I Loaded the Occult Panel

His consciousness drifting up from deep water, Richard slowly opened his eyes.

A white plaster ceiling. Near the corner ran a single, impossibly long, narrow crack.

He stared at the crack for ten seconds. His mind was entirely empty, like a freshly booted computer that hadn’t finished loading its software.

Then the memories began to flood in.

One set belonged to Earth: taking a shared bike home meant hitting an uphill slope, and he always had to get off and push on the steepest stretch.

His health had been terrible. Doctors diagnosed him with a congenital weakness; colds and fevers were a routine part of life, and his roommates regularly called him a weakling.

After work, he used to immerse himself in folklore forums, scrolling through half-true, half-faked field research posts.

He knew regional witchcraft traditions, folk channeling rituals, and shamanic cultures like the back of his hand.

He had written a few amateurish research articles and was actually somewhat well-known within the scene.

The other set belonged here: the Briston winter, cobblestone streets, and the smell of pipe tobacco in his father’s study.In the memories of the teenager named Richard Williams, his mother’s family had hosted a gathering in the Imperial Capital about ten days ago.

The Williams family had made a rare trip to attend. The cost of the round-trip train tickets had made his father ache for quite a while.

His mother had insisted on going, saying his grandfather had specifically asked for them.

At the gathering, his cousin pulled him aside, fished a small object out of his pocket, and handed it over.

”A gift. I hear it’s an antique from the Eastern Continent. Just something to wear for fun.”

It was a copper pendant the size of a thumb, dotted with verdigris and engraved with incomprehensible symbols on the front.

The original Richard found it interesting, so he hung it around his neck.

From that day on, his health worsened with each passing day.

At first, it was just fatigue—a constant feeling of never getting enough sleep.

Later, his hands and feet grew freezing cold, and no amount of time by the fire could warm them up.

On the fifth day, he started coughing and developed a low-grade fever.

His mother brewed ginger soup and called the neighborhood doctor, who diagnosed a common cold and prescribed a few doses of medicine.

But after taking the medicine, his fever spiked in the middle of the night, and he never woke up again.

The memories collided here, seeping into one another like wet clay, blending together.

The boundaries grew blurrier until they finally merged into a single person.

Richard quickly accepted the situation.

He was alive, and this was another world. The first order of business was to figure out his circumstances.

He turned his head to look out the window.

A dense cluster of over a dozen chimneys stood on the rooftops across the street, each belching a pillar of dark gray smoke into the sky.

A massive machine was operating in the distance, sending a low-frequency vibration through the foundation and into the room.

This was Briston. Richard rolled the name over in his mind.

Briston was a manufacturing city in the Northern Industrial Zone of the Albion Empire on the Western Continent, with a population of around two hundred thousand.

To map it to concepts from his previous life, the civilian technology was roughly pre-World War II, except this world had a few... other things.

Just as he bent down to fish for his socks under the bed, an information panel floated at the edge of his vision:

[Body]Breathing Level: —

Experience: — / —

Sleep Level: —

Experience: — / —

Walking Level: —

Experience: — / —

Eating Level —

Experience: — / —

[Mind]

Learning Level —

Experience: — / —

Speculation Level —

Experience: — / —

Perception Level —

Experience: — / —

[Spirit]: Locked

Sure enough, he had a cheat.

Richard excitedly began to explore it.

The branches under the Body and Mind categories were clearly visible, but his consciousness bounced back the moment he touched them, as if they hadn’t been activated yet.

The Spirit category only showed a blurry lock symbol. He tried touching the lock with his mind, but there was no reaction.

He poked it a second time, and another line of even smaller text surfaced beneath the lock:

[This door shall open when all four aspects of the Body are unlocked.]

The condition was perfectly clear: the Spirit category would only open once he fully unlocked Breathing, sleep, walking, and eating under the Body tab.

As for what exactly was inside the Spirit tab... He pulled his attention back and decided not to think about it for now.

[Available Points: 0]

He had absolutely nothing to work with. The feeling was a bit frustrating.

His gaze swept over the bedside table, where the pendant sat.

His mother had probably taken it off and left it there while caring for him during his fever.

Richard picked it up, planning to seal it away and find a place to throw it out later.

But the instant his fingertips brushed the copper surface, the panel shifted.

[Available Points: 0.1]

He froze.

It had been zero just a moment ago, but now it was 0.1.

His fingers didn’t let go, and the number kept climbing.

0.45... 0.63... 0.71... Something was seeping out of the pendant.

Richard flipped the pendant over, rolling it between his fingers.

0.82... 0.91...

A final wisp of energy bled from the copper face, so thin it was barely perceptible.

[Available Points: 1]

The number stopped.

Richard rested the pendant in his palm and waited a while longer, but the number didn’t increase any further.

Wearing this thing had made him weaker by the day, eventually killing him during that fever.

Richard set the pendant back on the nightstand.

Did his cousin Vincent know there was a problem with this thing?

He wouldn’t jump to conclusions just yet, but he needed to keep it in mind.

He looked back at the panel: [Available Points: 1].

He tried focusing his attention on the various branches of Body and Mind.

He could invest the point into any of them, but with only one, he had to pick a single option.

He ran through the choices in his head.

The three options under Mind—Learning, Speculation, and Perception—were all useful.

But they shared a common trait: they all required active behavior to accumulate experience.

He had to read to increase Learning, think to increase Speculation, and observe to increase Perception.

Efficiency would depend on how much energy he invested, and his energy was limited by his body.

To put it bluntly, his body’s current state was like a cracked jar.

He had to fix the jar before filling it. That meant looking at the Body category. With sleep, he would be unconscious; it offered the weakest physical sensation, and he could only sleep ten hours a day at most. With walking, the exertion cost energy, and this body would end up gasping for air just from moving a little too fast. As for eating, it was limited by their food supply, and given this family’s situation...

He remembered his mother’s subconscious calculations every time she cooked:

how many more days this block of butter could be stretched, or whether the meat broth could be watered down and reheated for another meal.

Hoping to eat well was clearly out of the question.

Breathing: It happened every single moment. It required no active intervention, consumed no extra energy, and didn’t rely on external resources.

Logically, it wasn’t even a choice.

He focused on the word ’Breathing’ and gave it a gentle mental push.

A line of text floated up: [Confirm?]

Richard thought for about half a second before pressing down on it.

The grayed-out text faded much faster than he’d expected.

[Breathing] Lv.1 Experience: 0/200

At first, a faint heat blossomed deep within his chest, as if a narrow pipe inside had been gently unclogged.

Richard subconsciously took a breath.

In this industrial age, the city’s air was choked with soot, sulfur, iron rust, and furnace ash.

More than half the adults here suffered from respiratory issues. The lucky ones coughed through autumn and winter, while the less fortunate carried the affliction for a lifetime until the day they died.

His own lungs had grown up marinating in this smog. It had always felt like a wad of damp cotton was permanently lodged in his chest, to the point where he’d long forgotten it wasn’t normal.

But after adding the point, he felt for the very first time that breathing was an exquisitely wonderful thing.

He glanced at the numbers:

[Breathing] Lv.1 Experience: 1/200

It had gone up by one point. The change was as subtle as blood flowing through capillaries, but it was moving.

He ran a quick estimate in his head:

A normal breathing rate was roughly fifteen breaths per minute. That was nine hundred times an hour, and over twenty thousand times a day.

At this rate, he’d probably max out the experience bar in about two weeks.

He found himself looking forward to seeing what changes would occur once it was full.

Tucking the thought into the back of his mind, Richard pulled on his other sock and got up to find a shirt.

The smell of toasted bread drifted all the way up from downstairs.

Once dressed, he carefully inspected himself in the wardrobe mirror.

The person in the reflection had brown hair and gray eyes, with slightly prominent cheekbones and collarbones.

The shirt hung loosely on his frame, and the sleeves had to be rolled up twice just to keep from swallowing his fingers.

Another scrawny weakling.

Adjusting his collar with that thought in mind, he pushed the door open and headed downstairs.

The dining room wasn’t large, but it was kept spotless.

His father, Rogers, was already seated at the table.

He was sipping black tea while reading a copy of the Briston Post.

”You’re up.” His father turned a page of the newspaper by way of greeting.

”Yeah,” Richard said, taking a seat.

”Does your throat still hurt?”

”Not anymore.”

”Be careful at school today. Stay out of the wind.”

”Got it.”

His mother’s voice drifted out from the kitchen. ”Richard, how many slices of bread can you eat today?”

”Two is enough.”

”How is two enough? Look how skinny you are,” his mother scolded lightly. ”I’m making you an egg.”

When his mother, Margaret, walked out of the kitchen with a plate, Richard glanced at her.

She had delicate features and pale skin.

Her footsteps were light and slow, and she occasionally pressed a hand to her chest without realizing it.

The old ailment of poor breathing lent her a fragile sort of beauty.

The fragments pieced together from his memory weren’t many:

His mother was born into the Ashford family in the Imperial Capital, but her status there didn’t seem very high.

Whenever her father’s family was mentioned, her tone was always indifferent.

His sister, Evelyn, was the last to come downstairs.

Her hair was slightly messy, a bow only half-tied while the other side drooped loosely.

Evelyn was a year younger than him, sharing his brown hair and gray eyes.

She had inherited their mother’s good looks, and the vitality of a fifteen-year-old made that beauty burst with lively energy.

Richard, on the other hand, had inherited the other side of their mother—a frail constitution that couldn’t even withstand a breeze.

”Sit down,” his father said, still not looking up.

Evelyn glanced at Richard, looking a bit confused.

She noticed that her brother seemed a little different today.

Their mother brought the food out and set the table:

Toast and butter, a small dish of marmalade, two cups of tea, and the extra egg prepared just for Richard.

Looking at the egg meant only for him, Richard sighed softly. The family’s financial situation was far from optimistic.

His father set the newspaper down. ”Greenwood’s tuition this year is twenty percent higher than last year.”

Instead of ducking his head and pretending he didn’t hear like he used to, Richard spoke up. ”I’ve been thinking about finding a part-time job.”

At that, even Evelyn looked up at him.

”What kind of part-time job?”

”I’m still looking,” Richard said. ”The library might have an assistant position, or I could transcribe things. It shouldn’t interfere with my classes.”

His father frowned. ”Get your grades up first. We’ll talk about a part-time job later.”

Evelyn stirred her tea with a spoon and mumbled, ”I could also...”

”You focus on your classes.”

The girl hunched her shoulders, lowered her head, and focused entirely on her slice of bread.