Sacred Calendar Year 823, end of the Dormancy Month (February), Lontart, the "Sadney" district.
This district had originally been outside the city walls, home to ordinary merchants who sold fish from the Storm Channel. Over time, it gradually attracted citizens who made their living from salting, processing, sorting, and brokering fish, and it steadily prospered. As the Holm Kingdom boomed under the influence of the Arcane Parliament, the district was incorporated into Lontart during the city's second expansion and named after the "Sadney" bream, a specialty of the Storm Channel.
But with the arcane steam trains running between Port Padre and Lontart, the fishing industry had been monopolized by wealthy merchants wielding their deep pockets, cheap prices, and fresh goods. The ordinary merchants went bankrupt or changed trades, and those who had depended on them either went to work for the big merchants or fell into the miserable state of unemployment.
Fortunately, at that time, the initial proliferation of alchemical goods and the increase in alchemical workshops ensured that the unemployed citizens could still find work. In just a few years, the Sadney district had transformed into a neighborhood that was half industrial workers and half fishing industry laborers.
The night was pitch black. Row upon row of houses still flickered with the dim yellow glow of candles, unable to afford arcane crystal lanterns. But the street lamps along both sides of the road blazed bright, connected by spider-web-thin black lines, their light and shadows swaying, interspersed with darkness, thick and thin.
"Ugh, what a pair of dogs!" A boy of fourteen or fifteen spat bitterly as he watched the couple nestled together in the shadow behind a streetlamp. Although the Holm Kingdom was conservative in style, and the couple did nothing more than embrace and whisper, the boy's eyes still gleamed with a heady mix of envy, jealousy, and spite.
"Andy, stop staring. It's about to start." A faint voice drifted from behind the trees lining the road.
Andy startled, quickly turning around to see three of his companions poking their heads out from behind a thick tree, waving almost imperceptibly to signal him.
"What, the thing—" Andy snapped back to reality, his expression immediately shifting to a mix of nervous excitement, as if he were about to do something dangerous and thrilling.
Slipping quietly toward the tree, he whispered complaints: "William, Mickey, Martin—why didn't you come find me sooner?"
Martin, the brown-haired one, snickered softly: "How would we dare come find you? You'd definitely be peeping on some couple."
"Right," said William, the golden-haired, blue-eyed one, clearing his throat. "Spring has come, all things breed and stir. Andy's in heat again."
"You guys have a death wish?" Andy gnashed his teeth and glared at them, his azure eyes blazing with humiliated fury.
"Keep it down! Do you actually want to die?" Mickey, the shortest of the bunch but with a dead-serious face, pressed his palm down hard.
Andy took a deep breath, clamped his mouth shut, pointed into the distance, and gestured with his eyes—should they go now?
"Yeah, otherwise we'll be late and won't hear the opening. Miss Nightingale's voice," William said with a dreamy, loopy look on his face.
"This one's in heat too…" Martin wore a look that said *I don't know these people.*
The companions whispered and snickered as they crept forward, timorous and tiptoeing, like thieves.
After winding past a dozen houses and slipping through two patches of sparse woodland, their voices gradually died away into an eerie quiet, and their breathing grew heavy.
Ahead was a row of common houses in a remote corner of the Sadney district. They stopped near the third building from the end—a plain two-story structure.
After pulling their collars up to cover half their faces, Andy knocked on the door six times in a rhythm of two quick, three slow, repeating once.
The door opened without a sound. A stern-faced middle-aged man quickly glanced left and right, then gestured for Andy and the others to hurry inside.
Andy, Martin, Mickey, and William slipped into the room with practiced ease. The main hall was packed with people, clustered around the center in a sitting or standing mass—one could say three layers deep on the inside, three on the outside. The curtains had all been drawn, and the room was dimly lit by a single candelabrum, its light swaying and flickering, unconsciously evoking the ghost stories they had all heard before.
In the hall there were burly men, girls, old folks, children, boys like Andy who had reached "that age," and several young women in the bloom of youth.
After exchanging glances, Andy and William leveraged their small statures to advantage, wriggling through the crowd until they squeezed up to the young women. They grinned sheepishly: "Scarlett, Selma—you came too?"
The pretty blonde, blue-eyed girl shot them a look, then pressed a slender white finger to her lips: "Shh, be quiet. It's about to start."
At those words, Andy and the others stiffened, all thought of getting close to the girls evaporating for the moment. They settled in with focused, attentive ears.
The house's owner—the stern, straight-faced middle-aged man in a worn white shirt—squeezed his way to the center and began fiddling with the peculiar object on the tea table, something roughly the size of a human head.
The thing was a dusty grey, carved all over with bizarre patterns. It had a row of black buttons and two round knobs, and two long lines of metallic sheen protruded from it like ram's horns—each about half a meter long, and equally wreathed in strange, arcane symbols.
Watching the stern man fiddle with this strange device, everyone present—old and young, male and female, rough and refined alike—held their breath as though they were at prayer in a cathedral, as if the object were something profoundly sacred.
*Zzzzt, zzzzt*—the familiar sound of electrical current crackled to life, and Andy's back snapped straight. The people around him made nearly the same motion at nearly the same time.