"I see you’ve been taking notes," Mr. Hutton said. "Tell us what you’ve written."
The original Richard had never spoken up in class; he was the kind of nobody a teacher would only remember by looking at the roll call.
But this Richard was different.
He glanced down at his notebook.
"I was thinking about that report." He stood up.
"The phrase ’recommend halting the investigation’ is a contradiction in itself."
Mr. Hutton raised an eyebrow slightly. "Continue."
"If the investigation’s conclusion was ’no abnormalities found,’ the normal phrasing would be ’investigation complete, no phenomena of note discovered.’"
"But they didn’t write that. They wrote ’halt the investigation.’
The premise of that phrase is that there *is* something worth investigating further, but they’ve chosen not to."
The classroom fell silent for a moment.
"An excellent analysis, Richard. You may sit."
As Richard sat down, he felt several pairs of eyes on him.
Warren, in the back row, was the most surprised.
’When did this quiet, sickly kid become so eloquent?’
The Greenwood dining hall was a vast, high-ceilinged room.
Exhaust ducts ran across the ceiling, supposedly for heat dissipation, but their effect was always limited.
Portraits of the school’s board members and patrons hung on the walls.
The gentlemen in the paintings looked down condescendingly upon the students eating below, as if ready to critique their table manners at any moment.
Richard, holding his tray, shuffled forward in line.
Standing beside him was Hugh Fenton, his classmate and one of his few friends.
The boy’s hair could never be combed flat. He pushed his bangs to the side, only for them to fall back into place two seconds later.
Hugh’s situation at school was similar to Richard’s. His father was a post office dispatcher, and his Mother was a middle school teacher.
His family also had to treat the Greenwood tuition as a major expense, and in this dining hall, they always stayed in their designated area.
"They have oxtail and tomato soup today," Hugh leaned in and said.
"I can smell it. It must have been made today, not yesterday’s leftovers."
"Mm," Richard replied, inching forward. "How much is a bowl?"
"Five pence."
Richard reached into his pocket, counted his coppers, and said nothing.
He pushed his tray forward, said "Thank you" to the woman at the counter, and took a cup of free hot tea before stepping aside.
The free hot tea was unlimited—one of Greenwood’s few remaining acts of generosity.
Hugh followed behind him, smiling awkwardly. He didn’t buy the soup either.
The two of them found a small table by the window and sat down.
Someone was already sitting at the table. His name was Barrett, also their classmate, and he was currently eating slowly and deliberately.
His bread was mostly plain, with just a thin smear of peanut butter.
When he saw Richard and Hugh approach, he scooted over a bit without a word.
The three of them gathered around the small table, each dealing with their own lunch.
The sounds in the dining hall were stratified.
The central area was the liveliest, occupied by the who’s who of the school.
Brighton was a small city, after all. There were no true aristocrats, just the second or third-generation children of wealthy merchants and elite families.
Usually, their grandfathers had built the family fortune, and their fathers had entered law firms or parliament.
By their generation, they naturally felt a wall separated them from the grimy commoners.
As Richard drank his hot tea, his gaze drifted across the hall.
In a corner by the window, a girl sat alone.
Lillian Hayward.
Richard pulled the name from his memory—a girl from his class who stood out for both her grades and her looks.
The girl had delicate features and a slender, straight nose. She looked as if she had been finely sketched with a pencil.
The tray in front of her was much like Richard’s: thin soup, bread, and no meat.
As if sensing his gaze, the girl looked up.
Her eyes flickered when she noticed the contents of Richard’s tray were almost identical to her own.
"Brother, stop staring."
A hand clapped him firmly on the shoulder. Evelyn had walked over at some point without him noticing.
She was clutching a paper packet.
"Here, some butter cookies I made in home economics. I’m on a diet lately, so you can help me finish them."
She shoved the packet into Richard’s hand and ran off without waiting for a reply.
Richard opened the packet. Inside were golden-brown cookies, their edges slightly crisped.
He watched his sister’s fawn-like figure retreat into the distance.
’A diet? She’s as thin as a rail. What’s there to lose?’
After breaking off pieces of a cookie and handing them to his two classmates, he popped a piece into his own mouth.
Crisp, sweet, and salty. The butter melted on his tongue.
Hugh held his half of the cookie, murmuring, "Your sister is really sweet."
"Goes without saying," Richard said, taking a sip of tea.
After the bell for the last class rang, Richard packed his bag at his desk.
A few boys shoved each other as they squeezed toward the door, their laughter and shouting spilling out like water.
"Richard."
A tall, sturdy boy stopped by his desk, followed by another boy and a girl.
The boy was named Mason, the type to join in on any ruckus.
The girl was Grey. She was quiet and came from a good family, so she was part of their little circle too.
"That speech you gave today," Warren said, planting a hand on the corner of the desk. "To be honest, it was a little unexpected."
"Just some random thoughts," Richard said, stuffing his notebook into his bag.
"Not just random thoughts," Warren corrected him. "It’s not easy to get praise from old man Hutton in class."
"So?"
"So, you might be interested in what I’ve got next," Warren said.
His tone was polite, but it carried an undertone of assuming Richard would agree.
"What is it?" Richard asked, lifting his bag and turning to the side.
Warren pulled a cloth pouch from his coat pocket and tossed it lightly in his hand.
He gave a mysterious smile.
"A Divination Disc. Got it from an old junk dealer. It’s said to be an authentic piece from the Eastern Continent."
Mason chimed in from the side, snickering.
"It’s one of those table-turning tricks, you know? Just some mumbo jumbo to spook yourself for fun."
Richard glanced at the cloth pouch.
In his past life, this thing had a corresponding name—a Ouija board. The principle behind it was the so-called "ideomotor effect."
The participants would unconsciously push in one direction, their combined force moving the object.
They wouldn’t be aware of it themselves, attributing the movement to an external force and fooling themselves into thinking they’d contacted something mysterious.
Scientific, rational, explainable—that was the textbook version.
But then he recalled what Mr. Hutton had said that morning: *The truly dangerous things are the ones that appear in the hat.*
Thinking of this, Richard was about to say, "I’m not free today..."
But halfway through his sentence, he suddenly felt a strange stirring from the panel.
The cloth pouch was about half an arm’s length away from him, being casually tossed by Warren.
And within that range, the number at the edge of his consciousness shifted.
[Available Points: 0.1]

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