Edrick had only slept for six hours and was already awake before ten o'clock. Upon waking up in the cramped, musty room, he saw a plate of breakfast on the stool by the bed: two slices of wheat bread without sawdust, a small piece of salted pork, and some cheap cheese shreds.
Edrick picked up a slice of bread and examined it—it was even spread with butter instead of cheap lard!
This breakfast was a real luxury for the Croft family. If it weren't for the silver coins Edrick had brought back last night, they wouldn't have been able to afford wheat bread even once a month.
However, eating black bread for an extended period was detrimental to Miryam's growing body, and her father, who did heavy physical labor, had been plagued by various illnesses since his early forties due to malnutrition.
"Not fast enough... We need to speed up the plan." Edrick wolfed down this "lavish" breakfast and hurried to the dock.
Although, according to his plan, the meager daily income from dock work was no longer important, he needed to gather some essential information before officially beginning his mission, especially regarding the Pureblood Order that Griff had mentioned.
If he got involved in such a high-stakes struggle, one wrong move could mean certain death.
Edrick arrived at the docks. His former coworkers had already heard about the Croft family's tragedy, and a few who recognized him stopped by to offer a word of comfort.
However, the dockworkers' "calling over" had ended at 7 a.m., and arriving at the docks at this hour meant there wasn't even work moving rotten vegetables.
Edrick looked around but didn't see the two men he usually worked with. Dockworkers relied on teamwork; they typically worked in groups of four. With his father dead and Edrick absent, the other two found it difficult to find work. However, when someone took a day off, they would usually seek out nearby vagrants or elderly beggars to fill in.
This usually meant heavier labor and less pay, but they couldn't afford to skip work. Otherwise, they wouldn't have money for the day's meals, and frequent absences would label them as loafers, making it even harder to get work and leading to a vicious cycle of hunger, weakness, and inability to work.
This was a brutal survival game.
The Croft family was destined to fall into this vicious cycle or an even more tragic fate. Fortunately, Edrick was still there. He keenly noticed something unusual at the dock today.
There were more unfamiliar workers and fewer familiar faces.
Edrick looked at the foreman, who was not the usual limping Jack, but a stranger who bore a striking resemblance to the man Edrick had killed two days earlier.
Though he had never seen this man before, combining the information he had obtained from Griff, it wasn't hard to guess that this was Maud "Mudbeak," the younger brother of the man Edrick had beaten to death.
Who was he? It didn't matter. Edrick didn't want to waste his brain capacity remembering the name of a dead henchman, but Maud "Mudbeak" was clearly an obstacle. Since he had appeared at the dock, he was likely involved in planning his father's death.
There were no decent jobs to be found, but Edrick wasn't one to sit idle. He found work as a coal porter at Stevedore's Stew, earning 7 pence an hour—a wage so low it was almost laughable given the workload.
Under normal circumstances, this wouldn't be a desirable job. The hours were irregular, the work was grueling, and the pay was meager. However, the location of Stevedore's Stew was ideal for observing the workers coming and going at the docks.
What surprised Edrick was that there was also a short-haired elf girl working alongside him. Unlike Adrian Gray's silver hair, which was unique to high elves, this girl's red hair indicated she was just an ordinary elf.
She looked dirtier than Miryam, dressed in dockworker's clothes, and at first glance, she could have been mistaken for a young man.
However, Edrick wasn't blind. He could see that beneath the thick layer of coal dust, there was a beautiful face. In the Rust District, this was a common sight. Thanks to the poor security, any elf girl with even a hint of beauty wouldn't bother to clean herself up too much when working outside.
Moreover, the elf girl's work clothes, stretched tight across her chest with almost no wrinkles, couldn't hide her gender at all.
Why would such a young girl be working as a coal porter?
Oh, but elves have lifespans of 200 to 300 years. Their bodies grow at a rate similar to humans until they are 18, but they don't reach adulthood until they are 30. After 50, their bodies hardly change at all until they approach the end of their lifespan, when they age rapidly.
So the elf girl before him, who looked no older than fifteen or sixteen, might actually be older than Edrick.
Noticing Edrick's confusion, the elf girl didn't hesitate to explain, "Physical labor pays better."
That was the truth. If given a choice, men wouldn't choose laundry or weaving, and even the most skilled weavers earned less than an ordinary dockworker.
"You... manual labor?" Edrick stared in astonishment at the girl whose height only reached his chest.
"Hehe, if I don't work for a while, I'll get beaten," the elf girl laughed, effortlessly lifting two large bags of coal, looking as though she had plenty of strength to spare.
Such astonishing strength in such a small body! Edrick knew he could never lift such heavy loads with such ease.
The elf girl didn't say much, but she worked quickly. However, Edrick noticed she seemed distracted, her attention constantly focused on the crowd of people coming and going at the dock.
Just like Edrick.
While moving coal, he scanned the dockworkers coming and going, and two of them caught his attention.
Edrick's coal basket swayed on his shoulder, making a faint rattling sound, and coal dust seeped through the worn collar of his shirt as he stared at a new porter.
"There are three suspicious-looking guys," the girl said, setting down her half-empty bowl of stew and sitting down next to Edrick, startling the young man.
Looking at the stunned Edrick, the girl smiled and said, "Tell me what you're looking for, Edrick Croft."
His body instinctively warned him, and Edrick reached for the dagger hidden behind his back, but he managed to suppress the urge. He watched the girl warily. At another time, in another place, she might have been a decent date, but the way she had initiated the conversation made Edrick extremely uneasy.
"Oh, I hope you don't mind. It's just a professional habit. I've written down the names of almost everyone on the docks." The elven girl said, flashing a wanted poster.
Wanted: Rust District Ripper. Reward: 300 Holy Light Pounds.
Edrick stared at the wanted poster, struggling to control his body and not give away any signs of panic.
What did she mean? Had she already figured out his identity? Impossible. Edrick was cautious, and the investigative efficiency in this world was low. Criminal investigation methods… Well, Edrick realized he wasn't familiar with the criminal investigation methods in this world. Perhaps those magical spells had extremely advanced investigative techniques.
Who was this girl? Had she come here to talk to him by chance, or was it intentional? And why was the reward set at 300 Holy Light Pounds!? The Croft family only earned 30 pounds a year! Just a few days ago, the reward was only 45 Holy Light Pounds. Was it because someone had killed Lord Steward and framed the Ripper?
Such a high bounty made Edrick want to report it himself.
"Is the Ripper among these people?" Edrick forced himself to stay calm and not show any weakness in front of the elf girl.
"No, I'm just here to gather clues," the elf girl said with a hint of pride.
"Are you a hero? No… you're a detective." Edrick guessed the girl's identity. Bounties were a major source of income for these detectives, and a serial killer with a 300-pound bounty was the most tempting target for them, both in terms of reputation and profit.
"That's right. When I get bored gathering information, I also observe you." The elf girl spoke while using a spoon to pick out a hard stem of cabbage from her bowl. She looked around, then tossed it on the ground. A spotted dog ran over to sniff it, then turned and walked away.
"You can eat all that beef and pork offal, but you won't eat a cabbage stalk?" Edrick couldn't help but ask.
The elf girl continued to pick out cabbage from her bowl, but this time she didn't throw it on the ground—she tossed it into Edrick's bowl, leaving him speechless.
However, Edrick didn't say much either. After all, he hadn't really gotten used to the food in this world yet. He didn't know what nobles ate, but the food of the lower classes was truly disgusting.
The elf girl finished picking out the cabbage and pointed at a skinny man wearing a necklace made of broken gears with her spoon: "You're observing that man, aren't you?"
That was one of Edrick's suspects.
The rusty gear fragment on the man's neck traced a gray line below his collarbone, perfectly matching the curve of his spine as he bent over to move coal. The elf girl smiled, "That's the mark left by chimney sweeps who spend years huddled in narrow chimney flues. He's a chimney sweep from Coal Street."
The skinny guy's fingertips unconsciously rubbed the necklace, his fingertips tinged with the bluish-black of coal dust, a mark of the coal-strewn street urchins who made their living in chimneys.
Edrick shook his head. This was a really bad undercover agent: "They always hide stolen tobacco leaves or cheap juniper wine in the cracks of the boiler pipes."
The elf girl smiled approvingly, then pointed to another bald, muscular man with an iron anchor tattoo: "The second suspicious person you observed is him, right?"
"Damn you, rope!" The burly man suddenly cursed, twisting the rope into a crooked single knot with his rough hands.
Edrick nodded: "Dockworkers typically use a bowline knot, which can withstand three times the weight. This guy with the fresh tattoo used an outdated sailor's knot."
Edrick had noticed the iron anchor tattoo on his forearm earlier: the ink was so fresh it seemed to bleed, and the anchor's tip was curved inward.
"And true Blackbeard crew members would point the anchor tip toward their wrist, symbolizing 'anchoring dock dominance.' This fool has it backwards." Edrick shook his head. The two men's disguises were far too amateurish. "Of course, we can't expect these men, who probably can't even spell their own names, to pull off any sophisticated undercover operations."
The elven girl smiled sweetly at Edrick, her beautiful eyes forming a crescent moon: "Not bad, but you missed one person."
She pointed to a short man: "He was walking close to the steam pipe while moving coal, and every thirty seconds he would use his little finger to hook his belt pouch."
The movement was too subtle; if not for the elven girl's reminder, Edrick wouldn't have noticed either.
The outline of the fabric in the short man's secret pocket revealed the curved shape of a wax-wrapped cylinder. Edrick recognized the shape: "Black honey."
This was a drug circulating in the dockyard black market, often poured into hollow coal blocks and coated with coal dust to disguise it. The street urchins would hide the drugs in the back waist guards, which were the easiest spot for foremen to overlook during body searches.
As the short man passed through the boiler room, the hem of his sleeve brushed against the condensation on the pipes, and the fabric's edge immediately developed a faint purple stain. Edrick recognized it as a reaction to urine alkali.
The substance on his shoe soles wasn't the rusty sand unique to Blackbeard's Gang's dock, but crystallized alkaline water from the sewers of Coal Ash Street, mixed with dandelion fluff.
"Although we didn't find any traces of the Ripper, discovering Black Honey is still some progress," the elf girl said, stretching lazily.
Edrick was puzzled: "Why are you telling me this?"
"You want to avenge your father, don't you?" The elf girl turned to look at Edrick, her bright eyes seeming to pierce through everything. "That's what the information I was investigating showed... but you seem to have other thoughts in your heart?"
Edrick suddenly felt a ridiculous sense of being read, and the flower maiden, who had been silent all along, suddenly reminded him, "That girl has the aura of a deity."
"The aura of a deity?" Edrick was utterly astonished. He knew that the sacred authority of the Whispering Lord could produce contamination, and collecting this sacred authority could grant incense points, but what exactly was this "aura of a deity"?
The flower maiden didn't want to waste her breath, so the kind-hearted money-giving boy explained, "It's the unique aura of a god, which is usually only possessed by true gods or apprentice gods _(:3 ⌟ ∠)_ But she had hidden it well before. Just now, she used a god's skill, so the flower maiden was able to sense it."
Edrick himself was an apprentice god. Could this elf girl be...
"I've done so much work today, I'm exhausted. The rest is up to you." The elf girl said, then left the restaurant without another word.
Edrick chased her out onto the street, watching her retreating figure. She seemed to notice him following her and turned around, shouting, "My name is Charlotte, Charlotte Holmes. Goodbye."
The smaller figure quickly disappeared into the crowd, leaving Edrick standing alone in the wind. He had chased her out just to get the elf girl to come back and finish the remaining work—there was still half a cartload of coal left, and he couldn't move it all by himself!