267: White light?

**Chapter 267**

The paladin didn’t move out of the door until the priest said he could.

“Let him in.”

I stepped through and bowed again, shorter this time, the house way already used up on the threshold.

“I am Jack. Here to serve you in any way you need.”

The room smelled like old incense. The priest sat with his hands together as if sitting were part of a rite. The nun stood to his left, veil on, soft eyes over cloth, white robe doing the same losing fight it had done in Elara’s office. The paladin closed the door at my back and stayed there.

The priest looked at me the way men of the cloth looked at servants. Not unkind. Not interested. Measuring whether I was a pair of hands or a problem.

“Assist,” he said. “Good. Then you can begin by standing there.”

He reached into the case at his feet.

What he brought out was a crystal the size of a fist, clear until the lamplight caught it and something under the surface moved, pale smoke that could not decide on a direction. He set it on the table with care, not like treasure, like a tool he did not want scratched.

“This is a Resonance Orb,” he said. “The church uses it to identify people. It reads mana through the skin and sets that reading against what we already know how to name. Human. Other. Things that should not be standing with our kind.”

The paladin’s glove flexed once and went still.

“King George died after pursuing a heretic,” the priest went on, as if I had not been in Elara’s office when he said it the first time. “We will not leave this estate half-read. Staff. Family. Anyone who still sleeps under this roof. The orb decides their fates. White is human. Anything else is a conversation we will have with Lady Elara after, not before.”

He turned the crystal a fraction toward me.

“Since you are already here, why don’t you do it as a test?”

There it was. Not a request. A courtesy laid over an order.

I asked the system what I was looking at before I moved.

[Item: Resonance Orb]

[Grade: A+]

[Function: Mana detection. Cross-reference against recorded racial signatures upon skin contact]

[Recorded signatures: Human (white) / Demi-human (red) / Unregistered (black)]

[Note: Result can be stored. Result can be repeated]

[Bypass: Possible]

[Connect vessel to System? Y / N]

Of course it was.

I had done this before. Awakening orb back in Hector Town. Helped me a lot back then.

“As you wish,” I said.

I put my hand on the crystal under three sets of eyes.

Cold first, a bite along the palm. Then not. Mana crawled up my wrist like a thin needle looking for a name in the blood, poking at whatever I had become when I chose the evolution and woke up a word I still didn’t say out loud.

[Connect vessel to System?]

‘Yes.’

The needle turned. Whatever page the crystal wanted, the system slid a human one over it and held it there. White bloomed under my fingers, clean and dull, the color of every farmer and every steward and every man in Hesha who walked around with a stub. A depressing, ugly-looking stub.

The priest’s shoulders eased a fraction.

“Human,” he said. “You may take your hand away.”

I did. The white faded. I checked the window again, not the color on the glass.

[Vessel bound]

[Remote access: Active]

[Display override: Enabled without contact]

[Current signature: Human]

[Range: Undefined]

Mine even when I wasn’t touching it. That mattered more than the white. If they lined the estate up tomorrow, I did not need to stand beside every hand that landed on the stone. I only needed the override to stay awake.

“We will need the rest of the castle,” the priest said. “Tomorrow, if Lady Elara permits.”

“Of course it is possible,” I said. “But we would have to inform Grand Lady Elara first.”

I meant it for more than courtesy.

Nobody related to me had shown an awakening the church would put on a ledger. That didn’t mean the danger was nil. Tara had reacted to the Julian bloodline when I had fucked her in her ass. A reaction only, but who knows what it could do?

Rayla had something in her I still couldn’t name, older than the bloodline and quieter, sitting under the same skin that had raised this body. If the crystal were honest, honesty would be the last thing I would want near either of them.

We took it to Elara.

She was back behind the desk. Valeria was not in the room. The couch had been cleared. Elara listened to the priest say *test* and *all who live under this roof* without blinking, then looked at me once, briefly, as if to confirm whether the most dangerous step had been crossed or not, and then nodded.

“You will not frighten my people,” she said. “If you wish to put your hands on my people, you need to make up a good story.”

The priest accepted that faster than I liked.

“A blessing, then. The orb reads the goddess’s favor as readily as it reads a stain. I will speak the rite. Those who come will believe they are being marked clean.”

“It will take mana,” Elara said.

“Yes. High-grade potions will cover some of it. Not all. So it may take a few days.”

“A week,” Elara said, giving a strict timeline.

“A week? While it is not usually possible, if I tire, Sister Anne will continue the rite.”

The nun inclined her head. At least now we knew her name. Which I was sure wasn’t hers.

That was that. The cover story had been drafted, and a strict timeline had been given.

“I want you out of my house after a week then,” Elara said without caring a slight bit for their feelings.

“We will make sure to be done by then.” The priest took no offense, although the paladin seemed like he was ready to tell Elara off. Yeah, not a good idea if he wanted to die so young. The priest understood that, which was probably why he gave him a sharp look.

Elara dismissed them the way she dismissed weather. Everything was left up to me, to arrange all of this, with other servants. The rest of the day went by trying to set up arrangements. Where the ritual would be taking place, and the order. The church’s lot accompanied me throughout the day though, even though I said it wasn’t necessary. Still, they insisted, and I didn’t overly insist on my side. No need to make them suspicious needlessly, after all.

The day ended, and I escorted everyone back to their rooms.

The paladin went into his own room this time. The priest followed after a short word I didn’t need. The nun kept walking to the last room in the row, the one with the narrower door.

Day was already thinning in the corridor. Lamps not yet lit. Her robe picked up what light there was and still could not hide what it was sitting on.

I had looked once in the office.

I looked properly now.

~~

Let me know if there are any problems. P.S: I'll be taking Sundays off to work on my website.