I Loaded the Mysticism Panel

One evening, after the Williams Family finished dinner, the father still hadn’t come home from working late.

After finishing her homework, Evelyn rested her head on the dining table for a while before her mother sent her to her room to sleep.

She was still muttering, "I’m not sleepy," but her feet were already starting to drag.

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

Richard had recently been trying to practice channeling his Stone Armor.

He was standing at the foot of the stairs, about to go up, when his mother called out to him.

"Richard, come sit for a moment."

Her tone was casual, much like when she’d ask her son to take out the trash.

But Richard noticed his mother close the door from the living room to the hallway, and then shut the door to the kitchen as well.

The two of them sat on the living room sofa, with only a single floor lamp lit beside the fireplace.

There was no fire in the fireplace.

On the grate rested a few pieces of unburnt charcoal, looking like a cluster of small, dark gargoyles crouching there.

His mother offered no preamble.

She held out her right hand, palm up.

"Put your hand on top."

Richard hesitated for a moment, but placed his hand on hers.

His mother’s fingertips were still ice-cold; they hadn’t been warm in over a decade.

For a time when Evelyn was little, she was terrified of her mother touching her forehead, afraid of that icy hand being pressed against her skin.

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

An extremely faint pulsation of Ether emanated from his mother’s palm.

It was intermittent, its frequency chaotic—sometimes it would pulse twice in a row, other times it would pause for a long while before pulsing again.

Compared to the steady, warm presence operating in his own chest, that thing was like a long-broken bellows.

But it was indeed moving, and... it was a bit more forceful than he had expected.

Margaret was using her residual circuits to perceive the state of the Ether within her son’s body.

Before his trip to the Imperial Capital, she would have been completely incapable of this.

Her residual circuits were already strained to their limit just maintaining her daily functions; she couldn’t spare any extra Ether to investigate the condition inside another person’s body.

But over the past month, things had been quietly changing.

The tin bottle Richard had handed her the night he returned from the Imperial Capital—she had recognized the daisy on it at a single glance.

Isabella had loved daisies since she was a child.

As a child in the back garden of Ashford Mansion, she would weave daisies into a crown, place it on her head, then run into the living room and announce to everyone, "I am the Daisy Queen."

Later, when Isabella grew up and became more self-conscious, she stopped weaving flower crowns, and the daisy 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 sister’s willingness to take the initiative to contact Richard spoke volumes in itself.

After about half a minute, Margaret withdrew her hand.

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

She placed her hands back on her knees, lacing her fingers together.

Richard’s internal circuits showed no signs of the fractures and blockages that plagued her own.

In reality, this was the effect of his panel’s Skill.

But Margaret didn’t know this and could only attribute the results before her to extraordinary talent, or perhaps good luck.

Although she had anticipated this from her son’s various actions, she still breathed a sigh of relief.

"If your body showed even the slightest sign of incomplete circuits, I wouldn’t be saying any of this today."

Her gaze fell on the pile of cold charcoal in the fireplace.

"I would have done everything in my power to stop you from going any further, even if it meant tying you down in Brighton to do it."

"But you are whole."

Richard asked tentatively, "So, Mom, your condition..."

"You should already know what the Ashford Clan does in the Imperial Capital."

Margaret interrupted him.

"Yes."

"So, you probably also know how many resources it takes to cultivate a Practitioner of the Mysterious Side."

She didn’t wait for Richard to answer, continuing on her own.

"Marvels, Alchemy Materials, the time cost of a High-tier Guide, the right to use ritual sites, cleanup fees after a failure... and when a Practitioner attempts to reach Minor Mastery, the costs multiply several times over."

"Because the ritual can fail. Failure doesn’t necessarily mean death, but it’s highly likely your circuits will be ruined. And after they’re ruined, you need extremely expensive aftercare."

"Back then, the entire clan had high hopes for me. At twenty-six, I had already touched that ’Path’."

So I rushed to break through to Minor Mastery. The ritual failed, and the ten years of resources the Ashford Family had invested in me all went to zero."

She said this nonchalantly, as if the person who had failed wasn’t her at all.

"Your grandfather didn’t get angry at the time."

His mother smiled.

"You’ve met him. He never gets angry. Anger is the most inefficient emotion."

"He just sat in his study and very calmly asked me one question: ’Do you intend to continue?’"

"I told him I couldn’t. If I tried again, I would definitely die."

Hearing this, Richard finally couldn’t help but ask,

"Then, Mom, why were you in such a hurry to break through to Minor Mastery back then? Couldn’t you have prepared for a while longer?"

"The Ashford Family... it isn’t as respectable as what you saw in the Imperial Capital. Especially since it’s in desperate need of strength from the new generation," Margaret explained.

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

His mother’s speech slowed.

"The things you’ve learned in books... Hunter, Secret, and Scholar. Those are the three paths, right?"

"Right."

"On the surface, these three paths seem like equal options, as if you can choose any of them. But in reality, the structures they can support are completely different."

"Have you ever heard of a Scholar clan?"

The question made Richard pause.

He ran through it in his mind.

The traditions and Tier systems listed in that book, *On the Ascent in the Veil*, truly didn’t mention any family that passed down the Scholar identity for generations.

Isabella was on the Scholar path; she was an associate professor at Imperial University with a formal academic position in the Classics Department.

But she was a member of the Ashford Clan, a daughter from a Hunter Clan.

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

"That’s because the Scholar path is inherently unsuited for establishing a family legacy."

She seemed to be searching for the right words in her mind.

"You also know... a Scholar is called a Scholar because the core of this path relies on the mind."

"Deciphering codes, appraising Marvels, interpreting Inscriptions, constructing theoretical models—every single one of these abilities is built upon intellect."

"And intellect is not something that can be reliably inherited."

"An exceptionally brilliant scholar might have a son of mediocre aptitude."

"The daughter of a once-in-a-generation genius might not even be able to properly memorize a basic conjugation table."

"It’s no one’s fault. That’s just how the human brain is structured. The distribution of wisdom and insight is nearly random."

"You can’t write ’intelligence’ into your will as an inheritance for the next generation."

"The Secret Direction follows the same principle."

"Sealing, Divination, Spirit Communication... these skills rely on talent even more than a Scholar’s."

"Some Secretive Ones have techniques of unimaginable subtlety, but their apprentices come from all corners of the world, with only a very small portion being their own children."

"The method of succession for the Secret Direction has always been a master seeking an apprentice, picking them one by one."

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

’It was true.’

In those esoteric texts, the authors’ signatures were always abbreviated or anonymous.

Phrases like "Son of So-and-so" or "Nth generation of the So-and-so family" never appeared.

Each text was left behind by an independent individual; there were no traces of it being passed down a family line.

"But Hunters are different."

"The foundation of the Hunter path is the body: bone density, muscle fiber composition, nerve reflex speed, Ether tolerance threshold."

"All of these things are written in the genes."

"A Hunter with an extremely high Ether tolerance threshold will likely have descendants who inherit a threshold that is also quite high."

"A mother with abnormally fast nerve conduction speed has a high probability of her child inheriting a similar constitution."

"While it doesn’t guarantee the emergence of a genius, it at least ensures that every generation is ’not too bad’."

"The logic of a Hunter Clan’s succession is built upon this ’not too bad’."

His mother placed her hands on her knees.

"Hunter training can be scaled."

"Starting at twelve or thirteen, they begin Ice Water Breath Holding, weighted runs, and pain tolerance training. Every single item has a standard procedure."

"Send ten children into a training camp, one or two will die, three or four will be eliminated, and all the rest can become qualified Practitioners."

"This is the logic of a Hunter Clan: use bloodline as a baseline, use training for mass production, and use scale to hedge against risk."

Her gaze shifted down a few inches, landing on the back of her hands.

"Those prominent surnames that appear in the Imperial Capital’s newspapers—Montague, Adams, Graham—are all Hunter clans."

"This is the reason why."

"Only the Hunter system can produce a sufficient number of Practitioners who can be integrated into an organizational structure."

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