Lu Yuan couldn't figure it out.
But he remembered this sense of unease.
Unease itself was the best reminder.
【Bronze City Status: +1...3/50】
Looking at the floating notification, Lu Yuan's brow furrowed slightly. Looking at this information had caused it to increase again.
It indicated that this incident once again involved things from long ago... Lu Yuan felt an internal resistance to this feeling of 'drifting with the current'.
He left the archives and returned to the first floor via the stairs.
The young man at the front desk had already prepared the hemlock extract.
There were two glass bottles of modest size, containing a deep amber liquid with the branch's label affixed to the glass.
"Sign for these."
Lu Yuan signed his name and tucked the bottles into his coat.
Just as he was about to leave, the front door was pushed open.
It was Karl.
The scarred man was drenched in sweat, his coat stained with dust, looking as though he had just run back from outside.
Seeing Lu Yuan, he paused for a moment.
"You didn't go with the captain?"
"No, it was a last-minute notice," Lu Yuan said, looking at Karl. "How are things on your end?"
Karl grabbed a cup of cold water from the counter and gulped down half of it.
"I did a circuit of three places." He wiped his mouth, his tone somewhat heavy. "At the Viscount's manor, the Viscount's attitude had changed completely. He was polite, but he simply wouldn't let me search thoroughly."
"The Baron is the same as ever, locking himself in his study. The merchant association representative was cooperative, but after searching for ages, there was nothing new."
He shook his head, looking helpless.
"Everything that could be found was found last time. This time was just going through the motions."
It was almost exactly as Lu Yuan had expected.
"Where's Helen?"
"Still out there. She went with the captain to coordinate with Hoguer's people." Karl set down the cup. "There seems to be new movement in the outer city as well, though the specifics aren't clear yet."
The outer city.
The direction where the Ascension Society was stationed.
Lu Yuan nodded and didn't ask further.
"Let me know if there's any news."
"Will do." Karl waved at him. "I'm going to write my report first. The captain is pressing for it."
Lu Yuan walked out of the branch and headed back along the stone-paved road.
Tucked in his coat were the hemlock extract and the copper badge.
In his mind were the words from the Northern Sea Voyage Records.
63 people, 11 confirmed survivors currently.
The log is left at the camp; we are heading north.
They headed north.
What happened after that?
It had been twenty years. The search and rescue team found no one, and the empire sealed the case.
But those 11 people—assuming some of them eventually survived and returned to the continent—what did they experience? What did they bring back?
And then there was that badge in Gregory's possession.
He was a core member of the Ascension Society. How did this object made of metallic memory material end up in his hands?
Was it circulated within the Ascension Society? Or did it come from another channel?
There were no answers to these questions for now.
But at least one path was open.
Tonight, once Laurina had the hemlock extract, she could begin preparing the trigger solution.
Whether it would actually open then was still hard to say.
But if he didn't try, he would never know.
The twilight light slanted through the gaps between buildings, dyeing the stone road in a wash of warm gold.
Lu Yuan quickened his pace.
By the time he returned to the Alchemy Workshop, the sky was in that state between light and dark.
Laurina was at the workbench, with a row of test tubes and several petri dishes laid out before her.
When she saw Lu Yuan enter, her gaze first fell on the items in his hand.
"You got it?"
Lu Yuan placed the hemlock extract in front of her.
Laurina picked up a bottle and held it against the light to check the color and transparency of the liquid.
"The quality is decent."
She set the bottle down and pointed to several items already prepared on the workbench: finely ground silver leaf powder, a small bottle of diluted mineralized salt solution, and an empty glass beaker.
"I already prepared the base this afternoon. Now that we're adding the hemlock extract, it will need to sit for one to two hours after mixing to allow the components to react fully."
She glanced at Lu Yuan.
"Whether it works or not, we'll only know after we try."
Lu Yuan nodded.
Laurina said nothing more and began the operation.
Her movements were precise, each step carrying a composure that Lu Yuan couldn't hope to imitate.
When measuring the hemlock extract, a slight turn of her wrist brought the liquid exactly to the graduation line.
The angle and speed at which she poured it into the beaker were controlled with extreme stability.
Once mixed, the solution took on a strange color somewhere between amber and emerald green.
Laurina moved the beaker to a cool corner of the workbench and covered it with a glass lid.
"Two hours."
Lu Yuan helped clean a few vessels and then returned to the window.
He didn't stay idle.
He took out his notebook and flipped to a blank page.
He wrote down two questions:
What is hidden inside the badge?
What does Morris want me to find?
He closed the notebook.
While waiting for the solution to react, Lu Yuan also unpacked the other three wooden boxes.
The largest one was waist-high, and inside were over a dozen strips of dried sandworm skin neatly stacked.
They were grayish-brown with fine scale patterns on the surface. Each strip had been cleaned thoroughly, rolled into a cylinder, and tied with hemp rope.
The second box contained meat.
Large chunks of dried sandworm meat, much thicker and more substantial than what Herman had sent this morning.
The color was deeper, the texture coarser, and the muscle fibers were visible on the cut surfaces, as solid as wood.
Pressed at the very bottom were two sealed ceramic jars. Unscrewing one, a pungent, fishy scent wafted up.
Sandworm blood. A dark red, thick liquid that had undergone preliminary treatment to prevent coagulation.
The other jar was even darker, nearly black.
The third box was more of a mix.
Several coils of sandworm tendons, dried until they were as hard as stone.
A small bag of sandworm bone powder, grayish-white in color.
There was also a package wrapped in three layers of oil paper. After opening it, he found a palm-sized dried sandworm gallbladder, its surface shriveled and dark green.
Laurina took a few extra looks when she saw the sandworm blood and the dried gallbladder.
"If treated properly, sandworm blood can be used as an adhesive or included in certain high-level formulas." She picked up the gallbladder and flipped it over. "This is even rarer. Sandworm bile has the property of neutralizing pollution residues; it's a natural purification medium."
She placed the two ceramic jars and the gallbladder on the bottom shelf of the medicinal cabinet, alongside the refined sandworm oil.
"That desert town of yours actually has so many things at its disposal?"
"A fair number of these are considered controlled materials..."
Lu Yuan didn't respond.
Herman always did things with sincerity.
The friendship forged back in Sandworm Town had yielded these substantial gains.
It would be enough to last for a while.
The sky outside had turned completely dark.
The bronze runes on the city walls lit up, tracing a faint golden arc against the distant horizon.
Lu Yuan closed his eyes and began his Guard cultivation for the night.
Once the two hours were up, he would see exactly what secret that badge was hiding.
Nine o'clock in the evening.
On the second floor of the Alchemy Workshop, the oil lamp cast flickering shadows against the walls.
Laurina had said "two hours" after preparing the trigger solution. An hour and a half had passed since then.
Lu Yuan sat by the window, the Knowledge Pathway Guide spread across his lap.
He had already flipped through the theoretical portion of the second stage of Guard several times.
The book spoke of "widening the riverbed," and while he understood the general meaning, actually doing it seemed to only progress a tiny bit each day.
He could only increase the value by 0.3 a day. At this rate, it would take at least another month to level up.
Lu Yuan felt a headache coming on. It was taking too long; he wondered if he could find some way to accelerate the process.
Rate on N.U.
