Chapter 358: Second Scribe

Today's final test was coordinated combat.

Richard left his shadow in the material world, positioning it behind him to the left in its Shadow Guard state.

The target was a copper disc mounted on the training room's east wall.

The copper disc was standard training equipment: a bullseye surrounded by three concentric rings.

Coated in a mixture of coarse salt and refined silver, the surface could withstand a Practitioner Level ether impact without shattering.

Richard fired a Moon Nail on his own first. The condensed cluster of needles trailed a hair-thin white line through the air and struck the copper disc dead center.

This was the baseline.

Then he attempted to attack while simultaneously controlling his shadow.

"You hit the target on the right. I'll take the left."

He passed the thought over, and the shadow raised its right arm.

Richard simultaneously raised his left hand, and the two of them condensed needles toward their respective targets.

Richard fired first.

His needles nailed the center of the copper disc, just as they had during his solo attempt.

But the shadow's shot went wrong.

Its condensed needles veered off course, glancing diagonally off the edge of the copper disc and slamming into the wall to leave a scorch mark behind.

Richard frowned.

The shadow's solo accuracy had never been low. In the baseline tests just a moment ago, over ninety percent of its shots had landed within the second ring.

There was only one reason it had missed by such a wide margin.

At the exact moment of the attack, he had split his attention toward his own left hand.

The moment his attention divided, the thought transmitted to the shadow grew thin.

With that weakened command, the shadow's precision plummeted.

It was like trying to write with the left hand while drawing circles with the right—even if managed, the quality of both would suffer.

Richard ran a few more test rounds.

When he devoted the majority of his focus to controlling the shadow, its accuracy returned.

But his own attacks faltered.

His Moon Nail strayed by more than half an inch, barely catching the edge of the second ring.

From a distance he could normally hit with his eyes closed, his performance dropped an entire tier purely due to distraction.

Conversely, whenever he pulled all his attention back to himself, the shadow's grip on the technique immediately loosened.

It was an impossible choice; he couldn't have both.

He spent another half hour in the training room, repeatedly testing different ratios of attention division.

Eventually, he found a barely workable balance: keeping about seventy percent of his focus on himself and handing thirty percent to his shadow.

He then drilled a few different combinations.

The shadow harassing from the flank while he attacked head-on.

The shadow drawing attention in the front with its armor while he circled behind to strike.

The shadow spreading out across the floor, shifting into its Curtain form to masquerade as an ordinary projection.

The instant an enemy stepped over it, the shadow would abruptly materialize to grab their ankle, allowing him to empty his magazine from a distance.

Every combination was useful, and every combination held a glaring flaw.

The flaw always lay in the exact moment his attention split.

The second he distracted himself to manipulate the shadow, his own defenses were left wide open.

If he faced a fast enough opponent, that momentary opening would be fatal.

Richard listed these tactics in his notebook.

"When controlling the shadow independently for high-precision tasks, the main body must retreat into cover."

"When the shadow runs broad harassment, the main body must maintain over seventy percent of its autonomous combat capability."

Attention division was something that could be trained.

...

The streets of the Academy District were plastered with all sorts of posters.

Every day, on the walk from his dormitory to the Petrie Building, Richard passed at least three notice boards.

The largest stood at the intersection where the Academy District's main road met the center of town.

Originally used for lecture announcements and reading lists, it was now plastered into a mottled mess by layer upon layer of posters.

The topmost sheet was a recruitment poster.

It depicted a young man in a pristine military uniform, standing tall beneath a flag.

His right hand pointed directly at the viewer, with a bold line of text beneath: Your Country Needs You.

The young man in the painting would stay forever young and forever spirited. His smile was just right—resolute yet warm.

He didn't know what the trenches smelled like.

These posters were everywhere: the entrance to the post office, the sides of public telephone booths, the pillars in train station waiting rooms, and even the backs of public restroom doors had one slapped onto them.

In the bottom right corner of the poster was a line of tiny text: "Triumphant Return Before Christmas."

Every time Richard walked past, he lingered on that line for a couple of seconds.

It was too ironic. The war had been raging for nearly four months.

He had read all the Compilation Group's bulletins. Mons, Ypres, the Marne River...

The front-line trenches had been dug all the way to the sea, and barbed wire stretched from one coastline to the other.

Who knew whose idea it was to keep phrases like "Triumphant Return Before Christmas" plastered on the walls; whoever it was probably didn't even believe it themselves anymore.

Right next to the recruitment poster was a notice urging food rationing.

"For the boys on the front lines, please eat one bite less every meal."

Below the text was an illustration of a bowl holding only half a serving of soup.

As Richard walked by, he saw a middle-aged woman in a black dress staring blankly at the notice.

She held a Cloth Bag in her hand, the stalk of a half-eaten cabbage poking out of the top.

That half-cabbage was pitifully thin, its leaves drooping and wilted.

Further down the street were posters proclaiming inevitable victory, posters urging the purchase of war bonds, and posters calling for women to replace men in the factories.

Seven or eight layers were densely glued onto a single wall, the new covering the old, while the peeling corners of the old exposed the even older posters beneath.

Richard stood at the base of the wall for a moment.

He noticed that the very bottom layer, pinned beneath several new posters, was an advertisement for a September performance at the Imperial Capital Opera House.

Mozart's "The Magic Flute."

Back then, the war had only been going on for about a month, and the Imperial Capital was still staging Mozart.

Gluck was supposed to be next, followed by Wagner... but because they were all composers from enemy nations, they had already been struck from every performance schedule.

He had other business to attend to today and didn't have the time to dwell on it.

Arriving in the Imperial Capital's South District, Richard took two turns down an alleyway and found a cafe.

The cafe's storefront was exceedingly narrow, squeezed between a tailor's shop on the left and a tobacco store on the right.

Mrs. MacNeil was already sitting inside.

A cup of black coffee sat in front of her. Wearing a gray coat and a plain scarf, she looked little different from the women selling chestnuts at the end of the alley.

"You're late." She picked up her coffee and took a sip.

"I ended up circling around that street sign at the entrance of the alley a couple of times."

Richard sat down opposite her and placed his backpack by the leg of his chair.

"The direction that sign points is slightly off."

"It is off." Mrs. MacNeil smiled, setting her cup back on its saucer.

"The store owner deliberately twisted that sign askew because there were too many noisy passersby in front of her door."

Richard pulled a stack of papers from his bag.

He had taken all the contents written down during his first automatic scribe session, arranged them in order, and bound them into a small booklet with a thin string.

The pages were numbered in pencil, from one to seventeen.

Mrs. MacNeil took the booklet and flipped through it rapidly. She lingered on some pages for less than three seconds before turning them.

She stopped when she reached the fourth page.

"These fragments of the funeral dirge can be sold."

She pulled out the fourth and fifth pages.

"The Civilian Guild specifically collects this sort of thing to pair with the Sleep-Return Ritual."

She flipped through a few more pages.

"You said this string of numbers represents the latitude and longitude of the patch of sea where a drowned sailor saw himself sink at the very end?"

"Yes. When my Inspiration brushed against it, there was an extremely salty taste, along with the suffocating feeling of water flooding into the lungs."

Mrs. MacNeil pulled that page out as well, scoring a line beneath the latitude digits with her fingernail.

"This person still remembers the location where he sank, which means his lingering thoughts haven't dispersed; he is still tethered to that stretch of sea.

"Parishes in coastal ports occasionally pay people to help send off these kinds of lingering thoughts, especially in fishing towns.

"Before heading out to sea, fishermen will go to the church and ask the priest to recite a passage. If the priest happens to have the coordinates of a lingering thought that matches that latitude and longitude, clearing it out will leave that patch of sea clean. When fishing boats pass by again, it's one less risk of having their anchors dragged."

She set the useful pages aside and pushed the remaining ones—filled with illegible scribbles and fragmented, repetitive phrases—back to Richard.

"These have no value. You can keep them to look over if you want, but it doesn't matter if you throw them away."

Finally, she turned to the half-page filled with "don't let me die" and the final phrase at the end: "the archers are right above you".

"This one is already outdated. It's useless."

This was perfectly in line with the conclusion Richard had reached earlier after discussing it with his aunt in Room 314.

Regarding the Angels of Mons incident, all the various sources of information pointed to the exact same conclusion:

Someone had planted a seed, tens of thousands of people had watered it to life with their prayers, and a high-level entity had ripped the fully grown manifestation out by the roots.

The final payout: two fragments of the funeral dirge cashed in for one pound and six shillings; the latitude, longitude, and attached lingering thought information cashed in for two pounds; and the remaining miscellaneous scraps added up to roughly one pound. It totaled about four pounds.

Four pounds was a substantial amount for him.

Moreover, the cost of earning this money was zero. All he had to do was sit there and let his hand write on its own.

His Inspiration went out for a stroll and came right back; he didn't even break a sweat.

Of course, Madam Marie would take a cut.

The only reason he could sell these for a decent price was due to her reputation. After the deduction, he would actually take home around three pounds.

"Next up is the second commission."

Mrs. MacNeil pulled out a Cloth Bag.

Opening it revealed Ashcore Grass, Poppy Capsule, Bay Leaf, and Spirit Moss—the exact same formula as the first time, without a single deviation.

"I'm doing it now?" Richard glanced out the window.

The sky had already grown dark, and the gas lamp in the alley swayed in the wind.

The shadows of the mannequins in the storefront window stretched and shrank erratically, stirring up some rather unpleasant memories for him.

"Yes." Mrs. MacNeil pushed her coffee cup aside. "Right here."

"The owner is an insider. Look at the wall over there."

Richard looked in the direction she was pointing.

After extending his Spirit Vision toward the wall behind the velvet curtain, he could see silver lines faintly shining through the paint.

"The owner ran with the Civilian Guild in her younger days."

"Later, she withdrew at the height of the torrent and opened this cafe. She carved the seals herself."

Mrs. MacNeil took an old silver Pocket Watch from her coat.

"I'll keep an eye on the time while you're in there. If you exceed thirty minutes, I'm pulling you out."

Richard nodded.

Compared to the first time, he now knew where he would be going and what the road back looked like.

He placed the Ashcore Grass in his mouth; it was so bitter he wanted to spit it right out.

The Poppy Capsule was sickeningly sweet, making his teeth ache.

The Bay Leaf carried a pungent spice that pierced deep into his nasal cavity.

Finally, the Spirit Moss. Upon entering his mouth, it still carried that fresh scent of freshly turned soil.

Richard gripped his fountain pen and closed his eyes.

Right before shutting them, he let his shadow sink onto the shallows behind the veil.

The shadow, designated as Sentinel, stood in the shallows facing the direction of the Spirit Realm.

With his spirit embedded in the shadow as a core, it could judge the situation on its own.

If anything from the depths tried to crawl up along his Inspiration, it would sense the disturbance.

The room's inscriptions served as the outer layer of protection, Mrs. MacNeil acted as the middle layer, and his shadow was the innermost checkpoint.