I Loaded the Mysticism Panel

At the time, he had judged it to be a textbook-standard Seal, likely created not long after the Oil Lamp was forged.

A standard Seal meant its structure could be analyzed, and if it could be analyzed, it could be dismantled.

The problem was, a vast chasm lay between what was theoretically possible and what could actually be done.

He had also considered the simplest, most brutish solution: smashing the Oil Lamp to pieces.

The bronze lamp body was brittle; a few hard strikes with a hammer would be enough to shatter it.

Once the vessel of the Seal was physically destroyed, the Seal would naturally fail, and everything stored inside would be released.

But he quickly rejected this incredibly foolish idea.

There were two main reasons.

First, he didn’t know what was sealed inside.

The Oil Lamp’s Seal structure was a standard Priest’s Inscription Seal. The design of such Seals was usually to keep something locked inside and prevent it from getting out.

If it only contained a pure deposit of Ether, breaking it would mean nothing more than the Ether dispersing and evaporating.

But what if it was a physical entity?

Mutated species from behind the Curtain, residual products of rituals, unclean things intentionally isolated... Appendix C stated that not all infiltrations from behind the Curtain were benign.

Smashing the Seal was like tearing down a prison door. It didn’t matter if a cat or a tiger was locked inside; everything would be let out at once.

Doing something like that in his own bedroom wasn’t much different from suicide.

And suicide was one thing, but it would also endanger his family.

Second, Marvels from the Black Earth River Basin were extremely rare on the market.

He had managed to buy this Oil Lamp for only two pounds entirely because Clement’s channel for unsold auction items happened to produce it, and because no local buyers in Brighton were willing to make an offer.

Stumbling upon it once was lucky enough. He couldn’t possibly expect the same luck a second time.

Therefore, the plan to smash it was ruled out from the very beginning.

He had to find a way to pry open a controllable fissure without destroying the Marvel’s overall structure.

But how?

The question had been turning over in his mind for a whole week, yet he hadn’t found a breakthrough.

Until tonight, when he finally deciphered a Seal maintenance manual from the pile of primary source materials at the Imperial University Library.

Its core content was about how to determine if a Seal was aging and how to perform preventative maintenance before aging occurred.

Richard organized the deciphered content in his notebook in logical order.

The manual first discussed the general principles of Seal aging.

All Seals aged. There were no exceptions.

Regardless of whether the vessel was silver, bronze, stone, or wood, and no matter how well the Inscription was carved or how perfectly the ritual was performed, a Seal began to decay from the moment it was set.

Maintaining a Seal was its own discipline, and the manual went on to discuss the weak points in a Seal’s structure.

This section made Richard’s eyes light up.

The author used a very vivid metaphor.

A Seal’s Inscription was a closed chain, and the connection points between the links were the chain’s most vulnerable spots.

In the terminology of Epigraphy, these connection points were called "junctures."

A juncture was where the path of the Inscription shifted: a straight line became a curve, a curve became an angle, or two sections of the Inscription from different directions converged.

The maintenance manual recommended periodically inspecting the junctures and immediately repairing any signs of weakening binding force.

The repair method was also described, and it was similar to the work Mr. Hutton had done in the basement before.

The manual also specifically emphasized that during repairs, one must never apply reverse pressure to a juncture.

’But what if the goal isn’t to strengthen the Seal, but to weaken it?’

The manual’s author likely never would have dreamed that while his disaster prevention guide clearly stated, "Keep fire sources away from flammable materials," an arsonist would read it as, "Place fire sources next to flammable materials."

Richard’s sleepiness vanished in an instant. He recalled an engineering accident case study from an elective class in his past life.

"Class, have you heard of the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919?

A steel tank full of molasses burst, and over two million gallons of molasses flooded an entire street, killing twenty-one people."

"Why did it burst? Because of stress concentration at the riveted joints."

Stress concentration. Those two words were like a key, inserting itself into the lock with a CLICK.

Bridges fail at the welds, ship hulls rupture at the riveted joints, and aircraft skin fatigue begins at the rivet holes.

All structural failures begin at the weakest point.

The situation with a Seal’s Inscription was almost identical.

You can’t break a steel wire by bending it once, but if you bend it back and forth in the same spot dozens or hundreds of times, the wire is guaranteed to snap right there.

Richard stood up from his chair and paced a few steps back and forth in his room.

Excitement made his heart beat much faster than usual, but he quickly suppressed it.

’The theory making sense is one thing,’ he thought, ’but whether it can be executed is another.’

Richard checked his pocket watch. 9:40. In an era where the poor had few forms of entertainment, his family was already asleep.

He placed the Oil Lamp in the center of his desk.

What he had to do next was simple: press his right index finger on a juncture of the Seal and begin to "knock."

He closed his eyes and entered Quadruple Breathing.

After two cycles of Ether conduction, his fingertip felt an extremely faint change.

’This shouldn’t be a delusion.’

The fourth round, the fifth, the sixth... By the seventh round, the change was clearly perceptible.

However, at the end of the seventh round, he stopped.

Each round of Ether conduction consumed his already meager reserves of Ether.

Seven rounds of probing had already proven the method was viable.

The elasticity of the Seal at the juncture was indeed decreasing; the fatigue effect was accumulating.

By his estimation, two or three more rounds of conduction at the same intensity could create a micro-fissure in the Seal at that spot.

But a string of tension remained taut in his mind.

With the Divination Disc, it was just a Candle that went out.

But the Oil Lamp was on another level entirely.

An artifact from the Priestly Era of the Black Earth River Basin, with a history of saturation for at least a thousand years, and a textbook-standard Seal that had preserved most of its Ether.

The Oil Lamp hadn’t even truly cracked yet, but he could already feel the bronze surface heating up.

’If the Seal really breaks and some strange things get out...’

He didn’t know what would happen, but he absolutely could not let it happen at home.

His father was sleeping downstairs, his Mother’s bedroom was at the other end of the hall, and his sister’s room was right across from his.

If something went wrong, whether he could handle it or not was secondary; he absolutely could not expose his family to the risk.

After resting for a moment, Richard got out of bed.

He wrapped the Oil Lamp tightly in a thick flannel cloth and tucked it into a large inner pocket of his coat.

He then took out his Trainee Inspector papers from a drawer and put them in his breast pocket.

If he ran into a patrolman, these papers would at least save him a lot of trouble.

He opened the door. The hallway was pitch black.

He didn’t turn on a light, feeling his way along the wall toward the top of the stairs.

He opened the back door a crack. The night wind rushed in, carrying the end-of-year chill and the smell of coal smoke.

Richard pulled his coat tighter, squeezed sideways through the gap, and gently pulled the door shut from the outside.

Brighton at night was a different city from Brighton during the day.

All the daytime clamor—the cries of vendors, the clip-clop of hooves, the factory whistles, the roar of school bus engines—was swallowed by the night.

Occasionally, the bark of a dog or the clap of a night watchman’s wooden clapper would drift from the distance.

He didn’t choose the alley by the flea market, nor did he go to Grafton Street. He chose a more distant place.

Heading south along Waste Rock Lane, there was a dead-end alley called Nail Lane.

At the entrance to the alley stood a public phone booth, its red paint peeling and two of its glass panes cracked.

Next to the phone booth was a high wall, and behind the wall was an abandoned oil press factory.

The factory had closed three years ago. Its windows were sealed with sheet metal, and its courtyard was overgrown with weeds.

The alley ended in a dead wall. Besides the entrance by the phone booth, there was no other way in or out.

The nearest residence was more than fifty yards from the alley’s entrance, across the main street from a row of shops.

At this distance, and with the solid walls of the abandoned factory providing cover, it would be difficult for any trouble to affect anyone else.

When Richard arrived at the Nail Alleyway, he glanced at his pocket watch.

10:45. It had been a thirty-five-minute walk from his house.

The public phone booth stood on the left side of the alleyway.

The light inside the phone booth had long been broken. Someone had scrawled a few lines of vulgarities on the glass, the words now mostly washed away by the rain.

Richard didn’t enter the phone booth. He stopped in the area between it and the high wall.

He took the flannel-wrapped Oil Lamp from his inner pocket.

The human-faced silhouette of the Sphinx was faintly visible.

The face was neither smiling nor sad, its gaze dispassionately fixed on anyone who approached it.

Richard placed the Oil Lamp on his coat and squatted down. He first went through several full Breathing cycles to let the Breathing Technique stabilize.

He pressed his right index finger onto a juncture of the Seal.

He was already very familiar with the small contact area between the pad of his finger and the bronze surface.

The ninth round began. An Ether pulse shot out from his fingertip.

The force was identical to the previous eight rounds, as was the direction.

Compared to before, the decay in the Seal’s elasticity at the juncture was even more obvious.

At the end of the ninth round, he stopped to catch his breath.

The tenth round. For this one, he gritted his teeth and pushed his Ether reserves until they were nearly depleted.

Richard’s heart was racing.

With a sharp CRACK, a fissure appeared.

Ether gushed out from the Rift.

It surged out so quickly that a searing heat pushed his fingertip back, forcing him to pull away from the bronze surface.

The panel flashed.

[Available Points: 0.22→0.31]

The numbers began to climb: 0.31... 0.39... 0.44...

The panel was absorbing the gushing Ether, its conversion efficiency faster than any other Marvel he had encountered before.

But he had no time to stare at the numbers.

The hairs on the back of Richard’s neck stood on end. He could feel the surrounding Ether Field changing.

The first thing to stir was the phone booth’s Shadow.

It slid from its original position, shifting across the ground like a water-soaked cloth.

Then came the high wall’s Shadow. Its edges twitched like a living thing, bulging forward one moment and retracting the next.

Richard straightened up and took two steps back.

His vision was undergoing an extremely bizarre split.

Nothing itself had moved. The phone booth was the phone booth, the wall was the wall, and the ground was the ground.

But the Shadows of these things no longer belonged to them.

The Shadows were detaching from their objects and acting independently.

The panel’s numbers were still jumping: 0.58... 0.63... 0.71...

The absorption continued, but the out-of-control range of the Ether Field was also expanding.

The window panes of the shops across the street began to resonate under the impact of the Ether Field.

BUZZZZZ... The sound was faint, but extraordinarily clear in the dead of night.

Richard’s heart clenched.

The Ether Field’s diffusion had already exceeded the confines of the alley.

He strode to the alley’s entrance and peered out.

The main street was deserted, and all the shops were closed.

But across the street, the row of shops—the bakery, the hardware store, the tailor’s, the pharmacy... each had a sign out front, and each sign cast a Shadow.

Now, all those Shadows were moving.

The Shadow of the bakery’s sign peeled away from the wall and crawled across the brickwork.

The Shadow of the hardware store’s advertisement rack twisted into an impossible angle. Though the rack itself was upright, its Shadow had bent into a bow.

And then there was the Shadow of the half-mannequin in the display window...

Richard stared at that Shadow, a chill running down his spine.

The mannequin had no arms, only a torso and a head, used for displaying clothes.

But its Shadow had arms, which were reaching forward on the display glass, trying to grab something.

The buzzing grew louder.

It wasn’t just the shops across the street. The Shadows of all the visible buildings on both sides of the street were flowing.

The Shadows of the entire block had come to life.

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