I Loaded the Occult Panel

Including Friday, it took Richard three full days to restore the remaining two pages of cipher in Appendix C.

Friday evening went smoothly enough; the vocabulary covered by the translation matrix still held up.

For most sentences, he only had to drop in the substitution rules and adjust the word order from context to bring the text to the surface.

By Saturday afternoon, after he returned from the antique shop, the work turned into a slog.

The further Appendix C went, the deeper its layers of encryption became.

Some words had been substituted twice: first replacing standard vocabulary with Old Latin, and then replacing the Old Latin with religious terminology.

The matrix Mr. Hutton had provided only cracked the first layer; for the second, Richard had to dig through the etymology of religious texts himself.

Fortunately, with Learning backing him up, he broke down word roots much faster than an ordinary person could.

He spread a copy of the Etymological Manual of Church Latin from the library across his desk, holding Appendix C down with his left hand while his right flipped through roots, tracking several clues through his head at once.

Sunday proved even harder. In the last half-page, the encryption method changed completely.The encoder had broken complete sentences into fragments and scattered them through the surrounding text by a fixed pattern.

It took him nearly two hours to catch the rule: every seventh word had been lifted, and stringing them together restored the original line.

Seven was a critical number in occult tradition.

Whoever wrote the cipher might have been trying to tell the reader something.

When he copied the final line onto a clean sheet of paper, Richard set his pen down, his fingers numb.

He put his draft sheets in order and read the restored text from start to finish.

Appendix C was divided into three parts.

The first part stated a single fact in a tight, scholarly tone:

Beyond the known material world lay the world behind the veil.

If the visible world were a house, the world behind the veil was the plumbing and wiring running through the walls.

The people inside the house walked across the floors and lived in the rooms.

They could hear the occasional rattle in the pipes, but almost no one ever bothered to ask where the sound came from.

Every phenomenon the world called ”supernatural” was, at root, seepage from the veil.

The voices heard by mediums, the drifting planchette on a Spirit Board, the unclean things driven out in exorcisms—all of them pointed to the same fact:

Something had leaked through from the other side of the veil, or someone on this side had reached across.

Toward the end of the section, the prose grew markedly cautious:

”The domain behind the veil is not uniform. The closer it lies to the surface, the milder the seeping power, and the easier it is for humanity to understand and use.

”But there is depth behind the veil as well. The deeper one goes, the further its rules drift from common sense.”

”In existing literature, records left by practitioners who explored those deeper layers are exceptionally rare, and their accounts are mostly vague, contradictory, and full of terror.”

”The only point of agreement is this: something is waiting in the depths.”

”Perhaps they have always been waiting.”

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The second part was titled: On the Three Categories of Breathing.

The text began by setting out a basic premise: among all known starting points for extraordinary progression, Breathing was the oldest and most fundamental.

The reason was straightforward.

Breathing was the natural conduit connecting the physical body to what lay behind the veil.

Every time air entered the lungs, a trace amount of ether moved with it.

Pneuma, ether—which some texts translated as spirit breath.

The passage described it as a seeping substance from the far side of the veil, diffused through the air.

It was colorless and odorless, beyond the reach of any instrument.

Mr. Hutton’s remark in class that ”instruments do not lie” took on another meaning here.

That an instrument could not measure it did not mean it was not there.

Ordinary people would never perceive it in their entire lives; it entered the body with a breath and left with a breath, traceless.

A trained practitioner, however, could intercept, guide, and store that ether within the body as they breathed.

That was the core of an extraordinary breathing method.

The text laid out three known categories of breathing methods, offering a basic framework without teaching the practices themselves.

The first category: the Golden Path.

This path aimed at order and balance.

The origins of the Golden Path traced back to the Temple of Asclepius.

It had been an ancient temple to the god of healing, and the earliest medical school.

Grounded in medicine, the Golden Path was defined by safety and stability.

Most orthodox extraordinary organizations treated it as the standard starting point.

The second category: the Path of Blood Ignition.

Long before the Empire was founded, groups known as Monster Hunters had ranged through the northern forests and marshlands of the Western Continent.

According to the text, a Monster Hunter’s training began at twelve.

Apprentices were put through repeated cycles of breath-holding and explosive exhalation in freezing winter water, until their bodies learned to drive ether into the blood automatically at the edge of suffocation.

Many failed to survive their first winter.

By the imperial era, the old hunter traditions had been absorbed into orthodox institutions, but the underlying substance had not changed.

The text summarized it plainly: ”Practitioners of the Path of Blood Ignition often burn brightly in their prime, but very few reach old age in peace.”

On the third category—the Path of the Abyss—the phrasing turned sharply guarded.

The first two methods, whether gentle or violent, still worked on ”this side” of the veil.

It was like standing on a bank and dipping a hand into the water; the only difference lay in how much you drew out.

The Path of the Abyss required the practitioner to sink into the veil itself—to dive beneath the surface and breathe there.

The text offered a cold analogy:

A man who lights a lamp in the dark can see everything the light touches;

but every eye in the dark can also see the lamp.

The deeper he goes, the brighter the lamp burns, and the more eyes turn toward it.

..................

By the time Richard reached that point, he realized he had not turned a page for quite a while.

His pulse had picked up; the blood was drumming in his temples.

The notes on breathing methods gave him far more to work with than the first section’s broad overview of the veil.

The requirement on his panel for advancing Breathing—”learn an extraordinary breathing method”—was no longer an empty phrase.

It had a structure now, a documented history, and a clear underlying logic.

The Golden Path, the Path of Blood Ignition, the Path of the Abyss—three roads laid out in front of him, each with its own trade-offs.

Appendix C might not teach the methods themselves, but it proved one thing: extraordinary breathing methods were on record and could be tracked down.

If he followed the thread, he would find one sooner or later.

He turned to the last page.

The third part had no heading—only a short passage in a noticeably more personal tone:

”If you have read this far and intend to go on, remember one thing.”

”On this road, the greatest danger is not the evil creatures behind the veil, but your own appetite.”

”Everyone who steps behind the veil faces the same temptation: deeper, further, more.

”Ether is more addictive than hashish, and the knowledge behind the veil breeds obsession.

”As your strength grows, it convinces you that you can keep walking forever—that one more step into the deep won’t hurt.”

”Those who can stop when the craving hits are the ones who survive.”

”The rest turn into new wandering souls.”