Cton was divided into four districts, east, west, south, and north.
The East District was relatively poor and home to large numbers of people from the lowest levels of society. Because of that, it was also called the slums.
Caelum rented a detached house there.
The house came with a basement. Compared with most places in the East District, the surrounding environment was already rather decent.
In the basement, Caelum processed the ingredients one after another according to the Stage One secret potion formula of the Investigator Sequence, then mixed them together in order.
Thorns.
Violet.
A monkey’s brain.
The eyes of one who was human yet not human.
After being handled according to the formula, these ingredients blended into a pale purple sticky paste.
Then the paste was poured into water made from cow tears and melted white frost.
With that, the secret potion was complete.
No ritual was needed.
No incantation either.
Caelum decisively drank the pale purple Stage One secret potion of the Investigator Sequence and quietly felt the changes within his body.
Gradually, he could clearly sense his five senses becoming sharper.
Hearing, smell, taste, touch, sight.
All of them improved greatly.
Compared with his five senses, his physique did not improve at all.
The power of the Investigator Sequence had never been focused on the body, so this lack of change was normal.
Yet aside from that, Caelum’s mind underwent a qualitative change.
His thoughts became quicker.
His perception grew sharper.
He also gained an extremely powerful intuition.
With it, he could easily notice hidden clues that ordinary people would overlook.
He could rely on intuition to perceive connections between two things at a level beyond logical reasoning.
He could even sense danger in advance by instinct, then avoid it or respond before it arrived.
After all, intuition was exactly the kind of thing that did not care about reason.
In short, this was the Stage One ability of the Investigator Sequence.
Powerful five senses.
Quick thought.
Keen insight.
And intuition beyond common sense.
"With this, my identity as an Investigator is truly deserved."
As he spoke, Caelum took out the archaeologist’s notebook and turned to the last page.
His gaze fell on the final line of the note beside the formula.
Remember, the key is acting.
"Acting..."
The reason every Sequence had a different identity name was that only by throwing oneself into the conduct of that identity and acting it well could one truly bring out the power of that Sequence.
In other words, if Caelum, as someone of the Investigator Sequence, rushed into battle on the front line, his power would be difficult to bring out to its fullest degree.
Only by properly acting his own role could his power satisfy the conditions needed to advance to the next Stage.
Otherwise, even if he possessed the next Stage’s secret potion, the advancement would most likely fail.
The one thing to remember was this.
It was always acting.
It was not truly becoming that role.
Sinking too deeply into it until he could not pull himself free would only have the opposite effect.
These were the archaeologist’s hard earned experiences.
After the effects of the Stage One secret potion of the Investigator Sequence stabilized, Caelum thought everything had ended there.
Then a burst of noisy, completely meaningless whispers suddenly sounded beside his ear.
At once.
Sanity falling
Sanity: 85
Sanity: 80
Sanity: 75
...
Caelum’s Sanity continued to fall until it stabilized at around 70.
The meaningless whispers drove straight into his mind like needles, one after another.
The pain was piercing.
He pressed a hand to his forehead, his face tight with discomfort.
Yet along with that needle like pain inside his brain, Caelum felt as if he had suddenly understood every truth in the world, as if all things had become clear to him at once.
The medicinal effect of the Stage One secret potion of the Investigator Sequence should have long been exhausted.
The power that had already stopped increasing began to surge upward again, pushing Caelum’s Sequence power to a higher Stage.
His five senses became even stronger.
His insight grew sharper.
More importantly, his intuition, already beyond that of ordinary people, climbed another level.
A long while passed before the whispers beside his ear vanished.
The feeling in his mind, as if he could understand everything, disappeared with them.
An ordinary person might have begun to crave and obsess over that feeling of understanding all things.
Caelum did not.
At the first moment, he suppressed the emptiness that rose in his heart.
His hand was still pressed to his forehead, and his complexion had not fully recovered.
"So these are the whispers of the ancient gods?"
This first experience was not pleasant.
Or rather, any normal person could not possibly find it pleasant.
Unless that person had already gone mad.
He looked at the attribute panel.
Sanity: 70
A single whisper from an ancient god had lowered Caelum’s Sanity by 20.
Two or three more times, and he would not be far from losing reason.
Fortunately, there had been gains.
From the state of his own body, Caelum estimated that he had most likely risen to Stage Two of the Investigator Sequence without taking the Stage Two secret potion.
This experience made him understand something.
The whispers of the ancient gods were, in essence, the gaze and blessing of an ancient god.
Only, the essence of an ancient god was far too high.
And They did not care whether someone could endure it. They simply forced power and knowledge in all at once.
Most people could not withstand or understand such a blessing.
Madness would be their only end.
Caelum truly had not expected to draw the attention of an ancient god so quickly.
Was he an exception?
Or were most Sequence users like this?
At the same time.
In a dark alley of the slums, the young woman who had once met Caelum stopped before the door of a certain prostitute.
She lightly sniffed the air nearby.
The young woman had been born with an unusually sharp sense of smell.
As a detective, this was a great advantage.
The giant rat had already been secretly taken away by the police department.
But that did not stop her from coming to inspect the scene.
According to an informant inside the police department, something remarkable seemed to have happened here last night.
As for what exactly it was, that was a very high level secret.
The informant had said nothing about that part.
This was precisely the kind of case that interested the young woman most.
Even if investigating it brought no reward at all.
Smoke.
Perfume.
Blood.
Gunpowder.
And a certain smell that seemed familiar.
After removing the distracting scents, she easily inferred that a shooting had taken place here.
Someone had also been shot and wounded at this spot.
The young woman frowned.
"This smell..."
Suddenly, the image of a man in a black suit flashed through her mind.
She sank into thought.
First, she ruled out the possibility that he had come here for pleasure.
It was even less likely that he had only passed by by chance.
Then there were only two possibilities.
Either he had come here before her to investigate the scene.
Or he was the person who had committed the case.
At once, the young woman became even more interested in Caelum.