[Perception] Lv. 2 made his Mirror brighter.
It could reflect the outside world with greater precision and had gained a new direction for reflecting what was inside.
Richard looked at his palm. The silver ink and bloodstains were mixed together, embedded in the grooves of his fingerprints.
He scrubbed hard with soap at the sink, but the stubborn stains between his fingers remained clearly visible.
Unable to wash them off, Richard could only dry his hands on a towel and lie down on the bed.
In a daze, he saw Mother brushing honey in the kitchen, Evelyn running on the platform in that new coat, and his father holding a newspaper up high, secretly dozing off.
With these thoughts, he gradually fell asleep.
Dreams have no boundaries.
When he was awake, [Perception] was a Mirror facing inward.
When he was asleep, the other side of the Mirror also began to reflect things.
The first thing Richard saw was fog.
The fog submerged his ankles, then his knees and waist, stopping just below his chest.
Everything above his shoulders was still above the fog; everything below was covered by it.
There was no wind, no sound. The only thing moving in this entire place was the fog.
Twelve stones stood in the fog. Each of these crudely hewn pillars was two heads taller than a grown man.
The stones formed a circle, and in the center of the circle was a patch of slightly sunken earth.
Richard felt this place was somewhat familiar.
A procession of people emerged from the depths of the fog.
At the front were several Priests draped in animal hides. Round bronze plates with simple patterns hung from their waists.
Their faces were painted with white pigment, smeared all the way from their foreheads to their chins.
In the middle was a woman, held up by two burly men.
The woman was very young, looking to be only in her twenties. She cradled an infant wrapped in animal hide.
’The infant isn’t fussing. He must be asleep already?’
Richard couldn’t hear any sound in the dream.
The woman did not struggle; she walked toward the depression on her own.
A crowd followed the procession—the elderly, men, women, and children were all there.
Every face was smeared with a streak of gray pigment, running from the brow bone to the cheekbone.
The entire tribe had come.
The procession stopped at the edge of the stone circle.
A Priest in animal hides turned around and said something loudly to the tribe.
Richard didn’t know what he was saying, but he could see the Priest’s expression was fervent as he raised his hands to the sky.
He was praying.
The two burly men released the woman, and she walked to the edge of the depression on her own.
The infant in her arms still hadn’t cried.
Only then did Richard see clearly that the infant’s face was bluish-purple.
The child was long dead.
Something must have happened to the tribe—a plague, a harsh winter, a famine... The resilience of a primitive society was very weak. Richard had already guessed what they were about to do.
The woman gently lifted the infant from her arms and placed it in the depression.
She knelt, placed both hands on the infant, and her lips moved. She was talking to her child.
A mother was comforting a dead child, telling him not to be afraid.
The man in the animal hide walked over, pulling a stone knife from his waist.
The blade of the stone knife was dark and had been sharpened to a keen edge.
The woman did not look up, her hands still resting on the infant.
She waited in her place.
The knife fell. Richard saw no blood in the dream.
The fog obscured everything.
But he could feel that the thing beneath the entire mountain, the thing that had always been listening, had become a little more awake.
It had only been listening before; now it began to receive.
It received the mother and her child, and the tune the mother hummed to her child in her final moments.
It received the entire tribe’s winter of hunger, cold, and the silence of children dying one after another, taking everything into itself.
One by one, the tribespeople walked to the edge of the depression.
Each person took something from their arms, their pockets, or the pouches at their waists, and placed it in the depression.
Richard could see the items:
a smoothly polished stone, a cleanly stripped bone, a tightly woven grass rope, a wild fruit, a pinch of carefully preserved salt...
Salt. His inspiration was stirred in the dream.
Sower of Salt, Spreader of Salt, Salt Beneath the Shadow...
After placing their items, the tribespeople retreated one by one.
The last one to retreat was a little girl.
About six or seven years old, with two thick braids and bare feet, she looked very much like the sacrificed woman.
The little girl placed a doll woven from straw into the depression.
Two small black dots were drawn on the doll’s face, along with a curved line.
This doll wasn’t meant for a Curse; the smile on its face was sweet.
The little girl put the doll down and reached out to touch the dead woman’s face.
The fog closed in, and Richard’s consciousness in the dream began to clear.
’Perhaps this was the earliest form of that "Mother,"’ he thought.
The fog parted again. Time flew by.
Richard didn’t know how much time had passed.
Perhaps decades, perhaps centuries. The twelve standing stones had changed.
Several had fallen, their broken ends covered in moss. The depression had grown deeper.
Every year, more people were placed within it, no longer just dead children and mothers.
Prisoners of war, sinners, willing sacrifices, victims of plagues... She received every one of them.
She grew larger and larger.
From beneath the earth, she also learned to take one thing from her children—their Shadow.

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