I Loaded the Occult Panel

The writing was agonizingly slow.

The shadow held the pen exactly as Richard did: three fingers pinching the barrel, wrist suspended. It had even perfectly copied his habit of leaving his pinky slightly raised.

The nib glided across the paper.

Richard stood silently by the wall, watching it write.

It filled more than half a page before the shadow finally stopped.

It set the pen down beside the inkwell so clumsily it nearly knocked the bottle over.

Then it straightened up and turned toward Richard.

It had no face.

In the candlelight, it was nothing more than a featureless mass of black, yet Richard distinctly felt it ”looking” at him.

It felt like a child handing in their first assignment, waiting for a teacher’s judgment.Richard walked over and held the manuscript paper under the candlelight.

The entire page was filled with writing.

Line by line, the spacing was perfectly even. The pressure and rhythm of each stroke looked strikingly authentic.

At a glance, it looked exactly like the handwriting of an educated person.

But leaning in closer, he saw there wasn’t a single actual letter on the page.

Every stroke was smooth and looped, spiraling out and twisting right back into itself.

The shadow had perfectly mimicked the physical motion of writing but had entirely missed the concept of words.

It had learned how the pen moved and how to space the lines, but it had no idea what it was actually putting down.

He remembered how his younger sister Evelyn used to lean over his desk when they were little.

She would copy him doing his homework, ”writing letters” in her own scratchpad.

Every stroke had been deadly serious. When she was finished, she would solemnly fold the paper and hand it to their mother.

Their mother had laughed for quite a while over that.

The scribbles left behind by this dark mass were far neater than Evelyn’s had been, but also far more hollow.

”Did you...” Richard set the ruined page down. ”Just copy my motions?”

The shadow didn’t respond. It couldn’t make a sound to begin with.

It simply tilted its shapeless head to one side, then back.

A thought crossed Richard’s mind.

It could ”write” because over the past half-year, it had clung to his walls, spread across his floor, and curled up at his feet, watching him work for countless nights.

Whether he was deciphering Appendix C, copying rubbings of the Boundary Stone, or working through the stack of supplementary materials for his aunt... it had watched every single stroke and committed the motions to memory.

It had learned the physical act of writing.

But it didn’t understand a single thing beneath those motions—not the Latin declensions, not the origins of the runic inscriptions, and certainly not the meaning hidden in the ink.

”It seems,” Richard muttered to himself, ”you can’t handle anything that requires a brain.”

He tried projecting a different thought toward it.

He didn’t speak, merely pushing the concept of ”come here” outward from his mind.

The shadow moved.

It broke away from the desk and took a step toward him.

Its gait was incredibly clumsy.

The first step was steady enough, but by the second, its foot began to phase through the floorboards.

Its entire leg sank half an inch into the wood before it forcefully yanked it free, causing its whole body to stumble.

It had trouble maintaining its footing in the material realm. Holding a three-dimensional form took vastly more effort than lying flat on the floor.

It stopped in front of Richard.

The very moment it halted, Richard felt it.

Just behind his sternum, within the Seat of the Sun, the leaves of the inverted Tree of Light were dimming one by one.

It was as if someone had opened a floodgate at the bottom of his ether reserves, letting it bleed out.

It wasn’t bleeding out quickly, but the drain was constant.

Richard understood what was happening.

For the shadow to stand and move in the material realm, it had to burn his ether.

It didn’t possess any ether of its own; it drew entirely from Richard’s supply.

For every second it spent in this world, the Tree of Light in his chest had to supply it with sustenance.

But lamp oil was finite.

Clement had once shared an old anecdote.

Stuart Auction House once handled a medieval oil lamp billed as an ”ever-burning lamp” that supposedly never went out once lit.

The buyer took it home, and for three days it burned beautifully. But the wick was sucking down an entire vat’s worth of oil, and by the morning of the fourth day, it flickered out.

There was no such thing as a flame that didn’t consume fuel. The same was true for the shadow.

Richard projected the command to ”go back.”

The shadow turned and plodded toward the wall.

Once it reached the baseboards, it flattened itself against the wall.

Its three-dimensional form smoothed out, shrinking back into an ordinary two-dimensional silhouette, safely pinned in place by the candlelight.

The drain on his ether finally stopped. He had lost roughly ten percent of his reserves.

Just having it walk a short distance across the room and scribble on half a page of scrap paper had burned through a tenth of his ether.

Richard sat on the edge of his bed, waiting for the hollow sensation in his chest to fade.

He now had a rough idea of how this worked.

The ability the lamp had granted him was undeniably a massive boon.

But it wasn’t free, nor did it instantly grant him earth-shattering power.

The mere fact that the shadow could move independently was miraculous in itself.

But right now, it was incredibly weak, incredibly clumsy, and reliant on his ether to function.

It couldn’t perform delicate tasks, couldn’t stay in the material realm for long, and couldn’t venture far from him.

Richard stood up, pulled the shadow off the wall once more, and made it pace back and forth across the room.

He needed to figure out the exact limitations of this pitch-black entity, one property at a time.

First: distance.

Richard stood motionless in the center of the room and commanded the shadow to walk toward the door.

About halfway there—roughly eight or nine paces away—the shadow’s movements grew sluggish.

One step further, and its silhouette began to fade. Its edges jittered wildly, as though an invisible tether was yanking it from behind.

The ether in Richard’s chest simultaneously began to drain at an alarming rate.

He hurriedly called it back.

The safe operational radius was about ten paces. Any further, and that invisible tether felt like it would snap.

If that happened, it would either dissipate and reform back at his feet, or he would have to burn exponentially more ether just to force it to hold its shape.

Richard committed this rule to memory.

Next: strength.

Resting on the desk was the Glass Inkwell his aunt had given him. Engraved with the words, ”Truth is arduous, yet endearing,” the heavy bottle was currently full.

Richard ordered the shadow to lift it.

The shadow extended its pitch-black arms, wrapped them around the bottle, and began to pull.

The bottle barely shifted across the desk. The shadow’s arms began to tremble, and its entire form turned dangerously thin and transparent.

Its physical strength was worse than that of a five- or six-year-old child.

Richard called it off before it collapsed entirely.

He sat back on the edge of his bed and sighed.

Weak, clumsy, a massive drain on his ether, short-lasting, and severely range-limited.

Right now, this pitch-black mass was effectively a newborn infant.

It couldn’t even walk properly, let alone perform tasks for him.

Yet, as Richard watched the quiet silhouette resting against his wall, the disappointment in his heart was slowly replaced by another feeling.

It was an infant, yes.

But infants grew quickly, and they were highly adaptable.

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

Early the next morning, the two drunkards in the manor were still asleep.

Sophia was sleeping sprawled out in the guest room, and his aunt wasn’t looking much better in her own bedroom.

The maid went in with bowls of hangover soup, only to re-emerge a long while later, saying the two ladies would need to sleep for quite a bit longer.

After breakfast, Richard returned to his room and locked the door behind him.

Before going to sleep last night, he had run one final experiment on the shadow.

He had used [Breathing: Healing].

Back during the Whitcom incident, he had noticed that directing this healing aura into a shadow was actually more effective than using it on his own flesh.

He had figured out why: shadows were fundamentally entities of the etheric plane.

It was the shuyet—the metaphysical shadow cast by his existence onto the other side of the veil.

The physical body was flesh and blood; the ether of healing had to fight to permeate that dense matter.

The shadow, however, was woven from the exact same source material. The moment the healing breath touched it, it integrated seamlessly.

Last night, he had channeled the healing breath into his silhouette on the wall.

The silhouette’s edges, which had been fuzzy and violently jittery, instantly smoothed out and stabilized the moment the breath nourished it.

Looking at it again this morning, the shadow appeared slightly darker and denser than it had yesterday.

Richard made another mental note.

He sat down on the bed, cast his Inspiration into the shadow pooling at his feet, and resumed his experiments.

For the shadow to act within the material realm, it burned his ether.

But the shadow’s true ”home” wasn’t on this side of the veil.

Richard tried pushing the shadow toward the other side of the veil.

The shadow sank downward.

Richard’s Inspiration followed it, crossing over to the other side of the veil.

In the material realm, the floor around his feet was completely bare; his shadow was gone.

Yet, in the shallows behind the veil, the pitch-black humanoid figure stood tall.

A moment later, as soon as the shadow fully crossed over, the continuous drain of ether from Richard’s chest ceased entirely.

The shadow was standing and moving behind the veil, yet it wasn’t consuming a single drop of his ether.

Richard was overjoyed. His theory was correct.

Captain Field had mentioned it, and so had Old Biggs.

Behind the veil, everything related to ether was amplified, while everything unrelated to it was suppressed.

For the shadow, crossing over was like a fish returning to water.

To stand and move over there, it could directly absorb the ambient ether saturating the veil, no longer needing to leech off Richard’s personal reserves.

Richard ordered the shadow to take a few steps across the shallows of the veil.

Its gait was vastly steadier than it had been in the material realm.

Over there, it was distinctly more ”solid” than it was on this side.

He then commanded it to jump, and to heave up a free-floating cluster of ambient ether.

It was still slow and clumsy, but the movements were noticeably smoother than before. More importantly, the entire exertion hadn’t cost Richard a single drop of his own ether.

Richard opened his eyes.

In the material realm, the shadow was weak, clumsy, resource-heavy, and fragile.

But he could just toss his shadow behind the veil.

Over there, it was completely self-sufficient. It didn’t burn his fuel.

It could train as hard as it wanted over there. Since time and ether were both plentiful, it could practice without ever stopping.

All Richard had to do was periodically channel [Breathing: Healing] into it to maintain its structure, and the shadow would never dissipate.

Richard leaned back against the headboard, slowly piecing together how he should utilize his shadow for now.

He was walking the path of a Scholar: studying books, deciphering texts, appraising artifacts, and conducting fieldwork.

He simply didn’t have the time to practice the skills of a Hunter.

But his shadow did.

As long as no one was around, Richard could sit at his desk and focus on his scholarly pursuits...

...while tossing that pitch-black mass behind the veil to train relentlessly.

The corners of Richard’s mouth twitched upward.

He had the distinct feeling that the shadow’s true potential was far from fully tapped.

He had a sudden impulse, preparing to send the shadow deeper into the veil to explore.

But his Inspiration immediately flared with a warning.

Richard instantly yanked the shadow back.

Behind the veil, past the shallows, lay an ever-deepening ”well.”

When Mrs. MacNeil had opened the door and dragged the eight of them across the threshold, he had seen with his own eyes how that well extended downward endlessly.

In the shallows, ether was plentiful, and things were relatively peaceful.

But the deeper one went, the more dangerous it became.

Richard weighed the risks in his mind.

The shadow was his shuyet. It was a literal part of himself.

If it were killed and shattered by something behind the veil, his physical body would not emerge unscathed.

At best, he would suffer severe mental trauma. At worst... he didn’t want to think about it.

Even if it was merely scattered, the amount of ether required to recondense a new one would be astronomical.

Even more terrifying was the fact that not everything behind the veil would simply want to kill it.

Some things might want to ”swap” with it.

They could burrow into the shadow, hijack its shell, and follow the connection right back to his physical body...

The shadow could train, but only in the shallows.

For now, it absolutely could not venture any deeper.

Richard carved this rule deeply into his mind.

Having settled all of this, he swept his Inspiration over the shadow one more time.

Halfway through the scan, he paused.

There was something about the shadow that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

When the Sphinx Lamp had acknowledged his Signature, it had granted him this ability to ”ferry a shadow between realms.”

But this ability seemed to be hiding something else.

Something that hadn’t awakened yet, curled up deep within the shadow’s silhouette.

Richard focused his mind, trying to sense it.

The core abilities of a Scholar were ”reading and parsing.”

Since the lamp had bound itself to him, it stood to reason that its abilities should align with his path.

Yet, everything the shadow currently provided—physical strength, movement, stealth—belonged to physical disciplines. It had absolutely nothing to do with ”reading.”

But he could faintly sense that the ”reading” aspect wasn’t missing.

It just wasn’t time yet.

Reaching out to touch the mass curled deep within the shadow, Richard could only feel a blurry outline.

If the shadow were to ”read” something, it would be much faster than him reading it himself.

That was the only hint Richard could decipher.

However, faster reading meant that if a text contained hidden dangers, those dangers would flood back into his mind through the shadow just as quickly.

It was a double-edged sword.

Richard withdrew his Inspiration, leaving the anomaly alone for now.

He got out of bed, walked to the window, and pulled the curtains open just a crack.

The sun was already rising over the Imperial Capital.

Sounds of movement drifted up from downstairs; his aunt was finally awake.

Even from this distance, he could hear her groaning in her room, clutching her head and calling for the maid.

Richard smiled.

He let the shadow sink back to his feet, resting quietly against the floorboards like the most ordinary shadow in the world.

He knew exactly what he needed to do moving forward.