Once Georgia had left, Vincent asked: "Vivienne, you have connections who can arrange a false identity for someone, don't you? The kind that holds up under scrutiny."
"I can manage that."
"Good."
Vincent nodded. "Vivienne, find me a property as well — somewhere in Jowood or the East District, a street-facing unit, nothing too large. I want to open a general services office."
"A general services office?"
It was the first time Vivienne had heard the phrase, but she could work out the rough meaning well enough.
"Go on, then."
The reason this idea had occurred to him was that after the morning's scrambling around, Vincent had realised that roleplaying the Shadow Trader couldn't follow the same thinking as the old Broker approach.
In fact, the old way of roleplaying the Broker had been deeply flawed — if not for the lucky trigger of reverse-roleplay, combined with Bernadette scoring big for him, he'd have been wandering from bar to bar making small talk indefinitely, who knows how long it would've taken to digest the potion.
So Vincent decided to take a page out of Klein's book from the original story: rather than going out to hunt down clients himself, he'd run an advertisement and let the clients come to him.
A fixed office was the logical first step.
And the reason he called it a general services office was precisely to avoid limiting himself to the concept of merchant alone. As he'd summarised the previous day: anywhere there's a transaction, a merchant belongs — full stop.
...
Eight o'clock that evening, Vincent walked into the Bravehearts Bar for the first time at night.
He had to say — it was a world apart from the daytime.
A whole city's worth of workers, finally free for the evening, had nowhere much to go in an age of limited entertainment. Coming to a bar to drink, trade gossip, and watch a dog go after a rat — that was as good as it got for a bit of proper relaxation.
"You're here, ma'am."
He'd barely squeezed through the crowd before he spotted Caspar leaning against the door of the private card room, waving him over. Caspar lowered his voice, looking tense. "They're here — they're already inside."
"Let's go in, then."
Caspar gave a careful knock. When a low "come in" came from the other side, he pushed the door open and let Vincent lead the way.
Seated around the table were three men playing cards. The one in the middle wore a white shirt and black waistcoat, his expression pale and cold. The two flanking him wore hooded cloaks and their faces were hidden.
"Mr. Maric, this is the lady I mentioned."
The man in the white shirt and black waistcoat stood at once. "Good evening, ma'am."
"Good evening, Mr. Maric."
The name hadn't registered at first — but then Vincent's eyes fell on the two dead-eyed figures on either side of him, and it clicked. Isn't this the man from the Temperance Faction of the Rose School of Thought?
Most people would sooner remember his companion — the Wraith, Sharron — the one many readers considered the ideal bodyguard for Klein. He hadn't expected it would be Maric who needed a false identity.
Which meant Sharron was almost certainly somewhere in this room as well.
"Right then, I'll leave you two to it." Caspar stepped back out of the card room, drawing the door gently closed behind him.
"Please, sit."
Maric settled back into his seat. "Did Caspar explain my request?"
"He did. A false identity that will withstand official scrutiny."
"Yes. I've only recently arrived in Backlund, and because of my status as a Beyonder, I can't go through official channels. Yet getting through daily life here is impossible without one." Maric's tone carried no inflection throughout. "Don't worry — I'm not a wanted man, and I have no intention of using this identity for anything dangerous."
Vincent gave a faint smile. "You don't owe me any explanation on that score. I'm arranging a false identity for you — I was never going to be a law-abiding citizen about it."
"..."
Maric was silent for a few seconds. "As I understand it, anyone capable of producing a convincing false identity generally has some degree of connection with official institutions."
"I simply want to make clear that our purpose in obtaining these documents is only to live more conveniently."
"That's fine."
Vincent nodded. "In that case, let's discuss the price."
"Two hundred pounds."
Maric named a figure first.
"That works."
Vincent had already asked Vivienne beforehand — a false identity typically ran around a hundred pounds. But that wasn't the only reason he'd made this trip tonight, especially now that he knew who he was dealing with.
He leaned back and folded his arms, turning over in his mind whether there was anything about these two that could be put to use.
An idea came quickly. "Mr. Maric — you're with the Rose School of Thought, aren't you? The Temperance Faction?"
"..."
Something finally shifted in Maric's expression. His whole body tensed in an instant, and the two undead figures on either side raised their heads and "looked" over.
"Easy."
Vincent glanced around the room and addressed the reflective surfaces near several corners: "And our other friend, who's also here."
A brief stillness fell over the room — then a dark silhouette materialised out of thin air, resolving into a young woman in a black court dress. She had light blonde hair, a small and neat black soft-brimmed hat, and strikingly delicate features, though her complexion was unnaturally pale.
There was no need to guess. This was Sharron, the Wraith.
"How do you know who we are?" Sharron's voice was faint and drifting — carrying the slight roughness of someone unaccustomed to speaking. "We only arrived in Backlund recently."
"I have certain unique intelligence sources. I happened to hear your names mentioned — Mr. Maric and Miss Sharron of the Temperance Faction of the Rose School of Thought. Is that right?"
"What do you want?"
Vincent leaned further back in his chair, fingers laced together. "I want to do a very large piece of business with you."
Maric asked, "What sort of business?"
"No rush — let me help you settle this first."
"What's it about?"
"Allow me to keep that to myself for now."
"..."
Vincent stood. "Your identity documents will be ready in two to three days. I'll have them sent here. After that, we can discuss the particulars of the big deal properly."
"You won't be disappointed."
After Vincent left the card room, Maric said quietly: "Do you think this person has any connection to the Indulgence Faction?"
"Unlikely."
Sharron shook her head. "I can feel it — even though she has certain intentions toward us, her disposition toward us is closer to benevolent than not."
"Then what do you think she means by the big deal?"
Sharron's silhouette began to fade. "Let's focus on the immediate situation first. The Indulgence Faction's people are already on their way."
Outside the card room, Caspar spotted Vincent the moment he came out and hurried over. "Did you sort everything out?"
"We did. Why are you so invested in all this, anyway?"
He grinned a little sheepishly. "Well, for one thing, I happened to be saved by them on the day we met. And for another, they're the most powerful people I've ever had the fortune of meeting. If I can make friends with them, my own safety down the line becomes a lot more assured."
"You think ahead."
Caspar gave a half-sincere, half-wry sigh. "If I didn't, I'd have been dead in some forgotten corner long ago."
After leaving the Bravehearts Bar, Vincent made his way back to the Zoutenberg Restaurant through a series of shadow-jumps. The streets of Backlund at night were thick with mist stained by the red moon, and the air carried an unpleasant reek.
They said most nations went through this during their industrial phase — that you simply had to survive the early hardship, and once the country grew powerful enough, it could ship its most polluting factories off to somewhere else.
But that was decades, even a century away. In the meantime, three or four generations of people would be consumed as the price of progress.
In the future, the reason the Loen royal family would cooperate with the Demoness Sect — allowing them to trigger a great smog that killed tens of thousands — was precisely because this was already the normal state of things. Large numbers of people died every year from the air; the deaths were simply spread across time, which made them easier not to notice.
He had just crossed out of the Bridge District into Jowood when he became aware of someone following him. Anyone else would have had an almost impossible time detecting a tail like this.
Because the pursuer was concealed within the shadows along the route — slipping from one to the next. It just so happened that Vincent had recently advanced to Shadow Trader, making him acutely sensitive to any movement within shadows.
If there was no other Shadow Trader in the world, then the one following him was almost certainly a Mystery Pryer from the Hanged Man Pathway — almost certainly a member of the Aurora Order.
Is it Mr. A?
Has he figured out I was the one who reported him, and come after me for revenge?
To be continued…
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