I Loaded the Occult Panel

They had gone through the entire routine several times already; there was no need for words.

Connecting the needle, guiding the breath, and Needle Piercing—the needle cluster burst within the most saturated segment of the main circuit.

Coleman let out a muffled grunt, then swung his left arm in two wide circles.

”I’ve never felt this loose,” he said with a sigh of relief. ”It’s like I just stepped out of a hot bath.”

”What about the breakpoint?”

”...It’s extended a little further than the last few times.”

Coleman tested the sensation.

”I thought it was my imagination at first, but the third round of needles confirmed it.”

”How much further, exactly?”

”It used to be completely stiff, but now... I can feel a faint numbness in the tissue right next to it.”Richard made a mental note of that.

”Don’t get ahead of yourself. Continuous needling might cause problems.”

”I know.” Coleman rolled down his sleeve.

Practice finished, the two of them sat on the backyard stone steps for a while.

Coleman suddenly spoke up. ”If I actually get cured, the first thing I’m doing is buying you dinner.”

”What are we having?”

”...I don’t know.” Coleman thought about it for a long time.

”My collies have been eating better than me lately anyway, so you can order whatever you want.”

Richard laughed.

It was nearly dusk by the time he got home.

Gas lamps already glowed in the windows of the houses at the east end of Slag Alley.

Evelyn’s morning plate of ”Mr. Rabbits” had been mostly devoured.

She had wrapped up the remaining two and shoved them at the very top of the cupboard, pinning a note with crooked handwriting next to them.

”Has my name on it. Eat them and you’re dead. —E.W.”

Richard studied the note for a moment before putting the two gingerbread cookies away.

After dinner, he returned to his room and turned up the lamp.

Two items sat on his desk.

An Ebony Box and a palm-sized Bronze Mirror.

First, Richard pushed the box into the shadows at the corner of the desk.

The Tower card was still vivid in his mind; he didn’t plan to touch the box just yet.

The Bronze Mirror remained under the light.

[The High Priestess · Upright], [The Moon · Upright]—the two cards he had drawn last night.

Richard cast his Spirit Vision over it, his gaze slowly trailing along the bas-relief ”Threads of Fate” around the mirror’s edge.

The surface was black and offered no reflection, but he could read the seal layered over the metal.

He recognized the technique; it was an early method from the Web Weaving Tradition.

He had his aunt’s supplementary materials to thank for that.

The seal twisted the twin intents of ’Refuse to be Read’ and ’Refuse to be Contrasted’ into a single strand before embedding them into the frame’s bas-relief. Its intensity wasn’t very high.

Richard mentally rehearsed the procedure he had used to deal with the Sphinx Lamp.

He took a few sheets of scratch paper from his drawer and laid the mirror face-up on top of them.

Underneath the paper, he slipped a small pinch of coarse salt.

Salt couldn’t completely block the flow of ether, but it could deflect its course slightly.

Richard’s Fourfold Breathing sank into its third cycle.

Every inscription had a starting stroke.

That initial stroke was the thinnest link in the entire seal.

It took him about twenty minutes to locate it.

Where the third ”Thread of Fate” on the back’s relief branched off, there was a tiny dot no thicker than a strand of hair.

The engraver had made their first stroke here all those years ago.

Richard repeatedly applied stress directly to that single dot.

Neither heavy nor rushed.

He would apply pressure, pause for a few breaths, and then apply it again.

On the seventh repetition, the relief near the dot trembled faintly.

Just like last time, he waited until his family was asleep before quietly sneaking out to find a secluded spot to continue the unsealing.

On the twelfth attempt, a faint wisp of grayish-white gas seeped from the dot.

As soon as the gas left the mirror, it was caught by the Panel.

[Available Points] started climbing from 0.

Richard didn’t stop.

He maintained his previous rhythm, applying stress every few breaths.

He kept the dot from mending itself shut without letting it crack too wide.

Sure enough, the Bronze Mirror held more than just simple ether residue.

The gray gas carried something finer, so subtle it was almost undetectable, yet his threads of Inspiration caught it.

Richard observed them with his Spirit Vision, seeing ”whispers” that looked as though they had been chewed to pieces.

These whispers couldn’t form complete sentences; only fragmented, disjointed words remained.

”...remember...”

”...the one inside the mirror...”

”...you also once...”

The whispers were incredibly soft, dissipating before they could float even a meter away.

Richard ignored them.

[Erudition] immediately pulled up a database of similar fragments. It was a low-tier curse of the Web Weaving Tradition called the Correspondence Curse.

This curse would infect the victim with a sense of doubt every time they looked in the mirror, making them think, ”This isn’t what I should look like.”

The doubt would accumulate until one day, the victim would grab the nearest object and smash the mirror to pieces.

Once the glass shattered, the ”self” inside would be released to possess the mirror’s owner.

The old owner would be seamlessly replaced by the new one, unnoticed by anyone around them.

This Bronze Mirror had likely been designed to target a highly powerful family heir.

The Correspondence Curse inside the mirror was already heavily worn.

Based on the fragmented whispers from earlier, the curse’s intended target had likely died a natural death centuries ago.

Having lost its target, the curse had spun idly inside the mirror for hundreds of years, each empty revolution grinding away a fraction of its intensity.

Today, only the dregs of its whispers remained.

Once Richard confirmed there was nothing he couldn’t control, he continued absorbing it.

The points on the Panel climbed steadily.

0.13... 0.27... 0.45...

When it reached 0.74, the grayish-white gas seeping from the dot began to slow down.

The whispers deep within the mirror grew sparse, eventually fading away completely.

Richard waited until the points settled around 0.78 before stopping.

He planned to keep this Bronze Mirror for future research; maybe he could even reconstruct the curse.

Returning home, Richard resealed the mirror.

After finishing all that, he let out a long breath at his desk.

[Available Points] finally stopped at 0.78.

He was 0.22 points short of the next full point.

Richard locked the Bronze Mirror in his drawer and glanced back at the Ebony Box in the shadows of his desk.

The box sat there silently.

The terrifying aspect of the Tower card lay in its ”irreversibility”; it wouldn’t necessarily require a ”complete unsealing” to bring disaster down on his head.

If the thing inside the box was the kind that would flood back along even the slightest leak...

Then he couldn’t afford to open a crack even the size of a pinhole.

That box could only be handled once someone of a higher Rank helped him verify it.

Richard wrapped the box in a layer of oil paper and a layer of coarse salt, then placed it in the hidden compartment under his bed, locking it away in the same place as the Gargoyle.

...

He arrived at the Branch Office on Sunday morning.

The reception room was quieter than usual.

The clerk on duty was a young man he hadn’t interacted with much, only a few years older than Richard.

”Is Old Biggs not here today?”

”He is.” The young clerk flipped a page back in the registry. ”Down in the underground autopsy room.”

Richard thanked him and headed downstairs.

The corridor was quieter than usual.

The heavy wooden door to the autopsy room was slightly ajar. He knocked three times.

”Come in,” Old Biggs called from inside.

Richard pushed the door open.

There were no corpses on the worktable today, only towering stacks of file folders.

Old Biggs sat at the table with reading glasses perched on his nose, holding a document, his brows tightly furrowed.

He looked up, saw Richard, and pushed his glasses up his nose.

”You’re here?”

”Yeah.”

”Senior Sister left a few days ago.” Old Biggs set the document down. ”She had a lot of matters to handle.”

”She asked me to tell you to keep practicing on your own for a while.”

From the pile of things at the other end of the worktable, Old Biggs dug out an old leather case.

He pushed it in front of Richard.

”Senior Sister left this for you.”

Richard opened the case.

Inside was a thick book. The lettering on its cover had been traced by fingernails countless times.

{Divination and Spirit Vision: From Novice to Mastery}

The author column read: Marie Viktorova.

”...This is?”

”Senior Sister borrowed it from the teacher back in the day. It’s the teacher’s own handwritten copy.”

”Almost every problem Senior Sister encountered doing fieldwork can be solved using the methods in this book.”

Old Biggs’s gaze fell on the volume.

”She’s lending this to you so you can practice on your own first.”

”Keep at it until you go to the Imperial Capital in June.”

”Once you’re in the Imperial Capital, the teacher will make time to tutor you for a bit.”

Richard’s shoulders tensed.

”Madam Marie has the time?”

”Yes.”

To be tutored by a Major Adept medium was an incredibly rare opportunity.

He silently did the math.

It was almost the end of February, leaving him with a little over three months before the summer study program in June.

In those three months, he had to devour as much of this book as he could.

When he reached the Imperial Capital, even if Madam Marie only spared an hour or two to lecture him, how much he could comprehend in that time would depend entirely on the foundation he built over these three months.

”...I’ll study it thoroughly.” Richard placed the book back into the leather case and carefully closed it.

”I know you will.” Old Biggs waved his hand.

He took off his reading glasses, rubbed the corners of his eyes, and stood up to pour himself a cup of tea.

”Have a seat. I’ll be busy with this for a while.”

”Did you have other business here today?”

”I need to requisition a few things from Team Leader Wentworth.”

”Oh, that’s out of my hands.” Old Biggs waved a hand. ”He’s on the third floor.”

Richard stuffed the book into his shoulder bag and was just about to stand up when Old Biggs suddenly set his teacup down.

”...No rush.”

”Hm?”

”Let’s chat for a minute.”

Old Biggs picked his teacup back up.

”About what happened a few days ago... I’ve been going through the death registry lately...”

”Finished?”

”Finished.”

Old Biggs slowly swirled the tea in his cup.

”I went through the North District’s registries for the past five years, from cover to cover.”

The man’s brows knotted together again.

”Based on the average of past years, the North District usually loses about a hundred and ten people a year.”

”Last year, it was a hundred and forty-two.”

”The year before that, a hundred and thirty-one.”

”The year before that, a hundred and twenty-six.”

”...It’s increasing every year,” Richard said softly.

”Yes.”

Old Biggs set his teacup down.

”I broke down the excess numbers by cause of death.”

”Workplace accidents account for a chunk of it, and that part is genuine. The machines in the factories have been running faster every year; the workers whose hands and feet can’t keep up add a few more to the count.”

”The deaths in the workhouse make up another chunk, and that part is real too. The workhouse started squeezing its food budget this year. Without proper nutrition, the elderly can’t survive the winter.”

”The portion that’s truly excessive and can’t be explained...”

Old Biggs tapped his finger on the tabletop.

”That’s about a dozen people every year.”

”Of that dozen, half are middle-aged men or women. No obvious medical history. When their families came to claim the bodies, they all said they were perfectly fine the day before.”

”The other half are vagrants and dock workers—people with no family to claim them.”

”...That matches how the Echo Society chooses its targets.”

”Yes.” Old Biggs nodded. ”I pulled the old files on these bodies and cross-referenced them with those thirteen locations on the canal map.”

”Over eighty percent of them died no more than three hundred yards from the nearest location.”

As Richard listened, he felt that things were spiraling increasingly out of control.

Old Biggs took a sip of tea.

”I’ve already submitted this compiled report.”

”The Branch Office will follow procedure and report it to Manchester, and Manchester will follow procedure to report it to the Imperial Capital.”