2: Chapter 2 Thieves and Night Watchers

The stems of the Time-Order Grass made a faint cracking sound in the mortar, like the sound of snapping dry branches in winter, only crisper and lighter.

Lu Li stopped, lifted the pestle, and took a look under the lamp.

The powder clinging to the tip of the pestle shimmered with a faint silvery-gray luster in the gaslight, like crushed mother-of-pearl.

That's not right. The powder of normal Time-Order Grass should be dark brown.

Lu Li frowned. He moved the lamp closer and rubbed a pinch of the powder between his fingertips.

The texture was unnaturally smooth, like low-quality flour with too much talcum powder added. It wasn't a grinding issue; the material itself was problematic.

That black-market merchant who sold the materials. Lu Li recalled that during the transaction, the man's eyes kept drifting to the left, and his right index finger kept tapping under the counter. He had noticed it at the time but assumed the other party was just afraid of being watched by the Nighthawks.

"Adulterating Moonlight Grass is a capital offense," Lu Li muttered to himself. "Tampering with Time-Order Grass—they want me to lose control before I even advance."

He poured the powder into a ceramic bowl, added a few drops of highly concentrated salt water, and stirred it with his finger. A layer of grayish-white foam immediately rose to the bottom of the bowl. After the foam dissipated, only one-third of the original powder remained at the bottom. Most of the rest had been dissolved by the salt water.

Flour. Time-Order Grass powder mixed with flour.

Lu Li took a deep breath, set the ceramic bowl aside, and picked up the pestle again. Fortunately, he had bought three extra portions.

By the time the second batch of powder was ground, the sky outside was almost bright. He had dismantled the bedding from the iron-frame bed and spread it under the table to absorb any spilled potion and to block the scent of the potion from spreading into the corridor.

The crooked wall clock struck five, the sound dull.

Lu Li stood up from the chair and stretched his stiff shoulders. He poured the ground powder into a clean beaker, then picked up the bottle of Fog Flower extract from the corner of the table.

The moment the cap was unscrewed, a damp scent, similar to the depths of a forest in the early morning, permeated the air.

It wasn't the fragrance of flowers, but the scent of fog itself—if fog had a scent. It was cold and damp, carrying the subtle sweetness of soil and rotting wood, along with a hint of a metallic sensation that didn't belong to the plant realm at all, seeping out from the rifts in the Spirit World.

Lu Li suddenly realized that the Fog Flower was not a plant of this world. It only grew on the fringes where the Spirit World intersected with reality, a product spawned by the footprints left behind by Beyonders who attempted to travel between the cracks of the two worlds.

The Marauder Pathway needed it because the essence of this Pathway was to walk along boundaries—the boundary of time and space, the boundary of fate and coincidence, the boundary of existence and nothingness.

He slowly poured the extract into the beaker, mixed it with the powder, and stirred it seven times clockwise.

Next were the black cat's whiskers. That wasn't hard to get.

Lu Li thought to himself that any old lady selling groceries in Tingen's East Borough could find a pinch of them; most of them were seniors of the "Marauder" Pathway—not Beyonders, but their skills were no worse than those of Beyonders.

Next was the key ingredient: the ash from the right index finger of an adult thief.

This item wasn't available ready-made. Everything sold on the black market was fake; they burned cow bone powder mixed with wood ash, packed in exquisite little urns, and sold them to those rogue Beyonders who wanted to borrow the power of the dead.

Real thief's ash had to be collected by hand. But not from a living person.

Before dawn, Lu Li left with a small cloth bag and a short-handled shovel.

In Tingen's East Borough, there was an abandoned public cemetery, specifically for unclaimed corpses and vagrants who were too poor to afford a coffin.

The cemetery had no walls, only a ring of crooked cast-iron railings covered in rust-colored vines, with large leaves hanging damply in the morning fog, like countless dying palms splayed out on the railings.

The cemetery caretaker was a drunken old man. The door to the guardroom was half-open, and the smell of cheap gin and intermittent snoring drifted out from within.

Lu Li lightened his footsteps as he passed through the cemetery.

A week ago, a notorious habitual thief was caught in the Lower District; the police hadn't even had time to interrogate him before he died in the detention center. No one claimed him, so he was wrapped in a straw mat and tossed into the cemetery, not even a tombstone was erected.

By the time Lu Li found the grave, the sky was already beginning to brighten. He had barely dug a few times before his shovel hit the coffin lid. The board was as thin as paper and shattered at the slightest touch.

Lu Li used the small shovel to collect the ashes into the cloth bag. When his fingertips touched those grayish-white powders, it felt like gently touching the lingering warmth of another life that had been extinguished.

He wrapped the cloth bag in a square scarf, put it in his pocket, filled the dirt back in, and patted it down.

The living have no peace, and the dead have no peace either. Lu Li thought to himself, this is the world of the Lord of the Mysteries. There is no dignity after Death, only Beyonder characteristics that condense into crystals after the host dies, quietly waiting for the next owner.

By the time he returned to the apartment, the Sun had already risen.

Lu Li poured the ashes into the beaker, then poured in the last ingredient—rainwater from the night of a lunar eclipse. This wasn't difficult; lunar eclipse nights were not uncommon in Tingen, and anyone with the intent could place a bowl on the windowsill during a rainy night. He also had a bowl, and the rain from last night was just enough.

The liquid in the beaker began to bubble after the rainwater was added, its color shifting from dark gray to a nearly transparent pale blue. A ring of tiny water droplets condensed on the walls of the beaker, looking like alcohol evaporating.

Lu Li placed the beaker on the table, stepped back, and observed it from half a meter away.

The steam had no smell. This did not match the normal situation, but Lu Li couldn't say for sure what was normal. The original work's description of the formula details was too brief, and the information he possessed relied entirely on fragments pieced together from the plot; there were always some truths that had to be felt out from the Darkness.

He picked up the beaker and drank it in one gulp.

The sensation of the potion entering his throat was not like a liquid, but like a ball of extremely cold air. It slid all the way from his mouth to his stomach, then spread outwards with his stomach as the center. Every inch of blood vessel it soaked lost its temperature momentarily, as if something was traveling along the veins, squeezing the blood along the way elsewhere. The extremities of his limbs lost sensation first, followed by his ears, nose tip, and lips.

Then, Darkness descended.

It was not the Darkness of fainting, but a purer Darkness, as if from the depths of the earth, wrapping Lu Li entirely in a warm silence. He didn't know how much time had passed before his consciousness slowly re-emerged from the end of the Darkness, like a drowning man surfacing from deep water.

And in the transitional moment when consciousness returned, a fragment of perception that did not belong to him seeped into his mind.

It was a strange scene from the archives of the Church of the Evernight Goddess. Someone was flipping through records of Old Neil's unease.

It was a type of "perception" that did not belong to any sense. Lu Li couldn't see it with his eyes or hear it with his ears, but he knew every word, every punctuation mark of that information, and even the sweat stains on the writer's fingertips and the hesitation in their heart when they wrote those words.

Then, Lu Li felt a gaze.

A gaze projected down from the extremely high sky, passing through layers of buildings and all physical barriers, landing on a corner of Tingen City. There was no emotion, no temperature, and not even a clear intent in the gaze.

It was just "looking," as if a giant had inadvertently lowered its head and seen an ant raising its head in the dust by its feet.

Lu Li suddenly realized that it wasn't Amon. Amon's gaze wouldn't have this kind of mountain-crushing pressure.

That was Sefirah Castle.

It was Klein opening his eyes above the gray fog.

He had sensed something.

Not the specific existence of Lu Li, but a vague, faint resonance produced under the same Sefirah. It was like two people in the same room whose breathing frequencies unknowingly synchronized, but they couldn't tell from which second it started. This resonance wouldn't expose him, but it would leave a trace in his subconscious—letting him vaguely know that in this world, there was another person whose fate was intertwined with his, doing things he didn't know about in some corner.

Lu Li thought, this was also his biggest trump card.

Not the power of Sefirah Castle, not the authority of the gray fog, but information. He knew everything about Klein, while Klein's understanding of him was limited to that resonance, which was so distant it could almost be ignored.

In the world of the Lord of the Mysteries, information was more precious than any artifact and deadlier than any Pathway. And the information he possessed was enough to rewrite the bloodiest pages in this novel.

Strength returned to his limbs. The potion had completed its final aggregation.

Lu Li stood up slowly and walked to the full-length mirror on the broken wardrobe in the corner of the room.

The person in the mirror was still him. A thin face, black hair, deep brown eyes.

But there was something more in the depths of his eyes—a faint, flickering light, like the reflection on a lens, or perhaps the eerie glimmer of a cat's eyes in the dead of night.

That was the mark of the Marauder Pathway.

Sequence 9, Marauder.

Promotion successful.

Lu Li clenched his fist. A feeling of unprecedented keenness surged from his fingertips. It wasn't strength, nor speed, but the sense of "touch" itself that had been amplified.

When his fingertips brushed through the air, he could feel every minute vortex in the airflow, and could distinguish the jagged edges of every speck of dust lingering between the lines of his palms.

This was the Marauder—not a combat-oriented ability, not a spell-casting ability, but a near-instinctual perception and manipulation of the "ownership of things."

He reached out and made a grasping motion in the empty air towards the old fountain pen stained with grass marks on the table.

The pen wobbled slightly, but it did not fly into his hand. He had only partially succeeded.

What a Sequence 9 Marauder could achieve was merely this most basic "telekinesis"—it couldn't even be called "taking," just a "disturbance."

To become a true thief, he still needed a great deal of practice and acting.

Acting as a Marauder.

No, not just acting. Lu Li reminded himself that, first and foremost, he had to survive.

Survival required money, an identity, and a reason to operate legally in Tingen City.

And in this world, what shelter could be safer than the Nighthawks?

The Nighthawks—the Beyonder organization of the Church of the Evernight Goddess, specialized in handling all manner of supernatural incidents.

Joining the Nighthawks meant having access to vast amounts of hidden knowledge, receiving abundant Beyonder material rations, and gaining the backing of an official identity.

More importantly, it would allow him to openly approach Old Neil, Dunn Smith, and Daly Simone, to get close to those who were about to be crushed by fate, and at the last moment, try to steal them away from the hands of Death.

But for the Nighthawks, they valued a clean background above all else when recruiting.

A nameless tenant living in the East Borough slums, with no family background, no church recommendation letter, and no one to vouch for him—someone like that wouldn't even get an interview.

However, while a commoner's identity wouldn't work, someone with special abilities could.

Lu Li thought to himself, the Nighthawks had a natural need to absorb wild Beyonders.

A rogue who had already advanced to Sequence 9 on their own without joining any secret organizations was, in their eyes, both a potential threat and a rare recruitment opportunity.

As long as he could prove his value without appearing too dangerous, they would take the initiative to solve his identity problem for him.

But he couldn't just walk up to them. Showing up directly was equivalent to confessing—why would a rogue Marauder know so much about the Nighthawks' recruitment channels? That would invite unwanted scrutiny.

He had to make them come to him.

Lu Li calculated in his mind, then dug out the small bottle of leftover Time-Sequence Grass juice from the corner of the table.

It was the scrapings left over from grinding, mixed with distilled water and a trace of alcohol; it was just enough.

He dabbed the grass juice onto his cuffs and lapels; the scent was extremely faint, difficult to detect unless one was a trained Beyonder.

But the remnants of black cat whiskers were more critical—the characteristic scent of the Marauder potion was recorded in the files of every Nighthawk.

Lu Li carefully sprinkled a few whisker fragments on the windowsill and by the door, making it look like they had been accidentally dropped while transporting potion materials.

Then he placed an empty beaker under the bed, with a few drops of dried, pale blue liquid remaining at the bottom.

After finishing all this, he packed away all the excess materials, sealed them individually, and hid them in different locations around the room, leaving only the scattered traces that would just happen to be discovered by an observant Nighthawk.

The final step was to forge a note. Lu Li tore a page from his notebook and wrote a few lines with his left hand.

The content was a fragment of a potion formula, containing a few common analgesic herbs, but at the very end, a horizontal line was drawn, and below it was written in a crooked hand: "Moon Eclipse Water, three drops. Do not add more, or it will cause hallucinations."

He did not sign it. A newly advanced rogue Beyonder locking himself up to record his experiences, cautious enough to use only his left hand and leave no name—there was nothing inherently suspicious about that.

But if this paper were found by someone who knew their stuff, the implications would be completely different—they would deduce what the person in the room had used these raw materials for, and would imagine a wild Marauder who had figured out the formula and completed the advancement alone.

And this inference would make them deeply convinced of their own judgment.

Lu Li folded the note, tucked it into his coat pocket, sat back on the bed, and closed his eyes to rest.

After waiting for about two hours, faint footsteps came from the end of the corridor.

They were not the footsteps of a drunken neighbor, nor the landlord collecting rent. Lu Li immediately became alert. The footsteps of those two types of people would not pause so suddenly, as if they had caught a whiff of a signal that shouldn't be in the air.

The footsteps paused for a moment outside a few doors, then continued moving, and finally stopped outside one particular door.

He had not locked the door.

When the door was pushed open, Lu Li happened to be sitting up from the bed, rubbing his eyes, feigning the look of someone just waking up.

Two people stood in the doorway. The leader was a middle-aged man in a dark brown trench coat, hands in his pockets, with an inconspicuous dark brooch pinned to his collar—the holy emblem of the Church of the Evernight Goddess.

His gaze swept across the room, finally landing on the empty beaker under the bed and the black cat whisker fragments on the windowsill.

Then he looked up and said softly in Hermes, "You haven't advanced for long, have you, sir?"

It was not a question.

Behind him followed a young lady who looked to be under twenty, with dark brown curly hair, brown eyes, and wearing a dark short cape with a cinched waist.

Her posture suggested she had been trained, maintaining the restraint of an observer.

Her gaze was cautious but not cold, and when she looked at Lu Li, it carried an expression somewhere between curiosity and appraisal.

Lu Li stood up from the bed, neither denying nor admitting anything. He simply looked at the middle-aged man, waiting for him to continue.

And indeed, he continued.

"I am Dunn Smith, captain of the Tingen City Nighthawks squad."

Dunn Smith. The Nighthawks captain. A man who, in the original story, didn't survive past the first volume.

His hair was already somewhat gray, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were deeper than his true age would suggest, but he stood straight, his hands always poised in a stance ready to draw a Beyonder item at any moment.

The young lady behind him also took a half-step forward. Lu Li guessed that it must be Daly Simone, a Sequence 8 Gravedigger, the future Spirit Medium.

Her gaze collided with his in mid-air; she didn't dodge, only gave a slight nod.

Lu Li suddenly realized something.

This person, this middle-aged man standing in the doorway eyeing him with a cautious gaze, did not know what kind of Death he would face in the near future.

He did not know that Ince Zangwill would betray him, did not know that the Sealed Artifact 0-08 would write his Death warrant step by step, did not know that he would sacrifice his own heart to protect this city.

But Lu Li did.

He looked into Dunn Smith's eyes and said very calmly, "I don't speak Hermes very well. But if you help me translate, I will tell you everything I can. Before that—"

Lu Li took the note out of his pocket, unfolded it, and handed it over.

"This is the formula for the Moon Eclipse Water sedative; consider it my letter of introduction."

Dunn took the note, exchanged a glance with Daly, and then looked at Lu Li. The serious shell in his eyes finally cracked with a faint smile.

"Young man, are you interested in joining the Nighthawks?"

Lu Li did not answer immediately. The remnants of cat whiskers on the windowsill, the non-existent potion dregs under the bed, the scent of herbs deliberately dabbed onto his lapels—all had fulfilled their mission at this very moment.

He nodded.

Dunn tucked the note into his pocket and stepped aside to clear a path for him to the corridor. At the end of the corridor, the window in the stairwell let in a vast expanse of sunlight from the clearing sky after the rain, spilling onto the dust-covered floor.

Lu Li followed him into that patch of sunlight.