Chapter 414: The Dirty Notebook

By the time April rolled around, Isabella was so busy she was practically nowhere to be seen.

The wartime front lines demanded an endless supply of seal blueprints, and her university workload only piled higher by the day.

She had originally managed to carve out an hour or two each week for Richard's private tutoring, but now those slots were entirely consumed by one urgent telegram after another.

Just as his aunt was fretting over the schedule, Clara stepped in and volunteered to take over.

When Clara walked into the empty faculty room next to 314 with a stack of books, she laid it out simply.

"The teacher said she truly can't spare a moment right now, so I'll be keeping an eye on your coursework for her."

Richard initially assumed Senior Clara's tutoring style would be roughly the same as his aunt's.

Assigning problems, grading them, assigning more problems, and coldly pointing out every mistake.

But that wasn't the case.

Clara's teaching methods were far gentler and much more meticulous than Isabella's.

The after-class assignments Professor Mortimer gave Richard grew increasingly devious.

The old man was deliberately trying to grind down his temper, specifically tossing him obscure, out-of-bounds textual collation problems.

One of these involved restoring a steganographic cipher hidden within a passage of church liturgical Latin from the Medieval Church.

Richard had stared at the text all night, yet he still found himself hopelessly stuck on the third layer of encryption.

The next day, he brought his draft to Clara.

Clara took it and scanned it from beginning to end, but she didn't just hand him the answer.

She pointed to a few lines on the paper.

"You're stuck on the third layer because you're treating it like a standard shift substitution."

She took a pencil and made a tiny mark next to the text.

"Think about it. What does this mark prompt you to do?"

Richard stared at the mark for a long while, his [Learning] and [Speculation] spinning up simultaneously in his mind.

It looked like a symbol exclusively used in the Church calendar.

Suddenly, it clicked.

"The offset for this section isn't fixed. It shifts according to the fasting periods in the Church calendar."

Clara nodded in approval.

"You should be able to figure out the rest on your own."

This kind of guided deduction... although it felt a bit wrong to admit, Richard found it far easier to digest than his aunt's force-feeding methods.

A little over a week passed like this.

Richard suddenly realized something: people had always said Clara was his aunt's most outstanding student.

He'd previously dismissed it as mere politeness, assuming everyone just flattered each other within the same academic lineage.

But having Clara actually tutor him proved that the praise was entirely genuine.

His senior's academic foundation was terrifyingly solid.

Inscriptiology, textual collation, ritual languages—she could take any of these subjects and explain them more thoroughly than an average lecturer.

That afternoon, the two of them spent over half an hour poring over a collation chart detailing late-stage variants from the Alexandrian School.

Once they finished, Richard rubbed his aching temples and couldn't help but marvel.

"Senior Clara, with your academic foundation and teaching skills, you're more than qualified to be a lecturer right now."

Clara was gathering the papers on the desk.

She didn't look up at his words, merely offering a correction.

"Don't forget about Silas. Out of the recent cohorts, he is much stronger than I am."

"The champion from Debate Week? But you only lost to him because of Ether."

Richard remembered it clearly.

Clara shook her head. "Rhetoric scores mean nothing. Ether is the foundation."

She neatly stacked the papers as she spoke, and Richard casually asked another question.

"How is Senior Silas doing now?"

Clara replied.

"He finished his postgraduate studies, successfully broke through to Minor Adept this year, and was hired by the Academy as a lecturer.

I've heard that once he has enough seniority, he'll be promoted straight to associate professor."

A hint of envy showed in her eyes as she spoke.

"That was the path my mentor originally wanted me to take.

Graduate, break through to Minor Adept, stay at the university as a lecturer, and quickly rise to associate professor.

With my mentor pushing from behind, my path would have been even smoother than hers was back in her day."

"Now..." She closed her folder.

"My circuits are damaged. Breaking through to Minor Adept is the hardest step on this path, and the risks are immeasurably higher for me now."

The faculty room fell quiet for a moment. Richard was just about to speak.

Clara beat him to it.

"But thanks to you, my injuries are nearly healed.

I can even feel the hidden damage in my circuits distinctly repairing itself.

If this trend continues, I might be able to seek my own opportunity to break through to Minor Adept by next year or the year after, just like Silas did."

..................

During the breaks in his tutoring sessions, Richard's thoughts frequently drifted back to the idea of letting his shadow join the Wild Hunt.

Holding onto the antler without using it simply didn't suit his nature.

Furthermore, the next Theogony Salon was rapidly approaching. That, coupled with the possible threat of a team battle and the dark clouds of the impending war and the two Virtuosos looming overhead, made him desperate to find a fast track for his growth.

Yet, despite his desires, he refused to rashly send his shadow into the Wild Hunt before he found enough information to fully understand the risks.

After all, if his shadow was actually destroyed, the loss to himself wouldn't be small either.

That day, Richard arrived at the door to Professor Mortimer's office once again.

He knocked twice.

"Come in."

He pushed the door open to find Professor Mortimer sitting in his old armchair, staring blankly into space as usual.

Seeing Richard enter, he pointed toward a stack of documents against the east wall—a pile half a head taller than Richard himself.

"Your task for today begins with this stack.

Catalog the index. Author, year, transcripts, and original manuscripts—record every single detail into the ledger."

"And after I finish?"

"After you finish, you record the next stack. Do I really need to spell that out for you?"

Richard took a seat at the cleared corner of the desk by the window and set out his inkwell.

He had originally thought the professor would take him under his wing like his aunt and senior, breaking down his life's work and explaining it to him piece by piece.

Instead, the thing he did most every day was copy and archive these dusty old books.

The top few books in the east wall stack were seal maintenance archives dating back several decades.

The paper was so brittle it practically crumbled whenever he turned a page.

Richard carefully pinched the edges, turning the pages gently as he began to copy them down one by one.

The contents were monotonous: author, year, and notes stating that on such-and-such date at such-and-such weak point, a lower-level seal was recast.

Transcribing the books was incredibly tedious work.

However, his [Learning] and [Speculation] were far from idle, piecing these archaic terms together with the new systems he was uncovering, one by one.

He copied for over half an hour.

Richard looked up and noticed that the old professor had lowered his feet at some point, holding his teacup motionlessly.

"Professor," he spoke up.

"The department archives already have copies of all these records, don't they?"

"They do."

"Then why are you having me copy them?"

Mortimer turned his head, his half-closed eyes lingering on him for a moment.

"The archives only keep the clean copies.

The ones that are filed away, stamped, and numbered. The things I have here are all discarded drafts, flawed diagrams, and half-finished judgments left behind by others.

The archives won't accept these, but as raw texts, they are far more useful than the clean ones."

Richard looked down at the stack beside him. Sure enough, the margins of several pages held someone's hastily scribbled annotations.

In some places, text had been crossed out in red ink, with a tiny line of writing squeezed in above.

Mortimer continued explaining.

"A beautifully transcribed file gets sent to the archives for people to read its conclusions.

But the conclusion won't tell you how the author took wrong turns every step of the way, nor how they went back to correct their own mistakes and start over. You are transcribing these to study the process of others making mistakes."

Richard thoroughly agreed. "I understand."

The old professor propped his feet back up.

"It doesn't matter if you can't memorize it all right now. Copy them enough, and you'll develop muscle memory. When you make mistakes yourself, you'll know to automatically correct them."

It was nearly noon by the time Richard finally reached the bottom of the stack. With a sore wrist, he set his pen down and stretched his hand.

Mortimer leaned forward in his chair.

He took the catalog ledger and flipped through it from start to finish.

After finishing, he gave a satisfied nod.

Richard thought he would praise him, but the old professor merely offered a single remark.

"Your handwriting is at least neater than it was last month."

"Is that a compliment?"

"I'm saying your handwriting last month looked like chicken scratches."

Richard stared in disbelief.

The old professor's own sprawling, chaotic penmanship was easily the ugliest handwriting around. How did he have the nerve to criticize anyone else's?

The old professor tossed the ledger back onto the desk and pointed toward the stack in the corner.

This stack consisted of several thick hardcover volumes, completely different from the loose pages and thin pamphlets from before.

"You don't need to look at the rest. Start on this stack this afternoon."

Richard sized them up and said, "These look far more extravagant than the previous ones. They're all hardcovers. Is what's recorded inside important?"

Mortimer gave a scoffing laugh.

"You'll see once you read them. The ones with the fanciest covers are often the least honest inside."

He seemed to be implying something with those words, but no matter how long Richard chewed on them, he couldn't figure out what the other man meant.

He walked over and carried the top book back.

Flipping to the first page, it opened with the seal maintenance records for several ancient battlefields in the north—roughly the same type as the archives from that morning.

But when he turned to the third page, Richard's fingers paused.

Along the margin of this page, a dense line of incredibly small annotations crawled.

The annotations weren't written in the Albion Language, nor in Latin or Ancient Greek.

Shockingly, they were in runes.

Richard looked up and glanced at the old professor, who was still staring blankly into space.

Mortimer, naturally, gave him no reaction.

Richard quickly skimmed through the entire book from start to finish first.

The first twenty-odd pages were entirely proper seal maintenance records.

Starting with the small script on the third page, a section of runic annotations popped up in the margins every few pages.

The handwriting of the annotations was completely different from the main text. The main text had the meticulous, stroke-by-stroke neatness of an old-school scholar, while the runes were written in a frantic, chaotic scrawl.

These runes employed the most ancient binding method, matching the rubbings he had seen in Corbin's office, though they were far more convoluted.

He closed the book and looked over at Mortimer again.

"Professor, this book has annotations tucked inside it."

Mortimer was counting the tea stalks in his cup, and it took a moment before he shot back an impatient reply.

"Isn't it completely normal for a book to have things tucked inside it?

Flip open any book in this room, and you can shake out something someone else didn't want.

Bookmarks, bills, unfinished love letters... it has everything."

"Then should I record the annotations in the catalog too?"

"Suit yourself."

Mortimer went back to counting his tea stalks.

"Record them if you can. If you can't, pretend you didn't see them. It's not like I'll be paying you any wages anyway."

Richard understood. He carried the book back to the corner of the desk and sat down once again.