His exhausted mind was dragging him to sleep, but Cale didn't put the diary down.
The handwriting was a challenge to read, and Gilran's thoughts were disjointed at best, but Cale couldn't stop reading for one reason.
He could understand Gilran's writing without the strange filtering effect of the tarnished crown.
The crown had always acted as a filter, translating Gilran's records into something he could comprehend, just as it had allowed him to understand the tongue of Entities in the first place. But this diary… it needed no such aid.
This could have only meant one thing.
The former king of hollows wasn't a natural-born entity.
Was he also a "highlander"?
"She cannot be allowed to be whole again."
The diary didn't mention anything about who "she" was, who couldn't become whole again by the next page.
It was another jumbled thought scratched down, something he could barely read.
"I thought I was going to feel something… I wanted to, but there was nothing. They were all dead, and I only thought of one thing…"
The handwriting got even harder to read; some letters looked indistinguishable from other ones in the alphabet, making it even harder to piece together.
"Without my shield, it will be more bothersome."
The page was over there, he barely scarted anything down, and even those thoughts were just a couple of sentences of his disjointed thoughts.
Am I going to end up like him as well?
With a loud yawn, Cale closed the diary and attempted to place it into the space conjured by Covenants, but he failed to do so.
Does it have restrictions on what can go in and what can't?
He still couldn't figure out the changes made to the power he was born with after he fused with Gilran's droplet.
I should have met with his remnant will, but I haven't yet. Why? I need to investigate Covenant later.
If he couldn't place it in the inner space of Covenant, he just put it down on his night shelf's inner drawer, which was empty, and closed his eyes.
I can't sleep.
He reached a point where he was so exhausted that he developed insomnia.
He could only stare at the ceiling absentmindedly, while thinking about what to do the next day.
There is a Gateway room in the castle, using that, I can return to Nostra. First things first, I need to create a paper trail to prove that I lived there in the first place… I need to get in contact with one of my siblings.
After a while, he finally managed to fall asleep.
***
Cale's eyes slowly fluttered open to the steady ticking of the clock on the wall beside him.
Four hours. Good enough for now.
Climbing out of bed, Cale made his way to the corner of the room where an elegant oak door stood. Pushing it open, he stepped into a wide bathroom that didn't bear any resemblance to royalty.
If anything, it looked like a normal bathroom from the flying cities.
He really was from the flying cities.
Taking a change of clothes from the wardrobe in his new room, Cale found both elegant suits and everyday clothes from their hometowns.
While the clothes were a bit larger than him, he could still wear them without drawing attention to himself while wearing them.
With the clothes in hand, he walked into the bathroom and cleaned himself up in no time.
His eyes still had circles underneath, but Cale paid no attention to them, returning to his new study right away.
I will go home today. Traversing between the cities and the castle shouldn't be a problem if I can listen to what he told me. And he wouldn't lie when I can just as easily leave the city here.
Looking through even more of the document names, he found the one tied to Renoir, more importantly, his son.
Wolf of the second tier, Devouring Beggar — Oleander.
A second-tier wolf class? I need to find it before the Aberrant Corps can, or they make him into an artifact before I can return him to Renoir.
Suppressing a yawn behind his hand, he pushed himself up from the bed. With a soft flash of warm light, the tarnished crown emerged from Covenant.
Placing the crown on top of his head once again, the tarnished bronze crown cast a shadow over his face, his reddish-brown eyes fading to a suffocating grey color.
Sitting down behind his ornate desk, Cale expressed an intent to call for one of his hollow subjects.
When he heard a knock on the door, he signaled for the attendant to enter — it was a hollow he could still recognize, the criminal from the Tamara organization, Hunter.
There was still some remnant blood on the clothes and orifices of the faceless attendant.
With a wide smile on the featureless attendant's face, it brought a cup of black coffee on a silver tray to Cale's desk.
"Thank you." Said the Hollow King, reaching for the cup of coffee. With the tray empty, the attendant bowed and turned for the door.
"Wait," The hollow king stopped him in his tracks, "I want you to become my personal attendant."
The hollow attendant almost dropped the silver tray; it looked flabbergasted but… elated?
Bowing even deeper, the featureless attendant grinned from ear to ear, "I make sure not to disappoint you, your majesty."
The attendant almost skipped out of the room in joy, but Cale could read the true feelings of his subjects.
There was nothing…
No resentment, no joy, nothing.
They just replicated the feeling of joy, and that's why they looked so empty. Even his expression of joy was just a clumsy attempt.
Returning to the document in front of him, Cale read over the most important details of the document.
Even if the Entity was relatively on the weaker side of them, it was an extremely deadly one.
A beggar who doesn't take money — but souls.
Gulping the rest of his coffee down and calling the hollowed-out version of Hunter to take it away, Cale rose from his seat and got ready to return home.
The towering figure of the Hollow King left the room and walked through the halls, waving back at the bowing hollows. Reaching a larger hall with two hollow guards standing in front of a door, crackling with a faint energy conjured by red essence.
"Open the door."
The hollows bowed at the sound of their king's voice echoing from the corner of the hall.
Cale approached them with an easy wave, and crimson essence rippled outward before him, dispersing to reveal a small chamber. At its center stood a massive door, overflowing with essence.
It was shining with a pale, searing light. It was churning and crackling loudly.
As Cale walked closer to it, he observed the way that the searing pale light stirred.
Is this a crack that has been… tamed?
On the top of his head, the tarnished crown felt like it came alive.
The crown let Gilran manipulate the cracks; that's how he brought me into his hall in the first place.
Cale never paid much attention to the inner workings of the cracks, other than some rudimentary knowledge that anyone from the first world would know.
Without much hesitation, Cale entered the door of light in front of him, his vision drowned out in the searing bright light, but it caused no pain.
The light around him slowly faded, and he found himself in a dark corridor where countless stairways shifted endlessly — vanishing into nothingness only to reappear elsewhere.
At the top of these staircases, images could be seen within the broken mirrors, with jagged shards floating loosely surrounding them.
There were countless stairs, some bringing him higher by a couple of meters, while some of them descended into a depth so dark that he couldn't see the mirrors.
But there was one high in the sky that led him thousands of meters in the air.
From the castle, there could be only one mirror that high in the sky; it has to be one that leads into an Alastor Union Flying City.
With that, Cale began to climb the thousands of steps towards his home, which exiled him.