Chapter 608: Chapter 608: A Face Worth Borrowing

- Caelum POV -

Caelum stood inside the rented room and began placing his prepared tools across the small table.

Caelum was a meticulous and orderly man, almost a perfectionist, because his work required the precision of a surgeon.

That was the plain truth of it. A careless assassin could kill once. A careless spy could survive once. Caelum’s work demanded more than survival. It demanded repetition, patience, and the ability to leave a place with fewer traces than the dust already gathered there.

One by one, he summoned the objects he intended to use.

The first were three small glass bottles, each vial no longer than two fingers. The liquid inside them did not share color, scent, or purpose. One held poison capable of killing instantly. A single drop was enough. The curious part was that almost two years ago, one of those vials had disappeared. Caelum had never forgotten that. He did not forget losses, especially losses measured in drops.

The second vial held a stronger chemical, his preferred tool by far. A person only needed to breathe it in a few times before sleep took them. No scream nor struggle. Compared to poison, it was elegant, practical, and far easier to explain away afterward.

The third was a simpler potion, though simple did not mean weak. It diminished presence until a person became close to absent, as if the world had misplaced them inside its own space. Not invisible in the literal sense. Nothing so crude. It simply encouraged attention to slide elsewhere, turning the user into a shadow people failed to question.

After the vials came his daggers.

Caelum placed both on the table with care. The blades were already washed, sharpened, and ready after what had happened on the train. They gave no hint of the work done with them. Good weapons did not brag. They waited.

On the back of the chair, he hung five different outfits for different occasions. Each one had been chosen for a purpose. A servant’s plain uniform. A messenger’s travel coat. A formal black suit suitable for minor administrative work. A technician’s layered attire with hidden pockets. A richer outfit meant for someone who could enter certain buildings without being asked who he was.

Beside them went rope.

A man like Caelum always needed good rope close at hand. Doors needed binding. Hands needed binding. Feet needed binding. Other situations also existed, and anyone pretending otherwise had never worked in a useful profession.

The rest of the items followed in quiet order.

A Shadowlink Echo for his young master.

Another Shadowlink Echo for Lord Valttair.

A dark orb, small enough to fit in one palm, through which he could observe the activity of each active clone.

Caelum currently maintained seven clones at all hours. One remained near Valttair. Three were positioned inside Morgain Castle, usually watching Rivena, Maeron, and Seraphine whenever they were present, though Caelum moved them through different corridors and posts as needed. The remaining ones shifted according to necessity, taking low places, forgettable posts, and angles no one important thought to inspect.

Since reaching Ascend Core, Caelum could maintain more clones over greater distances. Better still, he had developed a mana-feeding mechanism that allowed those bodies to sustain themselves without constant attention. With enough supply, they could remain active for a hundred years without disappearing, provided they stayed within a hundred meters of the feeding point.

Caelum stepped away from the table and moved in front of the mirror fixed to the wall. The glass was cheap, with a faint distortion along one edge, but it would serve. He combed his gray hair back in its usual style, adjusted the collar of his shirt, and lit a small lamp. He needed proper light for what came next.

Both hands rose to his face.

[Borrowed Face]

His unique skill activated.

It was not the work of an item. No artifact could replicate this properly. Artifacts left signatures, edges, imperfections. Caelum’s skill did not paste a mask over him. It corrected reality through mana and memory.

His fingers moved across his jaw, cheekbones, brow, and throat. With every touch, his face altered. Not quite deforming, but forming instead. The process was closer to sculpture than disguise, except the clay was flesh and mana, and the sculptor had no tolerance for error.

Caelum memorized faces perfectly. His photographic memory gave him the model, and [Borrowed Face] gave him the means to carve it into existence. Face, body, posture, small asymmetries, the weight of age around the mouth, the faint slackness beneath the skin. All of it answered his hands.

A short while later, the man in the mirror was no longer Caelum.

He had become an elderly gentleman of around sixty, pale-skinned, with two visible fangs and red eyes. A vampire. His hair remained grayish, close enough to his original shade that he barely needed to alter it. No reason to waste effort where effort added nothing.

The entire change had taken two seconds.

Caelum had reached a speed that bordered on offensive after so many years of practice.

He studied the result in the mirror, made one small adjustment to the left side of the mouth, and let his hands fall.

Good enough for the street.

He gathered what he needed from the table, stored the rest, and left the room.

Aurevane’s night air carried wine, metal, cooked meat, wet stone, and too many expensive perfumes failing to defeat the smell of crowded streets. Caelum moved toward the main road, where conversations would be plentiful and judgment scarce. It was the first night of the event. People drank more than they should, spoke louder than they meant to, and trusted noise to protect secrets.

It rarely did.

Tonight, Caelum wore a face no one knew.

That was not enough.

His true objective was to borrow a face that could open doors. Not a random face, and not a convenient one. He needed someone with authority, someone allowed to enter places others could only admire from outside. To do that, he would need to know the target fully. Appearance was the smallest part. Voice, habits, pride, speech patterns, irritation, preferences, social weight - everything had to be learned.

And he would need to do it quickly.

Caelum passed between late merchants and wandering guests, his cane tapping lightly against the street despite the fact that he did not need one. The vampire face helped. Elderly men with money were allowed to be curious. Allowed to linger. Allowed to ask questions no younger stranger could ask without becoming suspicious.

He stopped near a stall selling unusual ammunition.

The vendor had arranged his goods in velvet-lined trays: alchemical bolts, glass pellets filled with colored smoke, small metal spheres engraved with runes, and needle cartridges meant for compact launchers. Most of it was overpriced. Several items were dangerous in the hands of amateurs. One was mislabeled badly enough to take off the buyer’s fingers if handled with confidence.

Caelum picked up a small cartridge and turned it between gloved fingers.

The vendor leaned forward at once. "Fine choice, sir. That one carries a compressed burst charge. Very popular among visiting hunters."

"It is also unstable," Caelum replied in the dry, aged voice he had chosen for the disguise. "Unless your definition of popular includes widows."

The vendor’s smile weakened. "Ah. You have experience?"

"Unfortunately."

That was enough to keep the man talking.

Caelum asked a few harmless questions, nodded at the right moments, and gave the vendor just enough interest to appear occupied. His attention, however, had already moved elsewhere.

Two feet behind him, near the edge of the stall’s canvas shade, a pair of men spoke in low voices.

One smelled faintly of herbs and burned alcohol. Alchemist.

The other carried mana-oil on his sleeves, and the tips of his fingers bore tiny pressure marks from handling conduit tools. Mana engineer.

Caelum kept the cartridge in hand and let the vendor explain a mechanism he had already understood from the first glance.

Behind him, the alchemist lowered his voice.

"So, about The Glass Atrium..."

Caelum did not need to force his way into The Glass Atrium anymore; he had just found the face that would worth borrowing.