Ethan borrowed thirty-five gold lions from Ivy.

  Twenty-five went toward buying A Simple Guide to Magic Scroll Crafting, published by Juneflower Press in the Capital. The other ten went toward twenty sheets of charged parchment for making scrolls.

  After subtracting the savings he had managed to scrape together over the past two years, plus the fifty silver gazelles he had just fleeced from that cuckolded gentleman, he still owed Ivy four gold lions and fifty silver gazelles.

  Naturally, Ethan had given her a different expnation.

  He told Ivy he was buying a pywriting manual. According to him, his lifelong dream had always been to become the resident pywright of the Capital Opera House, and once he was transferred to headquarters, he pnned to spend his free time writing stage pys.

  Fortunately, Ivy seemed preoccupied.

  For once, the woman who normally insisted on digging into everything did not ask what he had actually bought. After lending him the money, she simply waited for him on the deck and showed no interest in his purchases at all.

  So in the end, he had still given in to temptation.

  Carrying the bag in his hand, Ethan suddenly realized something serious.

  Before they came here, Ivy had warned him that Old Mug the treant was a dangerous individual, the sort who could send you tumbling into a bottomless abyss if you were not careful.

  And yet, after actually meeting him, the most dangerous thing Old Mug had done was point the nozzle of Dark Creature Begone 3.0 at Ethan.

  Other than that, he had shown no intention of tricking him out of his money.

  But the moment Ivy offered to lend him money with no interest attached, a whole new world had opened before Ethan's eyes.

  Once desire and temptation were stirred up, they became very difficult to resist.

  Ethan gave himself a stern internal lecture.

  Still, the road of an elemental caster was long and difficult.

  Fireball and Ice Arrow Fundamentals did not just record beginner spells. It also touched briefly on the principles behind mana itself.

  Every supernatural path had its own method of advancement.

  For elemental casters, broadening their horizons, deepening their understanding of the occult, and strengthening their connection to the natural elements were all ways to temper and expand mana.

  To put it in Ethan's own terms, he needed to raise his intelligence stat.

  The stronger his mana became, the stronger the spells he cast would be.

  Unfortunately, after transmigrating, he had no character sheet to look at. His only real cheat was the ability to see his own skill proficiency. So the only way he could estimate his current mana strength was through comparison.

  Conservatively speaking, he was probably just a tiny bit stronger than the witch who had attacked Willowbrook not long ago.

  So how was he supposed to raise his intelligence?

  The answer was simple.

  Read more books reted to the occult.

  That was the conclusion Ethan had reached over the course of the past two years.

  He had already read through every occult-reted book in the Willowbrook library. Somewhere along the line, the townsfolk had started treating him as the local expert on such matters.

  He did not think that was much of an achievement.

  After all, the only things he had access to were books open to the general public.

  It was just that there were very few people in town willing to sit down and read them. Most of them preferred to come to Ethan with their problems and listen while he distilled and summarized the knowledge for them.

  As far as Ethan could tell, there were basically two paths to gaining access to more occult knowledge.

  The first was position.

  If he could be transferred to work at Bureau headquarters, then the occult collection in the Capital Archives would be opened to him. And since desk work tended to be fairly light, he would have plenty of time to read. His career goal, in fact, was refreshingly straightforward. He pnned to retire after reading every occult work in the Capital Archives.

  The second was wealth.

  If he could earn enough money, then in a pce like Hearthbay he could buy piles of occult books, including genuine spellbooks tied to actual skills.

  The first goal now had a glimmer of hope.

  That meant he could not ignore the second.

  That was why Ethan had gritted his teeth and bought A Simple Guide to Magic Scroll Crafting. If he could learn how to make magic scrolls, then he could turn Fireball and Ice Arrow into scrolls and sell them in Hearthbay.

  If it worked, that would bring in money much faster than a regur sary ever could.

  This trip to Hearthbay had made him realize that the pce's secrecy and its free-trade rules suited him perfectly.

  At that thought, Ethan's grip on the shopping bag tightened on its own.

  He was nervous.

  After all, in his previous life he had only ever been a diligent wage worker. He had no experience doing business. Everything would have to be learned from scratch.

  Still, no matter what happened next, Ethan's Magic Scroll Shop had officially set sail.

  Both Ethan and Ivy were busy with their own thoughts on the way back.

  The return trip went smoothly. This time there was no disaster involving Ethan sneezing and sending Ivy into someone else's house or a sewer.

  Ethan stacked the shopping bags on top of the crate, and by the time they got back downstairs to Ivy's apartment, Chloe was already waiting at the door with her neck stretched proudly high. The moment she saw them, she bounced over in delight, then butted the crate up with her head and carried the basic equipment of the Bureau of Containment's Willowbrook Intelligence Outpost inside.

  The moment Ivy got home, she stripped off her damp overcoat and stormed into her room like a gust of wind.

  Not long afterward, the sound of running water came from inside.

  Ethan opened the crate and began going through the inventory list.

  The contents really were as basic as advertised.

  There were only four kinds of items inside.

  And at st, he discovered what that sinister bck sludge in the bottles actually was.

  [Clear Mind Mental Blocker 2.0.]

  This was a suppressant made from the secretions of SI-0321, capable of effectively blocking the mental effects of most low-tier curses on investigators.

  A few words in the description made Ethan's scalp crawl.

  Oral solution.

  You were supposed to drink it.

  He tried holding one of the bottles out toward Chloe.

  Chloe immediately let out a horrified series of clucks and fpped under the table for cover.

  See?

  Even Chloe wouldn't drink it.

  The st items in the crate were several manuals.

  Each had Glossary of Curses and Contained Object Terminology written across the cover. Ethan needed these badly. All those containment designations sounded like code. Without a glossary, he had no idea what something like SI-0321 was actually supposed to mean.

  But he regretted opening the manual almost immediately.

  The moment he looked up SI-0321 by its number, he was met with the image of a creature whose main body looked like a giant red balloon. Several tentacles hung beneath it. The balloon seemed to function as both head and torso. Five eyeballs, each about the size of a palm, covered the front of the thing, and in the center was a protruding, trumpet-shaped mouth.

  [Cross-Eyes.]

  That was the Bureau's name for it.

  In a highlighted note near the top, the manual warned that the creature had first been sighted after a noble party. The case had ended with seven deaths, including the youngest son of a duke. There were no obvious wounds on the bodies. Cause of death, suffocation.

  Below that, in red text, the manual stated:

  All investigators who encounter Cross-Eyes are forbidden from maintaining eye contact for longer than three seconds.

  Research showed that after staring into Cross-Eyes for more than three seconds, the victim would fall into a hallucination. Since every observed subject who entered the hallucination had died, the Bureau still had no confirmed record of what the hallucinated world actually looked like.

  The "SI" designation referred to contained entities that showed strong hostility toward investigators and possessed lethal potential.

  And the so-called secretion of SI-0321 was the mucus extracted from Cross-Eyes' eyeballs.

  Researchers had discovered by accident that the substance had mental-blocking properties.

  Ethan's stomach turned violently.

  In that moment, he finally understood why some people said ignorance was a form of happiness.

  Drink this stuff, and with enough rounding, you were basically licking Cross-Eyes' eyeball.

  He did not know how other people felt about that.

  But there was absolutely no way he was putting it in his mouth.

  At some point, the bedroom went quiet.

  Not long after, the sound of a door opening rescued Ethan from the nightmare.

  Ivy stepped out wearing a loose white satin robe. Steam still clung to her body. Her short golden hair had been tied into a simple ponytail, and the signature tuft of blond hair on top of her head was temporarily gone.

  A faint, clean fragrance hung in the air.

  Ethan lifted the manual in his hand and spoke first.

  "I was getting a head start on learning the job. But before work officially begins, I have one question."

  "Ask."

  "You said earlier that we'll still be staying in Willowbrook for a while. I want to know what our real objective is."

  "To find a spellbook."