After the incident in the basement, the past few days of school life had been uneventful.
Attending classes, tutoring sessions during lunch, spending time in the library, practicing the Breathing Technique at home in the evening... His schedule was packed solid, with hardly any time left for daydreaming.
There was no after-school tutoring on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Holland had gone to the Imperial Capital on a business trip to attend a regular meeting of the Classical Society.
He was also going to inquire about this year’s Cicero Cup contestants and see if there were any changes to the format, so their private tutoring was postponed until next week.
Richard used this free time for the third-floor bookshelves.
He had already marked his fourth candidate book last week.
The cover was printed with a title so long it was soporific:
A Comparative Study of the Administrative Systems of the Lower Black Soil River City-States, Centered on the Priest Council System.
Publication year: New Era 1843. The authors were credited with two sets of initials, P.H.R. and J.E.W., likely a co-authored work.
The main text was, indeed, about administrative systems.
Council composition, election procedures, fiscal authority, military chain of command... The academic flavor was overwhelmingly thick. The footnote numbers ran from 1 to 112, and the list of cited works took up four full pages.
But starting from the third Chapter, there was a problem with the footnote numbering.
The skipped numbers were distributed unevenly. There were none in the first two Chapters, then four appeared concentrated in the third Chapter, three in the fourth, and six in the fifth.
A total of thirteen swallowed footnotes. He noted all the positions of the skipped numbers on a sheet of white paper, arranged by Chapter.
Thirteen empty numbers, corresponding to thirteen hidden passages.
The encryptor’s method was clean. They had ripped the footnotes directly from the main text, root and stem, and filled the resulting holes by re-sorting the adjacent numbers.
It would be impossible to notice without comparing the numbering sequence page by page.
But "ripped out" didn’t mean "destroyed."
Richard flipped to the last page of the book. After the page number, there was about three centimeters of blank margin for the binding.
He bent the spine back as far as it would go and leaned in for a closer look.
Tucked into the gap between the binding thread and the edge of the paper was an extremely thin strip of paper, invisible without taking the binding apart.
Richard pulled a wire bookmark from his notebook and carefully teased the paper strip out of the gap.
The characters on the strip were tiny, their density even higher than that of Appendix C.
All thirteen of the deleted footnotes were here.
He flattened the strip on the table and examined it section by section with a magnifying glass.
The comparison chart and etymology manual lay open beside him. His left hand held the strip flat to keep it from curling, while his right hand held a pen, restoring the text sentence by sentence on a white sheet of paper.
The bonus from Scholarship Lv. 2 made deconstructing the word roots almost instantaneous. Once he grasped the pattern of nested substitutions, the following sentences fell one after another like dominoes.
Within two days, he had completely restored all thirteen footnotes.
The content, of course, wasn’t about administrative systems. It was about the organizational structure of the Mysterious Side, the very thing Richard was most interested in.
The text first defined a term: Neophytus, which translates literally to "Newcomer."
The definition was: "One who has initially established a complete Ether Micro-Cycle within their body."
Richard set down his pen and stared at this line of text for a long while.
’A complete Ether Micro-Cycle.’
His current Breathing Technique practice had already established a nascent form of Ether retention in his chest, a warmth that lingered on his exhale.
But this nascent form was still a short distance from a complete micro-cycle.
Mr. Hutton had also said in the basement that the Ether Micro-Cycle in his body was extremely weak.
In other words, he didn’t even qualify as a Newcomer yet.
The Newcomer was the lowest entry threshold, the fundamental dividing line between "non-ordinary people" and "ordinary people" in the world behind the Curtain.
Only by crossing this line could one be considered to have officially stepped through the door to that world.
Fail to cross it, and you would forever be an outsider looking in, able to smell the food cooking inside but never getting a bite.
He pulled his attention back to the paper strip.
The text went on to list the sequence of Tiers above Newcomer.
Tier Two: Practitioner.
"One who has established a stable and self-sustaining system of Ether circulation within their body, and is able to actively call upon Ether to perform work on the Mysterious Side."
’The things Mr. Hutton did in the basement...’
’Snapping his fingers to open the iron gate, using Holy Water to activate the Engraving Knife, completing the entire process of reinforcing the Seal—every step required actively calling upon Ether.’
’The old gentleman is at least a Practitioner, and from the looks of his work, he’s far beyond a novice.’
Tier Three: Minor Mastery (Adeptus Minor).
The text’s description of Minor Mastery suddenly became brief, just a single sentence:
"To ascend from Practitioner to Minor Mastery, one must choose a specific supernatural direction for deep development in order to touch upon the Path to this Tier."
Tier Four: Grand Mastery (Adeptus Major).
Tier Five: Expert (Virtuoso).
Tier Six: Master (Magister).
And Tier Seven—Hidden Seat (Archon).
Starting from Grand Mastery, the wording in the text visibly tightened.
Expert was described with only a few words, Master with just half a sentence, and Hidden Seat wasn’t even given a definition, leaving only the term hanging there alone.
The author certainly wasn’t ignorant; he or she simply chose to reveal only this much.
Richard copied the seven Tiers onto the white paper in order, drawing a vertical axis from Newcomer to Hidden Seat.
’My current position is at the very bottom of this axis, not even touching the line for Newcomer.’
’Mr. Hutton is somewhere in the Practitioner Tier, but it’s impossible to judge how high.’
’Mrs. MacNeil, the professional Spirit Medium hired by the Warren Family, is probably a Practitioner or higher as well.’
’And those truly prominent supernatural figures in the Imperial Capital: the power behind the Ashford Clan, the people who blacked out the conclusions in government reports... what Tier are they on?’
The nesting level of the code in the last few lines of the paper strip deepened abruptly.
He barely managed to restore one root word—"Ordo," order.
And half a sentence: "Ascending from Tier Three, every Tier Transition requires..."
’Requires what?’
The following characters were locked by a third layer of nested substitution. The comparison chart in his hands could only solve the first two layers; the rules for the third layer were completely foreign.
He tried several possible combinations and hit a wall with all of them.
The correspondence between roots and affixes was completely scrambled in the third layer of encryption, using a method of recombination he had never seen before.
Richard put down his pen and rubbed his temples.
He’d hit a ceiling. This was the first time he had clearly felt the limits of his own abilities among these bookshelves.
He had been able to brute-force all the previous codes with his comparison chart and etymology manual, but not this time.
The third layer of encryption required a new tool, and that tool wasn’t in these twenty-six books.
He tucked the paper strip back into the gap in the spine and returned the book to its original spot.
He waited a day before tackling the fifth book.
During the study period on Thursday afternoon, Richard asked his homeroom teacher for leave in advance, saying he needed to go to the library to look up materials.
The homeroom teacher’s attitude toward him now was completely different from a month ago.
A student whose grades were soaring in every subject, who had been personally recommended by Holland for the Cicero Cup, wanted to do research? That was an excellent thing, of course. He was told to go ahead and look up anything he wanted.
’I guess this is the special treatment reserved for good students.’
With that thought, Richard had already arrived at his usual spot on the third floor.

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