"Because a sufficiently powerful Extraordinaire can exert influence over lower-Sequence Extraordinaires on the same path — and it's nearly impossible for anyone else to detect, even the seven major gods. So even the seven great Churches ensure their highest members share a single path, to prevent a key figure from betraying the organization without any warning.
An organization like ours, operating in the shadows, would be even more careful. Letting in anyone from a different Sequence path would be an unacceptable risk — you'd never know when you might be exposed without warning."
"Then Miss Edith — if an organization ever found that its members' abilities weren't suited to a particular problem, what would they do? Give up, or find someone to collaborate with?"
"Not necessarily. Extraordinary power isn't limited to living things. The path corresponding to the Steam Church produces Extraordinaires capable of infusing primary potion ingredients into objects, creating items that hold Extraordinary power — usable by any Extraordinaire, with only minor negative side effects. These are generally called mystical items among Extraordinaires.
And even without that path's Extraordinaires, inanimate objects can also absorb potion power the way living things do — just much more slowly, and the result has significant negative effects on the holder. But with the right approach to managing those effects, they can be just as useful as mystical items. These objects, with their pronounced downsides, are typically called sealed artifacts. For any organization — even the Church — the number of sealed artifacts they can effectively utilize is a significant measure of their strength."
She gave a brief summary, then returned to the point.
"Back to the matter at hand. Clearing the Instigator potion's influence is not difficult — the name itself is fairly direct. Instigate others, provoke conflict, inflame tensions, bring about confrontations. Do these things, and the negative influence fades. Based on our experience, the fewer abilities you use in this process, and the larger the disputes and conflicts you instigate, the more influence you clear. Under ideal conditions — with enough luck and opportunity — clearing the Instigator potion's influence in as little as two months is entirely possible."
This surprised Ryan. He'd assumed that as long as someone believed what he told them, the job was done. He hadn't expected the effect to require the instigated person to actually act on it — to produce real consequences — before any reduction in influence would occur.
He was also sensible enough not to directly ask whether this made him a genuine villain. Even if the woman in front of him looked and acted nothing like a traditional antagonist.
But showing no reaction at all would be suspicious. After thinking for a moment, he started with a complaint and then a question:
"Doesn't this make the Instigator even more visible to the Church than the Assassin? Miss Edith, when you were clearing the Instigator potion's own influence back then, how did you avoid attracting the Church's attention? How often did you change cities, and how far did you go?"
Edith gave a slight shrug, with a trace of helplessness.
"There's nothing to be done — the potion's name is what it is, and that's not something we chose. As for the Church, they monitor events in every city and track death tolls. Any anomaly triggers an investigation. So if your instigation has already resulted in multiple deaths or significant disruption, it's time to go quiet for a while.
How often to move — you'll have to judge that yourself. The Church has been in an unusual mood lately, paying closer attention to everything and responding more harshly than normal. Combined with how conspicuous your build is, I genuinely can't give you much practical advice there."
"You don't know why the Church has suddenly started cracking down harder?" Ryan kept his tone deliberately mournful.
"I don't. I've cut off contact with most people to avoid exposure — nothing to do with you, just how things are right now. As for being unlucky — there's nothing for it. Be careful. And clearing the potion's influence isn't urgent. Taking longer is fine."
She offered a brief word of consolation, then shifted.
"One more thing: I can't leave Mourne at the moment. You'll need to come back once a month and stay two or three days — I'll find you to settle payments. You must come. If you miss two months in a row, I won't be the one who comes looking for you."
Ryan thought of how he'd run into her almost immediately upon returning this time, and only asked:
"What if you happen to be occupied during those two or three days, Miss Edith? Do I simply wait?"
"No — just being there for two or three days is enough." She considered briefly, then added: "I think that covers what I wanted to say. Anything you'd like to ask?"
"Yes — several things, actually."
The corner fell quiet as full dark settled in.
I knew it. You can't have too many good expectations of an organization that operates in the shadows.
Back in his room, Ryan turned things over in his mind. Edith hadn't been obvious about it, but the experience their organization had accumulated in clearing the Instigator potion's influence made it reasonably clear that this group also treated human life as expendable.
He found himself with a grudging admiration for how thoroughly she'd covered her tracks. Four meetings in, all he had was her name and her face — and he couldn't confirm either was real. Nothing she had said or done had given him any actual information about herself or her organization. She hadn't handed him anything that could be used to report her to the Church.
She'd even made a point of mentioning, while explaining divination to him, that divination for one's own safety was the most reliable kind — hardest to go wrong, hardest for others to interfere with.
Which was a transparent way of saying: I divine before every meeting we have. Don't think you can use yourself as bait to draw me out.
So even now, with a reasonably high certainty that this woman and her organization were not good people, Ryan couldn't do much about it.
Also — I should make sure I don't meet her somewhere too isolated going forward. What if she's only being cooperative because I haven't cleared the Instigator potion's influence yet?
He considered it carefully. He wasn't going to let that possibility stop him from clearing the influence when the time came.
He'd thought it through clearly: from the moment she had sought him out, the risk had already existed. Whatever he did, he was almost certainly going to have to choose between the Church and her organization sooner or later.
His choice was obvious. He had been a model student once.
But now wasn't the right time to make an enemy of her — the Instigator's abilities offered no protection against her retaliation. Better to wait until after he'd received the Sequence 7 formula and materials from her, and had everything ready for advancement, before letting the relationship sour.
If it came to that, even if she sensed the trap and the Church didn't catch her, Ryan would at least advance to Sequence 7 under Church supervision. When he came out the other side, his odds of surviving her organization's retaliation would be meaningfully better than they were now.
As for what the Church would do with him afterward — he couldn't do much about that. Better to stay on good terms through good behavior.
Either way, it had to be better than joining her organization. An organization that treated lives as disposable would almost certainly treat a new member's life the same way. In Ryan's estimation, the difference between joining that kind of organization and being taken by the Church for experimentation was simply the difference between dying sooner or later.
I'll just hope the Church of the Evernight Goddess is reasonable about this — and takes some credit from my good behavior.