LIGHTNOVELONLINE 140 – Lost Sun Killer Myth: The Human Charcoal Letters
“How much do you want for it?”
“Just take the damn thing. I couldn’t source a Gulf Key no matter what strings I pulled in any reasonable amount of time, so consider this the replacement. I still have people looking for one, they’re just a bitch to find. So long as the belt’s wick gets burnt in the process of getting revenge for my cousin, I’ll consider us even.”
“...How specific is that criteria? Should Viridaimon grind the assassin into paste, or is it alright if I just off her without the suit and then use it to come after her employers?”
“Ah, I don’t care,” the lizard huffed. “Keep it and try to reverse-engineer it for all I care, so long as the assassin- Wait, her? Was that a slip of the tongue or do you already know who did it?”
“I have my sources.”
“Better than mine, it seems. Y’mind sharing? Could look into her some more. Promise I won’t do anything stupid, I’m not some hot-blooded whelp… I’d want to do it myself anyhow, and I’m not much stronger than Imraal in my state.”
A melancholic resignation came over him as he said that. Krahe weighed the risks, and deemed them minimal: “She’s with the Silversword Agency. A young human by the name of Eutropia.”
“I will attempt to look into her, though I expect that I will not find more than you already know.”
“Do so discreetly. It would not do for her to be on guard when I come to collect.”
“Come now. You think too little of me,” Garvesh chuckled wryly. “Take the diagnostic kit as well. If possible, run the full battery of checks before using the coupler.”
Detransforming left her feeling strange and her head thrumming with a dull ache, but grinding a couple Tabryxas between her teeth helped set her back in line. After doffing the extra support armor and packing everything up, she tried to waste no time in leaving Garvesh in peace. Her departure was delayed by an offer she couldn’t refuse: “Y’want some Machine Crab Juice? I was making some just as you arrived.”
Casus waited for her back at the safehouse. His expectant, excited reaction to the Black Sun Coupler proved that he had known about it in advance. Despite feeling distrustful voices niggling in the back of her head when he took to fiddling with the diagnostic equipment, she didn’t say anything.
It wasn’t long before this short time of peace came to an end.
At the end of each investigative thread, more often than not, violence awaited.
Getting access to the necessary restricted section in the Temple of Records only confirmed what she had already assumed, and built upon her suspicions beyond what she had dared to theorize.
The texts she found were more a collection of notes and letters than actual books, leading her to believe these were the originals which the Lost Sun Society’s books were based on, or at least copies of the originals. The text was recorded as “The Human Charcoal Letters”. They were dated in the time window of 4127AB to 4183AB. Over a millennium ago.
They spoke of a fate supposedly worse than death. An exceedingly rare condition wherein, over the course of an extended period, an anathemist could somehow self-mummify into a state akin to a living ember, not quite truly alive, but not quite truly dead; so-called Adustocorpus. The bodies of such anathemists could, supposedly, be split up and harnessed as power sources or for the creation of anathemic relics. The rarity of this occurring naturally was such that information was scarce prior to 4127, but cases had spiked to the extreme during the writing of the Human Charcoal Letters, and so had knowledge on the condition.
In particular, the Human Charcoal Letters spoke at length on several occult practices that all boiled down to variations of the same thing: Methods of manipulation and occult rituals designed to aid in driving someone to the point of Adustocorpus, so that they may be harvested for the practitioner’s own use. Uncensored, surviving excerpts from retrieved ritual books described the subject as “human charcoal”, hence the name of these documents. These practices were described simply as “charring”, obviously dehumanizing the victims for the practitioner’s own conscience.
The same chamber also contained extensive documentation on the Twin Churches’ joint effort in stamping out the individuals and occult groups which had created and used these methods. Krahe only skimmed through these records, finding not much more of use for the Lost Sun Killer Myth case. Regardless, she had gotten what she was looking for.
Upon next visiting the Lost Sun Society, she found that, curiously enough, the texts she had touched were now no longer missing any pages, and had been replaced into their proper places. When Krahe asked about it in a roundabout way, the librarian claimed to be unaware of any repairs being done to any of the texts recently.
On her way out, she ever so briefly glimpsed a lithe lizard. She assumed it to be Sorayah, since all the other saurians in the Society were on the heavy, crocodilian side. One of them, a man revered as a god-like miniature painter, resembled a humanoid komodo dragon, and smelled the part too, despite his efforts.
Krahe didn’t think much of it as she randomly chose a direction away from the Society, remaining no more and no less on-guard than she normally was. Of course, by any normal person’s standards her baseline was a schizophrenic level of constant vigilance. She wouldn’t have survived Crescent Jezail otherwise.
So it was to her surprise, and, admittedly, excitement, when she realized she was not only being tailed by several people, but surrounded by them at that. They… Weren’t great. They were good, yes, but not great. About the best one could expect from amateurs. Their outfits were too homogenous, and at least two of them wore openly-visible Lost Sun jewelry. Krahe had to give them credit; they didn’t know that she could see through Barzai, or that Barzai was even there. Really, a flying, camouflaged pair of extra eyes and ears was an immensely powerful tool.
