Chapter 30: The Three Major Directions

The fifth book employed a far cleverer disguise:

Flora of Temperate Medicinal Plants of the Western Continent

—With an Overview of Processing Techniques for Major Medicinal Herbs.

The publication details on the title page listed it as a branch publication of the Royal Botanical Society, printed in New Calendar 1819.

It was older than any of the previous books—nearly a century old.

The main text was heavily illustrated with hand-drawn line art. Notes detailing scientific names, origins, and medicinal properties accompanied each plant.

As Richard turned a few pages, the faint scent of herbs drifted from the paper.

Someone had genuinely used this as a botanical reference. The creased pages and smudged fingerprints proved it had seen far more use than his other candidates.

He almost thought he had misjudged his selection, right up until he reached the seventh chapter.

The chapter was titled: "On the Morphological Identification and Safe Harvesting of Toxic Ferns."

The first letter of every paragraph in the main text had been deliberately enlarged by half a point.

Richard copied down the leading letters of the first twelve paragraphs: P-N-E-U-M-A-V-I-T-A-E-S.

Pneuma vitaes. Ether life, or the breath of spirit.

Another acrostic cipher—easily one of the most widely used encryption methods in history.

He finished extracting the rest of the leading letters and arranged them into complete sentences on a blank sheet of paper.

It was a massive amount of work. The transcription alone took forty minutes.

Fortunately, the acrostic's encryption was rudimentary. He cracked the first layer with a conversion table and pieced the second layer together using an etymology manual.

By the time he finished at dusk, most of the hidden text had surfaced.

This was the most information-dense text he had pulled from the shelves so far.

The first deciphered section detailed the branching paths of supernatural disciplines.

The text explained it clearly: after establishing a foundational ether micro-circulation, a Newcomer had to choose a specific path to pursue based on their natural talents and their chosen breathing method.

Three major directions were explicitly listed.

First: Occultus, Secret.

Sealing, exorcism, divination, mediumship, curses, wards... This path boasted the widest array of methods and the most complex classifications.

The text used "a hundred crafts" to describe Practitioners of this direction. They could dabble in a bit of everything, but mastering any single art required prolonged, specialized training.

The gap between the ceiling and floor of the Secret path was immense.

A top-tier Secret Practitioner could lay down transmutation arrays covering entire cities or even nations, capable of cursing a target to death from thousands of miles away.

The worst among them possessed skills virtually indistinguishable from the fraudulent fortune-tellers and witch doctors hawking their wares in an ordinary market.

The text specifically noted that those on the Secret path excelled at ambushes. Setting traps and anticipating enemy movements were their greatest advantages.

The trade-off was extreme vulnerability in direct combat.

If forced into an unprepared confrontation, their survival rate plummeted off a cliff.

The medium hired by the Warren Family likely belonged to this direction.

Second: Venator, Hunter.

Tasked with directly combating the evil creatures behind the veil, Practitioners of the Hunter direction predominantly cultivated the Path of Blood Ignition.

The description aligned perfectly with what he had read in Appendix C: holding one's breath in freezing water, explosive breathing, and extreme training regimens designed to compress ether into the blood.

Hunters prioritized immediate combat power and ether bursts. In a face-to-face clash, a Hunter would absolutely crush Practitioners of the other two paths at the same Rank.

The cost was stated just as bluntly:

"Cultivators of the Path of Blood Ignition often shine brilliantly in their prime, yet few ever safely reach old age."

He had seen this exact quote in Appendix C; both books were citing the same source.

Hunters were the most dangerous and the shortest-lived.

The tradition of the Monster Hunters from the northern forests had survived to the present day, and the essence in their bones truly hadn't changed.

Third: Eruditus, Scholar.

Richard lingered on this section the longest.

Practitioners of the Scholar direction were fundamentally not known for their combat prowess.

Their functions lay in deciphering, appraising, translating, and even creating texts and artifacts.

The text used a clever analogy: Hunters were the blade before the veil, Secrets were the net woven across it, and Scholars were the lamp behind it.

The blade slaughtered, the net captured and controlled, and the lamp illuminated, letting people know what to hack apart and what to ensnare.

Scholars commanded the vastest reservoir of knowledge among the three major directions.

Paleography, supernatural archaeology, artifact appraisal, runic syntax, sealing theory, ether field studies, veil ecology... Every single one was a highly specialized discipline with a steep barrier to entry.

Precisely because of these steep barriers, Scholars held the highest status within the mystical hierarchy.

The text noted that Scholars were also the most deeply integrated with the political and academic systems of the real world.

Certain tenured professors at universities in the Imperial Capital were highly respected academic authorities in the newspapers, while behind the veil, they were likewise addressed respectfully as "Mister."

Mr. Hutton likely fell into this category.

An old gentleman teaching history at a local middle school while simultaneously maintaining the seals beneath the school's foundations, preparing introductory materials on bookshelves for potential Newcomers, and occasionally traveling to the Imperial Capital for inner-circle gatherings.

Every topic he taught in his classroom danced right along the edge of the veil.

He wrapped an occult core in an academic shell, passing on knowledge in a completely legitimate and compliant manner.

This was exactly how a Scholar operated.

Richard wrote the three major directions side by side on his blank paper, drawing a line from each to his current position.

His Panel was inherently tied to supernatural antiquities.

Artifact appraisal, seal structure analysis, runic deciphering, code-breaking... Everything he had done over the past month fell squarely into the Scholar's domain without a single exception.

A Scholar. Steady, profound, and far-reaching—it perfectly matched the development path he had charted for himself.

If he chose a direction to pursue, Scholar was practically tailor-made for him.

...

The second deciphered section was far more cryptic, relying heavily on analogies.

"Water extinguishes fire, fire forges metal, metal severs wood. These are the eternal laws of the world, and Practitioners alike follow this rule."

Richard copied the sentence down and read it over several times.

Elemental counters? No, it only mentioned three sets of relationships here.

The text didn't provide explicit matchups, but the implication was heavy enough: natural advantages and disadvantages existed between different Practitioners.

He couldn't be certain, but the line "Practitioners alike follow this rule" was enough to put him on high alert.

The world behind the veil wasn't solely a struggle between humans and evil creatures. Between Practitioners, there was also the dynamic of hunter and prey.

Only a tiny fragment remained of the third section:

"From the Rank of Practitioner onward, every subsequent leap requires the completion of a corresponding ritual.

"The essence of a ritual is a declaration to the veil—a declaration that one is prepared to endure deeper..."

It cut off again.

He tried extracting letters in multiples of seven, shifting them by the golden ratio, and reading them diagonally. All wrong.

The rule the cryptographer used fell outside every pattern he currently understood.

Richard set down his pen and leaned back in his chair.

The last sliver of daylight filtered through the third-floor window, and the fluorescent lights hummed above.

He wrote a single line on the blank paper: Ritual. Leap condition. Content unknown.

He drew a circle around it and added a question mark.

Just like the cut-off content after "requires" in the fourth book, this was yet another brick wall.

He already had many specialized terms in hand:

Newcomer, Practitioner, Minor Adept, Major Adept, Virtuoso, Master, Archon.

He had the three major career directions: Secret, Hunter, and Scholar.

He had the fact that leap rituals existed between Ranks, and he knew different Practitioners had natural advantageous matchups against one another.

He had quite a few puzzle pieces by now, enough to form a rough outline.

But an outline was still just an outline.

Detailed introductions to the higher Ranks, the specific contents of the rituals, and the exact mechanics of the countering relationships between different directions—the answers to none of these lay on this bookshelf.