The Mute Tower stood isolated in the center of a derelict square. The area within a hundred meters of the tower was already sealed off by two layers of barricades.

  Inside the inner ring, five Parish knights in black heavy armor with silvertrimmed cloaks were patrolling.

  Outside the outer ring, personnel from the Industrial Committee wore contamination suits and carried specialized probes and small devices.

  Weren't they supposed to be only Parish people here? Anger hadn't expected to find the Industrial Committee present.

  A Committee member spotted him and raised a hand to stop him. "Halt. Committee business. No unauthorised personnel."

  He produced his badge.

  "FirstClass Detective Anger Hastings, Special Investigations Division, Londinium Constabulary." He was direct, his tone far from friendly. "We've received reports from nearby residents about potential public safety anomalies at this location. I need to enter for assessment."

  "Detective Hastings." A man walked over alone, adjusting his glasses. It was the newly appointed Special Commissioner Brough, whom Anger had seen once at the Chief's office. "What a coincidence. Our friends from the Parish believe this place requires purification, while we have also detected anomalous energy fluctuations here... possessing certain research value."

  He strolled closer, looking at Anger. "The Constabulary is interested. Very good." Then he gave a glance to the member who had stopped Anger. "Provide the Detective with a risk assessment waiver form, and a Committee temporary observer pass."

  The subordinate swiftly handed over the relevant passes.

  “Detective, it really wouldn’t be quite proper for you to simply march straight in. However, I can provide you with credentials—you may enter safely enough. The place is dreadfully dilapidated, you understand. And from what we hear, it’s rather… unsettled inside. Quite hazardous, actually.We at the Committee have some rather advanced equipment from the Rhine Federation. Frightfully expensive, though. Applying for its use would likely take an age. I’m afraid we cannot lend it to you. You’d be on your own in there. Perhaps you ought to return and… liaise with Chief Schneider first?”

  “Unnecessary.”Anger saw through Brough’s attempt to use him as a cat’spaw in one glance, but he didn’t press the matter further.

  When he reached the inner ring, a Parish KnightCaptain stopped him. He had evidently overheard the exchange between Anger and Brough.

  Nevertheless, he blocked the way. "The corruption here cannot be resolved by secular force. It requires sacred rites of purification, Detective. Your involvement is not only against regulations but also unwise."

  Anger met his gaze. "My duty is to investigate potential unknown factors that threaten the safety of citizens, regardless of their origin. The Constabulary has the authority to understand everything that occurs within the walls of Londinium. If the Parish has the situation entirely under control, I shall merely record it. If not, please step aside."

  In the Core Empire of Alikaxi, there were far too many interest groups. If one truly stuck to every line in the bureaucratic framework, Anger wouldn't be able to take a single step.

  He pressed forward solely on the basis of the case.

  Seeing the detective showed no intention of backing down, the KnightCaptain said, "Wait a moment." He whispered something to a man beside him, who then left.

  Soon, the man returned and said, The Bishop says he may proceed.

  The KnightCaptain raised a hand, signalling the knights in the inner ring to let him pass. "Mind the integrity of the Sanctified Perimeter."

  Bishop Morris was, in fact, nearby in a nearby church. He had to be present because the Committee was here, but he certainly wouldn't come to the site itself unless there was a convenient church.

  Upon hearing that Anger had accepted the Committee's pass, he remarked, "A detective bearing the Committee's mark... Since he insists on acting as the Committee's eyes and ears, why not indulge him? I shall proceed to the site later with the Veil of Silence. Let him enter first."

  Given permission, Anger, however, was in no hurry to enter the Mute Tower.

  "I heard tonight is some kind of 'blood moon'. I'll wait for the right time to go in."

  The KnightCaptain turned and walked away with the others, tossing back a dismissive, "Suit yourself."

  Anger spent some time questioning a few passersby nearby. He inquired about the reasons for the tower's abandonment and the strange occurrences, while also using the opportunity to rest. The injuries he had sustained at the Viper's Breath still bothered him.

  But the nearby residents were largely indifferent to the tower's anomalies, only complaining that "those monks and knights from the Parish always make a dreadful fuss here."

  ******

  Anger looked up. The moon in the sky seemed normal, though the rain and fog made it appear dimmer than usual.

  Until a distant clock tower chimed.

  Anger's eyes caught sight of a strangely red moon hiding within the clouds and mist. Not just the red moon—there were also reflections of two others in the mist—but the central red one shone the brightest.

  A spectacle.

  Perhaps Anger had never truly bothered to look up at the sky before, always overlooking it. Now, he felt he was stepping into the same phenomenon experienced by the late Viscountess, that Elizabeth Bethany.

  Anger lowered his gaze to the dilapidated entrance of the Mute Tower below. The sealed iron gate was rusted shut.

  He stepped forward. The moment he crossed the Sanctified Perimeter, anomalies arose.

  Though his feet were on the stone path, the sensation underfoot alternated between hard and soft. His footprints would indent, only to vanish the next moment. The feeling was peculiar.

  Anger entered through a breach beside the main entrance. The instant he stepped inside the tower, darkness swallowed everything from the outside world—the blood moon, the mist, the knights, the Committee agents—cutting it all off.

  A pressure followed, squeezing his lungs, making even exhaling difficult. When he finally caught his breath and looked up at the tower's interior, his breathing grew even more labored.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Even with prior preparation, words failed to describe it. Time here is sick.

  Countless specks of dust hung in the air. They did not dance chaotically but were frozen in midair by an amberlike glow, forming hazy patches of luminous mist.

  By this eerie light source, he could make out the scene in the ground floor hall. Several rotten wooden tables and chairs were frozen in states of semicollapse, suspended in time.

  Could this be what Professor Croft called 'temporal stasis'? Are we not even in the same spatial dimension anymore?

  A large floorlength mirror, its surface webbed with cracks, stood with those cracks seemingly frozen in their appearance.

  The carpet had long since disintegrated into tatters, its colour faded, yet it maintained the shape of having been trodden upon.

  The sense of space here was utterly scrambled. He stood at the doorway, yet the distant staircase felt within arm's reach, while a pillar beside him seemed leagues away.

  Anger attempted a step. The sensation underfoot was the same as outside—sometimes hard as iron, sometimes soft and muddy like a bog. If the outside was merely a feeling, here he was literally walking upon this strange space.

  When his foot landed, he could even see ripples spreading through the air, disturbing the frozen dust and luminous mist, but they quickly settled back into stillness.

  A profound silence reigned. It wasn't that there was no sound, but all sounds here were distorted into a dull hum, blending into the background of this isolated pocket of spacetime.

  An indescribable loneliness and disorientation slowly rose like seawater, threatening to drown him from the feet up.

  So this is the inside of the Mute Tower, the Amber of Stilled Time. Anger took a deep breath, suppressing the dual discomfort—physical and mental. Gazing at this grotesque space, he cautiously took his first exploratory step forward.

  ******

  Looking at the stairwell leading to the tower's peak not far ahead, he tried to walk towards it. As he neared the steps to the next level and his left foot came down—Crack.

  Instantly—Bad.

  He didn't even have time to pull back his foot before a force yanked at him.

  He could feel his left foot undergoing a thousand years of weathering in an instant. The skin became desiccated and fissured; he could clearly sense his bones turning brittle and fragile. That fine, slack texture of the skin… an extreme sensation of aging erupted from within his body.

  His brain even hallucinated a stench akin to putrefaction—so revolting, so stimulating—compelling him to ponder: why must humans age? Why must they die?

  And almost simultaneously, the right half of his body violently shrank. The vision from one eye rapidly diminished. A childlike frailty and cognitive fog enveloped him, constantly clouding his mind, regressing him in an instant to the toddling years.

  The hallucinations of decrepitude and infantilization transformed into two torrents, clashing violently within his consciousness. His mind felt on the verge of being torn asunder.

  More terrifyingly, he felt his very existence being assimilated into this amberhued zone. His thoughts grew sluggish. The urge to struggle had barely surfaced before it was shoved down into a quagmire. His attempts to move were agonizingly slow. His awareness began to fray.

  Just as he was about to be pulled into the darkness by this zone, Anger's green eyes—for the first time—were intensely activated. He saw it: between every sphere of amber in this area, there existed connecting threads of light,uncanny filaments, linking them all.

  His left foot had stepped into emptiness, his body brushing against them. And the diary in his pocket emitted a unprecedented, scorching heat. Anomalous.

  The diary was like a living thing, actually beginning to burrow into his body.

  The pain jolted Anger awake. Relying on a burst of sheer willpower, he forcibly suppressed all the chaos flooding his senses. His body contorted almost grotesquely as he threw himself backward. At the same time, his right hand shot out and viciously grabbed the frame of the nearby fulllength mirror, its surface webbed with cracks.

  CRACK—SHATTER.

  ******

  The sound that came from the depths of the Mute Tower was audible even to those outside.

  “Check the fluctuations!” A technician beside Brough called out hastily. “Disturbance detected in the tower's amber field.”

  “It seems our Detective has successfully made his entry.” Brough adjusted his monocle. “Log it all. This is valuable data.”

  That old fox Schneider has such a restless subordinate under him. A little… discipline is in order.

  With virtually zero cost and a completely controllable risk, why not use him? A detective dead inside—we just need to draft a suitable explanatory report.

  Meanwhile, within the inner ring, the knights reported, “The Sanctified Perimeter remains stable.”

  The Knight-Captain gave a slight nod, his eyes fixed on the tower. “Stable, you say? Then what was that noise just now? That overreaching detective…”

  A young knight beside him spoke up nervously, in a low voice. “Sir, the detective has been inside for a while now. That sound…”

  “Attend to your duties.” The Knight-Captain’s tone was curt, lacking any warmth. “Focus on maintaining the Perimeter. As for the man inside… he chose his path. We gave him warning; he ignored it. Mortal courage is worthless against evils beyond mortal ken. Pathetic.”

  The young knight fell silent.

  Inside the tower, the rotting wood of the mirror frame could not bear the full weight of Anger’s body and the backward pull. It snapped.

  This break freed him from the edge of the timestopped amber zone. He crashed heavily to the ground, rolling twice in a rather undignified manner before coming to a stop.

  ******

  He lay on the floor, gasping for air, his heart hammering against his ribs.

  The sensation of aging in his left foot and the juvenile hallucinations affecting the right side of his body began to recede. Yet, the psychic tearing—that feeling of being ripped asunder—and the dread of impending eternal entrapment lingered stubbornly.

  He glanced at the broken mirror frame in his hand, then looked ahead at the seemingly empty space that was, in truth, fraught with peril. A palpable dread settled in the pit of his stomach.

  Anger dared not trust to luck again. No more reckless steps. He maintained the highest level of mental alertness. Only when his eyes could trace the entire space—the threads within the amber "bubbles"—did he allow his body to slowly, cautiously, inch forward once more.

  Then, he proceeded up the spiral staircase.

  The stairs themselves were profoundly unstable. With each step, the sense of unreality grew stronger, the very solidity of the world dissolving beneath his feet.

  The higher he climbed, the denser the amber-hued luminescence in the air became. Suspended dust motes grew more numerous, and soon he saw them clearly—floating in mid-air, encapsulated in that ethereal glow: stasis bubbles. Anger decided to call them that for now.

  These stasis bubbles were scattered across large areas, trapping within them flies, fallen leaves, even a corner of fabric.

  Finally, after what felt an age, he reached the bell tower's archive room, which also served as the clock chamber.

  The scene here was even more grotesque. There were no large stasis bubbles here, but bookshelves lay toppled like fallen giants. Most of the books and scrolls had been shredded by an invisible force, their pages suspended in the air, frozen into a vast, silent sea of scattered text.

  Some pages even burned with an amber flame at their edges—a fire that neither spread nor died.

  And in the center of the room hung a massive bronze bell. It was covered in strange, esoteric inscriptions. Anger could feel it: this was the epicenter of all the anomalies, the heart of this Mute Tower.

  Beneath a toppled bookcase, partly buried, lay a thick, leatherbound logbook. With considerable effort, he shifted the heavy remnants of the shelf and pulled the log free.

  The cover bore faded lettering, just legible: "Mute Tower Maintenance Log & Record of Silent Vow Enforcement."

  Flipping through it, most entries were mundane maintenance records.

  Only at the very end, following notes on the last major renovation, did he find a hastily scrawled addendum:

  "Vinter & Co.sponsored cornerstone stabilization project accepted. However... the cornerstone of the Silent Vow is cracked. The echoes will not cease. All is futility."

  The Silent Vow? Vinter? And what was this 'cornerstone' it mentioned?

  His thoughts were interrupted by an intangible force field emanating from the great bronze bell in the room's center.

  It seemed to possess a life and will of its own. The patterns of the stained-glass windows, distorted by spatial warping, shimmered bizarrely. In the light filtering through the coloured glass—tinged by the blood moon outside—the patina on the bell's surface seemed to writhe and crawl.

  The inscriptions, something between text and symbol, flickered in and out of sight, pulsing with a sinister aura.

  Anger looked upon the bell. He sensed it was no mere timekeeping device. It was the source, the core of this spacetime anomaly. A monster born of violent conflict, of twisted fusion—the catastrophic marriage and subsequent mutation of forces in this place.

  Its silent pose was more oppressive than any peal from a church tower. It was a scream held in check, a roar poised to declare its absolute dominion over this domain.

  And now... it seemed to be calling to him. Luring him closer. To touch that bronze surface, laden with the scars of past tragedy. To listen for the toll—forever frozen in its final moment, a sound no living soul could hear.