I Loaded the Occult Panel

By the time everyone emerged from the cellar, the sky outside was completely dark.

The stars were bright. Wind swept down from the highlands, carrying the smell of peat and sheep dung.

The carriage was parked outside the mill. The old driver huddled in a blanket on the shafts, dozing.

Waking at the sound of footsteps, the old man hopped down.

He was visibly relieved to see all eight people file out of the cellar in one piece.

But he asked no questions, simply helping the wounded up into the carriage.

No one spoke on the ride back to the inn.

The carriage bumped along the desolate trail, its axles creaking.

Richard leaned against the carriage wall with his eyes closed.

His Spiritual Capacity was empty.All ten units of his Aether reserve had been drained during the ritual.

Now, his internal Aether reserve was zero.

The Seat of the Sun was still operating, and the tree of light was still breathing, though all its leaves had folded closed.

Breathing: Healing slowly repaired his body.

The dry, cracking pain in his throat faded bit by bit, and the bloody scratches on his fingers were beginning to scab.

But the exhaustion was impossible to suppress; weariness seeped continuously from his bones.

Inside the carriage, Theodore was already asleep.

The stable boy’s head lolled against Maggie’s shoulder, his mouth slightly open as he snored softly.

Maggie didn’t have the energy to push him away.

She was practically asleep herself, her eyelids heavy.

Edmund sat at the other end of the carriage, hands folded in his lap, lips moving silently.

He was still praying.

Or rather, he was using prayer to calm himself.

Captain Field leaned near the carriage door, his injured leg stretched out straight.

Sarah sat beside him, her Hunting Rifle leaning against her leg.

Mr. Hutton and Mrs. MacNeil sat deepest in the cabin.

Neither of them spoke.

Mrs. MacNeil’s complexion was poor. Summoning and sustaining seven indwelling spirits drained the caster continuously.

From the beginning of the ritual to the end, she alone had supported the entire ”skeleton” of the sealing field.

Once the skeleton was withdrawn, she was left completely drained.

The carriage rolled to a halt in front of the inn. The proprietor was already waiting by the door.

He held a kerosene lamp, its light flickering in the wind.

”Everyone back?”

”Everyone is back. We all survived,” Mrs. MacNeil said, stepping down first.

”Any wounded?”

”One severe, one light. The rest are just exhausted.”

The proprietor nodded and turned to head inside.

”The hot water is ready, and ginger tea is waiting.”

”I’ll put an extra blanket in the wounded’s rooms.”

In the inn’s lobby, the fireplace burned brightly.

Flames danced over the logs, casting a warm yellow glow across the hall.

The eight of them filed inside, each finding a chair.

The proprietor’s wife brought a large copper kettle from the kitchen, white steam billowing from its spout.

”Ginger tea,” she said, setting the kettle in the center of the long table.

”Have a cup to warm up first.”

Richard took a cup and drank a sip.

The sharp heat of the ginger burned down his throat into his stomach, then radiated back up to his chest.

He drained the cup and poured himself another.

Halfway through his second cup, Mrs. MacNeil stood up.

She set her cup on the table and looked around at everyone present.

”Our mission this time was a complete success.”

She glanced at Captain Field and Sarah.

”Tomorrow, everyone take the day to rest.”

”Madam, may I ask a question?” Theodore asked, raising a timid hand from his corner.

”Ask,” Mrs. MacNeil said, raising an eyebrow.

”This whole business with the Whitcom Seal... since the Church won’t handle it, and the royal family won’t handle it, and they’ve been passing the buck for so long...”

Theodore sounded rather indignant.

”Why did it fall to you to tackle such a thankless job?”

”Right. When the Civilian Guild takes on this kind of work, where does the money come from?” Maggie chimed in.

”Is the Guild paying out of pocket for charity? The seal near my home has to be reinforced by us every year; I’ve never seen anyone volunteer to help.”

”I knew you would ask this sooner or later.”

Mrs. MacNeil raised a hand. The proprietor’s wife came over with a tin pitcher and refilled the cups of the four Newcomers.

”Let me explain the accounts to you.”

The medium folded her hands in her lap.

”By the official rules, the Whitcom Seal is supposed to be reinforced once every late autumn.

The funds are allocated by the royal family through the diocese—about two hundred and twenty pounds each time.”

”Two hundred and twenty pounds?” Theodore whistled. ”That’s enough to buy a few houses.”

”It’s enough to hire a Senior Practitioner and four apprentices for two weeks,” Mrs. MacNeil corrected him.

”It sounds like a lot, but every penny has a destination.

Ritual materials, silver, labor for recarving the inscriptions, hiring local guides, paying the diocese for a purification mass afterward...

Once the process is done properly, the leftover money isn’t enough to buy the local old priest a new robe.”

”But over the past twelve years, the number of times those funds were actually disbursed was...”

She extended her right hand and held up three fingers.

”Three.”

A heavy silence fell over the table.

”Where did the other nine go?” Maggie frowned.

”The Church says the royal family withheld it. The royal family says the Church embezzled it.”

Mrs. MacNeil’s tone gave nothing away:

”Both sides have been filing complaints in the Imperial Capital’s paperwork piles for over a decade. Meanwhile, Whitcom has been left unattended.”

”And the local diocese just ignores it?” Edmund’s voice grew tight.

”The local diocese applied for the grant through the proper channels every year. The old priest personally wrote eleven letters of petition.”

Mrs. MacNeil picked up her ginger tea and blew on the steam:

”The morning after he finished the last one, he fell from the church tower.”

Edmund’s hand trembled slightly around his teacup.

”...Fell?”

”The official conclusion was an accidental slip.”

Beside her, Mr. Hutton gently shook his head, saying nothing.

Edmund lowered his head, looking at the Silver Cross in his palm.

”Our order has this incident on file. The archives listed old age, vertigo, and carelessness.”

”Archives have to look pretty, and the living have to look pretty,” Mrs. MacNeil said. ”The dead don’t need to look pretty.”

The table fell silent once more.

Mr. Hutton shifted his chair closer to the table.

He took a thin, folded piece of paper from his coat pocket and spread it out on the tabletop.

It was a hand-drawn sketch. The Gaelic Highlands were outlined like a crouching beast, dotted with over a dozen small red marks.

Very faint dashed lines connected these points into a loose net.

”The seals in the highlands were originally established by the same group of pre-Roman priests.”

Mr. Hutton’s fingertip landed in the dead center of the grid.

”They designed the entire highlands as one massive ritual system.”

”No single seal node can operate in isolation. They all support the surrounding nodes.”

The old man’s fingertip slid outward along the dashed lines, brushing past the neighboring red dots one by one.

”Without the support of the Whitcom Seal, these dozen surrounding nodes will undergo accelerated decay, one by one.”

”One by one?” Maggie leaned in.

”By my calculations, twenty to thirty years.”

Mr. Hutton folded the paper back up and returned it to his pocket.

”Sounds like a long time,” Theodore muttered.

”It isn’t,” Mr. Hutton said without looking at him.

”Twenty years from now, Maggie will be in her thirties.”

The old man turned to glance at the red-haired girl. ”She might have her own children by then.”

Maggie picked up her teacup, then set it back down.

”Her children will ask her...” Mr. Hutton continued. ”’Mom, why aren’t children allowed outside at night in the highlands?’”

”’Why are there so many lines drawn outside the sheepfold?’”

”’Why does Grandpa burn a bundle of grass on the mountaintop every year?’”

Complete silence blanketed the table.

Captain Field rubbed the stubble on his chin.

Sarah had taken her hand off her Hunting Rifle and placed it on her knee.

”So for this mission...” Mrs. MacNeil steered the conversation back.

”The Civilian Guild is taking on what the royal family and the Church ought to do but refuse to. Once the pay is divided by our hours, no one walks away with more money than usual.”

”Then why take it at all?” Theodore asked outright.

Mrs. MacNeil smiled, though it carried a hint of bitterness.

”Little guy, for centuries, the Civilian Guild has made its money by purifying noble estates, blessing merchant ships, and channeling spirits for widows’ wills.”

”Those jobs feed most of the Guild.”

”But.”

She set her cup gently on the table.

”When the Guild was founded, that wasn’t what was written in the very first article of our charter.”

”What was written?” Edmund looked up.

Beside her, Mr. Hutton answered for her.

”When kings grow negligent, when saints turn silent, when the common people have nowhere to cry out—we must rise!”

He recited the words without much emotion, perhaps because he wasn’t a member of the Civilian Guild himself.

But it was a good maxim.

Edmund murmured, ”Our School of Theology textbooks also quote that line.”

”When the Church quotes that line, they follow it with a critique about the Civilian Guild overstepping its bounds,”

Mrs. MacNeil continued mockingly.

”But when our Guild quotes it, we use it to remind ourselves why this Guild exists in the first place.”

”Both sides quote the exact same line.”

She picked up her ginger tea, drained the last drop, and set down the empty cup.

”The meaning couldn’t be more different.”

The table fell silent for a long while.

Mrs. MacNeil waved her hand. ”Alright, get back and rest. Everyone is tired today.”

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

When Richard reached the second-floor corridor, he passed the other rooms.

Loud snores were already coming from Theodore’s room, audible even through the heavy door.

A rustling of fabric came from Maggie’s room; it was hard to tell what she was doing.

Candlelight leaked from Edmund’s room. He was probably still writing his observation report.

Richard unlocked his own door with a key.

The Panel floated into the upper edge of his vision.

The [Perception] Lv.1 tag had quietly changed to Lv.2.

He hadn’t noticed the level-up at all.

The high-density use of Spirit Vision during the ritual, the Aether information carried by the eightfold voices, and the mother’s lingering gaze before she fell to the bottom of the well had been silently absorbed as experience by [Perception].

Richard looked at it for a moment, then dialed the lamp wick up a notch.

The light grew slightly brighter, casting sharper, finer shadows over the wood grain on the walls.

He didn’t rush to get into bed, first spreading his right hand flat on the bedsheet.

At Lv.1, he could see the uneven texture of the wood, the creases on a book spine, and the granular size of the residual silver ink on his fingers.

Bringing blurry edges into sharp focus had been the direction of Lv.1.

The direction Lv.2 pushed toward was not the edges, but the inside.

The inverted tree of light within the Seat of the Sun was clearer to him now than ever before.

Its roots were buried squarely in the center of his chest, splitting into fine, blood-vessel-like twigs that extended into his limbs.

Deeper down, he saw a dark patch at the root of the tree of light.

The patch wasn’t large—only about the width of a fingernail—but its color was much deeper than the surrounding area.

Richard probed it with his mind, finally realizing what this dark patch was.

Using [Shadow Armor] during the ritual had drained his Aether reserve too rapidly, leaving a mild stagnation in the reverse channel.

Now that he could perceive it, he could use [Healing] to slowly treat it. A day or two should mend it completely.

[Perception] Lv.2 made his mirror brighter.

Reflecting outward granted higher precision; reflecting inward was a new direction.

Richard looked at his palm. The silver ink and dried blood were mixed together, embedded in the grooves of his fingerprints.

He scrubbed hard with soap at the washbasin, but the stubborn traces between his fingers remained clearly visible.

Unable to wash them off, Richard simply dried his hands on a towel and collapsed onto the bed.

Half-asleep, he saw his mother brushing honey in the kitchen, Evelyn running across the train platform in her new coat, and his Father holding the newspaper up high, secretly dozing.

Thinking of these things, he gradually fell asleep.

Dreams have no boundaries.

While awake, [Perception] was an inward-facing mirror.

While asleep, the other side of the mirror also began reflecting things.

The first thing Richard saw was fog.

The fog submerged his ankles, swallowed his knees and waist, and stopped just below his chest.

Everything above his shoulders was clear, while everything below was blanketed in mist.

There was no wind, no sound. In this entire space, only the fog moved.

Twelve standing stones stood in the fog. These roughly hewn slabs were each two heads taller than an adult man.

The stones formed a circle, and in the center of the ring was a shallow depression in the earth.

Richard felt this place was somewhat familiar.

A group of people emerged from the depths of the fog.

At the front were several priests draped in animal hides. Circular bronze discs bearing simple patterns hung from their waists.

Their faces were smeared with white pigment, streaked all the way from their foreheads to their jaws.

In the middle, a woman was being supported by two burly men.

The woman was young, looking to be in her twenties. In her arms, she cradled an infant wrapped in animal skin.

The infant wasn’t fussing, presumably already asleep?

Richard couldn’t hear any sounds in the dream.

The woman didn’t struggle, walking toward the depression on her own.

A crowd followed behind them—elders, men, women, and children.

Everyone had a streak of gray pigment on their face, drawn from the brow bone to the cheekbone.

The entire tribe had turned out.

The procession halted at the edge of the stone circle.

The hide-draped priests turned and shouted something to the tribe.

Richard didn’t know what they were saying, but he could see the priest’s intense emotion as he raised his hands toward the sky.

He was praying.

The two burly men released the woman, and she walked to the edge of the depression on her own.

The infant in her arms still did not cry.

Only then did Richard see clearly: the infant’s face was cyan-purple.

The child was already dead.

Something must have happened to the tribe—plague, harsh winter, famine... A primitive society’s ability to weather catastrophes was incredibly weak, and Richard had already guessed what they intended to do.

The woman gently lifted the infant from her chest and laid it in the depression.

She knelt down with her hands on the infant, her lips moving as she spoke to the child.

A mother coaxing a dead child, asking him not to be afraid.

The hide-draped man walked over and pulled a stone knife from his waist.

The stone blade was dark blue-black, ground incredibly sharp.

The woman didn’t look up, keeping her hands pressed against her baby.

She waited in her place.

The knife fell. Richard saw no blood in the dream.

The fog obscured everything.

But he could feel that the thing beneath the entire mountain range, which had been listening all along, woke up slightly.

Originally, it had only listened. Now, it began to receive;

It received the mother and her child, and the melody the mother hummed to her baby in the final moments;

It received the tribe’s entire winter of starvation, the cold, the silent deaths of children one after another, drawing everything into itself.

The people of the tribe walked to the edge of the depression, one by one.

Each person took something from their breast, their pockets, or their leather pouches, and dropped it into the hollow.

Richard could see those things:

A smoothly polished stone, a scraped-clean piece of bone, a tightly woven grass rope, a wild berry, a carefully preserved pinch of salt...

Salt. His Inspiration was sparked in the dream.

The Sower of Salt, The One Who Scatters Salt, Salt Beneath the Shadows...

After dropping their offerings, the tribespeople backed away one by one.

The last to retreat was a little girl.

About six or seven years old, wearing two thick braids and barefoot, she looked remarkably like the sacrificed woman.

The little girl placed a thatch-woven doll into the depression.

Two tiny black dots and a curved line were drawn on the doll’s face.

This doll probably wasn’t meant for a curse; the smile on its face was adorable.

The little girl set the doll down and reached out to touch the dead woman’s face.

The fog closed in, and Richard’s consciousness in the dream gradually cleared.

He thought that perhaps this was what that ”Mother” originally looked like.

The fog dispersed again. Time flew by.

Richard didn’t know how much time had passed.

Perhaps decades, perhaps centuries. The twelve standing stones changed.

A few had toppled over, their broken stumps covered in moss, and the depression had grown deeper.

People were placed inside every year; it was no longer just dead children and mothers.

Prisoners of war, sinners, willing sacrifices, plague victims... she received every single one of them.

She grew larger and larger.

Lurking underground, she also learned to take one thing from her children—their shadows.