Detective Once Again

Our path eventually opened into a vast, open square paved in dark, almost black, stone. In its center grew a strange and wondrous protrusion from the ground. It was a great, leafless tree wrought not of wood, but of a single, colossal piece of polished black obsidian. Its massive roots buckled the paving stones, and its branches spread out in a complex, fractal canopy, twisting and contorting against the now orange sky like the limbs of a sleeping giant… demonic insect.

And suspended between these obsidian boughs, or embedded within the larger branches themselves, were shimmering, rectangular panes. They were not glass, but seemed to be sheets of captured twilight or liquid shadow, across which flickered faint, silvery glyphs and spectral images. The entire structure seemed to hum with a low power, a vibration I felt in the bones of my feet.

"This," Xiao Ru announced with a reverent sweep of her hand, "is the Umbral Nexus. You might think of it as the city's central nervous system."

She gestured to the flickering panes. "From here, one may access... well, nearly everything. Public records, bounties, guild charters... and, of course," she said, her lavender eyes twinkling as she looked at me, "applications for new roles and positions."

I stared at the impossible structure, a fusion of primeval nature and some arcane artifice I could not comprehend. This was how one applied for a ‘job’ in the Makai—the inscrutable path to my new life, it seemed, began at the foot of this obsidian colossus.

Xiao Ru, her good cheer fully restored, took my hand and guided me toward the base of the great tree, toward one of the lower-hanging panes. I felt like a child being led to her first day of school, completely unmoored and lost. As we drew near, the silvery glyphs within the liquid shadow swirled and resolved into what was clearly a questionnaire of some kind, though I could speak their tongue, my eyes were stayed, as the thorn-like script I could not decipher may well have been English.

With the casual familiarity of one born to this world, Xiao Ru pointed to several places. "Your name... your desired role... declaration of intent..." At her final instruction, she gestured to a glowing handprint symbol at the bottom of the pane. "Now, press your hand to it to submit."

I did as she instructed, placing my palm against the strange, cool surface. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the entire pane flashed a violent, angry crimson, and a low, discordant hum echoed from the obsidian branch.

Xiao Ru gasped, her mouth falling open in genuine shock. "But... that's impossible! It never does that!"

My own mind, less concerned with the magical malfunction, seized upon the more fundamental problem. "Ahhh," I said, pointing at the swirling, alien script. "It might be because I cannot read a single word of that."

"Oh! Of course!" she exclaimed, her shock turning to embarrassment. "You are not a registered citizen! The Nexus does not recognize you."

My gaze drifted to Ashley, who was leaning against one of the gnarled obsidian roots with a bored expression. "Are you a registered citizen?" I asked.

"Of course," she drawled. "My body was catalogued the moment I was born into this damnable place."

"Then why..." I began, gesturing vaguely, "do you not have a home?"

Ashley snorted, a sound of pure, cynical amusement. "Citizenship is one thing, detective," she said. "Being approved for a sanctioned residence is quite another." Her words only served to deepen the well of my confusion.

But before I could look back to Xiao Ru to question this further, I felt a sharp, sudden prick on the tip of my index finger. A single, perfect droplet of my own dark blood welled up. I looked to see Xiao Ru holding a tiny, thorn-like stylus she must have produced from the screen itself. She had been tapping furiously at the pane while I was speaking. The screen, which had been red, now flickered a brilliant, verdant green. A series of soft, synthetic chimes echoed from the Nexus, a sound both natural and strangely technological.

"There!" Xiao Ru exclaimed, her triumphant smile returning. "I have registered you! The system has taken a sample of your blood for analysis. Now you are official!"

The thought of my own blood, my very essence, being drawn and catalogued by some distant, unseen power for purposes unknown, ought to have filled me with a righteous indignation. And yet, I found I could summon none. In a world of such layered strangeness, the violation felt strangely… administrative. A mere formality in my descent into this new reality. "Whatever," I believe, is the appropriate mortal expression, having lost that side of myself along the way, unto the wayside onto which I belied.

Xiao Ru, however, was a portrait of radiating, upbeat diligence. She touched two or three more of the shadowy panes near the base of the Nexus. At her touch, they… seemed to twist in upon themselves like ribbons of smoke before dissolving into a fine, iridescent dust. This shimmering cloud of particles, like the shed wings of a million microscopic moths, drifted from the branch and coated the entire obsidian tree in a soft, pearlescent glow. Xiao Ru stared intently into the heart of the shimmer, her lips pursed in concentration.

A moment passed in that strange, humming silence, and then, as if coalescing from the very light itself, an object began to form in the air before us. It was a thin, rectangular card, a filigree of captured radiance, as if the void had been etched into form and bound within a shard of spectral glass.

Xiao Ru plucked it from the air and presented it to me. I took it, and found it had no discernible weight. It was a thing of pure illusion, a holographic wafer that seemed to shift and change in size and depth as I tilted it in my hand, its surface a swirl of faint, unreadable constellations. "It feels… strangely magnetic," I murmured, feeling a faint but perceptible thrum against my palm, as if the object were alive and recognized me as its new master.

"There," she said, beaming with satisfaction. "Your petition was approved. You have been granted an office. It is not far from my own dwelling, in a respectable quarter of the city. Shall we go and see it?"

An office—granted. Just so. The swiftness of it, the absence of toil, petition… the bureaucratic rituals of paperwork I associated with such matters, was disorienting. A sensation rose—like the floor tilting five degrees to the left, like breathing through gauze soaked in static. My skull felt full of helium and bells.