Title: Ritual Record III
Ronan — male; attracted to women.
Below are notes from the third session on the forbidden ritual of sealing soul‑memories and extracting soul fragments, using the Moonlight System incantations.
Because confronting moonlight directly brings too much malice, I adopted a moonlight‑extraction method. I harvested one whole Frost‑ward bloom and began the moonlight extraction.
Prepared sealing ritual cloth.
The notes stop here. A quill soaked in ink stands point‑first in the inkwell; the long feather gives off an uncanny vitality.
Ronan flicks his hand and spreads the ritual cloth on the floor.
At first glance it is an ordinary standardized ritual cloth; the patterns and tadpole‑script add an air of mystery.
He intones a few awkwardly phrased translated words, crushes the Frost‑ward bloom, sets it alight, and drops it into his blood.
He uncovers his blindfold: his right eye is blood‑tinted around the sclera while the pupil is icy blue — two utterly different colors giving a distorted sensation. He lets a single drop of crystalline liquid fall in.
Pain instantly concentrates around the right eye, twitching along the delicate nerves intersecting the eye. The more it hurts, the sharper his perception becomes; a numb, prickling sensation spreads from the eye through his whole body. He feels as if submerged in moonlight, drifting in amniotic ease and comfort that one could lose themselves in — and he knows something is wrong.
In a daze Ronan swallows a pale‑blue potion; the bliss and ease fade. Dizziness and pain arrive in full. When he comes fully to, a wave of dread follows — countless students die each year from succumbing to the bliss of moonlight immersion.
He hurriedly looks down at the ritual sigils beneath him. Among the dense tadpole‑script a smear of ash faintly glows. The color of the blood drops reflects toward a blood‑moon.
He knows the ritual is one step short. From his pocket he takes a gray stone and fits it into a recess in the wall. A beam of moonlight projects down from the mural above; he raises his head and, through the stinging of his right eye, locks his gaze with the moonlight.
Blood‑tinged smoke rises from the ash and weaves into the moonlight, altering the moonlight's properties and imparting it with the blood‑moon's strangeness. The moonlight becomes blood‑tinted midair and shines into Ronan's right eye, the sapphire‑like pupil being slowly stained, turning into a crimson shooting star that orbits the blue gem at the center.
It worked, he thinks: the moon and the eye's affinity are indeed aligned in the sealing incantations. This unknown memory‑seal truly has kinship with the blood‑moon and can indeed yield memory‑souls.
A crimson shard of soul swims within the blood‑red eye. "The Moonlight System's sealing incantations are indeed compatible," Ronan murmurs. He notes in his notebook that adjacent seals exhibit a kind of mutual incompatibility.
A mark appears on the cover, then fades away; another appears. Understanding dawns, he closes the ritual book, dons his blindfold, and leaves the chamber. Outside the archaic cell is just an ordinary corridor, lined with nearly identical chambers. He walks to the end of the corridor and disappears around the corner.
"Room 4017 is vacated," Ronan tells another person.
"Ah, Ronan — how are you thinking about next month's Translator's Codex interview?" the other leans in and whispers, handing over a card. "Here, your student ID." He glances at a record. "No wonder you're the credits king; opening the chamber three times this month hasn't been cheap."
"Still considering it. But I've already prepared three translations," Ronan replies, taking the student card without really engaging further. "Yesterday afternoon I wasn't you — Norman, how come you're manning the ritual hall?"
"You know how it is. Aisha's working on a fire‑element translation; I heard she needs to prep an advanced rite, so she pulled some strings to swap locations." Norman adopts a knowing look. "Fire translations get feisty at noon; I volunteered to pay to dampen her fire."
"Aisha? Sounds like she's aiming for the Translator's Codex?" Ronan seems to pick up on something. "Never mind, I'm not interested."
He turns toward the main door and adds, "Don't forget to find me a Custodian's Bloom."
Ronan walks along the cobbled lane; whispers and small murmurs brush his ears. He knows the ritual's malice amplifies his perception of the outside world, and that the ritual's aftereffects will alter his temperament. Words like "the blind one, the one‑eyed dragon" slip into his mind and he pushes them out, quickening his pace toward his lodgings.
He opens the door, glances at an untriggered translation stone, then reaches for his apothecary table. He casually opens the second drawer; a strand of hair remains stuck to the bottom of a vial, untouched.
He swallows a calming draught to suppress the malign impressions, thinking, "Even a single room isn't safe, and the Translator's Codex is near." The pharmacist's warnings are not enough to cow those people.
At the door he places a Forest's Breath trap translation stone, retracting another translation stone to recharge.
Back at the bedside, he spreads the tadpole‑script cloth across the bed and tweaks it several times. It is clearly a ritual cloth he customcrafted.
He sits cross‑legged on the cloth and uses a gray stone to activate the tadpole script.
Murmuring, "The soul is the dance of butterflies" — a translated incantation — he plunges into the soul's depths, a force that soaks into the mind.
His spirit sinks inward and he merges the separated soul fragment. A memory coalesces, though parts are torn and jagged like sawteeth, highly disjointed. Still, a fair portion remains intact.
A truck roars by and Ronan jolts upright. A wooden gourd carries the soul of an otherworlder; with it come large swathes of life memories.
Ronan says, "Combined with the previous two soul separations, I've finally extracted non‑scholarly memories completely." The crucial revelation: this secret about spacetime actually stems from "I am a traveler from another world."
Such a secret will increase my mystique, he thinks. Though it's something others yearn for, my purpose is to enhance my personal enigmatic weight.
A swirl of cryptic runes orbits above his mind. Ronan recognizes it as an incantation; the violet secrecy denotes knowledge rarely known. [Hulu Realm]
He understands that the power to summon otherworldly beings originates from It; whether such a being possesses self‑awareness is unknown. For now, he thinks, the benefits outweigh the risks.
Sitting in a nearby chair, he opens a notebook and jots: quietly I have prepared six targeted translations. I have little trouble with the first two tiers of the Translator's Codex, but the third tier — personal mystique weight — has been badly diluted by the newly obtained secret; as a mortal my mundane proportion is too large. How to resolve this?
After thinking, he realizes this move was meant to grow mystique through experience; the "traveler secret" increased mystique instead and so I've shot myself in the foot.
He tears the note, sets it alight, and erases the evidence.
He opens the cabinet, breaks the seals, and counts the gray stones carefully. He thinks to himself, "Funds are low — it's time to put that batch of 'Spring Day Pyres' on sale."
He reseals everything, opens the door, and heads to the apothecary.