I Loaded the Occult Panel

The priest had already read to the second page.

Richard turned to leave, but the old woman hurried after him.

She was holding a small tin pot in both hands, its lid clamped tight.

The pot was still hot; he could feel the heat even through two layers of cloth.

”New fire for you,” she said, offering the pot.

”The circle up on the slope is for the village. We won’t feel at ease unless you have a fire burning on the shore when you head over.”

Richard took it with both hands.

The old woman said.

”Remember, don’t open it until you get there.”

She wiped her hands on her apron and took a step back.”If there are only ashes left at the bottom when you open it, dump them out and turn right back around.”

”Whatever you do, don’t try to light it yourself.”

MacFie was already waiting at the mouth of the sheep trail.

He carried a hurricane lamp wrapped in black paper, its wick twisted down to the absolute minimum.

As the two men headed down, the wind whipped in from the sea. Fifty paces out, the thumping of laundry mallets on the slope was entirely swallowed by the gale.

They stopped at the tide line.

”Where you’re going now is actually the landing point.”

”Tonight, the procession will be awakened by their names, marching toward the landing point one after another.”

”When they arrive, someone needs to keep the door open for them.”

”Those who have gone to sleep are the new anchors for this cycle.”

”I’ll have to trouble you tonight. My Rank is far too bright on the other side of the veil.”

”If a Major Adept stands at the landing point, the ones queueing up won’t be the only things that come.”

”If that happened, I’d have to fight a battle first, and by the time I finished, it’d already be dawn.”

Richard looked down at the still-warm tin pot in his arms.

It was fine. Ferrying was the inherent duty of the mask in his possession anyway.

”Remember, you are only acting as the door,” MacFie reminded him again, still uneasy.

”What do you mean?”

”When they walk over on their own, you hold it open.”

”But if you reach out to pull them, that door will swing open both ways.”

”When that happens and they start squeezing their way through to this side, you won’t be able to stop them.”

”I know.”

”Also, your Inspiration is high, making it easy to miss your footing.”

”If you slip, you’ll slide right into the Deep Realm. Be careful.”

The white-haired giant lifted his chin toward the sea.

”Return to shore before dawn. Every extra second you spend over there makes it more dangerous.”

”Do you have any safety measures in place?” Richard asked hesitantly.

MacFie hoisted the hurricane lamp.

”If something really happens to you, I’ll know on this side.”

”How will you know?”

”You don’t need to worry about that.”

The response was so blunt that Richard couldn’t find it in himself to ask further.

The descent point was south of the tide line, where a ship’s skeleton lay half-buried.

The wood was a glossy black. Having been soaked in the seawater for so long, even the insects couldn’t be bothered to gnaw on it.

MacFie explained, ”This was a shipwreck from 1814. Out of forty-one people on board, only nineteen were fished out.”

”This stretch is already a branch of the Drowning Line.”

”Three hundred years of sunken ships line up bow to stern here. The veil in this place wore down to the thickness of paper a long time ago.”

”It’s thinnest right here by the ship’s skeleton, which will make it easier for you to descend.”

MacFie took the pot and, after some preparation, set the tin vessel upright on the shore.

”I’ve already set the fire up for you. Once you’re behind the veil, just look back and you’ll see the fire on the shore. You won’t lose your way.”

”If the fire goes out while you’re halfway there...” MacFie paused in thought.

”Then don’t bother coming back. Just find a rock to sit on over there and wait until dawn.”

Catherine scribbled a line in her notebook and held it up: ’He’s joking.’

”...I’m not joking.”

The red-haired girl looked a little embarrassed and crossed the line out.

MacFie crouched down, tracing his finger against the frozen soil.

”After you go in, don’t trust the year beneath your feet too much.”

”The shoreline here consists of over a dozen layers of earth pressed together. Whichever year the tide rolls into is the year you’ll be standing on.”

”Also, keep the sound of the laundry mallets behind you and to your left at all times.”

He lifted his chin.

The long wooden board up on the slope was still thumping, the rhythmic beats answering one another in a call and response.

Richard patted the canvas bag on his back.

The Condensed Mirror Method activated. Once his ether fluctuations were suppressed, the only sound left in his ears was the rush of his own blood; the crashing waves seemed to recede far into the distance.

On his third cycle of holding his breath, he pushed ether from his Seat of the Sun toward the ship’s skeleton.

He halved the force of his push, remembering the lesson of his first descent at Highland Summer Lodge perfectly well.

Captain Field had said his Inspiration was on the high side, making it easy to sink into quicksand with a single misstep.

The ribs of the ship resting on the sand flipped over in his vision.

Richard lifted his foot and stepped over.

MacFie checked his watch, then hurried back to attend to his own tasks.

...

After the ritual was initiated, a string of bell chimes suddenly rang out on the coastal cliff road.

A bicycle slowly edged its way along the cliffside.

The rider was an old man with the white armband of the Coastal Defense Volunteer Force strapped to his sleeve.

He was here to inspect and enforce the blackout, preventing enemy submarines in the distance from spotting any light.

The old man leaned his bike against the base of a wall and fished a notebook out of his coat.

The doors of all seventeen households in the village were left ajar. The fires of every family had just been brought back from the slope not long ago; they were all safely contained within their stoves, emitting barely any light.

”Strange.”

The old man muttered to himself, ”Where did everybody go?”

He began checking them, household by household.

His main focus was the western windows, the ones facing the sea directly.

By the time the old woman came up from the slope, he had already reached the ninth house.

The old man didn’t even raise his head. ”Good evening. Just doing a routine inspection.”

”Where did everyone go?”

”Down the slope.”

”What are they doing down the slope?”

”Beating laundry.”

The old man let out an ”oh,” finding nothing suspicious about that.

Beating laundry required several people anyway, and with the village lacking entertainment, it was common for everyone to gather around to watch.

He continued his inspection, casting his gaze over the wisps of smoke slowly drifting out from the seventeen roof ridges.

The old man frowned, standing there lost in thought.

”The higher-ups’ regulations specify ’light sources visible from the sea’...”

”Smoke doesn’t count as light.”

He flipped his notebook to a fresh page.

”I’ve passed through forty-one villages coming up from the south on this patrol.”

”Some just pull their curtains shut and call it a day, but the moment the wind lifts the fabric, it’s as bright as a night market inside. I was over there urging them to fix it last week.”

As he spoke, he gave the old woman in front of him a thumbs-up.

”Your village does a great job blacking out the windows. You’re practically a model village.”

”I’ll report you to the district next month. They might even give you a mention in the district paper.”

”Then we’ll have to thank you for the trouble.”

The old man straightened his bicycle and hopped on, giving the bell a single ring.

The Acetylene Lamp wobbled twice across the road as he pedaled away along the cliff edge.

The old woman stood at her doorway, watching until that speck of light turned the corner and disappeared.

The village’s tradition of shuttering the western windows predated any anti-submarine regulations by several hundred years.

...

On this side of the veil, the sea was still there, but its color had changed.

There was no moon or stars overhead. Light seeped up from beneath the water, casting the entire mudflat in the sickly, livid gray of a dead man’s fingernails.

Just as Richard was about to head west, a jellyfish drifted past his feet.

With bells the size of washbasins, they traveled in swarms, clinging to the surface of the water.

They emitted no light of their own; instead, they seemed to devour it. Wherever they passed, the water grew noticeably darker than the surrounding areas.

Thinking about it, the things he and Edmund had encountered on land that night in Whitcom were called Drop-Attracting Fire.

That type of lower-level evil creature specifically targeted lone living humans.

Yet these bobbing things in the sea showed no interest in a living, breathing human like him.

He reined in his Still Water and detoured around them.

Further in, a layer of white encrusted the tide line.

At first, he assumed it was sea salt.

Only when he got closer did he realize they were crystalline formations—salty, scalding hot, and actively bubbling with steam.

According to the materials he’d reviewed before coming, these were likely the tears shed by the people who had stood on the shore seeing the ships off.

Dropping into the sea behind the veil, they solidified into tear crystals.

If he gathered enough of them, they could probably be sold for a decent sum, but unfortunately, Richard didn’t have the time tonight.

A massive patch of black moss grew within the crevices of the reef, its eyes even smaller and more densely packed than those on land.

This was a marine subspecies of the multi-eyed black fern. As he walked past, every single eye swiveled in his direction.

Richard casually sliced off a few stalks and stored them in the deepest compartment of his Frost Branch Box.

The water was already rising. While low tide in the material world wouldn’t hit until eleven-forty, the water on this side was already surging back to swallow the shore.

The exposed rocky spine of the island out there was being submerged section by section, starting from its midpoint.

The rocky ridge abruptly cut off three hundred meters ahead, marking the first temporal stratification behind the veil.

When Richard reached it, he could finally see it clearly: the sea had simply stopped there, and the ground was completely frozen.

He stepped across it. The soles of his boots crunched through a thin crust, sinking into the black mud beneath.

Water pooled at the bottom of the pits, so black it was reflective.

Here lay a dense grid of old-fashioned ridged fields. The locals called them feannagan (lazy beds).

As the name implied, by layering seaweed and manure, they could build up mounds of earth for planting potatoes.

On the material side, these ridges had long since been smoothed over by heather, left unturned for a century.

But on this side of the veil, they were completely new.

Even stranger was the sea.

The sea pressed down over the ridged fields, yet simultaneously existed beneath them.

The patch of ground ten paces ahead was both the ocean and a freshly tilled plot from 1846 waiting to be sown.

Two different temporal strata were eerily overlapping in the exact same space.

Richard stood there for a long time before suddenly understanding the professor’s warning: ”Don’t trust the year beneath your feet.”

The topmost layer of this path was this year’s sea.

Crushed beneath it was an era of cleared lands, burned houses, and starvation.

And further down lay something even older, so ancient he shouldn’t even dare to look at it.

Chronologically speaking, the field and the sea were two layers of the same event.

First, the land was cleared. The people were herded onto ships, and those ships sank in the west. After they sank, they drifted back along this exact line.

Richard lifted his foot and took half a step forward.

Half a step down, the hunger surged up. It was the kind of starvation that hollowed a person out from the marrow of their bones, a hunger so extreme one would be willing to stuff their own hands into their mouths.

It was the hunger of someone who had starved for seven straight weeks.

In the first week, they still thought they could hold on. By the third week, they began eating the seed potatoes saved for planting.

By the seventh week, they no longer wanted to move, merely lying in the furrows staring up at the sky.

Richard initiated his breathing method.

Since [eating] had reached Lv.4, protein, fat, carbohydrates, and minerals were all reporting for duty in his stomach, lining up one by one.

He had polished off half a table’s worth of food last night and eaten two bowls of porridge this morning. His body wasn’t lacking anything right now.

Not a single thing.

”...This isn’t my hunger.”

The moment he silently reaffirmed that thought, the starving sensation could no longer stick around.

It retreated from his stomach, withdrawing back into the furrow beneath his feet.

Richard stumbled back two steps, retreating onto the yellowish-brown grass, and leaned on his knees as he panted for a moment.

[Erudition] flipped open the relevant information in his mind.

This was likely féar gortach, hungry grass.

It specifically grew in places where people had collapsed from starvation. Anyone who stepped on it would suffer that same marrow-draining hunger.

Richard sighed.

”This place really carved the tragedy of not getting a share of food straight into the soil.”

The ridges naturally gave him no answer. They were still starving.

Richard thought for a moment. The two small wings at his ankles stood erect, lifting him entirely off the ground.

Then he took another half-step over that patch of green grass, and the exact same hunger surged back up.

Richard immediately pulled his foot back.

”...How can this be?”

That patch of grass wasn’t poisoned. It was simply a faithful record of the Great Famine of 1846.

”Then I’ll just have to go around it.”

He summoned his shadow, which had been standing by beneath him.

”Black dog.”

As the name fell upon it, the center of gravity for the black mass shifted forward, and its featureless head drooped down.

The Perception that had previously spread out like a net condensed into a single line, pointing straight ahead.

”We’re going around.”

”You don’t need to scout for traps,” Richard said.

”Just find the way for me.”

”Walk wherever the ground still belongs to this year.”

The shadow moved out, clinging to the ground.

It walked in a very bizarre manner. First, it veered seven or eight steps to the left, bypassing a patch of grass that looked completely unremarkable.

Then it doubled back and followed an old ditch for twenty-odd paces before abruptly cutting sharply to the right.

Richard followed behind, walking a ridiculously convoluted path that seemed to make no logical sense.

Following his shadow, he suddenly found the whole scene a little strange.

He felt like a hunter out for a stroll with his hound.

The shadow had already doubled back and now stood motionless, two paces away from him.

Richard knew what this meant. He fished out a small chunk of low-grade scrap material and tossed it over.

The shadow’s tentacles whipped out, snatching the scrap and sucking on it with loud, frantic slurps.

Sitting on the ridge, Richard watched it and suddenly let out a laugh.

He knew laughing out loud wasn’t entirely appropriate in a place like this, but he honestly couldn’t help it.

”Keep going once you finish eating.”

The shadow gnawed the scrap clean, retracted its tentacles one by one, and began shuffling forward again.

Nothing else went wrong for the rest of the journey.

It wasn’t until the sound of the sea echoed from the other side of the frozen bog that he finally glanced back.

The hundreds of grass plots were still lying there, every single grid perfectly level and neat.

Both the thumping of the laundry mallets and that beacon of fire remained behind him and to his left.

Once he crossed the field ridges, the mudflat was fully exposed.

Standing right in the middle of the mudflat was a pony.

It was glossy black all over. Its wet mane clung to its neck in distinct clumps, still dripping with water.

It stood sideways, its back to the sea, completely devoid of any saddle or tackle.