After dinner, Richard sat back down at his desk and first pulled up the panel.
The progress bar for [Scholarship] Lv. 2 had already climbed to 89%. With a constant influx of knowledge related to Mysticism, the progress was indeed rising quickly.
He dismissed the panel, pulled a piece of paper from his drawer, and began listing the things he needed to work through.
Annotate and translate the twelve sets of Boundary Stone Rubbing Copies;
Research on the Duality between the Bronze Plate and the Sheepskin Scroll;
The four batches of materials his aunt mentioned would be arriving one after another: Double Overwrite practice materials, Gaelic Ancient Script tracing copies, an annotated volume of Church rituals in Latin, and an expanded comparison chart for the Alexandrian School;
Submission to the *Northern Literature Review*, deadline February 15th;
Tutoring for the Dawn family, unmissable every Saturday and Sunday morning;
Moon Nail accuracy training, plus Stone Armor and Shadow Armor;
Daily maintenance of the Sphinx Lamp;
Spiritual Vision and Stone Reading;
Ether Massage for his mother, once a week;
The second Divine Pantheon Salon meeting, mid-February.
When he finished, he set down his pen and read the list over from top to bottom.
Scholarship advancement, progress toward a byline, presentable bargaining chips for the Salon meeting, the rate of his mother’s circuit degradation, the family’s expenses—all of it was closely interconnected.
At the very bottom, Richard hesitated before adding one more line.
Fighting Club.
After adding it, he put his pen down again.
The Fighting Club was different from the items above it.
Every item above was tied to either his academic advancement, his safety behind the Curtain, or his family.
The Fighting Club wasn’t connected to any of those.
He had originally joined the Fighting Club because [Breath Healing] had raised his body’s physical limits, and he wanted to take the opportunity to build a more solid foundation.
After half a semester, he could do more than a dozen pull-ups and jog a kilometer without getting winded or red in the face. His goal was already mostly achieved.
Continuing to train would bring diminishing returns while taking up more and more of his time.
Richard drew a line through "Fighting Club," crossing it off the list.
Crossing it off was one thing, but he still had to request a leave of absence in person.
The next day after school, before going to find Mr. Hutton, Richard first made a detour to the Fighting Club, located behind the gymnasium.
Pushing open the door, he saw Fraser by the punching bag near the entrance, bent over and adjusting the grip of a new face, a freshman.
"Thumb on the outside, don’t tuck it in."
He grabbed the freshman’s fist and demonstrated.
"If you tuck it in, you’ll break your own thumb with the first punch you throw, and your opponent won’t even feel a thing."
The freshman grunted in understanding, corrected his grip, and threw a punch. The bag swayed.
"There, that’s more like it."
Fraser patted the punching bag, then turned and saw Richard standing in the doorway.
"Fraser," Richard said, walking over. "I came to let you know that I’ll need to take a long leave of absence from the club for a while."
Fraser grunted but didn’t press for a reason.
"Busy with academic stuff?"
"Yeah, things are piling up now that spring is here."
"Then you go take care of your business."
Fraser clapped Richard heavily on the shoulder.
"Williams, you’re different from us."
"You’re someone with a real future. You do well in your studies, and then us good-for-nothings can brag about knowing you."
Richard played along with a smile.
"Whenever you come back, there’ll be a bag waiting for you."
Fraser took back his hand and turned to the freshman, who was still struggling with his thumb.
"Hey, I turn my back for two seconds, and you’ve already..."
Richard turned and walked toward the exit.
As he reached the door, he glanced toward the farthest corner of the room.
Coleman was back there, hitting a punching bag.
The way he hit the bag was different from everyone else.
The two bags in the center of the room, which people took turns hammering, swung wildly. The one in front of him, however, barely moved.
Richard took a closer look.
Coleman was always striking the exact same spot.
Punch after punch landed within that worn, oval-shaped area, never deviating by more than half an inch.
He understood.
’This must be the Child’s Skill of the Path of Burning Blood.’
’Beyond ice water baths, breath-holding, weight training, and pain tolerance, they also had to forge their bodies into weapons that could exert force in a single direction, at a single point.’
It was as if Coleman had eyes in the back of his head.
He stopped punching, wiped his face with a towel, and called out to Fraser, "I’ll see Williams out."
Richard nodded at him, and the two of them left the gymnasium, one walking in front of the other.
Outside, the snow had stopped, but the sky hadn’t cleared.
The path leading from the gym to the side gate was covered in a layer of hard-packed snow that crunched with every step.
After they had walked about ten paces, Coleman spoke.
"You’ve been busy lately."
"Yeah."
Richard glanced at him from the side.
’It sounded like small talk, but it wasn’t.’
"Lots of academic stuff," he answered vaguely.
Coleman kicked aside a chunk of frozen snow on the path.
"Are you stuck in your studies on the Mysterious Side?"
Richard considered this for a moment.
The Moon Nail was an old Technique from the Moon-Hunting Tradition, which naturally leaned toward the Hunter lineage.
Coleman had trained at a military academy for over two years. When it came to throwing techniques, he was probably more proficient than a Scholar like Richard, who was a relative newcomer.
"There is a throwing Technique I’ve been practicing, but I’ve hit a bottleneck."
"I can form it just fine, but I can’t get the accuracy down. I can hit a stationary target, but as soon as I increase the distance or the target moves, my aim goes wild."
Coleman grunted in acknowledgment.
"When it comes to throwing, you’ll only get so good practicing against a stationary target, even if you do it your whole life."
"At the military academy, whether we were practicing with throwing needles, blades, or explosive projectiles, they never let the new recruits train on wooden posts."
"No matter how accurately you can hit a wooden post, once you’re in the field, your opponent isn’t going to just stand there and wait for you to hit them."
"I’ve wanted to find a moving target, but I can’t," Richard said, a little frustrated.
"Now you have."
Richard stopped in his tracks.
Coleman stopped as well.
"You’ll be the target?"
"There’s an old saying at the academy: ’A statue can’t teach you how to fight, only a moving one can.’"

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