I Loaded the Occult Panel

Hecate concluded the matter of the mask resonance. The outline of the Torch and Key slowly softened from a solid state back to normal.

When the trading segment arrived, Prometheus was the first to place items on the table.

He set down several sealed copper canisters, each about half the size of a fist, their mouths tightly sealed with wax.

The voice behind his red-gold mask was still a little hoarse.

”These are high-purity alchemical stabilizers prepared by my master. Their purity is nearly two levels higher than the batch I gave you all before.”

The eyes of the others at the table simultaneously fell upon the copper canisters.

Major Adept-level alchemical artisans could be counted on two hands across the entire Old Continent.

Stabilizers produced by such a figure would never circulate on the open market. The group quickly swept them up.

Lacking the funds, Richard and Nemesis sat this one out.

”Also, my master left a message for the Chief.”Hecate’s Golden Mask tilted slightly.

”Speak.”

”The item the Chief commissioned him to make is finished. It will be delivered via a Spirit Realm Messenger in a few days.”

This referred to the blueprints inside the box Hecate had given him last time.

Hecate said no more. The outline of her torch flickered in acknowledgment.

Dionysus lifted a wooden box resembling a wine crate from behind his chair.

Opening it revealed six small, dark glass bottles neatly arranged inside, their mouths completely sealed with wax.

”The ’bottom ash’ from several old taverns in the Imperial Capital’s East District and South District.”

He pushed two bottles onto the table.

”What?” Heracles’s Lion-Mouth Mask turned toward him.

Dionysus flicked a finger against the side of a bottle.

”Decades of uncleaned hearth ash from old taverns, mixed together with ether residue.

Settled within it are the oaths sworn, the people cursed, and the tragedies wept over by those hearths for decades.”

He held a bottle up to the light. The layer of gray-black sediment at the bottom gleamed with an oily sheen in the dim glow.

”It’s very handy as a sealing filler, especially for sealing things related to ’promises’ and ’oaths’... Smearing a layer of this bottom ash into the cracks is equivalent to using decades of tavern rules to guard your door.”

A light chuckle came from beneath Demeter’s terracotta mask.

”You must have dug up their tavern floors.”

”Legally acquired.” Dionysus raised his hands.

”Those places all closed down. Wartime restrictions on operating hours squeezed them to death.

I paid to buy the hearths along with the bottom ash, and the owners even thanked me for hauling away a pile of junk.”

Over on Heracles’s side, the man beneath the Lion-Mouth Mask dumped out an old military rucksack onto the table.

A jumble of items clattered across the surface.

”I just got back from clearing a weak point behind the front lines. Everything sellable is right here.”

Richard swept his Spirit Vision over the chaotic pile on the table.

Heracles’s items were numerous and assorted. There were some processed materials from evil creature remains, and a few sealed fragments.

There were also two objects whose origins he couldn’t quite pinpoint: a charred, blackened identification tag and a wax-sealed glass jar.

The words on the ID tag had been blurred by high heat. Richard leaned in closer and could barely make out half a name and a regimental designation.

”Where did you find this ID tag?” Richard asked.

”No Man’s Land.”

”In that corridor between the two armies, where barbed wire is tangled with mud and rotting corpses.”

The man flipped the tag over.

”The regimental designation on the tag doesn’t match either side. After looking into it for a while, I found out it belonged to a transport company listed as missing three months ago.”

”How did a transport company end up in No Man’s Land?” Dionysus put down his glass.

”That’s the strange part.” Heracles shifted his legs, crossing them the other way.

”There are living people in No Man’s Land.”

The table went completely silent for a beat.

”Someone from a frontline Hunter squad told me about it.”

Heracles slapped the tag face-down on the table.

”In that corridor of death between the trenches, there are people dragging corpses at night.”

”But those people aren’t search teams collecting their own dead, and they have nothing to do with night scouts.

Search teams have designations, and night scouts wear black smocks.

These people wear patchwork rags, pieces of uniforms from both sides sewn together. They look like scarecrows dug out of a garbage dump.”

”Deserters from various countries,” Prometheus suddenly realized.

”Yeah.” Heracles nodded heavily.

”They escape the trenches and flee into No Man’s Land, unable to return to either side.

Rumor has it they come out at night to drag corpses, stripping the dead of their clothes, rations, and ammo. During the day, they huddle in craters or the ruins of collapsed bunkers.

When artillery from both sides bombards the enemy lines, these people just scurry back and forth, surviving in the gaps between the barrages.”

He pushed the ID tag toward Richard.

”Consider this tag a gift, Lord Hermes. You might just find something interesting on it.”

Richard picked up the tag, examined it, and put it away.

Heracles then picked up the wax-sealed glass jar and shook it a couple of times. There was a layer of brownish-black mud at the bottom.

”Dirt from No Man’s Land.”

”That No Man’s Land stretches from the coast all the way inland. It’s hundreds of miles long.”

”Hundreds of miles forming a continuous blood-soaked belt... Blood-soaked points have always been scattered individually—one down in a mine, another in an abandoned mill.”

He dragged his index finger horizontally across the table.

”This time, it’s one very long line.”

Richard stared at the layer of mud at the bottom of the jar, recalling the files on the Unresponsive Pit.

The Unresponsive Pit was a single point, where three mine blood-soaked points formed a triangle on the map.

What Heracles was describing now was an entire blood-soaked belt spanning the continent, from the North Sea to the Helvetia border.

Hundreds of miles wide, filled with hundreds of thousands of corpses, with more piling up every single day.

”If this line stews for another year or two.” Heracles pressed his palm flat against the table.

”I don’t even want to imagine what could grow out from beneath it.”

Aside from the ID tag and the soil sample, there were two other objects in the pile of odds and ends Heracles had dumped out that he couldn’t quite figure out himself.

A crudely made copper clasp, its surface engraved with a cornflower;

And a palm-length lead cylinder, sealed tightly, its surface so heavily worn it was impossible to tell if it had ever been engraved.

”These two were dug out from the ruins of a bunker blown apart by artillery.”

Heracles pushed them to the center of the table.

”I looked at them with my own Spirit Vision for a long time, and all I know is that there’s something inside.

Lord Hermes handled those cursed objects for me quite neatly last time, so I brought them straight here.”

”I’ll take them for now, then.” Richard nodded. ”I’ll give you an appraisal report later.”

He wrapped the two items separately in oiled paper and placed them in the side pocket of his canvas bag.

Then he paused and spoke the words he had been considering for a long time prior to this gathering.

”Starting today, I will be making long-term purchases of any Ether Condensate you hold, regardless of concentration or quantity.”

”I can pay in cash, or you can offset the cost with my appraisal services, converting the concentration into working hours.”

The table fell quiet for two seconds.

Heracles was the first to react.

His chair creaked.

”Are you serious?”

”Serious.”

”Fantastic!”

Heracles was practically ecstatic.

”Every time I return from a field op with those condensates saved up in my pockets, the Guild channels take a twenty percent cut to exchange them for cash, and I have to wait in line for half a month.

Once, I made three trips to the Guild office, and the old man behind the counter rolled his eyes the moment he saw me.”

Richard was very satisfied with the man’s reaction.

”Then I’ll take the Ether Condensate, the appraisal services will continue as usual, and we’ll hash out a conversion list for the concentrations later.”

”Deal, deal!” Heracles slapped his thigh.

Demeter also spoke up from the side.

”That saves me a lot of trouble, too.”

Her fields yielded a stable output, and the condensates were a byproduct.

The official recovery channels pushed prices even lower than the Guild—so low that the last time she dropped off a batch of medium concentration, the purchaser offered a figure that made her think she had misheard.

”I have a fixed batch every quarter on my end. If you want it, I can deliver it on schedule.”

”I’ll take it,” Richard agreed without hesitation.

As he spoke these few words, the Mask of Hermes tucked in his coat grew slightly warm.

[Inner Awakening] silently activated. Purchasing, pricing, brokering, bartering goods for labor... This was exactly the purview of the god of commerce.

From markets to banks, from the wool trade to maritime commerce, anything involving two or more people sitting at a table exchanging what they had for what they lacked fell under the jurisdiction of the messenger god.

For every business deal he successfully struck, the mask grew a fraction warmer.

Richard silently took note of this. Hecate’s words had now taken on a tangible sensation.

Doing business was Hermes’s true calling.

Having finished rejoicing, Heracles pushed the evil creature materials from his pile to the center of the table.

”See if anyone wants these, too.”

Richard quickly swept his Spirit Vision over the pile of materials.

The quality of these materials was wildly inconsistent, and they were difficult to process. He had no use for them himself, so he didn’t make a move.

The only thing that barely caught his eye was a clump of gray-green slime, a corrosive gel secreted by some trench evil creature.

Demeter, however, picked out that clump of gray-green slime first.

”Is this stuff highly corrosive?”

”Yeah, it rotted away a huge section of barbed wire.” Heracles gestured with his hands.

”I’ll take it.” Demeter tucked the slime into her cloth pouch. ”I’ll take it back to feed my fields.”

Heracles pocketed his cash, opened his mouth to say something, then snapped it shut.

This woman was actually using corrosive gel secreted by an evil creature as fertilizer.

It was Nemesis’s turn.

A few lines of text projected above her balancing scales. It was her list of inscription deciphering services, mostly unchanged from what she had announced at the last gathering.

Richard glanced at it. Her services were listed right there, but not a single person was pulling out money.

For the people at this table, taking objects of unknown origin to Richard for appraisal had already become a habit;

And the demand for work like inscription deciphering was intrinsically low to begin with.

Nemesis’s stall was completely ignored.

Looking at her somewhat stiff posture and her slightly lowered mask, Richard suddenly had an idea.

”Heracles.” He turned his head. ”You’ve copied inscriptions from altars before, right?”

”Huh?” The man was slightly taken aback at being called on out of the blue.

”I’ve copied a few passages, yeah. They look like gibberish drawn by ghosts.

Every time there’s a ruin, I’ll take a rubbing and bring it back, but I can’t read most of them so they just get tossed aside.”

”Those inscription rubbings you have—have you ever thought of finding someone to decipher them properly?” Richard asked.

Heracles waved a hand.

”Of course I’ve thought about it, but the waitlist for those Scholars through the Guild channels stretches all the way into next year.”

Richard shifted his gaze toward Nemesis.

”Nemesis can take them. She has a Major Adept-level Scholar standing behind her.”

Heracles’s posture instantly shifted.

Having scraped his way up to Minor Adept, he was well aware of the weight carried by a Major Adept Scholar... With a single word, they could have several Hunters like him scrambling to run errands for them, and fighting for the privilege.

”You vouch for her?”

”I vouch for her.”

Heracles didn’t hesitate anymore, digging out a stack of crumpled, folded papers.

His reasoning was very straightforward.

Hermes’s reputation stood on solid ground. Since he was willing to guarantee for Nemesis, she could be trusted.

”Here, I took these rubbings from the cellar of a bombed-out church near Leuven last month. Seven pages in total. We split anything of value down the middle.”

He pushed the stack of papers over to Nemesis.

Nemesis reached out and caught the papers.

She flipped through them, and the text on her balancing scales lit up.

”Medieval Frankish Latin, based on the church inscription style from the Merovingian Dynasty period. I can take this.”

Richard then pulled something else out of his canvas bag.

It was a copy of the Ancient Gaulish Inscriptions he had recorded during his field op in Folkestone.

A triple-reception sacrificial ritual structure, the two-thousand-year-old system buried under the foundation of the camp’s eastern half.

”This is for you, too.”

He spread the rubbing flat on the table.

”It’s an Ancient Gaulish system, dating back to before the Roman conquest. There are a few sections involving Gaulish dialect variants that I just can’t crack.”

Nemesis’s scales tilted slightly.

This was the rubbing the two of them had taken together last time, and it was also one of Professor MacFie’s main areas of expertise.

”You aren’t deciphering it yourself?”

”These specific spots happen to hit my blind spot. You’ll definitely be faster at this than I am.”

He was telling the truth.

Richard had too many things on his plate right now. Furthermore, when it came to Gaulish and Celtic matters, he truly wasn’t as skilled as she was. Finishing it himself would mean dragging his feet for days.

Handing it over to Catherine... no, handing it over to Nemesis would save him a considerable amount of time.

The others present watched this back-and-forth, having already gleaned a taste of the unspoken mutual understanding between the two.

Two Scholars who joined in the same batch, similar in age, similar in Rank.

And they were even throwing business each other’s way. A level of trust like this was basically an open card.

Richard didn’t plan to hide anything anymore.

The gathering had already reached the Second Stage, and the mask resonance had begun. Pretending not to know each other was pointless.

”We’ll share the deciphered results.”

Nemesis silently typed out a small line of text, delivering it exclusively to Richard as a reward for funneling business her way.

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