Arcanist In Another World-Chapter 91: Knock

Valens swept the cloud of dust with a Gale, filtered it through a Blockage, and was confronted with the pair of laborers staring agape at the recently grown one-story building that clearly lacked an expert's touch.

“Too crude,” he lamented as he gestured at them to halt, since he wasn’t done with the job. Growing a house from the soil wasn’t as much of a grand feat as making it look like a place worth living in. “But I suppose it fits the character of the street.”

He fixed a thin layer of stone across the walls, stretched them out, and cracked them in places so that they wouldn’t look brand new. Inside, he carved an antechamber out of the ground that led to a waiting hall, with two spare rooms further back to serve as his laboratories.

The main room would be just as big as the main hall, since he would use it to attend to the patients. There wasn’t much left for his would-be assistants to work here, but then, so long as Selin got her desk and a chair, the Templars could stand at the sides to serve as the guardians as planned.

Still, the soil lacked the charm wood had in its simplicity. That was why Valens repurposed the planks he piled in the backyard for the floor, giving the place an authentic feeling.

“I didn’t know Mages could do… this,” Selin said when she stepped foot in the new house, staring with wide eyes across the solid walls around her. “I remember most of my friends lived in old apartments with their families, crammed in a single room. But this—”

“As much as I fancy the thought of redesigning certain parts of Belgrave for a better layout, I don’t think I’m a good fit to take such a demanding work,” Valens said, frowning at the sloppy work he’d just managed. As it was, this was nothing in the face of what the Empire’s Earth Magi could accomplish even with simple resources. “And I don’t believe this was what the Captain intended when he sent me here for the groundwork.”

Selin chuckled at the joke while Dain bounded in with the look of a curious giant, feeling the wooden planks underneath his feet, thumping a fist or two to the walls as if he wanted to see whether they could hold true.

They did, so the laborers brought the ingredients inside in muted discipline, but Valens could see the looks they were giving him now and then. Questions, the two men had in their eyes, but this wasn’t the time for answering them.

A little commotion will be good for getting the attention of the Knuckle Alley’s folk. Curiosity is a great tool if you know how to build upon it.

His fingers tingled when one of the laborers hauled off a box of gleaming crystals inside.

“Finally,” Valens said, smiling widely. “Something I can use to clear the dusty air of this house. Selin, would you be kind enough to entertain our friend Dain here? I’ll have to work out a few things in the main room.”

“Sure,” Selin said, giving Dain an uncertain look.

Valens left them in the entrance hall after gesturing at the laborer to bring the box to the main room.

“Do you have any paint?” he asked the man, who flinched back at his voice. “We’ll need some for the walls and the doors. Some varnish, too, if you will. These old things have witnessed terrifying practices as of late.”

“Reckon we have some in the parish, Templar,” the man answered dutifully, earning an amused smile from Valens.

“Go fetch them, then,” he said, nodding, and closed the door once the laborer went out.

Now, let me try these.

As ordered, there were thirty round manastones crammed into the box, most of them smaller than the ones he saw in Brackley mines. Unlike the ambient mana, which remained silent against his probes, the mana resting inside these stones was already calling out to him to be used.

Valens picked one from the pile, and drilled a tiny hole into it with a Lifesurge. Heavy mana poured from inside of it in invisible waves, stirring the Resonance of the ambient mana around him.

This is such a valuable source.

He sucked a deep breath out of it. Sucked it in and felt it trickle down toward his mana pool, spilling generously into his fleshy cage in drops of pristine blue. Still, to actually renew his mana pool by relying on these things, he would need dozens of them as of now.

These are low-tier manastones, though. Getting a few high-tier ones would be useful in case things go wrong.

Thankfully, these ones would be used to feed the glyphs Valens would engrave around the main hall, mainly for sanitary purposes. Soundproofing was high on the list, too, as dealing with certain patients could be quite noisy.

Looks like I’ll spend the rest of the day here.

He took in another breath from the stone and rolled up his sleeves.

…

It was around midnight when the work was done. The laboratory and the main room, the antechamber and the paint job, Dain’s silent presence throughout all of it, Selin’s beaming smile as she checked her desk that faced the antechamber and the chair, the sweat pouring down from the laborers’ faces…

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All in all, Valens was happy with the result. Sure, it wasn’t the cleanest or most elegant clinic he had ever worked in his life, nor did it look like a clinic with the cracks across the walls and the simple furniture laid about the hall, but it was his clinic, and that meant a lot in a place like Belgrave.

Now, they only had to wait for the Captain’s work to open their doors to the public.

Once they sent off Dain and the laborers, Valens celebrated the occasion with Selin in their apartment. He was never much for celebration back in the Empire, but here, in this world, there was a lot to appreciate, especially after he stopped relying on Apathy in his every waking moment.

From being the heretic to opening a clinic in Belgrave of all places… A part of him wondered what Nomad would think about that. Lately, he was thinking a lot about that particular undead and the time they spent in the Necromancer’s Rift, the fit he’d gone through with Celme and the others.

I should visit them when I have the chance. They had a place in Melton if I’m not wrong.

Small it might be, but the Duality Guild wasn’t a simple organization as it appeared from the outside. For one, the Lightmaster was the brother of His Majesty King Edmund, and he had a cousin who worked as a lawyer for the Guild.

That and their belief in Zodros, the Lost Child of the Blessed Father, made them a secret cult masquerading as a guild in Melton for what Valens thought was an insidious plot.

There was also the case of Celme and Marcus’s Trials, which would take place in the Broken Lands as far as he knew. Therefore, before it was too late, Valens wanted to see if he could chat with them, even if it were to reminisce about their shared, albeit a touch chaotic, past.

He stuffed another sausage into his mouth as Selin placed another plate on the table.

“I just can’t get enough of these,” he said, glancing at the young woman who smiled sheepishly at him. “But you know you—”

“I’m doing it because I like it,” Selin shook her head. “And someone has to do it because you’re not taking care of yourself, Mr. Kosthal. You must be tired after going through… all of that, but you don’t seem to mind it. You heal people and build houses. As if that’s not enough, you’re treating my mind without expecting anything in return. Aren't you tired?"

Valens leaned back and glanced at the woman, saw in her face the worry she had for a man who nearly killed her in the name of cleansing the shadow out of her soul. Selin could be the purest soul he had ever seen, even though her past was full of painful memories.

“I don’t get tired, if that’s the thing you’re worried about,” Valens said. “I’m so used to it, in fact, that I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I didn't have something to work on.”

“Is that why you push yourself this much?”

“Perhaps,” Valens said. “But I don’t like to think too much on it.”

“Because once you start thinking about it, there’s no end to it,” Selin said.

Valens raised his chin and smiled. “Exactly. You have to trick yourself into believing the illusion that you have some control over how your mind works. Back where I came from, we used to call it muting the inner voice. It was the most important step to attaining apathy.”

“Apathy?” Selin asked. “So you could control your own thoughts?”

“Yes,” Valens said. “It takes years of work, but it is possible to set a boundary between the two parts of your being. We all do that in our daily lives to a certain degree. We silence the primal part of our being, letting the intelligent part take the reins, thus heeding the rules of our societies.”

“Can you—”

“No, Selin, I’m afraid I can’t. Even if I wanted to, it would take years for you even to begin establishing the first lines of those boundaries,” Valens shook his head. “And I’m not sure if distancing yourself from the other part of your being is a healthy practice in the long run. We were taught to do it, because that turned us into mindless slaves attending to every call of our Masters, made it so that we forgot to feel the anger, the hatred, the sadness of things we have gone through. We just lived, thinking we’re above such human emotions.”

“I know that feeling,” Selin said, lowering her gaze. “It happens when you show me one of my memories. Somewhere deep in my mind, I know they’re mine, and they’re real, but it is as though I experience them from the eyes of a stranger. I want to scream, to cry, but I can’t because there’s this distance between me and those times.”

“Your mind is trying to protect you,” Valens said. “Because that’s what we do when things get hard. We try to distance ourselves in different ways. We make ourselves busy. We fish, we eat, or we go out. We do whatever we can not to confront the obvious, but in your case, it’s good that you’re willing to embrace those memories. What you need is time. Slowly, they will become your own.”

A silence settled between them, but it wasn’t heavy.

It was a silence shared in understanding.

A silence to give time for words to take root.

Valens cherished it, feeling the cold touch of Apathy in the back of his mind.

Tricky indeed, the mind of a man. Apathy muted his thoughts, and without realizing, he began to regard it as this venomous snake trying to poison the very core of his being.

But wasn’t it just a tool?

On its own, the ethereal web remained silent. Still. It couldn’t act without Valens’s will. It couldn’t take control as long as Valens didn’t want it.

It was Valens who imposed such meaning behind it, because it represented the time he spent in the Empire. It represented the disturbing silence of the Magi around him. It was why the Inquisition considered it a crushing defeat when one of them tried to rebel against their rule.

Because if one of them could do it, what would make the others stop from trying it?

This tool. It wasn’t its fault that it had been used this way. If anything, Valens was doing the same thing he had lately, acting as if such a thing didn't exist.

But now, the control was his to manage.

He could do whatever he wanted.

Still learning lessons, eh, Master? It looks like I have a long way ahead of me to become someone worthy of the truth.

There was a knock on the door.

Selin straightened the moment she heard it, but Valens pushed her gently to the chair and went to check it. It was late evening, and they weren’t expecting a guest. So he reached for his sound vision to check what curious guest they would entertain should he open the door.

Through the Resonance, he glimpsed at the picture the frequencies painted in his mind. The door hampered the vision, but the slit underneath it was enough for him to get a sense of it.

There was no one there.

Scowling, Valens opened the door and peered outside.

There he found a rack with a suit hanging from it. There was no sign of who left it. Just the fancy suit and a letter pinned in the middle of it.

He pulled it loose and opened it.

It was the same as the one he got a few days back.

It would afford us the greatest pleasure and singular honour should you deign to grace us with your presence.

Friday. Six of the clock.

Anguier Street. No: 12. Gray Mansion. And the name of this man is…

D.G.

"Friday, huh?" Valens muttered. "It's tomorrow, then."

……