Chapter 899 - 898: Travelogue

After the Intelligence Agency meeting was over, Amber went straight to Gawain’s study.

Gawain was currently sitting behind his desk, carefully leafing through an old book that had already been repaired and reinforced. His gaze moved slowly over the mottled pages and the letters that had been redrawn by the bookbinder. The not-yet-dispersed smell of alchemical potions drifted faintly into his nose. The contents appearing in this ancient travelogue made him fall into thought from time to time, and then a voice suddenly coming out of thin air interrupted his motions—

"Hey! I just got out of the meeting and heard you were looking for me!" Amber’s figure surfaced out of the air, bringing with her that forever-buoyant energy. "Got another job where I can earn some extra money?"

Gawain lifted his head from the ancient book and glanced at Amber, who was now standing in front of him. A faint smile appeared on his face as he pointed at the chair beside the desk. "Sit. There’s something I want you to take a look at."

At the very first moment, Amber sensed something out of the ordinary behind Gawain’s smile and tone. This supposedly careless yet in fact rather keen half-elf twitched her ears at once and frowned suspiciously. "What’s this... What are you going to show me?"

Gawain stood up from behind the desk, let out a long breath, and gently pushed the ancient book forward. "Here—don’t worry, it’s been restored. It won’t fall apart that easily."

"A book?" Amber was first taken aback when she saw it was only a book. She accepted it by reflex, but very soon that nonchalant expression on her face slowly froze. She vaguely sensed something, a complicated and incredulous look surfacing in her eyes. She slowly raised her head to look at Gawain. "...Is it that book?"

"We’ve already found concrete evidence," Gawain nodded lightly. "An unknown shadow thief once tried to steal it from a certain cathedral—because of that, the book was transferred to the library of Saint Lu An Cathedral for safekeeping. We compared every document we could find and finally confirmed that this is exactly what your foster father attempted to steal back then."

"So it’s this one... All for this..." The perpetually exuberant expression faded slowly from Amber’s face. She grabbed the weathered cover of the ancient book a little too hard, but quickly loosened her grip again as though afraid of damaging it. She stared at the restored letters on the cover, her fingers slowly brushing over them. Her gaze shifted several times, but in the end she neither cried nor smiled.

After a long time, she lifted her head to look at Gawain. "I saw you were reading it just now... What’s so special about this book?"

"Strictly speaking, it’s pieced together from several different books—several broken fragments. Some clumsy compiler forcibly stitched them together, and among the few ’sections’ that make up this volume, the largest portion—and the one I believe most likely to have interested your foster father—is a travelogue."

Amber stared wide-eyed. "A travelogue?"

"Modir’s Travelogue," Gawain nodded. "Its author is the Duke of the North from six hundred years ago, Modir Vealt of the Wilder Clan."

As the one in charge of intelligence matters, Amber was more than familiar with this name and the information behind it. She was stunned. "...You mean the lost notebook of the Wilder Clan?! The one Victoria told you about?"

Gawain nodded and jerked his chin at the ancient book in Amber’s hands. "It’s in your hands now."

"But... why would my foster father..." Amber lowered her head to glance at the ’travelogue’ in her hands with a perplexed look. "Was this worth taking that big a risk for?"

"I was just trying to find the answer to that as well—looking for it in the contents of this travelogue, but I haven’t found it yet," Gawain said. "I’ve only got a tiny bit left. Maybe we can look for it together. If your foster father decided to take such a desperate risk after hearing parts of this travelogue, and if his information wasn’t wrong, then we’re bound to see it."

Amber nodded at once and came to Gawain’s side to open the book—but after one glance at the contents inside, she scratched her hair in slight embarrassment. "Uh... looks like you’ll have to do most of the looking..."

She saw that the main body of the travelogue was composed of a mass of dizzying, hard-to-recognize words and phrases: it was the human common tongue from six hundred years ago, closer to the script of the Gondor Empire. Although the modern human common tongue had evolved from it, centuries of change had made these words and their sentence structures very different from contemporary usage.

Amber could only just vaguely identify a few short phrases, and fully understanding it would be about as hard as reading one of the Gondor Empire’s ancient works.

She suddenly understood why a "clumsy compiler" had lumped such a book together with several completely unrelated miscellanies. Obviously only specialized, text-focused senior scholars and Priests with vast knowledge could make sense of this stuff—of course, an old man revived from the Gondor Era would also do.

Gawain was naturally aware of this, so he didn’t shirk the task. After pulling the book a little closer to himself, he began to work with Amber to decipher the words and sentences written on it.

This ancient travelogue contained an astonishing wealth of material. Its author—the Duke of the North from six hundred years ago—was clearly very different from the aristocratic nobles of this era. Modir Vealt lived in a time much closer to the early pioneers; he had even been profoundly influenced by the first Duke Wilder. As a result, he possessed far more of an adventurous spirit than his descendants, and... a far greater creativity when it came to courting death.

His footsteps had covered every corner that human beings of that time could reach (and even realms that no other human being had ever set foot in). Especially after he had completed the handover and arrangements of ducal power and responsibility, his journeys became even more astonishing: from the borders of the Gondor wasteland to the then-mysterious Violet Kingdom, from the icebound mountains of the Sacred Dragon Kingdom to the depths of the deserts in East Typhon, even to certain Otherworld realms occupied by elemental creatures and spatial fragments drifting in from who knows what corner of the universe... he set foot in them all.

Every time he explored a new place, he would first hand over his already-organized notes to one of his Loyal Servants (who would wait for their master’s return in a safe location), then record new entries during subsequent journeys. After returning safely, he would collate and organize these new notes, integrate them with the previous ones, and then take them along to his next adventure.

To Amber, who was born several centuries later, this behavior was rather hard to understand. After reading several segments of hair-raising adventure records in a row, she couldn’t help but frown and ask, "Why would a great noble like him... be so obsessed with adventuring? Many of these ’adventures’ clearly go far beyond leisure and pastime. They’re basically no different from seeking death..."

"...He belongs to a generation close to the pioneers. The descendants of the pioneers in that era were still deeply influenced by their fathers and grandfathers," Gawain shook his head. "Many of them firmly believed that human beings would one day return to the prosperity of the Gondor Era, and for the sake of that day, they had to tread every piece of land on this continent that could bear a human step, to seek the safe borders of the realm for human civilization at the time. I never met Modir’s generation, but I can imagine what their children were like from my own generation. I can say with certainty that Modir Vealt was not the only adventurer of his time—only someone like him, a great noble and a powerful extraordinary, had the ability to preserve his notes down to the present."

Amber blinked, half understanding and half not, and asked no more questions. She instead shifted her gaze back to the latter half of Modir’s notes. Beside her, Gawain’s eyes suddenly slowed as they swept across certain words and phrases on the ancient pages.

Amber noticed immediately. "You found something?"

"...I suspect I’ve found the content that caught your foster father’s interest..." As Gawain spoke, he quickly flipped through the following pages, roughly scanning the contents. After his expression changed several times, he slowly knit his brow.

"Then read it to me," Amber grew a bit anxious when she saw Gawain still hadn’t spoken. "Hey, I’m sure most of this has something to do with my background or whatever. I’m already mentally prepared—just tell me..."

"In his later years, Modir Vealt once explored the shadow realm and successfully established communication with the inhabitants there..." After pondering for a moment, Gawain nodded, reaching out to point at the lines in the travelogue—

The following are the handwritten notes left by Modir Vealt:

"X Month X Day... After several less-than-successful attempts, I finally located a weak point in the real world, a natural Shadow Rift. This rift can be expanded and stabilized with a ritual, allowing a human being to step fully into it and remain for an extended period, instead of flitting briefly along the border of the shadows like other shadow-related professions do. I’m not sure whether the Mages of the ancient Gondor Empire also used this method to open a Shadow Gate, but it’s the best method I’ve been able to find...

"X Month X Day, with all preparations complete, the rift opened. It was just as stable as I had imagined, though a bit smaller in scale than expected—still, it’s enough. I’ve decided to pass through this door tonight, at the hour when shadow magic is at its peak. Wish me luck...

"...On the other side of the door is a world even more barren and bizarre than I imagined... utterly devoid of color, the lifeless black, white, and gray form everything in this world... Things from the real world are projected into this space in grotesque, distorted ways. The little town where I’m currently lodged appears here as vast piles of overlapping, twisted fragments of buildings, while the distant mountains seem to have become a constantly writhing black mist...

"This world is clearly not suitable for ordinary people to live in, and I can’t see that it has any obvious value in terms of exploitable resources, yet I’ve still decided to press on a bit further. The good news is that apart from the imbalance of the elements, the Magic Power here is the same as in the outside world. I can still exert more than eighty percent of my strength here...

"X Month X Day... I encountered those creatures! They look very similar to humans, wearing strange clothes like cloth woven from magic symbols, their bodies like smoke constrained into human form... They drifted past from very far away; I don’t think I alerted them. I can be sure those are the legendary Shadow Inhabitants, intelligent residents living in the Shadow World. It’s said that only a few masters who specialize in shadow manipulation have, on extremely rare occasions, glimpsed these mysterious beings—but even those masters have no record of having successfully established communication with the Shadow Inhabitants...

"I, Modir Vealt, the most powerful human Spellcaster in this kingdom—even though I am not a Shadow Mage—intend to give it a try. I will attempt to establish communication with these mysterious beings. Perhaps they can tell me what kind of secrets this strange and uncanny world holds...

"X Month X Day, couldn’t beat them.

"X Month X Day, with all preparations made, I even returned to the real world to perform some special rituals. I believe I have now accumulated enough experience, including how to deal with their elusive, intangible bodies and their steadily increasing numbers. I no longer have any weaknesses.

"X Month X Day, couldn’t beat them.

"Modir, oh Modir! Just look at this shameful record of yours! You are supposed to be the most powerful human Spellcaster in this kingdom! How can you be driven into headlong flight again and again by a bunch of bizarre enemies who can only mutter and whisper?"

"X Month X Day, couldn’t beat them.

"I think I should resort to cunning instead.

"I’m no longer young; I should rely on strategy like an old Mage who behaves according to his age... If I take the right approach, perhaps those Shadow Inhabitants can also be reasoned with.

"I’m going to preserve all my previous failures in their entirety as well; perhaps they’ll serve as some sort of warning for adventurers in later generations. Of course, this may tarnish my image, but for an adventurer, to tread new paths is a sacred duty, and even the most humiliating experiences are precious knowledge. I cannot conceal my failures.

"Looking on the bright side, I’m already old, so I don’t have to rush to publish these notes. I can leave them as a testament and have my descendants make them public—this way, I won’t have to hear all the ridicule... It might even be that someone will be won over by my sense of humor..."

Gawain had already skimmed through it once before, so he could still keep a straight face at this point. Amber, however, couldn’t help but twitch the corners of her mouth; after a long moment she finally blurted, "This guy’s brain is huge..."

Gawain: "He’s one of Victoria Wilder’s ancestors..."

Amber: "So this is what they mean by ’great wisdom appears foolish’..."

"It’s just that his personality is a bit... distinctive," Gawain said, his expression solemn yet calm, as he pointed at the lines that followed. "Let’s keep going. Here is where he starts trying to approach those Shadow Inhabitants in a special way."

Amber hurriedly shut her mouth and stuck her head closer—she couldn’t really understand much of it, but she still followed along with Gawain’s fingertip as it moved down the page:

"...The Shadow Inhabitants seem extremely repulsed by uninvited guests from outside. They regard me as an intruder from the real world, which is why they have refused communication again and again. In that case, what if I make myself look like a creature that also lives in the Shadow World?

"This line of thought is bold yet feasible. I know a few special rituals and Magic Potions—high doses of shadow potion may not be so friendly to one’s intestines, but they might make those Shadow Inhabitants a bit friendlier toward me, and a bit of intestinal discomfort is hardly important by comparison...

"X Month X Day... Following the plan above, I completed the ritual and transformed myself into a form close to that of a shadow realm. I also ingested a sufficient amount of shadow potion. I found an old friend who knows shadow manipulation spells; he said I ’basically just look like shadow itself’ now. With that, everything should be foolproof.

"I’ve decided to attempt contact with those Shadow Inhabitants tonight—by that time, the shadow magic suffusing my body will also reach its peak, and my disguise will certainly be flawless.

"X Month X Day, couldn’t beat them.

"Had a bout of severe diarrhea after coming back.

"...(Gondor Empire vulgarity) (Anzu vulgarity) (northern parts of the Dark Mountain Range vulgarity) (obscene and unspeakably filthy language)"

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