I Loaded the Occult Panel

During the first weekend of classes, over half of the regular class was eliminated.

The justification posted on the noticeboard sounded appropriately high-sounding: ”Basic academic proficiency does not meet the standard.”

Richard knew the truth. The quotas were strictly limited. The eliminations had little to do with academic proficiency; people were cut simply because there were only so many spots available.

Among the diligent students who had been cut, a few broke down and pleaded in public.

One boy, who looked about Richard’s age, blocked Pendleton’s path.

He begged repeatedly, insisting he could still catch up and that his family had sacrificed everything to fund his education. He just wanted one more chance.

Pendleton couldn’t help him. The supervisor simply repeated that the roster had been finalized by his superiors and was completely out of his hands.

Most, however, packed their bags in silence.

The corridors quickly emptied out.

The crowds that had crammed in front of the noticeboards just days ago, eagerly searching for their names, were gone.Richard stood behind a pillar on the second-floor gallery, watching the students pack their belongings in the hall below.

He noticed something.

The expressionless representative from the Department of Internal Affairs had returned.

The man ignored the students who had made the cut. His gaze fell exclusively on those who had been eliminated.

These were young people with no other way forward, yet who possessed genuine academic foundations.

Right before leaving, the representative pulled a sheet of paper from his notebook and jotted down a select few names.

Richard’s breathing slowed.

Why exactly was the Department of Internal Affairs recording those names?

”What are you looking at?”

A voice came from behind him.

Phillips rounded the stairs, carrying a pot of tea.

Richard didn’t bother asking where he had acquired the tea this time; the man always had his ways.

Richard nodded toward the ground floor.

Phillips strolled over, peered down over the railing, and curled his lip.

”A bunch of poor bastards.”

He waved a hand dismissively.

”Come on, don’t look. Watching them is just depressing.”

He pulled Richard toward a windowsill at the far end of the corridor.

The ledge was wide and bathed in sunlight—a prime spot he had scouted out beforehand.

”Have a taste,” he said, pouring a cup for his companion. ”This batch is from the northwestern mountains. Fully fermented.”

Richard took a sip. The tea was thick and left a lingering sweetness.

”That bunch in our special class.”

Phillips said, leaning against the window frame and gesturing toward the classrooms down the hall.

”They’re all wound up so tight you’d think they were marching off to war.”

”They clearly think the competition is fierce,” Richard said, setting his teacup aside.

”Fierce, my ass,” Phillips scoffed.

”The twenty spots in the special class are basically locked in. They’re mainly purging the regular class.

What our group is actually fighting over is the ranking—who gets assigned to which mentor, and who secures which research direction.”

”Even if they fail to get into Imperial Capital University, anyone with an established circuit and a solid academic foundation is still a rare talent.

They’ll just be reassigned to other academies. Someone will always want them.”

”You’ve got it all figured out.”

”I do, but I can’t be bothered to fight for it.”

Phillips drained his tea in one gulp.

”Scraping for a good mentor just means I’ll be worked half to death for the next few years. What’s the point?”

”To become an associate professor?”

”An associate professor?” Phillips burst into laughter.

”Do you have any idea how much work an associate professor has to do?

Guarding old seals, running fieldwork out in the middle of nowhere, getting dragged out of bed in the dead of night.

My family’s estate is more than enough to let me live comfortably as a lecturer for the rest of my life. Why would I subject myself to that kind of misery?”

Richard gave him a look. This half-slacking, half-aware attitude was genuinely amusing.

He refused to completely lie flat, but he had zero desire to claw his way to the top.

”Speaking of which,” Phillips said, changing the subject as he refilled their cups.

”I read that essay you published in the Northern Literary Review.”

”You read that?”

”I read everything,” Phillips said, lifting his chin.

”It was brilliantly written. Though, if you’d published that piece in the Imperial Capital, you’d have kicked a hornet’s nest.”

”Why is that?”

”Because it lets people ’see’.”

Phillips met his gaze. ”And if there’s one thing the employers hate most, it’s being seen.”

The two were deep in conversation when someone approached from down the hall.

Catherine Blackwood walked toward them, clutching a stack of books.

Her red hair stood out sharply in the corridor.

To reach the special class classroom, she had to walk right past the windowsill where Richard and Phillips were standing.

As she drew near, her footsteps slowed for half a beat.

Through the passing crowd, she shot a glance in Richard’s direction.

Richard met her gaze and offered a slight nod.

Catherine returned the nod and kept walking, carrying her books down to the classroom.

”Got your eye on her?” Phillips leaned in, wiggling his eyebrows.

”No.”

Phillips wasn’t letting it go. ”I’m telling you, the girl looks cold, but she’s actually...”

”Actually what?”

”Actually, I have no idea.”

Phillips deflated.

”I’ve tried talking to her a few times, but she shuts me down in two or three sentences flat.”

Richard laughed.

...

During the second week of the seminar, the other associate professors gradually appeared in the classroom.

The first to step in was Isabella.

The students had long heard her name.

She was a famous beauty of Imperial Capital University, a Scholar at the Minor Adept rank, and an academic who had been promoted to associate professor at a remarkably young age.

Coupled with her relationship to Richard, gossips had already been whispering about her in private.

But the moment Isabella walked into the room, all whispers died instantly.

She wore a formal suit, her hair pinned up flawlessly.

Standing at the podium, she naturally radiated a commanding presence.

”Today, we cover Inscriptiology.”

”Specifically, the key variants bridging the late Alexandrian School and the annotations of the Medieval Church.”

She wrote the topic on the blackboard in a script so precise it looked printed.

Richard sat in the audience, not letting his gaze linger on his aunt as he focused entirely on the lecture.

When class ended, Isabella walked right past him without so much as a glance.

It was professional discipline. Richard understood perfectly.

He didn’t look in her direction, either.

Throughout the week, several different associate professors rotated through the classroom.

One arrived from the School of Theology, dressed in an immaculate black clerical habit.

He lectured on church liturgical Latin—specifically how the concealed ’sacraments’ directly paralleled ’Spell Formulas’ in steganography.

He spoke slowly, yet from the moment he opened his mouth, not a single student dared let their attention drift.

The School of Engineering also sent an associate professor, a man sporting a massive beard.

He lectured on industrial accidents during the steam age, detailing how each disaster had incrementally birthed new structural weak points.

He spoke of the accumulated ether pollution buried beneath a textile mill in the North Manchester District;

He cited the unusually high accident rates along specific stretches of the Imperial Railway System;

And finally, he broke down an industrial accident investigation he had personally participated in a few years prior.

But Richard read a deeper meaning into that lecture.

Industrial belts, industrial accidents, railway networks, docks, and mining zones.

He was telling them exactly where they would be deployed for work.

The seminar wasn’t the finish line. It was merely the threshold.

...

After classes wrapped up on Wednesday afternoon, Croft dropped a stack of thick kraft-paper envelopes onto the center of the podium.

”These are supplementary materials for you all,” he announced.

”One for each of you. Your names are written on them, so come grab your own.”

”Look them over if you have the time. If you don’t, just set them aside for now.”

Leaving those instructions, he packed up his notes and strode out without looking back.

A hum of conversation broke out across the room.

Richard walked up to the podium and sifted through the stack until he found the envelope with his name.

The envelopes varied greatly in thickness.

Some were as thin as a measly two or three pages, while others were practically bursting at the seams.

His own envelope fell somewhere in the middle—not the thickest, but far from light.

Phillips sauntered over, picked up his own envelope, and weighed it in his hand.

”Aren’t they generous?” he said, waving it at Richard. ”A customized set of notes for every single person?”

”I’m not sure what’s going on.”

Richard waited until he returned to his dorm before tearing the envelope open. Inside were seven sets of material.

The first tested rhetoric textual collation;

The second was an illustrated diagram question on sealing arrays;

The third was a chronological dating exercise.

Richard felt the design of these first three exercises was fairly reasonable.

Tricky, but not downright malicious.

Whoever had written them had clearly analyzed his homework and class performance, zeroing in on his weakest areas to test him again.

When it came to textual collation in rhetoric, his foundation genuinely wasn’t as unshakable as the students from Montagu’s faction, who had been studying it since childhood.

The sealing arts diagram required him to fill in three specific blind spots, hitting exactly the types of arrays he had never handled in practice.

And the chronological dating exercise... One glance told him it was Croft’s handiwork.

For these three, he was confident he could score above eighty percent.

Then, he flipped to the fourth set.

There was no citation listed, but the handwriting was glaringly familiar.

Having spent so long reviewing manuscripts slashed with red ink in his aunt’s office, he had memorized every quirk of her penmanship.

The fourth assignment was a double-layered palimpsest exercise.

[Erudition] immediately pulled up the source reference from his memory: Isabella’s own doctoral dissertation, Chapter Four, Footnote Seventy-Nine.

Richard let out a soft sigh.

If he hadn’t memorized her dissertation, he wouldn’t even know where to begin.

He flipped to the fifth set. More of his aunt’s handwriting.

This one was even more ruthless—a rubbing of an inscription heavily rooted in Ancient Greek.

Every single step was closely interlocked, specifically targeting his greatest points of discomfort.

The sixth and seventh sets were much the same. Each one was precisely aimed at his worst blind spots.

Richard sat at his desk, leafing through the seven sets of materials from start to finish.

The first three sets had been drafted by other associate professors. They targeted the flaws he had exposed during class, but the difficulty remained within reasonable bounds.

The last four sets had been drafted by his aunt. She had abandoned any sense of restraint entirely; every single question was completely off the syllabus.

Just what you’d expect from family. She wasn’t leaving him a shred of mercy.

Richard stacked the materials and set them on the left side of his desk.

He brewed a pot of strong tea, set out that inkwell that never seemed to run dry, uncapped his fountain pen, and prepared for battle.

...

The next day at noon, Richard carried his tray through the cafeteria, looking for a seat.

Phillips was already sitting at a corner table, a leisure book spread open in front of him. It was still his copy of The Metamorphosis.

His kraft-paper envelope sat next to his plate, looking as though it had only been torn halfway open.

A few sheets of paper poked out haphazardly, squeezed between his plate and cup and nearly buried under breadcrumbs.

”Have you done yours yet?” Richard asked, taking the seat across from him.

”Flipped through them,” Phillips replied without looking up. ”Interesting questions. Well-crafted, too.”

”Interesting is one thing, but when are you going to actually do them?”

”...No rush,” Phillips said, turning a page. ”They’re not collecting them for a grade anyway. Just looking them over is fine.”

Richard set down his fork and looked at him intently.

”Phillips.”

”Yeah?”

”Has it ever occurred to you that the fact they aren’t collecting or grading these assignments makes them even more important?”

Phillips finally looked up from his book.

Richard lowered his voice.

”Take your questions out. Compare them with mine.”

Phillips pulled the packet of papers from his envelope and pushed them across the table.

Richard scanned through them.

Out of the materials Phillips had received, two focused entirely on textual collation.

Collation was Phillips’ strongest subject, and the difficulty of these questions had been cranked up to a brutal degree.

Another focused on historical analysis—the exact topic Phillips had answered most casually during their oral exam.

Three more were a complex hybrid of Inscriptiology and ritual language, explicitly designed to expose his true skill level in the exact subject where he’d copied last year’s templates.

And the final set... Richard flipped to it, discovering it was a practical application of rhetoric.

Phillips had never once been called upon to answer a question on that topic during the large lectures.

However, Richard vividly remembered a conversation they’d had between classes. Phillips had casually mentioned his personal opinions on the rhetoric used in legal documents.

He had offered a couple of genuinely insightful remarks before immediately brushing the topic aside with a joke.

Someone had been listening.

”Your questions are completely different from mine.”

Richard pushed the papers back across the table.

”Oh?” Phillips shut his book.

”Out of my seven sets, four were written by my aunt, targeting my exact blind spots.

As for yours? Someone went to the trouble of excavating every single trace of you slacking off in class.”

Phillips’ expression faltered.

”...A customized set for every single person?” he asked, slowly sitting up straight.

”For every single person,” Richard said, stating his conclusion.

”The associate professors banded together to design a unique set of questions for all thirty-odd students in the special class.”

Phillips furrowed his brow, then slowly smoothed it out.

”Do you have any idea how much effort that would take?”

”I don’t,” Richard replied, shaking his head. ”But since they put in that much effort, do you really think they aren’t going to look at the results?”

Just before the first class of the afternoon, Richard approached Catherine.

The red-haired girl was sitting in a corner of the classroom, her head down as she worked through her assignment. He caught a quick glimpse of the material spread out on her desk.

”Your assignment is customized as well,” Richard said, standing beside her desk.

Catherine glanced up at him. There was no surprise in her gray-green eyes.

”I realized that the moment I tore open the envelope,” she said.

Her voice was quiet, but absolutely certain.

”Whoever drafted this set of questions has read every single answer sheet I’ve submitted in class.”