What the—!
Straight into the deep end, then?
Vincent's heart lurched. He read on urgently:
"December 5th — A week has passed since I set foot on the Moon. A full week since I last wrote in this diary. If I could choose, I would truly rather I had never gone."
"Then I could go on being blissfully ignorant — lost in the beautiful dream I had woven for myself, fancying myself the protagonist of the world, the lighthouse of human civilisation."
"But that dream was shattered on that day. As it turns out, I never left at all. The home I pined for with every fibre of my being — it was beneath my feet the whole time."
"Farewell, homeland. Goodbye forever, my 21st century — the one I can never return to."
Reading that, Vincent froze. Bernadette — are you trying to destroy the Fool? Leading with something this explosive would send Klein spiralling into despair on the spot.
Good thing it was him attending this meeting and not her.
No — this passage absolutely could not be shown to Klein. Not now, not at this stage. For a long stretch of his journey, the driving force that kept Klein going was the hope of finding his way home. Even in the later chapters, after enduring so much and finally accepting he could never go back, he had nearly shut down completely — and clawed his way back from that edge only after rounds of mental recuperation.
If he learned this now, he might very well collapse entirely.
"December 7th — Held a grand ball. The ladies and gentlewomen of Trier were as beautiful and vivacious as ever. Yet I, now at Sequence 1, find I have precious little interest in such things anymore. Perhaps... only that Primordial Witch could stir my desire these days."
"December 8th — Held a ball."
"December 9th — Held a ball."
"December 10th — Bernadette came. She seems to have seen through to my real state of mind. She is worried about me. She wants to know what happened. And yet — I cannot explain why — in this moment, what I felt was not warmth, but a sharp and violent irritation and revulsion, as though the person standing before me were not my most beloved daughter, but a bitter enemy I loathed with every fibre of my being."
"The despair and gloom I had suppressed for days erupted in that moment into a sourceless rage, which I then poured out upon the person I love most in this world. She stared at me as if seeing me for the first time, her face full of disbelief."
"This was the first true quarrel our father and daughter have ever had. Watching Bernadette walk away with grief on her face, I felt wretched — yet the inexplicable fury still crowded my mind. And in the distance, dimly, I seemed to hear a voice: No. I cannot accept this fate. I must do something."
"I must do something!"
"December 11th — Held a ball."
"December 12th — Held a ball."
Three pages of diary. That was all.
Vincent understood now why Bernadette had chosen these three pages — because what had happened during this stretch of time was something she would never forget for as long as she lived.
If he had to guess, it was from this day onwards that Roselle and Bernadette began to drift apart — until, ultimately, father and daughter became utterly estranged.
From the outside, looking in at the time, Roselle's behaviour toward Bernadette would have been incomprehensible. But looking back now, she could of course guess that something enormous had happened to Roselle during this period — something that drove the change in him.
That "enormous thing" was twofold: the severing of his path home, and the corruption he had sustained upon setting foot on the Moon.
Vincent tucked the three diary pages away, then cleared his mind and silently spoke the words — entering the mysterious room once more.
Sure enough, the Broker potion's full digestion had stripped away all the grey, leaving the room bathed in colour and looking like a perfectly normal sitting room — except that, beyond the restored colour, nothing else appeared to have changed.
But Vincent didn't mind. He made straight for the door, guided by the feedback from his spiritual instincts during the last visit: once colour had filled the entire room, he would be able to push through and step outside.
"What's beyond the door... I wonder."
He gripped the handle and pressed down gently.
The door swung open with a soft creak.
He drew a slow breath, then pulled the wooden door open all the way. In an instant, grey, black, and white light flooded through the crack, washing out his vision entirely — just as it had the very first time he had entered.
The next second, the three colours vanished. Carried by a force that was vast yet oddly gentle, he passed through the doorway and arrived on a massive stone platform seemingly suspended in mid-air. The platform was ringed by the ruins of collapsed stone pillars and crumbled foundations — the remnants, it seemed, of some great calamity.
Then — a flash of cyan caught his eye.
Stretching between heaven and earth in the far distance, the world appeared to have been divided by an unseen hand into layer upon layer of distinct strata. He counted roughly thirty-three tiers. Each one blazed with brilliant light; each one held the phantom silhouettes of countless buildings.
But those buildings looked deeply wrong.
It was as though a perfectly normal image had been sliced into fragments of every size, then carelessly reassembled. Some buildings were Chinese in style on the left, Western in style on the right, their upper and lower halves belonging to entirely different eras. Some seemed to have lost gravity altogether, hanging upside down in the air. Others were inside-out — exterior walls facing inward, interior rooms exposed to the open sky.
Chaos. Disorder. Distortion.
As a spectacle alone, it was even more staggering than Klein's space above the grey fog. Perhaps... this place truly was something equivalent — a different kind of existence, equal in standing to that grey fog above.
Then a phrase surfaced unbidden in his mind:
The Kingdom of Disorder.
That was its name.
"So this is what the 'mysterious room' truly looks like..."
It wasn't merely a room. It was those chaotic, disordered thirty-three tiers of sky — a breathtaking, mysterious "realm": the Kingdom of Disorder.
And with that name came a dim, half-remembered fragment of knowledge: it seemed to be an existence of comparable standing to Klein's space above the grey fog — one of those things indispensable for a Sequence 0 Beyonder advancing to an even higher level.
They had a unified name: Sefirah.
He didn't know which pathway's Sefirah the Kingdom of Disorder belonged to, but based on its name and those chaotic, disordered, even distorted thirty-three tiers — he could make a rough guess: very likely the Black Emperor and the Arbitrator pathways.
But that raised a new question: what exactly was his own "Broker" pathway, then?
The old question resurfaced again: why was he, here in the Harry Potter world, able to enter a Sefirah from the Lord of the Mysteries world? Was it because of his unique identity as a transmigrator, allowing the two worlds to intersect?
And if so — would others eventually stumble upon the existence of the other side as well?
A soft ding rang out. A semi-translucent apparition materialised in the air above him, rapidly solidifying from haze into substance: an ancient-looking Scale.
The left pan held grey crystals; the right held a single counterweight. The Scale tipped very slightly to the right — just one fraction away from balance.
"The Scale followed me over too?"
Vincent turned around. The old wooden door stood there on the edge of the stone platform, perfectly upright, looking entirely out of place — yet all he had to do was push it open again to return to the sitting room.
He found himself suddenly curious: now that the true face of the "mysterious room" — no, the Kingdom of Disorder — had been revealed, why had he first always entered through that sitting room?
Clunk.
Just as that thought took shape, the door handle was pressed down from outside, giving a sharp, clear sound.
Vincent's hair stood on end. He took two instinctive steps back: someone on the other side was trying to open the door.
Someone else was here besides him?
Who?
Another person chosen by this Kingdom of Disorder?
Vincent grabbed a chunk of fallen stone and eased himself toward the door, waiting for whoever was on the other side.
Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
But the door never opened.
After a while, the other person seemed to give up — the door handle went still. Vincent carefully pressed his ear to the door. Silence.
He now faced a choice: push the door open immediately, return to the sitting room and find out what was going on — or err on the side of caution and stay away for a while?
He rejected the latter at once. He couldn't possibly leave an unknown variable lurking unchecked on the other side. As the old saying goes: no one else may sleep soundly beside you in your own bed.
Take the risk.
Vincent seized the handle and pushed the door open with force.
The next moment, he was back at the sitting room doorway.
But there was no one there.
· ·
At that same moment — on the other side.
The instant the door was pushed open, Bernadette felt as though someone had delivered a sharp kick straight into her. Everything before her eyes receded at blinding speed, blurring into haze.
A few seconds later she was back in reality — and her body, as if struck by an invisible momentum, stumbled backwards several steps, nearly crashing to the floor.
"What just happened? Who pushed that door open? Was I forcibly ejected from the room?"
Three questions surfaced in quick succession.
Bernadette shook her head clear and silently recited the method Vincent had described: enter the room.
Nothing happened.
Enter the room.
She remained exactly where she was.
But she didn't give up. Every thirty seconds she tried again — until more than an hour later, the murk returned before her eyes, and she finally entered the "mysterious room" once more.
This time she was alone. The door was still shut. Everything looked exactly as it had before she left — as if what had just happened had been nothing more than a hallucination.
Bernadette crossed to the door again and pressed down the handle.
Seconds later, that same sensation of being "kicked" struck her again.
She was back in reality — and this time sat down squarely on the floor.
Bernadette: "..."
Enter the room.
This time, the moment Bernadette returned, she immediately searched the room for paper and something to write with. Finding neither, she changed tack at once — dragged a table to the doorway, picked up a metal ornament, and used its sharpest edge to scratch several large words into the tabletop:
"Are you Vincent?"
The moment she returned to reality, Bernadette felt as though her skull were being split open. Since advancing to the Saint tier, she hadn't experienced spiritual depletion in many years.
Along with the pain came bone-deep mental exhaustion and a crushing drowsiness. She barely managed to drag herself upright before effectively falling onto the bed, and lost consciousness entirely.
· ·
Half an hour later.
Vincent stood in the sitting room, quietly seething.
What was that — some kind of game?
He'd waited in the sitting room for ages with no sign of anyone. The moment he stepped through to the other side, someone started rattling the door handle again. He came back — and they were gone.
Hm?
That table.
Vincent crossed quickly and saw several faint words scratched into the surface: "Are you Vincent?"
The letters were visibly fading as he watched — not the words themselves fading, but the tabletop slowly repairing itself.
Still, the handwriting was unmistakable. The tension in his chest eased at once. He had suspected as much, but a suspicion was still only a suspicion.
He grabbed the ornament lying on the table and scratched his reply into the surface: "Yes, it's me."
He waited. Bernadette's words faded entirely — and his reply began to do the same.
"So everything in here repairs itself? That makes proper back-and-forth communication nearly impossible."
Vincent frowned, thinking.
Right — this place is the equivalent of Klein's space above the grey fog. Can I do what Klein does up there, and simply will paper and a pen into existence?
He focused his mind, attempting to use his spirituality to communicate with the room and "create" paper and a writing instrument. Several minutes later, his eyes ached from staring — and nothing had happened.
"So that function doesn't exist here. What then?"
A few minutes more passed, and a sharp sting flared through his mind — the first sign of spiritual depletion. He realised he had already spent a considerable stretch of time in here, and quickly scratched "Yes — Vincent" into the tabletop once more.
Then he returned to reality immediately. He still had the Fool's meeting to attend this afternoon.
· ·
3 o'clock in the afternoon.
By the ancient and weathered bronze table, three deep-crimson forms suddenly appeared, stretching and blurring into the vague outlines of figures before solidifying. Klein looked immediately toward the Lover's position.
By his reckoning of the intervals, this week's attendee should once again be the "Mr. Lover" — and he could hardly wait to see the expressions on Justice and the Hanged Man when they found the Lover had abruptly become a man.
"Good afternoon — Mr. Fool!"
Audrey was as bright and cheerful as ever, greeting everyone in turn. "Good afternoon, Mr. Hanged Man. Good afternoon, Miss Lover... eh?"
"Huh?!"
Audrey gave a sharp cry. "Lover — Miss Lover, how did you —"
Alger turned at the sound and immediately stared: what was going on? Miss Lover had... turned into a man?
His gaze went straight to Mr. Fool, waiting for an explanation from this mysterious being.
Their reactions satisfied Klein considerably. He tapped the edge of the table lightly and smiled with mild amusement:
"I forgot to mention it last time — the Lover's situation is rather unusual. He, or she, was struck by a curse from a high-Sequence Beyonder. Two souls were sealed into a single body. They swap every three days, while the other soul sleeps — round and round without end."
"!!!"
Audrey clapped both hands over her mouth in horror. "That's — that's absolutely terrifying. That's monstrous. If Suzie and I had our souls crammed into one body... I can't even imagine —" ...Why was Suzie the first person who came to mind?
Sealing two souls into a single body — so this was what a high-Sequence Beyonder was capable of?
Alger mastered his shock and quietly tried to guess which pathway's ability this might be.
"Good afternoon, Miss Justice, Mr. Hanged Man."
Vincent nodded to both of them. "Miss Lover has already introduced me to you both. I'll be attending the next four meetings in her place, after which she'll return for the following four."
"Of — of course."
Audrey still found it slightly hard to believe, and had a dozen questions she wanted to ask Mr. Lover — but with the Fool present, she held them all back.
She cleared her throat and looked toward the Fool. "Mr. Fool, I truly wish we had wine here. Otherwise we could properly toast your success."
She was referring to last week's news — that prayers to the Fool could now be offered at any time.
Alger chimed in appreciatively: "Your power far exceeds anything we imagined."
Vincent hadn't quite caught up to the rhythm of this pair of devoted Fool-admirers, and could only manage: "Same here."
Klein smiled faintly and said:
"Good. This tells us we are on a path that yields results. In future, if any of you are occupied on a Monday afternoon and cannot attend, hold a ritual in advance and inform me."
"That's wonderful — though I would never miss a single meeting for any reason!"
Audrey's voice was light with delight. Then, riding that wave of enthusiasm, she was about to speak again — when the until-now-silent Mr. Lover got there first: "Mr. Fool, do you have any intention of taking on new members?"
Klein leaned back, unhurried, and replied as he'd long been prepared to: "I have no objection to seeing more members here. But selection must be stringent — secrecy is our first principle."
The more members, the more useful this is to my own growth. But no dangerous elements may be allowed in.
"I see," Vincent said. "So it would require observation, recommendation, and vetting — with your final approval for admittance?"
"That's one way of putting it."
"Understood. From here on, I will do my utmost to find the most suitable candidates for you, and help our Tarot Club grow and flourish!"
...Didn't you refuse when I invited you to join? And now you're suddenly this enthusiastic? Klein thought. Well, I'm not in a rush to recruit new members right now — mainly because my spirituality isn't quite up to it.
Vincent's desire to "recruit" for the Tarot Club was, naturally, about adding weight to the Scale: Klein's true self might only be Sequence 9 in the outside world, but above the grey fog, his standing was another matter entirely. If a "new member" could be brought into cooperation with the Fool, the Scale should gain a significant boost.
What did you call that?
Milking Mr. Fool for everything he's worth.
On the side, Audrey opened her mouth, feeling distinctly put-upon: those were... all my lines.
Hmph. Mr. Lover was just as insufferable as Miss Lover.
She pressed her lips together, raised her hand reluctantly, and said: "I... I'll do the same."
Klein glanced at her: One Lover is already more than enough. What are you piling on for?
"..."
Audrey went still, eyes vacant: I... was just rejected by Mr. Fool?
To be continued…