Chapter 452: Something to Brag About

Matthew chuckled.

"I brought the kid a little gift."

He pulled a pressed, dried leaf from his coat.

It was about the size of a palm, with five lobes and a fine, serrated edge.

Richard didn't rashly use his Spirit Vision, but his basic Perception alone told him there was absolutely no ether on the leaf.

"Don't waste your energy. This thing isn't for you to use."

"It has no use at all?"

"None at all," Matthew said with a laugh.

"It can't serve as a medium for a Spell Formula, and it's not a supernatural item. If you steep it in water and drink it, it'll just give you diarrhea... I've tried that."

"Then what are you giving it to me for?"

"To brag with."

Richard looked up.

A teasing smile appeared on Matthew's sun-reddened face.

"I picked this leaf west of the central mountain range on the New Continent."

He tapped his index finger in the air, as if a map was floating right in front of him.

"The companions who went into that hellhole with me last time were all Major Adepts."

"After we got out, one of them said to me, 'Matthew, the next time you go, don't invite me.'"

No one in the room replied.

Donner raised his bandaged hand, clearly wanting to touch the leaf, but stopped halfway and put it back down.

"Only this one kind of tree grows there," Matthew continued.

"It's the only thing that grows across the entire valley floor. Nothing else survives.

When you walk through it, you look up and see leaves. You look down and see leaves. You walk for three days, and it's still just leaves."

"So if anyone ever dares to look down on you,"

He shoved the leaf into Richard's hand.

"Just tell them: 'A Virtuoso I know gave this to me.'"

Richard's eyes lit up, and he thanked him.

He suddenly asked, "By the way, while you were over there... did you ever see a Hunter with the last name Ashford?"

"The man should have been wearing a ring, engraved with an oak tree and a rampant lion."

Since it was rare enough to meet a Virtuoso from the New Continent who was actually easy to talk to, Richard naturally wasn't going to let the opportunity slip by.

Matthew's eyebrows twitched. "I did see one."

Richard sat up straight.

"He was guarding a boat near the Mouth of the Underworld River," Matthew recalled.

"He was taller than you, and looked a bit like you, too, except his temper was far worse.

He flipped a table halfway through sharing drinks with someone, then bought them a new one the next day."

"Is he still..."

"He was alive, but that was a few years ago. As for right now, I have no idea."

After saying that, he didn't elaborate further.

With the leaf handed over, Matthew had no more serious business to attend to.

He leaned back in his chair, and the poor piece of furniture let out another sharp, agonizing creak.

"Teacher, you really need to replace this chair."

Madam Marie murmured.

"I've replaced it several times before. You're the one who broke every single one."

"That means there's a problem with the chairs."

"That means there's a problem with you."

The faceless porcelain-white doll came over again holding a tea tray, replacing the cold tea with fresh cups.

Richard noticed that when the doll served Matthew his tea, it gave him a slightly wider berth.

"Kid," Matthew suddenly said.

"You've asked a lot of questions tonight, so let me ask you one."

"Go ahead."

"Why do you think Virtuosos don't enter the city?"

Richard thought for a moment.

The records in the books regarding this rank were pitifully scarce. They just repeated the same few words over and over: 'Has begun to deviate from the realm of humanity.'

He answered honestly, "Afraid of being seen?"

"Afraid my ass." Matthew picked up his tea, sniffed it, and set it back down.

"Once you reach that stage, it's no longer about 'being seen'."

"Think about a well."

"There is water at the bottom of a well. You draw water at the edge, lowering and raising the rope, and nobody gets in anyone's way.

But what if one day, that well stood up on its own and walked right into the middle of your village..."

He spread his hands. "Every family in the village would be scared half to death."

Donner chimed in, "My grandfather once said that in the early years, one of them arrived outside the City of Yazd, and no one in the city dreamed for three days."

"Three days is nothing," Matthew said.

He suddenly grinned, the wrinkles on his sun-reddened face bunching together.

"Right after I advanced, I returned to the Imperial Capital once and stood at King's Cross Station for a little while."

"The very next day, several new names appeared in the missing children's column in the newspaper."

"That's why those on the Old Continent rely entirely on proxies."

"The errand runners you see in the Imperial Capital are all impeccably dressed, busy signing documents, stamping seals, attending meetings, and going to banquets."

Next, Matthew talked a bit more about what he had seen on the New Continent.

Things like the Underworld City-State Cluster, macuahuitl, giant pythons, the Sun Dance, and the Day of the Dead...

After he had spoken for a while, Madam Marie said, "That's enough."

Richard stood up, bowed his farewell, and left with Donner.

Just as they reached the door, Madam Marie suddenly spoke again.

"By the way, you two might want to keep an eye on the newspapers for the next couple of weeks."

Matthew finished his tea off to the side and added casually, "When the teacher says to read the paper, it usually means someone is about to run into some bad luck."

"No one is going to die," Madam Marie corrected him. "Dead people are troublesome."

She rested her hands openly on the armrests.

"When someone dies, their family has to hold a funeral, their colleagues have to write eulogies, and the papers have to publish their life story.

Once their life story is published, the readers start sympathizing with them."

"It's better if they live."

"A living person has to leave the house every day and sit in the same conference room, while the entire Empire remembers exactly what they did last week."

Richard stood by the door, looking past a room full of mirrors that reflected no one, straight at the high-backed armchair.

"Madam, may I ask one question?"

"Ask."

"The hundreds of people who smashed up the shops on this street yesterday..."

"Nothing at all will happen to them. They went home to eat and went to work at the factories.

More than half of them couldn't even tell you what they were smashing yesterday. They were all being manipulated."

"Then are you..."

"Just enjoy the show," Matthew said lazily from behind.

"The teacher rarely handles this sort of thing personally. What she does is..."

"Matthew."

"...I didn't say anything."

Outside, the sky was completely dark. The sound of hammers on Flower Moon Street hadn't started yet. Only a single sliver of light leaked through the crack of the door at the tailor shop at No. 2.

The old tailor likely hadn't slept all night, still patching up that unfinished lining.

As Richard walked out of the entryway, he glanced back.

The door had already closed, and as usual, the brass plate reflected no one.

Upon returning to his dorm, Richard lay in bed for half an hour but simply couldn't fall asleep.

The two little wings on the soles of his feet were still gently flapping, making him feel as if his whole body was floating on water.

Giving up on sleep, he called up his interface.

[Hermes's Talaria]

[Current Abilities: Levitation, Swift Crossing]

[Swift Crossing (Three times a day): Short-distance teleportation.

Highly dependent on ambient ether concentration. Amplified behind the veil.

Attenuated in the material realm. Cannot pass through obstacles.]

"Cannot pass through obstacles in the material realm." He frowned.

The next afternoon, he signed the borrowing slip for a training room.

After bolting the iron door, Richard tested Levitation first.

He pushed ether down the inside of his right leg to his ankle. The two little wings stood up, and his entire body was lifted off the ground.

He walked across the layer of years-old dust on the training room floor without leaving a single footprint.

However, Levitation also consumed ether. The higher and faster he flew, the more it drained.

'Swift Crossing' had only appeared after the night of the flame division. He hadn't dared to test it until now, but with a proper venue, he finally could.

Richard pushed ether to his ankles, and the two tiny wings attached to the sides of his boots began to flap.

He mentally picked a landing spot in front of the copper disc target on the training room's east wall, about ten meters away.

Richard didn't even take a step. The spot where he stood was instantly emptied, and he was already standing in front of the copper target.

The breath in his chest seemed to have stayed behind, only catching up to him a moment later.

Richard braced himself against the wall to recover, looking back at where he had just been standing. There wasn't even a scuff mark left on the floor.

But ten meters was still too short.

He walked back to the center of the room and set his landing spot much further away.

The deepest corner of Room 3, roughly twenty meters away.

He activated Swift Crossing, but landed only about fifteen meters away.

Richard frowned. He spread out the Still Water of his mirror condensation method, illuminating the background ether noise of the entire training room.

Inscriptions were carved into all four walls of this room, suppressing the overall ether field to an extremely low level.

It was so low that practicing his mirror condensation method here was actually smoother than outside, because there was less interference.

But the flip side of having less interference meant there was also less ambient ether available to use.

He remembered the line in the description: Highly dependent on ambient ether concentration. Amplified behind the veil. Attenuated in the material realm.

Richard summoned his shadow up from behind the veil and had it test the ability on the other side, in the shallows.

The shadow wore a mask, and the two golden threads on its ankles flashed.

It vanished instantly.

Through their spiritual connection, Richard could sense the distance.

When the shadow landed in the shallows, it was so far from its starting point that he had to spread his Perception completely just to reach it.

"Amplified behind the veil."

That made sense. The messenger crossed borders; the material realm was never its home turf to begin with.

The three charges were used up, but he had tested everything he needed to test.

The Caduceus had granted him the "Inviolability of Emissaries", but he often wondered what he would do if he ran into someone who simply refused to play by the rules.

Now he had his answer. The winged shoes allowed him to both levitate and teleport, and the latter was the crucial one.

If he ever ran into real danger, he would at least have three chances to teleport away.

The following day, he tested it on the first floor of the Petrie Building.

The corridor was flanked by old walls embedded with centuries-old sealing layers. When he tried it, the distance attenuated, and he truly couldn't pass through the walls.

When he set his landing spot on the other side of an iron door, the Spell Formula didn't activate at all. The two little wings on his ankles didn't even flap, acting as if they hadn't heard the command.

He tried it again under the old sycamore tree in the Academy District.

The roots of the sycamore tapped directly into an active ether layer, making it one of the areas with the highest ether concentration in the entire school.

He set a landing spot for twenty meters, but instantly overshot it to thirty meters, nearly crashing right into a handcart loaded with lecture notes.

The old groundskeeper pushing the cart looked up.

"Sir, where did you just pop out from?"

"I've been standing here for a while."

"...Oh." The old groundskeeper pushed his cart away, glancing back after taking three steps.

Richard recorded these numbers in his mental database: for every tier the ether concentration increased, the distance roughly increased by fifty percent.

He added another note below it: Cannot pass through obstacles.

"In other words, the winged shoes only shorten a path that I can already physically walk across."

Richard suddenly felt that this conclusion sounded a lot like something Matthew would say.

Having completed his basic testing, Richard left his dorm later that day and walked onto the main road of the Academy District.

His mind was still calculating another matter: the small amount of ether stored in his bodily circuits would naturally dissipate by more than half after a night's sleep.

Running the mirror condensation method consumed a portion, and nurturing the Sphinx Lamp consumed another portion. The rest just evaporated for nothing.

He had never liked waste.

So, he turned Levitation down to its absolute lowest setting, keeping his hovering height barely thicker than a sheet of paper.

On the surface, it looked exactly like normal walking, except it saved him a great deal of physical effort.

When he reached the entrance of the Petrie Building, Richard came to a halt.