Peter complied with Althur's orders without protest. He silently made his way to the corner of the room and used the flame of a candle to light the unusual candle. The charred wick did not burn brightly but gave off a faint glow that distorted the air around it, creating a mirage of heat waves near the fireplace.
When the candle was lit, Peter felt queasy—a different kind of queasiness—when he approached the altar of the church that had been placed at the end of the cellar.
The air around him became thicker, reminding him of the dryness of standing on high mountainsides. Perhaps it would be similar to the atmosphere of the hot deserts, but Peter had never been to those places. How could he imagine such a thing?
He sensed that this candle was abnormal, just like the body that lay there. Ever since the venerable bishop from the White Lily church brought the corpse and placed it here, the altar has undergone some subtle alterations. He was sure that they were related to this dead man, but they were beyond his comprehension. A meager orphan who worked at the morgue and only visited the church for free meals couldn't possibly know anything about its secret.
Peter remembered the young gentleman's request, but he hesitated and kept his composure. The young gentleman's voice jolted him out of his reverie. "Put it on a stand and bring it to me," he ordered. Peter nodded and resumed his usual silence.
As Peter approached the mysterious man, the light on his hand illuminated his actions. The man stood still, his eyes closed and his lips moving in a silent chant. He seemed unaware of Peter's presence the entire time he watched the stranger intently.
The gentlemen had a scent of soap, a rare and precious smell, for most of the people here never got to cleanse themselves, for the river was also stained with ash and dust, darker than the river that led to hell in the believers' creed.
He scoffed at himself, perhaps the most polite man he had ever stood so close to. He pondered what the man was thinking when he posed the previous questions. The questions were odd, but they stirred Peter's mind. Maybe he felt sorry for him. Maybe he loathed him. This young gentleman's attitude was erratic.
Peter had seen enough of the world to know that there was no such thing as a good person. He sensed that in this man too, even though he claimed to be a walking corpse, yet his lively curiosity about the person did not move him. A wandering corpse wished to swap places with someone to end his unhappy life, but he knew it wasn't possible.
At that moment, Althur's mind underwent a remarkable transformation. He had left mundane reality behind and plunged into the realm of detail, the World of Details. He crossed a crucial threshold in his mental odyssey as a mystic traveler and novice gatekeeper. Echoes of the past flooded his present consciousness, disconnecting him from the world and sweeping him into the stream of history.
Beyond the reach of his senses, he chased the traces of the dead, beginning with the remains of the corpse. But strangely, these things seemed to be continuously changing and shifting. He hoped to find some clues, such as the disappearance of a revered mentor or an invisible force in the world of mind. But the information he received was irrelevant, or at least unhelpful, to his investigation.
What he saw now was a terrible disharmony and dissonance, worse than when he crossed his own Sea of Negative. Even though he had done this before, he was still facing something harsh and strange. Distorted colors and symbols swirled around; this was like a tiny chamber, but with billions of microscopic things appearing beyond the visual realm. They were like dust that he inhaled into his lungs, constantly invading the perception that took the form of Althur's simulation, making the image suffer from a storm of data, as if a hundred thousand endless voices were screaming outside his eardrum, stabbing his consciousness like sharp daggers.
He explored the exotic wines and cocktail recipes steeped in and intertwined with ancient lore. He blended unthinkable ingredients to concoct bizarre liquids. Yet he fell to grasping the essence of the soul and the cause of the vanishing of his supernatural powers.
Peter, the youth beside him, felt no time pass, only a few seconds. But for Althur, wandering in this world is an enormous burden. The details here defy time. To seek and receive information here, one had to relive an endless moment. It was rare for a Walaric of his rank to unleash his power like this, but he was indeed an anomaly.
Althur's mind was now on a battlefield where his Idt had suffered under siege by a dark force that sought to corrupt him. The old wounds of the dead still bleed from the past, staining and twisting Althur's mind with pain and rage. Madness and Will in Details World were two opposing ideals that clashed and collided in his mind, driving him to the brink of despair. He wandered and struggled, losing his way and his will.
Bitter and powerless feelings from past encounters that Althur never had a chance to process and verify, all corrupted and distorted by the dark influence. He scanned the freshest data available, catching glimpses of James and Winston's conversations and interactions, exorcisms, and battles with the possessed. This data painted a rough portrait of the dead man. But as he felt he was getting closer to his goal, the data stream suddenly snapped. Everything went from violent and chaotic, like a raging flood, to silent and frozen.
A sudden whirlwind swept across Althur's vision as the realm witnessed his realization, like a sudden rumble or loose stone triggering a cascade of snow and ice, creating a furious blizzard that swept away everything in its path. The sadness around him, swirling with the emptiness of the void and the finality of the end, engulfed and dragged down Althur's simulation. It was clearly all despair and helplessness. The human inability to grasp the reason for our birth and death is another mysterious and baffling force in reality. "Death!" Althur gasped.
Outside, Peter could feel the air growing more ominous as the man acted confused. After the young man had touched the corpse's heart with his bare hand and had frozen in that position without saying a word, as if locked in a silent battle in his mind, Peter's intuition felt inexplicably alarmed. Suddenly, a familiar aura radiated from him. Quickly recognizing it as the horrible sensation of realizing he was cursed, Peter shuddered as he clutched the strange candle, his hand too shaky to hold the candle steady, causing a tiny drop of wax to fall onto the dead flesh. Before he could snap out of it, the man beside him opened his eyes.
"How long have you been seeing ghosts?" The man's voice sounded cold, ignoring the trembling of the person next to him.
...
Cassius circled the shelves for a while. His feet stepped on shabby carpets laid to muffle the echo of walking on the stone floor. He scanned the shelves of history and politics, pausing briefly before the shelves of law-related books. He noticed that some of the titles were taped to the small iron tags on the spines of the books.
The Institutes of William, the law book that had the name of the Delight king and was composed by his orders based on the canon law of the Dan Empire, which was the foundation upon which the new monarch erected his legal architecture, occupied the majority of the shelves. Those who worked with the law had to twist and turn it to suit the new kingdom.