old dream

Chapter 40 Expensive Ritual

When Colin entered the door, Ji Li'an was boiling her cutlery.The dishes and knives and forks were stacked in a small pot, the boiling water was bubbling, and the dense steam made her bright and clean face slightly red.

After taking out the tableware, Ji Li'an will also boil the washed mask and handkerchief.

In order to avoid spreading her misfortune to others, she always pays special attention to the disinfection work.

Colin put the small gift box on the table, and then began to observe the changes in the details of the room.

Sometimes Ji Li'an felt a little subtle about Colin's scrutinizing eyes.

It's not because of the intrusion of privacy or other leisure, but they have been working together for four years, but they can still feel the alertness and distrust in his eyes.

Colin roamed the room seemingly at random, touching some small things.In fact, in several places, he has left marks.

Whether anyone has been in or out, and how long they have been shopping, can roughly make inferences.

In addition to letting prostitutes help bring things, sometimes, Ji Lian will let them in for some small diagnosis and treatment.

Colin felt very inappropriate for this way of letting people into this room.

But after talking about her a few times, Colin thought that Ji Li'an might have problems if she was alone for too long, so he finally made some compromises.

……

……

The secret door is said to be a secret door, but it is actually just a bookcase used to block the sight.After that, there is a two-by-five-meter cubicle.

Colin entered with the lantern.There were two rows of shelves against the wall in the compartment, and on top of them were countless anisette bottles.

All of them are original, well-packaged goods from the remote island country of Essini, prepared with distilled spirits and anise oil at the place of origin.Even before Prohibition, a bottle cost more than an ore.

As for now, there is no market price.

It is currently impossible for ordinary people to get it.As for the black market, with the recent trend, just a few bottles may lead to a bloody case.

But now, in this small room alone, there are probably about 1000 bottles stored.

Light amber in color, casts a bright sheen under the lantern.

Fennel oil comes from the extraction of anise, and other essential oils such as gentian, mugwort, cinchona and bitter orange peel are dissolved in alcohol.It is said to have a licorice-like back aroma, but Colin has not tried it.

After all, he doesn't understand wine.Although, he has invested almost all his money here for two years.

Colin opened the small gift box, and inside was five ounces of redstone, which were nothing but shapeless masses, no more than the size of two adults' fingers together.

After weighing the redstones, he wrapped them in paper and marked them.Then he took the note booklet hanging by the side and wrote down the newly added weight.

Then, he weighed the redstone that had been put here in the past, counted the weight of natural evaporation, and checked it.

The red stones currently placed on this shelf are 230 seven grams in total.

Since alcohol was no longer available in the market, Colin switched to buying redstone, leaving almost no cash on him.So these minerals are his account for the past month.

"One month, you can only buy half a pound of redstone." Ji Li'an said in a trance, her tone a little erratic.

Colin is currently doing work that risks his life, so his income is already very considerable.

But if you put this money into redstone, your monthly income is only the amount of two small grabs in front of you.

Moreover, they continue to evaporate and dissipate.

The five ounces of redstone that were placed here at the beginning of the month have evaporated more than a dozen grams by now.

"Instead of lamenting these, it is better to improve the ritual and reduce the outrageous dosage."

The ceremony was naturally the one used to break the memory seal in Colin's consciousness.

Said to be cracked, perhaps not quite accurate.After all, at present, the only way to confirm the existence of the memory seal is the stress response from the symbiotic flora.

Previously, Ji Lian tried all the methods she knew, but failed to capture the slightest trace of the ceremony.

This is not to blame her, after all, this is something that even the seminary has not done.What's more, as a refugee, Ji Li'an was trained by the church school for the purpose of filling the lower-level personnel.

But to open the 'lock' does not necessarily need to see what the 'lock' is. There are some problems in this world that can be solved by violence.

Now that Colin told her the existence of the 'lock', then she only needed to determine the coordinates of Colin, and then she could determine the location of the 'lock'.

Part of the reason why the seal in Colin's consciousness is difficult to detect is that it does not need to exchange energy with the outside world, and the entire cycle is self-sufficient with the power of the host.This proves that although it is exquisite, its physical size is extremely small.

This also provided a breakthrough point for Ji Lian to design the cracking ceremony.

In the Ankh people's theory, except that the rituals of the invocation are based on ancient agreements between mortals and elves.All other types of rituals are ultimately based on the "law of similarity".

Another more explicit name can also be used:
"Mirror Resonance Law".

To some extent, it can be understood as a distorted law of causality, similar to "like-breeding" or "effect must be the same cause".

To put it simply, if deep in the world, there has been a mirror event with several feature nodes.Then just imitate every feature of that mirror image, and inject enough fuel into it to make the course of events match the original mirror image.

The so-called ritual of Ankh's mysticism is to highlight several mirror images that are needed in an extreme manner against a background that is close to blank.Thus, to a considerable extent, the contingency caused by the mixing of mirror images in natural events is excluded.

Ji Lian's half-completed ceremony is designed for the mirror trunk based on the deeds of a demigod who is widely circulated in humorous stories, the "stealing god" Tempus.

In that story, Tambis smashed the world's most expensive and exquisite lock blindfolded and opened the broken treasure box, only to get a basil.

Of course, there's a lot of tweaking that needs to be done to get this ridiculously rudimentary image to work.

And its usefulness lies in: under the premise of not knowing the specific form of the 'lock', it can be opened with absolute force.

Therefore, Ji Lian used the story of Stealing the God Tempus as the mainstay, and only needed to repeat the mirror image to a certain extent in the ceremony to achieve the result of "I don't know what the lock is, but I got the wormwood in the treasure box" .

Of course, in order to ensure security, other mirror images need to be mixed in this ceremony as a mitigation adjustment.

A few years ago, they tried this half-completed ritual, and after evaporating a hundred grams of redstone, they managed to steal a little of Colin's formless memory.Prove that this ritual really works.

However, it still needs a lot of tweaking and refinement.Especially when it comes to redstone usage...

Three years ago, they roughly calculated how much redstone they would need if they wanted to open the seal in Colin's memory with the ritual of that state.

The final result is somewhat disappointing.

Judging from the effect of using the ritual for the first time, if they want to achieve their goals, they need at least:
2000 pounds of redstone.

Just saying this may be lacking in concepts, so it can also be expressed more intuitively in terms of money.

Based on the friendship price alone, it is probably... 80 Ori.

(End of this chapter)