I Loaded the Occult Panel

That evening, after the Williams family finished dinner, Father still hadn’t come home from work.

Evelyn finished her homework and rested her head on the dining table for a while before her mother shooed her back to her room to sleep.

She mumbled, ”I’m not tired,” but her feet were already dragging.

Margaret finished the dishes in the kitchen and dried her hands on her apron.

Richard had recently been trying to practice the channeling for Stone Armor.

He was standing at the foot of the stairs, preparing to head up himself, when his mother called out to him.

”Richard, come sit for a moment.”

Her tone was entirely ordinary, no different from asking him to take out the trash.

But Richard noticed she had closed the door to the hallway, and then pulled the kitchen door shut as well.

They sat on the living room sofa. Only a single floor lamp beside the fireplace lit the room.No fire burned in the hearth.

A few unburned stubs of charcoal rested on the grate, dark and squatting like a flock of little Gargoyles.

His mother offered no preamble.

She extended her right hand, palm facing up.

”Give me your hand.”

Richard hesitated for a second before resting his hand on hers.

Her fingertips were as icy as ever; they hadn’t been warm once in over a decade.

When Evelyn was little, she went through a phase of being terrified whenever their mother checked her forehead, dreading the press of those popsicle-cold hands.

But the moment their skin touched, Richard felt something else.

An incredibly faint pulse of ether passed from his mother’s palm.

It was intermittent and erratic, sometimes skipping twice in a row, sometimes pausing for a long time before beating again.

Compared to the steady, warm hum operating in his own chest, it felt like a bellows that had been broken for a long time.

Yet it was definitely moving, and... it was a bit stronger than he had expected.

Margaret was using her residual circuits to sense the state of the ether in her son’s body.

Before his trip to the Imperial Capital, she absolutely could not have done this.

Just maintaining her daily condition pushed those residual circuits to their limit; there was simply no extra ether to spare for probing someone else’s body.

Over the past month, things had been quietly changing.

The night Richard returned from the Imperial Capital, he had handed her a tin vial. She had instantly recognized the daisy on it.

Isabella had loved daisies since she was a little girl.

Back then, in the back garden of the Ashford Residence, she would weave daisies into a crown, wear it on her head, and run into the living room to announce to everyone, ”I am the Daisy Queen.”

Later, Isabella grew up, learned to be self-conscious, and stopped weaving flower crowns. The daisy simply became her personal mark.

That habit hadn’t changed in twenty years.

Margaret didn’t know how much Isabella had told Richard.

But she knew that her younger sister’s willingness to initiate contact with Richard spoke volumes.

After about half a minute, Margaret withdrew her hand.

”The circuits in your body... are much more complete than I thought.”

She placed her hands back on her lap, interlacing her fingers.

The circuits in Richard’s body showed none of the fractures and blockages that scarred her own.

In truth, that was the effect of his Panel skills at work.

Margaret didn’t know this, so she could only attribute the results to extraordinary talent, or simply good luck.

Although she had long suspected as much from her son’s recent behavior, she still breathed a sigh of relief.

”If there was even the slightest sign of circuit damage in you, I wouldn’t be saying any of this today.”

Her gaze fell upon the pile of cold charcoal in the hearth.

”I would have done everything in my power to stop you from going any further. Even if I had to tie you up in Briston, I would have held you back.”

”But you are whole.”

Richard tentatively asked, ”So, Mom, your physical condition...”

”You should already know what the Ashford Family does in the Imperial Capital.”

Margaret cut him off.

”Yeah.”

”Then you probably also know how many resources it takes to cultivate a Practitioner on the mystical side.”

She didn’t wait for Richard to answer before continuing.

”Supernatural items, alchemical materials, the time cost of high-level guides, the right to use ritual grounds, the post-failure remedial fees... When a Practitioner attempts to step into Minor Adept, those expenses multiply several times over.”

”Because rituals can fail. If they fail, the person might not die, but their circuits will almost certainly be destroyed. And once they’re destroyed, the remedial treatment is incredibly expensive.”

”Back then, the entire family placed great hopes in me. I reached that ’threshold’ at twenty-six.

So I rushed to break through to Minor Adept. The ritual failed, and a decade of resources the Ashford House had invested in me was reduced to zero.”

She spoke with breezy indifference, as if the person who had failed wasn’t her at all.

”Your grandfather didn’t get angry.”

His mother gave a small smile.

”You’ve met the man. He never gets angry; anger is the most inefficient emotion.”

”He just sat in his study and asked me, very calmly, ’Do you plan to continue?’”

”I told him no, that I’d definitely die if I tried again.”

Hearing this, Richard finally had to ask,

”Then why were you in such a rush to break through to Minor Adept, Mom? Couldn’t you have prepared a little longer?”

”The Ashford House isn’t actually as dignified as what you saw in the Imperial Capital, especially regarding the desperate need for new blood,”

Margaret explained.

Richard recalled what his grandfather had told him over the phone.

His mother slowed her speech.

”The things you’ve learned from books... Hunter, Secret, Scholar. Three paths, right?”

”Right.”

”These three paths might look like completely equal options, where you can take whichever you like. But in reality, what they can support is entirely different.”

”Have you ever seen a Scholar lineage?”

The question made Richard pause.

He went over it in his mind.

The traditions and Rank system outlined in On Ascension Within the Veil indeed never mentioned any family passing down a Scholar legacy generation after generation.

Isabella walked the Scholar path. She was an associate professor at Imperial Capital University and held formal academic status in the Department of Classics.

But she was a member of the Ashford Family, a daughter born to a Hunter lineage.

”You can’t think of one, can you?” his mother said.

”Because the Scholar path is naturally unsuited for forming a family inheritance.”

She seemed to search her mind for the right phrasing.

”You know this too... The reason a Scholar is called a Scholar is that the core of this path relies on the mind.

Deciphering codes, appraising supernatural items, translating inscriptions, constructing theoretical models—every single one of these abilities is built on intellect.”

”And intellect doesn’t inherit reliably.”

”An exceedingly brilliant Scholar might have a son with mediocre aptitude.

A generational genius might have a daughter who can’t even recite a basic conjugation table.

It’s nobody’s fault. That’s just how the human brain is wired. The distribution of intelligence and comprehension is practically random.”

”You can’t write ’smart’ into a will and hand it down to the next generation.”

”The Secret path works on the exact same logic.

Sealing, divination, channeling... these crafts demand even more innate talent than a Scholar’s.

Some Secret Practitioners possess skills so exquisite they defy imagination, yet their apprentices come from all over the world. Only a tiny fraction of them are their own children.”

”The method of transmission for the Secret path has always been a master seeking out apprentices, picking them one by one.”

Richard mentally cross-referenced this information with what he had read.

It was entirely true.

In those cryptographic texts, the authors’ signatures were always abbreviations or anonymous.

Phrases like ”Son of So-and-so” or ”Nth Generation of the So-and-so Family” had never once appeared.

Every text was left behind by an independent individual. There was no trace of a family passing the baton.

”But Hunters are different.”

”The foundation of the Hunter path lies in the body: bone density, muscle fiber composition, neural reflex speed, and ether tolerance thresholds.”

”All of these things are written into the genes.”

”A Hunter with an extremely high ether tolerance threshold has a high probability of having descendants with a similarly robust threshold.

A mother with extraordinary neural conduction speed is very likely to pass a similar constitution down to her child.”

”While it doesn’t guarantee a genius every time, it at least ensures that every generation is ’not too bad.’

”The transmission logic of a Hunter family is built entirely on that ’not too bad.’”

His mother placed her hands on her knees.

”Hunter training can be scaled.

At twelve or thirteen, they start breath-holding in ice water, weighted runs, and pain tolerance training. Every single routine has a standard procedure.”

”Send ten kids into a training camp. One or two die, three or four wash out, and every single one of the rest will become a qualified Practitioner.”

”That is the logic of a Hunter family: use the bloodline as a baseline, use training to mass-produce, and use scale to hedge against risk.”

Her gaze dropped a few inches to stare at the backs of her hands.

”Those prominent surnames that appear in the Imperial Capital’s newspapers—Montagu, Adams, Graham—they are all Hunter lineages.”

”This is the reason why.”

”Only the Hunter system can produce a sufficient quantity of Practitioners capable of being woven into an organizational structure.”