Just as Lein felt he was about to lose his mind, his spirits suddenly lifted.
The strange sensations that had plagued him for who knows how long—the bizarre colors seeping from the gaps in the diary’s text, the things hidden between words that seemed to be watching him—all vanished in an instant.
His eyeballs no longer ached, his vision was no longer blurred, and the lingering dizziness in his head dissipated completely.
That thing controlling him had saved him?
Lein couldn’t be sure.
That entity never communicated with him, only silently manipulated his body and sight.
But what had just happened was too bizarre.
Without external intervention, he couldn’t imagine being able to escape that state on his own.
He looked down at the diary in his hands.
Heber Rost’s handwriting was still scrawled, the pages still yellowed and brittle.
But he noticed that the content on certain pages seemed different than before.
It wasn’t that the handwriting had changed, but that something had been added.
Between the paragraphs he had read over and over countless times, several passages of text he had never seen before had now appeared.
The ink was darker than the surrounding content, as if it had been written recently.
Lein stared at those new paragraphs, his brow slowly furrowing.
He wasn’t sure if he had previously overlooked this content, or if it had truly materialized out of thin air before his eyes.
Considering the experience that had nearly driven him insane moments ago, he leaned toward the latter.
But his body didn’t give him time to think.
That familiar force took control of his hands again, forcing him to turn the pages and lock his gaze onto those newly appeared passages.
Lein could only read.
The new content matched the record-keeping style of the earlier sections—still field notes on local folklore and legends.
But the difference was that these paragraphs were marked with explicit dates and locations, much more specific than the vague accounts before.
Heber Rost recorded in his diary three trips to Moerlaike.
According to the diary, Moerlaike was a historic town located in the Northern Colony.
It sat in a narrow valley surrounded by mountains, isolated by dense forests and jagged rocky ridges.
Due to its remote location and poor transportation, the locals had extremely limited contact with the outside world, and as a result, a large number of ancient folk customs and bizarre legends had been preserved.
Heber Rost heard fragments about this place during an expedition and decided to visit in person.
On his first visit, Heber Rost stayed only four days.
From the moment he stepped into town, the locals regarded him with near-hostile vigilance.
No one was willing to offer him lodging, and he had to rent a room at double the price in a run-down inn on the edge of town.
On the first night at the inn, Heber Rost encountered something strange.
Regarding that incident, he left only one sentence in his diary: “What happened that night, I am unable to record, nor do I intend to record.”
After that, there was a large blank space, as if the writer could no longer continue after putting down the pen.
This visit yielded almost nothing.
The locals refused to answer any of his questions, and the few willing to speak only gave vague, ambiguous remarks.
The diary mentioned an old woman who mysteriously told him, “The light remembers what the earth has forgotten,” but no matter how Heber Rost pressed, she would not say another word.
Four days later, Heber Rost left Moerlaike.
The second visit occurred ten years later.
This time, Heber Rost came fully prepared.
He brought a cartload of goods that were scarce in the Northlands—fine woven fabrics, metal tools, spices, glassware, and more.
Upon arrival, he generously distributed these items to the town’s residents.
The gifts achieved what words could not.
Over the following weeks, the locals’ attitude toward him gradually softened, and the once-shut doors and windows began to open.
From the elderly in the town, Heber Rost learned that the residents of Moerlaike had for generations worshipped something they called the Falling Light.
According to local legend, in a distant age before the town was established, a burning star fell from the sky and plunged deep into the valley.
That star never went out, but continued to emit light from beneath the earth—a light of shifting colors, not of this world.
The first settlers discovered it and revered it as a deity.
Around this undying star, the locals developed a complete system of beliefs and regularly held rituals.
But when Heber Rost tried to learn the specifics of these rituals, no matter how he probed indirectly or applied pressure, the old people remained tight-lipped.
The town’s eldest elder bluntly told him, “Some things are not meant for outsiders to know.”
Heber Rost wrote in his diary that these people’s silence was not born of ignorance.
They knew exactly what they were guarding; they simply chose to remain silent.
The third visit occurred a year after the second.
But this time, Moerlaike no longer existed.
A geological disaster tore a giant crater in the center of the town.
It was said to be caused by a massive collapse of underground limestone caves.
Houses, streets, and plazas were swallowed within hours, and the entire town vanished completely from the surface.
Heber Rost later learned that such incidents were not uncommon in the Northlands.
The area was riddled with underground caves and underground rivers, making the geological structure highly unstable, and collapses could happen at any time.
He eventually tracked down some survivors of Moerlaike, almost all of them young people.
They told him that before the disaster struck, many signs had appeared in the town: cracks in the ground, strange noises from the walls, abnormal migrations of animals.
But the elderly refused to leave, claiming that abandoning their homeland would bring even greater calamity.
In the end, only the young people who didn’t take the warnings seriously left on their own, saving their lives.
Heber Rost used a considerable sum of money to buy the answers he had sought for years from these survivors.
The mysterious ritual he had been trying to understand for so long.
The survivors’ memories were fragmented, mostly from childhood hearsay and whispered gossip, but pieced together they formed a roughly complete picture.
Lein’s eyes fell to the next line, and he unconsciously recited it in his mind.
“The specific steps of the ritual are as follows—”
“Prepare a book that has not yet been read and whose content is unknown.
Under lamplight, read it through from beginning to end without any pause or interruption.
Then, use a candle flame to burn the book, and consume the remaining ashes.
Immediately after, begin transcribing the entire book from memory, writing from the first word of the first page to the last word of the last page, without making a single error.
The entire process must be carried out with full concentration and alertness.
Repeat this three times, and the ritual is complete.”
Adeline finished reading the description of this card, named [Primordial Ritual: Secret in Candlelight], and thought it was quite complicated.