She was standing in the center of the Academy laboratory. At first there was nothing but white emptiness around. The silence was too heavy to bear. After a minute or two, Niji took a step. And one more. The sounds echoed, muffled around her. Niji cringed, feeling an invigorating draft blowing somewhere nearby.

Fuzzy outlines of objects began to gradually sharpen through the uncomfortable whiteness—mostly, empty desktops for alchemical experiments. The fog was slowly crawling along their surface, going down to the floor. This motion reminded of clouds streaming down the mountains at high altitude.

With slow and indecisive steps, Niji approached one of the desks and cautiously cleared it from the fog. The only item on the table was a set of test tubes in a rack. With shaking hands, Niji took one of them—the liquid in the flask turned blood red and the glass cracked, staining her white palm. The fog grouped back and concealed the desk with the test tubes again.

Slowly but surely, the visibility expanded to the corners of the laboratory, indicating its boundaries. The door to the next room was closed, and on the walls there appeared empty frames from tables of alchemical elements that her friend Rem knew by heart. But the posters themselves turned out to be blank sheets without a single letter.

Niji threw a worried look toward where the windows used to be. It remained in its place, but with a nuance—the frame was hanging on a snow-white background, yet the center itself was full of haze.

She felt like the silence was going to kill her.

The fog was painfully slow to dissipate, and finally Niji spotted her blurry reflection on the surface of the desk—the kind of image to see during the evening in the window of the bus or a shop display. Niji’s white hair swayed slightly from the draft of unexplainable origin. Her skin seemed almost transparent, the iris of her eyes, which previously had a warm yellow-brown hue, was now brownish red. Her lips were crimson as well.

Niji recalled the technique recommended by those who practiced lucid dreams. Look at your own hands, they said. The mage girl glanced at her trembling palms—its skin was still deathly pale. The wind was torturing her hair. Windows and doors remained closed. It was too quiet.

While Niji tried to concentrate on her hands, something dark red and thick dripped onto her right palm, matching the color of her eyes and lips. And again. And again. Niji gasped and sensed an unpleasant tickling on her head. The silence changed to a gradually growing hum of the transformer. The girl looked into her reflection in the window and saw several streams of purple blood flowing down her white face from somewhere behind her hair.

Death. She said it couldn’t be avoided. It was too late.

~~~

August 17, 2025

In order to distract herself from the day before, Niji plunged into reading Haydee's volume of “Artifacts: Great, Epic, Legendary”, but she didn’t find out anything essentially new. The more powerful the relic, the less reliable information there was about it. However, in the book there were still a lot of curious facts about other objects of the magical world—the use of some of them even violated the Immutable Laws which prohibited the magical interference in mind and life of a person. If such a book was in the Academy library, then students would definitely not be allowed to read it.

Since Dasnor had canceled the training in connection with the turbulent events of that night, Niji headed to the “Blue Cat.” She didn’t want to sit all alone, waiting for somebody to help her find this Edward guy. The pub had already managed to become a kind of bastion of stability, and she was sure that the cozy atmosphere of the establishment would help her calm down the unceasing tremor in her hands.

The Elementalist walked to Ume Street Station and descended into the subway. The more people were around her, the safer she felt, dissolving in a stream of endless bodies, and the noise of trains breaking through the music in her headphones soothed her shaken nerves. Niji found a place at the end of the car and prepared for the journey with one change.

She got scared when Sebastian sat down next to her. He looked pale with a bandage on his head. Without saying a word, the guy handed the Elementalist a piece of thick paper that looked like a business card, and then left the train on the nearest station without ever looking at Niji. The girl’s hand was burning, as if she was holding not a piece of paper, but a hot coal, but just in case, she hesitated for a couple of minutes before finding out what was written there. The sheet was empty, but as soon as her eyes focused on the spot in the center, letters began to appear. Niji twitched because it was clearly written in blood. It turned out she was given a phone number with a signature that looked suspiciously like “F.” Then the letters faded and three kanjis replaced them, 玉 手 箱. Then the leaflet became completely clear.

Even though Niji didn’t have the vaguest idea what it meant, she had a really good feeling about it.

~~~

The "Cat" was not very crowded. Usually on weekdays employees of the nearest offices gathered here to use the promotional offer of a business lunch, but on that day the pub was almost empty for some reason. Beckz was standing in her usual place behind the bar. She joyfully waved to the mage girl. “Oh, hi there, Niji! There’s someone who’d like to see you.”

“Me? Who?”

Now concentrated, Niji scanned the room and almost shrieked when she saw who it was. Next to a pool table her former professor and the investigator of the Special Force Unit, Takeshi Izumi, was expecting her arrival, holding a short cue in his hands.