Jager allowed himself a small, internal smile of contempt. Angels and alchemy. The pathetic attempts of small minds to explain a phenomenon that was likely just a combination of luck, theatricality, and a deep understanding of folk medicine. He dismissed it all as background noise, the static of a world he was merely passing through on his way to a more important, more significant kill.
His focus remained on his own elegant, logical theory. Lord Lloyd Ferrum was in Zakaria on business. He was a young, ambitious industrialist, flush with the success of his soap empire. He would be making connections, securing trade deals, expanding his commercial footprint. That was the world of power, the world that mattered. The world of nobles and merchants, of contracts and coin. The activities of a slum doctor, no matter how sensationalized, were a sideshow, a quaint piece of local color that had absolutely no bearing on the great game he was playing.
This fatal miscalculation, this profound and arrogant blind spot, was the very foundation of his impending failure. He was so convinced of his own intellectual superiority, so certain that he understood the predictable, linear motivations of his noble prey, that he had rendered himself deaf, dumb, and blind. He was a master chess player who was so focused on the king that he failed to see the single, unassuming pawn that had crossed the entire board and was about to become a queen.
Meanwhile, the subject of the merchants’ breathless gossip, the humble “Saint of Rizvan,” was in his quiet clinic, worlds away from the grime and cynicism of The Drowned Rat. He was not bathing in the glory of his newfound fame. He was working.
The miracle of the Qadir heir had not brought him peace; it had brought him a new and profound sense of urgency. The surgery had been a desperate, high-wire act, a gamble that had paid off through a combination of sheer luck, his own iron will, and a flagrant abuse of powers that no one in this world could comprehend. He knew he could not rely on such a reckless, improvised strategy again. He needed better tools. He needed to turn his stolen knowledge from the future into tangible, reliable technology.
His clinic, after the last patient had departed, had been transformed into a different kind of laboratory. The small room was now a strange and anachronistic fusion of a medieval alchemist’s workshop and a 22nd-century engineering clean-room.
On his desk, the dozen new Lilith Stones Lord Qadir had gifted him were laid out in a neat, precise grid. They were his raw materials, his silicon wafers. Beside them lay a collection of fine, specialized tools he had commissioned from the city’s finest guild artisans—diamond-tipped scribes, silver calipers for measuring microscopic distances, a small, precisely balanced jeweler’s hammer.
He was not a doctor tonight. He was an engineer. And he was about to begin the next phase of his grand, secret revolution. He was going to build a computer. And no one, least of all the two arrogant hunters sitting in a filthy tavern across the city, could have possibly imagined the true, world-altering nature of the “worthless distraction” they had so contemptuously dismissed. Their vigil for a lord would continue, while the saint was quietly preparing to become a god.
The single candle flame in the center of Lloyd’s desk cast a warm, steady glow, its light reflecting off the dozen milky-white Lilith Stones and the gleaming silver of his newly acquired tools. The world outside, with its noise, its sickness, and its assassins, had been shut out. The clinic was now a hermetically sealed sanctum, a place where a new and forbidden kind of creation was about to take place.
Sumaiya sat on a small stool in the corner, a silent, captivated observer. After the life-altering events at the Qadir estate, her role had subtly shifted. She was no longer just his assistant; she was his apprentice, his confidante, the sole witness to his strange and wonderful genius. She had seen him perform a miracle of healing. Now, she was about to watch him perform a miracle of artifice.
“You’ve been staring at those rocks for an hour, Zayn,” she said, her voice a soft, gentle tease that broke the comfortable silence. “Are you trying to divine the future in them?”
Lloyd looked up from his intense scrutiny of the stones, a faint, distracted smile touching his lips. “Not the future, Sumaiya,” he replied, his voice a low, thoughtful murmur. “The potential. These are not simple stones. They are… sleeping clay. And I intend to be the potter.”
Chapter : 796 ʀᴇᴀᴅ ʟᴀᴛᴇsᴛ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀᴛ noᴠelfire.net
He had spent the past two days in a state of deep, focused meditation, conversing with the System’s Administrator, absorbing every piece of data it could provide on the physical properties and energetic mechanics of the Lilith Stones. He now understood their crystalline structure, their energy-conduction pathways, and the precise, delicate art of the Will Engraving process.
He had also formulated the next stage of his grand plan. The surgery on Tariq Qadir had been a success, but it had also been a terrifyingly close-run thing. It had highlighted a critical weakness in his abilities. His [All-Seeing Eye] was a divine diagnostic tool, but it was passive. He could see the problem, but the interpretation of the data, the formulation of a cure—that all relied on his own, fallible human memory and his patchwork knowledge of this world’s alchemy. He needed something better. He needed a tool that could not just see, but analyze.
He had explained to Sumaiya, in his now-perfected persona of the eccentric genius, that he wished to create a “diagnostic tool” to help with future cases. He had described it in vague, mystical terms, speaking of a device that could “read the body’s inner harmony” and “identify the precise nature of a spiritual imbalance.” To her, it sounded like a magical scrying device, an artifact of immense healing power. She had no way of knowing that what he was truly describing was a medical database and a diagnostic computer.
“The energy within these stones is raw, chaotic,” he began, picking up one of the diamond-tipped scribes. He was not just working; he was teaching, explaining his process to his audience of one, a habit he had developed from his brief, strange tenure as a professor. “To be useful, it must be guided. Channeled. The crystalline structure is a natural conduit, but it is a wide, raging river. I must carve canals. I must build dams and floodgates. I must impose order on the chaos.”
He held one of the smaller Lilith Stones up to the candlelight. With his [All-Seeing Eye], he was not looking at the dull, milky surface. He was seeing the intricate, three-dimensional lattice of its internal structure, a beautiful, complex web of crystalline pathways. He identified the main energy conduits, the secondary channels, the points of natural resonance.
Then, with a surgeon’s steady hand, he began to work.
The tip of the diamond scribe touched the surface of the stone. He did not press hard. He simply guided the tool, his will flowing from his mind, down his arm, and into the tip of the scribe. A faint, almost invisible line of pure, white light appeared on the stone’s surface. It was not a scratch; it was an incision on a metaphysical level. He was not cutting the stone; he was altering its very nature, carving a new, artificial pathway into its spiritual architecture.
Sumaiya watched, her breath held in her throat. The work was incredibly, painstakingly precise. Lloyd’s focus was absolute, his face a mask of serene concentration. He worked in complete silence, the only sound the faint, almost inaudible hiss of the scribe as it etched its lines of light onto the whispering stone.
He was treating the Lilith Stone not as a magical gem to be enchanted with a spell, but as a physical component, a piece of intricate, microscopic machinery. The concept was so profoundly alien to this world’s understanding of magic that it was like watching a man try to build a clock with water. Enchantment was an art of will, of weaving spells and binding spirits. It was a fluid, intuitive process. This… this was different. This was cold, hard, and brutally logical. This was engineering.
He worked for hours, his hands never faltering. He took the first small stone and carved a precise, complex geometric pattern onto its surface, a network of intersecting lines and circles that looked like a celestial map. He explained to a fascinated Sumaiya that this was the “input receiver,” a component designed to translate a physical touch into a specific, coded pulse of energy.
He took a second stone and carved a different pattern, a series of parallel lines that spiraled towards the center. This, he called the “processing core.” Its function was to take the input pulse and perform a single, specific, mathematical operation on it.
He carved a third, a fourth, a fifth. Each one was a unique component, a specialized piece of his magical machine. One was a “memory unit,” designed to hold a static piece of information. Another was a “logic gate,” capable of making a simple, binary decision.