The bodies lay in the yard like discarded coats.
Rhine wiped his dagger on the grass and kept his breathing steady. He didn’t let himself relax—not with that curse sigil still burning in his mind, not with the notebook sitting in the shack like a beacon.
Lady Alvin hovered in the doorway, hands clenched. “You… you killed them.”
“They weren’t here to negotiate.” Rhine glanced at the red dress crumpled in the dirt. “They were here to drag the notebook away. And if I’m unlucky, to drag me with it.”
Lady Alvin shivered. “Then we have to leave.”
“We will.” Rhine looked back at her. “But first—we finish our deal.”
Her eyes flicked to the gray notebook on the table. “You still want to… kill me?”
Rhine didn’t look away. “That was the bargain. It’s still an option.”
A long silence.
He added, voice low, careful. “But there’s another way. One that doesn’t end with you dead.”
Lady Alvin’s expression tightened. “Another way?”
Rhine nodded once. “A second life.”
He’d already considered the simplest route: drag her to Doom Volcano and let the fire do what bullets couldn’t. But Doom Volcano sat far out on the sea routes. Even with a ship, the round trip would take months.
Rhine didn’t have months.
Not with every faction in the Endless Sea sniffing for Faraneer’s notes.
So he offered her the faster route—and the crueler one.
A ghost like her was anchored by obsession—unfinished love, unfinished grief, unfinished rage. That anchor kept her from dissolving… and kept her trapped.
In Gade’s notes and the gray book’s alchemical fragments, Rhine had found a method: Forget-Dust Powder.
A brutal mercy. A way to grind down the anchor.
“If you take it,” Rhine said, “it doesn’t just numb pain. It strips the obsession out of you. You stop clinging to the thing that keeps you here.”
Lady Alvin’s lips parted. “So I’ll forget my husband. My daughter.”
“Not everything.” Rhine chose his words. “But enough. The parts that chain you. You might keep a faint impression. A warmth. A shape. But the names… the promises… the memories you’ve been living on for fifty years… those are the first things the powder will eat.”
She went pale, even as a ghost.
Rhine continued anyway. “After that, we need a vessel. A body that’s died recently—fresh enough that the soul’s imprint hasn’t rotted away. Gade’s notes say within three days is safest.”
Lady Alvin stared at him like he’d grown gills. “You’re talking about buying a corpse.”
“I’m talking about giving you somewhere to stand.” Rhine’s tone stayed flat. “The world’s ugly. I didn’t write the rules. I’m just trying to use them.”
“And then?” she whispered.
“Then we do what Gade couldn’t.” Rhine tapped the notebook. “We bind your spirit into the body, reset the flesh with alchemy, and let you wake up. Alive. Breathing. Human again—at least in the ways that matter.”
Lady Alvin didn’t speak for a long time.
Rhine waited. He didn’t rush her. This wasn’t a contract. This was a choice.
Finally, her voice trembled. “If I accept… I’ll be alive… but I won’t be me.”
“You’ll be you,” Rhine said. “Just not the version of you that’s been trapped in this place.”
She lowered her eyes. “And if I refuse?”
“Then I find a way to kill you,” Rhine said. He didn’t soften it. “You get release. And the notebook stays with me.”
Lady Alvin’s shoulders sagged. For a heartbeat, she looked exactly like the woman she’d described—thirty-seven, mid-laugh, still believing the world made sense.
She whispered, “I don’t want to die.”
Rhine’s gaze sharpened. “That’s your answer?”
“It is.” She closed her eyes. “If forgetting them is the price of living… then maybe it’s mercy. Maybe it’s what I should’ve done fifty years ago instead of clinging until I turned into this.”
A pause.
“But…” Her voice caught. “Before I forget… I want to see them. Even once. My husband. And my daughter, if she’s alive.”
Rhine nodded. “We’ll do that.”
He didn’t add the rest out loud: and then we move fast, because the next wave will be worse.
He guided her toward the Dragon Pack. Lady Alvin eyed the leather bag like it was a predator.
“You can put… me… in there?”
“It’s not a prison,” Rhine said. “More like storage.”
“A storage… for a person.”
“For a ghost,” Rhine corrected. “Close enough.”
She hesitated, then drifted inside—and vanished as the Dragon Pack swallowed her presence. Rhine felt the weight shift, like a sigh settling into his shoulders.
He checked the yard one more time, then pulled out a small white cotton pouch.
The Demon’s Corpse Bag.
Rhine held it open over the bodies.
The bag twitched like a living thing. Then it gulped.
Flesh, bone, blood—everything vanished into the cloth mouth without a sound. When it finished, three dark drops condensed inside the pouch: inferior demon essence.
Rhine didn’t hesitate. He lit them on fire.
The essence sizzled, spat out a stench like burnt rot, and evaporated into nothing.
No bodies. No evidence. No trail.
“That’s… horrifying,” Lady Alvin’s muffled voice came from inside the pack.
“Yeah,” Rhine said. “It is.”
He grabbed every useful thing from the shack—books, instruments, reagents, notes, even the crystals powering the Wind-Mist Wall—and shoved it all into the newly expanded space.
Twenty cubic meters disappeared fast when you were looting an alchemist’s life.
That night, under the cover of darkness, Rhine returned to the abandoned Alvin estate and found the family cemetery behind the ruined castle.
He let Lady Alvin out.
She floated toward a single headstone like she’d been pulled by a hook. The moonlight caught her sapphire necklace, and for a second she looked almost solid.
She didn’t cry. Not at first.
She just stood there, motionless, as if she’d been saving all her words for fifty years and suddenly found none of them fit.
Rhine kept watch on the hill until the night turned cold and the wind started to taste like damp soil.
Near dawn, Lady Alvin finally returned, eyes calmer.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “For letting me… be there.”
Rhine nodded. “Next is your daughter.”
He put her back into the Dragon Pack, then used the remaining hours of the night the way he’d promised himself he would.
Fishing.
A thousand items. Books, vials, powders, tools, scraps of half-finished work. Rhine ran his rod through the pile until his eyes burned and his fingers went numb.
Most of what came up was junk. Filler. Dead ends.
But enough of it wasn’t.
Enough that, by sunrise, Rhine was grinning like a thief who’d found a vault door left ajar.
Woodshire’s capital was Selby—large enough to have records, banks, and plenty of people who wouldn’t notice one more stranger in a hat.
They reached the city by afternoon. Rhine rented a room at an inn, bolted the door, and spread a set of salvaged notes across the bed.
Among them was a recipe he’d lifted from Faraneer’s old alchemical records: a bloodline disguise potion.
It wasn’t perfect. It didn’t make you someone else. It made you unfamiliar. The kind of face people struggled to remember.
Perfect for moving through a city full of eyes.
Rhine brewed it right there in the rented room.
When he drank it, his cheekbones softened. His jaw narrowed. His skin tone shifted a shade. Even his eyes seemed to dull, as if someone had scraped the shine off them.
Lady Alvin watched with open-mouthed shock.
“You just… changed.”
“It’s a potion,” Rhine said, rolling his shoulders like he was breaking in new armor. “Alchemy works better than prayer sometimes.”
“And now?”
“Now I do something illegal,” Rhine said, deadpan.
He pulled a leather card case from his pocket—one he’d lifted earlier with a polite handshake and a smile.
A barrister’s license.
The owner’s name was Thomas. Young. Ambitious. The type who’d never notice a pickpocket until it mattered.
Rhine put on a professional expression and walked into Selby’s registry office like he belonged there.
He flashed the license. He asked for a file check. He spoke in the crisp, bored tone of a man doing paperwork for a client with too much money and too little patience.
Clerks, as always, feared paperwork more than sin.
After a half hour of rummaging, stamped forms, and reluctant approval, Rhine got what he needed.
Catherine Alvin—now remarried. New surname: Byrne.
Current residence: Goldlake Town, Bramble Street 71.
Goldlake sat east of Windrest City, on land controlled by House Moros.
Rhine folded the paper, tucked it away, and smiled like he’d won a hand of cards.
“All right,” he murmured. “Let’s go meet your daughter.