Chapter 1: The Auctioned Ashes

The old house in Strasbourg let in cold drafts on rainy nights, the paint peeling off the window frames like rotten teeth. Léa Chantier stood in a corner of the attic, her fingers brushing against the slab of stone she had carried back from the ruins of the monastery. Three days earlier, her mother had pressed it into her handbag just before dying, the old woman’s hands trembling like dry branches in the wind. Now, Léa carefully picked away the century-old plaster from the slab’s surface with forceps, and under the ultraviolet lamp, a face of the Virgin that had been faint and blurred took on eerie geometric lines. It did not look like the work of a medieval painter. The lines were too regular, carrying a cold, industrial precision.

“That isn’t a religious symbol.” Léa murmured to herself. Her voice echoed through the empty attic, with a metallic edge to it. She adjusted the angle of the UV lamp, the light sweeping over a crack along the slab’s edge, where a deeper secret was hidden.

The doorbell suddenly rang, a sharp burst of static cutting through the sound of the rain. Léa did not turn around. She kept her eyes on the patterns on the slab, her mind racing. As the youngest top-tier appraiser at the auction house, she had seen countless fakes disguised as antiques, but she had never seen a technique that hid modern encoding beneath religious imagery. It was an impossibly cunning method, one that exploited people’s blind reverence for the sacred.

“Miss Léa Chantier.” A man’s voice came from the doorway — low, restrained, like a throat roughed down with sandpaper.

Léa finally turned. Pierre Turrey was standing in the portico, water dripping from a black umbrella, spreading a small dark stain on the wet stone steps. He wore a sharply tailored dark gray suit, the cufflinks glinting coldly under the dim light of the door lamp. Two years after their divorce, his gaze was still precise as a scalpel, trying to dissect her emotional defenses.

“Pierre.” Léa did not step aside. She stood in the shadow of the doorframe, still holding the forceps. “Your lawyer’s letter reached my office. You claim this stone belongs to your investment portfolio?”

Pierre stepped inside, his leather shoes creaking softly on the wooden floor. He looked around, his eyes sweeping over the tables stacked with files and the family portraits on the walls, before settling on the slab in Léa’s hand.

“The lawyer’s letter is a reminder, not a prohibition.” Pierre’s voice was level, stripped of warmth. “Under our premarital agreement, any movable assets you inherit that are tied to unsettled trust assets must be audited by a third party. This ‘mural’ has shown up in black-market records, and the catalog number matches a batch of unpublished assets from The Order.”

“It has been in my mother’s hands for forty years.” Léa turned the slab at an angle so the UV lamp lit it in front of Pierre. “Your so-called trust assets? This is a forgery, Pierre. Look at the lines here. Medieval lime pigments don’t reflect light like a uniform high-polymer material. This is a material from the 1980s or later.”

Pierre narrowed his eyes and stepped forward. His breathing was a little fast, not from anger, but from the excitement of a hunter who had found its prey. He stared at the slab, and there was no reverence for art in his eyes — only the greed of numbers.

“You’re lying to me,” Pierre said. “The Chantier Family are the guardians of The Order. This stone is tied to three centuries of underground vaults across the Alsace Region. I spent two years tracing that thread through the banking system, and now it has landed in your hands. You’d better not sell it to some clueless collector, because that would wreck The Replacement Plan.”

“The Replacement Plan?” Léa let out a bitter laugh, her voice full of barbs. “You want to use my inheritance to cover the holes from your failed investments. Pierre, what do you think I am to you? An account you can just drain whenever you want?”

“I think of you as an appraiser who doesn’t understand the legal consequences.” Pierre’s tone turned colder, like a shell of ice. “Those coordinates are hidden inside the stone, pointing to a batch of frozen gold. Hand it over, and we can settle the debt privately. Keep it, and wait for the court summons and the asset freeze.”

He reached out, palm up — an elegant gesture, and full of threat at the same time.

Léa did not give him the slab. She wedged the forceps into a thin seam along the edge of the stone and pried. A sheet of tin foil, thin as cicada wings, peeled off the back and fluttered down onto the carpet. Pierre’s gaze snapped to the scrap of metal.

“That’s the Anti-magnetic Shielding Layer,” Léa said. Her voice was terrifyingly calm. “Medieval monastery murals don’t get anti-magnetic treatment. Bank vaults after 2000 do. Pierre, you’re wrong. This stone isn’t an asset. It’s a key. And you? You’re just a fool holding a mismatched key.”

The color drained from Pierre’s face, replaced by a dangerous darkening. He seized Léa’s wrist, hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

“You think you’re smarter than the entire banking system?” he hissed through his teeth. “You have your professional instinct, I have my network of capital. I’ll buy access to the National Archives’ digitization system, and I’ll pull every communication record connected to your mother. You can’t run, Léa. This stone has to leave this house today.”

“Let go.” Léa’s voice had no inflection, but inside her sleeve her fingers were clenched so hard her nails dug into her flesh, the pain keeping her sharp. “You can snatch it if you want, but you can’t take my judgment.”

At that moment, the front door downstairs was flung open. A rush of damp cold wind poured in, sending the curtains whipping violently. A young woman burst into the entryway, rain dripping from her short hair. It was Audrey Perre, an independent reporter for the Strasbourg Herald, her eyes sharp as a wary owl.

“Mr. Pierre Turrey,” Audrey gasped, her voice a little hoarse. “The police have just sealed off the roads around the monastery ruins. Also, your private jet canceled tomorrow morning’s departure. I think you need to explain why your assets in Strasbourg have suddenly been hit with a freeze order.”

Pierre’s face went instantly pale. He released Léa’s wrist and stepped back, his gaze darting between Léa and Audrey. The arrogance that had had the situation under control shattered all over the floor.

“It’s a misunderstanding.” Pierre turned to Audrey, forcing a veneer of composure. “The media always loves to exaggerate.”

“A misunderstanding?” Audrey pulled a printed photo from her bag and slapped it on the floor. It was the back of the slab, from the exact same angle Léa had just pried open. “I interviewed the duty officer at the archives. They say you tried to pull the 1990s funding flow records of The Order through illegal means last week. Now, are you also going to privately stash a national cultural relic in this old house?”

Léa looked at the photo on the floor, and a strange shiver rose in her chest. Audrey had arrived too conveniently. Behind a coincidence like that, there was always a hand at work. She picked the slab back up and gave it one last scan under the UV lamp. The geometric lines shimmered in the light, like a string of silent code.

“Pierre,” Léa called after the man, who had already turned to leave. “You lost long before you realized you had. You’re tracking money. I’m tracking the truth. The truth doesn’t need a capital replacement. It just needs a pry bar.”

Pierre stopped at the doorway. In the curtain of rain, his back looked isolated and vulnerable. He turned to look at Léa one more time, his eyes complex — full of hatred, and a flicker of fear he could barely hide. Then he disappeared into the night, the sound of his shoes on the ground fading away.

Léa turned back to face Audrey, who stood with a look of wide-eyed astonishment. Curiosity and suspicion burned in the reporter’s eyes.

“Do you know what’s inside that stone?” Audrey asked.

“I know it’s a trap.” Léa carefully wrapped the slab back in cotton cloth. “But a trap is also a marker. Someone wants to lure us in the wrong direction, so the real assets of The Order stay buried.”

“You’re going to hand it to the National Archives?” Audrey frowned. “Colette Dupont has been extremely sensitive about those files lately. She might block your query access.”

“Then let her not be able to block it.” Léa put the wrapped slab into an iron box and locked it shut. “I need to find the 1985 monastery restoration report. It definitely has a detailed list of the pigment composition. If my analysis is right, this slab was deliberately planted during that 1985 restoration. The purpose was to cover up the truth buried underneath.”

Audrey stared into Léa’s eyes, trying to find a crack in her story. Finally, she nodded and pulled a business card from her pocket.

“If you need me to make some noise in the media, or if you need a witness, I can help,” Audrey said. “But don’t drag me into your legal swamp. My reputation is worth more than that piece of junk.”

Léa tucked the card away, her gaze landing on the cold keyhole of the iron box. The rain outside was intensifying, the drops hammering the glass like a rapid drumroll.

“I don’t need a witness,” Léa said quietly. “I need Colette Dupont. She’s been guarding that archive for thirty-five years. She definitely knows why some of the files are redacted.”

She picked up the iron box and headed for the stairs. Her footsteps echoed through the narrow stairwell, each step like it was being placed on a fault line in history.

Just as she was about to disappear around the stair landing, Audrey suddenly called out.

“Léa, wait.” Audrey’s voice trembled a little. She pointed at the wall behind Léa. “Look there.”

Léa turned back. On the attic’s patchy wall, the afterglow of the UV lamp was still casting itself, revealing another set of lines so faint they were almost invisible. The patterns matched the geometry on the slab perfectly, but their positions formed a combination of letters.

Léa’s heart skipped a beat. It wasn’t decoration. It was a map.

“That’s the… coordinates for the entrance to the underground crypt beneath Strasbourg Cathedral,” Léa murmured.

Audrey swallowed hard, her eyes filled with a mix of greed and fear. “Are you sure? They say there’s absolutely nothing in there.”

“Nothing?” Léa let out a cold laugh, her fingers tracing the projection on the wall. “In a capitalist’s eyes, something without value is ‘nothing.’ But for us, that’s the lifeline of the whole family.”

She turned and walked down the stairs, her steps firmer than on the way up. The iron box was heavy in her hand — the weight of history, and the omen of danger. Pierre’s threats were still ringing in her ears, and Colette Dupont’s conservative style was a high wall that would be hard to climb.

The next morning, in the domed main hall of the National Archives, sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows and fell on the marble floor in speckled patches. Léa was dressed in a proper black dress, the iron box in her hand, standing in the line of people waiting for access.

Ahead of her were a few people who looked like scholars, quietly discussing how to translate certain Latin texts. Léa’s gaze passed over them and settled on a table in the corner. A silver-haired woman, wearing white gloves, was carefully sorting through a stack of yellowed parchment. That was Colette Dupont, fifty-eight years old, the guardian of the archives, known for her strictness and conservatism.

Léa took a deep breath and walked up to the counter.

“Good morning. I am Léa Chantier.” Her voice was remarkably clear in the quiet archive. “I have a relic that needs appraisal. It’s relevant to the classification of national cultural heritage.”

Colette looked up, peering over her thick-rimmed glasses. Her expression was cold and professional. She extended her hand, gesturing for Léa to open the box.

“According to regulations, privately held relics that involve public historical assets must pass a preliminary review first,” Colette said. Her voice was dry, like sandpaper rubbing against something. “Put the object on the table, and keep both hands off of it.”

Léa placed the iron box on the shock-absorbing mat and opened the lid. The slab was exposed to the air, the UV lamp long since put away, only natural daylight falling on it.

Colette put on her gloves, picked up a magnifying glass, and leaned in. Her brow furrowed, her fingers hovering just above the slab, not daring to touch it directly.

“This is… a remnant from the monastery,” Colette’s tone had become hesitant. “It has a fifteenth-century plaster layer on the surface, but the underlying structure is abnormal.”