100X Returns: Starting with 1,000,000 System Points

Chapter 35: Chapter 35: Cold Trail

Two weeks passed without meaningful progress, the investigation’s earlier momentum stalling against the same institutional caution that had frustrated Alphina’s migration research from the start.

Jones’s discreet inquiry into the anonymous Guild donation moved at a bureaucrat’s pace, tangled in financial records that apparently required considerably more patience to untangle than either of us had anticipated. Alphina’s research into Thorncroft’s more recent movements turned up nothing beyond the same eight-year-old trail already gone cold.

I filled the quiet stretches with ordinary business — quest board work, careful cultivation of the seedlings and saplings steadily maturing in my domain, occasional check-ins on the migration anomaly investigation that continued its own slow, methodical progress without any dramatic breakthrough.

The Ember Root Ancient sapling had already produced its first harvestable roots, considerably faster than Verdant Genesis Array’s baseline description had suggested even accounting for the accelerated variant. I sold a modest portion through a careful, anonymous arrangement with a Tula alchemist, the coin steady and legitimate in a way my earlier System-granted wealth never quite felt.

"You seem distracted," Alphina observed, during one of our now-regular research sessions at the Arcanum’s reading hall. "More than the trafficking case alone would explain."

"Just impatient," I admitted. "Two weeks, and we’re no closer to Thorncroft than the day we first learned his name."

"Cold trails don’t stay cold forever," she said, with the patient confidence of someone who’d built an entire academic career on exactly that principle. "Something will break eventually. Usually right when you’ve stopped actively expecting it to."

She proved right, though not in the way either of us anticipated.

The break came through Sela, Meren’s mother, who sent word through the same notice-board system that had first brought me to her door — a hurried, hopeful message claiming she’d finally heard something concrete.

I found her considerably more animated than our first meeting, a folded scrap of parchment clutched tightly in one hand.

"A girl came to me two days past," she said, before I’d properly settled into her cramped, careful home. "Said she’d worked with Meren, briefly, before Meren disappeared. Claims she saw her again, just once, weeks later — being escorted through the lower market district, well-dressed, but with an escort that didn’t sit right, the girl said. Watched, more than accompanied."

"Did she get a good look at the escort?"

"Tall man," Sela said. "Wore something over his face, she said — not a proper mask covering everything, more like a decoration. Painted, she thought. Tears, she said, painted beneath the eyes."

I felt the cold certainty of confirmation settle heavily in my chest.

"Did she see which direction they went?"

"Toward the old warehouse district, past the tannery quarter." Sela pressed the folded parchment into my hand — a rough address, carefully written. "This is where the girl said she works now, if you want to speak with her directly."

I thanked her, promising to follow the lead immediately, and left with Sharp Soul Perception already stretching ahead of me toward the warehouse district that had started this entire investigation weeks earlier.

The two weeks of quiet stalling before that breakthrough had worn on me more than I’d let myself admit even to Alphina. I’d filled the empty hours with the domain’s steady, satisfying cultivation work, watching the Moonpetal Iris bloom in vivid, impossible color across the hillside near my modest house, watching the Duskwood Sentinel sapling stretch slowly skyward with the particular patience only a tree could manage.

There was something genuinely grounding about that work, tending rows of impossible, thriving plants in a kingdom-sized secret only I knew existed, that helped steady the restless frustration the trafficking investigation’s cold trail kept feeding. I found myself returning to the domain most evenings, not merely to sleep but simply to exist a while in silence, away from Tula’s crowded streets and the weight of everything I now carried.

I’d also used the quiet stretch to finally test my dormant elemental affinity properly, alone where no one could witness the attempt fail. I sat cross-legged near the silver-tinted river, closed my eyes, and reached inward the same way I had for that first, halting Qi circulation attempt behind my Brightwood hut, searching now for whatever mana channel Primordial All-Element Affinity had theoretically opened.

Nothing came. No warmth, no flicker, not even the faint, elusive trace I’d managed on my very first mana attempt weeks earlier. Whatever affinity the System had granted, it apparently required more than passive intention to properly access — the same lesson Swordsmanship Foundation had taught me through weeks of clumsy practice, now repeating itself with a considerably larger, more intimidating gap between theoretical access and genuine ability.

Later, I told myself, filing the frustration away alongside everything else waiting for a quieter moment than the current investigation allowed. Once this trafficking business is properly resolved, I’ll find a proper teacher and actually close that gap.

The promise felt increasingly urgent, though, the longer the investigation’s cold trail persisted. I’d grown accustomed to relying on Qi, on swordsmanship, on the hard-won physical growth two months of deliberate practice had built. But watching Jones’s careful, patient methodology grind slowly against a corrupted, well-protected enemy, I found myself wishing for tools beyond the ones I’d already mastered — something that might let me approach a problem like this from an entirely different angle than raw combat capability could offer.

Sela’s message, when it finally arrived, felt like exactly the break I’d needed, both for the investigation’s sake and for my own patience, worn thin by weeks of careful, grinding uncertainty.

The quiet weeks hadn’t been entirely without their own small satisfactions, even setting the cultivation work aside. I’d taken on a modest string of Guild quests during the lull, partly to maintain my careful, unremarkable reputation, partly because the coin from selling a portion of my domain’s harvest had begun to feel less like survival and more like genuine, growing prosperity, and I found I actually enjoyed the ordinary rhythm of honest work between the investigation’s tenser stretches.

One such quest — clearing a minor pest infestation from a merchant’s storage cellar — brought me briefly back into contact with Rennick’s counterpart here in Tula, a gruff, capable quartermaster named Voss who oversaw much of the Guild’s mundane contract work. He’d taken a liking to my quiet, reliable competence over the weeks, offering me first pick of the steadier, better-paying jobs before they reached the general board.

"You’ve got good instincts for someone who tests as modest as you do," Voss told me, counting out my payment after the cellar job wrapped cleanly. "Half the F-ranks who come through here can’t tell a rat infestation from a proper monster den. You spot the difference before you’re even halfway down the stairs."

"Years of paying attention," I said, the same worn deflection settling easily into place.

"Whatever it is, keep it up," Voss said. "Guildmaster Jones speaks well of you, for what that’s worth. Man doesn’t hand out praise easily, in my experience."

I carried that small compliment with me longer than I probably should have, a modest, genuine anchor point amid the trafficking investigation’s mounting weight. It reminded me, in a way the ledger’s cold, coded entries never could, that the ordinary, patient work of building an honest reputation still mattered — that whatever darker mystery waited at the edges of Tula’s poorer districts, the city itself remained, mostly, a place where quiet competence and honest effort still meant something to the people around me.

I thought of Brightwood then, unbidden, of Aunt Mira’s fierce care and Harlan’s quiet wisdom, and felt a brief, sharp pang of homesickness for a village considerably smaller and simpler than the sprawling mystery I now found myself tangled in. I hadn’t written to them since arriving in Tula, I realized with some guilt — a promise made and not yet kept, buried beneath the accumulating weight of Guild registration, migration anomalies, and now a trafficking network with roots considerably deeper than anyone had first suspected.

I resolved, that evening, to finally send word once this immediate crisis found some kind of resolution. Aunt Mira deserved better than my continued silence, however legitimate the reasons behind it.

Sela’s message arrived the following morning, interrupting that quiet resolution with the urgent, hopeful energy of a lead I’d genuinely begun to fear might never come.

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