Elaine leaned back in his chair. It was a long while before he lifted a hand to rub the space between his brows.
The copy of the letter still lay on the table, the gold along its edges bright enough to hurt in the dim light.
House White had not always been like this. And dumping this wreck on him, of all people — a reincarnator — was frankly hell difficulty.
That was right. Elaine White was a reincarnator. His original name had been Bai Qiyue. He had no clear idea why he had been reborn into this world, but from as far back as his memory went, he had known that the family he had landed in was a great house famous for miles around.
Having lived in this world since infancy, Bai Qiyue was naturally at home in its language and its script.
In his grandfather's generation, House White had still been the most famous Sealed Object collecting family in the old capital.
Old things the nobles and the various church organisations didn't dare keep, or Relics whose exact effects nobody knew: those were brought to House White for appraisal.
When the crown had Relics it found inconvenient to register publicly, they were left in House White's keeping under the name of a private commission. The Grey Tower and the Judgment Tribunal sent people now and then to consult House White's catalogue.
House White had been nothing like your "ordinary noble". Afterwards, though, the world outside all said House White had been brought down by greed.
They said the family had poured too much money into high-risk Sealed Objects, bet wrong on several royally underwritten collection investments, then got tangled up in the northern ore-vein project and never even recovered the principal.
Elaine used to get angry when he heard that sort of thing. Later he stopped getting particularly angry.
He had made his peace with it.
There were only a few things he had never been able to work out. His grandfather was not a man who would gamble an entire house.
And then, later, a great many of the marvels in the house — Sacred Objects, Sealed Objects, the rest of it — were dumped at a loss, and some never reached an auction floor at all. Some pieces were carried off by royal agents. Others were confiscated by one official body or another under the heading of "dangerous materials".
Elaine was an orphan of a collateral branch. His parents had died early and the main house had brought him back to the old manor to raise. Exactly how deep House White's reserves ran, he hadn't known at first. His daily duty was the duty of any rich man's son: to rot in comfort, and in his spare time to read a little of this world's history, this world being something close to the end of the Middle Ages.
And... myths of every kind, some of which might be true and some of which might not.
As for his own origins, Elaine had never looked into them much.
He had no memory of his parents, and no relative ever brought up that couple who had died young. It was not that Elaine was cold-blooded. He genuinely did not hold one single memory of his birth parents.
Elaine folded the copy of the letter, pulled open the desk drawer and prepared to shove it in.
Already lying in there were three demands for payment, two arrears notices for Sealed Object supervision fees, one IOU for a former servant's wages, and a White family crest button worn down until the pattern was almost gone.
He looked at the pile for a moment, and it struck him that the greatest talent of this "last heir" was absorbing every humiliation the fall of House White had to offer.
Unfortunately the drawer was nearly full as well. The pressure was, frankly, exploding.
He pulled the bottom supervision-fee notice out.
A grey-blue seal was stamped into the corner. The contents were simple. House White had been long in arrears on the stabilisation fees for its underground collection; if the sum was not made good within three days, the Regulatory Board would lawfully take custody of House White's unregistered Sealed Objects and seal the relevant storage areas.
Elaine's eyes stopped on "the relevant storage areas". House White's public collection room had been empty for a long time.
What could be sold had been sold, what couldn't had been sealed, and even the lowest-danger Sealed Objects had been carted off by the Regulatory Board against the fees.
Now, aside from Elaine himself, the most valuable thing left of House White was probably the handful of specially sealed Sealed Objects under the ancestral manor.
Well, the engagement was off. He might as well look for a chance to sell those few Sealed Objects, whose uses even Elaine didn't know. That ought to be enough to redeem the betrothal gifts.
If anything was left over, he could buy a few plots of land out in the country, or start some sort of business. This world looked to be heading into an industrial revolution, and Elaine reckoned that with a modern man's perspective he ought to make decent money investing in the new ventures.
Enough to feed himself, at least.
With that plan in mind, Elaine went and found the key to the manor's cellar, the thing the whole family had once treated as its highest secret.
According to his grandfather, the Sealed Objects in that cellar were the rarest and the most powerful of them all; used properly, one was enough to destroy a country, or a whole region of one.
And precisely because they were the highest secret, neither the other noble houses nor the crown knew House White still held them.
Destroy a country... is that actually possible? Elaine had trouble believing his own ancestral home held Sealed Objects that broken. And if it did... honestly, he probably had no way to use them.
He wasn't even a Seal-Bearer. The basic precondition for using a Sacred Object, a Relic, a Sealed Object, any of them, was being a Seal-Bearer. An ordinary person had no way to carry the negative effects such marvels brought with them.
Thinking all this, Elaine opened a very well hidden cellar in the manor's back courtyard. With the key alone he undid three layers of it, along with an assortment of sealing arrays known only to House White.
Let's have a look at what a few hundred years of family fortune actually managed to put away.
With the last layer of the seal undone, Elaine stepped into a hidden room that smelled of rot. He lit the candle he had brought with him, and found the opposite of what he had expected.
He had assumed a storeroom that small would be crammed with strange things. But once the weak candlelight filled the room...
Em... empty? Elaine stared, disbelieving, at the bare iron racks around him, racks that had clearly been built to hold something. Sealed Objects of every kind had once stood in those places. There were catalogue numbers laid out in a row along the bottom of every rack, proof that things had been kept here.
And now... not one thing.
All sorts of ideas came crowding into his head at once.
Did I get backdoored? Or was Grandfather just talking out of his arse? Neither of those seemed very realistic, did they?
Elaine wasn't ready to accept it. By the thin candlelight he went over the rotting little storeroom a second time.
Only on that second pass did he find it: right at the back of the storeroom, a white mirror standing squarely in the middle.
There was no catalogue number on that rack, and the white mirror was entirely out of keeping with the decay of the room, as though it had only just spawned there.
What... what is this thing? Elaine didn't know what to do with himself. Honestly, he was frightened. The ancestral storeroom had exactly one Sealed Object left in it.
There didn't seem to be any marking on it, either. What was this mirror for?
Thinking that, and as though something were guiding him, Elaine reached out and touched the mirror.