The coachman went pale. "Fifty pounds?!"
That was the equivalent of a year and a half's wages for him. The hospital's surgical fee was far less than that.
After studying the fat man for a few seconds, Vincent turned to the coachman. "You want to find someone who can properly heal that boy — is that right?"
"Ah?"
The coachman blinked.
"Is that right?"
"Yes — yes, that's right."
Vincent turned back to the fat man. "Go treat the boy first. I'll pay you when you're done."
The fat man immediately bristled. "Ma'am, who pays after the work's done? What if you just refuse?"
"And what if you're a fraud?"
Vincent was already turning to leave. "Suit yourself. I don't know that child — this was just me doing a good deed in passing."
"Wait, wait!" The fat man called after him hastily. "Fine, I'll go treat him." He paused, then added a threat: "But if you try to weasel out of paying — I'll have you know I know a lot of people. You won't get away with it!"
Once the fat man had hurried inside, the coachman's face had gone a shade paler: "Honoured ma'am... fifty pounds... fifty pounds is a little beyond my means..."
"You only need to cover the equivalent of the hospital's surgical fee. I'll cover the rest."
"Thank you, thank you — God bless you, kind lady — I'll go fetch the money right now."
The coachman fell over himself with gratitude and drove off in a hurry.
The real reason Vincent had gone three or four pounds out of pocket wasn't purely out of charity — that was only a small part of it. And it wasn't primarily about facilitating a deal between the coachman and the fat man, either. The main reason was to establish a connection with that fat man.
Through his Broker ability, Vincent could clearly perceive a powerful aura of need radiating from the man. His spiritual intuition told him that fulfilling that need could bring a substantial number of grey Astral Crystals to the Scale.
A few minutes later, a commotion erupted inside the hospital. Then a large, round silhouette came barrelling out at full speed, nurses and doctors streaming after it —
"Stop him! Stop that man!"
"He tried to poison the patient!"
"And he hit a nurse!"
The fat man wheeled around mid-sprint: "I told you — that was a treatment preparation, not poison! The nurse tripped over herself — I was trying to catch her!"
Barely a word out of his mouth, two public-spirited young men threw themselves at the fat man and tackled him to the ground — but he was enormously strong, flung them both off, sent one crashing into the pursuing nurses and doctors, and launched the other squarely into a passing police constable.
The two remaining constables drew their pistols without hesitation: "Halt! Don't move! Hands up — or we will open fire!"
The fat man froze solid. Then he raised his hands.
"I — I really was trying to treat the child..."
"Attempted poisoning. Assault. Resisting arrest. You have the right to remain silent!"
One constable kept his pistol trained on the man; the other stepped forward and snapped the handcuffs on. "Save it for the station."
As they marched him out, the fat man spotted Vincent and cried out: "Friend — please! Speak up for me — tell them I was trying to help, tell them this is all a misunderstanding!"
Both constables immediately turned sharp eyes toward Vincent.
Vincent took a deliberate step back, creating distance between herself and the fat man, and looked at him with a perfectly blank expression of non-recognition.
The fat man's face collapsed into despair as the two constables dragged him away, head twisting back again and again: "Speak up for me! Please, speak up for me!"
Vincent stared after him with a flat, exasperated look. Attempted poisoning might be explained away as a misunderstanding — but everything after that? The constables saw it all with their own eyes. What exactly am I supposed to say?
Still — that whole chain of events clearly hadn't been the fat man's fault. That was truly spectacular bad luck.
Meanwhile, back in the hospital ward, a boy who had been lying with his eyes shut and his face contorted in pain suddenly opened his eyes and muttered quietly: "That idiot nearly ruined everything. I swear — I was born to suffer." He sighed. "Haah. The things I have to put up with."
"Nurse, please fetch Dr. Allen — this child needs attention."
A tall, slender doctor with thin gold-rimmed spectacles and an expression of cool indifference walked into the ward.
...
On another front —
The coachman had barely driven a few blocks when several figures in distinctive uniforms stepped out from both sides of the street and blocked his path.
A stony-faced middle-aged man produced a badge and said coldly: "Military Intelligence Section 9. The person in the carriage will come with us."
The coachman went rigid with nerves. "There's — there's no one in the carriage?"
"???"
The man stepped forward immediately and threw open the carriage door. His expression darkened at once.
Capturing that woman had been a direct order from His Majesty. And they'd managed to fumble it.
...
When Vincent returned to the Zoutenberg Restaurant, he had an Invisible Servant deliver a message to several of the officers aboard the Dawn, asking which of them might be interested in taking the job of protecting Audrey — and earning the pay that came with it.
Stephen ended up claiming the commission without hesitation: for one thing, he hadn't left yet, and for another — he owed Her Majesty a rather large sum of money. Coming across a rich young socialite with more money than sense was an opportunity he wasn't about to let slip by.
What followed was simple enough. Through whatever means Audrey had used to arrange it, Stephen passed the "interview" and was taken on as her personal coachman for her outings. Day-to-day, he only needed to lounge around the villa drinking coffee.
A fixed term of ten days, at a salary of three thousand pounds.
Stephen's admiration was immediate. Here I thought piracy was good money — but compared to these bankers and capitalists, we're playing in a completely different league.
And at almost exactly the same moment, another grey Astral Crystal settled onto the pan of the Scale in the mysterious room, and for the second time the Scale came into balance.
"So — I can finally advance to Sequence 8."
Well, perhaps finally wasn't quite the right word. After all, from the day he had become Sequence 9 to this moment, barely a week had passed. The speed of that digestion was frankly absurd.
Looking back on how he'd digested the Broker potion: the accidental facilitation of a "cooperation" among the three major Churches had been a fluke — but the rapid digestion achieved through Bernadette's use of high-Sequence Beyonders was something that might be repeatable!
Hey — who knows. Maybe by the time they swap back, the Sequence 8 potion will be fully digested as well.
The only frustrating part was that even once the potion was digested, he still had to slowly accumulate grey Astral Crystals for the Scale before he could advance to Sequence 7. He couldn't help remarking on it again: I'd honestly rather just have the formula so I can gather the ingredients myself.
Vincent entered the Land of Chaos, drew a slow breath, and stepped forward to stand before the Scale. Just as before, the crystals on the pan shattered with a sharp crack and dissolved into streams of grey radiance that poured into his body.
The next instant, a bone-deep agony arrived.
Across his body — or rather, across his soul — countless fine threads of shadow spread outward, gnawing at him like venomous insects, eating steadily into him, expanding the area of shadow further and further, eroding his sense of his own existence bit by bit.
And yet, strangely, as the shadow spread wider, the bone-deep pain grew less — not more — until at last he had become entirely a shapeless, writhing mass of darkness, and the pain vanished all at once.
"What the — what just happened to me?"
His condition was peculiar. He felt simultaneously as though he had become a mass of shadow, and as though he was merely hiding inside a shadow — a smear of black and grey, like a blurred mosaic stuck to the floor.
Then, in his field of vision, shadows began to appear everywhere — filling every corner of the sitting room. They occupied the most inconspicuous spots imaginable, and yet to his current perception they stood out with startling clarity.
Rustle. Rustle.
From within those shadows came the faintest sounds — like whispers, or the language of small creatures. Too indistinct to make out clearly.
If I got a little closer... maybe I could hear them properly?
The thought had barely formed before Vincent seemed to blink across the room. But the rustling sounds stopped the moment he arrived, and Vincent paused, then felt a jolt of surprise: So this is what shadow-jumping feels like? I remember — isn't that an ability belonging to some Sequence on the Shepherd's Pathway?
Did I accidentally cross into another Pathway mid-advancement?
Wait — did that mean the whispering I just heard was the murmurings of the True Creator?
To be continued…
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