~3137 words
Checking his wallet and his inner pocket, Kiyotaka noticed that he only had £500 left. While it was quite a huge sum for anyone, it did not translate much to Kiyotaka.
The sales in the first two weeks for Prometheus Motors was well above the forecasts, however, it had significantly died out. He also had to return the £6.500 that he had borrowed from his own company.
As he was walking, he happened to pass by Sivellaus Street. It was a street that hosted the headquarters of the Backlund Police or Sivellaus Yard. An eerie feeling seemed to alert him and he felt his spirituality somewhat alert him.
He stopped and looked around in a non-suspicious manner. However, he could not find anyone who could pose a threat to him. After a few seconds of standing to the side and smoking to appear discreet, he left the place.
Kiyotaka wished to spend most of his day outside today. Because of what happened back home, he was not trying to arrive at a time during which everyone else was in grief, with the sole exception of himself.
Taking a few turns here and there, he arrived at Bravehearts Bar. Just as he entered, he saw a boundless grey fog appear in front of his eyes.
When he had entered, there were several eyes that darted towards him. Almost all of them were members of Zmanger Gang, however, none of them paid any heed to him and busied themselves in their work — some cleaning the tables, while others serving the customers.
In a sense, the gang members were still a part of the gang but were doing ordinary citizen jobs. Amongst these people, most of them were those who were too young or too old to fight, but wanted to stay in the gang to avoid starving to death.
Most of them had never met Kiyotaka as Williams, and were only familiar with Hyde, who was the representative between the "Big Boss" and themselves. That was why most of them did not give any outward reaction.
The people who had met Kiyotaka in the earlier days of takeover were mostly killed by Jason Beria and his devil dog. The handful of them who survived were closely monitored by Mal and were given such tasks which made it nigh impossible for them to interact with the other members and talk about the real "Big Boss."
Noticing that everything was going smoothly, Kiyotaka pulled his hat a little lower and quickly entered the bathroom. Once he did, he clasped his hands and the boundless grey fog spread everywhere before his vision.
In that vision, he saw flashes of images and reverberating words.
'Sequence 6 of Hunter Pathway is called Conspirer. There is not much known about it, other than their destructive capabilities are enough to overwhelm any peer Beyonders at Sequence 6. A head-on conflict with a Conspirer is tantamount to suicide.
They are really intelligent and it's very hard to shed your tail once they lock on to you. Their abilities are like an upscaled version of a Sequence 8: Instigator from Assassin Pathway. The only reason why the Intis Minister - Bakerland Jean Madan was killed by the Aurora Order saint was that the latter was from a Sequence 5 who could use multiple abilities.'
Just as the final bit of the message resounded in his ears, the grey fog dissipated.
Kiyotaka unbuckled his belt and slid his pants down before sitting down on the toilet. He placed his elbows over his knees and lowered his head until he was clutching his head with both hands. Running his hands through his hair, he began to ponder over his options.
'This is unideal. Even by a quick estimate, there is no way to physically match a Conspirer. Briber is on the upper end of the spectrum when it comes to physical enhancement, I can tell that much, but if a Conspirer can easily overwhelm most of his peers — which are at Sequence 6 — then this spells trouble for me.
Outsmarting them is not an easy task as well since mystically enhanced attributes would always triumph over baseline attributes unless that baseline is quite high. And unlike the Desire Apostle Jason Beria, a Conspirer doesn't seem to suffer from the corruption of the Abyss.
There is also the matter of the priest accompanying her. Since it's from the Feysac Empire, the priest is definitely from the Church of God of Combat, since they don't allow any other religion to proselytize there.
The Pathway under the Church of God of Combat is the Warrior Pathway — a Pathway focused on defense and offense. Assuming the priest is either Sequence 6 or 7, it'll pose quite a lot of threat.
Hmm... It seems like I would need counters to their Pathways, just like before. Pathways specialize in respective things, and while there might be some overlap, there is still a fundamental difference between them which can be exploited.
For example, the Seer Pathway is highly focused on deception and surviving in all kinds of situations. Divinations, Damage Transfers, Paper Figurine Substitutes, Shapeshifting, Acrobatic— all of these things can catch anyone off-guard and even if they don't, Seer Beyonders are highly slippery.
The same goes for Hunter Pathway which is focused on elements of violence and in a sense, in a broader context, war.
Secret Supplicant Pathway is focused on body and soul horror, while filled with corruption.
Criminal Pathway is oriented towards emotions, and humans' innate nasty desires and their manipulation.
Arbiter and Lawyer Pathways are focused around rules and going around those rules respectively.
It's all highly dependent on circumstances and matchups.
In theory, a Seer should almost never be able to ambush a Hunter.
Hunting, tracking, trap laying and sensing danger are the Hunter Pathway's defining strengths. If a Hunter is successfully ambushed by a Seer, it usually means the Seer first neutralized or bypassed those advantages through preparation, deception, superior information, or an unfavorable environment — which is the case in real life, but in theory, a Seer should never triumph over a Hunter.
Which means, if one wants to defeat a Conspirer, the elements of its instigation and conspiracies should be thrown in disarray. That can only be done by being chaotic, however, I can't be too careless.
As per Daly, the Nighthawks had already carried out an investigation on me, however, after divining through various sources, it was deduced that I had no part in the recent terror attacks. Even though they said I am in a partnership with them, they went on to investigate me without asking me first.
Which means they are still quite wary of me.
Fair enough, I suppose. I have been involved with too many things. However, as things stand, I need to quickly ascend the Sequences. Which means that I need to start making preparations for certain things.'
Once he was done monologuing over almost everything, he quickly cleaned himself, flushed and washed his hands before flushing once more and leaving the bathroom.
When he arrived at the counter, he looked at the Zmanger Gang member and placed a Soli over it. "I am looking for someone called Old Man. Do you perhaps know where he is?"
The barman took the Soli and went back to cleaning the mug. Keeping his head low, he started talking. "He is in Billiards Room 2."
Tipping his hat, Kiyotaka walked over to the designated room and entered without knocking. Before he could fully enter, his facial features contorted and in an instant, he had the look of a young and pale man who was extremely beautiful with black hair and green eyes.
Sitting behind a table — in quite a start contrast to his name — was Old Man. However, he was Old Man only in name. Sitting behind the table on the chair was an adolescent boy — in his late adolescence, probably around 15 or 16 years of age — with long brown hair that reached until his jaw and red eyes.
'Red eyes? Is he related to vampires?' Kiyotaka thought, however, he did not linger and instead walked towards the boy.
The boy was dressed in an old overcoat, and brown bowler hat with two whiskers above his mouth.
Kiyotaka as Hyde, tossed his hat on the table rudely and rested his hand on the handle of his cane.
"How can I help you?" The boy asked, sitting back leisurely.
"Isn't talking with those furs over your lip hard?"
Old Man was momentarily taken aback before chuckling nervously. "What do you want then?"
"I want to know when the next Beyonder meetings are going to take place. I am interested in the ones being hosted by Mr. A and Eye of Wisdom."
"Uh... The meetings arranged by Mr. Eye of Wisdom is conducted on a random basis. The clues are in the newspaper. As for the Mr. A one, one of them is being conducted this evening in Cherwood Borough." He produced a piece of paper and wrote something on it before pushing it towards him. "Here it is."
Hyde looked at it for a moment and then crumpled the piece of paper and tossed it back at the Old Man. Without saying anything he stood up. Just as he was about to leave, he turned back.
"You are one of the kids recruited by that Feysac Spy. Why was he here?"
Old Man's body bristled as his mind suddenly entered a fight-or-flight response. Clearing his throat, he looked up and smirked. "You don't have to know."
Hyde's mad eyes scanned him from head to torso — since the rest of his body was hidden underneath the table — and then left the room. As soon as he exited, he quickly changed his appearance back to normal and left the bar.
'I have to attend Mr. A's meeting. The people there are more prone to buy what I have to sell. But there is still quite a lot of time before that happens. Hmmm... What should I do? I need money. A quick way to earn money can be writing books like Fors. Should I write one?
With my connections, it should be quite easy to find a publishing company who would be willing to publish my books. And this can serve as a basis for future Rituals as well.'
Having a rough idea of what he wanted to do and write, Kiyotaka made his way to the library where he had read law books when he first transmigrated and sat down. After borrowing a few pieces of paper and pen, he sat down and looked down at the blank piece of paper.
While he had quite a lot of things which were not plagiarized by Emperor Roselle, he wished to publish something that would have a sufficient impact for his future plans. As he gripped and rolled the pen around in his hand, he thought about various things.
Kiyotaka had come to understand that people did not need to be told about certain things happening to them. Injustice was an argument, and arguments could be rebutted, litigated, drowned in funded counter-pamphlets.
What people needed was something far more patient and far harder to put back in its box.
As the thoughts began to form in his mind, he wrote a title in capitalized letters: "THE UNDIVIDED SELF"
In the process of brainstorming, he had made quite a lot of ideas redundant such as "The Trunsoest Manuscript" and "A Historian's Careful Allegory"
The reason for rejecting these ideas was not because it was flawed but because it was slow, and worked only on the literate and the curious. What he actually wanted right now was something a foreman could repeat to his men over a pint of beer without knowing he was quoting philosophy at all.
Kiyotaka began thinking from a single observation that was turned over so many times in his mind that it had gone as smooth as a river-stone.
The idea was that a man's worth was measured by his usefulness to something larger than himself such as duty, sacrifice and the subordination of appetite to order.
It was the same "doctrine" that sent farm boys to die in the mud of the Twenty-Years War against Feysac and called it glory. Whether that doctrine deserved to crack or not, he did not particularly care to decide. What interested him was far more simpler and that was that it could, and that almost no one had thought to try.
This could act as a stepping stone for him to hinder his competition.
He picked his pen back up and began writing. As he wrote that, ideas kept popping in his mind and his pen continued to work on the rich, white paper.
"Hunger is not a sin.
There is a lie so old that men have forgotten it is a lie at all, and it is this: that a man is two creatures wearing one skin — an animal of appetite, low and shameful, and a soul of duty, noble and true — and that his entire moral life consists of the second creature's war against the first.
Every catechism preaches this and every sermon on sacrifice assumes it. It is told to the starving man that his hunger is a temptation to be mastered, not a fact to be answered. To the soldier that his fear of death is a weakness to be conquered, not a truth to be heeded. To the factory owner that tells his workers that their exhaustion is idleness. In every case, there is the same trick: whatever a man actually wants, actually feels, actually is, gets renamed the Beast, and whatever asks him to deny it gets renamed the Soul.
But consider, for considering is the sole gift humanity has — who benefits from the idea that teaches a man to distrust his own hunger?
Not the hungry man."
Kiyotaka paused there, reading the line back. It was the hinge of the whole argument, built to look like a question.
Once he had reread it, he started writing again. It centered around the Beast and the Soul.
It went in detail that there was no divided self, no beast and soul locked in combat but only a single undivided creature whose wants were its truth, and that any institution, be it the crown, church, factory, family, which asked a man to override that truth "for something greater" was asking for labor extracted below cost.
Kiyotaka made sure to hide the actual meaning behind words and some kind of dry humor.
Duty, he wrote, was simply the word the comfortable used for the sacrifices of the uncomfortable.
And that sacrifice was never distributed evenly. It only ever flowed one direction, from the many who were told it ennobled them, to the few who never had to make it themselves.
This was, he knew, only half true, which was exactly why it could work.
A wholly true philosophy invited scrutiny but a half-true one, delivered with enough conviction and enough genuine grievance underneath it, felt like a revelation.
And much to Kiyotaka's favor, Backlund had grievances in abundance. He only needed to give that grievance a philosophy sturdy enough to stand on in the vaguest of manners. What people chose to build on top of it afterward was their own business.
He was not writing for the underclass alone, either.
That would have been a crude approach.
After all, arming the poor and waiting for pitchforks to be raised was the kind of insurrection that got manuscripts and books burned and printers and authors to be hanged before the ink was dried out.
Instead, this was also aimed at the idle, such as neglected second sons and bored daughters of Conservative households and the clerks who copied out the House of Lords' endless procedural delays, wondering what any of it was actually for, in private, of course.
What each of them did with the doctrine once they'd absorbed it was not a thing he needed to specify, even to himself, in so many words.
Kiyotaka found he could construct the philosophy with equal care regardless of which door the reader chose to walk through and that this equanimity was, if anything, the safest posture a man in his position could hold.
After all, it could hardly be called sedition if even its author could not say what it was seditious toward.
He read back over the opening pages once more and then ended the entire manuscript with the same sentence he had started: "Hunger is not a sin."
After he was done rereading it, at the bottom of the title page, he deliberated over it and wrote the name that would carry this philosophical book into the world.
A moment or two later he wrote:
~By "a Reprobate"
By this time, he had written around 20 pages worth of content and the light outside had almost vanished, replaced by an intense dark. The light from the gas lamps was dimmed even more as a heavy downpour began to fall on the entire city.
Kiyotaka bought a file and kept the manuscript inside before paying the librarian for the coffee and other utilities he had used there. Once he was done, he pushed the file inside his coat pocket and left the library.
Outside, the sound of rain was loud as it hit the road and every now and then, he could hear loud groans of complaints and tramps scrambling and fighting each other for any kind of shade they could find against the merciless rain.
Kiyotaka took out his pocket watch and looked at it. It was quarter past 6, however, it felt as if it was midnight. Clearing his throat, he stood there for about 20 minutes until a carriage passed by the library.
Raising his hand, he stopped it and then boarded it.
It was finally time for him to attend Mr. A's Beyonder Meeting after a long time.
*****
Author's Note: This chapter is a subplot that I wanted to peruse much further into the future, but given the nature of rituals, I decided to do it early on. Hence why, this chapter is coming out separately and not as a part of an installment.
Just to show what the future might hold for Kiyotaka and what other possible routes we can take for him to influence in the world. If you think this was boring, I agree. I felt bored writing it as well, since this concept of him getting things ready for rituals in its juvenile state.
Hope you all won't be too harsh on me. That said, I'm out and I will see you all in the next Installment of chapters which will likely cover the Feysac Conspirer and the evil spirit.
Ha-det.