Chapter 176: Beneath the Stones

Chapter 175: Beneath the stones

As the hall cleared, Lothe remained by the distribution desk, flipping through the parchment dossier for Willowbrook.

Seana leaned over his shoulder, the faint, clean fragrance of cold lotus brushing his cheek. "Find something?"

"Something is missing," Lothe muttered, his thumb tracing a short, three-line paragraph on the third leaf.

"Missing?"

"The summary mentions an elderly witness who reported a strange acoustic disturbance moments before the child vanished. But the scribe classified the sound as ’environmental noise’ and omitted the direct testimony."

Lothe immediately stepped toward Director Voss, who was sealing a dispatch case. "Director."

Voss looked up. "Yes?"

"The Willowbrook file references an acoustic anomaly reported by a villager, but the original deposition was cut from the dossier. Who summarized this file?"

Voss’s brow furrowed. He took the parchment, scanning the bottom margin. A hard edge crept into his eyes. "This was compiled by the second-tier scribes at the frontier post."

He snapped his fingers, signaling an aide. "Send a courier hawk to the outer post. I want the complete, unedited transcripts from the Willowbrook registry delivered to my desk within the hour."

Lothe met the director’s gaze. "Don’t bother with the hawk. We’re heading there now. We’ll ask the witness directly."

Voss offered a rare, grim nod. "Okay."

——————————

[Willowbrook Village]

The journey by Celestial Crane took less than an hour.

Willowbrook was a modest agricultural hamlet tucked into the foothills: two dozen timber-and-thatch cottages, a central stone well, and terraced fields sloping down toward a dense pine forest.

When the massive white crane landed on the village threshing ground, the villagers shrank back behind fences, their faces drawn with exhaustion and terror.

Chief Harlan, the chief who had reported the case to the Arbitration Hall, hurried forward, bowing until his spine creaked. "Elder! Lords and ladies... thank heavens you’ve come."

Elder Rowan stepped down, his demeanor brisk. "Take us to the boy’s residence. The point of disappearance."

"This way," Harlan said, leading them through a narrow gravel path.

Outside a small stone cottage, a young woman sat on a wooden bench, staring blankly at the ground. In her hands, she clutched a frayed scrap of sky-blue cloth, her knuckles white.

When she heard the footfalls, she looked up, her swollen, bloodshot eyes fixing onto Seana’s crimson robes immediately.

"Please..." her voice was a shredded whisper. "Anthony... he was just playing. He never leaves the yard. Please bring my baby back..."

Seana knelt before the woman, her movement devoid of the cold authority she wore on the dueling grounds. She gently wrapped her hands over the mother’s trembling fingers. "We will find him. I promise"

"Please, walk us through where he was standing."

The woman choked back a sob, pointing toward the narrow gap between their cottage and an old timber storage shed. "He went behind the shed to hide. The other children counted to ten. When they ran around the corner... he wasn’t there."

Lothe didn’t wait. He walked past the fence, stepping into the narrow lane between the buildings.

The soil was damp from morning frost. Caelan and Darian flanked the perimeter, casting ward-detection talismans that flared a soft, useless white.

"Nothing," Darian grunted. "No spatial displacement, no residue of cloaking talismans."

Lothe ignored them. He crouched on one knee, his fingertips hovering a millimeter above the earth.

He didn’t look at the dirt. He looked at the flagstones forming the cottage’s foundation.

Between two rough-hewn basalt blocks, half-buried in the soil, was a hairline groove.

His eyes narrowed.

It was a perfect, geometric arc—the curvature of a circle roughly five feet in diameter.

"Caelan. Darian. Stop moving," Lothe commanded, his voice dropping an octave.

Both youths froze. Oren stepped up beside Lothe, glancing down. "What is it? It’s just a cracked foundation stone."

"Cracks don’t follow a constant radial curve," Lothe said coldly.

He channeled a hairline needle of his Void Qi into the groove.

The moment his energy grazed the basalt, the stone didn’t resist. Instead, his spatial sense slipped straight down through the solid rock as if it were water.

The interior density of the stone had been hollowed from within—not shattered by brute force, but systematically dissolved and restructured on a microscopic level.

A low, cold smirk tugged at the corner of Lothe’s mouth.

"What did you find?" Oren pressed, frustration leaking into his voice. "There’s no Qi trace here."

"That’s because whoever made this didn’t use Qi," Lothe murmured, rising slowly to his feet.

He turned toward Chief Harlan, who was watching from the gate.

"The omitted witness in the report," Lothe said, his voice cutting like winter steel. "The one who heard something right before Anthony vanished. What was the sound?"

Harlan blinked, sweating under Lothe’s unblinking stare. "The old hunter... Old Man Chen. He lives across the lane. He said he was mending traps by his window when he felt the floorboards vibrate."

"Vibrate how?"

Harlan swallowed hard. "He said... it sounded like heavy iron teeth grinding together beneath the dirt. Like an enormous clock ticking inside the mountain."

Silence fell over the yard.

Seana rose, her eyes meeting Lothe’s across the gravel.

Click.

The mechanism in the dark.

Lothe’s hand slid into his sleeve, his eyes flashing with lethal clarity as his gaze moved from Seana to Nyren then to the rest slowly.

"Then we should pay Old Man Chen a visit. Shouldn’t we?."

[Few minutes later]

The cabin smelled of smoked pine needles, animal fat, and old tobacco.

Old Man Chen sat on a wooden stool by the window, scraping a deer pelt with a dull horn blade. His hands were thick, his knuckles swollen from decades of damp mountain air.

Elder Rowan stood near the center of the small room, his tall frame making the low ceiling feel even lower. Behind him, Nyren, Oren, Caelan, and Darian crowded into the parlor. Their clean white-and-silver robes looked out of place against the drying pelts and strings of wild garlic hanging from the rafters.

Lothe and Seana leaned by the door, quiet.

"The garrison inspectors dismissed your report," Elder Rowan began, his deep voice filling the cabin. "They wrote it off as settling timber. Tell me what you heard."

Chen didn’t seem nervous around the elder. He spat tobacco juice into a clay pot by his foot, looking past Rowan to eye Lothe and Seana.

"The youngsters who came by three days ago were in a hurry," Chen said, his voice raspy. "They waved their little bronze compasses around, said the spiritual energy in the air was calm, and told me an old man’s ears play tricks. But houses don’t settle like clockwork, Elder."

Lothe pushed off the doorframe. "What was the rhythm?"

The old hunter tapped his horn scraper against the stool leg.

Tock. Tock. Tock.

Three light, dry taps.

Then he stamped his heavy boot against the floorboards.

CHUNK.

The timber rattled.

"Three light clicks," Chen said. "Like gears slipping into place. Then a heavy, wet drop, like a butcher dropping an iron gate. It happened sixty feet away, right behind the widow’s shed, just before the mother started screaming."

Oren folded his arms. "The village rests on shale. Subterranean gas pockets pop when moisture shifts."

"Gas doesn’t smell like sour brine and boiled pine pitch, young master," Chen retorted. "When that latch dropped, the draft sucked down into the dirt, then puffed back up through the cracks in my floor. It smelled of vinegar, bitter almond, and boiled resin. Same stuff the undertakers used forty years ago when a cave-in killed twenty miners in the deep shafts and their bodies sat in the dark for days."o

Beside Lothe, Seana stiffened.

"Not quicklime," Seana said quietly, cutting through the conversation. "Did it have a faint metallic tang? Like fermenting grain mixed with copper?"

Chen looked up, surprised. "Aye, miss. Exactly that. Burned the back of my throat."

Seana’s expression hardened. "Pale-Wax Embalming Leach."?