Seth needed to plan this heist for a day in which the Baron was not present at his house. People at those levels had superhuman senses and the strength of elephants, albeit he had not seen that part yet.
Either way, he still got the chills when he remembered meeting Baron Blackword so Seth played it safe and looked out for a day in which the Baron was guaranteed to not be at his home.
The nobility were famous for many things and one of the things they did the most was party. Whether it be political meandering or just a fancy for showing off, it was a great way for Seth to rob his target.
The party Seth would use was the Queen's 168th birthday. Since she was one her 5th evolution she had gained over 50 years of extra lifespan.
Seth couldn’t care less for the monarch. She had ruled as dreadfully as her father and as a result, the entire country has suffered a slow decline, yet the palace walls had never been so beautifully cleaned.
The party was in 3 days and was a national holiday, so the streets were going to be extra busy. Even better to escape into if the need were to arise.
Seth had himself a plan and with nothing to do but wait, Seth spent the rest of his time doing a mix of extra preparation, scouting out new positions for his guild, and getting more information out of his friends, be that Rat and Mouse or the upper-class Hyorn.
Time passed and Seth could only wait in bed as he needed to wake early the next day. Fear wasn’t the right word, Seth felt anxious about the day ahead of him and his heart felt strange.
Like a rock, it felt foreign to his body. Seth could only hope to ignore this oddity, but it just unsettled him unlike anything before. Staring at the ceiling, hoping for rest. Seth tried his best to keep his eyes closed.
Darkness came when his eyelids closed, and the doors of Seth’s imagination opened. A place where physics was ignored, and the laws of reality were just mere suggestions. The mind itself was the thing that rivalled Pandora’s box in its randomness and like the universe in its infinite proportion.
Seth started small, colours like green were present all over this canvas and then he added brown. Trees were made, the ground, the sea and even the sky.
A place called Earth. A distant memory from a time before he had died and now it felt so far away. He lived in a new world; one he didn’t even know the name of. Maybe they left it out of the books, or perhaps that theory didn’t even exist.
He used to live here, on this green and blue ball. Seth played around with it. His body was either enormous or the Earth had shrunk, it wasn’t like that mattered.
He looked down, at the ball and on it lay lines. Political boundaries spanned the ball, for it was the only way Seth had remembered the ball.
Countries made up this world. Much like his new one. Were they good or bad? Did Seth even care?
He knew what he wanted. To never return, live until time itself gave up. Seth fell asleep, nightmares of that place plagued him. But by now Seth was starting to get used to them.
When he woke up with a sweat-covered head and he saw the sun’s position, Seth felt endless annoyance. His damn nightmare had made him late. Seth immediately got changed and drove his carriage, which was already prepped, towards its position.
The unassuming carriage was bought under a fake name and was discreetly parked in a back alley right next to the entrance to the noble district.
After parking, Seth had to hurry towards an area where the employees gathered to enter the Noble district. The area inside the Servants district had 20 or so people waiting by a water fountain where Seth joined them in a uniform remarkably similar to theirs.
Since it was the dead of the morning and they were going to work, nobody was awake enough to notice someone join them so they waited for a moment before the person on horseback came to escort them inside.
Sadly for Seth, it wasn’t the guard he had made friends with, but Seth could only shrug this off as unlucky. Heads faced down and smiles non-present; the group entered the district for their early morning shift.
The difference in wealth was laughably obvious. The streets were cleaner, the shops were better maintained, and the paint was an obvious difference. Here shops were green instead of grey and since every shop wanted to attract customers they all were painted a nice spectrum of different colours.
Seth walked past these shops and went towards an area that was extremely close to the entrance. This was seen as a sign of being lower down In the noble rankings and since his target was a Baron this certainly checked out.
The man on the horse said a few words and left after one last look at all the employees. He stared at Seth for a little too long, enough for Seth to have a mild panic attack, but he left, and Seth had gained entrance.
The group split up to do their respective jobs and Seth broke away from the group by immediately hiding inside the outside bathroom. This time it wasn’t to knock out some poor worker but to wait until the Baron had left which was in a couple hours.
Shuffling around inside a cupboard Seth’s back was in incredible pain and after only 20 minutes he realised that staying here for hours was going to be torture although Seth’s resistance to pain was extremely good, he felt his arm going numb and losing a limb was not a good thing to do when you were aiming to be a god.
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Out of the cupboard, Seth allowed his arm to feel some blood again before he started to look around. Before he used the old man as a sort of cushion and unless he wanted to borrow another he was going to have to move.
Last time Seth paid the manager coin for his troubles and for Seth this made the act a net positive, but he hadn’t brought any money with him, so he had to drop the plan for moral reasons. He certainly didn’t want to kill someone for something so minor.
On that thought, Seth looked for a lock in the bathroom and found one on the floor by the door. It was a remarkably easy fix and looking back Seth could have done this before, but to be fair his mind wasn’t exactly very calm. Happy with his easy fix Seth spent his time thinking and quadruple-checking his plan. He had a few instances of people trying to get in but a simple, “Someone’s in here!” made them go to another bathroom.
After Seth felt like a few hours had passed he decided to start exploring. He already had some information on the layout of the building, but he hadn’t actually seen it.
So with his employee uniform on he started wandering through the first floor. Many people ran around doing various jobs, cleaning, food prep and various other tasks were being completed by these professionals and they were professionals.
Most people working here were level 50+ and some would even have a skill. They were called servants but they were very much still in the upper class of regular people.
Wandering past these Seth saw many rooms that would better serve these professionals. Equipment here were all past rank 5 and the knifes in the kitchen were even higher in rank.
Barons were still in a league of wealth Seth had hardly scrapped the surface of and with that in mind Seth continued on.
Past the first floor, Seth arrived at the Library. Most Nobles had one of some size and it was a show of intelligence and wisdom for one to own a library, so nobles tried their best to make their own as impressive as possible. Blackwood back in Darter had destroyed him in favour of his meditation rooms and that was part of the reason the designers thought it was such a strange change.
Books lined shelves and Seth could not help but wander through the library in an almost trance-like state. Imagining the things he could do if he read all of the books Seth wanted to just steal these. Information was power and Seth wanted power more than most so he may have slipped a few into his prep bag and one into his pocket.
Maybe he was just greedy, but he was a thief, so it wasn’t like it was out of character.
With those secured Seth reached into his prep bag and pulled out some glasses he used to track where the man a beacon was. In the wooden library, Seth’s spectacles started to glow a soft light blue before returning to normal. As they did Seth’s vision slowly shifted from one of normality to one of blank space.
These glasses were quite special in they looked for a specific mana signature and saw nothing else. Seth imagined these would be useful for everyday objects that people lost like keys, phones, and other small objects. The glasses only had a 5-minute window before a day of recharging was needed so Seth looked around with haste trying to find his necklace.
Turning a full 360 degrees Seth somehow managed to find nothing. `Was it not on this floor?` Seth had to think for a moment before reaffirming to himself that it was definitely this floor he saw it on.
`He must have moved it` was the conclusion Seth produced so without anything better to do he looked above him and below him. It wasn’t going to be on the servant floor, so it was on the third floor.
The library floor was a pretty loud one so Seth made sure to minimize sound emitted as he made his way towards the staircase. There were 2 going all the way up the house, and Seth was going to use the front-facing side.
Seth’s intuition was now flaring, and his plan was being reorganised as he moved. Serene Mind kept Seth calm and so he moved with purpose and without fear.
Except he should have, he was spotted. A loud voice echoed inside the library, “Oi, what are you doing up here?”
The voice was posh, but not noble posh. More like an imitation, a bit like his Murderous Butler friend. Seth concluded it was a senior servant so with haste he thought of a plan.
The servant appeared behind a bookcase and walked up to a still Seth.
“Are you going to answer my question?”
Seth turned and made his best innocent and sorry face, and he forced tears into his eyes.
“I’m, I’m so sorry I really wanted to read a book.”
Seth would have worded that better if he had time but alas time was an extremely limited resource. The senior servant looked Seth up and down and said, “You know you could get fired for this, trespassing is no minor ordeal.”
Seth could only cry more, some of those tears were now. He didn’t want to die, and this seemed to be the end.
The servant took a deep breath in, “But, I don’t think our Master would like that. He never says so but I think he admires those with a love of knowledge and it’s why the library is so big. So, I’ll only give you a warning. What’s your name I’ll have to write this down?”
Seth immediately made one up and said his new name, “John Smith.” He had to maximise his chances of having a name that an actual servant had, and this name was reliably average.
“Alright, back to work then. See you.”
Seth got waved off but actually didn’t get escorted down so he simply continued what he was doing before and made his way up to the third floor.
The old Hyorn described this place to have some sort of secret mechanism and Seth safely assumed that the vault or safe was stored there.
With that in mind, Seth looked around the corridors for some suggestions as to what the floor was composed of. Seth assumed that the bedroom of the Baron was here as there must be at least one in the home and this was the last floor, and because of that a bathroom as well.
Other than that, maybe a study. Seth really had no idea, so he walked towards the area where he saw the glowing light. Sadly 5 minutes had passed so he couldn’t get an updated position, but he did know the rough area, so he followed that and his intuition to enter a living room.
The floor was dark brown wood, and the walls and ceiling were made just the same. Leather chairs sat on top of fur rugs and a fireplace made the room a great place to relax.
On top of a mantelpiece, above the fireplace, was a photo. A young well-dressed boy smiling with his parents. Other art decorated the walls, but they were all rather bland compared to this one.
Seth walked up to it and empathised with his target.
`No, stop! I need to steal` Seth dropped the photograph, it’s case shattering into pieces as Seth walked around the study towards a bookcase.
Seth had seen the movies, and so he started to pull on the books. Each book came out and sadly Seth was disappointed to find no secret door was opened this way. It seemed that part of the culture hadn’t made it here yet.
Seth looked further around the room and returned to the fireplace where he looked into the wood pile. Unlike what one would imagine it seemed as though no ash was lying at the bottom, so Seth started to look closer.
He noticed a small glint below several layers of crisscrossing pieces of wood. Seth tried to take out the wood but when he lifted it the entire wood pile came out with it. They were fake!
Whilst Seth lifted it up what he failed to notice was a lone mechanism above the fireplace, in the chimney. It was a Soul Intimidator, albeit an off version of its kind. A lone hole leads a string of mana towards a trap inside the secret room.