For the next two days, Richard lived according to the plan he had set for himself.
He woke up promptly at six in the morning. His [Sleep] Lv. 2 allowed him to wake up at a time precise to the second.
After getting dressed, he went downstairs to find his Mother already frying bacon in the kitchen.
He drank half a glass of warm water and went for a slow jog around Waste Rock Lane.
[Walking] Lv. 2 automatically adjusted his breathing rhythm to match his pace.
During his jog, his microcirculation maintained a very slight level of activity. By the end of the whole workout, he was only lightly sweating and didn’t feel the usual breathlessness.
After his run, he returned home, showered, changed, and came down for breakfast.
Evelyn usually came downstairs around this time.
Rubbing her eyes, she walked into the kitchen and saw her brother already at the table, drinking tea and eating bread.
"Brother, you get up to run before it’s even light out. Is that something a normal person would do?"
"Normal people can’t."
"But winter break is almost over. And you, the normal person—have you finished your homework?"
"..."
Having brought up homework, Evelyn dropped the topic and ignored him.
After breakfast, it was time for Richard’s training.
He tied an old Latin textbook to his wardrobe door with a thin string to use as a target.
He held his breath, pushed the Ether, formed a Piercing Needle, and released.
PFT.
The Silver Needle sank into the letter ’N’ on the second line of the textbook’s cover.
He pulled the needle from the wardrobe door, returned to his spot, and shot again.
PFT.
The letter ’N’ on the second line, again.
’His Moon Nail practice was what he was focusing on most right now.’
’If I master it quickly, I can pass the inverted judgment criteria.’
’Then I’ll get a new Technique, and I can also take the semi-finished model to the gathering and get something for nothing. It’s killing multiple birds with one stone.’
In the afternoon, he practiced [Stone Armor].
During the exhalation phase of the third cycle of Quadruple Breathing, he pushed Ether to the surface of his skin.
Under his control, a thin, hard shell gradually formed over his entire left arm, spreading from his fingertips all the way to his shoulder.
The Covering Armor solidified stably on his arm.
He let out a long breath, and the Covering Armor dissolved.
Then he repeated the process, over and over.
The proficiency of [Shadow Armor] was tied to [Stone Armor]; by practicing the latter, the former improved as well.
After finishing his [Stone Armor] practice, he began to practice Spiritual Vision and Divination.
The training Copper Disc from Old Big was placed in the center of his desk.
A Gray Wax Stick was lit, and wax dripped, drop by drop, onto the surface of the disc.
When the seventh drop of wax fell, it solidified into a small, irregular flower.
Richard examined the flower’s outline.
Five petals. The largest one faced east, with a thin crack running off-center through the middle.
He was familiar with the several symbols Old Big had taught him, but tonight’s flower didn’t match any of them.
There was a saying in the lore of Wax Words: when a Divination Master divines a shape they can’t understand, it’s most likely because their mind is too cluttered, affecting the solidification of the wax.
Richard blew out the Wax Stick and wiped the disc clean.
His Divination practice concluded, he took out the copy of the *Northern Literature Review* that Charlotte had given him.
’It’s about time I started writing myself.’
First, he read through the entire volume.
The writing style generally fell into two camps.
One was prose from the children of northern miners, writing about their fathers down in the pits, their mothers in the laundries, and themselves studying in the mining district’s elementary school.
The sentences were unadorned, the structure simple, using almost no rhetorical flourishes. They won readers over with sincerity.
The other camp was youths trained in grammar, who wrote of spring daisies, summer lakes, autumn chestnuts, and winter’s Furnace Fire.
Their rhetoric was refined, their imagery dense, their structure symmetrical. Reading each paragraph was like listening to a pan flute.
But the few pieces Charlotte had circled were all from the first camp.
Next to a piece from the second camp, Richard saw her red pen annotation: "Beautiful words, but sadly, empty."
He closed the subscription volume.
His first idea was to write about his Cicero Cup experience, focusing on "how a northern boy finds his footing in the Imperial Capital."
By the second paragraph, he read it over and felt something was wrong.
The version of himself in the text was far more polished and composed than the real him. It had nothing to do with "authenticity."
After one revision, it felt even more wrong. It had turned into a contest report designed to catch the eye of an admissions office.
Richard crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it into the wastebasket.
For his second idea, he wrote about Mr. Hutton.
By the third paragraph, he caught himself.
’If I strip away the layer behind the Curtain, what does the character of Mr. Hutton become?’
’An old-fashioned teacher upholding the classics in a northern industrial city?’
’That kind of character has already been written to death in those second-camp articles.’
By evening, seven or eight crumpled balls of paper were piled up on the left side of Richard’s desk.
Evelyn glanced over as she came in to bring him a glass of hot milk.
"What are all these crumpled papers for?"
"...Writing."
"Writing what?"
"A submission."
"For who?"
"A magazine."
Evelyn set down the hot milk and reached for the topmost paper ball.
Richard slapped his hand down on it.
"Don’t look."
"Why not?"
"It’s not good."
"I’m not going to laugh at you."
"..."
"Alright, alright." Evelyn pulled back her hand. "When you’re done, show them to me. I’ll help you pick the best one."
"And how will you pick?"
"Whichever one makes me cry, that’s the one."
"That’s some standard..."
"What’s wrong with it?"
"The saddest story isn’t necessarily the best one."
"Then what is the best kind of writing like?"
Richard thought for a moment.
"After it’s finished, both the writer and the reader feel that it couldn’t have been any other way."
"’Couldn’t have been any other way?’"
Evelyn didn’t understand.
She walked out with the empty tray, glancing back at her brother just before closing the door.
"Don’t stay up too late."
"Okay."
After the door closed, Richard brought the hot milk to his lips for a sip. The cup was scalding.
He set the cup back down.
A blank sheet of paper still lay spread out on his desk.
He wrote the first sentence.
"The third house from the east end of Waste Rock Lane is home to a widower named Burns."
"He hauls coal at the pier and has done so for thirty-one years."
"Last winter, he coughed up blood but didn’t dare go to the hospital."
Once he stepped out of his own perspective and that of those around him, he discovered there was actually a lot he could write about.
Why didn’t Burns go to the hospital?
The municipal hospital for Brighton’s North District was in the wealthy district across the river.
A one-way trip on the tram was two pence, the outpatient registration fee was six pence, and the doctor’s examination cost another shilling. The medicine afterward would be a continuous drain on his finances.
All that added up would be a considerable sum even for the Williams Family, let alone for a widower living alone.
But money was only the surface issue.
According to the rules of the South District Wharf Union, if you missed the morning roll call for three consecutive days, your position would be eliminated.
To reapply after being eliminated, you had to be placed at the very bottom of the union’s waiting list. It would take at least three months for another opening to come around.
For a sixty-two-year-old man, three months meant his savings would be eaten up by rent and coal, he’d have to buy bread on credit, and rely on parish donations for winter wool.
The housewife next door, when passing his gate, would also glance in with the kind of look reserved for the destitute.
Richard’s pen tip returned to the paper.
He recalled a worn-out booklet he had flipped through at Whitcomb during his winter break internship.
Mrs. MacNeil had casually handed it to him during a chat, and a line of small print inside was still etched in his memory:
"Those receiving parish relief must sign the register to confirm their unemployed status.
Those who receive relief for twenty-eight consecutive days will have their names transferred to the permanent file."
The permanent file was a card catalog with a blue cover, organized by parish.
Once your name was in that catalog, you were effectively erased from the labor market.
Burns couldn’t end up in that book.
This was the so-called "principle of lesser eligibility."
Those on relief had to live in conditions worse than the lowest-paid laborer; otherwise, no one would be willing to do the hardest, most tiring jobs.
This principle was written, bold as brass, in the explanatory clauses of the Poverty Relief Technique, without even an attempt at concealment.
The true goal of the entire poverty relief system was to maintain this cheap labor force, to prevent them from ever stopping.
It made people who coughed up blood afraid to see a doctor;
It made the sick afraid to stop working;
It made those who stopped working afraid to register for relief;
And it ensured those who registered could never return to the labor market.
In terms of the machine’s own goals, it operated with great success.
The whole mechanism was perfectly interlocked, and every process had a name.
The Poverty Relief Technique, the permanent file, the workhouse system—every process was written down in black and white as being "for the good of the needy."
But once the whole system was set in motion, the needy could only move down, never up.
His sister’s voice drifted up from downstairs; she was discussing with their Mother whether to buy butter at the market tomorrow.
Richard stood up and stretched his shoulders.
For the next section, he wanted to write about the workhouse.
The Brighton North District workhouse was located at the end of Morton Street, a three-story gray brick building with an iron gate that was perpetually half-closed.
There was a brass plaque by the entrance, engraved with "Home for the Poor, Est. 1867."
He had passed by it once last year and had seen the people lining up at the entrance.
Most of the people in the line were women holding children, along with two middle-aged men who appeared to be disabled.
Richard hadn’t looked too closely at the time.
But now he remembered: there hadn’t been a single able-bodied man in the line.
According to the rules, able-bodied men who entered the workhouse had to participate in "work duty" every day: picking apart Hemp Rope, breaking stones, sweeping public roads.
There was no pay for this work duty, only two meals and a bed.
Richard jotted this connection down in the margin of his draft, drawing an arrow to the main paragraph.
From the perspective of the Mysterious Side, the story of Burns wasn’t just a social problem.
A person crushed by despair and resentment, if they possessed latent circuits, had a chance of becoming a wandering spirit after death. Even without circuits, they would leave behind a death-wail.
When enough death-wails gathered, all sorts of minor anomalies would appear nearby: echoes in the house, knocking on windows at midnight, nightmares during sleep.
If the density of death-wails in a certain area continued to rise, Evil Beings would be drawn to it, because death-wails were their favorite food.
Richard suddenly realized, ’Since the Industrial Revolution, the density of death-wails in industrial cities has been rising every year.’
The workload of the Branch Office had doubled, not just because the Curtain itself was thinning, but also because the death rate among the lower classes was increasing.
For every Burns who breathed his last alone on a wooden bed, the Branch Office’s reinforcement budget had to be increased the following year.
Winterworth had complained about the tight budget, Old Big had complained about the rising cost of Enchanted Bullets, and Captain Field had complained that the volume of field missions across the North had doubled compared to five years ago.
Everyone was complaining about the numbers on the books, but no one was looking at the source of those numbers.
Richard didn’t write too much of this on the draft paper.
Matters from behind the Curtain couldn’t be published in a Surface World magazine, but the skeleton could remain, waiting for the right language to give it a skin.
The skeleton was this: a solitary old man coughed up blood but wouldn’t go to the hospital because the entire system was specifically designed to prevent him from stopping;
The system prevented him from stopping because those who stopped became a burden;
But the price of him not stopping was that one day he would suddenly collapse on the stone steps of the pier, his last breath exhaled into the river water.
That last breath would make a sound, one that people in the Surface World couldn’t hear.
The money that coal mine owners and textile mill owners earned from exploitation went into their private accounts.
After the leaking death-wails attracted Evil Beings, the bill for the cleanup was charged to national expenditure, to be shared by all taxpayers.
Besides, this also allowed the Branch Office’s budget to increase every year.
’If all the people like Burns lived decent lives;’
’If, in the nights of the industrial districts, no one had to breathe their last alone;’
’The death-wails would decrease, and the Evil Beings would become rarer.’
’Old Big’s salary would be cut, and Captain Field’s field mission allowance would be cut along with it.’
’The Ashford Family’s ranking in the Imperial Capital would be pushed down even further.’
The entire system of the Mysterious Side was, in fact, a beneficiary of this injustice.
Even if only a passive beneficiary.
Thinking this, Richard took a soft, sharp breath through his nose.
No matter how deeply a Scholar researched, they couldn’t touch the monthly profits in a factory owner’s ledger;
No matter how swift a Hunter’s axe, it couldn’t split open the skulls of those masters in Parliament;
For all the incredible powers behind the Curtain, they were all useless when faced with the true source of the problem.
’As for Grand Masters and some of those in even higher positions, perhaps they benefit from this system too?’
Richard didn’t dare speculate any further. His inspiration was already beginning to send him a warning...

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