“Sometimes, some people get so engrossed in their own ideas that they completely forget about the whole idea of common decency. People like those are what gives bad names to researchers who spend their lives unraveling the mysteries of the world.” - Elogia El Liage, researcher of magic from the Levain Institute for Higher Learning, circa 401 FP.

At the end of the other corridor, Aideen did not find any guards. Instead, she found two doors across from each other right at the end of the road. From one of the doors she could vaguely hear snoring noises, so there was likely someone living there. She earmarked that door for later checking and instead turned towards the other door first.

The doors were closed, with a clever latch system that would need the appropriate key to open. Fortunately, Aideen’s training and experience with the Death’s Hands centuries ago included methods to open such locked doors. While back then they taught her how to do it using something as simple as a metal wire, Aideen had developed a more effective method since.

She simply peeled away the flesh from one of her index fingers and shaped the bone to fit the keyhole instead, forming a perfect fit out of her own bone. It was somewhat painful, but nothing compared to the sort of pain she had experienced over the years, and it only took a few seconds before she turned her finger and the latches opened.

The room she entered was large, so large that it likely occupied most of the underground space beneath the mansion. She saw beakers and tubes, and other common alchemical tools on tables here and there, whereas the couple of beds she saw in the room reminded her a lot of the sort of bed some midwives liked to use to facilitate easier birth, which gave her a bad premonition.

Most of the room was occupied with various alchemical apparatus and tools, while a few others were items she recognized often used for helping in diagnosing a patient’s condition, something developed to help mundane healers and less powerful mage-healers to be more effective. It was something Morin had created just before she had left for Alcidea, so she was not surprised to see it proliferate so far and wide.

Despite the large size of the room – which included an open area around one corner which was looked to be some sort of training or testing area – and how the space was further economized by judicious use of storage cabinets – which were pretty much storage artifacts that traded portability for ease of creation – there was not a single document to be found in the room.

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Nothing to give any indication on what was done there, not a single record of experiments or any log books or the likes.

Aideen knew that likely meant those records were kept secret, probably in the hands of either the Baron himself or whoever was running the laboratory, as it was clearly one. Her suspicion fell onto the other room where she heard the snoring noises, and she carefully put everything back how she found it, before she shut and re-locked the door behind her.

It was simplicity itself for her to repeat the process to open the locked door to the bedroom across from the laboratory, and she quietly entered to see a rather lavish bedroom – especially considering its hidden underground location – where an old human man was sleeping. Aideen first made sure that the old man would not suddenly wake up while she was there by subjecting him to the same treatment she gave the guards upstairs, which sent him into a magically induced coma he would not wake up from no matter what until at least another few hours.

As she scrounged around the bedroom, Aideen checked every storage item she found, but saw nothing of importance, merely some tools and daily necessities to be found. Her search was fruitless until she finally checked the sleeping man and found a storage ring on one of his fingers. It was there that she finally found some papers and books that related to whatever was going on down there.

A frown almost instantly covered her face once she took a peek at what the papers contained, though.

What was recorded on the papers were indeed notes from an experiment, but it was not from anything of the sort she had expected. What she could discern from the papers painted a picture that made Aideen feel nauseous and wrathful at the same time, as she had not expected that the secret the Baron was hiding was of such vile sort.

It was indeed an experiment they were conducting secretively in the basement. An experiment of selective breeding. If it was just that Aideen wouldn’t have been so affected, as it was a common thing to do for livestock and other domesticated beasts. Her reaction came from the fact that the experiment in the basement was done on people.

To be specific, the subjects of the experiment were the missing women from the disappearance cases that had plagued Deyosia, the same women Aideen found locked up in the cells at the other end of the corridor. All that meant… that the children she found there were likely the results of the sick experiments the bastards were doing.

She was tempted to end the life of the old man still sleeping soundly on the bed in her anger, but stayed her hand, as she felt that it would be too light a punishment for these people. Instead, she took the ring with her and closed the door once more, before she started to make her way back up towards the Baron’s mansion.

There she headed towards the room where Oleg was resting for the night, as they had agreed that she would report her findings to him, before he would decide how they would proceed from then onwards. She made her way swiftly through the mansion, unnoticed by anyone, and before long she stood before the door of Oleg’s bedroom.

Aideen knocked on the wooden door in a pattern of four quick knocks, then three knocks with longer delays between them, followed by another five quick knocks. She heard the door being unlocked a moment later, and heard Oleg quietly bid for her to enter.