One week.
This was the time Karma asked for.
This is when the window will open.
The problem with Ingvild Leviathan was that she didn’t officially exist.
Not like someone dead or erased—her name still sat in the Leviathan family records, tucked away in that subtle way inconvenient relatives were noted in noble archives: there in the lineage column, missing from everything else.
No current address.
No doctor on file.
No faction ties, no social engagements, no magical registration he could track down through any means open to a minor Devil with a small estate and a research partnership that didn’t stretch to asking Serafall Leviathan outright.
He couldn’t ask Serafall.
That particular Satan of the Devil world was exactly the kind of person who would remember the question, recall who asked it, and eventually link that memory to something he’d rather keep unconnected.
Besides, he didn’t yet have the kind of leverage needed to ask a Satan anything.
He was working with what little he had: Karma’s sense pointing toward Leviathan territory, a hunch from the novel that Ingvild was somewhere isolated, and a stash of old Leviathan family documents the Marbas library still had from friendlier times between the houses.
The Leviathans had kept several secluded estates deep in their lands—built for family members who needed privacy.
Records named three, but two were long gone, sold or demolished over the past century.
The third showed up only once, in a note about upkeep costs, called something like the Quiet House, with coordinates that might have been a spot in the far residential belt or just a clerical mistake.
When he fed this to Karma, its pull shifted by about four degrees, upgrading its certainty from general area to probable region.
Not a location.
A region.
Progress, of a kind.
His concealment constructs were coming in handy as ever.
He’d spent two weeks on them, working in the east wing during those quiet hours between midnight and dawn when the manor was so still it felt like even the walls were holding their breath.
The House had come first, since scale was the most pressing issue.
The wards on the Marbas estate were barely functional, leaving the place exposed to any determined supernatural scan—not ideal when he had work he preferred to keep under wraps.
He needed something that could blanket the entire property in a ward-and-concealment field without tearing down and rebuilding the old ward system, which would’ve taken months and materials he didn’t have.
After three days of experimenting in the east wing, the solution was to make the ward into a construct big enough to cover the entire estate—a living ward, sustained by a being created solely for that purpose.
In its fully deployed form, the House stretched across the manor’s outer grounds, mostly unseen and intangible, carrying the magical signature of the existing ward-work but spread over the scale of the Marbas estate’s original design.
It answered his mind-link, able to shrink down enough to trail him at a distance when he traveled, carrying a miniature version of the ward-field that created a zone of similar magical invisibility around him.
It could also expand again.
One creature existed solely to quietly return to its post over the estate.
He’d told it: Your job is to conceal and maintain the wards.
Don’t engage.
Don’t respond to outside contact.
If something tries to scan through you, mirror the ambient readings of whatever environment you’re in.
The House gave off a sense of deep, structural understanding, as if it knew its purpose the way a foundation knows how to bear weight.
Not intelligence, exactly—more like a kind of specialized completeness.
The ward-carrying constructs were the most intricate of all—small enough to slip into a coat pocket when compressed, each one holding a fragment of Mist’s spatial logic, aligned with a single ward concept from a framework he’d picked up in another world, in another life.
There were twelve in total, divided between his pockets and a small case.
Deploy them in a pattern around a space, and it would, for all outward appearances, become a place where nothing was happening.
They didn’t lock time—that was still beyond him—but they layered spatial concealment over temporal consistency, creating an effect so close to undetectable that any difference was meaningless in practice.
These had the least personality of the three types.
They were tools in the truest sense—made for a purpose, content to fulfill it, and uninterested in offering opinions.
Once, out of curiosity, he’d asked them what they thought about their role.
The impression he got in return was simple: function.
One word, yet an entire philosophy in itself.
“Fair enough,” he replied.
This chapter is dedicated to clearing all of that up.
Hope this helps!