I Loaded the Occult Panel

The lights in the Williams household went out earlier than usual tonight.

His mother coughed a couple of times before heading upstairs. The weather was growing colder by the day.

His father had worked overtime for several days in a row. After getting home and eating dinner, he crawled straight under the covers.

The kerosene lamp in his sister’s room went out before ten o’clock.

Richard finished his evening routine as usual.

His fixed gaze through Spirit Vision held steady at fifteen seconds—three seconds longer than last week.

He had picked up three items on his way home for a quick stone-reading test—a pencil, an ink bottle, and a stub of an eraser.

The readings for all three perfectly matched his own condition for the day. The rules governing the symbols and their positions were gradually taking shape in his mind.

He closed his notebook and shoved it into a drawer, wrapped the Copper Dish in its cloth, and returned it to its place. The final step was nourishment.

During the final exhalation phase of his Fourfold Breathing, he guided a lingering wisp of ether from the Seat of the Sun to his right palm. He pressed his palm against the lamp and injected it.He repeated this routine every day; it had become so practiced he didn’t even need to think about it.

Pure ether from his [Spiritual Capacity] flowed out. The lamp’s metal shifted from cold to warm, then to burning hot, before finally settling into stillness.

Richard placed the lamp back on the corner of his desk and reached out to wind his alarm clock.

The familiar text in the corner of his vision trembled faintly.

[Breathing Lv.2 Progress: 100%]

Richard’s hand froze.

The progress bar was full.

The advancement requirement for Lv.3—”Acquire an extraordinary breathing method”—had been met three months ago.

The single available point he had been saving finally had a use.

He sat cross-legged on the edge of his bed and blew out the lamp.

[Available Points: 1.13]

Sinking his consciousness into the Panel, he allocated that single point.

The physical sensation of the point taking effect was completely different from the previous two times.

At Breathing Lv.1, it had felt as if a tightly shut window in his chest had cracked open, letting the outside air rush in for the first time.

At Breathing Lv.2, it was as if that window had been wiped clean. The light had grown clear, and every breath drew in just a little more than before.

But when Breathing Lv.3 arrived, he could finally look through that window.

He closed his eyes, sinking his focus to the area directly behind his sternum.

The outline of the Seat of the Sun shifted from blurry to clear. It changed from a sphere of warm light into an inverted tree.

The roots anchored themselves in the center of his chest. The trunk followed the path of his aorta downward, splitting into capillary-like branches that extended all the way to his fingertips, toes, and the crown of his head.

The leaves were thin films of light that coated the inner walls of every blood vessel.

The entire tree swayed gently in time with his breathing.

When he inhaled, the leaves spread wide and light surged upward from the roots. When he exhaled, the leaves curled tight and the light sank back down the branches to the roots.

This was the true form of the Ether Micro-circulation.

The system he had been continuously cycling for the past three months was finally laid bare before his own eyes tonight.

The Panel hovered at the edge of his vision:

[Available Points: 0.13]

[Breathing Lv.3] Progress: 0%

[Trait: Healing]

He brushed his consciousness against that line of text, and a description surfaced:

”Healing: During breathing, the Ether Micro-circulation performs real-time physical repairs on the body.

Targets for repair include micro-tears in the ether pathways, muscle fiber strain, trauma, hairline fractures, and chronic inflammation.

High-level trauma (such as ruptured organs, comminuted fractures, and severed limbs) exceeds the repair capacity of this trait.”

He had originally assumed that Healing would be an emergency measure, something akin to recovering vitality after a battle.

In reality, it was more like long-term internal maintenance.

As long as he was breathing, his body was being silently mended by an invisible hand.

He lay back down on the bed and began his Fourfold Breathing according to this new rhythm.

At the end of each cycle, he could feel extremely subtle, hidden areas being ironed out just a little more.

The stiff muscle in his shoulder from sitting too long, the vague throbbing in his temples from mental exhaustion, the occasional popping in his left knee...

These minor, easily ignored ailments of daily life were smoothed away one by one with every breath he took.

The next morning, he woke up before his alarm even rang.

Evelyn went downstairs first, as usual.

Passing by her brother’s door, she paused to listen.

Hearing no movement inside, she muttered to herself, ”That’s rare. He’s not fighting me for the chores today.”

During his morning classes, Richard’s mind was completely off his textbooks.

He was quietly doing some calculations.

Mr. Hutton had once warned him: ”The greatest danger in cultivation isn’t practicing too little, but practicing too much.

The ether pathways are like a river channel. If you draw the water too fast today, the riverbed will crack tomorrow.

And no matter how much water you pour into a cracked riverbed, it won’t hold.”

Everyone at the Newcomer stage was restricted by this very riverbed.

But the existence of Healing meant adding a self-maintaining lining to that riverbed.

The water still flowed and the friction still occurred, but the channel walls were no longer being worn down unilaterally.

His ceiling had been raised.

By how much, he still didn’t know; that would take time to test.

But it meant certain options he had previously crossed out could now be put back on the table.

...

Arriving at the unlabeled bookshelf on the third floor of the library, Richard crouched down by the seventh compartment in the fourth row and slid his fingers across the spines.

He had been here so many times over the past three months that he could distinguish the thickness and texture of every book purely by touch.

He was looking for one book in particular.

The book he had crossed out during his initial deciphering and filed away under the ”temporarily useless” category.

On the surface, a certain passage in it discussed the hunting rituals of the northern forests. But if you extracted every fifth word and strung them together, it described the Path of Blood Ignition.

Using blood as kindling and pain as fuel, it squeezed ether from the very depths of the bone marrow, pouring it all out in a single instant as explosive power, an immense pain threshold, and amplified senses.

The method of entry: holding one’s breath in ice water, hyperventilation, muscle whipping, and skeletal stress training through repeated breaking and healing.

Richard’s reaction when he first read this passage had been to simply shut the book.

With the original owner’s frail body, he wouldn’t have survived two full cycles of breath-holding in ice water, and a single session of muscle whipping would have left him bedridden for three days.

As for the repeated bone-breaking stress training... he wouldn’t have survived the first few stages.

But now, he read it all over again.

In his mind, each piece of extreme training was deconstructed into two questions: Could the intensity be lowered? And could the recovery period be shortened?

The answer to the first question was ambiguous;