I Loaded the Occult Panel

By the time dinner rolled around, Margaret had taken out the salted meat for tomorrow and brought in two small cabbages from the backyard.

Evelyn stood at the stove, stirring a pot and giving orders:

”Mom, don’t add so much water.”

”The broth needs to be thick.”

”But you hardly put any meat in. If it boils down, it’ll be too salty.”

”Now you’re the one bossing me around.”

Evelyn held up her wooden spoon. ”I’m a professional. I’m taking my entrance exams next month.”

When the food was set on the table, Richard counted the dishes.

Salted meat, cabbage, a plate of potatoes, and a small dish of some unknown dark sauce.

He pointed at the sauce. ”What’s this?”Evelyn looked at him expectantly. ”Take a little taste and you’ll know.”

Richard scooped up a small dab. It was sweet with a hint of coolness and the aroma of mint.

”Honey and mint.” The girl planted her hands on her hips.

”A whole swarm of bees somehow landed on our plum tree. I chased them for blocks, banging on a cake tin!”

”Banging a cake tin?”

”If I didn’t, they would have flown away.”

His mother chimed in. ”When she came back that day, her nose was swollen like a plum. The neighbors thought she’d been out fighting.”

Evelyn didn’t seem to mind. ”I was fighting.”

”And I won!” she said cheerfully.

Richard laughed so hard he nearly choked on a potato.

After dinner, their father went upstairs to draw those railway bridge structural blueprints.

Evelyn also hugged her notebook and went upstairs.

Reaching the top of the stairs, she leaned halfway back over the railing. ”Brother, you have to come with me to check the beehives tomorrow.”

”Sure.”

Only mother and son were left in the kitchen.

Margaret dried a bowl, put it back on the rack, and sat down across the table. ”Where did you go on this trip?”

Richard didn’t go into too much detail. ”I went with the professor to a village in the northern Highlands to help them repair an old seal.”

”Is it fixed?”

”Of course it’s fixed.”

Sitting across from his mother, Richard silently circulated the Condensed Mirror Method, spreading out Still Water.

His mother’s hands were much thinner than they had been a couple of years ago, her knuckles protruding prominently. Then there were those residual circuits idling pointlessly within her body.

The darkened areas of the circuits connected to her lungs, causing a chronic, dull pain to seep out with every breath, though it was slightly better than the last time he had looked.

The massages Aunt Isabella gave whenever she ”passed by,” combined with the medicine in the tin bottle, at least kept his mother’s condition from deteriorating further.

But preventing deterioration was all it did. He had been saving up for Gushing Spring for nearly three months, and he was just a sliver away from being able to use it.

”What’s wrong?” Margaret asked.

Richard shook his head. ”Nothing. I was just thinking your complexion looks even better than it did around Christmas.”

”I still have half a bottle of Isabella’s medicine left, and she mailed another one last month.”

His mother suddenly looked at him. ”By the way, did you get into any trouble with anyone in the Imperial Capital?”

Richard rubbed his hands against his knees. ”A little.”

”How much trouble?”

”Not a small amount... but Grandpa knows about it, and so does the professor.”

Margaret nodded, not pressing for details. ”As long as you know what you’re doing.”

Richard sat in the kitchen with his mother for a little while longer before heading upstairs to his own room.

He tidied his desk, then took out the Sacred Ibis Bronze Paperweight and the Small Bronze Balance.

Ever since that night at the Black Trench, these two supernatural items had been in his hands, accompanying him for a year.

He decided to look at the pendant first.

This was the item dug out of the water horse’s stomach. He hadn’t even looked at it closely, just shoved it straight into his bag.

The silver quality of the pendant was poor, and verdigris was seeping into it.

Richard pressed his palm against it to absorb the points.

[Available Points: 2.63... 2.71... 2.76.]

Just as Professor McPhee had said, it stopped very quickly.

There were no mystical side structures on this pendant, and leaving ether in it wouldn’t offer any protection, so he simply drained it completely before letting the Sacred Ibis examine it.

The long beak tilted toward the pendant, and as Richard applied his Inspiration, it began to keep a tally.

First, it read out a name and the year 1889. Going further down, its origin was an ordinary commemorative baptismal pendant from a church.

A parish would distribute dozens of them a year; once they were gone, they were gone.

Richard used the balance to weigh it, capturing a few fleeting images.

When this pendant fell in, the person wearing it was still on a boat, or perhaps on the shore. Either way, they definitely weren’t anywhere near the pendant itself.

The balance couldn’t weigh what happened afterward; it could only weigh the final scene.

He thought for a moment, then wrapped the pendant securely in a soft cloth.

Next was the glass bead.

Yesterday, he had just assumed it was a trade bead from the Viking Age.

In that era, the northerners had plundered their way down. Even when they weren’t plundering, glass beads were the most reliable hard currency. A single glass bead could be traded for half a sheep.

It wasn’t too surprising for something like this to fall into the hands of an ascetic monk.

But looking at it now, he realized the brightness of the ether inside the glass bead didn’t quite match a simple trade bead.

The long beak of the Sacred Ibis tilted over.

Its place of origin emerged first: the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. It dated back two hundred years earlier than the arrival of the Vikings.

Richard had more or less guessed this. Next came its circulation history.

Richard’s eyebrows twitched. He realized this bead had passed through so many hands that the Sacred Ibis took a long time to finish tallying them all.

Merchant ships, bazaars, the rucksack of a traveler who died on the road, a division of family property, or the price paid for a life.

Then it arrived on this island.

Once on the island, that long chain of circulation came to a complete halt.

Richard nudged the balance over. This time, the left pan dropped incredibly slowly. He almost thought it was going to freeze in midair.

What it weighed wasn’t a price or a year, but a count.

The people who twirled this bead between their fingers had changed generation after generation, but the gesture had never changed.

Every evening, the ascetic monk who carried a portion of food out the door to a guest would first twirl the bead between his fingers. One twirl meant one portion.

He leaned back in his chair, realizing that the ascetic monks had treated this bead as a counter. For 1,100 years, once a day.

This bead had been counting the whole time, counting until the last ascetic monk died in the stone hut and fell into the dust, never to be twirled by anyone again.

Because of this, the deep blue glass bead took slightly longer to absorb points from, though not by much.

[Available Points: 2.76 → 2.97.]

Finally came the ascetic monk’s stone bowl. Over those 1,100 years, this stone bowl had held barley cakes and barley porridge, and in the hardest years, raw barley grains.

He flipped the stone bowl over and aligned the carving on the rim with the light of the desk lamp. There were three letter spaces here.

He had already seen those three spaces back on the island.

He hadn’t been able to read them at all at the time. It wasn’t until McPhee spent two days manually teaching him how to trace Ogham script along the stone hut’s doorframe that he slowly started to figure it out.

Richard closed his eyes and felt it slowly. The edge was the boundary, and the boundary was exactly where he was supposed to be.

His fingertips slid upward, finding the first letter space. This stroke cut horizontally across the ridgeline. ”Ailm, fir, the letter A.”

The two strokes of the second space also cut horizontally. ”Onn, gorse, the letter O.”

The five strokes of the third space were entirely on the left. ”Nion, ash, the letter N.”

”A—O—N.”

Richard opened his eyes, slowly spelling it out.

Aon, one of the simplest words in Old gaelic, meaning ”one.”

The person who carved it had only cut three letters into the edge, stopping there and writing no more.

Richard pressed his palm against it. The deposited ether was thick and uniform, completely devoid of any abnormal structures, much like the oil at the bottom of an aged pot.

[Available Points: 2.97... 3.31... 3.74...]

This time, he stopped when only about five percent remained.

[Available Points: 3.81.]

Having finished processing all three supernatural items, Richard packed everything away into the hidden compartment under his bed, ensuring the bead and the pendant were wrapped separately.

Only then did he sit back down at his desk and look over the entire panel from top to bottom.

[Body]

Breathing Lv.5 eating Lv.4 sleep Lv.4 walking Lv.4

[Mind]

Learning Lv.4

Speculation Lv.4

Perception Lv.5

After reviewing the panel, he felt a bit dazed himself.

At this time last year, he hadn’t even completed his Signature, and several attributes on his panel were still stuck at Lv.2 and Lv.3.

Now, two of the seven attributes had crossed Level 5, and the rest had uniformly reached Level 4.

Especially [Learning]; that column currently had the highest progress among his Lv.4 skills.

Over the past six months, copying books, deciphering texts, making rubbings, studying Ogham—he had fed progress into it item by item, and the progress bar had unknowingly crossed the halfway mark.

Richard focused his attention on the [Breathing Lv.5] column.

With his points exceeding 3, a sudden thought struck him.

He figured that since he had already reached Lv.5, what about Lv.7 next?

According to his own calculations, Lv.3 required 1 point, Lv.5 required 2 points, so Lv.7 should require around 3 points.

He had nearly 4 points on hand, which should be completely sufficient.

He wondered if he could preview it.

[Conditions not met.]

[Required Available Points: 5]

[Current Available Points insufficient. Cannot preview.]

Richard furrowed his brow. He clicked on [Perception], only to find the exact same thing.

[Conditions not met. Required Available Points: 5]

Advancing to Lv.7 required 5 points, not 3 points.

Richard leaned back in his chair, feeling somewhat deflated.

A point progression of 1, 2, 5 was neither an arithmetic nor a geometric sequence. Clearly, Lv.7 had an additional threshold.

An extra line of prompt also appeared at the bottom of the panel:

[Prompt: When all seven attributes reach Lv.7, ”Spirit” will unlock a new function once more.]

Seeing this line, Richard’s slight disappointment faded away entirely.

Five points meant that Lv.7 was a major watershed.

He began to calculate his point accumulation speed: a proper supernatural item yielded about 0.3 to 0.8 points, while slightly better ones might yield just over 1 point.

But things you couldn’t hope to stumble across easily, like the Sphinx Lamp or fragments of a Virtuoso’s signature artifact, could provide anywhere from 1.5 to 3 points.

He did the math on how long it would take to gather 5 points.

Even factoring in the points he would inevitably spend along the way, two years or so should logically be more than enough.

By the time he actually gathered 5 points again, his Breathing would probably be close to 100% of Lv.6.

Two years, he felt, should be enough time for him to reach the threshold of a Minor Adept.

By then, he would be able to utilize Donner’s shop and the channels on Flower Moon Street.

As for that table at the Theogony Salon, nearly half the people there owed him a favor.

Clement’s line had been cut, but the gates to the Imperial Capital were now completely open to him.

The supernatural items he would have access to once he broke through to Minor Adept would be on a completely different level than what he could access now.

Perhaps, once he advanced to Minor Adept, 5 points wouldn’t be considered much at all.

Reaching Lv.7 roughly equaled a Minor Adept. So what if he pushed all seven skills to Lv.7?

[Spirit] would unlock yet again. Perhaps, by then, he would be able to touch the threshold of a Major Adept?

Thinking of this, he smiled to himself. It was still a bit too far off to be thinking about such things now.

Richard started considering his next goal: getting all four of the [Body] attributes to Lv.5.

[Breathing] had already reached it. The remaining three required 2 points each, adding up to 6 points total.

As for the unlock conditions, the requirement for [sleep] had been fulfilled back in April.

”During a single sleep, naturally have a dream that is later proven to be real.”

That night, he had dreamt of his grandfather turning around at the back of the line, making the gesture of yielding the hunting ground to him.

Though he had ended up dragging him back down later, it was undoubtedly a Precognitive Dream.

The requirement for [walking] was: ”Evade pursuit by someone of a higher Rank than yourself.”

During that chaotic battle in Flanders on April 30th, he had extricated himself from the mirror reflections of the Black Earth River Master, completing it alongside the requirement for [Perception].

The most troublesome one was still [eating]: ”Actively ingest a product from behind the veil and completely metabolize it.”

It was the classic chicken-and-egg problem. Without [Decay Digestion], he didn’t dare eat, but without eating, he couldn’t unlock [Decay Digestion].

This matter still required careful long-term planning.

Richard opened the Frost Branch box. Inside rested a few segments of black moss he had harvested from the sea behind the veil a few days ago.

This submarine subspecies of Multi-Eyed Black Moss had eyes that were smaller and denser than its terrestrial counterpart, and both its toxicity and its effects were comparatively weaker.

If he backed it up with his Lv.4 [Filtration]... Richard felt there was no need to rush. He was still a long way from maxing out Lv.4 anyway.

He closed the box and organized his notebooks.

Lying back on his old bed, Richard noticed that the crack on the ceiling was exactly the same as always.

...

June 3rd. The sky was heavily overcast.

According to the conventions of previous years, the graduation paperwork for middle school students shouldn’t be issued until July.

But Evelyn was testing into the Imperial Capital Royal Culinary Academy, going through the technical college channels, and she had to be there by mid-June.

The Royal Culinary Academy required a stamped certificate of completion and a transcript of grades. If either was missing, she wouldn’t be admitted, so they had to come early to sort it out.

When they stepped out the door, Evelyn was still putting up a stubborn front. ”Why are you following me?”

”I’m going with you to do the paperwork.”

”Why do I need you to go with me just to do some paperwork?”

”Fine then, I won’t go.”

”No, you still have to go.” She pulled her brother’s hand.

”You’re just idling around at home anyway.”