The next day, a group of specialized personnel, supposedly from the Department of Internal Affairs, arrived from the Cathedral to start the operation. They parked their horse-drawn carriages by the door and began hauling off what was left from Miss Martha’s legacy to the extensions strapped behind them, while Valens and Selin watched under the supervision of a silent Dain.Word came that Garran and others were out for a haunting case in the West Meadow, a rather rich part of Belgrave involving a certain famous businessman. So today, they were granted Dain’s silent but judging eyes to act as the gaze of the Church.Efficient men, Valens realized soon, when the special personnel finished clearing the whole house in just a couple of hours. These were men stuck in their First Trials but used the stats wisely to make themselves useful, which was to carry couches and beds as if they weighed nothing.Once they were done and gone to fetch Valens’s list of ingredients, the real duty began.“This is tricky,” Valens mused when the look of dusty floors, moldy planks, soot-riddled walls, and broken faces of the back rooms confronted him. “I suppose we can’t be too liberal with our use of water here. This place hardly stays afoot as it is.”“There’s a pair of buckets in the back. I can start with scrubbing the floor—”“Nonsense. I won’t have you tire yourself to death to cleanse this little bit of wood. Just let me think it through,” Valens said, smiling at Selin.He began to march around the main hall, thinking of a way to be gentle about this. He wasn’t nearly as adept in water-based spells as wind-based ones, so he had to come up with a real plan rather than diving straight into it.The cracks across the floor… We have to fix them, but if I try to go over them one by one, it will take days to finish the floor, not to mention the walls.“Dain,” he said a moment after, turning to the towering Templar who lounged (...)