The air in the cramped rented room felt cleaner, even though its smell was a mixture of damp-wall must and cheap cigarette smoke permanently embedded in the wood grain. It was the dead of night. Murniarta was drawing breath in an extremely slow rhythm—a rhythm audible only to those who knew how to listen between the sounds of noise.
Karel sat cross-legged on the edge of the thin mattress, letting his body relax slightly after a night filled with the smell of death and sinister plans. He looked at the ivory-white ceramic fragment again. The floral carving was too lifelike to be mere decoration; it felt like a broken promise.
His index finger moved toward a small wooden box with simple carvings, the box that had always served as his secret refuge. Inside were the heirlooms left by his father—an ancient compass whose needle always pointed in illogical directions, several strange metal coins, and of course, the Waskitha Glasses.
Karel picked up the glasses. Their frames were made of silver blackened by time, yet the design felt so familiar, so deeply personal. These were not fashion accessories; they were a tool that required a ritual.
He closed his eyes. The ritual began with a long breath, shutting out all external noise—the rumble of an approaching car, perhaps Laras hurrying over; the whisper of an arcane incantation, perhaps Maya reciting one; or even the sharp gaze of a supervisor. He drew energy from memory, from every detail he had ever learned about how this world worked.
Click.
As he settled the glasses on his nose, the world seemed to refresh. The false neon light that had illuminated the room moments ago suddenly became clear, strengthened by the heavy crystal lenses.
He opened his eyes. The physical world had not changed, but his perception had changed completely.
The Waskitha lenses operated on a different frequency. To an ordinary person, the room's wall was simply a wall. To Karel, it now appeared to have a faint layer of energy, like a thin bluish-purple mist that rippled from time to time. It was residue from spiritual power trying to find a way out.
As long as he looked through the glasses, he could “see” more than just the wall. Behind that layer of energy, he caught a visual flash that made him gasp: a Khodam. Not a grotesque form like the ones dukun often put on display, but something far more organic—like a human shadow made of mud and smoke, with blue veins of light clearly visible between its joints.
The magic system was real. And he, Karel Sastrowinoto, forced to live with Arcane Blindness—a condition that should have shut him out of the spiritual world—had instead become the person most prepared to see it.
“Not a curse,” Karel whispered to himself, his voice hoarse from rarely being used for private monologues. “Just a filter. A filter that forces us to see what actually matters.”
Karel's attention returned to the ceramic fragment in his hand. He turned it beneath the dim light of the glasses. The carved flower pattern was no ordinary design; it felt like a language. A symbol that was supposed to be connected to a far larger artifact.
Suddenly, a faint pattern caught his attention. At the bottom of the floral carving was an extremely fine line, almost like an accidental brushstroke. It was a distinctive brushstroke style.
Karel's heart, which he had kept in the slow rhythm of a cold professional, suddenly beat a little harder.
That style.
It was exactly the same as his father's hand. His father had always stressed that every line, every brushstroke, carried a specific energy resonance. His father had never been good at expressing his feelings, but through his carving, he always left traces of emotion—caution, disappointment, or sometimes a fleeting glimpse of hidden pride.
Karel held his breath. A strange, piercing warmth suddenly spread through his chest. A wave of emotion he quickly forced beneath the layers of a Cleaner's indifference.
Father.
He remembered their last meeting, a blurry memory, like an image recorded while a lightning storm battered the camera. He had glimpsed his father in a dark robe, holding something resembling this fragment, as if it were a marker of fate.
“They'll come looking for this,” Karel murmured, his voice barely audible now, swallowed by the room's silence. “They'll think it's just an antique.”
He slowly placed the ceramic fragment back on top of the wooden box. His fingers stopped right beside the place where he kept the ancient compass. There, alongside several other strange coins, he set the fragment down.
This was more than evidence from the previous night's incident. It was part of a larger collection. A map he was assembling without realizing it.
Karel drew another long breath, forcing the emotion back down. He had to put his cold demeanor back on. He was a cleaning machine; a machine that could not show internal system damage.
“Let them search first,” he whispered to himself, his eyes now shining with determination that went far beyond cleaning up mafia corpses. “Let them think this is merely the first clue found by a beginner. They don't know this is only the opening of the first act.”
Out there, in Murniarta's dark corridors, many forces were in motion—the force of law, structured spiritual power, and entities of darkness. And Karel, with heirloom eyes perched on his nose, had just made certain that all those forces would collide at ground zero, a point he had arranged himself.