Antonie rushed to his side to help him up. As Alphard slowly surfaced from the daze, working through the aftershocks of the process, his mentor already had a fresh preparation ready to gauge the condition of his soul and confirm its state.
Leaving the stability of a soul to chance simply wasn't a risk they could afford.
As the minutes passed, the atmosphere settled, and Antonie studied Alphard's soul with painstaking precision.
Examining the mass of light, Antonie confirmed, with visible relief, that not a single crack marred its surface. Instead, he found that the process of Digestion had already begun — the fundamental phase where the soul reshapes itself around its new power.
Following the same bag-and-stone comparison from before, the bag was absorbing the sacrifice, knitting itself back together around the stone and sealing it inside, without a single sign of giving way or breaking apart.
"How long does the digestion process usually take?"
"About a couple of weeks to a few months before you're ready to ascend to Key 2. Digestion can move faster in some cases, but it's best to wait at least a full month regardless, so your body has time to adjust too. Feeling any changes yet?"
"No, nothing yet," Alphard said, studying his own hands, half-expecting some visible reaction.
"That's probably because you haven't activated the power yet. Try this potion."
Alphard drank the next potion, its color noticeably different from the last. This wasn't an ordinary brew; while not strictly essential, it had been formulated by expert alchemists as a safeguard for initiates who struggled to manifest their power on their own.
Unlike the soul potion he'd already tried — a blend of thirty milliliters of Ghost River and twenty milliliters of Corpse Tears — this activation variant altered the proportions dramatically: forty milliliters of Corpse Tears, with twenty milliliters of Thunder Marrow added as a base to force the spark of ability awake, giving it a faintly sweet undertone.
Suddenly, Alphard's vision blurred, and strange silhouettes began winding their way through the room.
A flicker of instinct warned him that the reality around him had shifted somehow, though he couldn't pin down exactly how. What unsettled him more, though, was his own reaction — fear didn't send his heart racing at all; instead, an almost total detachment settled over him in the face of the situation.
Studying the details closely, he noticed something sinister: Antonie's features looked subtly off, faintly wrong, revealing that this wasn't truly him. That was when it clicked for Alphard — his companion had projected this false scenario to test whether his abilities had actually awakened.
That was when Alphard's vision shifted once more. As his irises took on a grey, unfathomable hue, the world around him warped into a monochrome canvas. Black claimed every object or person lacking spiritual essence, while white outlined the spirits present around him.
Antonie returned to normal, but Alphard's field of vision had already crossed beyond the physical plane. Without moving an inch, he found himself able to tune into places, presences, and conversations across a wide stretch of the building, the clarity fading gradually the further it reached.
Little by little, Alphard's perception settled back into its natural rhythm as the monochrome contrast dissolved into nothing. Facing him, Antonie watched with a faint smile fixed on his face, though the steadiness of his eyes betrayed a quiet unease as he evaluated the results.
He was looking to confirm not just whether the potion had worked, but whether the ritual had left behind any hidden mental crack or invisible anomaly.
Before long, Alphard rested in the room, recovering from everything that had happened. Antonie, meanwhile, busied himself organizing his materials, jotting a note into that same lengthy list from before.
"Why do you do that?" Alphard asked, taking a sip of water from a small cup.
"It's for future rituals. While you all are out on missions finding objects, Oliver and I study them alongside any potential Key relics. Some just never turn up again — either they've already been used, or they're simply too difficult to track down."
"And why are they so hard to find?"
"Think of it like a very specific recipe for a very specific dish. The ingredients are rare — it's not like you can just grow one — and they're scattered all over the place."
"So then, how do people actually find these relics on missions? Shouldn't there be specific locations to search?"
"A lot of relics turn up hidden in completely random places. But most of what we actually have came from some ritual gone wrong — someone botching it, and by the end, they end up warped or destroyed, while the relic itself stays intact, since no invocation ever actually completed."
Alphard sank into his own thoughts, turning over everything he'd just learned about the nature of these relics. The scope of it all had strict limits, far stricter than he'd first imagined.
Just as Antonie had explained, being a Door user was an exceptional condition — the result not only of how difficult and precise the potions were, though they offered a second, less dangerous, if considerably weaker, path, but also of the strict regulations governments enforced to keep this kind of power from spreading unchecked.
But the reason behind such vigilance went far beyond human military concerns. Alphard began to grasp the true scale of the conflict here — humanity wasn't just fighting among itself, but against foreign races and entities against which an ordinary person stood no chance at all.
Turning over just how complicated it all was, he made a mental note to work through several of his companion's books, hoping to learn more about the world's history and lore.
Having rested enough, he thanked Antonie for everything he'd done. Still, his frustration hadn't entirely faded, so he left with only a small pat on the shoulder, taking a couple of books with him in a bag on his way out.
He rode the same elevator back up. As the cabin climbed, he found himself wondering how he'd ever learn to master his Door's abilities, though the idea of "sacrifice" kept circling back through his mind — he kept trying to work out, in the most literal sense, what it actually meant for his emotions to turn false without him ever noticing.
Back at the station, he said his goodbyes to Madeleine with a polite bow. But just before he stepped through the exit, he found Charlotte waiting near the entrance, holding a package of an unusually distinctive shape.
"Here — this is part of the job too. Don't open it in public."
Charlotte placed a long, narrow parcel in his hands. Holding it, the cold rigidity of metal beneath the paper sent a jolt of unease through him; it was clearly something dense and heavy, though Alphard couldn't quite place what kind of object might be hidden inside.
Heeding Charlotte's firm instruction, he resisted the urge to peek and waited until he got home to open it.
After saying his goodbyes, Alphard set off down the avenue at a slow but steady pace. The rattle of carriages over the cobblestones and the faint glow of the gas lamps breathed life into the streets as he scanned the traffic for a carriage for hire to take him home.
Something in his bearing had shifted, irrevocably; his eyes now carried a firm resolve. He no longer felt adrift — he was determined to unravel the secrets of this new world, fully aware that mastering this power was his best shot at finding his way back home.
Arriving in the Bercy District, he walked home wrapped in the cool breeze, the scent of flowers lining the boulevard, and the warm glow of a sun shining in its full splendor. After the darkness of the ritual, the world around him felt like a genuine comfort.
Inside him bloomed a strange but genuine sense of joy — for the first time, he didn't feel like he was standing at the edge of an abyss, but moving forward with purpose, even knowing full well it might cost him more than it appeared to.
I'll be home again soon, and all of this will just turn out to have been some strange nightmare.
He arrived home to find, once again, no one else there. Alphard hurried up to his room, setting his top hat on the edge of the bed and leaning his cane against the wall.
He set the books aside on the bed, his focus narrowing entirely onto the package he still held. Having handled it enough times already, he'd reached a conclusion that felt more than reasonable.
It's a gun.
Carefully unwrapping it, he revealed an imposing revolver of flawless craftsmanship. Its frame was forged from nickel-plated metal, giving it a silver finish so pure and polished it caught and threw back the light of his room.
Along the barrel ran fine engravings, an unmistakable mark of the finest craftsmanship. It also carried a rotating cylinder built to hold more rounds than an ordinary revolver.
Still, it radiated a coldness that chilled the tips of his fingers. Its mechanisms moved with precision, and the moment he gripped it, the heavy chill of the silvered metal and the dark wood of its handle reminded him, sharply, that this was no toy — it was a tool built for one purpose alone: taking lives.
I guess they'll come for me for some mission eventually, or leave a letter in the mailbox. Which one's worth more, I wonder — my past, or the future of whoever I end up killing with this?
After a few moments of reflection, he set aside the thought of ever using the revolver against a civilian, imagining instead that he'd use it against some monster or dangerous entity threatening someone innocent.
Alongside the revolver, tucked inside the bag, rested a small box holding eight elongated rounds, their tips sharpened, their metal finish flawless and gleaming.
Instinctively, Alphard called on his spiritual sight to scan for any hidden anomaly. Through the filter of his mystical perception, he watched as an ethereal essence rose from the bullets, coiling around them like thick smoke.
The realization struck him instantly — this wasn't ordinary ammunition. It was a compound crafted for one purpose alone: hunting down entities that weren't human at all.