I Loaded the Occult Panel

During the final week of April, Croft pulled out a telegram during class and slapped it onto the podium.

He pushed up his glasses.

”Today, I won’t be lecturing on ancient evil creatures. We are going to discuss something much more recent.”

He wrote a line on the blackboard: The Preemptive Namer.

He heavily underlined the phrase with his chalk.

”Last night, the radio station across the border broadcast the same message in four different languages.”

”The Albion Empire military has deployed asphyxiating gas on the front lines, violating all norms of civilized warfare.

”The government of Germania hereby appeals to the conscience of the world and reserves the right to employ all necessary means in response.”

He put the telegram down when he finished reading. The classroom was dead silent.

Croft continued.”Every newspaper reprinted this today, but their commentary was uniformly summed up in a single sentence: just another despicable lie.”

Fischer stood up. ”It is a lie. When have we ever done such a thing?”

Croft nodded. ”We certainly haven’t. So what?”

Fischer opened his mouth, speechless.

Croft said, ”The entire Empire read it, laughed it off, and flipped to the back pages to check the horse racing results.”

He picked his chalk back up from the podium and added a few more words beneath that line of Latin.

”Now, please treat this as a folklore question. I want everyone to use your brains.”

”Two families in a village have a feud.

”Family A runs to the church doors first and shouts in front of the whole village that the old woman from Family B is a witch.”

”The next day, Family B runs out and shouts, ’No, the old woman from Family A is the real witch!’”

”So, who do you think the village will believe more? Williams, tell us.”

Richard stood up and answered without hesitation, ”Family A, of course.”

”Why?”

”Because by the time Family B speaks up, that space in the villagers’ minds has already been claimed by Family A.

”Whatever Family B says just sounds like simple retaliation.”

”Correct.” Croft tossed the chalk aside.

”This is the oldest, dirtiest, but most effective trick in folklore.

”The first to speak drives the nail in. The one who speaks second can only try to pry out a nail that has already been set. The harder they pry, the guiltier they look.”

Montagu raised a question. ”Associate Professor, what does this have to do with the matter you brought up today?”

Croft spoke.

”That is something I should be asking you. Why would a person rush to accuse someone else before anyone has accused them?”

Edith was sitting in the row closest to the window, clutching her botanical field guide.

She raised her hand. ”Because they want to do that very thing themselves.”

Croft glanced at her. ”Very good. Keep going.”

Edith continued.

”They pin that stigma on someone else first, so that when they finally do it themselves, no one will be willing to look closer.”

When class ended, Croft folded the telegram, tucked it into his inside pocket, grabbed his hat, and left.

Richard packed up faster than anyone else. He had something important to do tonight.

But the moment he stepped into the corridor, he heard that melody.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t Fischer singing. The voices drifted up from the bottom of the stairwell.

Two young women were humming as they walked. When they reached the line about leaving a lamp on the windowsill, one of them even reached out and tapped the beat.

Fischer caught up from behind, his shoulders shaking with laughter.

”Did you hear that?”

”I heard it. I’m not deaf.”

Fischer patted him on the shoulder.

”Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t teach them a single note?

”The choir’s baritone learned it first, and his wife works in the laundry room.

”Those women in the laundry room sang it while scrubbing clothes, and within three days, it spread all the way to the student dorms.”

As Richard headed downstairs, Fischer kept following him.

”I even gave it a name.”

Fischer unfolded the sheet music and held the title page up to him.

Written across it in thick strokes was a single line: The Williams Rules.

Richard stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes went wide, and an intense wave of embarrassment surged through him.

”Why would you name it after my family? Cross it out!”

”It’s already too late to cross it out.”

Fischer stared at him with a purely teasing expression.

”Didn’t Old Croft just lecture about this? The Preemptive Namer. I spoke first, so the spot is already mine.

”If you run around now telling everyone you didn’t write it, what do you think they’ll say?”

Richard opened his mouth, completely at a loss for words.

Two knocks on the wall echoed from down the hall.

A red-haired girl stood at the corner, one hand resting on the doorframe and the other supporting a wooden crate.

She pulled a notepad from her pocket, scribbled a few words, and held it up.

”Give it up, Richard. He has already won.”

Fischer burst into laughter, seemingly thrilled to have gotten the better of Richard.

As he jogged off, he called back that he was going to find the choir’s baritone to revise the master score.

Richard sighed and didn’t chase after him. He wasn’t actually that petty.

Noticing Catherine’s crate, he walked over and helped her lift it.

It was quite heavy. The iron band on the lid pinned down a green customs slip.

”What’s in here? Rocks?”

They carried the crate down to an empty faculty lounge on the lower floor. Beside him, Catherine casually grabbed a paper knife and pried the iron band open.

The top layer consisted of clay jars with their mouths sealed with wax. The labels read ”Wildflower Honey.”

Below that was a massive slab of smoked salmon wrapped in greaseproof paper.

Resting at the very bottom were two bottles of wine, their necks bound in tight coils of straw rope.

Before he could react, Catherine shoved one of the bottles into his hands without a word.

Richard held it, unsure if he should accept, but Catherine was already writing in her notepad.

”These are all local specialties sent from my hometown.

”The expensive bottle of wine definitely has to go to the professor, so I’ll give the other one to you.

”Take it and share it with Phillips. Hasn’t he been... in a somewhat bad mood lately?”

Catherine had initially wanted to use a much more direct term, but after a moment of thought, she tactfully settled for a bad mood.

Since Phillips had been brought up, Richard didn’t refuse.

”The King just recently took the pledge. Is it really a good idea for us to be drinking in secret?”

Catherine smiled and wrote on the paper:

”The King isn’t drinking. What does that have to do with us?”

Carrying the wine back to his dorm, Richard leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

There was something he had kept bottled up inside for two years. Recently, the news of the poison gas attacks had spurred him to carefully re-evaluate things.

The world from Richard’s past life had no veil.

It was a world that humanity had stripped completely bare from end to end. The things excavated from temples were truly nothing more than pottery shards and bones.

There were no supernatural items. Seances and Spirit Boards were nothing but parlor tricks and useless pieces of wood.

People called this kind of era Disenchantment.

A bearded German scholar had written about it, saying that the plight of modern man was that the world no longer held any mysteries.

In principle, everything could be solved through calculation... in principle.

Richard silently repeated that phrase in his mind.

Opening his eyes, he stared at an inkblot on his notebook.

Over the past year, there had been the fire at Haymes, the night of the Mons retreat, and the Christmas Eve truce involving hundreds of thousands of men.

This world had a mystical side. Some of the things he remembered were no longer very applicable here.

For example, the battle behind Haymes had actually been fought between two Virtuosos. The great retreat at Mons truly did feature archers. And on Christmas Eve, the collective yearning for home really had called back the dead.

And the Day of Mourning... none of this lined up with the history books he had read.

As for the colonies over on the New Continent, they were a complete blank.

He remembered that there was supposed to be a massive, loud country on that landmass—one that stuck its hands into absolutely everything.

The Eastern Continent was even worse. Of all the events he recalled, very few matched what was printed in the newspapers.

Right now, the map in his hands was only half correct.

He stared at the inkblot on the paper for a long time.

A thought crept out from an inconspicuous corner of his mind.

He thought, Even if there are deviations, there must still be parts I can use, right?

He tried silently writing out the historical details he remembered:

There was a river. Hundreds of thousands of men were destined to die along its banks, dying continuously over the course of nearly half a year.

There was a fortress. Someone was meant to say a very famous line in front of it.

A plague would sweep in from the west, killing more people than the entire war combined.

The Rus Empire would completely collapse during a certain winter, giving way to the most dazzling rebirth in human history...

But all of these memories were incredibly blurry, as if viewed through a pane of frosted glass. That was very strange.

Every single cipher he had cracked and every book he had read over the past year...

As long as he had looked at them, they were imprinted in his mind, accurate down to the exact wording, punctuation, and printing flaws.

Erudition had illuminated every bookshelf in that mental library, allowing him to pull them down with a casual reach.

So why was he unable to pull down some of the things he had read in his previous life? Why couldn’t he retrieve them?

Richard wanted to make a more precise prophecy.

The moment this thought surfaced, the ether field inside the entire room solidified.

Outside the window, the faint wind was still blowing and the sycamore leaves were still rustling, but as those sounds reached his ears, a layer between them had vanished.

Something was very slowly shifting a sliver of its attention toward him.

It hadn’t even woken up.

It had merely shifted in its sleep, turning over because someone had recited something that was not meant to be recited.

In that split second, the full activation of Inner Awakening allowed Richard to process his current situation.

First, the entity casting this gaze was not the one from across the sea, and it certainly was not the lord of the hunt.

Both of those figures had names. This one did not—or rather, its name could not be spoken, for to speak it was to summon it.

It had no interest in him personally. Its only interest lay in the fact that someone was trying to foresee what would happen next.