AP CH5
“Ah… I can’t go on like this anymore…”
Sitting in the garden, Huai Shi looked utterly disheveled and pale. Just thinking about the past two days made him raise his head and howl in despair, tears streaming down his face.
This wasn’t merely the threat of going bankrupt anymore. First, he’d been caught secretly interviewing to become a host, ruining what little reputation he had left in a single day. Then he had stumbled upon a dead body for no reason at all, gotten dragged off at gunpoint into some strange secret government agency, and finally, his spirit had suffered a crushing blow…
Inside and out, from his mind to his wallet, there was nothing left to bear such bitter and painful misery.
Especially when he saw the latest entry in that wretched book—it made him want to die every time he looked at it. And as luck would have it, he was so poor he couldn’t even afford a rope to hang himself with. The gas supply had been cut off for half a year now.
No way to die, no way to live.
“Might as well just drop dead already!”
He threw the notebook aside in a fit of powerless rage, tears like a panda’s staining his cheeks. When his tantrum finally ended and the tears dried up, he obediently picked the notebook back up, wiped the dirt off carefully, and sighed as he stared blankly at the bare garden again.
It would pass, Huai Shi. It would pass… Maybe after a while, he’d forget all about this?
He silently prayed in his heart and then frowned again, worrying about where to earn his next living expense.
…
…
“If you could really think like that, it’d be nice. But if you count the time carefully… those guys should be setting their sights on you by now…”
He heard a strange voice beside him. It sounded like a woman’s—husky, sultry, with a faint trace of mockery. She said, “Little fellow, you’re going to die soon.”
“You’re the one who’s going to die!”
Huai Shi snapped back, turning around with a glare—only to freeze on the spot.
There was no one beside him.
This was his own backyard. No one ever came here, let alone someone suddenly talking to him out of nowhere.
Then who was speaking?
He saw a crow perched lazily on the fence, grooming its wings.
“Don’t just stand there, yeah, I’m talking to you.”
While Huai Shi stared dumbfounded, the crow opened its beak and spoke calmly: “Yes, it’s the crow talking to you. You’re not dreaming.”
As it spoke, it even let out what sounded like a satisfied little burp.
“You can talk?!”
Huai Shi gasped in shock, then suddenly snapped to alertness. “Wait—that’s not right! What the hell are you?!”
The crow chuckled softly, its tone becoming strangely teasing and aggrieved. “Wow, and here I thought you used to stare at me every day like I was your little darling. Now you’re calling me some ‘thing’?”
“Y-you—you… you’re that damn book?!”
Huai Shi finally realized and flipped open the notebook. On the title page… the silhouette of a crow was gone. As if the bird had really flown out of the pages and come to life.
“More or less.”
The crow sighed and glanced at the notebook in his arms. “Though we’re both remnants, the me standing here now is just a fragment of the record from that book.
But if you think I’m the ‘Heaven’ itself, then that’s just ridiculous.”
It said things Huai Shi didn’t understand. Then its tone changed, and its crimson eyes fixed on him:
“But that’s not important. The real question is—”
“—do you really think I was lying to you just now?”
It asked softly, “Those records of the dead—didn’t you experience every one of them yourself?”
Huai Shi shuddered instinctively at the thought of the endless nightmares he’d suffered through the previous night. His voice grew dry. “They’re… really all dead?”
“Oh, yes.”
The crow nodded. “Everyone who saw that box—except for you—is already dead.
There were a lot of fine things in there. After so many years of slumber, it finally managed to gather a great amount of Source material. Messy, yes, but still enough for what… eight or nine hundred souls, maybe?”
It smacked its beak contentedly, casting a delighted look at Huai Shi. “Considering the little gift you received just by looking at it, need me to help you, boy?”
…
…
“Forty grams of copper, fifty-seven grams of silver, twelve grams of powdered tin… One crucible, one gas burner. The leftover lead block—he threw that in for free…”
By evening, after running around town the whole day, Huai Shi finally returned home. He dumped the plastic bags onto the table, grabbed the bottle of mineral water leftover from the day before, and downed it in huge gulps—not caring at all whether it was still clean or healthy.
“My credit cards are maxed out, my loans are drained, I’m buried in debt—and I spent the last of my cash on this junk. What the hell is the point?”
“Alchemy, of course.”
The crow preened its feathers and said calmly, “Creating a Stigma usable by someone like you, an ordinary person, isn’t exactly easy, you know.”
“Stigma?” Huai Shi snorted. “What, you want me to become some acrobatic janitor flying through the sky?”
“What’s that, some modern joke?”
“No, just a scam from trashy game companies.”
Thinking of the classmates who spent five or six thousand—or even thirty or forty thousand—on gacha games, Huai Shi felt bitter envy welling up from the depths of his soul.
“But this is different, Huai Shi. Although the name’s the same, the Stigma I speak of is not such a laughable thing.”
The crow patiently explained, “If the essence of an Ascender’s soul is the embryo of divine authority, then the Stigma is the product born from analyzing the remnants of godly legacies.
By tracing the leftover traces of miracles to seek a path toward the divine, imitating gods, and investigating their authority and lingering marks—this process of research is what gives birth to the existence of a Stigma. Through rituals of metals and incense, we mimic vast miracles to create small ones.
This is the Stigma.”
“…God?”
Huai Shi was stunned. “Do gods truly exist in this world?”
“There once were.”
The crow fell silent for a moment. “But they’re all dead now. Things abandoned by the times hold no weight in the world today. Soon, they may not even be worth remembering.”
The crow clearly didn’t want to dwell on the subject and simply urged Huai Shi to set up the crucible and begin the refinement as soon as possible.
“Are these materials really enough?”
Once the fire was hot enough, Huai Shi, following the crow’s instructions, put on a mask and carefully ground the lead into powder, mixing it with a few drops of his own blood. He then meticulously inscribed unfamiliar runes onto a sheet of thinly pressed metal. The patterns were simple but demanded absolute precision.
The crow’s eye for detail was terrifying. Even the slightest mistake meant wiping it clean and starting over—again and again—until Huai Shi had wasted who knows how many cc’s of blood before the task was finally complete.
“These are only auxiliary materials. Even the simplest stigma cannot be forged by ordinary fire or mundane metal. What we’re making now is just the crudest, most temporary emergency tool. In the future, when you craft higher-level stigmata, you’ll even need phantom beast blood… and many sacrifices… maybe even—”
It paused, saying no more.
“Rest ten minutes. Begin at exactly 11:15. Remember—there’s only one chance. If you miss it… well, you probably don’t have the money to try again, do you?”
Mentioning money made Huai Shi even more nervous. He gripped the notebook tightly, rehearsing the crow’s dictated steps over and over in his mind.
Meanwhile, the crow stood silently beside the crucible, gazing into the flames.
In a blink, the crimson fire turned pure white. Streams of light surfaced from within, brilliant and dazzling.
But the crow’s form was growing fainter.
“What’s that?” Huai Shi asked.
“Source matter. The ignited source matter.” The crow glanced at him and explained before he could ask more. “Source matter is the substance of souls, the spirit sealed within physical matter… you can think of it as fragments of the soul.
You lacked materials, so you had to make up for it with the flame itself. Now, every second burns away the equivalent of one human soul. Ah, don’t worry about the supply—this is all from the stockpile in that box.”
Huai Shi gulped. He didn’t know what to say.
What was even more terrifying than burning one soul per second… was that, according to the crow, that box contained the source matter of nearly a thousand people.
What the hell kind of box was that?
“Stop thinking about pointless things. It’s starting, Huai Shi.”
The crow gave him one last look. The lead inside the crucible was now fully molten, but instead of smelling foul or metallic, it gave off a faint golden glow under the pure white flame.
Like gold dust shimmering in ash-gray mist.
Huai Shi snapped back to focus, grabbed the materials laid out in order, and dropped them into the crucible one by one. First tin, then copper, and finally silver…
Each time a metal was added, the molten solution absorbed it instantly without even a ripple.
The pure white flames surged. Streams of light were greedily sucked into the crucible. A violent flash made Huai Shi’s eyes sting.
And in that final moment, he heard the crow sigh.
“Let’s hope this time, the gamble pays off, Huai Shi.”
Softly murmuring, its form—now thin as a phantom—suddenly spread its wings, leapt into the air, and dove into the crucible.
Boom!
With a low, deep sound, the fire went out. Mist rose from the crucible, swirling in complex patterns before slowly collapsing inward.
As Huai Shi stared in stunned silence, something began to solidify and gently floated down from the air.
A feather.
A metallic feather.
It was like a feather cast in pure silver, every barb perfectly shaped, flawless. Light flowed across its mirror-like surface, reflecting the world with strange, flickering images.
The feather landed softly in Huai Shi’s palm.
“This is now my true form—a non-sequence special stigma: Branch of Events.”
The crow’s weary voice sounded in his ear. “With that notebook and Branch of Events, even before the coming chaos, you’re qualified to serve as a reserve recordkeeper.”
Huai Shi stared at the thick notebook in his other hand, its pages fluttering on their own, filled with swirling words—as if he were gazing into another self, one recorded in pure text.
“Just what… is this thing?”
“Well… you could call it Heaven’s last shadow upon this world.” The crow sighed softly. “You might as well call it… the Book of Destiny.”
At that moment, the endless flowing text gathered together. The silhouette of the crow on the title page vanished, and new lines of words appeared:
Huai Shi (Stress Phase)
Title: None
Stigma: None
Divine Mark: None
Skills Possessed:
General Knowledge LV3
Art: Cello Performance LV6
Death Premonition LV0
“See? Now you’ve been acknowledged as its rightful master,” the crow said wearily. “As for how to use it… figure that out yourself. I need to sleep for a while…”
“Wait—‘Death Premonition’? What the hell is that? Why is it so vague?”
Huai Shi squinted at the page until he could make out the nearly transparent words.
“It’s literally a sense for death. After dying dozens of times in a row, you start to pick up a knack for it, right? The fact that it’s so faint means you’ve just barely gotten started—not yet a real skill. Still… LV6 in cello? You might be a genius after all…”
Its voice faded… then fell completely silent.
It really seemed to have fallen asleep.
Only the dumbfounded Huai Shi remained, holding his pen and notebook, completely at a loss.
Yet with the pen called Branch of Events in his hand, knowledge of its functions flowed naturally into his mind—besides manipulating text-based objects, its main feature was the ability to write in the air, freely changing color…
“Well… at least I’ll save on printing costs for flyers in the future…”
Huai Shi forced a bitter smile and glanced at the pen, then back at the book. After carefully flipping through it, he found nothing new—except at the very back, where several files faintly glowed.
Huai Shi hesitated, then raised the pen and touched one.
In an instant, brilliant light burst from the pages.
The light swallowed him whole.