I Loaded the Occult Panel

Richard’s grip tightened on his staff. Shouting was useless now.

He pushed ether to his ankles. The two small wings clinging to his boots stood upright, lifting him off the cobblestone ridge.

Richard floated up to the height of that path of return, shifting sideways to block the space between it and the patch of blackness.

With the Caduceus planted in front of him, the swarm of the dead stopped far away.

The murmurs suddenly surged in volume. The back of Richard’s neck was slick with sweat... Within that vast stretch of unintelligible whispers, he suddenly caught a familiar word.

Richard gritted his teeth. When the swarm of the dead shifted left, he moved with it.

The flying shoes were massively amplified behind the veil; pushing himself sideways took almost no effort.

When it shifted right, he followed suit. The swarm of the dead simply decided to surge straight over Richard’s head.

Richard pushed his ether, rising higher to keep himself between the path and the swarm.

The Inviolability of Emissaries had become an immunity amulet. In every angle the swarm took to bypass him, Richard could clearly see its apprehension.But this patch of blackness stretched out too far; he couldn’t block such a massive area alone.

The swarm bypassed him and dove from the east. In that single swoop, it snatched up a child.

Richard lunged to block the spot... but he was already too late.

Suddenly, something sprinted across the surface of the sea. Richard didn’t get a clear look at first.

It ran too fast—so fast he only saw a blur of wet, gleaming green.

The monster bounded onto the island, as large as a calf.

Its tail was woven into a thick braid, coiled and knotted on its back.

Its four paws landed on the cobblestones without a single sound.

This was the Green-Furred Phantom Hound.

The giant hound glanced at Richard and gave him a nod.

The beast carried MacFie’s ether fluctuations. Hovering in midair, Richard nodded back.

The Green-Furred Phantom Hound turned and lunged out over the water.

The massive stretch of shadow on the water was instantly torn open, and the corresponding mass in the sky plummeted as a result.

If the things in the sky were out of reach, attack their shadows on the water.

Richard’s eyes lit up; he felt like he had just learned a new trick.

The swarm of the dead gathered once more, circling wide before pressing down from the north.

The Green-Furred Phantom Hound sprinted along the edge of the island, keeping pace.

Afraid to leave shadows on the water, the swarm had no choice but to fly higher.

The higher they flew, the longer their dive would take.

Richard dropped back onto the cobblestones, no longer chasing the swarm.

He turned to face the final ten percent of the crowd still standing on the path. He still had to read the second column.

Richard unrolled the manifest, the wind snapping at the edges of the paper.

”Tania, First Class.”

No one on the path looked up. He moved down a column.

”Tania, Second Class.”

Seven or eight heads raised.

”Tania, Steerage.”

This time, far more looked up. They passed through the rift, walking just as uniformly as the others had.

Richard read down the list, column by column. He called out every ship name he could pronounce: Tania, Thetis, Petrel, Saint Brendan.

When he reached the immigrant transports from decades ago, the names were absurdly long.

One was called the Elizabeth and Sarah. The shipowner had hung both his wife’s and daughter’s names on the bow.

After reading that one, a small patch of the crowd departed.

He called out the cargo holds, the lower-class cabins, and the so-called ”deck cots.”

When he read that line, over thirty people looked up.

Up in the sky, the swarm of the dead returned to the path to continue picking its targets.

It was at this moment Richard figured out the rules.

The swarm didn’t touch the people he had just called away; it only picked from whoever was left on the path.

Richard held up the manifest, looking at those people, and finally understood why they were left behind.

They were stowaways who had crawled out from under the cargo in the deepest holds.

People who had their thumbprints forced onto contracts and were sold onto the ships; infants born on board and abandoned the moment they docked;

Those who died halfway through the voyage and were shoved over the railing;

And those who had drifted over from other ships, caught in the propellers and dragged along for half the journey.

Richard suddenly understood the victory conditions for tonight.

The rules, laid bare, were simple: only the unaccepted could be harvested.

He was essentially registering people’s identities, while the flock in the sky was snatching up those without one.

Realizing this, he raised the manifest again and read twice as fast as before.

The Green-Furred Phantom Hound was still running around the island. A second bark rang out.

When the sound reached Richard, the cobblestones beneath his feet trembled.

A huge chunk of the undead swarm fell from the sky into the sea, throwing up spray that was entirely black.

Richard kept his flying shoes active, floating just a fraction above the path.

He used up another charge of Swift Crossing.

He held onto the third charge, saving it for the worst-case scenario.

When he turned to the last page of the manifest and finished reading the bottom lines, he looked up.

Roughly two hundred people were still standing motionless on the path.

Ship names, cabin classes, Harbors... these two hundred people had none of those.

Richard felt a burst of scalding breath wash over him.

He turned to see the Green-Furred Phantom Hound approaching, carrying two wooden crates on its back.

The hound bounded onto the island and shook the two crates off at Richard’s feet. Then it flopped down to the side, resting its chin on its paws and panting heavily.

After catching its breath, it spoke—and the voice that came out was MacFie’s.

”Richard, I left you an emergency contingency.”

”Professor?”

MacFie said, ”Open these crates. They’re all unclaimed belongings from the Queenstown Town Hall.”

Richard crouched down as instructed and flipped open the latch of the first wooden crate.

The items inside formed a shallow layer. They were all worthless trinkets... or rather, anything of value had already been picked out.

Nestled at the very bottom were twenty-odd small bundles.

The Green-Furred Phantom Hound carefully picked one up and snipped the thread with a claw. Inside, surprisingly, was soil.

”When these people left their homes, they realized they had nothing to take with them.”

”The potatoes had rotted in the ground, their houses had been leveled by landlords, and their livestock had been sold off long ago.”

”So they crouched down, grabbed a handful of dirt from outside their doors, wrapped it in a scrap of clothing, and sewed it shut.”

”When they sewed it, they were probably thinking: ’Once I reach the New Continent, I’ll scatter this handful over my newly bought land.’”

The Green-Furred Phantom Hound cast a glance at the swarm of the dead.

”There are only twenty-something bundles of soil. Don’t count on them too much.”

Richard frowned. ”Professor, what about the ones without soil?”

”Then they have absolutely nothing.”

The Green-Furred Phantom Hound sprinted back across the sea.

Richard arranged the twenty-something small bundles one by one on the cobblestones, lining them up in a row to begin the naming.

He spread out the Still Water, reflecting the two hundred-plus people on the path.

On the first reflection, he found a man standing near the back.

Pressed within the layer of ether around that man was the same origin as this small bundle.

Richard pushed the naming forward:

”The one from the region of Gaiosdova.”

The ether followed the conductive path and latched on.

On the path, the barefoot man looked up, exactly like those who had just been awoken by Harbor and cabin names.

The massive swarm of the dead in the sky swirled above his head before bypassing him entirely.

Richard was giving them a sense of belonging. As long as a person still had one place that accepted them—even a place only the size of a handful of dirt—they were off the menu.

”The second one.” Richard picked up the second bundle.

Just as he was about to spread the Still Water to cast a reflection, the swarm of the dead plummeted down.

Richard pushed with the flying shoes, cutting across sideways to forcefully block that trajectory.

With that block, the Still Water shattered.

By the time he pulled the Condensed Mirror Method back up, the swarm had already snatched away two.

Richard clutched the second bundle of soil, his brows tightly furrowed.

That hurdle of the Mirror Second Stage he had never been able to cross: the moment he cast a spell, the water dispersed.

It took Richard four cycles to pull the Condensed Mirror Method back up.

This time, he pushed the rhythm down while trying to push the naming forward.

Halfway through the push, the water’s surface exploded again. The Condensed Mirror Method dispersed.

He looked up, panting, as the swarm snatched away another.

Standing on the cobblestones, Richard suddenly had a strong urge to curse.

At that exact moment, Speculation and Inner Awakening turned their gaze back upon him... reflecting a person trying very hard to hold his water’s surface steady.

Holding it steady. He had been trying to hold it steady since the very first day he practiced the Condensed Mirror Method.

He held it when he woke up in the morning, when walking, when in class, and when sparring.

His aunt had said, ”For the mirror to reflect people, the person must be steady first.”

Yet Madam Marie’s cat visitation that night had suggested another direction: the mirror doesn’t leave the house.

”Do not seek outward; only ask about what is currently in your hands.”

Richard stopped. He did nothing. He saw his own anxious heart in that moment.

During that pause, the swarm was snatching people right above his head... He could feel it.

Richard relaxed his hands. He stopped holding it.

A mirror didn’t need anyone to hold it; it just hung there, and when someone approached, it would reflect them.

The inverted tree of light in his chest unfurled its leaves, one by one.

His ether fluctuations sank down, sinking to that line and continuing to sink further.

Richard opened his eyes.

The entire sea, the whole path, that flattened expanse of blackness in the sky, those eight pairs of rising and falling hands on the slope... everything was reflected within.

He raised his right hand and pushed the second naming forward, but the water’s surface didn’t shatter.

”The third one.” The Still Water didn’t ripple.

The fourth, the fifth. By the time he reached the eighth, he could already reflect the movements of the swarm while simultaneously pushing the namings forward.

Richard reflected its dive, flew over to block it, and the water’s surface remained intact.

By the time he finished reading them all, the people remaining were those who had truly left nothing behind.

Richard crouched down, gazing indifferently at that path of return in the sky.