I Loaded the Mysticism Panel

Richard lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.

A dog in the house across the alley barked again. After three barks, its owner shouted it down.

The numbers on the panel floated at the edge of his vision.

[Sleep Level 1] Progress: 99%

He blinked.

Unlike the Eating Skill, experience for Sleep was accumulated purely from the product of sleep duration and sleep quality.

Sleeping a full seven or eight hours each day made the progress bar creep forward.

The oxygen optimization from Breathing Lv.2 made his sleep quality a great deal higher than that of an ordinary person.

He fell asleep quickly, never woke up in the middle of the night, and spent more time in deep sleep.

After two months of accumulated high-quality sleep, the progress bar silently filled up tonight.

[Sleep Level 2] Progress: 0%

The change was even quieter than when Eating had leveled up.

In the morning, Richard opened his eyes.

He woke up before his alarm rang, his consciousness surfacing cleanly and crisply, as if he had been pulled up from the bottom of the sea.

He sat in bed for a moment, sensing the state of his brain.

The information he had sorted through last night rested securely in its proper place in his mind, every piece instantly retrievable.

It didn’t just help him sleep well and feel energetic during the day.

During sleep, it had performed a high-quality organization and consolidation of the information stored in his brain.

The rate at which he forgot things he learned during the day had decreased after a night of this restoration.

......

Using his flexible time after class that day, Richard returned to his private reading room.

A notebook lay open on the desk. This was for recording notes on the Divine Pantheon Salon.

The handwriting was a size smaller than what he usually used for notes. He planned to add to it after every gathering.

He flipped the notebook to a blank page and began writing a character profile.

The profile pointed to Hecate:

A Secretive One, possibly at the Grand Mastery Tier, with the means to support inter-city deliveries and dream connections. She has an intimate knowledge of the Imperial Mysterious Side and has been operating an information network for a long time.

Richard’s pen tip paused under the line "has been operating an information network for a long time," and he wrote down the letter M.

M. stood for Lady Mary. Out of caution, he didn’t write out her name.

Breaking down the elements of Lady Mary’s profile, there were far too many matches.

First, the Grand Mastery Tier.

Old Big had personally admitted that his teacher was a Grand Master, the ceiling for living Cultivators on the Old Continent. This matched the power Hecate had displayed in the Divine Hall.

Second, the Secret Direction.

Lady Mary was a Spirit Medium from a civilian Guild, a representative figure of the Secret Direction herself.

Hecate’s methods—building the Dream Divine Hall, operating the Spirit Realm Messenger, and arranging the Perception Space—were all High Tier applications of the Secret Direction.

Then there was her long-term operation in the Imperial Capital and her students spread across the country. This was the most crucial point, as Spirit Realm Messenger deliveries relied on Anchors.

To deliver an item to a completely different city, you need activatable Anchors in those cities.

Only someone with a network of students spanning the north and south of the Empire could achieve this.

Gerald had said on the phone that Lady Mary’s recruitment method was to accept all who came.

This "cast a wide net" recruitment posture seemed somewhat similar to what Hecate had said to the new members at the first Round Table.

Furthermore, from the perspective of Mysticism, the Triple Goddess corresponds to youth, the present, and the future.

According to Old Big, Lady Mary’s students spanned at least three generations.

The earliest disciples were already retired, while the latest were still apprentices.

This cross-generational master-disciple structure perfectly corresponded to the three stages of maiden, mother, and crone.

Richard connected these five points with straight lines, and the end of each one pointed to the same name.

If Hecate really was Lady Mary, then the danger level of the Divine Pantheon Salon would be raised a notch for him.

He had already made contact with Old Big, and the Warren Family invited Mrs. MacNeil for exorcisms every year.

From Brighton to Imperial City Huayue Street, from the Secret Guild to the family manor, he had been caught in the net before he even realized he was standing on its edge.

If this deduction was correct, then his every action, his every word, was likely being watched by an unseen, secret eye.

The mere thought of this possibility sent a chill down Richard’s spine.

The next day after school, Richard found some time to help his sister with her homework.

Evelyn’s difficult problem tonight was a word problem about wage distribution at a textile factory.

As he outlined the steps to solve the problem for his sister, his mind was actually busy calculating a different line of thought.

"Brother, you’re being especially patient explaining this today."

Evelyn said, chewing on the end of her pencil as she looked up from her workbook.

"Your homework is hard today."

"It’s not that hard..." she muttered, lowering her head again.

After dinner, he helped his Mother clear the dishes and returned to his room, opening his notebook to the page with Lady Mary’s name circled.

If one wanted to refute a deduction, the surest way was to find contradictions between it and known facts.

The biggest contradiction was motive.

Both Gerald and Old Big had spoken of Lady Mary’s reputation within the civilian Guilds.

She had a stable cooperative relationship with the official system; even the Imperial Branch Office would borrow her students’ local intelligence networks for field operations.

Her entire foundation was built on her word-of-mouth reputation.

A person who could manage her affairs so well that three different factions all showed her deference had no reason to create an underground organization that violated mainstream ethics and whose members addressed each other by the names of gods.

She could work quietly within her own circle of clients; there was no need to sit at such an anonymous Round Table.

The ones with a motive were those who "could not attain the position they desired within the existing rules."

Hecate’s monologue, "How dare mortals call each other by the names of gods," concealed an arrogance that placed her above the current rules.

But for Lady Mary, if she were to openly flout the rules, decades of accumulated credibility would vanish overnight.

Even purely from a perspective of self-interest, she had no reason to do so.

Richard crossed out the M. in his notebook.

But this chain of suspicion wasn’t broken; it merely shifted from the "teacher" to another direction.

The second suspect was written on the next line of the notebook.

Mrs. MacNeil. This time, he used a K. to represent her.

She was Lady Mary’s prized student.

She had long been frequenting the homes of wealthy northern merchants and had ready-made information channels with local nodes of the Mysterious Side.

After the Divination Disc incident, she was the first to deliver the judgment "this little fellow is no simple character" to the Warren Family.

If someone needed to observe Richard’s progress over the long term, collect data on his abilities, and determine if he was worthy of joining the Round Table, Mrs. MacNeil was a ready-made pair of eyes.

His pen tip paused for a moment under the word "eyes".

Richard put down his pen.

The true mastermind hiding in the shadows wouldn’t allow an observable chain of connection to exist between themselves and an invitee.

Hecate wouldn’t make such a clumsy move.

The meticulousness with which she built the Divine Hall and operated the Spirit Realm Messenger suggested she was someone extremely sensitive to "information leaks."

A person like that wouldn’t let information flow to the home of a client with a talkative son.

Richard crossed out the K. as well.

Conversely, the person Richard was most confident in identifying was the other newcomer at his table.

Nemesis.

Female. Based on her voice, not very old. And she had undergone rigorous debate or speech training.

Her father was a Hunter before he died. When Hecate revealed the divine names, the vengeful determination projected by that name was identical to a certain someone’s speech on a stage.

In Richard’s mind, there was only one person who fit this set of characteristics.

Catherine Blackwood.

That girl had a fire of reckoning in her bones.

The debate training matched, the family background matched.

He was sixty to seventy percent sure.

Richard also refrained from writing any explicit text pointing to Catherine in his notebook.

The identification remained at the level of symbols and abbreviations, using N. for Nemesis.

Richard had no intention of verifying it.

If he was sixty to seventy percent sure about Nemesis’s identity, then her guess as to "who is Hermes" probably wasn’t far off the mark either.

Two people at the same anonymous Round Table, both having likely recognized each other, and both having tacitly chosen to remain silent.

This tacit understanding was, in itself, a form of protection.

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