Vincent threw himself backwards off the sofa, and the fireball hit the cushion and dissolved into nothing.
More fireballs followed before he could make sense of it — coming from different angles, in quick succession. He grabbed a nearby chair and flung it into the path of most of them, then sprinted for the door while he had the opening.
"This woman said the island was perfectly safe. I haven't even left the bedroom and I'm already being attacked."
He ran down a corridor of inlaid jade, turned sharply at the end, and emerged at the top of a staircase leading down into the main hall. The wall directly opposite stopped him for a moment — a massive mural, a man on horseback with a sceptre in hand. Emperor Roselle, unmistakably.
The whole space looked more like a small museum than a home. Objects that radiated value in every direction. He didn't have time to be impressed by Bernadette's wealth — another wave of heat prickled at his back.
He twisted aside. And this time, he got a look at whatever was attacking him.
It was palm-sized. Translucent. Roughly sprite-shaped. And it was hurling burning scrolls at him with the desperation of something that had been at this for a while.
The Invisible Servant had, by now, worked through nearly its entire supply. It looked down at the last scroll in its possession, at something of a loss.
Its orders had been clear: the moment the Queen appeared to be "acting strangely," apply the scrolls immediately. Bernadette had even given it a dozen, accounting for imprecision.
Not one had landed.
It watched the Queen sprint toward the castle gate, registered belatedly that it could travel through the spirit realm, blinked into it, and stepped back out directly in her path. The last scroll ignited and flew.
Got one!
It had barely begun to feel pleased when a pale hand closed around its face, squeezed, and drove it into the floor with considerable force.
Crack.
It bounced. Vincent followed up with a kick.
The Invisible Servant fled into the spirit realm in sheer terror.
Vincent's foot connected with empty air. He over-rotated and nearly went face-first into the ground.
"Squeak!! Squeak!!!"
The creature reappeared several meters away and launched into a flood of indignant squeaking. It wasn't articulate, exactly — the intelligence wasn't quite there — but the general meaning came through in fragments:
I... Invisible Servant... most loyal... to the Queen...
Everything I did... Queen's orders...
Queen grabs me... throws me... tries to kick me... I... sad...
Right.
Listening to that small, aggrieved voice — and looking at the scrolls it had been firing — Vincent pieced together what had happened.
It wasn't entirely Bernadette's fault for not mentioning it. Or rather, it probably was deliberate. She'd wanted this creature watching him from the shadows.
He understood the logic. He'd considered setting up security cameras himself.
She'd just overestimated its operational competence. It had blown its own cover immediately.
"Come here."
He beckoned. "What I did just now — that was... a kind of magical fit. You understand? Consciousness disrupted, couldn't tell friend from foe. Completely out of my control."
"All better now."
"Squeak?"
The Invisible Servant tilted its head, deliberated for a few seconds, then slipped through the spirit realm and emerged in front of him.
"So that's what spirit realm travel looks like in this world."
Vincent watched with genuine interest. In the Apprentice pathway, that ability only came at Sequence 5. For other pathways it generally required demigod or angel rank — and some pathways couldn't do it at all.
Yet here was this creature, apparently born with it as a given.
If the ancient magic worked here... and if he absorbed its soul...
He was looking at the Invisible Servant. Eyes narrowed slightly. Chin tilted.
"Squeak?"
A beat.
"SQUEAK!!!"
It screamed, bolted into the spirit realm, and vanished.
"..."
I was just thinking about it. Was that really necessary?
He shook his head and walked through the open doors of the main hall into the dim courtyard outside. In the red moonlight, and the glow spilling from the castle behind him, he saw that the broad plaza before him was also built of deep green jade.
He stopped at the centre of it and looked back.
"I thought Emerald City was just a name."
It really was all jade.
A shame. In this world, jade wasn't particularly valuable — otherwise selling this castle off piece by piece would have made someone richer than most nations. Then again, if jade had been valuable, Bernadette probably couldn't have collected enough of it to build the castle in the first place.
He wandered to the edge of the plaza and looked out over the island, and then further — the vast, dark sea in every direction.
Somewhere out there, tens or hundreds of kilometers of open water, and nothing else. Just him and the ocean.
He felt a quiet unease. Maybe something closer to fear.
People were social creatures, more or less. He genuinely couldn't understand why Bernadette had chosen to put a home here. Did ascending to demigod change something fundamental — make solitude feel natural rather than wrong?
The salt wind was cold and damp. He pulled his arms in, turned, and walked quickly back inside.
"Hey. Little one. Are you there?"
No response. It had apparently been genuinely frightened.
He made his way back to the room he'd started in, lay down on the bed for a while, and found he wasn't tired enough to sleep. He picked up one of the books Bernadette had left — an Old Hermes grammar — and started working through it.
In Lord of the Mysteries, a significant number of supernatural abilities drew on this language. If he was going to be stuck here for three days, he might as well use the time.
He hated studying.
At some point, without noticing when, he fell asleep with the book open.
When he woke, the room was full of bright golden morning light. The red moon had given way to sun, and it turned the jade of Emerald City into something that shimmered.
A beautiful morning. Which began in the bathroom.
He was about to stand up from the jade toilet when Bernadette's final note surfaced in his memory. His expression did something complicated. He reached for the paper on the side.
"...This is what you asked for."
He leaned forward, and applied it carefully.
"This feels... very strange."
The Harry Potter World. 16 Privet Drive.
Bernadette had been in the house for three full days without setting foot outside, exactly as the recording had asked.
In that time she'd gone through every tape Chen Yuan had left her — the learning materials more than anything — watching them over and over. As a demigod of the Seer pathway, her learning capacity was well beyond the ordinary range. A few passes through the tapes and she had the basics of English conversation. After that she'd moved to the dictionary and grammar book he'd left alongside.
Progress on those was slower. The bone whistle gave her the ability to understand, but not to read — the tapes had taught her to recognise a limited number of words in written form, and self-teaching from a dictionary with that as a base was slow going.
"It seems the fastest way to actually learn this language is to find someone to read aloud to me — words, phrases, grammar."
But the man had told her not to go out.
She didn't have to follow his instructions to the letter, strictly speaking. But even if she went out — where would she find someone to teach her?
To be continued…