"I… I thought I saw someone just now..."

Rose stammered out, her voice trembling with a fear that wasn't entirely an act.

She gestured weakly toward the bullet hole.

"A rat, maybe. It was in the corner and it just startled me... I just… reacted."

The enforcer, a man she knew only as Grifter, stared at her.

His eyes were flat, disbelieving.

"You fired a gun in a sealed apartment over a rat..."

He stated, his tone utterly dead.

"It was quite big..."

Rose whispered, shrinking back, playing up the terrified girl.

"Within our line of activity, one must always be paranoid over everything. The supernatural world is quite dangerous..."

She defended herself.

Grifter didn't lower his gun.

His eyes continued to sweep the room, lingering on the piles of boxes, the single window, the mattress.

He was trained...

He knew something was off, even if he couldn't see it...

He couldn't call her a liar outright.... not without consequences from higher up if he was wrong.

His gaze finally landed back on her, heavy with suspicion.

"The delivery today went smooth... So what's the problem?"

"It's nothing, perhaps I've just been on edge as of lately."

She said, forcing her hands to stop shaking by clasping them together.

"After what happened to my brother. Loud noises… they set me off."

It was a half-truth, and she poured real emotion into it.

It was the most convincing lie she could tell.

Grifter watched her for another long, silent moment.

Finally, Grifter gave a slow, dissatisfied grunt.

He holstered his weapon.

"Clean that up," he said, nodding at the plaster dust and the bullet hole.

"And get your nerves under control. We can't have you shooting at random things, you're lucky the other rooms were set up with talismans of secrets... Next time you miss a check-in, I won't be so forgiving."

He turned to leave, but paused at the shattered doorway, looking back at her.

"The artifact you moved today... The buyer is… particular. Any issues, any strange feelings around it, you report immediately. Not to Darius but to me. Understood?"

"Understood," Rose said quickly, nodding.

With one last lingering look around the seemingly empty room, Grifter left, his heavy footsteps fading down the hall.

Rose didn't move.

She stood frozen in the middle of the room, waiting.

A deep whisper finally settled in her ear.

"Do you care about your brother?"

Hearing this, Rose nodded out of fear.

There was a moment of silence before the man behind her replied.

"Good."

As the voice settled, the feeling of her existence being scrutinized finally went away.

Her knees went limp as beads of sweat dropped to the ground.

...

'It seems that the problem with the original Seth Arden lay within the demonic artifact that Cedric Laibac stole…'

Seth slowly organized the new information in his mind.

'But what does that have to do with me? With my transmigration?'

Seth frowned beneath his mask.

The only clear connection between him and the original Seth was their name.

But that was it...

They looked nothing alike!

Their personalities were different and even their interests were worlds apart!

'Maybe the name itself is important...' he thought.

'Or maybe something happened when Phoebe killed the original Seth that pulled me here.'

But what could it have been?

Phoebe didn't have the power to pull a soul from another world...

She was just a beginner witch!

As he thought about it, a few ideas formed in his mind.

His first idea was that it was because of Phoebe's involvement with higher-level beings.

Jake Williams' warning had already confirmed her fate was tangled with powerful forces.

Maybe one of those beings was pulling strings...

If their power worked like a ritual, maybe the shared name "Seth Arden" acted like a target.

The original Seth died, and the ritual, searching for a "Seth Arden," accidentally grabbed his soul from another world and stuffed it into the empty body.

He pondered that... It made a weird kind of sense.

The second idea was about the method Phoebe used to kill him.

She had used her Sin, but maybe she also used a special material or object as a focus to apply her curse on him...

She never explained the details...

Maybe that object was a bridge, or a key, that connected two points— death in this world, and his soul in another.

'It's either the tool she used, or something else...'

As he thought of this, Seth had one idea over what it could have been!

The tombstone itself!

He remembered it clearly...

The tombstone Phoebe used looked quite ancient.

The name "Seth Arden" carved into it didn't look fresh either...

It looked like it had been there for decades, maybe even a century... Weathered and old.

A cold shiver went down his spine.

'Could it be that someone planned this a long time ago? That someone wanted the original Seth Arden to die, to create an opening for the Progenitor of the Sin of the Meaningless to be born?'

'But their plan had an error. Instead of creating a new Progenitor from scratch, their ritual pulled in a ready made soul, which was mine, and I inherited the title by accident?'

Was his entire presence here the result of a decades old scheme that went slightly wrong?

He had to see the grave again...

It didn't take him long to get there.

With the physical boost from [Null Presence], he moved quickly through the city and into the wooded area.

Soon, he stood before the simple tombstone in the quiet forest.

He looked around, really thinking about the location this time.

Why here?

It was remote, but not completely isolated.

A main road was only a twenty or thirty-minute walk away.

People could still come here if they wanted...

'If you really wanted to hide a body, wouldn't you choose a better place?' he thought.

'A deeper part of the forest? A swamp? Somewhere that's actually isolated...? This spot is hidden, but it's not impossible to find. It's an odd choice...'

Then he looked at the grave itself.

The more he thought about it, the stranger the details were.

First, the burial was shallow... Way too shallow.

A standard burial uses a casket about 2 feet tall, placed inside a concrete vault about 1.5 feet deep.

With the required soil on top, the whole grave is usually about 6 feet deep.

His grave was only about 1.5 feet deep total!

The casket was old and rusty.

And its size—a 2-foot tall casket inside a 1.5-foot vault—meant there was extra space.

It wasn't a snug fit...

It felt less like a container for a body, and more like a... a box you could struggle in.

A box you could escape from!

It felt like Phoebe, or whoever dug this grave, wanted someone inside to have a chance to break out...

Of course, you could explain that it was due to Phoebe's inexperience and that she didn't know proper burial depths...

But the next part was harder to explain!

It was the timing!

Phoebe had come to visit the grave on the exact day he resurrected.

The third day after his burial.

Why visit then?

It couldn't just be to pay respects...

She was his killer. Guilt? Maybe.

But to visit so specifically on the third day felt quite intentional.

'She arrived on the third day... right when I woke up,' Seth thought, the coincidence was quite odd.

'Could her shocked reaction have been because she expected something to happen, but not exactly me walking out? Did she expect a resurrection, but of someone else? Or something else?'

He surmised that Rose probably had not known about the ritualistic process as only Phoebe had visited...

'Heh... resurrecting on the third day. Isn't that what Jesus Christ did?'

He couldn't help but mock his own ridiculous situation.

But the thought stuck.

Was the "third day" symbolic?

In many cultures and stories, three days marks a transition.

It's the time between death and the afterlife, a period of change.

In the supernatural world, symbolism was power...

Was his shallow grave and three-day resurrection part of a ritual?

A badly performed, or incorrectly targeted, ritual to create a Progenitor?

'That girl...'

Seth could not help but re-evaluate Phoebe in his head.

He had always seen her as clumsy, a bit stupid, and tragically out of her depth.

A beginner witch in over her head, dragged into revenge by her family's tragedy.

But now, the picture was getting more complicated...

She was connected to higher existences that even Jake Williams, a being of immense power, acknowledged and warned about.

Her fate was considered "cursed" by people in the know, like Rose and Darius.

'Are there also deeper reasons as to why her mentor kept in contact with her?'

He thought

She had performed a murder that, by all new evidence, seemed to be part of a ritual...

The shallow grave, the old tombstone with a pre-carved name, the symbolic third-day resurrection.

These weren't the actions of a panicked, grieving girl...

These were definitely ceremonial!

She might not have understood the full ceremony, but she was always the type to follow instructions quite well..

And those instructions led directly to him waking up in that coffin.

Phoebe definitely had access to knowledge or sources he knew nothing about...

Who told her to bury Seth Arden in that specific way, in that specific place?

Who gave her the old tombstone?

Was it her mysterious mentor, Danica?

Or was it the "higher existence" tangled in her fate?

Seth exhaled slowly.

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