered troublesome and a collector’s oddity?

Professor Raoul followed two steps behind her, an unhappy crease between his eyebrows and dark shadows under his eyes. Nonetheless, when he saw us, he offered us a comforting smile.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” he said. “I see we have more guests than expected. Thank you for making the time today.”

The woman came to a stop in front of us, crossing her arms and surveying us with a sharp eye.

“The name is Artunis Sattari, Chief of the Ministry of Security and Investigation. Introduce yourselves.”

It was Roxana who acted first. She stepped forward with a curtsy.

“Hello, Madam Artunis. My name is Roxana, and this is Verica and Luka. We heard from Acacius that he was taking care of matters today, so we thought it might be helpful for everyone to drop by as well. I hope we haven’t caused any trouble.”

Artunis nodded. “Luka. No last name?”

“No.”

She took out a box of cigarettes and placed one in her mouth. “Is that right? Think very carefully about your answer.”

In his will, Acacius had written out Luka’s last name, but when Kosmonymia announced the solving of KP-04, it had been blacked out. Had Artunis heard about that?

“Artunis,” Professor Raoul said softly. For maybe the first time since they’d appeared, he actually looked at her. “There’s no need to pry into unrelated matters. And don’t smoke in the classroom.”

“Tch.” Artunis lowered her hand from her cigarette, but didn’t take it out of her mouth.

Professor Raoul stepped forward and opened the classroom door for us like a real gentleman. Once we were inside, he gave Artunis a key that she used to unlock the adjacent storeroom.

“I’ll speak to you all one by one,” Artunis said. She took out a silver clock, wound it up, and placed it on the teacher’s desk. Next, she adjusted the time on one of the clock faces on her silver wristwatch. The back of my neck prickled as she crooked a finger at Veric. “You first.”

I didn’t know why I felt so uneasy, but I grabbed onto Veric’s sleeve and pulled her back anyways. She gave me a quizzical look. Artunis narrowed her eyes.

However, it was Professor Raoul who spoke first.

“Artunis,” he said with a perfectly hair-raising calm. “The safety of my students is my utmost priority. So, please. Don’t go overboard.”

Or else what? … What could she do?

Artunis was silent. She rubbed the golden band on her ring finger. Professor Raoul’s hands were unadorned.

“It’s a closed room simply to save some time,” she said. “None of your students will be harmed… I promise.”

She turned and entered the storeroom.

[Inevitable Survivor] had gone quiet. I slowly let go of Veric’s sleeve.

“Acacius?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Nevermind.”

A moment later, I decided to push the storeroom door shut anyways. I turned back to the others and added in a low voice, “Professor Raoul, can we call these interviews off?”

Professor Raoul sighed. He took off his glasses and began cleaning them with an embroidered handkerchief from his pocket.

“You are free to do as you wish,” he said. “But both Artunis and the Ministry are dead-set on obtaining this information, and if you must be questioned, I’d rather it happen somewhere within my reach.”

That didn’t make me feel much better. “Is it safe?”

He smiled wryly. “As safe as interacting with someone with her power can ever be.”

I took a deep breath, exhaled, and nodded. His protection was better than nothing, right?

“Then… I’ll go in now?” Veric asked tentatively.

“Why are you looking at me?” I said. “Just go.”

“Don’t worry,” said Roxana. “We’re the two Saintess candidates, and he” — she gestured at me — “is a Duval. Even if Artunis wants to make a move, it won’t be on us. The only one who might need to worry is Luka.”

Luka ran a hand over the hilt of his sword.

“Don’t worry about me either,” he said softly. “I’ll be fine.”

Veric pressed her lips together, but after glancing at Professor Raoul one more time, she nodded firmly. She strode into the storeroom, and the door swung shut behind her with a firm click.

I hoped I hadn’t made the wrong choice.

Chapter 37 Chapter 39