Chapter 413 - Sherlock Sofia Sunders System Secrets

Sofia was thankful that there was no one to watch her at the moment as she thought she was probably looking quite a bit crazier than usual laughing by herself in a kitchen with all the drawers and cupboards open, some of which she had broken in her precipitation.

No knives!

What kind of lunatic does not have a single knife in their kitchen?

That’s right!

Sofia brought [The third Key] out of her storage and threw it slightly in the air to make a flip. The dagger flew up then back down, but Sofia suddenly had second thoughts, since the dagger could absolutely cut through her hand if she caught it improperly, and she couldn’t heal.

Pulling her hand back at the last second, she watched as the dagger continued its fall and embedded itself deep into the kitchen counter. So deep in fact that it fell right through it and finished its course sideways in the cupboard below.

Oops. This thing is dangerous…

Sofia crouched down to grab the dagger and pulled a face when she observed the state in which she had put the room she was in.

“I should probably repair the kitchen before I leave…”

Still, if I am to believe the dagger’s description, its owner was the God admin, since they had divine essence. So… this was a God’s house.

Now to assemble all the pieces together.

If I remember our theory with Saria and with Orator’s poem…

One of the Admins is a human hero, and we have a picture with three ‘humans’.

One is likely to be a Dragon, considering the system had a specific Dragon section, although they could really be anything.

The dagger confirms the third one has to be a God or a Recessed. There was Saria’s theory that it was one of the Lords but I just don’t believe that. It doesn’t add up with how the three I encountered behave. Realistically it could still be Annihilator, but somehow I’m doubtful, especially since the system itself seems so clueless about the Deep.

Now if we follow Orator’s poem, the human hero is lost in space trying and failing to ‘reach a past long lost’, presumably to return to his previous world.

Then one Admin is asleep and fragmented, while the last one is ‘gone’ as they ‘fell prey to greed’.

Orator appeared to give the poem when we theorized that the Deep might have erased an admin, all but confirming that it was the case with that first verse about an admin being gone.

This would be the individual who’s missing from the picture.

Once again, Sofia walked up to the ‘empty bedroom’. It still looked empty to her, and yet, just like the first time, her instincts clearly processed the empty room as a bedroom. It couldn’t possibly be anything else despite being empty.

It’s not empty. It’s erased.

Somehow, one way or another, what used to be present in this bedroom still exists, but it also doesn’t. It’s as if my brain is seeing it but I’m not. And it’s the same for the picture. I can look at that person on the right and immediately identify him as a handsome human guy, and yet I’m completely incapable of actually seeing it or visualizing him in my head as more than a blurry blob.

Sofia left the empty room as it was starting to mess with her mind, and went to sit down on the dining room’s couch.

“If the third key was an item from the erased admin, would it not also be ‘erased’ by the Deep? If even his bedroom got wiped, then surely something that important… And the name on the dagger was redacted, not erased by the Deep, redacted by the system. It wouldn’t have had to do that if that admin had been erased. Asty’s account of witnessing someone getting erased was a lot like what I’m experiencing now with the room and the picture. She knew someone had been there and what he had been talking about, clearly identifying him as a man, and yet completely unable to remember his name or exact appearance.”

Sofia was restless, sitting in place on the couch didn’t feel right, so she started walking around the room, talking to herself.

“So it’s safe to say that the God is the sleeping–fractured admin and the presumed Dragon is the erased one.”

She grabbed the picture to give it another look.

Three humans.

Gods can look however they want, and Dragons can shapeshift to adopt a smaller, more practical form. If the admins’ group was formed with a human hero in their rank, who was the least likely to be able to vastly change his appearance, it would make sense for the other ones to adopt a similar likeness to make working together easier. Especially so if they were going to spend a lot of time around each other to create the system… To the point of sharing a house…

I really got a picture of the three admins!

Even Saria will be impressed.

I wonder how much Valeure would pay for this one. Not that I intend on selling it, but still.

“Well, a picture of two admins and whatever remains of the third…”

Sofia looked at the picture again.

One question remains. Since the erased is the presumed Dragon, although their actual race doesn’t matter much here, is that other guy the God and Anna the hero, or is Anna a God.

The thought of a God spending her free time writing obscene smut fictions… Somehow isn’t too far from what I expect from them? I mean, just look at Sun’s hobbies…

If we’re going by the design of the keys, the first key is a sword, which makes sense as I now know that it’s also the summoned human heroes’ most used weapon by far throughout history, apparently.

The third key is a tiny dagger. I don’t know, instinctively I want to stick the tiny dagger to the petite woman and the sword to the middle-aged guy, because the dagger will really actually look like a kitchen knife in this guy’s hands. I also generally got the impression that the Titles instructions booklet and the UNIQUE titles descriptions were written by a man, but that’s inconclusive evidence, just baseless intuition.

There’s more to it, though. The guy’s room had all this mechanical stuff, they were clearly in love with tinkering with stuff, and they most likely made all the weird electrical stuff in this house. Like the [Hero’s foodlocker], whose design was somehow reproduced by a random hero more than a thousand years later and which we found in Zangdar.

It sure is starting to sound like the heroes’ world has some interesting technologies that the summoned people are trying to bring over. Things like… Electricity-using items, which are mostly useless here because of all the mana…

But the heroes’ world does not have mana.

A lot of points are starting to draw a line.

A human hero on the left. A Goddess in the middle. A Dragon on the right.

Once again, Sofia brought out her dagger.

A fragmented God, as in, their essence has been spread out, with, let’s say, one of them being used to make a dagger?

“And she has blue hair, too. Could just be a high charisma stat doing that… Or it could just be because she’s a God and can look however she wants to look.”

Goddess Anna…

Lost in her thoughts, Sofia slowly walked back and forth in the kitchen as she mumbled to herself.

“Goddess of what, though?”

“If we’re to judge from her books, probably the Goddess of lust… And if we’re to judge by her looks, probably the Goddess of beauty or something like that…”

“I’m not usually into other women but I have to say… Aherm. Anyway… That’s that. It was an interesting mystery to mull over, but it’s not really advancing me much. I could also still be wrong about my assumptions, but I’m about 80% confident that I got things right. What now? Back to the trial?”

Sofia looked around, first of all, she still had to fix the kitchen. Although it was unlikely for the admins to ever come back here, the three of them could all still technically be alive, even the one who got erased, after all, curse was still able to appear in Cinthia’s chat despite his name still being impossible to even think of.

It would just feel like shit to come back home from such a situation and to find your home in this state…

I mean, I’ll still be stealing some stuff, but I can at least leave the place clean…

She patched up the kitchen, and repaired the broken things like shattered drawers by replacing them with bone-sculpted versions. It wasn’t the same color, but at least Sofia made the shape and texture similar. The worst part was the hole in the counter, she did plug it with bone, but it just didn’t look good. There was nothing else she could do about it however so she left it like that.

With all this done, there were two more things Sofia wanted to do, first of all: go check out the last door. She had gotten sidetracked by the picture of the admins but there was still another door at the end of the corridor which she hadn’t opened and couldn’t sense through, so for all she knew, there could still be an infinity of other rooms to check out in this house. Secondly, she wanted to play around more in the ‘empty’ bedroom, and try to understand more about Aphenoreth’s erasing, since it felt likely that he was the source of said erasure, all Inquisitive that he was.

And last but not least, she hadn’t counted it in the ‘two’ things to do, but she was absolutely going to take anything she might have missed that she could have a use for. Although she wanted to avoid ruining the place too much, if the admins kept any kind of intriguing magical items in their house, she had to face it, there wasn’t a world in which Sofia wasn’t going to grab them.