The Sinner Hunting System

"A relic?"

Raphael looked around, mildly surprised, but the System had flagged it clearly, somewhere nearby, something was here.

The room had the layout of a master’s private quarters.

Most of it had surrendered to time, but the bones of former luxury were still readable in the structure, a large canopied bed, several tables, a row of display cabinets, three chests.

"Looks like I’m the first one in. Hopefully a vampire count’s private rooms have something useful. I’m fairly short on money at the moment."

He started with the tables. The drawers held mostly decomposed cosmetics that released a smell best left undescribed. He closed them after a single look.

"In that era men wearing cosmetics was entirely normal. Count’s personal taste. Fine."

He moved to the next table, and the next after that. Nothing of value in any of them. He exhaled.

"Decorated Count. This poor?"

He came to the bed, picked up a shredded piece of fabric, and raised an eyebrow.

"Silk? No, woven from the thread of some kind of supernatural creature. Cold and smooth, carries a trace of arcane energy."

He turned it over in his fingers.

"Would have been worth a great deal once. In this state, useless."

He set it down and moved to the display cabinets.

"Let’s see... some kind of decorative art, looks like ceramic, but the wear is severe. Not worth anything now."

He moved to the next.

"Oh, this one’s not bad. Silver construction, should carry some value. Shaped like a figure. A woman."

He studied it at close range.

"Why does this look somewhat like the Marquess’s wife?"

He pocketed the piece with an expression that suggested he had questions about the count’s private life, and moved on.

He didn’t skip anything. Whatever the relic was, it could be hiding inside any of these unremarkable objects.

The display cabinets held a thorough variety of items, each examined in turn.

Swords, but badly damaged, inscribed with names from that era that carried no recognition and no value now.

Books reduced to gray dust inside their approximate outlines, identifiable only by the ghost of their shape.

Statues, bronze, silver, but the metal was impure, mixed alloys that had oxidized in the open air over centuries into something dull and corroded.

Then the last two cabinets gave him something worth stopping for.

The first was a weapon cabinet. Inside it stood a long staff, entirely black, its upper end curving into a hooked axe-blade.

Not a woodcutter’s axe, the blade was narrow, sharp at a level that caught the eye, its curve following the precise line of a bird of prey’s head.

Where the eye would be, a red gemstone was set into the metal, and from that stone a faint arcane pulse breathed in and out like something alive.

"Resembles a shepherd’s crook axe, but the details are different. The hook is more pronounced, the edge is thin, this was designed for combat, not labor."

He looked at the base.

"The grip ends in a weighted sphere. Solid and heavy."

He looked at it for a long moment, and his mouth curved slightly.

"Found it."

After all this time, through all this corrosion, it remained immaculate. Clean as the day it had been placed here. Every line sharp, every surface unmarked by age.

He lifted it from the cabinet.

[Analyzing... Complete.]

[Relic: Death Crow.]

[Description: Crafted by a high-tier mage. The handle structure incorporates special materials from the Mirror World, iron birch wood that has been saturated with arcane energy over long periods, with a fine steel core inlaid within.

The axe-blade is forged from Kyle alloy, a metal with extremely high arcane affinity.]

[Effects: Consumes arcane energy to summon a Death Crow.

The summoned entity has no combat capacity but is highly sensitive to the resonance of death, it can detect deaths and their locations within a defined range, up to two months prior.]

[Each strike from Death Crow applies the Death Sentence mark to the target, moderately disrupting the target’s fate at the level of misfortune and pushing them toward more dangerous outcomes. It can also weaken the target at a psychological level.]

[An embedded blood gem: after a killing blow, the target’s soul can be bound within the weapon for a duration determined by the soul’s strength. The bound soul can be interrogated or subjected to other methods.]

[Relic Cardinal Sin: Nihilism.]

[Matching sin: effects doubled. Mismatched sin: effects halved.]

[Sin mismatch penalty: each activation of Death Crow requires payment, a large quantity of arcane energy, or one complete soul.]

The information moved through his field of vision and was gone. Raphael’s expression settled into something satisfied.

"Workable."

He gripped the handle and swung it once through the air.

The blade cut cleanly, a sharp keening sound, the weight distribution perfectly calibrated, each swing carried a feeling of the weapon guiding the motion, responding before he’d committed fully to the angle.

The length was slightly more than his extended arm, comparable to Lyndon’s sword, manageable to carry on his back without drawing undue attention.

"The relic’s cardinal sin is Nihilism, one of the new seven. Doesn’t match my Superbia, so the effects are halved.

Death Crow’s detection range drops to roughly one month. Death Sentence weakens from moderate disruption to light disruption. And every activation still needs payment on top of that."

He looked at the final cabinet. Inside, a white-gold bracelet, its surface engraved with text in an archaic script he didn’t recognize. He reached for it.

Nothing. No System response whatsoever. Just an object.

"Strange. Nothing to distinguish it, but it’s survived intact across all this time. Something is off about that."

He pocketed it. The count wasn’t in a position to object.

Last: the three chests, each chest chest-high, the materials still solid despite the centuries.

"Let’s see what the count left behind."

He pressed his hands to the nearest one’s latches with a hint of anticipation and lifted the lid. No lock. That struck him as slightly wrong.

Inside: nothing. Empty, with a few remaining support brackets showing where something had once been stored with care.

"Gold, probably. Gemstones. Hard currency of some kind. Long gone."

He shook his head.

"I should have opened the chests first. Maybe Death Crow’s death mark already reached me. Bad luck."

He moved to the right chest and opened it.

Something in there. Several somethings, slender fungal stalks, each one thread-thin with densely clustered nodes at the tip, giving off a smell that sat somewhere between alcohol and fermentation.

More than a dozen of them at a glance. Around them, four of the familiar crystals, all of them filmed with dust and dark.

[Analyzing... Complete.]

[Arcane Material: Centennial Dragon Whisker Mushroom.]

[An arcane material saturated with magical energy for one hundred years. Contains a single drop of dragon’s blood.

Usable in potion brewing or the preparation of certain specialized solvents.]

"Potion brewing, I know the principle. Water ghost saliva makes an underwater breathing tincture.

Vampire teeth can be processed into a stimulant that keeps someone alert through the night.

Dragon Whisker Mushrooms, a hundred years old, more than a dozen of them."

He pulled them out carefully and tucked them into Sam’s cloth bag.

"The dead have no objections."

The center chest was last.

"Please don’t be a mimic. On the other hand, given the taste of whoever built this place, it might actually be a mimic."

He raised Death Crow, approached slowly.

Before he touched it, the chest opened on its own. A hand came out from inside, pressed against the lid, pushed it wide.

Not treasure. Not another plant specimen.

A person.

Dressed in a double-breasted coat in the style of the eighteenth century, face painted in the heavy cosmetics of a stage clown, the figure climbed out of the chest, straightened up, and bowed to Raphael with an air of polished courtesy.

"Bingo! Congratulations on completing the first round of the Blood Moon Game. You have qualified."