Kreuzberg District, Schleyerhof Road, Apartment No. 7, under the stone eaves across the street.
The wind whistled through the old iron drainpipes, seeped between the brick seams, and carried the cold air from the eaves.
Three men stood in the shadow of the old street, leaning against the peeling brick wall, their figures cut into three ghostly shadows by the faint glow of the gas streetlights.
They said nothing, but their eyes were fixed on the Hermann Family's house across the street.
The leader was an Old Bloom of about sixty.
His dark gray felt hat was pulled very low, and he wore a faded coffee-colored trench coat with straight shoulder lines and immaculately fastened buttons.
The hem of his trench coat swayed slightly with the wind, and a gold-threaded seam was vaguely visible beneath the hood.
He held an ebony cane with intricate inscriptions carved into its shaft, and its handle gleamed with a cold metallic sheen.
He dragged his left leg, limping, and the heel of his shoe made a heavy “thump, thump” sound when it hit the pavement.
His name was Gerhard Bloom.
He was one of the Solomon Order’s peripheral intelligence informants in Bella Berlin’s Old District.
This was the kind of cultist whose name, if heard, would surely invite the Shinra iron fist.
When Shinra Empire citizens heard of the Solomon Order, they had only two reactions:
One was fear;
The other was disdain.
No one truly understood what they wanted to do, only that this mysterious society had always claimed to be searching for the legendary 'Seventy-Two Demon Pillars of Solomon'.
According to the Solomon Order’s doctrine, the Seventy-Two Pillars were relics of wisdom left from the Old World, the crystallization of extraordinary knowledge, power, and dominion, and the key to unraveling the truth behind the Celestial Conjunction, the Amber Field, and the destruction of the Old World.
The Solomon Order was infamous because they rarely did anything good.
Shinra often faced natural and man-made disasters, and the Solomon Order was one of the man-made ones.
For example, the most widely known one:
The Bayerland Cataclysm.
haptos calendar 719, eastern plate of the Holy Rotum Empire.
That year, a research facility named Bayerland, located on the northern edge of Kievan Rus', had just been completed.
It was a border observation post jointly established by the Empire’s officials and the Twelve Orthodox Churches, primarily used for sealing and monitoring abnormal activities in the Amber Field.
On the surface, this was an attempt to contain the civilizational contamination from the Conjunction.
However, no one knew that less than three months after its opening, the Solomon Order had already infiltrated its interior.
They brought a 'Key of Solomon,' a 'key' derived from an Old World ruin.
It was a materialized medium used to unlock the Demon Pillar seals, a component of some complex mystical ritual.
Deep within the facility, members of the Order secretly constructed a summoning ritual array, targeting:
The 'Thirteenth Demon Pillar, Byleth'.
It was rumored that the Thirteenth Demon Pillar possessed terrifying power and a vast legion.
Legend said that by awakening It, one could grasp the most precious Old World heritage within the Amber Field.
But things did not go as the Order had planned.
The ritual went out of control.
No one knew which step went wrong.
Perhaps the array was incomplete, perhaps the energy channeling was miscalculated, or perhaps...
The Thirteenth Demon Pillar never intended to be controlled from the beginning.
At that moment, the entire Bayerland Amber Field boiled, and the field contamination quickly breached the warning line.
The Originium field instantly spread, contaminating a hundred miles of land; the earth collapsed, vegetation charred, and towns were directly wiped out.
No one walked out alive.
And no one dared to approach again.
The authorities never released the true casualty figures, but the Zeldan Church, then the head of the Orthodox Church, had records of this history; they said:
“The earth screamed, Oripathy spread, tens of thousands of people had not even bones left, and millions of people embarked on a journey of displacement.”
“From that day on, Shinra no longer brought rain, and the land no longer bore fruit.”
Over the next three hundred years, the name “Bayerland” was directly erased from the Shinra map.
That area was marked as a dead zone, and the authorities blocked all entry permits.
The Amber Field’s radiation field gradually receded only after three hundred years.
And this was merely one of the disasters they left behind.
Behind almost every major man-made disaster in the Shinra Empire, their traces could be vaguely smelled.
From the explosion at the Branson Workshop to the Ambohav tragedy...
They were like a group of fanatics steeped in the Old World’s poison, using profound-sounding terms like “summoning,” “liberation,” and “fusion” to carry out one horrific disaster experiment after another.
And the authorities and the Twelve Orthodox Churches—no matter how many times they suppressed them, how many strongholds they destroyed, how much information they sealed...
They always reappeared.
Like cockroaches in a gutter—stubborn, foul, and impossible to exterminate.
Now, Old Bloom, an informant under the banner of the foul cockroaches, stood across the street from the Hermann Family's house.
It was obvious they had no good intentions.
Old Bloom lifted his hat-covered head, revealing a pair of squinting old eyes.
“...Are you sure you didn’t make a mistake?”
His voice was hoarse, making one feel a prickle of discomfort.
“The target we’re looking for, is she here?”
He didn't move, his body like some dried old tree, only slightly tilting his head to glance at the two middle-aged men behind him.
The target of his question was the man standing on his left, a tall man wearing an iron-gray jacket with un-dried rust stains on his chest; when his cuff was pulled up, it revealed his left hand covered with clusters of Originium crystals.
Evidently, this was an Oripathy patient, an infected individual, who seemed to have reached the proliferation stage; if he did not receive further treatment, what awaited him was the gradual spread of Originium throughout his internal organs.
This infected individual's name was Roman Weisser, formerly a track worker in the West Port District; he was expelled from the union for dereliction of duty during an unregistered Originium transport and subsequently, by chance, became Old Bloom’s subordinate.
At this moment, he replied in a low, rough voice:
“Target confirmed.”
“I pulled up the Berengar family’s household registration records in Archive Room Four and matched them to a foster care registration with the Hermann Family.”
“The girl is named Helena Harriet Berengart, twelve years old, with greenish eyes; her features match.”
He paused, then added:
“The Berengar couple should be the two Pioneers who clashed with Lord MacGregor back then.
They were both Eden graduates, participated in several Conjunction Edge missions after graduation, and finally disappeared during an operation in an ancient eastern ruin.”
“The Grand Inquisitor of the Church speculates that Lord MacGregor’s Solomon Key most likely fell into their hands and was transferred to a place where the Order could not find it.”
“Now that the Order has restarted the Key retrieval plan, as the blood relative descendant of the Berengar couple, she is now the only continuing node.”
The infected man spoke all this in one breath.
Upon hearing of Eden Academy, Old Bloom couldn't help but let out a cold snort, a sneer twitching at the corner of his mouth.
He couldn't tell if it was anger or sarcasm, that suppressed emotion, a mix of old grudges unforgotten and a wildfire raging, like a gunpowder keg covered with a cloth:
“Those dog students from Eden.”
“Hypocritical, vain, self-righteous!!!”
The corner of Old Bloom’s eye trembled slightly, as if a memory had cut him.
During his youth, he had submitted academic letters several times, receiving no replies; in his young adulthood, he had a conflict with an Eden student involved in joint imperial law enforcement, resulting in a crippled leg.
Such a life trajectory was enough to transform longing into jealousy, and jealousy into hatred.