With the assistance of my Traits, I was able to create the program I required in a shockingly short amount of time.

Unfortunately, even with the Traits, there was a limit for the impromptu program I had modified, its main performance limited to open-source news crawler, and more importantly, the horrible state of my painfully low-performance laptop.

Not the best tool to unravel an ancient mystery, but it was what I was limited to. As the cries of my laptop rose, running the program, I stood up, filled a bucket with water, and left the room. Since I had about an hour to kill, I might as well wash the car, at least getting rid of the worst of the mud that stuck to its surface as I drove away from the crime scene.

“Not a bad car,” I murmured as I carefully washed it with a brush. Pity that, despite the comfort, it was extremely boring to drive it. “I’m lucky,” I murmured as I continued to wash. After all, it wasn’t like I had the money to buy anything but another rust bucket to replace it, which would give me all the excitement I would need.

Washing the car took almost an hour, making me go back to my room to refill the bucket several times — which also allowed me to enter some new keywords into the program before launching another instance.

After I had finished, I returned to my room, reading more articles about the fire while the program tried to finish, trying to find something useful. Unfortunately, the chatter about a mysterious cult fire was hardly something that could be navigated easily.

When I finally received a ping from my computer, I was glad to abandon my phone, browsing the results the program had compiled.

This time, I wasn’t reading the news it had managed to extract, as it was hardly something I could parse in an evening. Even reading all the articles that were written about one little event was impossible, let alone all cult appearances in America.

No, I was delving into the numbers behind the news, trying to analyze the meta-data behind it, which, if used appropriately, could reveal an impressive amount of information about the topic or the target.

There was a reason both the tech companies — to sell the products and brainwash people to stay online longer — and the governments — to spy on people much more accurately — were obsessively focused on analyzing the meta-data produced by people rather than the content of their messages.

Of course, to achieve that level of accuracy, they employed thousands of genius coders, built dedicated data centers big enough to rival a football stadium, and even created their own backdoors to the physical devices people used to increase the accuracy of the data they collected.

A modified open-source program, an old computer, and the public data I could gather from the web were hardly the same scale. It could hardly document all the cults and identify which cults were just ordinary conmen, and which had actual supernatural ties.

That didn’t mean the results were completely useless, far from it. Even the simplest things, like the increase in the number of incidences.

The first pattern I had noticed was a significant spike in the results of the cults. Of course, when I say significant, I wasn’t talking like ten times, but a percentage increase. To be certain, twenty-one percent increase over two years based on the keywords I had searched.

It wasn’t a horribly high number, certainly not enough to trigger a government panic — especially since they hardly cared about the type of the people targeted by cults in the first place — but it was still a significant amount.

However, as I continued delving deeper into the results, I had found something scarier. Checking the police reports — only for the cities those records were public, which, unfortunately, not many — I had noticed another scary detail, a spike in the number of missing people, and the number of fires that were suspected as arson.

The percentage increase on those events wasn’t as scary as the number of cult incidents, but considering the number of people who burned their own homes for insurance money and people kidnapped for other things, the percentage increase wasn’t as critical.

The scary thing was not the percentage, but the timeline. Unlike the cult news, each city had a different time for the sudden jump they had experienced. For some, it was barely six months ago, for some, it went back almost a decade.

It wasn’t the most accurate data, but with the perspective my supernatural experience gave me, combined with what I know, it didn’t paint a calming picture.

I tried to read some of the information released to the public, but it didn’t give me much. There were too many cases, and more importantly, I had too many interactions with the police in my youth to trust anything they had published. I had no doubt that the public version of the cases was sanitized to the death to absolve the guilt of any involved police officer, even if that meant erasing — or officially, using editorial discretion — each and every useful piece of information that could help the case to be solved.

I didn’t let that stop me, of course. I have scoured over the reports, news, and every relevant nugget while the program continued to run, providing me with more and more information. I had hoped that the Pattern Recognition would have helped me, but it was either too weak to work on such an unstructured topic, or it didn’t work as well on an area I wasn’t competent in.

Regardless of the reason, however, it meant that when the night sky started to turn blue, I only had an educated guess that whatever was at the root of the event, it had started several years ago, and for some reason, started to spread faster two years ago.

Such a change was hardly the most calming…

“Just the thing I needed to make things fun,” I murmured as I threw myself into my bed. I had a meeting with the conditioning coach at ten, and, at this point, getting a few hours of sleep was more important than trying to get some marginal benefits from my research.

If there was one benefit to a night filled with mind-numbing research and analysis, it was the assistance it gave to my sleep. I fell asleep the moment my face touched my pillow, only to wake up to my alarm.

“It’s just nine,” I murmured as I raised my head, barely three hours of sleep I caught hardly enough, but I still managed to rise to my feet forcibly.

I looked around, expecting to see my guide floating next to me, bored, encouraging me to stand up. Yet, she was still absent.

It would be a lie to say a part of me didn’t cheer at the possibility, trying to convince the rest of my mind that it was just a fever dream, one that I finally woke up. Unfortunately, all I needed to disappoint that optimist part of my brain was to close my eyes and reach to that special place in my mind, housing both the System and my guide.

I focused on the feedback, one bright and throbbing softly like a heartbeat — though it lacked the previous intensity where she had pulled back to hide from the party, suggesting she was far from being recovered. Her presence was stronger than the last night, but only marginally so, far from the horrible source of migraine that I experienced the previous attempt, trying to burst free. This time, she felt like a gentle sparrow, resting.

Yet, even as I focused on the mental space, I could see her continuing the devouring the thin line of Intent the continuing gossip about my naughty achievement provided.

Extinguishing the fire clearly took a lot from her.

Understandable, as the magical fire had created an overwhelming sight, and everything she had done up to that point shouted she was far from her prime. I didn’t know how strong her prime was, but considering she had name-dropped more than one Greek god in casual terms, I doubted her magical power ceiling was particularly low.

However, I didn’t have much time to waste on idle musings, so I focused on the other part of the equation. The System.

I reached to trigger its Trait-bestowing ability, only for nothing to happen. Not too surprising as I could see my guide devouring the generated intent despite the ongoing gossip. Though, I couldn’t help but feel like it was a waste.

After all, Monday morning was the apex of the pointless gossip, a clutch people used to dispel their Monday syndrome.

“I want my Traits,” I murmured petulantly as I closed my eyes, trying to tap into the flow of Intent to change direction, at least partially redirecting it toward the system instead, but after several attempts. With my situation, getting stronger was much more important than quickening her awakening — especially since she had proved that she would push me into danger without even blinking.

Preventing her from waking up was too optimistic, but at least, I wanted to be as strong as possible before she awakened and pushed me into another dangerous situation.

Unfortunately, no matter how much I tried to focus, I wasn’t able to redirect the flow of the Intent. Maybe I was doing something wrong, or maybe her pull was simply stronger than the pressure I could generate with my inexperience.

Regardless of the reason, however, the continuous failure was enough to make me stop. Not because I was particularly discouraged, but because I had a meeting to go to, and before that, I needed to eat my breakfast.

I grabbed a protein bar, the only thing I could digest before the training session before packing the rest of my stuff and going to my car.

I couldn’t wait until the conditioning test was completed, and they started delivering my meal plan.