I Loaded the Occult Panel

”Follow me upstairs.”

Gerard walked toward a small, iron-riveted door on the left side of the backyard.

Richard had stayed at the Ashford Residence several times but had never noticed this door.

It was half-hidden by holly and a tangle of old vines.

Behind it lay a spiraling stone staircase, barely wide enough for two people to squeeze past each other.

The passage ended at a small room on the west side of the second floor.

Richard had never been in this room, either.

Unlike the large study on the first floor used for formal receptions, this place was much smaller, with only a single window facing the backyard.

The furnishings were simple.

There was a solid oak table, and to its right stood a locked iron cabinet.A picture frame hung on the wall, displaying a group photograph.

The photo had been taken long ago, its edges yellowing with age.

Four people stood in the picture.

On the far left was Gerard in his thirties, at the prime of his life, wearing a short field coat with a saber hanging at his waist.

Beside him stood an even more heavily built man.

Half a head taller than Gerard, he had thick eyebrows and a square face, his arms crossed over his chest.

The third man stood on the far right. He was shorter, wearing a felt hat with the brim pulled low enough to obscure his features.

Flanked by the three men was a girl.

She looked about seven or eight years old, wearing a dark, high-collared dress.

Her hair was woven into a thick braid that draped over her shoulder. She looked incredibly stiff, as though it were her first time being photographed and she didn’t know what to do with her hands.

Richard recognized a few traces of his mother in that face.

Gerard unlocked the iron cabinet. With his back turned, he rummaged inside for a moment before pulling a velvet pouch from its depths.

He untied the pouch and tipped an object into his palm.

It was a bone needle.

Extremely dense inscriptions covered its surface, the characters so fine that Richard could barely make out the strokes even with his Spirit Vision.

They were mostly curved lines ending in sharp angles, every stroke carrying the keen, cutting edge of a blade drawn across skin.

”This thing.” Gerard placed the bone needle on the table.

”My father left it behind.”

Richard lifted his gaze from the bone needle and met the old man’s eyes.

”Your great-grandfather.”

Gerard sat down in the wooden chair across the table.

”He walked the path of the Moon Hunting Tradition. A Major Adept—the Ashford family’s last Major Adept before me.”

Richard thought of the group photograph on the wall.

”The man standing next to me in that picture is your great-grandfather.”

Gerard’s gaze shifted toward the photograph.

”After a Hunter reaches a certain age, their body starts breaking down. They might shine brilliantly in their prime, but the subsequent decline is faster than for anyone else. Even reaching Major Adept only delays the process.”

Gerard gently turned the bone needle so the inscriptions faced up.

”He was seventy-one when he passed. For a Hunter, that is already considered a long life.”

”Before he passed, he did one last thing.”

He pointed at the bone needle.

”A Hunter’s body is steeped in ether for decades. By the Major Adept stage, that saturation goes from skin to bone. Even every hematopoietic stem cell in the marrow has been completely rewritten.”

Gerard looked at his grandson.

”Because of this, the remains of a Major Adept Hunter are inherently exceptional alchemical materials.”

Richard stared at the bone needle on the table.

”Before he passed, your great-grandfather allowed an alchemist to extract some of his bones.”

”Only a portion. He destroyed the rest of his remains himself.”

Richard searched his memory for the relevant knowledge.

Self-destruction meant that right before his death, his great-grandfather had used his final ounce of strength to ignite the decades of ether accumulated within his body.

Bones, flesh, and every rewritten tissue had been reduced to ash in the ether he had sparked himself.

”Why did he...”

”To leave no opening for others.”

Gerard kept his explanation brief.

”The remains of a Major Adept are far too valuable. Over the past few centuries, countless incidents have erupted over them... wars between families, assassinations within the Guild, and even standoffs between the authorities and civilian factions.”

”My father did not want his bones to become bargaining chips for others to fight over.”

His fingers pulled away from the bone needle.

”Burned clean, so no one could take them.”

”He only left a few pieces, preemptively crafted into items that could protect his descendants.”

Gerard pushed the bone needle to the center of the table.

”I planned to give this to you before I even left for Franc. It has nothing to do with the Spell Formula you produced today.”

Richard looked at the bone needle on the table, momentarily at a loss for words.

”Let me explain what it does first.”

Gerard’s tone shifted back to strictly business.

”Whenever anything attempts to attach to, parasitize, or replace the wearer, the bone needle will automatically activate.”

”Once activated, it releases a Moon Hunting Tradition purification pulse, burning away any trace of ether that does not belong to the wearer.”

”You don’t have to trigger it manually; it acts on its own judgment.”

Gerard held up a finger.

”There is also a one-time use.”

”You can manually activate the bone needle. I’ll show you where the activation mark is later. Upon activation, it will unleash the full-powered strike of your great-grandfather—a Major Adept Hunter of the Moon Hunting Tradition.”

”Only once. Use it, and it’s gone.”

Richard reached out for the bone needle.

It carried the presence of a living person.

What was sealed within the ether wasn’t just power, but the traces of a man’s decades of life.

Richard grasped the bone needle in his palm and closed his fingers.

”Thank you, Grandfather.”

”Don’t thank me.” Gerard stood up.

”This belonged to your great-grandfather.”

He took two steps toward the door, then stopped.

”No one can know about this.”

He turned back, looking his grandson in the eyes.

”Vincent doesn’t know, and Baldwin and the rest certainly don’t. Your aunt also has a piece, but she won’t tell you, and you must absolutely never ask her about it.”

Richard gave a nod.

Gerard pushed the door open.

”Lock this away in your mind.”

The old man stepped into the passage.

”Once locked, never open it again.”

Gerard led Richard down the spiraling stone stairs and back out to the backyard.

Vincent and Baldwin had already started practicing push hands.

Vincent was using his left hand, and Baldwin was humoring him by using only thirty percent of his strength.

The two went back and forth beside the training pillar. Their movements weren’t large, but their footwork was incredibly precise.

”Let Richard pick his items.” Gerard waved to the butler.

The butler carried an absurdly large black leather suitcase out from the house and set it on the stone table on the back porch.

The clasps were brass, engraved with the Ashford family’s oak tree and rampant lion.

Once opened, the interior revealed padded compartments, with items laid out neatly in their own individual slots.

Richard swept a glance over it.

There were quite a few items inside: a few copper coins, several irregularly shaped dark crystals, rolls of something wrapped in oil paper, a small, sealed glass bottle filled with a dark brown, sludge-like substance, and other odds and ends.

”These items.” Gerard stood beside him.

”Some I brought back from my recent trip to Franc, and some the family has accumulated over the years.”

”Take your pick.”

”Choose whatever you can use. Don’t hold back.”

Richard first extended his Spirit Vision.

His gaze swept slowly across the suitcase, lingering on each item for two or three seconds.

Some items possessed excellent ether but were heavily polluted, having been brought back from the frontline trenches.

Others didn’t align with his path.

A few were purely alchemical raw materials, like those two crystals. They were extremely high quality, but Richard had no way to process them himself.

He settled on two items.

The first was the sealed glass bottle.

The substance inside the bottle was Ether Condensate from the mud of Flanders.

The death toll in the frontline trench zones was extremely dense. The aura of death had steeped into the dirt, compressing and condensing the trace amounts of natural ether within the soil into a crystalline state.

The quality of this kind of condensate was far denser than anything that could be collected anywhere during peacetime.

Richard twisted off the cap and took a sniff.

A bloody, rusty stench mixed with an indescribable bitterness shot up from the opening, stinging him so sharply that the corner of his eye twitched.

The aura of death was thick. Tens of thousands of lives had rotted into that mud—a rot that wouldn’t freeze away in winter, nor wash away in spring.

For the second item, he dug out something from the bottom of the suitcase.

It was a small bronze statue, roughly the height of a palm.

A Standing Saint Statue.

It depicted a robed figure holding up a broken cross in his right hand—the top half had snapped off—while cradling a half-unrolled scroll in his left.

The craftsmanship was exquisite; every single fold of the robes was clearly visible.

Even the words on the scroll had been carved in... though the text was so small it appeared as nothing more than a row of blurred scratches to the naked eye.

Richard focused his Spirit Vision on it.

The ether was incredibly old, and incredibly fine.

The kind steeped in over a thousand years of church prayers.

It had been saturated century after century by generations of believers through their prayers, hymns, kneeling joints, and trembling lips.

Its quality was so high it easily ranked in the top three among all the supernatural items he had handled.

He checked beneath the base.

A line of extremely tiny text was inscribed there.

Richard’s Erudition called up the entire database of letterforms he had ever read for comparison—Carolingian minuscule.

A script from the Carolingian dynasty.

Richard held the saint statue in his hand, turning it over and over, until his gaze finally landed on the scratches along the scroll.

This was a genuine inscription, intentionally carved onto a palm-sized bronze statue.

He didn’t have time to decipher the contents of the inscription right now.

But the mere presence of this inscription meant the saint statue’s value already far exceeded its point cost.

Points would run out, but knowledge would never be depleted.

”Just these two.” Richard placed the glass bottle and the saint statue on the table.

Gerard glanced at the items he had picked and said nothing.

Vincent and Baldwin, however, wandered over to see what was going on.

Baldwin looked at the bottle of sludge condensate first and caught a whiff of its bloody, rusty scent.

”You actually dare to touch this kind of stuff.”

”It’ll be fine once it’s purified.”

”You have the ability to purify the mud of Flanders?” Baldwin looked a little skeptical.

”I have the equipment.” Richard didn’t go into detail.

Vincent’s attention landed on the saint statue.

He took the bronze statue, turned it over a few times, and held it up to the daylight to look at the row of scratches on the scroll.

”...What does it say?”

”I haven’t read it yet.”

”The text is so small, I just see a blurry line.”

Vincent handed the bronze statue back, sporting a look that clearly said, ’I can’t participate in your world of Scholars.’

Baldwin snatched the bronze statue from Vincent’s hand to take a look himself.

”You want this sort of thing too?”

He turned the bronze statue upside down.

”Half the cross is broken off. Even a museum would reject it for being damaged.”

”Uncle Baldwin.” Richard took the bronze statue back.

”The inscription carved onto this thing might be worth more than an entire church.”

Baldwin opened his mouth, then shut it again.

Vincent patted his uncle on the shoulder.

”Scholars never see things on the same wavelength we do.”

Richard wrapped his two chosen items separately in oil paper and stowed them in his canvas bag.

Gerard walked toward the house.

”Head back to school early after dinner. You all still have normal classes tomorrow.”

After finishing dinner and handing the Spell Formula booklet over to his grandfather, Richard boarded a carriage heading back to Imperial Capital University.

The carriage traveled along Chelsea Road toward the Academy District. Richard leaned against the carriage wall and slipped his right hand into the inner pocket of his coat.

The bone needle was right there.

The full-powered strike of a Major Adept Hunter. Did he finally have a trump card that could truly secure a victory?

The carriage rolled to a stop at the entrance of his dormitory building.

Richard returned to his room, took off his coat, and sat down at his desk, choosing to study the saint statue first.

The letters of the Carolingian minuscule script began to surface in his mind one by one, arranging themselves into lines.

The drawn-out blast of a steam whistle echoed from the distance.

It was likely a night train passing by, carrying yet another batch of reinforcements toward the seaport.