I Loaded the Occult Panel

The bus was almost empty.

Richard sat by the window with his backpack on his knees, leaning close to the glass to watch the streetlights slide past one by one.

When he got home, his sister had already finished baking bread.

Lately, she had been obsessed with a recipe for honey oat bread.

She had tried making it a few times, and she felt today’s batch wasn’t too bad.

”Try this.” Evelyn held a fresh slice up to Richard’s mouth.

Richard took a bite.

”...Better than the last batch.”

”Right?” Evelyn nodded proudly. ”I switched to butter softened at room temperature. It blends in much more evenly when you knead the dough.”

”Yeah.””Why are you back so late today?”

”At the library,” Richard answered smoothly. ”I have an Ancient Greek translation due tomorrow.”

Evelyn just said, ”Oh,” and didn’t press further.

For once, Father hadn’t worked overtime and was home for dinner.

Evelyn stood guard in front of the cabinet like she was watching over a seal that needed constant patrolling and reinforcement.

She brought a tray of freshly baked, reasonably well-shaped macarons to the table. ”This batch is allowed to be eaten.”

”What about that tray?” Father asked, looking toward the highest shelf of the cabinet.

”That batch is maturing.”

”Macarons need to mature?”

”They do,” Evelyn answered with utter conviction. ”Good things take time.”

Father glanced at the tray tucked away on the highest shelf where no one could reach it, and said no more.

Richard lowered his head and ate a macaron, knowing full well that the other batch would likely ”mature” until everyone forgot it existed.

When that happened, Evelyn would quietly finish the tray by herself some afternoon and then announce that it had ”failed to mature and couldn’t be eaten.”

Dinner was more enjoyable than it had been for the past few days.

His mother glanced at him a few extra times across the table, noticing that the heavy tension that had hung over his brow for the past few days had lightened considerably tonight.

She didn’t say anything, only picking the largest piece of potato from the stew and dropping it into his bowl.

Back in his room, Richard closed the door.

He pulled out the old wooden box he used for storage from under his bed.

Two Classical Literature minor textbooks sat on top of the box; beneath them lay the stack of things he actually needed to sort through.

He opened the wooden box and took out the items he would need tonight one by one.

The first stack was a pile of manuscripts.

The one on top was his modification notes for [Moon Nail], which he had revised repeatedly over the past half month.

The core of the modifications lay in the choice of medium and the rhythm of spellcasting.

He had compressed the three steps—receiving the needle, drawing breath, and Needle Piercing—so they could be completed within two breaths, while adding an extended deduction path for focusing.

The second manuscript was the batched channeling method for [Stone Armor].

He had changed the channeling method to run in batches: the first batch laid the foundation, the second covered the whole body, and the third was allocated specifically to weak points.

With the exact same amount of ether, the spell could now last for over a minute and a half, and its original effects were enhanced.

Richard took these two manuscripts out tonight and reviewed them from beginning to end once more.

Ever since [Speculation] had activated, he viewed the things he had written before through a completely different lens.

Beneath that stack of manuscripts lay an even older document.

It was the table of contents for the [Shadow Armor] Reverse-Engineered Theoretical Model, which he had traded away the first time he attended the Theogony Salon.

Richard pulled it out and spread it flat on his desk.

He was intimately familiar with the handwriting on the page.

At the time, he had thought he had hidden the core equations of the reverse-engineering layer perfectly.

He had provided the framework while leaving blanks, allowing anyone who read it to see there was real substance without him giving it away for free.

Now, rereading it, he couldn’t even get through half a page before he started sighing.

What he had written back then could hardly even be called a half-finished spell formula model.

It was just an outline that looked convincing on the surface.

The framework was empty, the supporting structure was hollow, and every deductive sequence was glossed over with vague placeholders the moment it reached a critical juncture.

To think Prometheus had actually been willing to trade a bottle of Deep Ether Condensate for this.

Richard pressed a finger against the edge of the page.

Prometheus could probably tell at a glance how much of it was genuine and how much was just empty show.

But he had shown a necessary degree of tolerance to a Newcomer who had only just reached the edge of the round table.

That bottle of ether condensate was less a payment for the table of contents, and more an advance paid on the expectation that the kid would bring out better things in the future.

Richard folded the outline again and set it aside.

Dionysus was far shrewder.

When presented with Richard’s {Shadow Armor: Reverse-Engineered Theoretical Model}, he simply remarked, ”I’m only interested in finished products,” and priced a half-finished work accordingly.

He didn’t come across as arrogant or dismissive of its value, but he wouldn’t offer a single extra drop.

Richard took out a new manuscript he had drafted since then.

Ever since [Speculation] had activated, he no longer needed to leave placeholders when writing this kind of material.

If a supporting pillar could stand, he built it;

if it couldn’t, he openly admitted as much and treated that section as an open problem for the reader to deduce on their own.

This was completely different from his old approach of obfuscating to protect his secrets.

He read through the manuscript from beginning to end once more, tweaking the phrasing in three places.

Then he checked the theoretical paper for [Moon Nail: Reflection] before packing all four documents away.

The second stack consisted of physical items.

He took out the small oil-paper packet of Starfall Sand, then placed it right back into the very bottom of the wooden box.

He didn’t plan on bringing it with him.

Starfall Sand was far too versatile. It could be mixed into crystal ball stands, astrolabe pointers, or the paste used to seal Tarot Cards, and it was also useful for nourishing supernatural items associated with ”suspension,” ”inversion,” or ”reflection.”

It was much more cost-effective to keep it for himself.

After a moment’s thought, he retrieved the piece of Ether Condensate from a hidden compartment.

The condensate itself was wrapped in oil paper.

The moment he unwrapped the oil paper, he could feel a burning heat against his fingertips.

Sweeping over it with Spirit Vision, he saw the even layer of ether on the condensate’s surface slowly seeping outward.

Its radiation was extremely steady; leaving it on the desk for half a minute would raise the ether density across the entire surface noticeably higher than in the corner of the room.

Keeping something like this at home meant it had to be sealed up tight.

He had no use for it himself. The ten points of pure ether inside his [Spiritual Capacity] were his most stable source for nourishing the Sphinx Lamp.

His aunt had mentioned something similar back in the Imperial Capital.

Ether Condensate could nourish supernatural items efficiently and in large volumes, but it was still an external substance at the end of the day.

Feeding a supernatural item condensate was like spoon-feeding;

using the pure ether from one’s own [Spiritual Capacity], however, was continuously establishing a connection.

The former grew flesh; the latter grew roots.

When a supernatural item recognized a master, it recognized the latter.

Tonight, he planned to place this piece of condensate on the round table.

It was useless to him, but for someone whose signature artifact was still in its early nourishment stages, or someone who needed an alchemical catalyst, it was a very practical item.

As for what he intended to trade for this time, he wasn’t planning to exchange for any more Spell Formulas.

He hadn’t even started learning the Silence Spell yet, which would take at least a month or two of dedicated focus.

His progress with [Moon Nail] was still nowhere near the advanced versions Nemesis had mentioned, like ”Moon Blade Rain” or ”Moon Chain.”

He had only just finished modifying the batched channeling method for [Stone Armor], and it still needed repeated verification through practice.

Breaking past the ”must have light” restriction for [Shadow Armor] was an even longer-term project.

Developing four Spell Formulas simultaneously was more than enough; adding any more would just be biting off more than he could chew.

This time, he planned to ask about those two herbs, and whether there were any other reliable channels for acquiring supernatural items.

The official route required going through the General Administration’s appraisal process, and who knew how long it would take to hear back.

At the round table, Prometheus had channels for gathering resources from the Deep Realm.

Dionysus might be shrewd, but he had eyes and ears everywhere.

Nemesis came from the Moon Hunting Tradition and was familiar with the resources around the Deep Realm.

Even just getting a single clue out of them would be better than fumbling around blindly on his own.

The same logic applied to acquiring supernatural items.

With that, he had everything he needed to bring.

He turned off the wall lamp and lay down on his bed.

The Silver Ring on his chest felt cold against his skin.

...

Richard opened his eyes; he was already sitting at the large marble round table.

The golden mask of Hecate, seated at the head of the table, looked colder than the previous two times.

The overlapping phantom figures of the maiden, the mother, and the crone were frozen in place; neither the Torch nor the Key manifested.

This was a signal.

Of the seven stone chairs, five were occupied today.

Prometheus sat within his red-gold halo, the flame above his head burning steadily;

Nemesis still had her long whip and scales, the whip coiled motionless at her feet;

the seat next to Richard, as usual, showed only the faint phantom of a caduceus.

Dionysus’s purple seat was empty.

Hecate spoke first.

”Dionysus has matters to attend to today.”

She didn’t explain what those matters were, and no one at the table spoke up to ask.

The one with the most noticeable change was Ares, who had missed the previous gathering on medical leave.

Several new cracks ran down the left side of his red-copper mask, splintering from the brow bone to the cheekbone.

The man’s entire left arm was gone from the shoulder down.

Judging by the shape of the stump, Richard could tell it had been gnawed off by something.

The bone fracture was jagged, and teeth marks lined the bite.

Hecate lifted her chin toward him.

”Ares.”

”...Here.”

”Last time, you traded through Lauren’s line and entered the Ash Belt.”

”Yes.”

The man lowered his head.

”When you came out, you were the only one left.”

”Yes.”

Hecate’s voice carried no overt reproach.

But everyone at the table could hear the subtext: Ares had done something foolish.

”Those two brothers of yours,” Hecate continued. ”Are they both dead?”

”...They’re both dead.”

Ares’s remaining right hand gripped the edge of the table, the veins on the back of his hand bulging.

Hecate stopped her questioning there.

She didn’t rub salt in the wound, nor did she offer any empty pleasantries.

Today, she said nothing else.

Saying nothing was itself a statement of her disappointment.

”...Let the trading begin.”