The silence in the safehouse was a constant, oppressive presence, a tangible reminder of the city's condition.
Elias ignored the protests of his body, the throbbing in his head, and plunged into research. Sleep was a luxury he couldn't afford.
He needed to understand what had happened, not just that it had happened. What was this Oblivion effect? How did it work? Was it permanent?
His immediate focus was the faint trace of 'null' energy permeating his wards. It was the only direct sample of the effect he could safely interact with.
He set up a high-sensitivity resonance meter, isolating the subtle pressure from the outside, attempting to measure its frequency, its composition, its very nature. The readings were frustratingly abstract.
It wasn't energy vibrating at a frequency; it was the absence of vibration, a flatline that somehow exerted pressure. His tools struggled to quantify it, like trying to measure silence with a sound meter.
It felt less like a magical frequency and more like a fundamental property, like cold or darkness, applied to emotional and psychic resonance.
He theorized rapidly: Was it a massive dampening field, suppressing emotional wavelengths? Or something that had actively erased the capacity for emotion within living beings in its radius? The behavior of the people he'd seen suggested the latter – not just suppressed, but absent.
He turned to the contained objects, the trophies of his race across the city. The music box, the locket, the courthouse model, the Split Handshake.
They sat silently in their shielded pouches, their curses inert, but they were artifacts of the process. He placed the music box on the analysis table, then the locket beside it.
He focused on their binding patterns, their residual energy signatures, the faint traces of the Architect's cool-blue magic still clinging to them.
He revisited the shared harmonic frequency that linked them. It pulsed faintly within the contained energy, a low, resonant tone distinct from the curses themselves.
He ran a comparative analysis between this harmonic and the 'null' energy permeating his wards. There was a complex, abstract relationship – a mathematical or structural opposition, like a mirror image or an inverse function.
The shared harmonic wasn't just a link; it might be the antithesis of the Oblivion nullity. A counter-frequency? A key to generating the opposite of the null effect?
This suggested a terrifying hypothesis. The harvested emotions weren't just fuel; they were the medium for the nullification.
The Architect had distilled aggression, despair, betrayal (and possibly others), blended them into a specific, potent mix, and used the Oblivion sphere to broadcast a 'null' frequency calibrated to cancel out or smooth over the complex, vibrant 'noise' of human emotional resonance.
The shared harmonic was perhaps the 'fingerprint' of this specific emotional blend.
He needed to see if the effect was truly uniform across the city. Risking detection, he powered up a few key nodes in his external sensor network – discreet magical sensors hidden in mundane objects in different districts.
He focused them on reading general emotional/psychic energy levels and detecting the 'null' frequency.
The readings came back chillingly consistent: emotional resonance levels were critically low across the board, and the 'null' frequency was detected everywhere, a uniform blanket draped over the city.
Powering the sensors caused no immediate reaction in the silent streets below, but the sensors themselves seemed to report their data with a strange, almost imperceptible lag, as if the 'null' was interfering even with simple magical transmission.
The research was a painstaking, frustrating process. His databases contained no entry for a city-wide emotional nullification field. Magical theory touched on resonance cancellation and emotional manipulation, but never on this scale, never resulting in this profound absence.
His tools, designed for analyzing specific curses, struggled to get a handle on this pervasive, abstract phenomenon. His headache was a constant, grinding distraction, and the psychological weight of knowing the city outside was trapped in this state pressed down on him, a form of despair he had to actively fight against, even within his wards.
He was hitting dead ends, theoretical walls. How do you reverse an absence? How do you introduce emotion back into millions of people? Was it a temporary field that would dissipate? Or had the capacity for emotion been fundamentally altered, requiring a more drastic intervention?
The isolation was a heavy burden. There was no magical council to report to, no network of Curators he could call for help. His job had always been solitary, but this crisis demanded a collective effort, a knowledge base far greater than his own.
Yet, he was the only one who knew, the only one who could potentially piece together the solution.
A glimmer of possibility flickered in the overwhelming darkness of the problem. If the shared harmonic was indeed the opposite of the 'null' frequency, then perhaps generating a massive, city-wide pulse of that harmonic frequency could act as a counter-signal, a restorative vibration.
But he didn't know the exact composition of the emotional blend used to create the nullity, and generating a city-wide magical pulse was something far beyond his capabilities and resources.
He needed to understand the Architect's formula. The specific mix of harvested emotions. Aggression, Despair, Betrayal... what else? And in what proportions? This information might be embedded within the contained objects, within the very emotional residues they held.
The thought was daunting. Analyzing the raw, contained emotional energy of powerful cursed objects was dangerous work. It required direct exposure, filtering the overwhelming feelings through his own consciousness to understand their composition, risking psychological backlash or worse.
He had always done it with extreme caution, in small doses. Now, he needed to understand the entire blend used to silence a city.
But it seemed like the only path forward. The contained objects held the recipe for the poison. Perhaps they also held the key to the cure.
He looked at the contained objects on his table. He took a deep breath, the quiet air of the lab filling his lungs.
He had to do it. He had to analyze the harvested emotions, understand the Architects formula, and find out if a counter-frequency could be created, amplified, and broadcast on a scale large enough to wake the city from its terrifying, silent slumber.
The daunting task of becoming an emotional alchemist for a city of millions began now, alone in his warded lab.