Chapter 117: Character Portraits

Richard lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.

A dog from a house in the opposite alley was barking again. It yapped three times before its owner shouted it into silence.

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

[Sleeping Lv.1] Progress: 99%

He blinked.

Unlike his eating skill, experience for sleep accumulated purely as the product of sleep duration and sleep quality.

Getting a full seven or eight hours a night pushed the progress bar forward a chunk.

The optimized oxygen supply from Breathing Lv.2 gave him much higher sleep quality than an ordinary person.

He fell asleep faster, slept through the night without waking, and spent more time in deep sleep.

After two months of cumulative high-quality sleep, the progress bar quietly filled tonight.

[Sleeping Lv.2] Progress: 0%

The change arrived even more quietly than when his eating skill had upgraded.

In the morning, Richard opened his eyes.

He had woken before the alarm even sounded, rising cleanly to the surface of consciousness as if lifted straight out of deep water.

He sat in bed for a moment, checking the state of his mind.

The information he had sorted the night before sat neatly in place in his mind, every piece available for instant recall.

It did more than help him sleep well and stay energetic during the day.

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

After an overnight cycle of repair, anything he learned during the day had a significantly lower rate of forgetting.

...

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

A notebook lay open on the desk—one dedicated to the Theogony Salon.

His handwriting was a size smaller than in his usual notes; he planned to add a little to it after every future gathering.

He turned to a blank page and began writing character portraits.

The portrait pointing to Hecate read:

A Secret practitioner, likely at the Major Adept rank, with means sufficient to support cross-city delivery and dream connection; thoroughly familiar with the Empire's mystic side, and a long-term operator of an information network.

Richard's pen paused beneath "long-term operator of an information network," and he wrote down a single letter: M.

M. stood for Madam Marie. Out of caution, he did not write her name out.

Breaking down the elements of Madam Marie's portrait, far too many points matched.

First, the Major Adept rank.

Old Biggs had personally confirmed that his teacher was a Major Adept—the living ceiling for practitioners on the Old Continent—which matched the strength Hecate had displayed in the temple.

Second, the Secret path.

Madam Marie was a medium from the Civilian Guild, making her a representative figure of the Secret path in her own right.

Every method Hecate used—building the dream temple, operating the Spirit Realm Messenger, and setting up the perception space—belonged to high-level applications of the Secret path.

Then there was her long-term operation in the Imperial Capital and a network of disciples spread across the country. This was the most crucial point: Spirit Realm Messenger deliveries had to rely on anchors.

To deliver tokens to entirely different cities required activatable anchors in each of those cities.

Only someone with a student network spanning the north and south of the Empire could do that.

Gerard had mentioned on the phone that Madam Marie's approach to taking students was to turn no one away.

That wide-net approach to recruitment sounded similar to what Hecate had said to the newcomers at their first round table.

Going a step further, from an occult perspective, the Triple Goddess corresponded to youth, the present, and the future.

According to Old Biggs, the age span of Madam Marie's students covered at least three generations.

Her earliest disciples had already retired, while her newest were still apprentices.

This cross-generational lineage structure matched the three stages of maiden, mother, and crone.

Richard drew straight lines connecting all five points, the end of each line pointing to the same name.

If Hecate truly was Madam Marie, the threat level the Theogony Salon posed to him would rise by a full tier.

He was already in contact with Old Biggs, and the Warren Family brought in Mrs. MacNeil every year for exorcisms.

From Briston to Flower Moon Street in the Imperial Capital, from the Civilian Guild to his family mansion, he had been caught in the net before he even realized he was standing near the edge.

If this deduction held true, every move he made and every word he spoke could be exposed to an unseen, secretive eye.

The possibility alone made Richard shudder.

After school the next day, Richard made time to tutor his sister with her homework.

Evelyn's difficult problem tonight was a word problem about wage distribution in a weaving mill.

As he outlined the solution steps for her, his mind was actually turning over a completely different line of reasoning.

"Brother, you're being especially patient explaining things today."

Evelyn chewed on the end of her pencil, looking up from her workbook.

"Your homework is difficult today."

"It's not that difficult..." she muttered, lowering her head again.

After dinner, he helped his mother clear the dishes and returned to his room, flipping his notebook open to the page where he had circled Madam Marie.

The soundest way to refute a deduction was to find a contradiction between it and the known facts.

The biggest contradiction here was motive.

Both Gerard and Old Biggs had spoken of Madam Marie's reputation in the Civilian Guild.

She had a stable working relationship with the official system; even when the Empire's Branch Office went on field assignments, they would borrow her disciples' local intelligence networks.

Her entire foundation rested on a word-of-mouth reputation.

Someone who had maneuvered to the point where three different factions gave her respect had no reason to run an underground organization that violated mainstream ethics by addressing one another with the names of gods.

She could work quietly within her own circle of clients; she had no need to sit at an anonymous round table like this.

The people with real motive were those who "could not get the position they wanted within the rules."

Hecate's monologue about "how mortals dare claim the names of gods" concealed an arrogance that placed her above the existing rules.

But for Madam Marie, the moment she openly defied the rules, all the credibility she had accumulated over decades would drop to zero overnight.

Even purely from the standpoint of self-interest, she had no reason to do it.

Richard crossed out M. in his notebook.

But the chain of suspicion was not broken; it simply shifted from the "teacher" in another direction.

He wrote his second suspect on the next line of the notebook.

Mrs. MacNeil—this time, he used K. to represent her.

She was Madam Marie's prized student.

Regularly moving among wealthy merchant families in the north, she had a ready-made information channel with local nodes of the mystic side.

After the Spirit Board incident, she had been the first to give the Warren Family the assessment that "this little guy isn't simple."

If someone needed to observe Richard's progress over the long term, gather data on his abilities, and judge whether he was worth bringing to the round table, Mrs. MacNeil was a ready-made pair of eyes.

The pen tip paused beneath the word "eyes" for a moment.

Richard set the pen down.

Someone truly pulling the strings from the shadows would never allow an observable chain of connection between themselves and an invitee.

Hecate would not make such a crude move.

The precision with which she built the temple and operated the Spirit Realm Messenger hinted at every turn that she was someone acutely sensitive to information leaks.

Someone like that would not let information leak into the household of a client with a chatterbox son.

Richard crossed out K. as well.

At present, the person Richard felt most confident he could identify was actually the other newcomer at the table.

Nemesis.

Female, young judging by her voice, and trained rigorously in debate or public speaking.

Her late father had been a Hunter; when Hecate drew back the curtain, the vengeful resolve projected by her divine name was identical to a certain someone's public speech.

In Richard's mind, only one person fit that entire set of traits.

Catherine Blackwood.

This person had the fire of reckoning in her bones.

Her debate training matched; her family background matched.

He was sixty or seventy percent sure.

Even so, Richard did not write down any explicit words pointing to Catherine in his notebook.

His identifications remained strictly at the level of symbols and abbreviations, using N. to correspond to Nemesis.

Richard had no intention of verifying it.

If he was sixty or seventy percent sure he had recognized Nemesis, then her guess about who Hermes was probably wasn't far off the mark either.

They were both at the same anonymous round table, had most likely recognized each other, and both had tacitly chosen to stay silent.

That unspoken understanding was in itself a form of protection.