One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
When he opened his eyes, the only light in the room was a sliver of a streetlight's glow filtering through a gap in the curtains.
Richard lifted his head slightly from the pillow and glanced at the nightstand.
He remembered turning off the lights sometime after 9:20.
A little over an hour.
The entire Divine Pantheon Salon—from the moment he opened his eyes between the Temple pillars, to Aries presenting the Three-Ring Enchanted Bullet, to Hecate saying, "The gathering should end now"—had taken place.
He felt like it had been about thirty-odd minutes, which wasn't too different from the little over an hour that had passed in the real world.
The organizers probably had to wait for everyone to fall asleep before pulling them in, so a discrepancy of a few dozen minutes was normal.
Richard mentally singled out this piece of information.
If they could manipulate the flow of time in the dream, stretching a few seconds in reality into hours in the dream, or conversely, compress an entire night in reality into just a few minutes in the dream, then their power would be truly unfathomable.
That would mean they could literally steal time from him, or force entire periods of time into him.
A person whose very time was held in another's hands would have no choice but to be at their mercy.
But they hadn't.
The time in the dream was more or less equivalent to real time.
Hecate and the organization possibly behind her were using a relatively "natural" Dream Connection Technique.
It simply pulled multiple invitees to the same dream-node, allowing them to meet, talk, and trade there.
It had boundaries. It didn't manipulate time or rewrite memories.
It wasn't a "Miracle."
Richard slowly exhaled.
He had originally thought he might have stumbled upon a group of high-Tiers who had a direct line to the depths of the Veil.
Now he knew they were still just people—people who were, for the moment, stronger than him.
That was enough.
Aside from Hecate, the power levels of the Round Table's core members were mostly concentrated at the Practitioner level.
Minor Mastery Level members might exist, but the probability was low. In theory, there could be special cases like "a miser or a prisoner among the Minor Masters," but the chance was slim.
At this power level, even if a deal went sour and relations deteriorated, the difficulty of a Round Table member hunting him down alone wouldn't be impossible to handle.
The only ones he truly couldn't fight were Hecate and any others who might be behind her.
He couldn't judge the upper limits of their power right now, but there was no need for them to deal with him personally.
If they really wanted to deal with a sixteen-year-old high school student, they wouldn't have needed to invite him to the Round Table.
They could have just made the clay coin explode the moment he got it.
The fact that they didn't meant they weren't looking to eliminate him, but to recruit him.
As long as he didn't cross any lines, they would maintain their stance as his inviters.
This gave him enough time to grow stronger.
He lay back down under the covers and fell into a deep sleep again.
The next morning, Evelyn's voice drifted up from downstairs.
"Bro! Get up! If you don't come down soon, the fried eggs are going to get tough!"
Richard glanced at the clock on the wall.
7:20. He had overslept a little.
He got dressed and went downstairs.
Evelyn was standing in front of the stove with her back to him, humming a tune she'd picked up from who-knows-where while frying eggs.
"Is there any cheese today?" Richard asked.
"Yes," his sister replied without turning around. "Go get it from the cellar yourself."
"Okay."
Richard went to the cellar through the back door of the kitchen.
A chill hit him in the cellar. He walked down the three steps and took a pottery jar from a wooden rack.
Richard returned to the kitchen, carrying the cheese crock up the stairs.
Evelyn scooped the fried egg onto his plate.
"Bro."
"Hm?"
"You seem a little excited today."
"Do I?"
"Yeah." His sister tilted her head, looking him over. "Sleep well?"
"Mhm, I had a dream."
"What did you dream about?"
Richard wiped his mouth and dipped his bread into the egg yolk.
"I dreamed that you opened a bakery in the future."
"...What?" Evelyn turned around.
"I dreamed you opened a bakery and hired me as a taste tester."
"...Are you serious?"
"Dreams don't lie," Richard said with a serious nod. "You'd better start saving up."
Evelyn grabbed a burnt piece of bread crust and tossed it onto his plate.
"Well, did you dream about me tossing you the crusts?"
Richard shook his head and took a bite of the crust after dipping it in the yolk.
The yolk was warm, and the burnt taste of the bread spread in his mouth.
Evelyn sat down across from him, elbows on the table, and quickly finished her own breakfast.
Sunlight slanted in through the small window, falling across one side of her face.
As Richard ate, thoughts of Hecate, the Divine Hall gathering, the Double Serpent Staff, and the Balance Whip were temporarily locked away in another drawer of his mind.
A factory whistle blew in the distance, and the wheels of a small milk cart rumbled on the street.
His mother's footsteps descended from upstairs. She seemed to be in even better spirits today than yesterday.
His father, already in his work clothes, was tying his shoelaces at the door.
Everything at home was normal.
After history class the next day, the old man and the young man once again stayed behind in the classroom in tacit understanding.
Richard studied the old gentleman's expression and spoke first:
"Sir, I have a few questions."
"Speak."
"Last night, did you arrange for someone to come over?"
"Indeed, a Minor Master of the Secret Direction went over," Mr. Hutton said, taking back the homework notebook.
"She's a mutual acquaintance of your maternal grandfather and me. You don't need to know her specific identity.
"After she arrived, she performed a failsafe ritual for you. Once finished, she left on her own without alerting your family."
The classroom was quiet for a moment.
Downstairs, students were moving desks, their wooden legs dragging across the floor with a continuous, piercing screech.
This time, Mr. Hutton spoke first.
"Richard, do you feel that your grandfather has disappointed you?"
"...No."
"You do. You're just not saying it."
His gaze rested on Richard's face for a moment.
"Listen closely. An elder who is honest about his family's limits is ten times more helpful to you than one who pretends to be omnipotent."
Richard didn't respond.
"Now, I'll say what I want to say." Mr. Hutton pulled another sheet of paper from his drawer and placed it on the desk.
It was a map of Brighton, with seven or eight spots circled in red pencil.
"These are the local nodes I can mobilize within two hours.
"A coroner, two old Priests in the parish, the gatekeeper at the North District Funeral Home, the owner of that old curiosities shop in South City... these people are all Practitioners from civilian Guilds. Together, they'd have no problem handling a medium-scale contamination event."
"But for dealing with something on the level of a 'Spirit Realm Messenger'..." The old gentleman shook his head. "It's not enough."
"This incident itself is already beyond the operational radius of the local nodes."
"That's why the person who came to perform your ritual last night was called down from a higher level.
Her job was to provide a safety net, not to counterattack.
She left as soon as she was done, leaving no trace that could be tracked by the other party."
Mr. Hutton looked at Richard.
"You don't have a family like the Montagues or the Greshams, who can ring a bell in the Imperial Capital and have half a company show up."
"You don't have a tree like that behind you, and don't you try to find one to lean on."
The old gentleman said these last two sentences very slowly.
"Those who lean against a towering tree first learn to look up.
"They look up at the sky obscured by others, look up and wait for the Shadow others cast.
"Then one day, when he's standing on his own and the tree is gone, he'll have even forgotten how to walk."
"I've seen too many children like that."
"Their family backgrounds are better than yours, their resources more plentiful, their Guides of a higher Tier than me.
"But along the way, they just stop. They stop under that great tree and never take another step forward."
"When that tree falls, they fall with it."
Mr. Hutton made a vague circling gesture in the air, encompassing all of Richard.
"Where you're standing now, there is no tree."
Richard met his gaze.
"I understand."
Mr. Hutton didn't press for any details about the previous night's dream.
He didn't ask who the other party was, where the gathering was held, how many people were at the table, what price he had offered, or what he had received.
He only offered that piece of advice and then stopped.
The old teacher opened the notebook again, twisting the cap off his red pen.
"School's over. If there's nothing else, you should head home early."
"Alright."
Back home, Richard shut himself in his room again.
A pencil twirled half a circle between his fingertips before landing on a blank page.
He drew two horizontal lines, dividing the page into three columns.
In the leftmost column, he wrote "Shareable."
In the middle column, "Intermediate."
In the rightmost column, "Top Secret."
The "Shareable" column was for the least valuable information, things he could give away without any loss to himself.
Introductory content from Appendix C: the existence of the Veil, the three types of breathing exercises, the concept of Ether as a diffuse substance.
The first paragraph of *On the Ascent in the Veil*: the first two levels of the Tier sequence.
The names of the five great traditions.
He wrote these down one by one, feeling they were all useless with each entry.
If he put these things on that Round Table, the effect would only be slightly better than buying a copy of the *Albion Evening Post* from a street kiosk.
Of the three people sitting across from him last night, even the weakest was probably more familiar with this stuff than he was.
The "Shareable" column was exhausted after only a few moments of writing.
The pencil tip moved to the "Top Secret" column next:
His connection to the Ashford Clan; Mr. Hutton's identity as his Guide; the real school he attended.
As for the cornerstones of his survival, like his panel Skills and the Point absorption mechanism, these were a level even higher than "Top Secret."
He wouldn't even write them on paper; he only calculated them in his mind.
Returning to the middle column, he paused and thought for a long time.
This "Intermediate" section was what he really needed to fill.
Things he could trade without exposing his identity.
Things that would make the people at the Round Table feel he had bargaining chips, but wouldn't make Hecate want to turn him inside out to learn all his secrets.
But after thinking for ages, he couldn't write anything down.
Even the Marvels with residual Ether were impossible to trade.
Setting aside whether anyone would want them, the Marvels in his possession were mostly purchased under his real name or gifted by elders, giving them a clear line of provenance.
If he traded these Marvels, anyone who really wanted to investigate would be able to doxx him quickly.
He had already used something like the Haldane Model once; presenting the same thing again wouldn't be valuable.
In the first line of the "Intermediate" column, he wrote just three words: "To Be Added."
Below it, he left about twenty blank lines.
As he closed the notebook, the clatter of plates and bowls came from downstairs.
Richard went to the kitchen to help.
He took two plates from the cupboard and scooped his sister's freshly fried hash browns onto them one by one.
But half of his mind remained on the middle column of the notebook in the drawer upstairs.
'Those twenty blank lines have to be filled. Not just for next month's gathering, but for the one after that, and the one after that.'

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