◈ ◈ ◈

Orion stared at the screen.

Read it again.

"Follow the cat," he said out loud.

Luna’s ears went flat. "Excuse me."

"Not you." He turned around slowly, scanning the training ground, the path leading back to the estate, the hedges along the far wall.

There.

Sitting on top of the stone wall at the far end of the training ground, watching him with an expression of profound feline indifference, was an orange cat.

Not special looking. Not glowing. No runes. No mythic energy signature coming off it that he could detect. Just an orange cat sitting on a wall looking at him like he was mildly beneath its notice.

"That cat," Luna said flatly.

"Apparently."

"Master is going to follow a random cat because the system told him to."

"The system has been right before."

"The system also told you to sleep on a rock."

"It told me to get a mat, which is different." Orion was already walking toward the wall. "Stay here."

Luna made a sound like she’d physically bitten into something unpleasant. "Absolutely not."

"Luna."

"I’m coming." Her tone left no room. "If master is following strange cats into unknown situations then master is not doing it alone."

He considered arguing. Decided against it. Honestly having her at his back for whatever this was made more sense anyway.

The orange cat watched them approach. When they were about ten feet away it stood up, stretched with the total bodily commitment that only cats could pull off, and then jumped down the other side of the wall.

They followed.

The other side opened onto a narrow path that ran along the outer edge of the estate grounds. Mostly used by groundskeeping staff. Quiet at this hour. The cat was already twenty feet ahead, moving at an unhurried trot, occasionally pausing to look back at them as if checking they were keeping up.

"This is undignified," Luna muttered.

"Following a cat?"

"My master following a cat."

"Your master follows leads," Orion said. "The lead happens to be a cat. Don’t overthink it."

She made the bitten-into-something-unpleasant sound again.

The cat led them along the outer path for several minutes, then cut left through a gap in the hedges that Orion would never have noticed if he wasn’t being actively guided. Through the gap was a small courtyard, clearly not a formal one, more like the space left over between two sections of the estate wall that nobody had found a use for. Weeds coming up through the stone. An old stone bench. A section of wall that was patchwork, newer stone mixed in with the older stuff like it had been repaired at some point.

The orange cat sat down in the middle of it and stared at the patchwork wall.

Orion looked at the wall.

Looked at the cat.

Looked at the wall again.

"Okay," he said. "What am I looking at."

The cat did not answer because it was a cat.

But his passive skill was doing something. That low background hum of combat instinct picking up on something in the space. Not a threat exactly. More like. Potential. Like standing next to a door that wasn’t labeled and feeling the draft under it.

He walked closer to the patchwork section.

Up close the repair work was obviously much newer than the surrounding stone. Not recent, maybe a decade, maybe more. But deliberately done. Carefully. The kind of repair that was more about hiding something than fixing something.

He pressed a hand against it.

The wall was hollow behind the patch.

Luna was beside him immediately. "Master."

"I feel it too." He stepped back, examining the dimensions. Not large. About the size of a door but sealed completely. "Someone built this closed."

"Who."

"No idea." He glanced at the orange cat. It was washing its face. "System, any information."

The screen appeared.

◈ MISSION UPDATE ◈

[Follow the cat :: In Progress]

Location Reached: Concealed passage, outer estate wall

Historical Note: Passage predates current estate construction by approximately 200 years.

Current Status: Sealed from this side. Entry possible.

◈ HOST OPTION ◈

Proceed? [YES / NOT YET]

This passage leads outside estate boundaries.

Contents unknown.

Risks unknown.

Reward remains locked until completion.

◈ ◈ ◈

Two hundred years old.

Older than the current estate. Older than the current Ashbourne main building. Older, probably, than several generations of the family that now occupied this land.

And someone had sealed it from the inside.

Orion looked at Luna. She was reading the space with her perception stat that was rated S on the system, her ears slightly forward, her expression doing the hunting-evaluation thing.

"Anything dangerous on the other side," he said.

She was quiet for a moment. "Not immediately. Further out, something. I’m not sure what."

"Something dangerous?"

"Something large."

He thought about this for exactly four seconds.

"Alright," he said, and started working on the patched section of wall.

It came loose easier than expected. The mortar had dried to a kind of crumbling brittleness that suggested whoever had sealed it hadn’t expected it to need to hold forever. Or hadn’t expected anyone to find it. He pulled the stones free one by one and stacked them neatly to the side, which Luna observed with something that might have been fond exasperation.

"Only master would neatly stack the evidence," she said.

"I might need to put it back."

"Of course."

The opening that revealed itself was narrow. Not uncomfortably so but narrow. A passage cut directly through the outer estate wall, stone-lined, sloping slightly downward. Dark. The faint smell of earth and something older coming out of it.

The orange cat walked past Orion’s legs and into the passage without hesitation.

He followed.

The passage was about thirty feet long and ended in a door that wasn’t sealed from this side. Old wood, iron fittings gone to rust, but it pushed open when he leaned on it with his shoulder and the light that came through was proper outside light.

External.

Beyond the estate wall. In the narrow strip of land between the Ashbourne outer wall and the start of the city proper, a space that was technically Ashbourne territory but practically ignored by everyone.

Or so he’d thought.

There was a structure here.

Not big. Not obvious. Half hidden by decades of vine growth that had been climbing the outer wall and apparently extended to cover whatever this was as well. The shape underneath was about the size of a single room. Stone built. Old stone, the same age as the passage.

The orange cat was sitting in front of the door.

Orion stood in the outside air for a moment, feeling the morning properly, hearing the distant sounds of the city just beyond the wall, looking at this hidden structure and feeling the weight of the situation arrange itself in his head.

Someone had built this two hundred years ago.

Someone had sealed the passage from the inside more recently.

And the system had known exactly where it was.

He looked at the structure’s door. No lock visible. No obvious mechanism.

He put his hand on it.

◈ HIDDEN MISSION ◈

[Follow the cat]

Final stage reached.

Enter the structure.

What’s inside was left for you specifically.

◈ ◈ ◈

Left for you specifically.

He pushed the door open.

The inside was one room. Stone floor, stone walls, no windows. Three things in it. First was a stone shelf along the far wall with objects on it that he couldn’t identify yet in the low light. Second was a table with something on it covered by cloth that had gone grey with age. Third was something written on the wall in large deliberate characters.

He got closer.

Read it.

Then read it again.

Luna appeared at his shoulder, reading alongside him. Her breath caught slightly. Just slightly.

The writing said, in characters clear enough that two hundred years hadn’t dimmed them:

For the one who summons without summoning. The next step is yours.

Below it was a symbol he didn’t recognize.

Below the symbol was a single question mark.

Which was also, he noticed with a feeling that was doing several things at once, the exact same question mark currently displayed next to CORE ATTRIBUTE on his status screen.

He looked at the covered object on the table.

Looked at the writing on the wall.

Looked at the orange cat, which had followed them inside and was now sitting on the stone shelf looking profoundly satisfied with itself.

"That old bastard," Orion said quietly, and it came out more awed than angry.

This hadn’t been an accident. The lightning. The reincarnation. The specific body. The specific world.

None of it had been an accident.

Luna’s hand found his arm. Warmer than usual. "Master."

"Yeah," he said.

"What does it mean."

He reached out and pulled the cloth off the table.

What was underneath stopped his breath for a full second.

Then the system screen exploded with notifications, more than he’d ever gotten at once, stacking over each other in rapid golden succession, and somewhere in the estate behind the wall he could have sworn he heard, faint and distant and probably imaginary, the sound of an old man laughing.