I Loaded the Occult Panel

After class, Richard went to Room 314.

He knocked and entered. His aunt was alone in the room; Clara and Sophia’s desks were empty.

Sophia had left a coat draped over the back of her chair.

Isabella sat behind the desk, not even raising her head. ”Close the door.”

Richard closed the door and sat in the chair opposite her.

Isabella pulled an oilpaper package from the side of the desk and unwrapped it.

The clay figurine lay inside the paper. Its cracked, noseless face pointed toward the ceiling.

”I showed this to a few people in the department.”

Isabella pushed a red pen aside. ”Professor Mortimer also took a look.”

Richard said nothing, listening quietly.The appraisal results differed from his expectations.

”The figurine itself originated in Crete, dating back to around the late Mycenaean period,” Isabella explained.

”It originally sealed a segment of the ’Words of the Labyrinth’. If the holder got lost in a labyrinth or in a region behind the veil, they could use it to find the exit.”

”Words of the Labyrinth...”

Richard thought this automatic navigation function was pretty impressive.

The very first lesson Captain Field and Sarah had taught the Newcomers was never to wander blindly through the weak points behind the veil, because once you got lost, you couldn’t come back.

”Later, somehow, it fell into the Ash Belt.”

Isabella flipped the clay figurine over.

”The segment of the Words of the Labyrinth inside the seal broke free and escaped.”

His aunt continued, ”The shell cracked. It’s empty inside.”

Richard understood.

”So that’s why I couldn’t read anything useful from it when I first got it.”

Isabella gently scratched the bottom of the figurine with her fingernail.

”Furthermore, this thing has been subjected to wave after wave of corruption. Its original function of helping people find their way has been inverted. Now, it makes people lose their way.”

”However, Imperial Capital University’s collections only hold three fragments of the labyrinth tradition. The base pattern on this clay figurine is relatively complete.”

Richard nodded.

”I’ll make a rubbing of the base pattern to keep, and hand the original over to the department.”

”Adding a physical reference of the Cretan Labyrinth to the collection will also boost my standing in the department.”

Isabella glanced at her nephew. There was no expression at all on her cold face.

”It’s your decision.”

Despite her neutral tone, Richard could tell his aunt was extremely satisfied.

Isabella wrapped the clay figurine back up and pushed it to the corner of the desk.

Then, she pulled out a wax-sealed official document from beneath a stack of papers.

She spread the document flat on the desk.

”Clara’s field assignment order has also come down.”

Richard rested his hands on his knees.

”She departs early next month. Heading north.”

”The Gaelic Highlands?”

His aunt shook her head. ”Further north.”

”The Orkney Islands.”

Richard brought up a map in his mind.

The Orkney Islands, located above the northernmost tip of Albion.

It was a scattered string of small islands hanging at the very top of the map, where the freezing winds could slice a person paper-thin.

”Where exactly?”

”Scapa Flow.” Isabella tapped her index finger on the desk.

”The anchorage of the Imperial Navy’s Grand Fleet.”

”Dozens of capital ships, battlecruisers, and destroyer formations are all huddled together in that single bay.”

Dozens of colossal steel warships docked in the same waters year-round.

Tens of thousands of sailors ate, slept, drilled, fretted, and lived in fear aboard those ships day and night.

The fleet barely left port all year. The newspapers called it a ”fleet in being” strategy, using their mere existence to deter the enemy.

But the coal smoke, rust, human body heat, and mental strain produced by those massive ships stewed at the bottom of the same bay, day after day.

Meanwhile, the Orkney Islands were scattered with Neolithic standing stone circles and tombs.

The Stones of Stenness, the Maeshowe tomb, the Ring of Brodgar... all of them were sacrificial ruins from thousands of years ago.

Those ruins had been buried underground long enough, and now they were being crushed beneath the weight of dozens of warships and the collective dread of tens of thousands of living souls...

”What is Senior Clara going there to do?”

”Maintenance on the seabed seals. She has to dive down to do it.”

His aunt’s expression was equally grim.

Richard had read about it in books.

The inscriptions keeping the lids of the weak points shut were carved into the bedrock of the seabed. Practitioners had to strap ether accumulators to their backs, dive to the bottom, and mend the runes stroke by stroke.

No sunlight reached the seabed, and the immense pressure of the ocean warped the ether field, leaving an extremely short window for anyone to work down there.

Across the entire Empire, the number of Practitioners capable of doing such work was incredibly small.

His senior was an outstanding person, and precisely because of her excellence, the higher-ups were assigning her the most grueling tasks.

The office door clicked, and Clara pushed it open, stepping inside.

She carried a paper bag in her right hand. A small grease stain seeped through the bottom.

”Brought this for you two.” She placed the bag on the desk.

Inside were two small cakes, one lemon-flavored, the other caramel.

Richard loved sour food. Everyone around him had noticed this, including his sister, Grey, and his two seniors.

He suddenly realized that he rarely paid attention to what the people around him liked.

”Senior Clara, are you a good swimmer?”

Clara took out a cake and handed it to her mentor.

When Isabella took it, her fingers brushed against the grease stain, and she frowned.

”Don’t worry.” Clara’s voice was no different from usual. ”I’m a great swimmer.”

Isabella set the caramel cake down on the corner of the desk.

She then brought out the piece of Flag Fabric from a Flagbearer that Professor Mortimer had dismantled and cleaned, spreading it out on the table.

”I asked Clara’s distant uncle for you.”

Richard focused his attention. ”Did he accept the job?”

”He set one condition.” Isabella’s expression was subtle.

”He can follow your requirements, but he wants to record the crafting process to keep in his own artisanal archives.”

Richard thought about it. The request was perfectly reasonable.

The senior’s uncle was busy with military supply orders, his alchemy workshop booked solid.

To squeeze out time for a civilian commission was already doing them a huge favor.

”I agree.”

Isabella handed the flag over to Clara.

”He’ll finish it next month. When it’s done, Clara will hand the finished product over to you.”

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

Late that night, Richard finished everything he needed to do for the day.

He ran through three full cycles of his breathing method, and his practice of the Silence Spell was progressing well with the shadow’s assistance.

Now, when he expelled the vacuum, he still needed to hold the steel pipe in his hand, but the density of the expelled vacuum was getting higher and higher.

With his daily regimen completed, the room fell completely quiet.

He brought out the Gargoyle.

The Gargoyle was the very first supernatural item he had received from his grandfather.

Its design was rugged, the craftsmanship far from impressive, and its ether had been almost entirely drained by him.

Richard first expanded his Spirit Vision.

On the etheric level, only a paper-thin layer remained on the Gargoyle, practically intangible to the touch.

Gargoyles squatted atop churches and towers, enduring wind and rain as they glared down with ferocious faces.

They were created for the sole purpose of scaring off unclean things.

The intent that the carver had hammered and chiseled out, strike by strike, still lingered in the crevices of the stone’s texture four hundred years later.

Richard mulled over the name in his mind three times, then used his ether to channel it, pushing it upward.

”Gatekeeper.”

Ether flowed out, following the conduction path and landing on the Gargoyle’s surface.

The Gargoyle flared with light for a moment.

The protective attribute that had almost completely dissipated thickened once more after the name was bestowed upon it.

He grasped the Gargoyle and used it as a medium to cast Stone Armor once again.

The coverage area was wider.

It wasn’t just the coverage. He tapped his knuckles against the shell on his forearm; the hardness was completely incomparable to its previous state.

The previous hardness of the armor could only block attacks from ordinary cold weapons.

With this thickness now... Richard estimated mentally, it should even be able to stop small-caliber firearms.

About ten minutes later, the luster on the Gargoyle’s surface began to dim.

After fifteen minutes, it faded entirely.

The Gargoyle reverted to its pre-named state, and the guardian attribute shrank back down to that near-dissipated thinness.

Richard jotted the data down in his notebook.

He then tested the pure ether extracted from his Spiritual Capacity and found that its effects were superior to the ordinary ether in his Micro-circulation.

Comparing identical amounts, the pure ether from his Spiritual Capacity maintained the effect for nearly half again as long as his regular ether.

Having written down the first observation, he began the second test.

He took the Gargoyle in his hand again and gave it a new name this time.

”Fang.”

Richard wanted to give it an offensive attribute.

The instant the name was pushed upward, something incredibly thin snapped back along the conduction path.

It whipped against his wrist like a snapped rubber band, making him flinch.

The Gargoyle’s surface lit up for less than three seconds before extinguishing. The name couldn’t stick at all.

This outcome was within Richard’s expectations.

The Gargoyle’s fundamental nature was defense. Attaching an offensive name to it fundamentally clashed with its essence.

When the name was off, the ether slipped. Unable to latch on, it rebounded.

The rebound was light because the deviation wasn’t too drastic; defense and offense both fell under the umbrella of martial force, after all.

Richard tried two more names.

”Dust,” a neutral name meant to make the Gargoyle lightweight.

It stuck, but the effect was far inferior to ”Gatekeeper.”

”Reflective Shield,” a defensive counterattack type.

That stuck as well. The duration was similar to ”Gatekeeper,” but the enhancement was slightly weaker.

The conclusion was clear: the closer the name matched the object’s essence, the greater the enhancement and the longer it lasted.

The further it deviated, the more obvious the backlash. He didn’t dare test a completely contrary name.

If he gave this honest, gate-guarding Gargoyle a name like ”Betrayer,” the rebound would likely snap his fingers right off.

Richard placed the Gargoyle back on the nightstand, letting it crouch side by side with the Sphinx Lamp and the Sacred Ibis Bronze Paperweight.

The three beast-shaped artifacts each occupied a corner.

After being toyed with for half an hour, the Gargoyle looked even more ferocious than usual.

The Sphinx Lamp had its eyes half-closed, looking entirely indifferent.

The Sacred Ibis Bronze Paperweight kept its head bowed in silence.

Richard glanced at them.

”Naming is the pen, parsing is the ink, and ether is the paper. Lacking any of the three, the words cannot be written.”

The prompt on his Panel summarized it brilliantly.

He turned off the light and went to sleep.

By dusk the next day, Richard was at the Academic Affairs Office signing a loan slip for a training room.

Beneath the academy district was a row of independent training rooms, usually used by students to practice their Spell Formulas.

Sealing inscriptions were embedded into all four walls, keeping the ether field perfectly stable.

Whatever Spell Formulas were cast inside, nothing could be heard or felt from the outside.

Locking the iron door from the inside, Richard stood in the center of the training room and summoned his shadow from behind the veil into the material world.

The shadow stood up.

The mass of darkness was significantly thicker than it had been months ago.

After the spirit was embedded within it, it possessed its own Ether Micro-circulation and breathing rhythm. Having trained behind the veil for so long, its progress was visible to the naked eye.

Richard started with a baseline test.

”Stone Armor.”

He passed the thought to the shadow.

The shadow extended its pitch-black arm, and a thin shell grew over its forearm.

The shell was thin, but it was far better than its initial translucent state.

After noting down this baseline standard, Richard began the naming process.

What was the shadow’s essence?

He scanned it inside and out with his Spirit Vision.

The shadow was a profile of himself, projected onto the other side of the veil.

Its foundational tone was perfectly identical to Richard’s: Scholar, Recorder, Ferryman.

But the shadow also possessed a trait entirely its own: plasticity.

The shadow had no fixed form; it was pure aspect.

It carried almost none of the predetermined complexity of a human being.

Like an unshaped block of clay, it could be molded at will.

Richard settled on the first name.

”Shield.”

A remarkably simple word. Ether flowed out, running along the conduction path and landing on the shadow.

The shadow tightened inward, condensing from a loose mist into solid ink.

”Stone Armor.”

The shadow cast it again.

This time, the shell was almost twice as thick and far more uniformly shaped. It was practically a smooth plate of armor affixed to its forearm.

Richard reached out and knocked on it. Its hardness far surpassed the previous attempt.

He cancelled the name and passed over the second one.

”Nail.”

The shadow’s outline shifted as sharp angles condensed from the thick black mist.

”Moon Nail.”

A Silver Needle shot from the shadow’s fingertip like a fired bullet, its speed several times faster than before it was named.

The needle nailed itself into the training room’s inscribed wall.

Richard stepped closer to check the depth of penetration. Its piercing power had correspondingly increased.

The third name.

”Stillness.”

The shadow’s outline underwent no obvious change, but the fluctuation frequency of the entire mass of black mist dropped.

”Silence.”

A patch of vacuum was spat out from the steel pipe in the shadow’s palm.

Richard measured it with his Inspiration. The range had expanded, and the density of the vacuum was much more uniform.

With all three Spell Formulas tested, Richard sat down against the wall and began to deliberate.

The conclusion laid out before him made his palms sweat with excitement.

The Spell Formulas cast by the shadow after being named were even stronger than those cast by his main body.

The logic was simple: the shadow’s plasticity allowed it to perfectly harmonize with every name he granted it.

If you called it a shield, it became a shield.

When he cast Stone Armor himself, the carapace had to contend with his own muscles, bones, and skin.

The shadow didn’t have to deal with that. Once enhanced, it formed the armor instantly, and the resulting hardness was absurd.

The duration, however, remained the old problem.

Without using his Spiritual Capacity, the naming effect began to fade after about ten minutes.

Furthermore, the shadow simply existing in the material world rapidly consumed ether, and the naming process consumed it as well. It was burning from both ends.

Richard stood up from the floor and dusted off his pants.

There was one last thing to test. He materialized the bronze Mask of Hermes.