From the inside, the cabin was really simple.
It was just one big platform with several partitioning walls dividing the space into separate rooms.
It was barely functional, it was cramped, and it slled heavily of brine and damp wood... but compared to the idea of shivering in the freezing winds outside on the beach, it felt like a five-star resort.
I walked toward the center room, my toga rustling softly against the floor. Lying on the rough bed fra inside, I found the featureless white mask and picked it up to inspect its smooth surface.
Earlier, I had borrowed an Appraisal Card from Alexia, so I used it on the Mask.
====
[Na]: —
[Rank]: —
[Type]: —
[Item]: —
[Description]: —
————
[Enchantnt]: —
————
[Maker’s Inscription]: —
====
"Agh, just as I thought."
I dismissed the Appraisal Card with a frustrated sigh.
The damn thing was blank. Not a single line of text.
You see, when an Artificer forges an item, they enchant their creation by engraving runes onto it.
Aside from granting enchantnts, runes can also be used to properly label the item — basically a way to tell its na, rank, type, abilities, and description.
An Appraisal Card simply reads those description runes and translates the information into a simple language that the rest of us can understand.
But if the maker never bothered to label their work, then even Appraisal wouldn’t find any data to relay.
Origin Cards and most non-man-made Acquire Cards had such sophisticated rune patterns that most Appraisal Cards could read them naturally.
Man-made items, however, required proper labeling because the quality of a human’s work would obviously be inferior to nature.
Now, just to be clear, I’m not calling Vahn’s work shabby compared to natural Cards. The guy was a God of Craftsmanship, after all.
Yet when he created this item, and many others, he clearly wasn’t in the best state of mind. So he probably didn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, invest the ti needed to refine every unimportant detail.
You could also argue that he probably just didn’t want the world to know what he had made. A mask designed to hide from the heavens shouldn’t exactly co with a convenient instruction manual for any random appraiser to stumble upon.
But it was the sa case with every other Divine Artifact we recovered from his corpse. Even my Vajra showed nothing.
So, yes. My guess was that Vahn didn’t label the items because he made them strictly for his own personal use.
"Well, it’s not like I need the instruction manual anyway."
I knew precisely what enchantnt each artifact had. I had thoroughly tested them all out in the ga.
So I sent a pulse of Essence into the unnervingly light Mask held between my fingers, and it rippled in response like it was made of liquid tal.
Then, right before my very eyes, its shape began to change. The flat, featureless white surface began to fold and elongate to wrap around my wrist. Its color bled away from stark white, darkening into a deep black.
Soon enough, the Mask wasn’t a mask anymore. It was now an obsidian band of polished glass, circling my left wrist like a minimalist cuff.
Good.
Carrying a mask around everywhere would have been troubleso, especially with one hand. And for the journey ahead, I wanted to keep it on at all tis.
It was a powerful artifact.
Depending on the user’s rank, the mask’s power ranged from simple invisibility to putting the wearer onto the fringes of reality itself, where they could neither be seen nor rembered as long as it covered their face.
Right now, at my B-rank, I could only use it to slip past most sensory perceptions like sound, sll, and sight for a limited ti. Ten minutes, if I rembered correctly.
But that was more than enough.
Because its strongest enchantnt was its passive one — a telepathic shield that protected my mind from external probes and would flag the location of anyone trying to divine my presence.
Between that, and the Vajra that allowed to unleash around ten to twenty million volts of raw lightning, I was pretty satisfied with my share of loot.
Was it worth dying over?
I looked down at the black cuff on my wrist. Then I glanced at the empty space where my right arm used to be.
"Oh yeah. Totally worth it."
Totally worth it!
•••
After retrieving the Mask of Nobody and lanting the tragic loss of my Acquire Cards so more, I decided it was probably ti to stop wasting ti and go check on Michael... and maybe help them with the mast.
But just as I was about to leave the cabin, sothing on the side of the bed caught my eye. It was a bracelet.
A bracelet that looked like a loop of fingernails threaded together by a strand of silver elastic.
I raised an eyebrow.
Oh, wait. I had seen it before. It was Juliana’s. She had been wearing it as an anklet the last ti I noticed it.
I vaguely rembered being curious about it back then. And seeing it again now, that curiosity ca right back.
So I picked it up and began examining the fake human nails with mild interest.
"Why would any girl even want sothing this... bizarre?" I muttered with an amused smile. "God, she really does have weird tastes."
Scoffing, I was about to toss it back onto the bed... when sothing about the bracelet caught my attention again.
The quality...
More specifically, the quality of the fake nails.
Up close, they didn’t resemble cheap plastic or hardened gel. I rembered noticing that detail before as well.
They had a translucent, pearlescent sheen, almost like the inner lining of a seashell, but underneath that was a texture that felt... strangely familiar.
I ran my thumb along the edge of one of the nails. It was sharp. Properly sharp, like sothing it had been carefully trimd and filed.
"...Oh— Oh fuck!"
My heart suddenly dropped into my stomach.
Hastily, I summoned my Origin Card and used my power on one of the nails, trying to mold the acrylic into a different shape.
I waited for a second, then a second more.
...But nothing happened.
My ability refused to work on it.
I felt my hand starting to shake. A sense of lightheadedness crept in and I felt short of breath.
...Keratin.
These fake nails weren’t fake at all! They weren’t plastic, or gel, or so exotic resin! They were organic, made from fibrous protein! They were real!
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