I Loaded the Occult Panel

For the next two days, Richard stuck strictly to his planned routine.

He rose at six o’clock sharp every morning, with [Sleep] Lv.2 allowing him to wake to the exact second.

By the time he dressed and headed downstairs, his mother was already frying bacon in the kitchen.

He drank half a glass of warm water, then set out for a jog around Slag Alley.

[walking] Lv.2 automatically adjusted his breathing rhythm to match his stride.

During the run, his Micro-circulation maintained a faint, barely perceptible flow. By the end of the workout, he had worked up a light sweat without any of the usual breathlessness.

After returning home, he showered, changed clothes, and came down for breakfast.

Evelyn usually came downstairs around this time.

She rubbed her eyes as she walked into the kitchen, only to find her brother already sitting at the table, drinking tea and eating bread.

”You got up to run before dawn. Is that something a normal person does?””A normal person wouldn’t.”

”But winter break is almost over. Has a normal person like you finished his homework?”

”...”

As soon as Evelyn brought up homework, she dropped the conversation and ignored him.

After breakfast came Richard’s training time.

He tied an old Latin textbook to his wardrobe door with thin string to serve as a target.

Hold breath, push the ether, Needle Piercing, release.

Thwack.

The Silver Needle pierced the textbook’s cover right on the letter N in the second line.

He pulled the needle from the wardrobe door, returned to his mark, and threw again.

Thwack.

The second line’s N again.

Practicing the Moon Nail was currently his highest priority in training.

The sooner he mastered it, the sooner he could pass the reversal criteria.

When that day came, he would gain a new Spell Formula, and he could also use the semi-finished model to bluff his way into rewards at gatherings—killing two birds with one stone.

The afternoon was reserved for [Stone Armor] practice.

During the exhalation phase of his Fourfold Breathing’s third cycle, he pushed his ether to the surface of his skin.

Under his control, a thin, hard shell gradually condensed along his entire left arm, spreading from his fingertips up to his shoulder.

The armor stabilized into a solid layer across his arm.

”Phew.”

He let out a long breath, and the armor dissolved.

Then he repeated the process, cycling through it again and again.

The proficiency of [Shadow Armor] was bound to [Stone Armor]; by practicing the latter, the former advanced alongside it.

Once he finished with [Stone Armor], he moved on to practicing Spirit Vision and divination.

The training Copper Dish from Old Biggs sat precisely in the center of his desk.

He lit a gray wax strip, letting the melted wax fall onto the dish drop by drop.

At the seventh drop, the wax hardened into an irregular little flower.

Richard examined its outline.

Five petals, the largest facing east, with a thin slit splitting the center.

He was familiar with all the symbols Old Biggs had taught him, but tonight’s shape matched none of them.

There was a saying in wax divination: when a diviner cast a shape they could not read, it usually meant their mind was cluttered, interfering with how the wax set.

Richard blew out the wax strip and wiped the dish clean.

With his divination practice concluded, he brought out the issue of the Northern Literary Review that Charlotte had given him.

It was about time he started writing.

He read the entire periodical from cover to cover first.

The prose styles generally fell into two camps.

One consisted of essays by the children of northern miners, chronicling their fathers down in the shafts, their mothers in the laundries, and their own days at the local elementary schools.

The phrasing was unadorned and the structures simple. They used almost no rhetoric, winning the reader over entirely through sincerity.

The other camp belonged to youths with formal grammar training, writing of spring daisies, summer lakes, autumn chestnuts, and winter hearths.

Their rhetoric was polished, their imagery dense, and their structures perfectly symmetrical—reading each paragraph felt like listening to a pan flute.

Yet every single piece Charlotte had circled belonged to the first camp.

Beside one article from the second camp, Richard spotted her red-ink note: ”Beautiful writing, but regrettably hollow.”

He closed the journal.

For his first concept, he planned to write about his experience at the Cicero Cup, framing it as ”how a northern youth found his footing in the Imperial Capital.”

By the time he reached the second paragraph, he read it over and knew it was wrong.

The version of himself on the page was far more glamorous and composed than reality, completely missing the mark of sincerity.

After a round of revisions, it read even worse—it had turned into a competition résumé meant to catch a university admissions office’s eye.

Richard crumpled the paper and tossed it into the wastebasket.

For his second concept, he wrote about Mr. Hutton.

By the third paragraph, he caught himself.

If he stripped away the reality behind the veil, what would Mr. Hutton become?

An old-fashioned teacher clinging to classical traditions in a northern industrial city?

That trope had already been written to death by the second camp.

By evening, a pile of seven or eight crumpled wads of paper had formed on the left side of his desk.

Evelyn glanced at them when she came in to bring his hot milk.

”What’s with all the paper?”

”...I was writing.”

”Writing what?”

”A submission.”

”To who?”

”A magazine.”

Evelyn set the milk down and reached for the topmost paper ball.

Richard clamped his hand down over it.

”Don’t look.”

”Why not?”

”It isn’t ready.”

”It’s not like I’m going to laugh at you.”

”...”

”Alright, alright.” Evelyn withdrew her hand. ”When you’re done, let me read them. I’ll help you pick the best one.”

”How will you choose?”

”Whichever one makes me cry, that’s the winner.”

”That standard of yours...”

”What about it?”

”The saddest piece isn’t necessarily the best written.”

”Then what does the best written piece look like?”

Richard thought for a moment.

”When it’s finished, both the writer and the reader feel that this is exactly how it has to be.”

”Exactly how it has to be?”

Evelyn didn’t understand.

She carried the empty tray out, glancing back at him just before she closed the door.

”Don’t stay up too late.”

”I won’t.”

Once the door shut, Richard lifted the hot milk and took a sip. The rim of the cup burned his lip.

He set the cup down.

A blank sheet of manuscript paper still lay across his desk.

He wrote his opening sentence.

”The third house at the east end of Slag Alley belongs to a widower named Burns.”

”He hauled coal at the docks for thirty-one years.”

”Last winter he coughed up blood, but he didn’t dare go to the hospital.”

Stepping back from the perspective of himself and those immediately around him, he realized he actually had a great deal to write about.

Why didn’t Burns go to the hospital?

The municipal hospital for the North District of Briston was across the river in the wealthy district.

A one-way trolley ride cost two pence, outpatient registration was six pence, a doctor’s examination cost an extra shilling, and the subsequent medicine would be a relentless financial drain.

Added up, it wasn’t a small sum even for the Williams family—let alone a solitary widower.

But the cost was only the surface issue.

According to the South District Dockworkers Union’s rules, missing morning roll call for three consecutive days meant a worker’s name was struck from the roster.

Reapplying meant going to the very bottom of the waiting list, and getting a new vacancy took at least three months.

Three months. For a sixty-two-year-old man, his savings would be eaten entirely by rent and coal, his bread would have to be bought on credit, and his wool for the winter would depend on parish donations.

When the housewife next door walked past his gate, she would glance inside with a look reserved for paupers.

Richard’s pen returned to the paper.

He remembered a battered ledger he had flipped through in Whitcom during his winter internship.

Mrs. MacNeil had handed it to him casually during an idle chat, and one line of small print inside stayed with him:

”Recipients of parish relief must sign the registry to confirm their unemployed status.

Those who receive continuous relief for twenty-eight days shall have their names transferred to the permanent archives.”

The permanent archives were a card catalog bound in blue covers and organized by parish.

Once entered into that catalog, a person was struck from the labor market.

Burns could not afford to land in that catalog.

This was the principle of ”less eligibility.”

The pauper on relief had to suffer worse conditions than the lowest laborer; otherwise, no one would be willing to work the hardest, most grueling jobs.

This principle was written openly into the explanatory clauses of the Poor Law without the slightest pretense.

The true objective of the entire poor relief system was to lock down those cheap laborers and keep them from stopping.

Keep the man coughing blood from daring to see a doctor;

Keep the sick man from daring to stop work;

Keep the out-of-work man from daring to register;

Keep the registered man from returning to the labor market.

In serving its own goals, the machine ran with resounding success.

The entire apparatus meshed with seamless precision, and every procedure had a name.

The Poor Law, the permanent archives, the hard labor system—every step was printed in black and white as being ”for the sake of the destitute.”

Yet once the system began to turn, the destitute could only sink lower. They could never climb up.

From downstairs came his sister’s voice. She was discussing with their mother whether to buy butter at the market tomorrow.

Richard stood up and rolled his shoulders.

For his next section, he wanted to write about the relief house.

The Briston North District Relief House sat at the end of Morton Street—a three-story gray brick building with iron gates that stood perpetually half-open.

Beside the entrance hung a brass plaque engraved with the words: Home for the Poor, Established 1867.

Passing by once last year, he had seen the queue outside the gates.

Most of the line consisted of women cradling infants, along with two middle-aged men who looked disabled.

Richard hadn’t paid it much mind at the time.

But thinking back now, he realized there hadn’t been a single able-bodied man in that queue.

By regulation, once an able-bodied man entered the relief house, he had to perform daily hard labor—unraveling old ropes, breaking stones, and sweeping public roads.

The labor carried no wages. It bought only two meals and a bed.

Richard jotted this connection in the margin of his manuscript, drawing an arrow to the main paragraph.

From the perspective of the mystical world, Burns’s story was not purely a social issue.

If a man crushed by despair and resentment possessed latent circuits, he had a chance of turning into a wandering spirit upon death. Even without circuits, he would leave behind a death echo.

When enough death echoes gathered, minor anomalies would sprout up nearby: sounds echoing indoors, tapping on windows at midnight, and nightmares.

If the density of death echoes in an area continued to rise, evil creatures would be drawn in, as death echoes were their favorite food.

It struck Richard suddenly that ever since the Industrial Revolution, the density of death echoes in industrial cities had climbed year after year.

The Branch Office’s doubled workload wasn’t just because the veil itself was wearing thin, but also because the mortality rate among the underclass was rising.

For every Burns who died alone on a wooden bed, the Branch Office’s reinforcement budget for the following year had to increase.

Wentworth had complained before about tight budgets, Old Biggs had complained about the rising cost of Enchanted Bullets, and Captain Field had complained that field missions across the North had doubled compared to five years ago.

Everyone complained about the numbers on the ledgers, yet no one looked at the source of those costs.

Richard didn’t write all of this down.

Matters behind the veil could not be published in a Surface World magazine, but the skeleton could remain, waiting for him to dress it in the proper language.

The skeleton was this: a solitary old man coughed up blood but refused to visit a hospital because the entire system was specifically designed to prevent him from stopping.

The system kept him from stopping because a man who stopped became a burden.

Yet the price of never stopping was that one day he would simply collapse on the stone steps of the docks, exhaling his final breath into the river.

That final breath would make a sound; it was just a sound the Surface World could not hear.

The money wrung from that exploitation by coal barons and textile mill owners went straight into their private bank accounts.

When leaked death echoes lured out evil creatures, the bill for the cleanup was charged to the state, split among all taxpayers.

What’s more, it kept the Branch Office’s budget climbing every single year.

If all the Burnses of the world lived decent lives;

If, in the nights across the industrial districts, no one ever again had to swallow their last breath in solitude;

Death echoes would dwindle, and evil creatures would grow scarce.

Old Biggs’s salary would be slashed, and Captain Field’s hazard pay would be slashed along with it.

Ashford House’s ranking in the Imperial Capital would be pushed down even further.

The entire mystical system was, in truth, a beneficiary of this injustice.

Even if it was only a passive beneficiary.

At this thought, Richard took a quiet breath.

No matter how deeply a Scholar researched, they could never touch the monthly profits on a factory owner’s ledger;

No matter how sharp a Hunter’s axe was, it couldn’t cut through the entrenched power of the lords in parliament.

For all the formidable power behind the veil, none of it could exert the slightest force against the true root of the problem.

As for certain high-ranking figures at Major Adept and above—perhaps they were benefiting from this very system?

Richard dared not speculate any deeper. His Inspiration had already begun to warn him...