The Villainess Returns with a System-Chapter 115: Catelyn’s Legacy

As days went by, the dark sky over Archester only intensified.

The Blackthorn Plague spread through the four corners of the old world, and the death toll rose dramatically. Vivian had to halt most of the work at ViTech headquarters until further notice.

Nations began to close their borders, and most trips to the New World were halted. It was said that Avalon was spared from the infectious plague, as the colonists there had applied strict rules to those who newly arrived, which ended up with some infected individuals being burned alive.

Within House Moore, Count Julian’s condition deteriorated; he grew more tired, and his cough intensified. With no cure available, the infected nobles became increasingly desperate amidst rising fatalities.

To encourage the search for a cure, the Moores offered a bounty, leading to an influx of charlatans and quacks at the mansion gates, even though that was not where the cures were to be submitted.

Vivian spent most of her days working on various tasks and tying up loose ends.

Valentine sent her a letter saying he had found a building in the city centre, which he had bought and begun renovating according to her ideas for his Galleria project, but the work had been halted by the spread of the infection.

Vivian also noticed that her brother, who had disappeared from the house after the scene he made when the management of the Moore Conglomerate was temporarily passed to Tristan Moore, was diverting a large sum of funds to open new clinics in the city’s impoverished areas. While it was unusually humane of him, Vivian realized he was supporting the Heroine girl in her efforts to cure the Blackthorn, something she would not oppose.

As for day-to-day life, Vivian would usually spend time with Isabella, but the latter mostly visited to see her new boyfriend, Morris De Brosa. Thanks to that traitorous best friend, Vivian had to keep herself busy by taking long walks around the mansion alone.

However, she never expected to find something strange in the westernmost hallway of a tower that had fallen into neglect, used only to store gardening tools. There, Vivian found a stairway leading to the top of the tower, to a room she did not think she had ever been in before.

She was repulsed by rats and cockroaches, and such old places were bound to be infested, but as she steeled her nerves, she fiddled with the lock on the door until her superior lockpicking skills prevailed.

In that room, Vivian found nothing of interest: only a pile of old books on geography, astronomy, and an old telescope gathering cobwebs.

It was only when she looked closer at the telescope that she found a name that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

"Catelyn Moore."

Vivian had discovered her mother’s room, which later revealed a legacy she never expected to find.

°°°°°

The room was dark, spiders lay their cobwebs in all its corners, and dust covered every inch of it with layers that could be no less than fifteen years old.

Vivian was still shocked by the engraving of the name Catelyn Moore—her mother’s name—on the telescope in the center of the tower’s attic. She tried to look for other traces of Catelyn, and what she discovered was nothing short of fascinating.

Catelyn Moore was a woman of many talents, so talented and bright that everyone who was once close to her remembered her very fondly. Due to that fact alone, Catelyn’s study was filled with letters from friends, gifts from antiquarians, common exchanges, often meandering into the trivial affairs, with the appearance of some occasional dispatches concerning academic pursuits.

Vivian was not sure why such an important place filled with her mother’s belongings was left untouched for so many years. It was as if this place was left to oblivion in hopes of it never being found... or rather, there was a deeper intent of leaving it that way.

But once Vivian took a more careful look around the place, something shocked her as she came to realize something.

Looking up towards where the telescope was aimed, Vivian saw an empty space covered by a thin wooden blank where a window should have been. This opening perfectly matched the shape of the window she had previously found in her father’s upper-story study—the one with its glass panel cracked in a pattern resembling the scratches on the first Mithril Coin she received from Lady Agatha Moore (Chapter 72).

Shocked, Vivian looked around fast for a study chair or a table, before dragging one out from the corner and jumping on it to examine that window frame. A gut feeling told her that this was it, this was the true window frame for that cracked window that resembled her coin.

Right away, Vivian bolted across the mansion in her expensive silk indoor dress, and as she entered the study, she lifted up the heavy window and carried it with her to the attic of the western tower, while avoiding the eyes of the nosy servants.

There, she found some tools in the lower level, which she borrowed and used to remove the wooden blank before attempting to install the window frame where it belonged.

Despite her poor carpentry skills, she succeeded in everything without losing a finger, and finally had the missing window right where it once was.

A lot of questions were plaguing her mind all that time. Why was this room so isolated and neglected? Why was that window frame in the Lord’s Study rather than here? What did this room mean to her mother? And why did Lord Julian leave it like that?

To simply answer all these questions, she would need to ask her father, but aside from him being mostly tired and ill these days, her questions would alert him to her possession of the Mithril coins.

So if she were to speculate some of these answers, it was probably due to the fact that Saskia would have raided this study if she were to find out it still existed. Vivian never understood Saskia’s obsession with Catelyn’s old belongings, but whatever it was, it was not completely out of malice—maybe just one of her bitchy habits, but who knows.

While that does not answer most of the questions she still has, one large hurdle remained, and it had the potential to answer everything... or open a beehive of new mysteries: What did Catelyn Moore have to do with the Mithril Coins?

°°°°°

Vivian spent the whole evening trying to solve a mystery that was simply unsolvable. She read all the letters in her mother’s study, she fiddled with every drawer, and she poked her lockpicks in every keyhole.

But the more she looked, the less she understood.

There were these curious correspondences with a very unique individual called Black Dahlia. While the name felt somewhat morbid to Vivian, most of Black Dahlia’s letters were addressed to an "Old Friend" with whom she was discussing deep philosophical questions.

While it was interesting to read the first few letters, Vivian soon realized that there was a code hidden in these words, and it was too much for her to figure out without knowing the context of the relationship between her mother and that Black Dahlia.

The next morning, Vivian was in for a surprise.

It was a sunny summer day, and the sun made a very rare visit to the gloomy and cloudy Archester. This sunny sun made a ray of light drop in the middle of Vivian’s room, which suddenly sparked an idea in her head.

Vivian rushed back to the western tower before she finished her morning stretches, and she found what she had in mind happening.

These cracks on the window she installed yesterday were not random, as they drew a pattern similar to those coin scratches on the opposite wall.

Now, what to do with those light patterns?

Time was running out, as the sun would not be here all day, and there were some clouds in the sky. Also, who knows what the weather will be like in the coming few days, or when it will ever become sunny again, maybe the next decade or something.

Vivian acted fast and checked every corner of the room until she was able to discover three holes at some part of the wall. These holes must have held something in this place; the question is, what was it?

The safest guess was a mirror, as light cannot do much unless it is reflected. Bringing in any mirror may serve the purpose, but what if it were a special mirror?

Vivian spent the whole day looking until noon, and the sun was already way past that point in the room. For that, Vivian continued the search all night until she found a type of mirror fixed right outside the mansion’s door that was fixed by the three screws to the wall of the exact same shape as the holes she found.

After some convincing with Old Theo, she managed to find the storage of the mansion where old things were left lying around, and she picked an old mirror that had a cracked frame. She hurried back with it to the study and waited for the next day.

By the next day, the light was reflected nicely on the mirror, and the ray was now going to the telescope. Vivian did not want to mess with the telescope too much, as it was one of her late mother’s belongings, but since it was part of this mystery, she found no leeway around it and tried to move it. However, the telescope was firmly fixed to the floor.

Vivian feared that time would run out, and she would have to wait until tomorrow. She felt like unscrewing the telescope’s tripod, but as she bumped into the body of the telescope while she was moving, she realized that maybe it should not be moved, just rotated.

Turns out she was right. The sunlight reflected from the wall mirror was converged, maybe due to the mirror being concave. Thinking of it, concave mirrors should not be used in day-to-day life, which means this mirror she got was the right mirror from the start.

But now, what was left was to figure out the relationship between the telescope and the reflected spotlight.

After fiddling for a bit, Vivian easily realized that if the spotlight was to be focused on one lens of the telescope, it would strangely be projected from the other lens.

Vivian was not an expert on telescopes or photogenic lenses, but she at least knew that telescopes should not project light like that. This telescope, or whatever it is, was no conventional device or was made of very special and unusual materials.

So what was its real use, one might ask? So far, Vivian was lucky enough to gather most of the clues, but if she was to wasted more time, she would have to come back tomorrow to realize more.

Then it hit her just as she pondered over it a little.

Mithril has something to do with light, right? It is silver; mirrors of this day and age are made of silver. So...

Vivian picked up her coin and tried to fit it over the other lens of the telescope, which was projecting light, but as she did so, she noticed some changes and distortions happening on the projected light.

She became excited and started adjusting the telescope to make the light shine on a third wall, which was covered in shade. After finishing that, she had a projector-like telescope, which did not do much on its own, yet. Adding the Mithril coin to its end, however, felt a little bit insufficient.

No matter how she tried to look at it, there was something wrong with this projection. She rotated the coin with her hands a few times, but it felt wrong. Shapes and shades emerged from the projected image, but nothing could be comprehended from them, even when she flipped the coin to the other side.

Vivian looked at the coin again and noticed that its size was not a perfect match to the lens; it was a bit smaller, in fact, so she started following the cylindrical body of the telescope until its width matched the side of the coin. There she found that a part of the telescope could be rotated horizontally, and a socket was opened.

"Wow!"

Vivian finally saw it, a perfect socket for the Mithril coin.

This is it!

This is the mystery she was unable to solve all that time!

Without thinking, she inserted the coin in the socket and closed it... Then a message was projected on the wall.

Letters... clear, hand-written letters.

"Al-Kabal, Rite of Elgard. A Message left by the 23rd Caretaker of the Blood Keeper, Black Dahlia, transcribed by the 24th Caretaker. Recipient: Mr. James Moore."

Just the first paragraph was enough to make Vivian forget everything else in her mind. She pulled a chair and stared with a blank mind at every word written.

James Moore? Now her brother’s name is appearing. Al-Kabal? What is that? Rite? A secret society? Like the one Isabella was trying to recruit her to? Blood Keeper? What does that mean?

Was her brother involved? Was this the reason he had a falling out with their father and left Elgard after they fought?

Why did Agatha Moore pass that on to her?

Is she ready to read the rest?

Does she have a choice?

"My dearest James,

If you are reading this, then fate has dealt us a cruel hand, and I fear we may never look into each other’s eyes again. Please know, with every breath I took, every choice I made, it was always for you, your sister, and the fragile hope of a future I may never live to see.

My life was not my own. It belonged to a purpose greater than comfort, greater than safety, greater even than love. I walked a path riddled with shadows, not because I wanted to, but because someone had to. If my end has come, let it not be in vain. Let it open a door for you—a door to something better.

By now, I imagine Lady Ravenheart has passed the token to you, and I can only guess at the storm in your mind and heart. I never wanted this burden for you. I prayed that you would find your own way, free from the chains that bound me. But the truth, once known, has a weight that cannot be undone. And so I ask of you the impossible.

Your father must never know. His heart is too loyal, too proud. He would see treason where I saw salvation. Do not blame him. Do not hate him. He loved me most of all, and so he is hurt the most.

My allies in Al-Kabal will recognize the power of your name—and they may try to use you. Do not let them. You are a Moore. Never forget that. And in the Kabal, that name does not bow—it commands. We are the architects of a new destiny and the true keepers of the truth, the only ones who can make Avalon more than just a dream.

Avalon is the seed of a new Empire, one that can rise above the blood-stained reign of Albion’s Kings. I may not live to see it. You may not either. But your children might, or their children. What we begin now may take generations, but it is worth everything.

Lady Ravenheart and the Blood Keeper will stand by you. Trust them. Lean on them. But trust no one blindly. The world is full of masks, even among allies.

And James... my sweet boy... if they took me, don’t search for me. If they killed me, don’t avenge me. If your father gave up, forgive him. If Saskia or Robert disappoint you, show them grace. But whatever happens, look after Vivian. Protect her and keep her close until she spreads her wings.

I know what I am asking. I know it is too much. And yet I ask it still—because when you learn the whole truth, you’ll see the strands of fate have bound us all tighter than we could ever imagine.

I carried this dream in my heart every day. Now, I place it in yours. You are not alone. You never were. And no matter what happens, I will always love you.

Your mother,

Catelyn."

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