I Loaded the Occult Panel

On the way back to his dormitory after class, Richard passed a newsstand at the corner.

The front-page headline screamed in massive print: ”Ypres: Imperial Expeditionary Force and Enemy Locked in Desperate Tug-of-War in the Flanders Mud.”

The accompanying photo was a gray, murky blur where nothing could be seen clearly.

All it showed was a churned-up wasteland of muck, with a few ant-sized figures hunched over in the mud.

The old newsstand vendor huddled behind a thick scarf. Only his eyes peeked over the edge, irritated red by the biting wind.

A line of small text beneath the photo offered a single statistic.

As of late October, the Imperial Expeditionary Force had suffered over 50,000 casualties in Flanders.

Fifty thousand. That was the entire population of a district in Briston.

Richard pulled his gaze away from the newspaper and continued toward the academic buildings.

He remembered the last day of the Compilation Group. Croft had leaned against the podium with both hands in his pockets, not even bothering to hide his exhaustion.”The system was built for peacetime.”

”Now everything has to be compressed into a few months, a few weeks, or even a few days.”

”The more we compress things, the higher the chance of errors... and when errors happen, we don’t have the manpower to fix them.”

”This Crash Course Manual you’ve compiled.”

Old Croft patted the stack of manila envelopes on the desk.

”To put it bluntly, it’s like using plywood to plug a hole in a dam.”

”But plywood is still better than bare hands.”

Richard shoved his hands into his coat pockets, his fingertips brushing against a Copper Penny.

He ran his thumb over the coin’s milled edge, then pulled his hand out of his pocket.

When he reached the entrance to his dormitory, Edith was jogging over from the direction of the library.

She was clutching the botanical field guide she never went anywhere without, her nose frozen the color of a berry.

”Richard!”

She stopped under the porch overhang, catching her breath.

”Did you hear... Lecturer Pollock is adding a class next week.”

”What kind of class?”

”I don’t know. The notice just said ’Supplementary Special Topic on Ritual Language.’ It didn’t mention any specifics.”

Edith shifted the field guide to her other arm and rubbed her frozen fingers together.

”There’s something else too. The dining hall hasn’t served a solid piece of beef in three days.”

”I know,” Richard said, his expression equally grim.

The girl’s expression was so serious it was almost funny.

”I don’t eat much, so it doesn’t really... um, what I mean is...”

”If even the dining halls at Imperial Capital University are cutting back, how badly are ordinary families out there having to ration?”

Richard didn’t answer.

His mind flashed back to his visit home over Harvest Day, and the recipe modification notes his sister had scribbled in her notebook—notes where the phrase ”substitute white sugar with beet sugar” appeared with increasing frequency.

The two of them headed into the dormitory building one after the other.

Richard returned to his room and wrote a reply to Demeter first.

As his pen moved across the paper, [Erudition] automatically sorted all the data he needed to cite into chronological order.

After signing his name, he sealed the envelope with coarse salt and stamped it with the wax seal of Hermes’s Caduceus.

That done, he packed the clay bowl and the appraisal report into a clay jar, leaving it ready for Demeter’s bees to collect.

Early the next morning, Richard picked up the day’s newspaper under the dormitory porch.

Standing beneath the overhang, he scanned the front page by the morning light.

The headline was printed in massive, blocky lead type.

”Ottoman Empire Declares War—Bosphorus Strait Closed.”

On the surface, this just meant another enemy entering the fray. The newspaper devoted half a page to analyzing the blockade’s impact on shipping and the resulting shock to the allied food supply lines.

Richard folded the newspaper and tucked it under his arm.

Out on the streets, the news would probably only warrant a few sighs of ”here comes another one.”

But inside the Petrie Building, it meant something else entirely.

Sure enough.

Before the first class of the morning even started, the east corridor was already packed with people.

Lecturers, graduate students, and upperclassmen—a crowd of exhausted-looking people—stood around, some clutching newspapers and others empty-handed, all talking non-stop.

”That region of Mesopotamia...”

The speaker was a white-haired lecturer.

Richard had seen him a few times back in the Compilation Group, though he couldn’t recall the man’s name. The lecturer was clutching a copy of the newspaper.

”Babylon, Ur, Nineveh.”

He counted them off one by one.

”And the sprawling ruins of Nimrud, the ancient Assyrian capital... The things sealed beneath those places are on a completely different scale from the weak points here in the Empire.”

Another lecturer chimed in, a tall, heavyset man wearing a monocle.

”The Ottomans have stood guard over those ruins for centuries. The caliphate system has an entire seal maintenance framework of its own.

The esoteric rituals of the Sufis, the patrol routes of the ascetic brotherhood... it’s a completely different approach from what we do here, but it works for them.”

The white-haired lecturer snapped his newspaper. ”And now there’s a war.”

”A war where artillery shells are going to rain down on those ruins.”

He braced a hand against the hallway wall, looking as though he might collapse otherwise.

”It’s exactly like Mons. Artillery fire shatters the old seals, and whatever’s been festering underneath just boils to the surface.”

”The buildup beneath Mons was only a few centuries old.”

The monocled lecturer extended his index finger and drew a circle in the air.

”If those spots in Mesopotamia breach...”

”That tower in Babylon.” The white-haired lecturer’s voice grew even hoarser.

”Its name alone has several layers of seals.”

”What do you mean by name seals?” a graduate student nearby asked cautiously.

The white-haired lecturer turned to look at him.

”It means the people who inscribed the name didn’t think sealing it underground was secure enough.

Even the name itself had to be locked away, layer by layer, to prevent someone from reading it aloud and awakening those sealed entities through the name.”

The chatter in the corridor grew into a loud buzz, even noisier than before.

Richard listened silently, then turned and walked toward the classroom.

As he passed by Croft’s office, his [Perception] enhancement allowed him to catch a snippet of the conversation inside.

Probably because this was something about to be announced anyway, they hadn’t set up an isolation array.

”That’s everyone the Department of Classics can spare.”

Greer’s voice leaked through the crack in the door, thick with nasal congestion.

”The front lines need people, and the rear needs people. We’re stretching a rubber band from both ends, and eventually, it’s going to snap.”

Croft’s voice was dry. ”How is the department planning to handle it?”

”How else?” Greer sighed heavily.

”We push the graduate students to the front lines, and let the prep students and undergrads fill the holes they leave behind.”

”Prep students filling in for graduate students?”

”Unless you want to fill them?”

Richard walked past the doorway without stopping.

The last thing he heard was Greer’s nasal voice.

”If fighting breaks out with the Ottomans, the demand for front-line Scholars is going to double.

The inscription systems on the eastern front are completely incompatible with the western front. They’ll have to learn it all from scratch...”

Soon after, a second piece of news broke.

”Naval battle in the Coronel waters: Two Imperial armored cruisers sunk, over 1,600 sailors killed in action.”

The shockwaves this sent through the campus were far greater than the Ottoman declaration of war.

The navy was the backbone of the nation.

For centuries, the Empire had relied on that backbone to uphold its global hegemony. Colonies, trade routes—every inch of its territory was built upon naval keels.

In most people’s minds, the Imperial Navy would never lose.

But over by the New Continent, two armored cruisers—the Good Hope and the HMS Monmouth—had sunk to the bottom of the ocean, taking over 1,600 lives down with them.

Richard found out about this during the lunch break.

The dining hall was quieter than usual.

The usual sounds of students wandering with trays looking for seats or stopping to chat with acquaintances had largely vanished.

Montagu sat in his spot by the window, the tray of food in front of him almost untouched.

Beside him, Fischer was speaking to him in low tones.

He later learned the reason from a small notepad Catherine passed to him.

One of their classmates from Yorkshire had a family member serving as a sailor on the HMS Monmouth.

As soon as the news broke, the student hadn’t shown up for class.

Montagu and Fischer, as the head and deputy class representatives, were planning to go visit him together.

Richard wasn’t close to that classmate; he was thinking about something else.

1,600 sailors sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

As they sank, their terror and agony sank right along with them, even harder to dissipate than the aura of death festering in the mud on land.

”Would 1,600 people dying at once at Coronel be enough to form a new Drowning Line?”

He couldn’t answer this question.

If the answer was yes, then from now on, the wreckage site of every large-scale naval battle would carve a new scar into the seabed behind the veil.

The waters around the Old Continent were already densely packed with Drowning Lines—the accumulated debts of centuries of naval battles and sunken merchant ships.

Modern warships were steel behemoths weighing thousands of tons; a single sinking meant the loss of at least a thousand lives.

At this rate of filling the seabed, what would happen to the veil beneath the waves?