Up against one of the walls, there was a small shrine that held his old armaments. It had sat there untouched since he’d put it there, yet not a speck of dust had touched the ancient metal. It burst with such Aether that it could be seen by the naked eye.

A squat, long table sat in the center of this ordered mess, a pair of equally long incense stick holders sat atop it. Kanbu took his time picking out the incense sticks, personally drawing the name of someone he wished to pray for on each one.

There were usually fourteen. Nine for the fallen, three for the survivors, one for the wanderer, and one for the fool Henry.

Today, he added two more. One for Zelsys, and one for Zefaris.

He knew their names the moment he set eyes upon them, saw the flames that shone in their souls. The so-called Evil Eye was a skill he’d mastered first of all and that had served him well throughout life. Kanbu thought it a shame that so many nowadays had turned to artifactry in favor of learning it properly.

One was focused and precise, a sharp blaze shining through a telescope’s lens. This soul was hardened and cracked in the hell of war, yet the cracks had been mended recently.

The other, a many-faceted inferno refracted a thousand times over. It was like her soul was a fledgling star made of candlelights in a stained-glass mosaic.

“Dragonslayer Arts: Minimized Inferno Spark...” the old man whispered and a gout of green fire burst from his lips, igniting all sixteen incense sticks in a row. Each burned for a split-second, then went out. Even still, each one’s tip glowed a different color, and each one’s smoke swirled in different patterns.

An incomprehensible prayer began to issue from his lips. Kanbu himself didn’t understand the words he spoke, for these were not his words - they belonged to those he prayed for.

Those two back there gave him hope. Not hope for the fate of Willowdale - hope that he wouldn’t have to wear that armor again. That he wouldn’t have to open the mausoleum of history and expose for the world to see the foundations upon which this land truly stood.

Things would inevitably circle back to the Old Era if it became known why this land was important. Whether that was good or bad, he wasn’t arrogant enough to say.

The Sage’s raising of Hedan’s Shield had already brought things to the edge of revelation… Even if it was the best play out of a bad hand.

Many thought that the world’s great heroes had slaughtered one another for the ideals of their countries. Perhaps it was true, in a way. Kanbu viewed it differently - he thought that those so-called heroes who had thrown themselves into the war machine’s grinding gears were either foolish or sycophantic.

But then, Kanbu was a relic, a relic of an era in which a hero had been a man who knew he was free - not some statesman’s lapdog.

The old man finished his prayer, stepped through the Sea of Fog, and returned to his restaurant.

Another day of running the store.

Crouching down at the huge barrel of Liquid Vigor, filling seal-bottles first thing in the morning - this had become one of many new parts to his daily routine. They weren’t cheap by any measure, but people still bought them. Quite a few farmhands spent on Liquid Vigor what they would’ve spent on mundane booze, even though the alcohol content was low enough that the elixir’s own effects allowed the body to filter it out before it could enter the bloodstream.

No surprise there - before, they’d get drunk to relax and forget their aches after a long day of work. Liquid Vigor would permit a man to work that very same long day and come out without so much as an ache to show for it, and the energy to make the most of their remaining time. Now if only he could come up with a slogan to sell Daytime Dust and Liquid Vigor as a daily supplement - one for the morning, the second for throughout the day, and perhaps some third sleep aid for the evening.

Sigmund had never felt this good. In situations that would’ve previously triggered a seizure, strength and confidence instead surged through his body. He’d pondered on some manner of explaining what was different, and the best analogy he’d come up with went thus:

In the past, the preternatural production of Rubedo that occurred within his body in states of heightened stress of emotion would send him into essential shock. His body coped by marshalling all its resources towards the singular goal of eliminating the excess, and thus sent him into bouts of paralysis.

Through willingly re-enacting the night of slaughter that had left him with this curse, in bringing that repressed memory to the surface, he must’ve broken some mental block that had prevented his body from doing the same thing it had done on that night. It must’ve been a form of shellshock interacting with the effects of Victory Wash that had left his body generating Rubedo as fuel and then choking on it.

Whenever he grew truly angry or even just fired up from physical exercise, he still felt the familiar heat rising in his gut, the heat that in the past had signaled an oncoming seizure. He felt blood flooding into his extremities with pressure that would give a normal man an aneurysm. The heat came, it grew, and it now fueled the historian’s strength.

Certainly, only his own Rubedo could bring him nowhere near the state that he’d achieved on that night, the so-called Victory Demon. In a manner of speaking, despite his aberrant metabolism he couldn’t naturally produce all the essentia that had rendered Victory Wash into such a potent catalyst and fuel source. It was Ignis that he needed, the essence of fire - and how convenient it was that the easiest way to imbibe Ignis was to just drink whiskey, as he’d proved to himself when he had reproduced the Victory Demon to help Makhus defend the store from a break-in.

It was just a shame that he felt like a dead man walking after only a half-minute in his refined Victory Demon state.