Chapter 346: Collective Fieldwork

Three new bulletin boards had been nailed to the wall in the teaching building corridor.

The largest was plastered with blackout regulations, filling several densely packed pages.

The second was entirely dedicated to rationing notices: purchase limits on white sugar, restricted quantities of fresh meat, and egg rations per household.

Next to it, someone from the Student Union had pinned a handwritten slip of paper:

"The cafeteria butter has been replaced with margarine. If you find this unsatisfactory, please provide your own."

The final board featured politely worded notices encouraging students to volunteer at rear-area hospitals over the holidays.

"Your hands, too, can contribute to this war."

It was signed at the bottom by the department's most senior professors.

Grey had also written him a letter recently.

"Richard,

"They don't put jam on the toast at our school anymore.

"Chocolate is rationed too—we only get two pieces a week.

"Some people in class have started bringing snacks from home.

"Heidi ate half of Cunningham's canned jam, and the two of them argued so loudly in their dorm that the whole floor heard it.

"How is the food on your end?

"Are you getting enough to eat?"

At the end of the letter, she had drawn an emoticon of her own invention.

A round face with two little dots for eyes and a downward-curving arc for a mouth.

A sad face.

Richard folded the letter and tucked it into his drawer.

The changes at the Imperial Capital University cafeteria were hard to miss.

Steak had vanished from the menu two weeks ago, replaced by a drab, grayish mush that the cafeteria ladies stirred tirelessly.

Rumor had it there was beef inside, but it tasted entirely of oatmeal and flour mixed with soybean oil.

Butter was completely gone.

The pale lump sitting on the table, exuding a faint chemical odor, was the "margarine" from the notice.

The first time Richard spread that margarine on his bread, the Lv.3 Filtration trait of his eating skill ran a comprehensive scan of it.

The feedback suggested he would be better off gnawing on plain bread.

But he ate it anyway.

Wasting food was wrong. His mother's teachings echoed in his mind: 'Wasting food is worse than failing a class!'

The cafeteria lady still sighed every time she saw him approach.

When Richard handed his tray over, she fished around in the pot with her ladle for a good while.

She dumped a portion over half a scoop larger than anyone else's onto his plate, then shot him an exasperated look.

The look conveyed a clear message: he was too skinny to be eating this much, and she had no idea where it was all going.

Richard thanked her, took his tray, and found a corner to sit down.

He was used to sitting in the corners.

If he sat in the middle of the room, the surrounding students would be left speechless by the sheer volume of food piled on his tray.

Halfway through his meal, Catherine walked over with her tray and started writing in her notebook.

"How many portions did you get today?"

She sat down opposite him. The food on her plate was pitifully sparse.

A single slice of bread, half a bowl of soup, and a small side of vegetables.

"Three."

Catherine looked down at her half bowl of soup, then back up at the small mountain of food in front of Richard.

"A Hunter would grow muscles from eating this much," she said, breaking off a corner of her bread and dipping it into her soup. "You just grow more brains."

"I'd rather have the brains."

Catherine shot him a glance with her gray-green eyes before starting her own lunch.

Speaking of which, Richard had noticed that Montagu had recently started wearing a Silver Ring on his left pinky.

He had handled quite a few old pieces of silver himself, and he could tell the ring was ancient.

Montagu was still perfectly composed during class. His arguments in discussions remained methodical, and he could still be seen in the training room every night.

However, his usual smile... even his polite fake smile was completely gone, and the other students no longer dared approach him.

Piecing this together with what Montagu had mentioned about his older brother, Richard had a rough guess as to what had happened.

That afternoon, Richard bundled up the actual Cretan Clay Figurine along with all its rubbings and knocked on Croft's office door.

Croft had several papers spread out waiting to be graded, and on his desk sat that same cup of tea, bitter enough to make one question the meaning of life.

"Come in."

Richard closed the door and set the figurine and envelope on the only patch of empty space left on the desk.

"Associate Professor Croft, this is a Cretan Clay Figurine from the Cretan labyrinth tradition.

"Its original function was as a maze guide. The sealed substance inside has dissipated, but the base inscription is perfectly preserved."

"The rubbings and the appraisal report are in the envelope."

Croft frowned, casually tore the envelope open, and pulled out the report.

"You traced this section yourself."

He tapped a finger against the rubbing on the seventh page.

"Yes."

"Good tracing," Croft said, closing the rubbings.

After inspecting the clay figurine, he fished a rubber stamp from his drawer and pressed it forcefully onto the bottom right corner of the report.

A red owl-and-wreath seal stamped onto the paper, right next to Richard's signature.

"This is the department's fourth physical reference piece from the Cretan labyrinth tradition."

Croft handed the stamped report back to him.

"The collection registry will list the donor—Richard Williams, Department of Classics preparatory class, Imperial Capital University."

He turned back, that familiar sinister smile on his face.

"If anyone cites this piece in the future, your name will appear right there in the footnotes."

"You've left your name behind too, kid."

Richard backed out of the office and pulled the door shut behind him.

The following week, Lecturer Pollock did indeed add an extra class.

The notice read "Supplementary Special Topic on Ritual Language," with no further explanation.

When the day of the class arrived, not only were all the preparatory students present, but a few undergraduate upperclassmen had squeezed their way in too.

"What we are discussing today," Pollock said, pressing his chalk against the blackboard, "is related to the war."

The chalk slowly scratched out a single line of text on the board:

"Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine."

(Grant them eternal rest, O Lord.)

Everyone in the lecture hall recognized that sentence; it was the most famous line of the Requiem Mass.

It was sung in churches year after year, month after month—at funerals and on memorial days.

Pollock pulled another sheet of paper from beneath his lecture notes.

"Feedback from the front lines," he said, spreading the paper out on the podium.

"Those young Scholars fresh out of school are all using the benedictions from the Church's version of the Missal, because that's exactly what they learned in the academy."

"But when they got to the front lines, the death echoes wouldn't listen."

Pollock turned the paper so the front row could see it.

"The ritual language taught in our current textbooks—the Scholars on the front lines can chant it all day, and the death echoes won't budge an inch."

He picked up his chalk again.

"So, the higher-ups have demanded we bring the original texts back.

"At the very least, we're going to teach you the primordial versions of those key terms, giving you a few more tools at your disposal if you ever end up on the front lines."

The class lasted two hours.

Richard copied every single passage into his notebook.

Erudition automatically created a cross-referenced index in his mind, comparing the original texts to the Church's Missal versions.

As class came to an end, Pollock tapped his chalk against the podium.

"I don't know how many of you sitting here today will eventually end up on the front lines.

"But even if you spend your entire life sitting in an office in the Imperial Capital, knowing what these extracted teeth look like is better than remaining ignorant."

He returned the chalk to its groove.

"Class dismissed."

On the final Monday of November, Croft reopened the windowless classroom.

Among those filing in today, aside from the veterans of the Compilation Group, there were quite a few new faces from both the preparatory and undergraduate classes.

None of the graduate students had shown up; they all had other fieldwork assignments.

Sitting in the corner, Fischer was still gnawing on a piece of bread, not even bothering to brush the crumbs off his collar.

Croft leaned against the edge of the podium.

"A fieldwork assignment has come down.

"Port Folkestone, the refugee reception camp."

He wrote the location on the blackboard in massive letters that took up almost half the board.

"You all should have read about what happened at the end of October in the newspapers.

"The allied forces fell back to the Yser River defense line. Once they couldn't retreat any further, they opened the water gates."

Several students nodded.

This event had dominated the front pages for days, described from various angles.

Some called it a 'heroic self-sacrifice, where the Allies paid with their own territory to halt the enemy.'

Others summed it up with a single line of small print:

"Approximately twelve hundred square miles of low-lying plains in western Flanders were inundated by seawater."

Twelve hundred square miles—just how large an area was that?

It was roughly more than twice the size of all the Imperial Capital's administrative districts combined.

"The backflow of seawater submerged that entire plain," Croft continued.

He spread a briefing document out on his desk and pressed his fingertips against the paper.

"It washed away the trenches and artillery positions, along with the soldiers on both sides.

"The tactical objective was achieved, but it also drowned whatever was originally buried beneath that soil."

No one in the classroom spoke a word.

Croft flipped to the next page of the briefing.

"Those lowlands in Flanders were the territory of the ancient Gauls thousands of years ago.

"You should have learned a bit about the relationship between the Gauls and water in Pollock's class."

Of course they had. Richard retrieved the data in his mind.

The ancient Gauls worshipped water. Rivers, springs, wells, marshes—any place where water pooled might serve as a ritual sacrifice site.

They threw their offerings into the water. Most consisted of miscellany like weapons, jewelry, and coins, though occasionally they threw in living sacrifices too.

As the saying goes, "dry for a thousand years, wet for ten thousand years." The items soaking at the bottom were perfectly preserved.

Croft tapped a section of the briefing underlined in red.

"Once the sea gates were opened, the saltwater poured in, disrupting the sealed structures of those freshwater sacrificial ruins and waking them up in the process."

"What woke up?" Montagu was the first to speak.

"There are no definitive appraisal results yet," Croft said, shaking his head.

"The investigation team is still conducting assessments near the waterline, but one thing is already confirmed."

He laid the second and third pages of the briefing side by side.

"The refugees who escaped from that flooded zone carry a layer of... dampness on them."

Croft looked up after reading that line.

"The frontline assessment team says this dampness clings to the refugees' fear. It's so thin that standard Spirit Vision can't even scan it.

"You won't pick up a thing using formal detection methods, but any place those refugees walk through will grow damp again."

"What kind of damp?" an undergraduate asked.

Croft shook his head.

"It has nothing to do with ether; it's simply water vapor condensing on the floors and walls.

"The volunteers at the reception camp thought it was just moisture from the sea breeze, but they mopped the floors for three days straight and still couldn't get them dry."

He flipped to the third page of the briefing.

"The next part is a bit more interesting.

"During the first week, three children in the reception camp claimed they saw 'people in the water.'

"The adults thought they were just nightmares. Those kids had just escaped the flooded zone, so having nightmares couldn't be more normal.

"During the second week, the temporary water supply pipelines set up in the camp dispensed salty water between three and five in the morning for two consecutive days.

"The Port Authority inspected the pipelines and the water source, but everything was perfectly normal.

"The pipelines are hooked up to the local tap water, and the water coming out of the local plant is fresh.

"But the water flowing out of those pipes during those two hours was salty."

"The third week," Croft continued without pause.

"While doing her rounds, a volunteer night-shift nurse discovered that every sleeping refugee in a particular row of tents had perfectly synchronized breathing rhythms."

A chill ran down the back of Richard's neck.

"Inhaling at the same time, exhaling at the same time, with intervals synchronized down to the second. The nurse woke one of them up, and that person said they were having a dream."

Croft moved his gaze from the briefing to the students below the podium.

"Dreaming that they were sunk at the bottom of the water, and that something else was breathing for them."

He closed the briefing document.

"The Imperial Capital Liaison Office has already sent the first batch of people over to conduct an assessment. The conclusion is that the hazard level isn't high, but the area of effect is expanding.

"Refugees are arriving in an endless stream. They're still flooding into the harbor every day, and the number of people carrying that layer of 'dampness' is steadily increasing."

"Everyone who can go to the front lines has been drawn away. The final plan is for the Department of Internal Affairs to transfer young Practitioners to gather in Folkestone."

Croft slapped the briefing document against the podium.

"Treat this as practical training. You're all just sitting idle right now anyway, so you might as well go earn some fieldwork experience for your resumes."

He swept his gaze over the crowd.

"It's voluntary. Anyone who wants to go can register with me after class."

After class, Richard stood by the corridor windowsill for a moment before going over to sign up.

The preparatory students signing up alongside him were the same old faces.

Edith was the first to sign up this time. She had been brooding ever since she was left out of the Compilation Group last time.

Now that there was a practical opportunity, she naturally wasn't going to let it slip by.

After signing his name, Fischer muttered to Richard, "Should I bring a few extra shirts? They say it's really cold over at the harbor..."

"Doesn't matter if you do or don't," Richard said. "You won't have time to change once you get there anyway."