Chapter 29: Rank

After the incident in the basement, campus life over the past few days had been uneventful.

Classes, lunchtime tutoring, hours spent in the library, returning home at night to practice the breathing method... His schedule was packed tight, leaving him barely any time to even zone out.

There was no extracurricular tutoring on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Holland had traveled to the Imperial Capital to attend the regular gathering of the Classical Society.

He was also checking on the competitors for this year's Cicero Cup and seeing if the format had changed, so the one-on-one tutoring was postponed to next week.

Richard spent this free time at the third-floor bookshelves.

He had marked his fourth candidate book the previous week.

The cover bore a title long and tedious enough to put someone to sleep:

A Comparative Study of the Administrative Systems of City-States in the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Black Soil River, Centered on the Priestly Council System.

Published in the New Calendar year 1843, the author line carried two sets of initials, P.H.R. and J.E.W., suggesting it was co-authored.

The main text did indeed cover administrative systems.

Council composition, election processes, financial authority, military chains of command... The academic tone was sickeningly dense. Footnote numbers ran from 1 to 112, and the bibliography took up four entire pages.

But starting in the third chapter, a problem emerged with the footnote numbering.

The skipped numbers were unevenly distributed. The first two chapters had none, four were concentrated in the third chapter, three in the fourth, and six in the fifth.

Thirteen missing footnotes in total. He noted the locations of the skipped numbers on a blank sheet of paper, arranging them by chapter.

Thirteen blank numbers meant thirteen segments of hidden content.

The encryptor's method was clean. They had simply excised the footnotes from the main text and filled the resulting gaps by reordering the adjacent numbers.

Unless someone cross-checked the numerical sequence page by page, they would never notice.

But "removing" was not the same as "destroying."

Richard flipped to the very last page. Past the final page number, a blank binding margin of about three centimeters remained.

He pried the spine open as wide as it would go and leaned in.

Tucked into the crevice between the binding threads and the page edges was an incredibly thin slip of paper. It was invisible unless the binding was unstitched.

Richard pulled a wire bookmark from his notebook and carefully coaxed the strip of paper out of the crevice.

The text on the slip was impossibly small, packed even more densely than Appendix C.

All thirteen deleted footnotes were right here.

He flattened the paper slip on the table and used a magnifying glass to decipher it section by section.

With his cipher key and etymological dictionary open beside him, he pressed his left hand against the slip to keep it from curling and used his right hand to transcribe the text onto blank paper, sentence by sentence.

The boost from Learning Lv.2 made his root-word deconstruction nearly instantaneous. Once he grasped the pattern of the nested substitutions, the subsequent sentences fell into place like dominoes.

Within two days, all thirteen footnotes were fully restored.

Naturally, the contents had nothing to do with administrative systems. Instead, they detailed exactly what Richard was most interested in: the organizational structure of the mystical world.

The text began by defining a term: Neophytus, literally translating to "Newcomer."

The definition read: "One who has preliminarily established a complete Ether Micro-circulation within the body."

Richard set down his pen and stared at the line of text for a long while.

A complete Ether Micro-circulation.

His current practice of the breathing method had already established a rudimentary form of ether retention in his chest; a residual warmth lingered whenever he exhaled.

But a rudimentary form was still a fair distance from a complete Micro-circulation.

Mr. Hutton had also mentioned in the basement that the Ether Micro-circulation in his body was incredibly faint.

In other words, he didn't even qualify as a Newcomer yet.

Newcomer was the absolute lowest threshold of entry. It served as the fundamental dividing line between the ordinary and the extraordinary in the world behind the veil.

Only by crossing that line could one officially step through the threshold into that world.

Fail to cross it, and you would remain a permanent bystander outside the door—able to smell the food inside, but never getting a taste.

He pulled his attention back to the paper slip.

The text went on to list the hierarchy of ranks above Newcomer.

The second rank: Practitioner.

"One who has established a stable and self-consistent ether circulation system within the body, capable of actively invoking ether to perform mystical work."

The things Mr. Hutton had done in the basement—

snapping his fingers to open the iron door, using holy water to activate the Engraving Tool, executing the entire sequence of reinforcing the seal—every single step required actively invoking ether.

The old gentleman was at least a Practitioner, and judging by his handling, he was far beyond the entry level.

The third rank: Minor Adept, Adeptus Minor.

The text's description for Minor Adept abruptly became brief, consisting of just a single sentence:

"To ascend from Practitioner to Minor Adept, one must select a specific supernatural direction for deep specialization before they can reach the threshold of this rank."

The fourth rank: Major Adept, Adeptus Major.

The fifth rank: Virtuoso.

The sixth rank: Master, Magister.

And the seventh rank—Archon.

Starting from Major Adept, the text visibly tightened.

Virtuoso merited only a few descriptive words, Master was reduced to half a sentence, and Archon wasn't given a definition at all, leaving the term hanging there in isolation.

It wasn't that the writer didn't know; they had simply chosen to reveal only this much.

Richard copied the seven ranks onto blank paper in order, drawing a vertical axis from Newcomer to Archon.

His own position sat at the very bottom of that vertical axis; he hadn't even touched the horizontal line for Newcomer.

Mr. Hutton occupied some position within Practitioner, though exactly how high was impossible to judge.

Mrs. MacNeil, the professional medium hired by the Warren Family, was likely a Practitioner or above.

And the truly prominent extraordinary figures in the Imperial Capital: the forces backing the Ashford Family, the people redacting the conclusions in government reports—which tier were they on?

The cipher's nesting layers abruptly deepened for the final few lines on the paper slip.

He barely managed to restore a single root word—Ordo, order.

And half a sentence: "From the third rank upward, every leap in rank requires..."

Required what?

The subsequent characters were locked behind a third layer of nested substitutions. The cipher key in his hand could only solve the first two layers; the replacement rules for the third layer were completely unknown.

He tried several possible combinations, hitting a wall every time.

The correspondences between root words and affixes had been completely scrambled in the third layer of encryption, using a reorganization method he had never seen before.

Richard set down his pen and rubbed his temples.

He had hit a ceiling. This was the first time at these bookshelves he explicitly felt the boundary of his abilities.

He had been able to force his way through the previous ciphers using his key and etymological dictionary, but not this time.

The third layer of encryption required a new tool, and that new tool wasn't in these twenty-six books.

He tucked the paper slip back into the spine's crevice and returned the book to its place.

...

He waited a day before starting on the fifth book.

During Thursday afternoon's self-study period, Richard asked his homeroom teacher for time off, saying he needed to look up materials in the library.

His homeroom teacher's attitude toward him was completely different from a month ago.

A student whose grades were rapidly improving in every subject, who was personally recommended by Holland to participate in the Cicero Cup, needed to look up reference materials?

That was a good thing. He could look up whatever he wanted, for as long as he wanted.

For once, he was enjoying the exclusive privileges of a star student.

Thinking about this, Richard arrived at his usual spot on the third floor.