The chapter opens with an Ergo dream sequence, showing his mind being consumed by his hunger, with only his loneliness stopping him from losing himself completely, as he wants to learn more about himself and have people in his life. He hears his mother calling his name, so he turns back and sees three figures. The first one wears a futuristic uniform and calls him a failure, ashamed of her own ineptitude. The second woman is dressed primitively, was significantly more filled with life than the others, and her eyes had red irises and gold pupils. She says she likes Ergo this way, and gets into an argument with the Crudelis person, who accuses her of being giving useless information to the failed experiment. While they argued, the third figure just watched Ergo without saying a thing. Her eyes were completely without a self. Ergo felt like he was making eye contact with absolute zero disguised as a nebula. Even after seeing all three of them, Ergo can't identify which of them was the mother he heard. The dream ends on him hearing a fourth voice calling him from the other side. It's Waver, with Gray right behind him.
Gray wakes up in an apartment provided by the Clock Tower's Singapore branch and goes nurse the unconscious Ergo. It's been three days since she and Waver have been taking turns doing that, and she feels like she has a little brother now. The fact that Ergo doesn't wake up reminds her of the cat Waver couldn't save. Ergo then wakes up and the two start catching him up on what happened. Before Rin and Gray joined the battle, Rin had already evacuated the children, as she had trained them for that in case a real pirate crew ever invaded their turf. Ergo got killed when the Wuzhiqi took off a third of his head, but then his Phantom Hands went out of control and merged into a single giant hand that destroyed half the island (explaining the giant handprint in Chapter 2's cliffhanger). Ergo's head was fully restored when the big hand formed. No one died because they were all in the spaces between the fingers, maybe by luck, maybe by intent. They try to discuss Ergo's origins, but Latio is the only real lead they have now. Waver doesn't know much about the Six Sources, only that they're the 6 oldest families in Atlas, as the Atlas people don't interact with the outside much, and the only other Source he ever met, Zepia, is not the standard Atlas mage. What he does know is that instead of researching to reach the Root like Clock Tower mages, the Atlas mages research to prevent a predicted end of the world. Meaning that if the Crudelis family contributed to making Ergo, that means he's tied to whatever doomsday event the Crudelis is assigned to prevent. As Ergo shakes from his life having just escalated from "happy days playing with kids" to "bound to confront a potentially world ending threat", Gray makes her good internal commentary on how mages are just people painfully aware of the end of all, clumsily trying to cope with that by either finding something absolute while there's still time (Clock Tower) or struggling to delay the inevitable (Atlas). Back to the Ergo exposition, Waver explains that his memories aren't "lost", they're saturated. Gods have a lot more information than what it fits in a human, so whenever he access the god powers in his Phantom Hands, he needs to open space by removing from his memories and personality, until he's completely replaced by the gods inside him. Yes, just like Gray. Waver extends him his hand (after a long speech about hands as symbols of destruction, contact, and evolution) and asks what he wants to do. Ergo comments that didn't had anything to do, so he always went along with whatever Rin and the kids were doing. Even now, he still considers that the objectively right thing to do because they had things to do, unlike him. Ergo insists that supporting people with clearer goals is the right thing to do, but being offered this promise to look together for what he wants, he says wants to make that mistake. And so, Waver tells his two students to go outside, as it's their turn to get on the offensive.
The trio regroups with Rin, who had made all the calls she was asked for, thought she protests that she was made to contact the Thought Magecraft people in his stead. This was because Waver just assumed Rin had Chinese contacts since she knew Baji Quan. Rin explains she learned it from a priest she knows, and Waver gets very interested in being introduced to Kotomine because a priest knowing Baji Quan is an usual combination, but Rin replies that he wouldn't like him and he's dead. They go to the big commercial district and receive a suitcase from Chris, the head of the Clock Tower's Singapore branch. Next, they go to a Chinatown and Rin rings a bell, making a pair of buildings become visible. A black building and a red building coiling around each other. That's the Louxuan Guan's Singapure branch. The Louxuan Guan (Chinese for "spiral manor") is one of the two major Though Magecraft organizations. All of their buildings incorporate the shape of the spiral in some way, with the most common being building literal spiral manors, as it's the case here. Waver skips on explaining the other major Thought Magecraft organization because they're all Xians, so there's no reason to expect them to ever interact with humans. A Guan mage named Tao gives Waver a small wooden box. The party then goes the secret Harry Potter reference area in the subways, and Waver opens the wooden box and suitcase, with each of them containing one key. To explain what's the deal with that we need to talk about magecraft copyright. The biggest source of income for most mages comes from royalties from their patented magecraft formulas. In fact, the main reason why so many mages want Waver dead is because his MO is figuring out the inner workings of other people's magecrafts, changing them, and then patenting them under his own name. But, as we know, magecraft is practiced in secrecy, so the copyright bills can only be properly charged due to the Carrion observatory in Albion. However, the Carrion can't observe the entire world, which is why the Clock Tower has other branches, which with their own observatory, allowing magecraft copyright to be enforced in about 70-80% of the globe. The Singapore branch has the
Luxcarta, but since it also covers Guan territory, accessing it requires authorization from both the Clock Tower and the Guan. What's happening here is that Waver is lying that he's investigating unauthorized use of his copyright so he can track Latio. That's what the phone call to Reines on the Interlude's cliffhanger was. The Carrion/Luxcarta normally detects the traces of magecraft Clock Tower mages cast on the world, but since Atlas mages cast magecraft on their own bodies, tracking Latio's magic bones shows her exact location.
The scene cuts to Latio, sleeping in an abandoned construction site in Sentosa. She sleeps sitting, with her back on a steel beam. Tangere wakes her up because the Wuzhiqi arrived 16 minutes and 35 seconds before the predicted time. Latio asks if she knew Ergo would survive her smashing his head and she confirms it, saying his creators, herself included, would be really stupid if they made him easily killable. Latio unsuccessfully tries to piece out what happened with the giant hand, but instead of telling her the answer, the Wuzhiqi instead decides to reward her effort by warning that Waver already found her. Latio doesn't buy it. She's confident Waver isn't insane enough to abuse his Lord powers and scam the Guan just to track her. The latter could cause a major conflict between factions. The Wuzhiqi insists she's taking a Lord's underhandedness too lightly, until she goes on a big tangent about humanity's nature to consume the planet's resources, and claims that humanity should stop wasting the planet's time already. She believes just burning down the home they were born in and going outside is the correct path for humans. Latio deduces that the god she chose is a Taoist one because she was talking about "correct path". Interestingly enough, the Wuzhiqi reacts with a "What? Yours isn't?". Latio says she doesn't need to know. The Wuzhiqi transforms from that hawk form into the gold-pupiled woman and asks Latio to give Ergo to her. She claims this would preserve the order in the old contract. Rights to Ergo's ownership came first to the Crudelis, second to her, and last to the Wandering Sea. Latio refuses but the Wuzhiqi reminds her of how she got terrified and opened herself to negotiations when Gray was about release Rhongo. Latio doesn't have a counter to Rhongomyniad, while the Wuzhiqi is strong enough to deal with it. The Wuzhiqi taunts her even further, talking about the Crudelis family's history of just hiding behind other families' back, scavenging on their skeletons, but Tangere intervenes and de-escalates the situation before Latio turned it into a fight. The Wuzhiqi likes his style and ask to keep him, but Latio refuses that as well. She claims she already has everything calculated to deal with Gray's trump card. The Wuzhiqi leaves with a warning that all sides involved have their personal reasons to want Ergo, so this won't be over soon. Of course, the Wuzhiqi doesn't mind waiting a little more after having already waited for so long.
Later that night, Gray catches Ergo singing a song about the fear of ghosts (cue 5 paragraphs of narration detailing every reason why Ergo is an awful singer). He tells that Lana (the kid who cut his hair) noticed he was scared once and taught him this song, assuming he was scared of ghosts. Ergo now understand that he was actually scared of something that was inside him. Something that would suppress his memories and personality and replace him. Gray can relate a lot to that, so she starts talking about how her life with Waver and Reines gave her the will to stay herself. The bonding moment lasts until Ergo's stomach growls. Gray offers to cook to him, and starts to notice Ergo looks at her a lot more intently whenever he's hungry.
While Gray and Ergo where having their moment, Waver was watching Rin treat her jewels. Rin is impressed Waver was so fast to devise this formula to counter Latio's magecraft with Rin's. He's terrifyingly knowledgeable of how her circuits and foundations work. Waver answer it's his nature as a talentless man to look at an absurd talent like Rin's Average One and constantly think about what he could do if he had that.
They share some Chinese tea after she's done with her preparations, and Waver questions if her sense of responsibility towards Ergo is her only reason to fight alongside them. Rin admits that she's also doing it because she's excited to be on an adventure (an adventure of Lord El-Melloi II, if you will). After exhausting his attempts to convince her to back down, Waver says he wants to hire as a pirate consultant. They agree the terms, and before saying goodbye, Rin asks him about Gray's relationship with Saber. She easily through Waver's false answers but decides not pry if he doesn't want to explain. She just assumes she's like Ergo, but Waver says they aren't the same. Rin tries to come up some metaphors to define their difference, but nothing she's saying is feeling right, so Waver proposes the metaphor that they're like sheep and wolf.
The next morning, the party goes to Sentosa. Waver is visibly sleep deprived. They meet Lana, who says she already grouped up all the kids old enough to understand what they were doing. This was a joint operation between Waver's group and Rin's pirate crew. The pirate kids, familiar with the region, would guide them, following Waver's commands. Waver is concerned about putting the kids in danger, but their quick evacuation and restructuring to a new base shows that Rin raised those kids to be survivors. Since Ergo is Latio's goal, he has a big role to play here as the bait. Waver is worried about other parties like that Wuzhiqi, but Latio is the only one they can go for now, so one step at a time.
Originally Posted by Misaya
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