Du Wei picked up a candlestick. After thinking for a moment, he also took a weapon down from the wall. Given how weak he was, he chose a short sword. After another brief hesitation, he tucked several fresh candles into his clothes.

Then he stepped into the secret chamber hidden in the wall.

The faint candlelight illuminated only the space some two or three paces ahead and behind him. Fortunately, Du Wei had been born with somewhat greater mental power than ordinary people, and his senses were correspondingly sharper.

The passageway had been built into the enormous stone wall. Cold, hard stone hemmed it in on both sides, and who knew how many years it had stood there? It was thick with dust. Though Du Wei did his best to make every movement quietly, he could not keep from stirring it up, and soon he was sneezing again and again.

Every so often, his feet crunched on little stones. With the candle flame wavering, he could only proceed slowly and carefully.

Luckily, the place seemed to be ventilated. Though the flame flickered, it did not go out for lack of air.

After he had followed the passage for a while, a stairway appeared before him. The narrow stone steps spiraled down into the earth. They were crudely built, but solid enough. By Du Wei's reckoning, he had descended more than thirty levels before he finally saw a small door.

The metal handle had long since rusted over. Du Wei gripped it and twisted hard twice, only to find that the door was locked and would not open at all. He sighed, then suddenly remembered the sentence carved backward on the bookshelf...

“The spoon is the key...”

Holding up his candle, Du Wei searched around the door. At last, on the ceiling directly above it, he spotted a pattern.

It was a carved design. From its markings, he could barely make out that it was a star chart. He knew little of astronomy, but because the clue about the “spoon” was fixed in his mind, he quickly found the Big Dipper—the seven stars shaped like a spoon.

“The spoon is the key...” Du Wei muttered. The ceiling was too high for a thirteen-year-old. Even on tiptoe, he could not reach it. By the dim candlelight, he studied the pattern intently.

One candle was almost spent. As he lit a second, an important thought suddenly came to him.

A key?

What a joke!

If someone discovered this secret passage, then even without a key, could they not simply find tools and pry the door open? Without a key, they could still smash it down by force.

If so, the key was hardly important. Yet the clue had made a special point of saying “key,” so it had to carry a deeper meaning.

In other words, without the key, smashing or prying or any other method would be useless.

This “key” probably could not be understood literally.

Du Wei sat and thought for a while. When he rose again, he jumped as high as he could and barely managed to tap the Big Dipper pattern on the ceiling with his short sword.

Bang!

Du Wei's eyes lit up. The sound seemed hollow.

He abandoned the idea of working on the door. Bending down, he found a crack between the floor slabs and drove the short sword firmly into it, leaving it standing upright. Then, bracing himself against the wall, he stepped onto the sword. That raised him a little higher. He was still unsteady, but he could just reach the ceiling.

A thick layer of dust covered it. As Du Wei felt around, he discovered that the stars of the Big Dipper stood out from the surrounding surface. He tried various things: knocking, twisting, turning, and more.

At last, he did not know what he had touched, but he gave it a hard turn. One of the stones in the star chart actually rotated. With a series of clicks, a floor slab in the corner suddenly sank down.

A black opening appeared in the floor, with another flight of stairs descending within it.

It worked!

Du Wei cried out softly and grinned as he jumped down from the sword hilt.

Just as he had thought: it was a trick meant to deceive people. Du Wei was now sure his guess had been right.

The rusted door beside him was only a decoy. The real secret had nothing to do with it. If a visitor had not heeded the clue and noticed the Big Dipper, then even if they forced that door open, they would never find the true secret here.

Du Wei was certain that the real secret lay in the black passage that had opened in the floor.

He went to its edge. The entrance was so narrow that one person could barely squeeze through. It was pitch-black inside, so Du Wei first lit a candle and threw it down. In its falling light, he could see that the stairs were not very deep—only about seven to ten feet down. There should be a concealed room below.

Du Wei did not go down immediately. He sat at the entrance and waited for a while. When nothing unusual happened below, he carefully made his way down the steps.

It was a completely sealed room, enclosed by stone walls on all four sides. Rows of iron cabinets stood along the two walls. Many were sealed, and every lock had rusted over. In the middle stood an enormous stone platform.

It came up to Du Wei's waist. Its surface was engraved with numerous profound, indecipherable patterns: a large arc in the center, surrounded by the positions of the stars.

Du Wei studied it for a while without finding any clue, then simply gave up on the design and concentrated on searching the iron cabinets.

Every cabinet was locked. After so many years, the locks inside had probably rusted solid. Du Wei struggled for quite some time. Just when he was beginning to feel frustrated, he finally gave a cheer: he had found an unlocked drawer.

It was the only unlocked drawer in all the cabinets.

Inside lay a stone case.

The Rowling Family crest was carved onto its front.

Du Wei laboriously lifted the case, sat down on the floor, and carefully opened it. Inside was a scroll of parchment.

The parchment was densely covered in writing. When he unrolled it, a green, hexagonal crystal like a gemstone fell from within.

Patiently, Du Wei lit the third candle he had brought with him and began to read the words on the parchment.

“To the reader of this letter:

“Dear reader, you must surely be a descendant of the Rowling Family. First, then, there is something you must know. This is a letter left by your ancestor. I, who wrote it, am Semel Chira Rowling, wife of the seventh head of the Rowling Family and an astrologer.”

At those first lines, Du Wei could not help being surprised.

An astrologer—Semel?

Of course Du Wei knew that the history of the Rowling Family included an unusual family head. That head had been deeply interested in astrology and had even married a female astrologer. The highest structure in the family castle where Du Wei now lived, a tall white tower, had been built by that family head so that his astrologer wife could remain high in the tower at night and observe the stars more clearly.

Du Wei had not expected this letter to be written by that man's wife, the female astrologer herself.

He read on.

“...When you read this letter, I hope you understand that what you are about to face is a perilous adventure. You may open a door forbidden for countless ages, for beyond that door may lie a realm of taboo beyond the reach of humanity.

“At the same time, this is the result of my life's research.

“If you are prepared to take this risk, take the gemstone wrapped with this letter and carefully feel over the stone platform in this room. You will find a socket. Once you insert the gem, you will receive the most complete information I have left behind. To ensure that this knowledge does not fall into outsiders' hands, the message can be activated only by the blood of a Rowling Family descendant. Please let your blood fall upon the gem. The blood of the Rowling Family will guide you to the information I have left.”

At the end of the letter was one final line:

“May the great Rowling Family prosper. Through my husband, I came to love this family deeply!

“Your ancestor, Semel Chira Rowling.”

Du Wei read it in one breath, and his heart was filled with even greater shock.

From the family histories he had read, he remembered Semel Chira Rowling—whose original name had been Semel Chira, before she took the Rowling name on marrying into the family—very clearly.

She had been the wife of the seventh head of the family, a renowned master astrologer, worthy of reverence even within the field of astrology. Du Wei's first teacher, the old scholar Master Rossiat, was also an astrologer. During the year and a half he had taught Du Wei, whenever he happened to mention this ancestor of Du Wei's, he had been full of respect. He had even once said in passing that this woman named Semel was perhaps the finest astrologer the Empire had produced in nearly two hundred years.

But the reason Du Wei remembered her name was not that she had been a great master astrologer. There was another reason.

According to the Rowling Family records he had read, this great female astrologer had also been a woman who loved her husband deeply.

The seventh head of the Rowling Family who married her had not lived long, dying at around fifty. Semel, this great female astrologer, was clearly devoted to him. On the third day after his death, she killed herself in the tall white tower he had built for her during his lifetime, following him in death.

Before she died, the great female astrologer carved a sentence into her tower: “Because of love, we shall live forever.”

It was that last testament that had made Du Wei remember this celebrated woman in the family's history.

Without the slightest hesitation, Du Wei crouched down and began feeling around beneath the stone platform. He soon found the socket mentioned in the letter.

It was exactly the right size for the gem. Du Wei immediately cut his finger and let a drop of blood fall onto it.

As he inserted the gem into the socket, Du Wei instinctively took two steps back...

In the dim secret chamber, the engraved patterns on the square stone platform suddenly erupted in brilliant light. It lit the whole room as bright as day, so intensely that Du Wei could not keep his eyes open.

Then the light slowly gathered together, finally forming a column of light above the platform. At its center appeared a human figure.

It was not a real person, but a lifelike phantom woven from light. It was exactly the size of a living person, and Du Wei's eyes widened in astonishment.

He suddenly realized something very important.

This Semel, the legendary master astrologer, must also have been an exceptional mage. Everything that had just happened, and the phantom before him, were clearly magic!

The phantom's light gradually dimmed until it reached a brightness the naked eye could bear.

At last Du Wei could clearly see the figure standing within the column of light.

She was a woman in a red robe, with silver hair white as snow. Her body was wrapped in scarlet, and her face was extraordinarily beautiful. Her eyes seemed full of gentleness, yet those black pupils gave Du Wei a faintly uncanny feeling.

“You who have opened this message, I am your ancestor, Semel Chira Rowling,” the phantom said slowly. “This is the last magical message I left before my death. The magic array I left behind can be opened only with the magic crystal imbued with my own power and the blood of the Rowling Family. Since you can see this message, you are a descendant of the Rowling Family. You may therefore receive all my secrets without reservation.”

Looking at the beautiful woman before him, so vividly real, Du Wei could not help feeling shaken.

To preserve a message for centuries in a magic array—such magical skill belonged to a top-tier master mage. Semel had possessed such ability!

“I cannot know how many years have passed when you activate this message, nor how much of the magic power I left in the crystal remains. So listen carefully to every word I say. There may not be enough power left for this magic array to activate a second time.”

Semel's phantom spoke slowly.

Though he knew that the Semel before him was not a real person but only a phantom she had left behind, Du Wei still could not help nodding.

“First, I must explain this: what I leave you may bring you boundless benefit, but it may also bring you endless trouble. No one except my husband knew the result of my life's research. Whoever opens this message and reaches this place must have some knowledge of astrology, or at least of the study of the stars. So the first and most important thing I must tell you is this: every astrologer in this world is wrong! All of them—every single one—is wrong!

“Astrology is absolutely not the shallow art of merely predicting the future through changes in the stars. Although everyone now believes astrology is no more than divination, I must tell you... astrology is actually a kind of magic—a powerful and profound kind of magic.

“An astrologer should not be regarded merely as a scholar of the stars, much less as a shallow prophet who cloaks herself in mystery.

“A true astrologer should possess power capable of rivaling any mage!

“Mages can summon the power of wind and draw upon rain, storms, fire, and every force of nature. Why, then, can astrologers not borrow the power of the stars?

“Indeed, we astrologers can go further still. For I have discovered a power mages cannot grasp—one they will never be able to grasp. It is... law!”