How to Get Girls, Get Rich, and Rule the World (Even If You're Ugly)-Chapter 53: How to Decode a Hoard of Forbidden Things (3)

The sound was dull. A muffled clink. It echoed as if the alley were deeper than it looked.

But the figure didn’t react.

Nothing.

Not a turn of the head. Not a twitch of the fingers. Not even a shift in the scent.

And that didn’t reassure me.

It unsettled me even more.

Because everything here was waiting for us.

And maybe the only thing more dangerous than a trap that’s been sprung...

Is a trap that doesn’t need to move anymore.

Thalia took a deep breath beside me.

"I think I’m going to try," she said.

I turned my head slowly. Just a centimeter of expression was enough to make it clear what I thought of that idea.

"We don’t even know if she’s alive, Thalia."

"And if she is, what if we lose the chance?"

"Sometimes, losing the chance is what keeps your eyes in your skull."

But she was already taking the first step.

I followed. Half a step behind. Hands close to my coat. Eyes on everything except the target.

The figure remained motionless.

Until something changed.

Not in her. In the scene.

Two shapes emerged from the opposite end of the alley — not the way we had come in, but from a nearly invisible side path, up until now just a blur of shadow, rotted wood, and cracked stone.

The kind of passage your brain skips over at first glance, marking it as a forgotten wall or some useless corner of urban decay.

But now, that alley was breathing.

And from it came two hooded men, cloaked in dark garments that dragged against the ground with a solemnity that wasn’t theatrical — it was practical. Like they were used to moving through silence without needing to pretend they belonged.

They walked with a strange calm, as if each step was timed to the heartbeat of someone invisible.

Thalia stopped right beside me — not because I held her back, but because even she, determined and impatient as she was, recognized that the kind of presence these two carried demanded respect — or at the very least, a pause.

Me, I was already still by instinct.

Not like prey. But like a cautious predator.

Something about their movement triggered old reflexes — the kind buried in situations where logic stops working and only cold detail remains.

The two men didn’t even glance at us. Not even by accident.

It was like we were irrelevant shadows, ignorable presence — or worse, anticipated figures, expected but not important enough to interfere with the real order of things.

They moved directly toward the figure at the end of the alley — the one who, until then, seemed untouched by time, a statue seamlessly nestled in the darkness.

And only with their arrival did she move — a slight tilt of the chin, almost imperceptible, yet full of intention.

It wasn’t a greeting. Or a signal. It was authorization.

The body language was clear, even if it made no immediate sense.

They knelt before her — which, considering the sludge on the ground and the evident risk of the place, was the kind of gesture done only out of faith... or a deeply ingrained obligation.

They leaned in and whispered something — something I couldn’t decipher, even with all my practice in lip-reading. Too close. Too fast.

Short sentences, delivered with surgical precision.

No ceremony. Only content.

Pure exchange.

Then she turned her head, as if closing the protocol. Still cloaked, revealing only her chin — and a strand of hair too golden to be natural.

It wasn’t blonde. It was gold in a metallic way, as if it had been dyed with the shine of something that didn’t belong to this world — or this time.

That glow didn’t come from anywhere.

And yet, it shimmered on its own.

For a moment, a disjointed memory clawed its way toward the surface — a blurred recollection from another life, smothered by time and by the absurdity of crossing between worlds.

I saw flashes. Washed-out colors. The plastic texture of a Formica wall. The muffled hum of an office building’s air conditioning.

And then... her.

A woman walking through the wrong door of a court of appeals — the kind I used to haunt out of obligation... and sometimes, out of strategy.

At the time, I didn’t know her name. No one did. She had no scheduled hearing.

No case in the system. Dressed with a formality too deliberate for a visitor and a casualness too calculated for a lawyer.

She entered without hesitation, with silent steps, and stopped beside one of the columns as if she were part of the architecture.

But what struck me — what struck me again now — was the gaze.

She didn’t blink. Literally. Didn’t shift focus. Didn’t scan the room like someone looking for something. She already knew where everything was.

Eyes that didn’t ask.

Eyes that already knew.

And still, they watched.

A veteran judge who had been in the room with me later remarked that "sometimes silence walks in wearing heels, just to remind us the court is fiction."

I laughed at the time. But that night, I had trouble sleeping.

Because deep down, I knew that woman hadn’t walked in by mistake.

She was there to see who would notice her presence.

Who would feel the displacement. Who would realize the clock hands had stopped when she crossed the carpet line.

And now, years and a world later, that same sensation ran down my spine.

| ENTITY PROFILE: THE GOLDEN-HAIRED SOVEREIGN |

Something about her presence broke through the barrier between instinct and information. I wasn’t just feeling her weight in the alley — I was seeing it.

My mind, or whatever twisted layer of the system clung to me now, projected her profile like a dossier I had never requested but always feared.

A presence that didn’t need to speak because the air around her did it for her. I don’t know why I was seeing it... but I believed every word.

And I wish I didn’t.

| Type: UNKNOWN

| ATTRIBUTES |Presence: Absolute (silence becomes heavy in her proximity)Movement: Minimal – but deliberate. Every gesture implies a command.Aura: Distorts perception of time and spatial dimensionsEyes: Unknown – but induce cognitive dissonance upon direct contactKnown Activity: Appears before or after high-level transitions (political, metaphysical, or dimensional)

| ABILITIES |► Protocol of the Veil [Passive – Scene Anchor]→ While seated and still, she becomes the center of spatial gravity. All perception realigns around her. Prevents impulsive magic or direct physical action without consequence.

► Silent Authorization [Active – Gestural]→ Grants permission for events to unfold via micro-movements. Her nod is sufficient to activate pre-arranged actors or contracts.

► Memory Desynchronization [Passive – Psychological]→ Anyone exposed to her presence for more than one minute experiences fragmented recall of events from past lives, alternate timelines, or suppressed memories.

► Thread Compression [Triggered – Exchange]→ When approached by operatives or envoys, extracts or implants information directly. No record. No dialogue. No magic visibly cast.

| WEAKNESSES |→ Unknown physical form beneath cloak. May be a projection.→ Susceptible to disruptive emotional fields (grief, overwhelming laughter, spiritual purity).→ May react unpredictably if protocol is interrupted by spontaneous acts of chaos.

The figure in the alley — the hair too golden, the restrained movement, the eyes I couldn’t yet see but already feared — evoked that same dissonance: as if reality were being worn like borrowed clothing by something never meant to inhabit it.

Now the scene felt strangely familiar.

But before I could connect anything, the men were already standing, moving away from the seated figure with the same discipline they’d arrived with. They didn’t look at us. Didn’t exchange a word. Just walked back the way they came.

And that was when I realized the side alley where they disappeared wasn’t just an alley.

It was a living passage. A slit between two ruined buildings, too narrow to notice in a hurry, but real — concrete — and now pulsing with a residual presence that seemed to mock my certainty that I had observed everything upon entering this place.

| ENTITY PROFILE: THE VEILPASSAGE |

I looked at the side alley again, and something in the back of my vision peeled open — not my eyes, something deeper.

It wasn’t just a path. It was... documented.

Tagged.

Like the city itself had a glitch in its architecture, and the system was trying to warn me: "This is not just a wall."

The moment that awareness locked in, I saw it.

Or rather, I understood it.

This wasn’t a corridor. It was a creature that wore brick like skin and silence like breath.

| Type: Urban Rift / Threshold Organism

| Classification: Hidden Conduit / Dimensional Gateframe |

| ATTRIBUTES |Location: Between decaying structures, cloaked in perception staticActivation: Passive — requires specific individuals or sequences to manifestPhysicality: Mutable — shifts width, depth, and orientation subtlyAura: Null field — suppresses common detection spells and directional memory

| ABILITIES |► Cognitive Bypass [Passive]→ Causes the mind to ignore or misclassify the passage until activation conditions are met. Appears as wall, rubble, or shadow.

► Residual Echo [Triggered – After Use]→ Emits temporal or magical residue post-usage. Observers feel unease or déjà vu, but cannot articulate why.

| WEAKNESSES |→ Cannot form in consecrated or non-chaotic zones→ Briefly visible in reflections or sound maps→ Exposure to disruptive sound (e.g., bells, whistles) distorts alignment

Something inside moved, or seemed to move. Not a clearly human shape, but a slender and fluid shadow — the kind of form you only notice when you’re not looking directly at it.

Maybe it was an illusion. Maybe a reflection.

But my instincts, the same ones that had saved me countless times, weren’t screaming in alarm — they whispered, as if even fear was afraid to draw attention.

I turned my gaze back to the woman, who had returned to the same posture as before, seated, impenetrable, unmoving.

No words, no gestures. But everything was different now. The exchange had taken place. The scene had been set.

And we, standing there, were just witnesses to something clearly beyond our scale of comprehension.

And even so, something in me — old, stubborn, and curious — still wanted to understand.