Chapter 266: Bountiful Harvest

The inverted Judgment Hall retreated from the domed ceiling inch by inch, like an ebbing tide.

The scales in the black water, the gaping maw of Ammit, and the bird-headed god holding his pen all faded into pale silhouettes before scattering into a few drifting wisps of ether.

The stone walls returned. The stone pillars returned.

Inside the glass display cases, the masks that had turned away slowly faced forward again, one by one, returning to their slumber before their respective label plaques.

The clamor that had filled the room settled into silence all at once.

The students collapsed or slumped to the floor. A few couldn't even sit up straight, clinging to the edges of the display cases as they gasped for air.

Richard didn't bother checking on the others; he stared only at the Panel notification in front of his eyes:

[Seed extracted.]

[Planting conditions: All three Intellect attributes (Learning, Reasoning, Perception) must reach Lv.3.]

His first seed had been extracted from the Bronze Sphinx Lamp.

Its planting condition had been unlocking the Spirit attribute, which required lighting up all four Body attributes.

Now, this second seed required all three Mind attributes to be maxed out.

One bound to Body, the other bound to Mind—a perfect symmetry.

The [Shadow Inversion] from the Sphinx Lamp had flipped the Stone Armor, creating the Shadow Armor.

Flipping the Moon Nail had created the Moon Nail's Reversal, an ability capable of refreshing his own Micro-circulation.

Opening that avenue of reversal had brought nothing but tangible, solid benefits.

And now, another seed had fallen into his Panel.

Name, Mirror, Substitute.

Richard began to speculate.

Mirror, reflecting the target's mold.

Name, seizing the target's lifeline.

Substitute, swapping himself into the target's position.

An old hypothesis, one he had buried at the very bottom of his notebook, suddenly surfaced in his mind: a body double.

Back then, it had merely been a thought.

But now?

Name, Mirror, Substitute.

But this couldn't be rushed.

[Learning] had surpassed Lv.3 long ago.

[Perception] had just crossed the Lv.3 threshold right here in this vault.

The only thing missing was [Reasoning].

The nourishment for the [Reasoning] skill was simply "thought."

Sitting alone in a room daydreaming wouldn't yield a single drop.

But once autumn arrived and he entered the preparatory class for the Department of Classics at Imperial Capital University, there would be no shortage of work requiring him to decipher, collate, and pluck the load-bearing pillars from stacks of old theses.

Especially with his aunt in the department to give him special tutelage.

By then, his Reasoning experience would likely soar just as fast as his Perception.

He dismissed the Panel.

Shadow Inversion allowed him to invert Spell Formulas. What would this Name, Mirror, and Substitute seed give him in the future?

As Richard pondered, the corners of his mouth ticked up uncontrollably.

No, he couldn't smile yet.

A room full of people had just crawled their way out of a sealing ritual for a Black Soil River Virtuoso fragment.

Some were sprawled on the floor gasping for air; others were clinging to the glass cases, retching.

If he laughed out loud right now, it would be highly inappropriate.

Across the vault, Curator Wetherby's white beard drooped limply against his chest, his face an ashen gray.

After a night of weighing, having wagered his entire ether reserves on that single reading, he—the one hosting the ritual—was the most exhausted person in the room.

He leaned heavily against the central stone altar, unable to speak for a long while.

"It's over," he said. His voice was hoarse, his throat completely hollowed out.

"Everyone, rest for a moment. These old bones of mine need to sit down."

Mr. Pritchard slid down a stone pillar and simply plopped onto the freezing floor tiles.

Mr. Hammond sheathed the blade at his waist and leaned against the vault entrance, closing his eyes to rest.

The research students were scattered across the room in various states of disarray.

Wade Bourne sat with his back to a sarcophagus, his face pale and green.

His own reflection had chased him around for nearly ten minutes, and he still hadn't recovered.

Montagu stood by a low table, tidying up the rubbing paper, his movements as meticulous as ever.

Only the slight tremor in his wrists, barely visible past his cuffs, betrayed any loss of composure tonight.

Catherine sat cross-legged on the floor, the back of her head resting against a glass case. Her red hair was half-undone, a thin layer of sweat still clinging to her face.

Edith hadn't moved from her spot; she remained huddled on the ground, her face buried against her knees.

Both groups kept to their own quiet exhaustion.

Richard, however, was in exceptionally good spirits.

While the others were dropping from fatigue, he had energy to spare.

The plume of smoke had riled up all the supernatural items in the room earlier. Now that it was gone, they were settling down, withdrawing their auras one by one.

But as they retracted, the items whose sealing nodes had been loosened continued to seep out their last lingering wisps of ether.

Richard stood before a Canopic jar, studying the jackal head carved into its lid for a moment.

Then he strolled over to a stone stele covered in carvings of birds and beasts, leaning in close to inspect every stroke of the inscriptions.

[Available Points] began to tick up again.

"Williams."

Wade Bourne lifted his head from the wooden crate, watching the only figure in the vault who still had the strength to walk around.

"You... you still have the energy to look at those?"

"Just a few more glances," Richard said without turning his head, his gaze fixed on a falcon motif on the stele.

"The Black Soil River Exhibition closes tomorrow. Who knows when we'll get to see the real deal like this again."

Bourne opened his mouth, but lacking the energy to reply, his head slumped back down.

Nearby, Fischer adjusted his round spectacles. Watching Richard's intensely focused back as he shuffled from one display case to the next, he muttered under his breath.

"He entertained guests all day, then read fragments all night..."

He shook his head.

"This guy really has studying ingrained in his bones."

Catherine half-sat on the ground, her expression hidden beneath her red hair.

She threw a brief glance in his direction before looking away.

Richard stood in front of a small item resembling a brass censer.

Unhurried, he skimmed the very last trace of ether seeping from it directly into his Panel.

The numbers on the Panel were still climbing.

From the destruction of the fragment to the complete settling of the supernatural items, Richard squeezed every last drop of value out of this brief window.

[Available Points: 3.21... 3.44... 3.62... 3.81.]

As the supernatural items sealed themselves back up, the leaking surplus grew thinner and thinner.

At 3.81, the number stopped.

Adding his previous 0.73 and subtracting the one point spent to advance his Perception, he had harvested just over four points in total this time.

With 3.81 remaining, leveling Walking to Lv.3 would cost one point, and leveling Reasoning to Lv.3 would cost another.

That left an excess of 1.81.

Expanding his Spiritual Capacity from ten to twenty would take one point.

It was exactly enough, with some change to spare.

Richard closed his notebook, slipped his pen back into his pocket, and straightened up.

His legs had gone numb from crouching. He stretched in place a couple of times to get the blood flowing again.

Quietly, he retreated into a corner.

He needed to know whether everything he had done tonight had alerted anything.

He crouched behind the deepest row of wooden shelves, which were draped in dust cloths.

With the stone wall behind him and the shelves in front, he was completely hidden.

The adults in the vault were entirely drained of energy, and the students were sprawled haphazardly. No one was paying attention to a teenage boy ducking into a corner.

From his inner pocket, he fished out his divination tools.

The space was cramped. Ceromancy required lighting candles and dripping wax, which would cause too much of a commotion.

Lithomancy involved tossing stones, which risked making a clattering noise.

After a moment's thought, he drew out his deck of Tarot Cards.

Richard closed his eyes, carefully gathering his question in his mind, word by word, making it crystal clear.

'Tonight was a bountiful harvest, and I even intercepted that wisp of arcane ember. Have I been targeted by anything?'

Thanks to the tranquil layer of water spread out by [Perception: Calm Observation], he could feel the edges of every card perfectly without opening his eyes.

After shuffling, he drew three cards and laid them face down on the lid of the wooden crate in front of him.

He flipped the first card:

[The Hermit - Upright]

An old man in a cloak stood alone in the wilderness, hiding a lit lantern beneath his robes.

Richard relaxed slightly.

A hidden lantern, a lone traveler, standing unseen in the wild.

...It seemed he had done a decent job.

Tonight, the twenty-odd people in the vault had all been riled up and toyed with by that plume of smoke.

Yet he alone had stood his ground, remaining entirely undetectable even to the fragment itself.

The Hermit reflected that exact reality.

He flipped the second card:

[Wheel of Fortune - Upright]

A massive wheel with various living creatures clinging to its rim.

Some were carried upward as the wheel turned; others were carried down.

Richard stared at the card, silently interpreting it.

The wheel was turning.

The entire ordeal tonight—from the smoke turning hostile, the reversal of the veil, and the ensuing chaos in the room, to the curator finding the true weight and the fragment's destruction...

An entire cycle had already reached its peak and was now sliding back down.

Everything that had hung over their heads tonight had passed the zenith alongside the wheel and faded away.

...Whatever gaze had been fixed on him had also passed its peak and was receding.

The message of the Wheel of Fortune was "passing."

The situation had changed; the wheel had moved on.

He flipped the third card:

[Strength - Upright]

A maiden in plain white garments reached out, gently pressing her hands over the open jaws of a majestic lion.

Her face showed no sign of strain, and the lion crouched submissively.

Richard stared at this card for a long time.

Strength... The maiden hadn't used brute force to close the lion's jaws; she had relied on gentle restraint.

He understood. Tonight, as he harvested points from the vault's supernatural items, he had only skimmed the topmost layer of oil from each piece.

And he had never once slacked off in wearing the two disguised ornaments in his grasp.

He had suppressed his hunger—the urge to harvest just a little more, to lean in and take just one more look.

Taming that lion and keeping it pinned beneath him... that very restraint was what had protected him.

Richard's restraint was his own strength.

The three cards lay spread across the crate's lid.

The Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Strength.

Hidden well, passed its peak, held back with restraint.

Richard let out a slow sigh of relief.

He didn't have the Starfall Sand on his person, but the layer of still water spread by [Perception: Calm Observation] remained perfectly calm, utterly devoid of any probing ripples from an external source.

He was just about to pack up the cards.

"Little sir."

A voice rounded the far side of the wooden shelves.

Richard looked up.

Mr. Pritchard had recovered a bit without him noticing and had wandered over to this corner.

The Minor Adept of the Secret path was still pale, but his eyes were fixed on the three cards atop the wooden crate.

"You put in a lot of effort during that ordeal. I saw it all."

Pritchard's gaze swept over the three cards.

"Finally get a chance to rest, and the first thing you do is lay out a spread."

He crouched down across from Richard.

"The Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Strength," he identified them one by one. "Do Scholars study divination now, too?"

Richard's mind raced.

Those walking the Secret path possessed a sensitivity to divination and traces of the veil far beyond that of ordinary people.

Pritchard might not be able to read exactly what he had been divining.

But if he probed too deeply, there was no telling what might slip out.

He would just follow the topic, then. Showing no panic on his face, Richard simply pushed the three cards forward so Pritchard could see them more clearly.

"Since you saw it, Mr. Pritchard, I'll be direct," he said, his tone steady.

"Even though the fragment has dissipated, I still felt a little uneasy.

So I thought I'd ask... if there was any lingering danger left in this vault."

He took the same deck and the same spread, and forcefully pivoted them to answer a completely different question.

"That's what you were asking?" Pritchard's interest deepened.

"Then what did you read from these three cards?"

Richard set his mind to work, entirely deconstructing the meaning of the three cards from top to bottom.

"Please look, sir," he said, pointing at the first card.

"The Hermit, upright. I was divining for residual danger.

The Hermit walks alone in the wilderness, a solitary wisp.

The fragment was fundamentally a lonely shadow. Once the curator verified its weight, it retreated back into the uninhabited dark and dispersed all on its own."

His finger moved to the second card.

"The Wheel of Fortune, upright. The cycle has exhausted itself, turning a full circle from its rise to its fall.

Tonight's ritual, from the reversal of the veil to the fragment's collapse, had a clear beginning and end. It completed a full rotation.

The fragment faded completely alongside this wheel. There is no turning back."

His finger landed on the third card.

"Strength, upright. The maiden presses the lion's jaws closed, taming the fierce beast.

This can be read as the seal having completely brought any remaining danger under its control.

Though the lion's jaws are open, they have been pinned in place. There is nothing restless left in the vault."

Richard finished in one breath, cleanly twisting the cards' meaning from "Did I hide well?" to "Is this place still dangerous?".

Pritchard stared at the three cards and slowly nodded.

"That was a very fluent reading. Under whose tutelage did you study?

Is there actually someone still teaching the art of divination in a small place like Briston?"

Richard thought for a moment. There was no harm in telling him this.

"I suppose you could say I studied under Madam Marie. I learned the basics from a student of hers who works as a coroner.

Later, while out on a mission with Mrs. MacNeil, I learned some more advanced divination and Spirit Vision."

"Ah, Madam Marie... I received some pointers from her once."

Pritchard's tone immediately warmed.

"And Mrs. MacNeil—though I've never partnered with her on a mission, I've heard of her reputation."

'''