The Thirteenth Seat of the Rounds
"Bring me 32,768 treasure chests, and I'll take you with me."
In practice, it was a way of saying she had no intention of taking her at all. Ekaterina, who had no idea what a treasure chest even was, only tilted her head. What a pitiful little creature.
A moment later Lupin dropped into a crouch, bringing herself down to the other woman's level.
"Guess I've got to kindly explain it for the newbie again. Listen carefully. A treasure chest, you see, is a box, a casket, a chest — something with all sorts of treasures stuffed inside. You with me so far?"
"Uh. Yeah… I mean…"
"And those are hidden all over the world. You understand that part too?"
"Hidden… you say?"
"Anyway, they're hidden. Think it over carefully, Ekaterina. You'll land on the answer soon enough."
Lupin rose with a thoroughly satisfied look. Ekaterina remained face-down on the ground, as if sunk deep in thought. Yegor, who had been watching, came over and muttered.
"That's enough. She's not going to understand no matter how you put it."
As if Lupin didn't already know that. The woman simply wouldn't stop clinging, so she'd had no choice but to hand her a task that could never be completed.
"I was just telling her to give up. In a roundabout way."
"In that respect, you've become needlessly aristocratic."
Lupin understood nobles as people talented at talking in circles and scraping a profit out of every direction, so the remark landed on her like praise for a splendid achievement.
"Then shall we go get some food? I threw my body around all of a sudden, and I'm starting to get hungry."
"We'll have to wait until Klein comes back. We can hardly leave her here alone."
"That's not really a problem. The dove's keeping a perfectly good watch."
As she said it, Lupin remembered a fine idea she'd forgotten — sticking a dove on Ekaterina, the same way she'd done with Klein. Let a dangerous beast like that wander free, and it was obvious she'd come sneaking back to yank someone's pants off. Fail to prepare in advance, and Lupin might well end up swinging a sword without so much as a pair of panties on.
She was just about to call down another dove when Yegor asked, looking puzzled.
"A dove is watching Klein?"
"Yup. Stick one on somebody with aura, and it follows them around and reports where they are."
Yegor barely managed to stop his mouth from falling open.
"A spirit carries out an order like that…?"
"Yeah. It listened pretty well."
Spirits, by nature, were immensely high-handed with humans. Beings of the spirit realm, keeping an ecosystem of their own — what would they stand to gain by taking an interest in the human world? There was, however, exactly one means of controlling them: the power bestowed by the stars. Aura. Before a truly vast quantity of aura, even a spirit could not so much as twitch.
"You're not running short on aura, are you?"
"I could still call down another two flocks of doves from here."
"That many…?"
But doing so required, quite literally, a staggering amount of aura. Unlike a simple order to attack, a higher-order command — recognize that person's unique aura the way one recognizes a fingerprint, and track them — demanded precisely that. Two flocks, plus two surveillance doves, amounted to the same thing as summoning a flock four times over.
If she'd been throwing aura around on that scale, I should at least have been able to feel that it existed…
And yet Yegor had stayed at Lupin's side for months, and as far as he could sense, she definitively had no aura. If a spirit obeyed her even so, there could be only one reason.
So she really was an Apostle of the Calamity Star…….
Lupin wielded a special power above aura itself — a power that only spirits, pure spirit-beings, could perceive.
Yegor pulled her off to one side and asked, his voice considerably sharper than usual. His expression was so grave that Lupin, for once, let herself be dragged along by the sleeve without a fight.
"How do you usually go about increasing your aura?"
"Increase? My aura? How?"
"You don't even know a basic method of aura cultivation?"
Lupin frowned. The look said, plain as day, why are you getting on my case?
"Somebody would've had to teach me for me to know."
"Then how do you use aura?"
"I snap my fingers, and the power just goes whoosh out of my body…?"
…She really is a Star Apostle.
Yegor barely managed to settle his pounding heart. He wanted to confirm just one more thing.
"Then follow my lead, and try aura cultivation once."
He sat cross-legged on a flat stone and rested both hands on his knees, palms turned toward the sky. Then he closed his eyes and began to explain at length.
"Aura taken in through food, water, and the skin gradually accumulates in the body. It circulates, and slowly it gathers in the heart. But not all aura does so. Some of it stays lodged deep in the skin, or in the organs, and never moves. Aura cultivation is the method of scraping together every bit of that neglected aura, sending it flowing along the entire network of blood vessels, adapting the flesh to aura, and expanding the heart's capacity to hold it."
Lupin didn't catch even half of it. It was a long explanation, for Yegor — which was itself a measure of how badly he'd been shaken.
"First comes the minor cycle: from the heart to the lungs, from the lungs back to the heart, then through the head, and home to the heart again. Once that's complete, you move on to the major cycle — spreading aura into every corner of the body, as carefully as if you were painting every vessel, and then drawing it back into the heart. When you draw aura inward, inhale. When you send it outward, exhale."
Anyway, wasn't he just telling her to pile aura up in her heart and spin it around and around? Not at all sure she had it right, Lupin crossed her legs and copied him. She drew in a great breath, then let it out long and slow. Hoooooo.
Nothing happened.
Lupin broke into a sunny smile.
"I don't get it!"
By then Yegor had finished the minor cycle. He nodded. Yes. She was a Star Apostle. With that, he accepted it.
If aura cultivation was the art of picking out only the sugar dissolved in sweet water and storing it in the heart, and if steadily increasing that store was how an Aura User grew and crossed into a higher realm… then Lupin's body was already something like a crystal, chemically hardened from nothing but extracted sugar. An absurdly hard piece of candy, to put it one way. Candy of such extreme concentration takes an age just to melt. Which was why spirits that had once received her life force as their price consumed no further life force for a fixed span of time.
"Are you aware that you yourself are a Star Apostle?"
"What's a Star Apostle?"
Lupin nearly launched into the subject of Big Sis Star, then bit the words back. That was a story only she knew. Big Bro Taechang and Big Sis Star — both of them beings only Lupin knew, and only Lupin could see. Say it out loud, and she'd be the weird one in a heartbeat. If she had to compare it to anything, it was no different from bringing up VTubers in front of a friend who actually had a social life.
That reaction left Yegor bewildered.
Why doesn't she have any awareness of it?
Every apostle who had descended upon the continent had known, with perfect clarity, that they were an agent of a Calamity Star. And the moment they turned against humankind, they ran wild like a train whose brakes had failed. Intelligent as they were, they laid meticulous, elaborate plans and advanced toward their aims one careful step at a time, and the result was always something akin to disaster.
The first apostle, Heaven-Slayer. She carried out slaughter upon slaughter, and right up until she was banished into a rift in the world, she left horrific wounds across the continent. Her goal had been to reduce the absolute number of human beings.
The second apostle, Hallowed Revel. Well over a hundred thousand saintesses followed him, forming a single vast den of wine and flesh, and because of it countless people lost wives and mothers, elder sisters and younger ones. His goal had been to bring down the balance of human society.
The third apostle, the Demon King. Shrewd as he was, he reached out to human powers that had stood in isolation and set human against human. His goal had been to shatter humankind's unity.
Then what, exactly, is Lupin….
But Lupin, all but confirmed as the fourth apostle, was nothing like the apostles who had come before. She had no grand cause. Wasn't she just some feral little beast, living hand to mouth on one treasure chest a day?
Feeling the weight of Yegor's long, level stare, Lupin shrugged.
"Why are you looking at me like that? Am I just that incredible? I mean, fair. This fine specimen here is the top one percent of all Aura Users. Perfectly worthy of respect. Is Star Apostle some kind of epithet made for someone like me? Feels a little soon to be receiving a title like that. Might even be embarrassing."
An idiot like this, an apostle. Drag her to the Imperial Astronomical Bureau and declare, this woman is an apostle, and it would be Yegor who got told to stop spouting nonsense.
Lupin, still preening, let her eyes fall half-shut and muttered.
"Hey. Why are you just staring? Hurry up and at least clap. This is getting awkward."
And what happened when Yegor actually clapped at a moment like this?
"Thank you! Thank you, my friends!"
She rejoiced, pure and simple. Like a child who knew nothing of the ways of the world. Vatslava, reading the room, clapped along — and now Lupin flushed outright and tipped her nose high toward the sky.
This…… was an apostle?
Whether she noticed their confusion or not, Lupin summoned a dove to keep watch on Ekaterina. For some reason the creature circled and circled her, and then, all at once, shot high into the air.
"Hey. Where's that one going?"
It was heading for a clock tower standing a short distance off. Lupin, who had been blankly watching it fly, elbowed Yegor.
"What's going on? It definitely recognized Ekaterina's aura, didn't it?"
His head was killing him, but as a vending machine of knowledge, Yegor still did his job.
"It means the one in front of us is a fake."
Lupin shot upright.
"Huh? This one was a clone too?"
"Think about it. She wields nine clones. How many forms have we actually seen so far?"
"Nine, right?"
"Right. So one's missing."
Missing? Nine clones ought to mean nine in view. The thought running through her head was written, unfiltered, across the blank look on Lupin's face.
Yegor sighed and muttered. He knew perfectly well that scolding an Apostle of the Calamity Star was forbidden — but a thinking person, faced with a fool who had gone too far, found that anger difficult to swallow.
"The main body calls nine clones, and the total is ten. Think. For once."
Lupin, turning his words over, gave a shiver — like someone stunned to discover a piece of foreshadowing planted at the very beginning of a story, the kind that only pays off around chapter five hundred.
"Whoa. I literally just got chills."
