Chapter 52

Late at night, Kyon crawled out of the bushes. He stretched himself till his bones cracked and flexed his neck muscles. First thing first, he stumbled to the hot water spring to have a drink and get washed. He had been dreaming about taking a bath recently, given the latest events, in his nightmares. This time he huffed and puffed around the hole in the fence for about 10 minutes to make sure that even if the young lady emerged from the water, she would be absolutely dead.

He was almost in perfect health. He had grown new teeth. His bones had healed. All his internal injuries had been cured. He could go to the war if the need be.

Kyon made himself more or less pretty and sneaked into the closest bushes. It never hurts to observe and explore. Even if Anna, Dinah, and even more so Juno were still sleeping, he couldn't be too careful.

And indeed... When he saw the beefy guard strolling about the mansion, his happiness knew no bounds. If he had been inside, they would have easily found him. It's not about seeing or hearing, not at all... Kyon knew that the guard wasn't taking a walk around the house. He was scanning the area with pure energy. In his case, a shaggy and tenacious slave could be noticed even through the wall!

{Yeah, caution is everything…} - The young scout thought with a sigh of relief.

Kyon spent the next night in the ambush, watching the house. He determined that one guard covered the perimeter every two hours, including the second floor. After that, the guard returned to his post. Fortunately, the park didn't belong to his itinerary.

The next night, Kyon updated his information with an accurate schedule of the rounds. The guard started the inspection strictly on time. During the breaks, Kyon could go anywhere, and he jumped at that opportunity.

It was his outing number two, day number three or night number three, to be more precise. Kyon knew the mansion well from the previous scouting, so he wasn't interested in the most part of it.

And there he was, inside the mansion again. First thing, Kyon got into the bathroom and snatched a hairpin. It might always come in handy. The measured breathing in the room downstairs told him where the maids were sleeping. Kyon decided to go upstairs and found a row of doors that opened only with a formation. He could hear quiet sniffing behind some of them. One belonged to Marina. The young lady was generous enough to allocate a separate room for her new friend. The other sound came from the little demoness herself.

While Kyon was hanging around near the doors to the girl's bedrooms, wondering where to go, he heard quiet steps downstairs. His heart did a double somersault right into his stomach. The guard must have started another round in an hour, not in two! That's a fine kettle of fish. Kyon was sure that he couldn't slip away unnoticed this time. Scanning is a powerful thing, after all!

While his mind was rushing around his skull in panic, searching for a way out, his keen hearing detected the toilet door open. Kyon could hardly hold back a moan of relief. It was just a maid who went out to do some "night errands!" His heart reluctantly returned to its rightful place, giving him a strict warning: another stress like this, and it would refuse to work under such nervous conditions.

Kyon lurked in the darkness. It was too early to relax. Only when the bedroom door slammed behind the maid, he decided to step out of the shadows.

The next moment, Kyon felt an indistinct soft poke in his back. His heart cursed and demanded resignation, but when Kyon turned around and met Juno face to face, it stopped altogether.

Kyon's eyes hazed over. He felt a sense of futility growing inside... He had just swapped one hell for another. Death herself had found him. There she was, the little one, rocking from side to side and squinting blindly. Synergy immediately clicked him on the nose, forcing him to delay the farewell to his life and use his brains. The girl was sleepy! She must have just woken up at the call of nature. Probably, Juno couldn't make heads or tails of the situation. She was still half asleep!

Juno poked her nose in Kyon's chest where his heart wasn't beating anymore, taking refuge in the unconscious. She looked so cute, rubbing her sleepy eyes. She looked at the slave, rubbed her eyes again, and when she looked again into the darkness, the boy was gone. Juno shook her head, totally confused, and went to the bathroom.

In a split second, Kyon glided like a shadow into the nearest corner unlit by the moon. He counted her steps with a sinking heart... When, by his count, the girl was in the right room, he jumped out of the mansion and literally dived into the saving thicket of bushes. – {Did it really work!?}

Juno emerged like a sleepy little bird from the toilet and froze for a moment in a stupor: what did she just see? She glanced around, enraged... {That's pure nonsense... Am I imagining things.} - She agreed on that and carelessly returned to her room.

That's how Kyon survived due to the impossibility of his existence.

Meeting sleepy Juno was a nerve-racking experience. The dear little angel was a death messenger and, at the same time, an object of his revenge. This time, everything worked out alright. Kyon glanced around and whispered a sincere "thank you" to heaven, just in case. What if there really was someone up there.

The next night, Kyon was cautious. A bomber only gets to make one mistake, after all... He was lucky enough not to "blow up" so he shouldn't meddle with fate anymore. Ideally, he should steer clear from the damned (literally) mansion. But his only hope for salvation was there. He had no choice but to try and find at least something useful. Where does everyone keep everything useful? That's right, in a dusty storeroom.

The lock was simple, uncomplicated. All he needed was a couple of seconds and a bent hairpin. The door opened with a quiet creak. Following his voice of reason and mild paranoia, Kyon carefully locked it up from the other side and only then looked around.

It was not unexpected to see cleaning equipment inside: mops, rags, all sorts of useless tools... There also was a huge, dusty like everything else here (isn't it ironic that no one cleans the cleaning storage area!) bookcase filled with instructions for servants. Kyon, hungry for literature, eagerly attacked his prey and "swallowed" a good half of the books in just half an hour. He reached for another book and... He nearly swore out loud. It happened to be a typical "switch," an opener!

The bookcase slid to the side with a quiet screech, opening the descent to a deep basement.

{A secret passage!} - Kyon exclaimed quietly, trying to believe his eyes. He made sure there was no activity outside, gathered all his courage and went downstairs. There must be something valuable, that's for sure. They would not hide an ordinary room behind the whole system, right?

The descent did not take too long. About ten meters below, Kyon could see rows of bookshelves lit by dusty crystals. There was no treasure, no money, no "secret laboratory." It was a sheer disappointment for all sorts of plunderers and marauders, but not for Kyon: {Books!}

He frantically ran through the section titles: history, alchemy, herbalism, commerce, enchantment, formacy, reference books, fiction, and so on and so forth...

Kyon was excited. He grabbed the first available book on alchemy and flipped through it, memorizing each line. Truth to be told, he did not find any particularly valuable or secret information, but he didn't expect much. In fact, the library was not a family heritage. There were no cloudy stones with formations, no techniques or miracle recipes. There was only publicly available information like laws, patterns, concepts, principles, and canons, as well as detailed descriptions of herbs, animals, stones, metals, etc.

It's rather unusual to hide a dusty storehouse of books behind a bookshelf. Who could come up with that? Maybe it was just a whim? Or did the owner of the mansion want to set a trap for his children? Like in forbidden (hidden) fruit is sweet.

Given his informational hunger and the absence of any other means of learning about the world, Kyon didn't complain. He could learn some general concepts so that he wouldn't make a complete fool of himself if anything popped up. Kyon was staring greedily at the shelves marked "History"... {No... It definitely won't help me right now.}

His eyes lingered on the section of formacy. It was what Martin and Flitz did. Formacy was valued in this world almost above all else. Kyon was interested in this science when he was in the mine. A lot of curious things could be found among formations: a searching formation, a family formation, a passport formation, a subjugating formation, formations in cloudy stones, a sound transmitter formation. And that's only what he had personally seen. To put it short, it was an interesting and most importantly, widely practiced science!

Kyon cast a longing look at the piles of other books and made up his mind, nodding to his thoughts. They had to wait. He opened the first manuscript and plunged headlong into the world of formations.

Kyon's eyes were burning with interest and a thirst for knowledge. He took one book after another, studied it, memorized, pondered over, juxtaposed the information, looked past any falsehood or inaccuracy, figured out what he could make out of it... His head worked at 120%. Synergy was not idle, either. It kept obligingly warning the owner that the dawn was close. Unfortunately, the reading session was over for the time being. Kyon put the opus aside with a sigh. (The title was "The searching formation and the ways it should NOT be used." It was impossible to put this book down!) Then he went upstairs. He had to tinker with the "handle-opener" on the backside of the bookcase, but he was lucky to find the necessary inconspicuous book pretty soon. Kyon quietly left the mansion and had some rest in the bushes that had become so dear to him.

During the next three days, he made nightly raids into the hidden basement library.

The science of formations turned out to be the foundation of modern society. Slaves, servants, workers, family members, investigators, sect members, citizens had a formation that displayed their rank in the hierarchy, as well as their position, affiliation, age, sometimes location, the status of being alive / killed / poisoned / ill, cultivation, sometimes even shopping list! Certain functions such as alive / dead / location identification required a point of data accumulation that got a signal created by the spatial attribute. There was an information center in the mine. Martin, for example, connected Kyon's formation to a mercury mirror. As an option, it could be another person, a group of people of a certain status, position, etc. Each respected family had a center that received information about all family members to find out if anyone had been killed, poisoned, had raised the stage of cultivation and so on to have a maximum control over them.

A formation is essentially a passport with embedded information about a person.

Formations have different functions, for example, analyzing air temperature, humidity, pressure. They can record sound, a visual image: an analogue of a bug, a camcorder, a camera. That's why the framed photo in Flitz's office was so strange. It was created by a visual formation.

Formations can be defensive and attacking, but these require some resources to create, usually money, sometimes key-spheres, some assets or something else.

Formations differ in quality. They are conditionally divided into "E", "D", "C", "B", "A", "S" ranks, where "S" is a brilliant piece of genius work done by a high-ranking formacist. The higher is the rank of the formation, the more compact, uncomplicated, effective and clear it is. It wasn't the first time Kyon had heard about the rank system. It was used everywhere. People were ranked by numbers: 1st rank, 2nd, 3rd and so on. Everything not connected with people was ranked by letters: "E", "D", "C", "B", "A", "S".

When applying a formation, the formacist creates a slot - the void inside which the formation is placed. It doesn't only contain information but also protects / hides it from the others who could detect it on the spiritual level.

The core of the formation is often connected with something (an info-center, an object, a person...) It's often necessary to have a spatial attribute to give orders at a distance, to find a person with a searching formation, to transmit sound, etc. The body of the formation consists mainly of pure energy, the most basic element on the planet.

Formations can be created without a spatial attribute. For example, it's possible to create a subjugating formation that responds to a specific voice, not to the superior formation, just as Flitz did with Kyon.

Kyon was happy to find out that creating formations closely resembled writing the program code. He used to be a computer whiz in his world. Creating the code, endless optimization, setting the properties of the formation you need... He was back in his element.

Kyon could set absolutely any properties with his programming skills! He had discovered the essence of this bizarre magic in the books he read and needed to practice it on someone, no way around it. He'd love to experiment on Juno but not yet.

Formations are a kind of bridge to the energy of the world. They assign certain properties, nature, and behavior. That's why the world, or rather the energy, works according to your rules, according to the formation rules.

Kyon was right thinking that the local energy had internal memory.

It was rather frustrating that it took more energy to create a formation for someone more cultivated than the formacist. However, it was nice to know that an optimized formation contained more energy in each code line, which increased the chance of success. Optimization was his strong suit.

Kyon came up with a brilliant idea: he should make his unique formation not to gain a skill or get an illusional advantage but specifically to take revenge on Juno. Kyon rubbed his hands with glee, trembling excitement over his insidious plan. The fate had brought him to the library, no doubt! {Alright, nasty girl! Just you wait!}