The paper made a crisp sound between her fingertips.
Cecil forced herself to swallow the curse that had almost escaped her lips.
For the first time, she felt her refinement was undergoing a devastating test.
A prank.
This was absolutely intentional on that woman’s part.
Just as she was about to crumple the letter into a ball, a detail caught the corner of her eye.
In the crease at the very bottom-right corner of the letter, a tiny charcoal arrow was drawn.
It pointed to the other side of the paper.
Cecil’s slender fingers stopped abruptly in mid-air.
She raised an eyebrow and flipped the letter over.
The doubt in her heart began to spread uncontrollably at this moment.
Was this really a letter written by Valor herself?
In Cecil’s past impressions, that deacon of the Dawn Church had always been like a piece of cold pig iron that could never be warmed.
Every time they met at the joint meetings, that blonde woman always had a stern face and was biting towards the Seventh Agency to the core.
But why did the tone of this private letter seem so...
Playful?
Cecil twitched the corner of her mouth.
If these words had been written by some apprentice scribe by Valor’s side, she felt her rationality could barely accept it.
But if it was that prim and proper woman who had personally drawn the arrow...
Then she really needed to re-evaluate the mental state of this eldest daughter of the Dainfield family.
Suppressing the sense of dissonance in her mind, Cecil focused her gaze on the back of the letter.
“In 657 BC, Aurelian, the seventeenth Inquisitor of the Church, personally led the Dawn Knights to the western Grey Hills.”
“The ultimate goal of this trip was to purge the Divine Scion pollution of Mist City.”
“The great battle of cleansing lasted for three full days and nights.”
“After that campaign, which was enough to alter the geographical structure of the land...”
“The target Divine Scion was successfully sealed within the undersea ruins.”
“Mist City, as the core source of pollution, was completely destroyed in the holy fire.”
“Since then, the geographical term ‘Grey Hills’ has been permanently erased from the imperial map of the Kingdom of Velen.”
As expected.
The moment she saw the last sentence, Cecil’s gray eyes lit up.
All the scattered clues had completely formed a logical closed loop in this second.
The perfectly curved coastline of Moon Bay, looking as if it had been drawn with a compass, was not a wonder of nature at all.
It was a battlefield ruin.
It was a permanent wound left on the material world by a Scale Seven Saint—those who stood at the peak of the human supernatural pyramid two thousand years ago—after they had completely unleashed their authority.
Those beings, who were nearly gods, had incidentally wiped out the entire Grey Hills along with the city upon it while restructuring the rules.
Therefore.
The original land had collapsed, and the cold seawater had poured in.
That was how the current Moon Bay came to be.
Cecil slowly spread the letter flat on the table.
Beside her, old Mr. Roland Orphal was still snoring like a bellows.
Now.
What truly gave her a headache and filled her with despair was not this two-thousand-year-old geographical change.
It was that word mentioned frequently in the letter.
Divine Scion.
Lest she forget.
At this very moment, in the eastern plains of the Kingdom of Velen, the Seventh Agency had mobilized nearly two-thirds of the headquarters’ core combat units just to encircle and suppress the newly awakened “Skeletal Divine Lord” in the Pennine Mountains.
The fires of war over there had not yet been extinguished.
And now.
The family records of the Dainfield family were telling her that at the westernmost tip of the kingdom, beneath the seemingly calm deep sea of Moon Bay, another Divine Scion was also tightly sealed.
In this way.
All the recent actions of those cultists from the Mist Veil Society could be explained.
The “Lord” that those rats hiding in dark corners constantly spoke of and wrote about in secret letters...
In essence, it was that Divine Scion sealed under the seabed by the ancestor of the Dainfield family two thousand years ago!
Their so-called “restoring the Lord’s Glory”...
Was to find a way to break the seal beneath Mist City.
To release that two-thousand-year-old polluted entity and bring another Great Extinction to this already decaying world.
As for the so-called “divine oracles” received by those low-level cultists...
Cecil curled her lip, a trace of disdain flashing in her eyes.
That was merely a bit of radiation deliberately projected into the real world by that lump of flesh at the bottom of the deep sea through the gaps in the rules.
Damn it.
The situation was even worse than she had estimated.
She had to move even faster.
Cecil turned her head to look out the porthole.
Gazing as far as the eye could see.
At the end of the thick fog and the night, that massive circular bay, presenting a perfect arc, was already faintly appearing on the edge of the horizon.
Originally.
She had applied to the headquarters to take the fastest royal airship in order to conduct an aerial observation of Moon Bay’s topography to look for clues.
Now.
This goal had already been accurately answered in advance through Xia'an’s one-way secret letter and Valor’s family reply.
There was no need to look at the topography.
Now, the only thing that needed to be personally confirmed through specialized means...
Was the specific locations of the twelve lighthouses in the Moon Bay region.
With things progressing to this point, the strategic role of those twelve lighthouses was already self-evident.
They were essentially twelve coffin nails driven into the Divine Scion’s sealing array.
While they guided navigation in the material world, on the spirit world level, they continuously suppressed the spiritual recovery of the Divine Scion below.
Therefore.
If necessary, the Seventh Agency had to seize control of all twelve lighthouses back into official hands at the first opportunity.
So, what role did Wayland Capital play in this game between the Divine Scion and the seal?
What was the true goal of that old fox, Thomas Wayland?
Was it merely for that “Fifth Element” hidden underwater?
Cecil stared at the dark earth outside the window, a flash of uncertain confusion in her eyes.
Capital sought profit.
But if they blew up the world, there would be no place to spend gold crowns.
There was one thing she knew better than anyone else.
The dirty cooperation between Wayland Capital and the Mist Veil Society had definitely not ended there.
On the contrary.
Their core plan might have only just begun.
Cecil just watched the window quietly.
Her gaze pierced through the layers of clouds and fog, finally landing on that cold sea surface in the far distance, reflecting the pale waning moon.
...
And at this moment.
On that sea coveted by various forces.
A schooner supply ship flying the flag of the Wayland Shipping Company was moving steadily with the waves.
Inside the captain’s cabin.
Elias was clenching his fists tightly, veins popping on his forehead.
He felt like he was about to have a personality dissociation.
In the past half hour, he had truly experienced mental devastation.
That damn parrot was currently outputting crazily at Elias in a vulgar, raspy voice:
“Oh! Look at those chestnut curls! Look at that sturdy little body!”
“Gold crowns! Twelve gold crowns! As long as you pay, this old bird is yours tonight!”
“Darling, want to try the joy of high-altitude, high-frequency wing flapping?”
“Go to hell!”
Elias finally reached his limit, grabbing half an oatmeal biscuit from the table—hard as granite—and throwing it at the bird.
Bloodsong was on the side covering his face, seemingly embarrassed to have a Resurrectionist leader like Crowley.
“Sexual harassment!”
“This is absolutely cross-species sexual harassment!”
Elias roared crazily in his mind at Old Ed, who had been hiding in the bracelet’s spirit world space and playing dead.
“Err... strictly speaking, he’s just repeating the slang from the lower district taverns that Old Sea Dog often visits.”
Old Ed’s voice sounded full of schadenfreude and perfunctoriness.
Elias rubbed his temples, intending to go out to the deck to catch some cold wind and get rid of the bird smell in the room.
Just as he took his first step.
A faint sound suddenly came from the floor behind him.
Elias paused and immediately looked back.
He saw that Ophelia, who was lying on the room’s carpet, had long eyelashes that began to tremble slightly.
Amidst a soft groan of pain, the reporter finally woke up.
“Ugh...”
Ophelia struggled to sit up.
“Hiss... it hurts...”
She took a sharp breath, her hands covering the back of her neck.
Her vision gradually cleared from its initial blurriness.
At this moment, Ophelia’s brain began to rewind rapidly, piecing together the last images before she lost consciousness.
She remembered very clearly.
Back in the tavern, after that terrible earthquake, that old captain had suggested going to the lighthouse.
She had proposed that she wanted to understand the working environment of the keepers.
That elegant lady had told her it was very dangerous.
But she wouldn't tell her exactly what the danger was.
Was this danger the cause of Ryan’s death?
She believed she had to investigate, otherwise, it would be irresponsible to Ryan and to herself.
Then that mysterious old captain had suddenly grabbed her arm.
Before she could even ask a question, her vision blurred, and she arrived directly in this captain’s cabin.
What made her break down was that ever since she entered the room, that damn parrot had been muttering something about “money matters” in her ear.
Ophelia had originally wanted to ask where this was, but the old captain said he had things to do and turned to leave.
When she wanted to go out to check, the door was locked.
She had pounded on the door and shouted for a long time, and finally, she saw a tall man in a sailor suit walk in with a face full of impatience.
That man had impatiently informed her: The old captain had other business to attend to, so stay put.
Ophelia, of course, was not so easily brushed off.
She had immediately claimed this was an egregious kidnapping.
However, before the words had even fully left her mouth...
The tall sailor in front of her had crossed to her side in two steps.
Ophelia didn't even have time to cry out in alarm.
She felt a sharp pain from the back of her neck.
She immediately felt her vision go black and collapsed.
Until now.
Ophelia struggled to lift her head, wanting to scan the new environment.
She saw two tall figures beside her, slowly leaning toward where she was sitting up.
Under the light of the dim, explosion-proof gas lamp.
The two looked down at her from above.
“You’re awake?”
“Twelve years have already passed.”
“Huh?!”
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