Chương 27: Chapter 28: What Remain in Snow

A small figure dashed through the woods while angling toward the southern edge of the forest, snow kicking up in soft flurries behind each stride, her breath fogging white and constant in air still thick with the tail end of the blizzard that had chased her through the trees not an hour before. Corin had told her days before any of this began, to simply follow the river south and he would be waiting.

Thanks to a small warding charm he'd pressed into the back of her hand at that time, leaving any trail behind her was no longer a concern—except for the messy stage she'd needed to leave behind first. She had left an honest trail up to the clearing on purpose. Beyond it, she intended to vanish entirely. Even so, the evidence she'd left behind wasn't a guarantee of anything. It might fool most people but would not necessarily fool everyone.

A skilled enough Mystic or a sufficiently high-ranking Stalker remained a genuine threat regardless of how convincing a scene she'd staged. Corin had already warned her that the Mystic Path held divinations capable of confirming whether a soul was still alive or still present in this realm at all, regardless of what physical evidence suggested.

But she was not like the rest of this world's entities, and she intended to gamble on that difference producing a result in her favor rather than one that unraveled everything she'd just fought to build. Esbern would likely question what had happened once word reached him. But he was not the kind of man who chased a problem once it had crossed outside Oakhaven's walls. She had revealed just enough to make herself into something capable of attracting disaster.

So she'd decided to end it quickly, to break the chain Voss had already begun tightening around her. Vira, on the other hand... she already had the answer. She only needed to follow her own instinct. She was smart enough to know how to handle the rest. That matter, at least, was as resolved as it was ever going to be. The only thing left to finish was leaving this perimeter entirely.

Upon reaching the last stretch of tree line, she finally caught sight of a small merchant's wagon half-hidden in the dark, snow already gathering along its canvas cover in a thin, undisturbed layer, Corin leaning against its wooden side with the unhurried patience of a man who had never once doubted the outcome. A few flakes had settled in his hair and along his shoulders, as though he'd been standing there long enough for the storm to start treating him like part of the landscape.

He looked up as she approached, an amused smile already forming.

"Ho ho. You actually pulled it off. I half expected our contract to break before the night was through, but I'm glad it's still standing... and that you're still standing along with it." Stelle regarded him with calm, carefully emptied eyes.

"Almost." Corin's gaze dropped finally to the ragged freshly healed stump where her left forearm should have been. His easy smile didn't waver, though something sharper flickered briefly behind it.

"Ah. Seems you're missing something, little snowflake. Did Voss send a high-ranking Tier 2 after all?"

"Something more troublesome than that," Stelle said.

"But I managed."

"You are indeed capable. Don't worry though, maybe I'll find something to replace that missing limb of yours. For now, let's get moving." He straightened, turning toward the driver's bench without waiting for an answer. Stelle climbed into the wagon and settled against the wall, the canvas overhead sagging faintly under the weight of accumulating snow, a thin draft of cold air slipping through the gap by the flap with every gust outside.

The wound at her elbow was already sealed shut by regeneration, the bleeding long since stopped. It was only once she was still, with nothing left to demand her attention that she noticed the problem clearly. The wound had closed. The limb itself had not returned. Whatever mechanism had knitted her burns and lacerations back together in hours had apparently reached its limit somewhere well short of regrowing an entire severed hand.

If I had kept the arm, she thought, turning the possibility over with clinical detachment, reattachment might have solved this cleanly. But I chose otherwise, for good reason. But there was another option and also one she had already begun calculating before the wagon had even finished pulling away from the treeline. A second rapid evolution, the same violent, accelerated process that had rewritten her body once before in a forest very much like this one, might regrow her missing limbs.

System, can I regrow or fix my limbs during rapid evolution? [SYSTEM] [Due to body reconstruction, it is possible to trigger a regeneration process during rapid evolution.] [Adding custom instructions and extra energy will ensure activation.] It would require a substantial amount of mana to trigger. Which was precisely where Cael's remains would prove useful.

She understood that a living creature couldn't be stored inside her Spatial Inventory—but a corpse was a different matter entirely, and Cael's body, frozen in whatever state it had entered her inventory in, still carried the lingering resonance of a genuine Tier 3 core. Is there a way to use Cael's remaining mana core to support a rapid evolution? [SYSTEM] [Due to a mismatched mana signature and incompatible elemental affinity, only 30% of the remaining core can be integrated.] [Full integration would require two additional Tier 3 cores of matching Frost affinity to upgrade the system to Sequence 2 and trigger a complete rapid evolution.] Stelle stared at the readout for a long moment. Reaching Sequence 2 would require more power than she currently had, two Tier 3 cores with matching Frost affinities. Her first system upgrade hadn't required much, just the core of a Tier 1 monster, yet even that had reshaped her body. Now, the system was far more demanding.

A daunting requirement, but an absolute necessity. Another hand was better than one, but until she could fulfill the system's conditions she would have to adapt to her handicap. As long as Cael's body remained inside her spatial inventory, it would stay preserved without decaying, saving her the concern. Perhaps she could use his core to finally forge that weapon. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. I'll hold onto it for now, she decided.

She let the thought settle and closed the readout without initiating anything, tucking Cael's core back into whatever quiet corner of her system it had come from. Her gaze dropped to her only remaining hand, her fingers lightly tracing the phantom silence where her left should have been. A cold wave of discomfort washed over her then she felt incomplete, off-balance.

Reaching out, her right hand brushed against a trinket among Corin's belongings inside the wagon, her fingers wrapping around it tightly, as if her lone remaining hand were the most fragile and precious thing she possessed.

"That one's three gold, my friend," Corin said without turning from the reins.

"You always treat me like I'm made of money," Stelle replied.

"I can't help it when you look like someone with tons of wealth." He glanced back at her over his shoulder, a teasing glint in his eye.

"Did you really get nothing off those pursuers of yours?"

"I have a whole body," Stelle said. Corin laughed, loud and genuine, as though she'd meant it as a joke.

"Ha! I'm surprised you know how to make one of those." Stelle didn't answer further. There was nothing useful in explaining that she hadn't been joking at all. Her tone shifted, turning serious.

"So. What is it you actually want from this?" Corin's mouth curved upward, unhurried.

"Now, now. Patience. Your next stretch of road is going to be a considerably more interesting journey than the one behind you." Deep in the forest, a small group of Ministry soldiers moved through the churned, frost-blackened clearing, boots crunching over broken roots and scorched earth. The fresh snow already beginning to settle over the worst of the violence and soften its edges.

Voss stood a short distance away, arms crossed, examining the scene with a stillness that gave nothing away, snowflakes catching in the folds of her robes and melting, one by one, against skin gone cold with something other than the weather.

"Any tracks?" she asked.

"Anyone seen leaving the area?"

"Nothing, Magister," one of the soldiers reported.

"No trail we can follow. It seems only a high-ranking Stalker could have pulled off a clean withdrawal like this. Based on what we saw, shadow mana was used to erase the remaining tracks." Voss's brow narrowed. How dare he deceive me. A shout rose from further into the clearing before she could say anything further.

"We found something!" The group converged quickly. Half-buried in the churned frost lay a small, pale forearm, severed cleanly, dark with dried blood. A child's arm. Voss's composure cracked just slightly, before she turned away entirely.

"We're leaving. Clean up the remains and bring that with us. I want her body located or whatever's left of that bastard Cael. And find me a Mystic practitioner who can actually confirm something for once." Her plan, in its original shape had been elegant. Hire mercenaries to scare and abduct the girl. Arrive at the right moment to personally "rescue" her from them.

It would have positioned Voss as Stelle's savior, the perfect unimpeachable justification for taking a traumatized and grateful child into full Ministry custody, with the Vanguard left holding nothing but the humiliating fact that they'd failed to protect her in the first place. Even Esbern's authority would have struggled to argue against that. But her calculations had failed somewhere in the execution.

Cael had apparently gone beyond the terms of the contract, and now the girl was disabled at best, dead at worst, and the single greatest opportunity of Voss's career lay scattered across a frozen clearing in pieces too small to salvage. She would not let this slide. Someone was going to answer for it.... Three days passed on a road that barely deserved the name, the wagon's wheels grinding slow and steady through snow that never quite stopped falling long enough to let the world underneath show through.

The trees thinned by degrees the further south they traveled as the deep evergreen dark of Oakhaven's forests gave way to open snow-blanketed fields and the occasional huddled silhouette of a farmhouse with chimney smoke bending sideways in the wind before it could even rise, and Stelle spent most of that time sitting in total silence while watching the pale white world slide endlessly past the wagon's canvas flap.

Corin finally brought the wagon to a stop beside a small, crumbling ruin in a stretch of land abandoned by anything resembling a road, snow drifted deep against its collapsed walls, softening every broken edge into something almost peaceful.

"Where are we?" Stelle asked, her systems already sweeping the area for threats out of habit.

"Standing above an old catacomb," Corin said, with a grin that gave away nothing about whether he was joking.

"A catacomb. Are you planning to loot treasure from the corpses?"

"Not a bad idea, honestly. You really do know your way around, little snowflake." The nickname sent a small, unwelcome pang through her—an echo of Rakan she hadn't asked for and didn't have time to examine. She let the thought pass without following it and asked her question instead.

"Then what's our actual purpose here?"

"You really don't know yet, do you?"

"..."

"We are here to make you thoroughly dead." Every defensive instinct in Stelle's system fired at once, and she took an involuntary step back before she could stop herself.

"Hey, now." Corin raised both hands, mock-placating.

"You look like a cat that just got sprayed with water. Relax... I mean dead in the eyes of a divination. Nothing more literal than that."

"Divination," Stelle repeated, still on high alert.

"As in the Mystic Path."

"Yes, if I recall correctly, you left behind your arm on the battlefield. Didn't you?"

"I did."

"Then they're very likely already hunting for a Mystic practitioner who can confirm your status one way or another." Corin's expression stayed unbothered, almost bored.

"Fortunately for you, based on what I know of Oakhaven, there's no practitioner of the Mystic Path in that city who holds a contract with anything resembling a death deity. The nearest one I'm aware of lives in the town of Erefen, five days south-west."

"What does a death deity have to do with confirming whether I'm alive?"

"Simple. Countering a divination, a ritual, anything born from the Mystic Path, requires something equally rooted in the Mystic Path to answer it." Corin led her deeper into the ruin's crumbling hallway, its shape long since lost to centuries of quiet collapse.

"We're here to meet an old friend." Corin glanced sideways at her, something knowing in his expression.

"In this catacomb—one that only a handful of people in this world even know exists—lives someone who can help make your disappearance permanent in the eyes that actually matter. As long as you remain alive and present in this world, little snowflake, you will never fully escape the gaze of the higher powers." He continued, his voice settling into something closer to a lecture than idle conversation.

"The Mystic Path was never about how skillfully you build the bridge. It's about how well you maintain and eventually fulfill whatever contract or deal you strike with what answers you from the other side. That's simply how it works. It's said that once a mortal reaches the very pinnacle of what a mortal can become, they may transcend entirely—stepping past the Path itself into the Mystic realm, where a soul can become something close to a god."

"You already know I'm a Mystic," he added, glancing back at her.

"And you already know our contract carries a sanction from something considerably higher than either of us. The two of us simply need to hold up our own ends of it, so we can each walk away with something worth having." Stelle said nothing for a long moment before her mind drifted back to the day that contract had first begun.