135

Riding in his family's carriage all the way to the outskirts of Queens, Edward arrived at his destination just five minutes after eight o'clock.

It was the mansion purchased by Mr. Miller Carter, a new merchant in Beckland, but it was not where he lived. Although he had settled in Beckland, his new house was being renovated and was now hosting a dinner party to show his face in front of Beckland's middle and upper classes. I invited friends I knew well, and asked my friends to introduce newcomers to expand my network. When the new home is renovated, there will be an even bigger banquet.

The valet in the red vest, having confirmed his invitation, took the gift from the coachman's hand and led him through the front courtyard with the garden and pool to the main entrance of the house.

The coachman, who had kept his head down, drove the carriage to a hidden part of the street, and the smoke filled the air, and he disappeared with the carriage.

Edward Vaughn tucked the small glass bottle in his hand into his sleeve, rubbing the tip of his gold-encrusted cane, and walked slowly beside the manservant as he admired the gardens of the mansion. As soon as he entered the door, he saw a gentleman in a formal gown, with slightly white sideburns, deep nasolabial folds, and a pair of sharp blue eyes.

Presumably this is the initiator of tonight's feast, Mr. Miller Carter. Edward took the East Chester County wine he had brought from the manservant, handed it to the gentleman, smiled and pressed his chest to salute:

"Sorry to be a little late."

Mr. Carter, a serious old gentleman, took the red wine and replied with a smile: "It's okay, the banquet hasn't started yet." ”

"Your operas are all excellent, I have admired them for a long time, and I never imagined that I could invite you to a banquet."

"You've won a prize." Edward skillfully replied that in Rune, a subtle compliment to his master was an important social etiquette, and it was a slight departure from Intis's relatively blunt compliment, "I am glad to be friends with you from the east shore of the sea, and I am very fond of the scenery there." ”

Mr. Miller Carter was visibly very pleased with this, and the two talked about the customs of Jianhai County, and seemed to be happy with each other. Walking through the long corridor of about ten meters is the hall, and the banquet is about to begin. Mr. Carter had someone else to greet him, so he was sent to the floor to say goodbye and leave, and Edward glanced around the ballroom, took a light brown glass of pre-dinner champagne from the tray of a passing waiter, and savored it slowly against the wall.

Soon after, Mr. Carter returned to the hall where the banquet began, and the band played the first dance music. He was not in a hurry to find a dance partner, but slowly looked at the long table, trying to find a few foods of interest to him. At that moment, he felt something subtle coming from behind him.

"Good evening, Mr. Vaughn, when did you come?"

Edward, a young man who often accosted him at the Kragg Club and was very energetic, quickly flashed through his mind with this string of adjectives and pointed to a specific term, Talim.

Edward turned slowly, feeling the chill on his face, and he saw Talim with a smile on his face, and he saw the hideous black cobra that wrapped Talim tightly around and hissed and spitted letters. The snake's tail pierced through his clothes and embedded in his left chest, as if it had come out of Talim's heart.

The demon and the serpent stared at each other for half a second.

"I just arrived." He replied, and very abruptly, he asked, "You seem to have had a lot of luck lately?" ”

Did you provoke a witch? He didn't look at the toothy cobra again, and speculated with interest in his heart that the curse was not difficult to remove, but it was very interesting to investigate. Talim was a young man of good manners, a descendant of the nobility, who was well regarded in the middle and upper classes, and he had been working normally at the club lately, and there were no rumors of him being in love with a woman. But the curse was on him, and it was a curse that could take his life at any time, and would not cause any damage to his body, and he would fall suddenly, as if he had died of a heart attack, according to the wishes of the spell caster.

Why was a very normal aristocratic young man targeted by a witch like this? Edward glanced at Cobra again.

"Peach blossom luck? It seems to be a word invented by Russell the Great? ”

"Yes, it means that the opposite sex is very good." Edward took an unhurried sip of champagne and looked at the black serpent for another second before staggering his gaze, "How are you doing, Mr. Talim?" ”

Talim was stunned for a moment, then slightly vigilant, as if he had thought of something, thinking about when he had leaked the news. But he didn't see the clue from Edward's face, so he relaxed slightly, and laughed at himself: "I don't have peach blossom luck, I don't know where you saw it, if it's really like you said, it's okay to have a few beautiful and caring ladies in company." …… Alas, as for the beautiful lady, I have met one often lately, but I have also been tormented by her. ”

"It looks like you're not enjoying the beauty of your relationship."

"Romance? Don't talk nonsense! Talim hurriedly spoke, and the cobra wrapped around him lowered its head slightly, baring its fangs, as if looking for a place to get its mouth down. As long as its mouth opens, it can swallow the not-so-short Talim whole, "That girl has nothing to do with me, she is in love with a friend of mine, on the contrary, I sincerely wish her a smooth relationship and the two of them can live in harmony." ”

Edward shook the goblet in his hand slightly, and the meaningful expression on his face made Talim feel a little weak.

"Well, I see—" he teased in a whisper, "it's the one you spoke of earlier, and my advice is still to elope." ”

Talim's eyes widened suddenly.

"No, don't mention it!" He hurriedly leaned forward and lowered his voice, "I, I heard that you have been busy with the year-end opera commissions recently, can you tell us about the current progress of your work?" Yes, yes, I have some interesting anecdotes that I want to talk to you about. Yes, the last time I spoke to you about Mr. Miller Carter's mansion, I wanted to introduce you to Mr. Sherlock Moriarty, the brilliant detective who helped him solve the housing incident. ”

"The editorial office didn't allow me to publish the progress. However, the adaptation of the script has been completed, and the progress of the soundtrack is steady. ”

He tried his best to change the subject, and after talking for a while, he finally found a suitable topic, and the content and voice became normal. Edward had no intention of dancing for the first time, but standing in a daze was too eye-catching, and he simply followed the other party's meaning and asked as smoothly as he could: "I did have some friendship with Mr. Moriarty, but I haven't heard him say anything about it, do you know the details?" ”

136

“…… Mr. Moriarty, an experienced and excellent detective, first visited the basement of my house and found a large number of snakes gathered and came with a trained assistant to drive the snakes, only to have a collapse in the basement in the process, but fortunately none of them had an accident. ”

Klein made an excellent impression on Mr. Carter, and when he came to talk to the guests, he found that Talim and Edward were talking about it, and immediately jumped in to add some contacts to the wonderful Mr. Detective. When he mentioned these things, he was still a little embarrassed and happy: "It's good that I chose him, otherwise others may encounter accidents." ”

"It's amazing." "I knew he must be a great guy, and he was very skilled!" ”

"There's a big basement under your house......"

Unlike Talim, Edward whispered to himself in a puzzled tone, which Mr. Carter heard, but did not show surprise, as a playwright's surprise at something strange and mysterious.

So he nodded and added: "Yes, when I bought this house, Baron Pound didn't tell me, it was a surprise. ”

"Mr. Carter, I would like to take the liberty of asking a question." Edward pondered several times why there was a basement on the street that he had no impression, but to no avail, and asked Mr. Carter, "That is, after Detective Moriarty discovered the snake, you didn't go in to see it until the snake was over." And it collapsed at the end, didn't it? ”

He was going to say, "You didn't go in and take a look until it finally collapsed?" But after thinking about it, I chose a more tactful, gentle, and non-suggestive rhetorical question.

After all, he has a high opinion of Klein, and questioning it will be counterproductive.

"Yes." Miller Carter did not doubt him, and even agreed with him, "Mr. Moriarty immediately alerted me when he found out that there was a snake underneath, and I stopped sending servants to clean it up, reducing the possibility of their casualties." I later examined the basement, which was undoubtedly in disrepair and had indeed collapsed, and that Mr. Moriarty's appearance at the time was definitely not a fake, but a real disaster. ”

"I see." A slight smile tugged at the corner of Edward's lips, and he turned his head to forget about the invaluable answer.

While Talim and Miller Carter were enthusiastically exchanging more details about Mr. Moriarty, Edward squinted his eyes and glanced up, and the pitch-black cobra was suddenly enraged by the disdainful gaze, and opened a large mouth large enough to swallow Talim's head whole. The demon bared its teeth slightly, leaking half of the crazy filthy aura, and the invincible cobra was suddenly frightened, and suddenly retracted into Talim's heart.

Talim's expression froze, and the champagne slipped from his hand, rolled over the corner of Edward's coat, which was closest to him, and shattered on the ground. He gripped his heart with his hands in pain, unable to straighten up for several seconds.

The initiator stared indifferently at his back, bent by pain.

Mr. Carter was startled by the sound of glass shattering, but after only five seconds, Talim was standing up straight again. His face turned slightly pale, and he barely pulled out a smile: "I'm sorry, Mr. Carter, I was suddenly unwell just now, and now I'm better." Haha, maybe I really should have had a good rest lately. ”

Seeing that he was all right, the old gentleman breathed a sigh of relief and asked the servant to sweep the glass shards from the ground.

Later, when Edward made a timely request to go to the dressing room to change his clothes, Mr. Carter called a servant and asked him to take Edward to the rest area to take off his dirty coat and send it to be washed. Once in the single room, he picked out a bottle from his collection cabinet labeled "Esoteric Society-Mystic Master-Entity" and threw it to the ground.

The glass bottle turned into a puff of white smoke when it hit the ground, and a middle-aged man in ragged clothes who fell to his knees suddenly appeared in the single room. He shuddered for a moment, then stood up with his head down, his flesh and blood wriggling, and in the blink of an eye, he became another identical Edward Vaughn.

"You know what to do."

“…… Yes, master. ”

The demon ignored him, grabbed another bottle of "Abraham-Traveler-Soul", opened a door, and disappeared into the room.

137

Williams Street, 8 is the mansion that Miller Carter bought.

Through the door, Edward arrived in an instant. The owner of the house went to the banquet, and the unfinished house, which was guarded only by a few servants, was piled up with building materials in a messy garden. He walked into the garden as if no one was around, pushed open the door, and walked silently past the manservant who was napping in his chair, until at last he saw a handrail in the corner of the first floor, which had just been erected, and the paint had not yet dried.

Edward stood at the entrance to the underground and looked down, and he could clearly see that there was a small area inside, but within the scope of his spiritual intuition, this underground space did not exist.

Obscured?

Can you block the spirituality of angels? Only physical means can be discovered?

The seal of the true god?

What's underneath? Even if it is a seal with strong side effects, the church cannot be placed in a place where mortals may touch it.

With such doubts in mind, Edward walked down the stairs quietly, step by step. Instead of lights and candles, he saw that the basement had been initially renovated, with a few gas lamps installed, and the foothills were clean, but there was still some gravel and sand a few meters away that had not been cleaned up.

He walked down the gravel. Behind the rubble is a newly built wall.

"Behind this is the real sealing place."

Klein found out, but he chose to blow it up instead of telling anyone. Does it prove that he feels that the matter has been completely resolved and does not need the help of others? Did he stumble upon it himself, or did the mysterious organization he belonged to have him come and keep it secret? ”

Edward muttered to himself, and once again used the powers of a traveler to open a door here, and walked in, the large and small rubble piled up inside flew up, avoiding both sides, leaving a passage large enough for one person to walk.

"There are a lot of candlesticks ......"

"An Iron Throne? Even that...... No, two? The hand of authority and the black crown, Tudor and Trenthorst—ah, this is not the remnants of Solomon, the last United Nations where I came. ”

Edward was immediately disappointed to see the time when these historical artifacts were born, and he had never been to the tomb of the Black Emperors until now. Solomon's tomb had long since been found and destroyed, and Russell would not let him go.

He walked on until he came to the end of the gates, all of which were ajar and contained statues of the six gods. It had already been shattered in the explosion that covered it all, and it was all mutilated.

And the last one, the only room that was still closed, did have something behind it. Dark red blood seeped through the crack in the door below, and an eerie aura enveloped it. Edward glanced at it, stepped on it directly, walked to the door in a few steps, and tapped lightly with his fingers together.

Blood was pouring down from above the crack in the door - Edward felt a little aesthetically fatigued, as if he was watching an inferior horror movie. But he was the only one who thought so, and the eerie atmosphere, unidentified creatures, and blood everywhere were enough to scare any creature that had just arrived—lines of blood stagnated at line of sight with him in defiance of the laws of physics, and then coalesced to open a scarlet eye in the fist-sized mass of blood.

He looked at the big eye, and he couldn't figure out what the other was doing. Just as He was about to speak, a voice suddenly made his fists harden when he heard it from inside the door:

"Demons? The demon of Sequence 2 of the Jumping Alive? ”

"And the breath of a prisoner, you're still a prisoner in Sequence 2, snort, you can't be Fabuti who was crippled by my master, right?"

Edward's already unsmiling expression was accentuated by the gloomy light, and he gently popped the fist-sized eye and drew an inverted cross on the door.

"It's rude, so good at spraying, you must be an angel of war, it's better to see than to hear, you do have a lotus tongue."

His expression became subtle, implying three points of indifference, three parts of detachment, four points of confusion and "why do I always encounter these unplanned things", "I don't do it in the future when the real needs are really troublesome" He wiped the blood from his hands, threw the handkerchief directly into the pool of blood, turned and left.

TBC

——————

If you don't save this time, you won't be able to do it enough.

After a long time:

Medici: Yo, isn't this the great master of our backyard?

Decline:......

Medici: Why don't you speak? It's not boring to dig up the soil here.

Decay: I don't understand why you dare to provoke me if you can't beat me.

*Based on readers' feedback, I found that it would be easy to be misunderstood if I wrote some light-hearted little theater like ↑ at the end, so I decided not to write it in the future.