I Loaded the Mysticism Panel

The sky on Wednesday was a uniform gray. A solid sheet of clouds stretched from one end of Brighton to the other, with no discernible thick or thin spots.

Richard sat in the classroom through the last class of the morning, then packed his textbook into his bag.

He had traced the four sets of inscriptions on the Gargoyle's base twice. He could barely make out the structure of the first two sets, but the last two were completely unintelligible.

He had wracked his brain, but those two sets of symbols didn't match any known substitution rules.

If he kept trying to puzzle it out on his own, his progress would be despairingly slow.

Besides, the regular gatherings of the Divine Pantheon Salon also required him to find ways to expand his knowledge of higher-level Mysticism.

He needed new tools, a new direction, that new key.

Mr. Hutton wouldn't just hand him the key.

It had always been this way. He was waiting for his student to come knocking.

So, he would knock.

During lunch, Warren ordered him a steak with cream soup, as usual.

Richard ate quickly, using his knife and fork to cut the steak into neat little pieces and popping them into his mouth one after another.

Warren was gnawing on a chicken leg across from him, the corner of his mouth glistening with grease. "You're in a hurry today."

"I'm busy this afternoon."

"What is it?"

"I'm going to see Mr. Hutton."

Warren stopped chewing his chicken leg.

At Greenwood, students who took the initiative to see Mr. Hutton were exceedingly rare.

It wasn't that the old gentleman was unapproachable. His lectures were witty, and he would occasionally chat with students in the hallway about the weather or sports.

But everyone had the vague sense that this amiable old teacher was somehow different from the others at the school.

Greenwood had an unwritten rule: at the beginning and in the middle of each month, Mr. Hutton would be absent for two days each time.

On the academic office's schedule, those days would be cleared in advance for a substitute teacher.

The principal never asked why, and the head of the department would never dream of pushing him on it.

For any other teacher, a two-day absence without an explanation would have the dean of academic affairs fuming.

But Mr. Hutton was the exception.

He had taught at Greenwood for decades. Two principals had come and gone, and neither had ever touched his teaching schedule.

Besides that, there was something else few people ever noticed.

The faculty offices at Greenwood came in two types: a large, open-plan office with a dozen or so desks pushed together, and small, private offices.

There were only five of these private offices, belonging to the principal, the various department heads, and Mr. Hutton.

Why would a history teacher with no administrative duties get an office on the same level as the principal and department heads?

Before becoming one of Mr. Hutton's "official students," Richard hadn't noticed these details either.

Looking back now, the answer wasn't difficult to guess.

After lunch, he walked east along the first-floor corridor of the main school building.

Mr. Hutton's office was around the corner at the end of the hall, with an inconspicuous bronze plaque on the door.

The door was ajar, and the faint smell of tobacco drifted out from within.

Richard raised a hand and knocked twice on the doorframe.

"Come in."

The voice wasn't loud, but even before he pushed the door open, he could smell freshly brewed black tea.

When he pushed the door open, he froze for a second.

Mr. Hutton sat behind his desk, flipping through a lesson plan with his left hand, his right hand resting on the tabletop.

Neither of his hands was free. The lesson plan was in his left, and his right index finger was pressed against a line of annotations.

"Sit."

Richard sat down, his eyes habitually sweeping around the office.

In the past, when Mr. Hutton had kept him for a talk, it had always been in a classroom. This was his first time in the man's office.

The room wasn't large, less than half the size of a classroom.

An old map hung on the wall by the window. Unlike the map of the New Continent's coastline in the classroom, this one showed a panorama of the entire Western Continent.

The old man pushed his lesson plan aside, clearing some space on the desk.

"You've come to see me because you're stuck on something, am I right?"

"Yes." Richard didn't beat around the bush.

He took a notebook from his bag, flipped to a specific page, and slid it across the desk to Mr. Hutton.

Several sets of symbols were traced in the notebook, scattered across the grid lines.

They were fragments he had isolated from the inscriptions on the Gargoyle's base.

He had deliberately scrambled the order and mixed in a few other symbols he'd collected from the Imperial University Library to throw things off.

It looked like a collection of obscure characters a curious student might have scraped together from various places, its specific origin impossible to discern.

"I've come across some inscriptions recently. I can make out the structure of the earlier parts, but a few sets don't seem to match any known system."

He tapped the tip of his pencil on the scattered sets of symbols.

Mr. Hutton glanced down at the page.

Though the symbols had been broken apart, scrambled, and mixed with others, the curvature of the strokes and the angles of their turns still carried the feel of their original medium.

These characters weren't copied from a book; they were traced from an artifact.

Inscriptions printed on a page are subtly different from those chiseled onto the surface of an artifact.

The former are standardized through typesetting, while the latter retain the slight imperfections from being hand-carved.

Mr. Hutton had likely noticed this distinction.

But he didn't ask where the symbols came from, nor did he question why a high school student would have tracings of an artifact's inscriptions.

"These sets here." His finger tapped the target symbols scattered in the notebook. "They aren't part of the Western Continent system."

"That was my assessment as well."

"And you'd be right."

Mr. Hutton pushed his chair back slightly and pulled a folded piece of paper from the second shelf of the bookcase behind him.

The paper was thin and deeply creased. Unfolded, it was about the size of two sheets of stationery.

It was covered in densely packed symbols and their corresponding words. The handwriting was finer and the arrangement more compact than the last chart he'd been given.

"Here." He pushed the paper over.

Richard unfolded it and glanced over it. The symbol system on this chart was completely different from the last one.

The last chart dealt with code-word substitution on a Latin level. This one corresponded to an entirely different language.

"Ancient Greek Language?" he asked, recognizing a few letters.

"Correct." Mr. Hutton leaned back in his chair.

"The symbols you've encountered belong to an encryption system based on the Ancient Greek Language.

Specifically, it's the terminological system of the Alexandrian School, which developed from Alchemy Documents from the Ptolemaic Era."

He picked up his cup of tea and took a sip.

"This system is more complex, with deeper layers of encryption."

The old man didn't ask Richard why he was suddenly interested in inscriptions on artifacts, nor did he ask which artifact the symbols were from.

He only placed a lamp by the roadside at the appropriate time; what it illuminated depended on the one Walking the path.

Richard's fingers brushed against the surface of the chart.

Multiple threads of thought converged in his mind.

'The raw materials he'd collected from the Imperial University Library, and the last two sets of inscriptions on the Gargoyle... The two locks use the same key.'

But then again.

"Sir, my foundational knowledge of the Ancient Greek Language is next to zero.

Right now, this chart is no different to me than a piece of scrap paper filled with words I can't read."

"Not entirely scrap paper." The old man's white eyebrows twitched. "At least you know what you need to learn next."

Richard folded the chart neatly and tucked it into his notebook.

Mr. Hutton flicked the corner of his lesson plan with his finger.

"The grammar of the Ancient Greek Language is far more complex than Latin's. Verb conjugations, noun declensions, the middle voice... the basic framework alone will take you a while to get through."

"But you learn languages much faster than the average person. In two to three weeks, you should reach the threshold where you can begin attempting to decipher it."

'Two weeks.' Richard calculated the time in his head.

It was already mid-November. The Christmas holiday was at the end of December.

If he hurried, he could probably get the basic framework of the Ancient Greek Language down before the holiday.

Mr. Hutton held his teacup, his gaze drifting from Richard's face to the gloomy gray sky outside.

"Speaking of the Christmas holiday."

His tone shifted, becoming a little less casual.

"I've arranged a winter break internship for you."

"What kind of internship?"

"It's related to the primary duties of a Scholar." Mr. Hutton didn't offer any more details.

"We'll discuss the specifics after Christmas. You'll be notified when the time comes."

He swirled the teacup in his hand.

"If you perform well during the internship, it can count as your *probatio*."

*Probatio*.

One of the three conditions for a Newcomer to advance to a Practitioner.

"You should be mentally prepared. This internship isn't a solo affair."

Richard sat up a little straighter.

"I'll be contacting a few colleagues I know. Some are Hunters, others are Secretive Ones."

Mr. Hutton drew a small circle on the desk with his finger.

"They've been active in the North for many years. They're experienced and reliable.

When the time comes, we'll work together to complete some tasks. Consider it your first glimpse of the scenery behind the Curtain."

He glanced at Richard.

"You've been at Greenwood for so long, and everything you've encountered has been on paper: literature from the bookshelves, symbols from inscriptions, deductions in your notebook.

No matter how much you find on paper, you're always one step removed."

"The world behind the Curtain can't be fully understood just by reading books.

Some things you have to see with your own eyes, touch with your own hands, and experience for yourself to truly understand them."

"Also," he added, "you'll get to meet some other Newcomers from the northern region."

"Other Newcomers?" Richard sounded surprised.

"You didn't think you were the only young person in the entire Northern Imperial region who wants to walk this path, did you?"

Mr. Hutton's white eyebrows twitched.

"Brighton, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle... in the major cities of the Northern Industrial District, plenty of talented young people emerge every year.

Some are discovered by a Guide, like you. Some inherit it from their families. And some just stumble into it on their own."

"Most of them don't know each other. They walk their own paths and have their own Guides.

But every so often, there are occasions for these people to meet and put a face to a name."

He turned a page of his lesson plan.

"The winter break internship is one such occasion."

"A few Newcomers get together, do some practical work under the guidance of experienced seniors, and get a chance to see how far their peers have come."

Richard nodded, not pressing for more details.

Since Mr. Hutton had said they would "discuss the specifics when the time comes," asking now would be pointless.

'But even though the old man had said "no major problems will arise," that was completely different from being "completely without danger."'

'That meant that while the internship wouldn't be beyond a Newcomer's capabilities, it also wouldn't be as simple as flipping through books in a classroom.'

'There would be real contact, real operations, and maybe even real... confrontation?'

Richard mentally took stock of his current equipment and abilities.

The Fog Wall Technique could only confuse ordinary people, and the lesson from Central Avenue was still fresh in his mind.

He still hadn't bought his Trainee Inspector's sidearm. Even if he had, he'd had so little shooting practice that he was still far from proficient.

He'd only deciphered less than half of the Technique on the Gargoyle and was a long way from actually being able to use it for Casting.

'If he really ran into unexpected trouble during the winter internship, he had pitifully few tools at his disposal.'

Mr. Hutton had said just to bring his brain and his eyes.

'But Richard felt that his brain and his eyes alone probably wouldn't be enough.'

'I need to step up my firearms training.'

'And I have to speed up my progress on the Gargoyle's Technique.'

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