I Loaded the Occult Panel

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

When he opened his eyes, the only light in the room was a narrow sliver of a streetlamp leaking through the gap in the curtains.

Richard lifted his head from the pillow and glanced at the nightstand.

10:37 PM.

He remembered turning out the light around 9:20.

A little over an hour.

The entire Theogony Salon—from the moment he opened his eyes among the temple pillars, to Ares bringing out the 3rd Circle Enchanted Bullet, right up to Hecate saying, ”The gathering should come to a close.”

His internal sense of time told him roughly thirty minutes had passed, which wasn’t too wild a discrepancy from the real-world hour and change.

The host likely had to wait until everyone was asleep before pulling them in; a delay of a few dozen minutes was entirely normal.

Richard singled out this piece of information to examine.If they could manipulate the flow of time inside a dream, stretching seconds in reality into hours...

Or conversely, compressing an entire night in reality into mere minutes of a dream—then their capabilities were truly unfathomable.

That would mean they could strip entire spans of time from his life, or forcibly cram them into his mind.

A person whose very time was held in someone else’s grip would have no choice but to be a puppet at their mercy.

But they had not done that.

Dream time and real time were fundamentally equivalent.

Hecate and whatever organization stood behind her were employing a relatively ”natural” dream-linking spell formula.

It simply pulled multiple invited guests into the same dream node so they could meet, converse, and trade.

It had boundaries. It did not manipulate time or rewrite memories.

It was not a ”miracle.”

Richard exhaled slowly.

He had originally assumed that tonight he might brush up against a circle of high-ranking figures with direct access to the depths of the veil.

Now he knew: they were still just people, merely a group temporarily stronger than himself.

And that was enough.

Setting Hecate aside, the strength of the Round Table’s core members was mostly concentrated at the Practitioner Rank.

Minor Adepts might exist among them, though the odds were not high. In theory, special cases like a stingy miser or a prisoner of that Rank could happen, but the probability was low.

At that level of strength, even if a trade fell apart and relations soured, dealing with a Round Table member hunting him down individually would not be impossible.

The only one he truly could not defy was Hecate, along with whoever else might be standing behind her.

He had no way to judge their ceiling right now, but they had no reason to take personal action against him.

If they really wanted to deal with a sixteen-year-old student, they would not need to invite him to the Round Table at all.

They could have simply made the Clay Token detonate the moment it touched his hand.

The fact that they had not done so meant what they wanted was not elimination, but recruitment.

As long as he did not actively cross the line, they would maintain their posture as inviting hosts.

This gave him enough time to grow.

He settled back under the covers and drifted into a deep sleep once more.

The next morning, Evelyn’s voice drifted up from downstairs.

”Richard! Time to get up! If you don’t come down now, the fried eggs are going to overcook!”

Richard checked the clock on the wall.

7:20 AM. He had slept in a little.

He got dressed and went downstairs.

Evelyn stood at the stove with her back to him, frying eggs and humming a tune she had picked up from who-knew-where.

”Do we have cheese today?” Richard asked.

”Yeah.” His sister did not even turn her head. ”Go fetch it from the cellar yourself.”

”Alright.”

Richard went out through the kitchen’s back door to the cellar.

The air down there was piercingly cold. He descended the three steps and reached up to take a clay crock hanging from the wooden shelf.

Richard carried the crock back upstairs to the kitchen.

Evelyn slid a fried egg onto his plate.

”Richard.”

”Hmm?”

”You seem a bit excited today.”

”Do I?”

”Yeah.” His sister tilted her head and gave him a curious look. ”Sleep well?”

”Yeah, I had a dream.”

”What did you dream about?”

Richard wiped his mouth and dipped a piece of bread into his egg yolk.

”I dreamed that you opened a bakery.”

”...What?” Evelyn turned around.

”I dreamed you opened a bakery in the future and hired me as your taste tester.”

”...Are you serious?”

”Dreams don’t lie.” Richard nodded earnestly. ”You better start saving up.”

Evelyn grabbed a burnt bread crust and tossed it onto his plate.

”And did you dream about me throwing bread crusts at you?”

”...”

Richard shook his head, dipped the burnt crust in egg yolk, and took a bite.

The warm yolk and the charred taste of the bread spread across his tongue.

Evelyn sat down across from him, resting her elbows on the table as she quickly demolished her own breakfast.

Sunlight slanted in through the small window, falling across one side of her face.

As Richard ate, Hecate, the temple gathering, the double-snake staff, and the balance whip... all these things were temporarily locked away in another drawer of his mind.

A factory whistle blew in the distance, and the rumble of a milk cart’s wheels echoed down the street.

His mother’s footsteps sounded as she came down the stairs; she looked in even better spirits today than yesterday.

His father had already put on his work clothes and was tying his shoes by the door.

Everything at home was as usual.

..................

After history class the next day, the old man and the young student once again remained behind in the classroom by mutual, unspoken agreement.

Richard observed the expression on the old gentleman’s face and spoke first:

”Mr. Hutton, I have a few questions.”

”Speak.”

”Last night, did you arrange for someone to come over?”

”Indeed, a Minor Adept of the Secret path went over.” Mr. Hutton gathered up the homework notebooks.

”She is a mutual acquaintance of your maternal grandfather and myself. You do not need to know who she is specifically.

After she arrived, she performed a fail-safe ritual for you. Once it was done, she left on her own without alerting anyone in your household.”

The classroom fell quiet for a moment.

Downstairs, students were moving desks, the wooden legs dragging across the floor with a continuous, grating screech.

This time, Mr. Hutton spoke first.

”Richard, do you feel that your maternal grandfather let you down?”

”...No.”

”You feel it in your heart; you just aren’t saying it out loud.”

His gaze landed on Richard’s face and lingered.

”Listen to me: an elder who speaks clearly about the limits of his resources is ten times more helpful to you than an elder who presents himself as omnipotent.”

Richard said nothing.

”Now I will say what I want to say.” Mr. Hutton pulled another sheet of paper from his drawer and set it on the desk.

It was a map of Briston, with seven or eight spots circled in red pencil.

”These are the local nodes I can mobilize within two hours.

A coroner, two elderly priests from the parish, the gatekeeper of the North District funeral parlor, the owner of that antique shop in the south of the city... These people are all Practitioners from the Civilian Guild. Added together, they would not have a problem handling a medium-scale contamination incident.”

”But to deal with something on the level of a Spirit Realm Messenger...” The old gentleman shook his head. ”They aren’t enough.”

”This matter itself has already exceeded the handling radius of our local nodes.”

”That is why the person who came to perform the ritual for you last night was dispatched from a higher tier.

What she did was provide a fail-safe, not a counterattack.

Once her work was finished, she left immediately, leaving behind no traces for the other party to track.”

Mr. Hutton looked at Richard.

”You don’t have a family like Montagu or Grantham behind you—the kind where ringing a bell in the Imperial Capital brings half a company running.”

”You don’t have a tree like that behind you, so don’t try looking for one to lean on.”

The old gentleman spoke these words very slowly.

”People who lean beneath a towering tree are the first to learn how to tilt their heads up.

They tilt their heads to look at the sky someone else has covered, and they tilt their heads to wait for the shade someone else casts.

Until one day, when they stand there on their own and the tree is gone, they find they have even forgotten how to walk.”

”I have seen far too many children like that.”

”Their family backgrounds were better than yours, their resources more plentiful than yours, and their mentors higher in Rank than me.

Yet as they walked, they just stopped. They stopped right beneath that great tree and never took another step forward.”

”And when that tree fell, they fell right along with it.”

Mr. Hutton drew a slow, imaginary circle in the air, framing Richard entirely within it.

”Where you stand right now, there are no trees.”

Richard met his gaze head-on.

”I understand.”

Mr. Hutton did not probe into any details about last night’s dream.

He did not ask who the host was, where the gathering took place, how many people sat at the table, what price Richard had offered, or what he had gained.

He simply offered those words of advice and then stopped.

The old gentleman opened a notebook again and twisted the cap off his red pen.

”School is dismissed. If you have no other business, head home early.”

”Alright.”

..................

Back home, Richard once again shut himself in his room.

He twirled his pencil halfway around his fingers before lowering the point to a blank page.

He drew two lines down the page, dividing it into three columns.

In the leftmost column, he wrote: ”Shareable.”

In the middle column, he wrote: ”Middle Tier.”

In the rightmost column, he wrote: ”Top Secret.”

The ”Shareable” column was the most worthless; handing these things out would not cause him the slightest loss.

The introductory content of Appendix C: the existence of the veil, the three types of breathing techniques, and the concept of ether as an infiltrating substance.

The first passage of On Ascension Within the Veil: the first two levels of the Rank sequence.

The names of the five great traditions.

He wrote these down item by item, finding them more pointless with every stroke of his pencil.

Placing these things on that Round Table would probably yield an effect only slightly better than buying a copy of the Albion Evening Post from a street kiosk.

The three people sitting across from him last night—even the weakest among them—likely knew these topics backward and forward, far better than he did.

After writing in the ”Shareable” column for a short while, his ideas dried up.

His pencil point shifted first to the ”Top Secret” column:

The connections of the Ashford Family; Mr. Hutton’s identity as his guide; the actual school he attended.

As for his very foundation for survival—the Panel skills and the absorption point mechanics—those were at a tier even higher than ”Top Secret.”

He would not even commit those to paper; he only calculated them silently in his mind.

Returning to the middle column, he paused and pondered for a long time.

This ”Middle Tier” section was what he truly needed to fill out.

Things he could trade without exposing his identity.

Things that would make the people at the Round Table feel he had chips to play with, without making Hecate want to turn his life inside out investigating him.

Yet he thought about it for a long while and could not write down a single thing.

Even those supernatural items with residual ether left on them could not possibly be used for trading.

Setting aside whether anyone else would even want them, the supernatural items in his possession were almost all purchased under his real name or gifted by elders, giving them a clear and traceable origin.

If he traded these supernatural items, any buyer who really wanted to investigate could drag his identity into the light in no time.

Something like the Haldane model had already been used once; bringing out the exact same thing a second time would not be worth anything.

On the very first line of that ”Middle Tier” column, he wrote a single note: To Be Added.

Beneath that, he left roughly twenty blank lines.

As he closed the notebook, the clattering of bowls and plates echoed up from downstairs.

Richard went down to the kitchen to help out.

He pulled two plates from the cupboard and scooped up the hash browns his sister had fried one by one.

But half his mind remained upstairs, fixed on the middle column of that notebook in his drawer.

Those twenty blank lines had to be filled.

Not just for the gathering next month, but for the one after that, and the one after that.