Chapter 120: Small Surprises and Big Surprises

In his room, after finishing his daily breathing method, Richard decided to try nourishing the supernatural item.

He first glanced at his panel: [Spiritual Capacity] 10/10.

It had been full for several days now.

The reservoir stopped filling once it reached the top; it could not swallow even a drop more.

It was a pity he couldn't keep accumulating ether once the gauge maxed out.

By running the breathing method every day, he could have continuously poured pure ether into it.

But since he was at the limit, the excess simply overflowed for nothing.

That overflowing portion bled into the air, mixing with the ambient, unrefined ether outside, never to be recovered.

Richard made a mental note of this. Once he had an abundance of points, he needed to arrange an expansion.

Upgrading from 10 to 20 only cost 1 point. It was a worthwhile trade.

But he was in no rush to think about that tonight.

He shifted the Sphinx Lamp slightly closer to the center of the desk, adjusting it until the distance to his palm felt right.

Mr. Hutton had told him that nourishing a supernatural item was like watering a plant: too much would drown it, and too little would let it wither.

Richard closed his eyes and steadied his breathing.

By the breath-holding phase of the third cycle, ether systematically gathered at the Seat of the Sun.

The volume was slightly more abundant than usual. He assumed his condition was just good tonight.

He pushed the ether out from the Seat of the Sun, letting it slide along the inner pathway of his right arm toward his palm.

Just as the excess began to flow into the lamp, a small stream spontaneously surged from the ten units of pure ether stored in his reservoir.

One stream was the practice excess outputted by the Seat of the Sun; the other was the pure ether automatically welling up from his Spiritual Capacity.

The two streams merged into a single mass at his palm, surging through his skin into the lamp.

The next moment, the Sphinx Lamp's temperature spiked from lukewarm straight to scalding.

The heat numbed the skin of his palm. He almost pulled his hand away.

But the scorching heat did not continue to rise. It stopped at a critical threshold right between scalding and tolerable.

Richard opened his eyes and looked at the relief carving on the lamp's body.

The outline of the sphinx was veiled by a thin layer of oxidation.

He had looked at that human-faced, beast-bodied relief countless times.

Half-closed eyes, an indifferent jawline, and the corners of its mouth neither raised nor turned down.

But now, he caught a subtle difference.

The slits of those half-closed eyes seemed a bit wider than before.

He held his breath and stared at it for another moment, but it quickly looked no different from before.

Richard pulled his right hand away from the lamp. He could feel a faint pull between himself and the object.

[Spiritual Capacity] 9/10

The ether in his reservoir had decreased by one unit.

Richard leaned back in his chair to think.

Since the Sphinx Lamp could draw ether from him, it might be treating the reserves within his Spiritual Capacity as a part of itself.

Mr. Hutton's evaluation at the time had been that he shared a "weak resonance" with this supernatural item.

After tonight, that word "weak" might need to be reconsidered.

If he consistently maintained a full Spiritual Capacity while nourishing it...

Then during every daily session, the Sphinx Lamp would absorb extra pure ether.

One unit did not sound like much, but it would add up over time.

He could not yet determine what changes this pure ether from his Spiritual Capacity would trigger in the lamp.

Mr. Hutton had once said, "Keep up the nourishment, and it will eventually give you a surprise."

Perhaps that small surprise might turn into a big one.

Downstairs, he heard his mother cough twice, accompanied by his father's deep snores.

The bell tower at Greenwood chimed ten times.

He climbed into bed, and his Sleep Skill slowly took effect within the gentle warmth of the blankets.

In the next room, his sister was still reciting geography for her test tomorrow.

"...Manchester is the largest city in the Northern Industrial Zone of the Empire. Its primary industries include cotton textiles, woolen textiles, machinery manufacturing..."

The little girl's voice grew softer and softer, eventually fading into a few indistinct murmurs.

...

After school that day, Richard went to the library again.

Against the east wall on the second floor of the Greenwood library sat the newspaper rack.

Dozens of daily and recent newspapers were clamped into wooden holders, categorized by city: the Imperial Capital, local Briston, other cities in the Northern Industrial Zone, and editions sent back from the overseas colonies.

When Richard came up the stairs, his gaze habitually swept over the rack.

The outermost wooden clamp held today's issue of the Albion Evening Post.

The front page featured a few inconsequential local news pieces. The third page had been left half-open by an earlier student, revealing a short news brief placed away from the headlines:

"Captain of the Gloucester Dies Suddenly in Hotel; Police Preliminarily Rule Cardiac Arrest"

Richard stopped in his tracks.

He took the wooden clamp down and fully unfolded the third page.

Right below that brief was another, even smaller article.

The Admiralty's recruitment deadline for the third rescue team had been delayed by two weeks, with the cited reason being that "volunteer numbers fell short of expectations."

He flipped further back.

In the corner of the sixth page, a reprinted summary from the Commercial Gazette: Colony Edition mentioned that several border towns on the New Continent had experienced a "population decline under non-war, non-plague circumstances" this quarter.

Richard placed the newspaper back in its clamp and pulled out a few older issues from the past month.

He flipped through them in chronological order.

The expeditionary force losing contact, the rescue team losing contact, parliament passing secret appropriations, and an abnormal surge in colonial resource import figures.

None of these short briefs stood out on their own, but stringing them together was a different story.

He could roughly see the Empire's pattern of response to the New Continent.

Downplaying the situation to the public, secretly allocating massive funds internally, and wiping out anomalous discussions on the public opinion front.

Richard leaned against the wooden frame of the rack. He shifted his gaze from the papers up to a distribution map of the Empire's overseas colonies hanging above.

The map had been drawn decades ago, and its colors were already fading.

The New Continent was depicted as a massive, irregular landmass. Its eastern coastline was densely packed with the names of over a dozen colonies; however, the vast territory west of the central mountain range was just a swath of light gray, completely devoid of any named settlements.

Richard stared at that light gray area for a moment.

The Empire's colonization of the New Continent had lasted for at least three hundred years.

In the previous century, the Albion Empire had already brought steam engines from factories to ocean-going merchant ships. Telegraph lines were laid out to every mid-sized and larger city within its borders, and internal combustion engines were installed in the army's latest armored vehicles.

Logically, three hundred years of colonization was more than enough time for the settlements on the New Continent to expand into autonomous cities and gradually mature into newborn nations.

A landmass across the ocean was naturally suited to breed independent regimes; the suzerain state's control could not possibly extend that far.

Yet Richard had never heard a single rumor of an autonomous regime appearing on the New Continent.

Not only were there no autonomous regimes, there was not even a shred of newspaper coverage regarding local national affairs.

The colonial updates that occasionally surfaced in the papers constantly repeated the same few phrases: "border settlements," "stable supply," and "seasonal fluctuations."

For over three hundred years, the New Continent had maintained this exact state—neither growing nor expanding.

The eastern towns were packed tightly along the coast, becoming sparser the further inland they went, fading into a complete blank slate west of the central mountains.

Richard brought his gaze back to those few short news briefs in the paper.

"The nights there are darker than the nights anywhere else."

The words from Captain Harding's public statement seemed to bleed from between the lines of the text.

Richard put the newspaper back in its place.

He walked over to a seat in the eastern corner of the second floor.

At the chair, he pulled out the Ancient Greek vocabulary list he planned to read today, but he did not open it immediately after sitting down.

He did not intend to delve deeper into these New Continent reports for the time being. Right now, he should not be splitting his attention on something so far away.

However, his mind would not simply stop thinking just because he told it to.

Moving upward on the Scholar path of progression was impossible without a sufficient concentration of ether, sufficiently ancient supernatural items, and a sufficiently deep source of information.

Where did supernatural items come from?

Most artifacts of great age were distributed around the cradles of known civilizations.

The Black Soil River Basin, Mesopotamia, the Ancient Greek coastlines, the Spice Islands, as well as the ancient monasteries and civilization ruins within the Empire's borders.

Richard could generally access artifacts from these places through the academy system and auction house channels.

But what about when his Rank climbed to a certain height?

He remembered exactly what Old Biggs had said.

Major Adept was already the ceiling on the Old Continent. The higher ranks written about in the texts—Virtuoso, Master, and Archon—had no living examples on the Old Continent.

The description in Appendix C shared the same tone: the deeper into the veil one went, the more the rules deviated from common sense, and the practitioners of those higher ranks "no longer need to be known by us."

It was impossible for those higher ranks to just vanish into thin air.

They were either hiding in some corner of the Old Continent that Richard could not yet reach, or they were outside the Old Continent altogether.

And outside the Old Continent, the only known landmass was the New Continent.

For hundreds of years, the New Continent had formed no autonomous regimes and birthed no independent nations. Its colonization progress had perpetually stalled within the narrow coastal regions.

The simplest explanation Richard could think of was that something inland was preventing humanity from gaining a foothold.

The deterrence was strong enough that countless expeditionary forces lost contact, the populations of border towns steadily declined, and returning ship captains dropped dead in their hotel rooms.

Richard closed the book in his hands.

As long as he intended to push onward past the rank of Major Adept, the New Continent would inevitably stand in his path.