Chapter 269: Metamorphosis and [Reflection]

It was nearing noon by the time he left the Phillips home and returned to the residence.

The old butler stood under the porch to welcome him, asking if he wanted to eat in the main hall.

"No need," Richard replied, heading straight up to the second floor.

He ate a simple lunch at the small table in his room.

A few slices of ham, some toast, a fried egg, and a pot of hot tea... His mind hadn't been on food at all for the past two days.

Finished, he neatly pushed the plate and silver spoon to the corner of the table, then got up and locked his bedroom door.

In the July heat of the Imperial Capital, the afternoon sun baked through half the window.

Richard drew the curtains halfway, leaving light on only a corner of his desk.

He sat on the edge of the bed.

The Panel floated up.

[Available Points: 3.81]

Perception Lv.3, Progress 0.6%

Spiritual Capacity 10/10

[Perception] had just crossed the threshold to Lv.3.

Richard still hadn't fully grasped the [Silent Observation] he had acquired in the museum's Storeroom.

A new trait took time to master.

He also wanted to see the requirements for the next tier.

He sent a thought into the [Perception] column to preview it.

"This item is active. Further advancement requires the following conditions:

Reach Lv.4 at 100% progress;

Available Points: 2;

Experience an active lock-on or probe from an entity of a higher Rank, and independently escape this lock without relying on outside assistance or concealment supernatural items."

"Unlockable Effect Preview — Perception: Reflection:

While stationary, you are not only harder to detect, but can also reflect any probing directed at you back at the source."

Richard stared at the word [Reflection] for a long time.

[Silent Observation] was like shutting a window from the inside, preventing anyone outside from looking in;

[Reflection] was turning that shut window into a mirror.

Hunters were the blade, Secret practitioners were the net, and Scholars behind the veil were the lantern.

He had been told this explicitly when he first learned about the three major paths.

If the person carrying the lantern wanted to live a few years longer, the most crucial thing was knowing which eyes in the dark were watching them.

[Reflection] directly addressed this need.

But its unlocking conditions were much harsher than those for [Silent Observation].

"Without relying on outside assistance or concealment supernatural items"—this condition blocked off every playable card in his hand.

Hunter escorts didn't count; Mr. Hutton and Professor Mortimer didn't count; Madam Marie certainly didn't count.

The Silver Ring hanging at his chest and the Eagle Hook sitting in his pocket couldn't be used either—both happened to be "concealment supernatural items."

Either he trained his concealment Spell Formulas to perfection, becoming capable of suppressing his entire presence into a snuffed-out candlestick in the corner of a room right under the nose of someone a whole Rank above him.

Or he had to run into a trapped Minor Adept enemy, or a trapped mid-rank evil creature.

Richard weighed the two options.

He knew he was still thousands of miles away from the first one.

[Perception: Calm Observation] only meant "still water reveals no depths," not "still water casts no reflection."

The two sounded similar, but achieving them was vastly different.

As for the second, he chuckled to himself.

Mid-rank evil creatures were everywhere, but one securely trapped and quietly waiting for him to practice his courage on it...

Running into that kind of coincidence even once would be harder than winning the lottery twice in a row.

Furthermore, what if the creature's seal loosened even slightly?

As a newly advanced Practitioner, he wouldn't just be fleeing a perceptual "lock-on"—whether he could even keep his life would be up in the air.

Richard dismissed the Panel and exhaled.

He would shelve [Reflection] for now.

The current path was to thoroughly master [Silent Observation] and advance the few matters he had on hand.

As for the conditions...

Conditions like that could rarely be actively orchestrated; rather, they crashed into you when you reached that point in the road.

With that thought, he began his routine nourishment of his supernatural item.

But as he turned it over in his hands, he suddenly felt something was slightly off.

An extremely shallow new groove marked the forehead of the sphinx relief.

The mark was so fine and shallow that it was only clearly visible when illuminated at a specific angle.

Richard cupped the lantern and held it under the single beam of light leaking through the curtains.

The moment he activated Spirit Vision, the groove's texture became perfectly clear.

The stroke had been newly carved.

Under Spirit Vision, an extremely faint line of ether had deposited within the mark, slightly cleaner than the ether across the rest of the lantern.

It was a new deposit. It had likely seeped out the night before last—the night he had read the load-bearing beam of the fragment's name and transferred the shadow between the two realms.

The corners of Richard's mouth slowly curled upward.

This was the supernatural item metamorphosis mentioned in the old books his grandfather had given him.

"Every time the supernatural item's master gains a certain degree of improvement in their skills, the supernatural item itself will undergo a change."

"This metamorphosis is slow, but it is tangibly visible."

His own lantern had gained a groove on its forehead today.

Tomorrow it might be the scales on the lion's body, and the day after, the features of the human face.

It was growing alongside him.

Richard held the lantern for a moment before gently setting it back on the desk.

His grandfather had said it: a supernatural item's metamorphosis was the yardstick by which a Practitioner measured their own progress.

The fact that it had changed today meant it had acknowledged his reading in the museum last night.

Richard pondered for a moment.

The metamorphosis itself could not be rushed.

But since this lantern now recognized him as its master, would the abilities it granted him also increase alongside this new mark?

His fingertips stroked the lantern.

He closed his eyes and commanded the shadow to rise.

Instantly, the shadow peeled itself off the wall, dropping onto the floor tiles to stand as a person-sized black silhouette.

His control over it was already much more agile than at the beginning.

After days of ceaseless practice behind the veil, the shadow walked much more steadily than it originally had.

The supernatural item vaguely hinted at the direction of his ability's metamorphosis.

Following that hint, he commanded the shadow to open a drawer.

The shadow stretched out its two pitch-black arms and pulled the drawer halfway open.

Pressed at the very back of the drawer was a notebook filled with his collation notes, made of entirely ordinary paper and ink.

Richard commanded the shadow to carry the notebook behind the veil.

The shadow's hands reached over and picked it up, but the moment it dived into the shallows behind the veil, the notebook fell to the floor.

Richard wasn't surprised.

At the very back of the drawer was also a velvet pouch containing a few empty-shell supernatural items.

Richard ordered the shadow to fetch it.

The shadow sank down, taking the Eagle Badge in its palm along with it.

Under Spirit Vision, the pitch-black humanoid figure stood in the shallows behind the veil, holding the badge in its palm.

The eagle's beak faced Richard's direction, as if waiting for his nod.

Richard sent another thought.

Holding the badge, the shadow floated back into the material realm.

As the shadow merged back onto the wall, the Eagle Badge hit the floor with a heavy thud.

Richard scratched his head and sighed.

This pitch-black lump really was clumsy from head to toe; it couldn't even manage a proper handoff.

He bent down and picked up the badge.

The badge's temperature hadn't changed, nor had its weight.

It had physically gone from this realm to the other, and returned.

Richard sat on the edge of the bed and flipped the Eagle Badge over in his palm.

The shadow couldn't carry ordinary objects.

But ether objects were "physical" to the shadow.

Anything tainted with ether—supernatural items, spellcasting mediums, enchanted trinkets—the shadow could carry on a trip between the two realms.

The very first application was stealing supernatural items, but he set that thought aside for now.

Hiding things behind the veil wasn't bad either.

But the most immediate application was equipping the shadow with ether weapons during combat.

The device made from shadow eater scales, the needles forged from soul devourer teeth, that Ebony revolver and its Enchanted Bullets...

The shadow could use all of these things.

Richard returned the Eagle Badge to the velvet pouch and placed it back into the drawer.

The shadow retracted beneath his feet.

...

Richard came down from the second floor, taking the servants' passageway as usual.

The Ashford Residence had been built up over generations; the main hall, banquet hall, and family living quarters each occupied their own floors.

The library was located at the far end of the west wing, taking up half a floor on both the second and third levels.

The second floor housed ordinary books:

ancient Greek and Roman classics, modern anthologies, and some excerpted notes his grandfather had written in his early years.

The third floor, however, was locked.

For Richard's one-month stay, the butler had provided him with a master key for the second floor.

His grandfather always kept the key to the third floor on his own belt.

However, the materials he was looking for weren't on the third floor.

Although the Ashford House was said to be a "declining lampstand," the training manuals, field notes, and circuit maintenance records accumulated by generations of Hunters were still plentiful on the second floor.

They were simply placed in a corner, rarely leafed through on a normal day.

Richard entered the library from the staircase in the west wing.

At half past two in the afternoon, the library was perfectly quiet.

The leaded glass window sliced the sunlight into a grid of square shadows, painting a chessboard across the floor tiles.

Richard walked along the bookshelves toward the very back.

At the far end of the second-floor library, a single low cabinet stood against the north wall.

There was no lock on the cabinet, only a cloth curtain hanging across it.

That shelf was what he was looking for.

He lifted the curtain. Inside, the oldest volumes had yellowed, curling pages; the pages of the newest ones were still white.

Richard pulled out the thinnest one.

Small, gold-stamped letters on the cover read: "Ashford Family Twelfth Generation Blood Ignition Circuit Maintenance Manual".

He opened it.

The first page was a hand-drawn circuit diagram.

The main circuits of ether circulation within a Hunter's body branched out from beneath the tree of light directly behind the sternum, extending to the limbs, the spine, and the cranial cavity.

The second page covered common treatments for circuit damage.

The third page detailed the frequency, depth, and initial duration of cold water immersion... listed item by item with crystal clarity.

After reading a few lines, Richard had a good grasp of the basics.

Just as he was about to close the book and swap it for the next one...

"Young Master Richard."

Richard turned around.

The butler stood at the end of the bookshelf, about six or seven paces away.

"Are you looking for something?"

Richard hadn't yet placed the tome in his hand back onto the shelf.

"...I'm just browsing through the family's training materials."

The old butler gave an acknowledging hum.

He glanced at that row of bookshelves.

"Young Master, your path is that of a Scholar."

"It is."

"The circuits of the Scholar path," the butler said, shifting his gaze back to Richard, "and the circuits of the Hunter path require two completely different methods of maintenance."

A thought struck Richard.

It seemed this butler understood much more about the mystical side than he had initially thought.

"You know about these things as well?" Richard asked.

"I have served the Ashford House for nearly forty years," the butler said with a slight bow.

"When your grandfather returned injured from a field assignment, I was the one who carried the medicine basin.

On the night your uncle first underwent the ice water conditioning, I was the one who tended the furnace.

And when Young Master Vincent suffered broken bones twice as a child, I was the one who carried him to the physician."

The old butler shifted the subject.

"Regarding the breathing method, if you wish to study it, I can go inform the master. It would be much more appropriate for him to explain it to you personally."

The butler hadn't stopped him directly.

But his underlying meaning was crystal clear: this bookshelf was not something to be casually browsed alone.

Testing the breathing method haphazardly would ruin one's circuits.

Richard placed the tome back in its original spot.

"...I'll trouble you, then."

The butler bowed slightly.

"Please take a seat here for a moment. I will go invite the master."

In less than a quarter of an hour, hurried footsteps echoed outside the library.

His grandfather, Gerard, walked briskly through the door.

Richard stood up.

"Grandfather."

"Sit."

Gerard waved a hand dismissively and sat down in the high-backed armchair in the corner.

After pouring tea for the two of them, the butler tactfully withdrew, gently pulling the door shut behind him.

Only the two of them remained in the library.

Gerard picked up his teacup and took a sip.

"What is it? Do you feel the Scholar path is too weak, so you wanted to secretly practice a few Hunter tricks?"