Chapter 9: Byrd Mastang
Who was it?
Although the secret room wasn't large, it was buried deep underground. The stairs leading down were quite steep; looking up toward the entrance, Rolls could only see the visitor from the knees down.
The man wore a pair of black leather boots and dark trousers; the rest of him was lost in Rolls's blind spot.
"You can't even recognize my voice anymore?"
It was the voice of a middle-aged man, full of majesty, giving Rolls an instinctive urge to submit.
Majesty?
Rolls's pupils constricted. He remembered—that was the voice of the "Viscount of Fear," Byrd Mastang.
The great pirate with a bounty exceeding 10,000 pounds!
A Sequence 5 powerhouse!
He had returned to Backlund!
"Sir, you've returned." Rolls exerted every ounce of self-control to keep his voice from trembling.
How was it so sudden? He had just pushed the task the "Viscount of Fear" assigned him to the back of his mind, and now the man appeared. Was he here to press for the task's completion? But Rolls hadn't the slightest clue about that mission—would he be punished?
Wait! In the original work, there was a description of that ironclad ship!
101 meters long, 21 meters wide, four main guns, with a speed of up to 16 knots...
What if he asks where I got the intelligence? Should I say I heard it from a judge at the Royal Court?
No, if I can sense when Johnson is lying, a Sequence 5 "Viscount of Fear" who is higher than me will definitely sense if I am lying.
"What are you thinking about? Am I that terrifying?" Byrd Mastang's voice rang out again.
"It's nothing, Sir. You're here for that ironclad ship, aren't you?"
Rolls felt like punching himself. Why did he blurt that out? Was he a Curly-Haired Baboon? If he hadn't spoken, it might have been fine, but now he was definitely in trouble!
Suddenly, Rolls felt his taut nerves relax. The air around him seemed to begin flowing.
Rolls looked around and realized it wasn't an illusion. Inside the secret room, small whirlwinds appeared out of thin air, sweeping up the dust. The gathered dust, now the size of a fist, drifted slowly up the steep stairs and out of the room.
Byrd Mastang began to descend. He didn't look like his bounty poster—wearing an Intis-style shirt with complex patterns on the cuffs and collar or draped in a dark red captain's coat. Instead, he looked like most gentlemen in Backlund: a white shirt and vest under a black formal suit, topped with a top hat. The only thing out of place was his bronze skin—the permanent mark of a life at sea.
Because the secret room was cramped and the stairs steep, Rolls had to lower his head and even stoop to move around. Rolls was nearly 1.8 meters tall, and Byrd Mastang was of similar height, yet he wore a hat. However, the man neither bowed his head nor bent his waist; he walked straight down as if the distance between the ceiling and the stairs had expanded out of thin air.
It was Distortion, an ability of the "Baron of Corruption" (Sequence 6 of the Lawyer pathway). Byrd Mastang had distorted the distance between the stairs and the ceiling.
While Rolls was processing this, Byrd Mastang suddenly appeared in front of him—he had distorted the distance between them.
Byrd Mastang didn't mention the ironclad ship. He scanned the secret room and suddenly said, "I thought you were like your father—choosing not to continue down the Beyonder path and sealing this room forever. Why did you open it again today?"
"My father knew about this room too?" Rolls didn't answer the Viscount's question. Instead, he seized a "loophole" in the statement to ask his own. This was a basic code of conduct for a Lawyer: always maintain the initiative. However, he was also genuinely curious; in his predecessor's memories, he was the only one who knew of this room.
Byrd Mastang didn't mind. He glanced at Rolls and replied, "This room was built by your father. It was only later, when he chose to be content as a lawyer rather than continue the path, that he sealed it."
"Then why..."
Byrd Mastang interrupted Rolls's follow-up question by patting his shoulder. "Enough, kid! Don't play your 'Lawyer' tricks in front of me! You're far from ready!"
Rolls smiled sheepishly. "Sorry, Sir. It's become a habit."
"That won't do. Remember the essence of the Acting Method. You are acting as a 'Lawyer'; do not become lost in it. Your father was like that, which is why he was never able to digest his potion."
Byrd Mastang sighed, his expression tinged with sadness.
"My father..." Rolls continued to probe. He simply wanted to skip the topic of the ironclad ship entirely.
"Enough! Answer my question! Why did you open this room today?"
Rolls felt Byrd Mastang's figure suddenly grow toweringly tall. The lights in the secret room dimmed, and the air seemed to turn stagnant.
This was the ability of a Sequence 5 "Mentor of Confusion"—the Majesty of the Mentor!
Rolls "followed his heart" and stopped testing Byrd Mastang. However, from that brief interaction, he confirmed his suspicion: the relationship between the "Viscount of Fear" and his father, Mason Adrian, was indeed extraordinary.
"To become a more powerful Beyonder!"
Though suppressed by the Viscount's majesty, Rolls answered—albeit only partially. After all, becoming stronger was indeed one of his goals for coming here.
"And why is that?"
Byrd Mastang frowned. Although he had only interacted with Rolls for a week on the surface, he had been watching him from the shadows for a long time.
He knew exactly what kind of person Rolls was. Despite his comfortable life, Rolls wasn't like those ignorant noble children full of curiosity about the Beyonder world. His upbringing in a lawyer's family made him rational and perpetually cautious toward the supernatural.
Rolls's initial decision to consume the potion and become a Beyonder was mostly due to the "coercion" of this great pirate. Consequently, when Byrd taught him mysticism, Rolls only cared about the "Acting Method" for the sake of survival, treating other knowledge with passing interest.
Rolls replied without a pause: "I got tired of it."
It was the truth. Though he'd only been a lawyer for less than a month, the stacks of case files and precedents—decimeters thick—were overwhelming for a legal novice.
The laws of the Loen Kingdom relied on Case Law rather than Statutory Law. Judges sentenced based on previous cases, meaning Loen lawyers had to hunt for identical precedents.
The collections of these precedents were often dozens of centimeters thick; some even reached over a meter high. Great lawyers would scour these collections to find the lightest possible sentence for their clients, which also allowed judges to rule without fearing public backlash, as there was a precedent to follow.
Byrd Mastang nodded in understanding. After all, Rolls was just a young man in his early twenties; no matter how rational, he had his limits. Rolls wasn't like Mason, who came from poverty. For someone born into comfort to persist for two years was already the greatest consolation to Mason's efforts.
Byrd had been a lawyer himself; he knew exactly what his former colleagues were like. But this was for the best; he no longer had to keep the truth about Mason from Rolls.
Using a sapphire ring crafted from a "Wind-Blessed" characteristic on his finger, Byrd Mastang conjured a whirlwind to shut the door. He then Distorted the concept of "closing the door," turning it into: "Seal the room, isolate the inside from the outside!"