From the week he met Lady Mary until today, one matter still weighed on Richard’s mind.
It had to do with Lillian Hayward.
Lillian had always been a quiet person. When they happened to cross paths in the hallways or on the second floor of the library, she would, at most, give a slight nod.
But for the past two weeks, she had been appearing in his line of sight with abnormal frequency.
He went to the third floor of the library; Lillian was on the third floor.
He left school through the side gate; Lillian just happened to be on the path by the side gate.
Twice, he had looked up and met the young woman’s gaze head-on.
It was the kind of gaze... that seemed to be searching for something, yet finding nothing.
This change had begun right after the black cat left its "kiss" upon the silver ring.
At first, Richard dismissed it as his imagination.
Until last week, when the young woman stopped him at the door of a private reading room on the third floor.
Lillian stood before him, her fingers twisting the corner of her clothes.
Her large, clear eyes scanned him, then scanned him again.
She finally spoke, her voice very soft.
"Has... has something happened to you recently?"
The way she was looking at him made Richard’s skin crawl.
"No."
"Oh."
She replied, her expression tinged with worry.
"...That’s good, then."
After saying this, the young woman realized she had asked too much.
She quickly sidestepped to let him pass, then practically fled in disarray around the corner to the stairwell.
Richard stood there, recalling Mr. Hutton’s words.
Lillian had potential, she possessed sufficient inspiration.
’Over the past six months, my Ether Micro-Cycle has been growing stronger by the day. To her Perception, it was probably never a secret.’
He had been constantly advancing.
And Lillian had been watching Richard advance from the sidelines.
Until he started wearing that silver ring.
’In her Perception, the light of the "kindred spirit" she had been silently observing for more than half a year had been extinguished overnight.’
Logically speaking, Richard didn’t owe anyone an explanation.
Especially since the origin of this ring was something he couldn’t breathe a word about.
But her question, "Has something happened to you?" made him feel that perhaps he really should offer some kind of explanation.
According to Grey’s intel, there were always two or three afternoons each week when Lillian couldn’t be found.
The attendance rosters for her elective classes had question marks next to her name;
She was nowhere to be found on the second or third floors of the library;
But she didn’t go home either; she wasn’t on the bus after school.
For a student who was consistently in the top five, teachers would mostly turn a blind eye if she skipped an elective class or two.
She skipped class, but she didn’t go anywhere.
Or rather, she went somewhere no one else knew about.
At first, Richard was unwilling to dwell on it.
But after that night at the Unyielding Pit, he had started to get paranoid about such things.
He went to a phone booth and called Mr. Hutton.
The phone on the other end rang seven or eight times before it was answered.
"It’s me, Richard."
"Mm," Mr. Hutton said, getting straight to the point. "What’s the matter?"
Richard briefly recounted Lillian’s recent abnormal behavior, the time she stopped him on the third floor to question him, and the afternoons she skipped class each week.
The other end of the line went quiet for a moment.
"Sir?"
A very soft chuckle came from the receiver.
"Richard, you’re not the same student from last year who needed his teacher to make decisions for him."
"...Yes."
"I’ll tell you this upfront." Mr. Hutton returned to the main topic.
"I mentioned Lillian to you once last year. Do you remember what I said at the time?"
"You said that friends can say more to each other than a teacher can."
Of course, Richard remembered.
"Mm, and I want to say it again now."
"A teacher can ask about her classroom performance, how things are at home, or what books she’s been reading recently.
A teacher can advise her to stay away from certain places, or outright prevent her from going to them."
"But whether or not a person has fallen into a pit they can’t climb out of... that’s something a teacher can neither ask about nor persuade them out of."
The old gentleman added a few more instructions:
"Lillian’s situation is indeed rather complex, but it hasn’t reached a truly dangerous stage. Otherwise, she wouldn’t still be diligently attending school at Greenwood."
"If you want to investigate, then investigate. Just be discreet and show the young lady some respect."
"...I understand," Richard replied.
"Hanging up."
With a CLICK, the line went dead.
.........
During art class the next day, a chipped model apple and half a loaf of bread sat on the still-life platter. Richard’s pencil had only made three strokes on his drawing paper.
Richard twirled his pencil, his knuckles resting against the paper.
Over the past few days, he had occasionally found himself thinking about that hollowed-out man.
’He wondered, when the man was still alive, at which blow did he start to think, *this is just how it has to be*?’
Beside him, Hugh was engrossed in drawing his imaginary "Charcoal-Roasted Brighton Winter Dove";
To his right and behind him, Warren was fiddling with his sketch, having drawn the apple to look like a gourd;
Grey was a desk away, diagonally behind him. She would occasionally glance up at him before burying her head in her work again.
The quiet, lazy, half-asleep afternoon atmosphere of the classroom slowly pulled him back from the image of the autopsy table.
Richard set down his pencil and summoned his panel.
His gaze lingered on the [Perception] entry.
Lv. 2, progress 38%.
On the morning he set out from the West Suburb Mine Area, he had glanced at his panel.
At that time, [Perception] Lv. 2 had been at around 27%.
Between his regular Divination and Spiritual Vision exercises, plus Mrs. MacNeil’s hands-on Divination lessons for the past two weeks, he couldn’t say he had been slacking on his training.
A 10% increase in one month was already quite good.
[Perception] was a Wisdom-type [Skill]. Unlike skills like [Eating] or [Sleep] that leveled up just by being alive, it had to be honed through active training.
He had gained 11% in a single night down in the Unyielding Pit.
The thing outside the well wall calling his name in other people’s voices;
The inverted Star Sea reflected above him after the world turned upside down;
The gaze from Major Aud when he channeled the power of an Expert;
And the "eyes" activated by Divination during the autopsy...
It was no surprise that his [Perception] had been stimulated to such a degree.
Speaking of which, throughout the entire battle at the bottom of the pit, the Answering Head’s gaze had never once lingered on him.
The next advancement condition for [Perception] read: "Actively observe a hostile target of a higher Tier from behind a curtain for fifteen minutes without being detected."
Originally, Richard hadn’t expected to meet this condition anytime soon.
A Newcomer "actively observing" a hostile target of a higher Tier.
Even if he did encounter such a target, expecting it not to notice him for fifteen minutes was asking a bit too much of himself.
But that day in the Unyielding Pit, the entire battle had lasted about twenty minutes.
Protected by the innermost Light Lock, he had used his Lv. 2 [Perception] and his "peeking-from-behind-a-wall" method from [Hidden Spiritual Vision] to watch the Answering Head from start to finish.
He watched its movements, the black medium in its hand, the rhythm of its chanting, and the preparatory motion for every Silencing Technique it cast.
He wasn’t given a second glance the entire time.
Twenty minutes—five minutes longer than the required fifteen.
Richard confirmed it on his panel.
Below the line describing the advancement condition, a new line of small text had appeared: "Condition met."
Thinking back now, the Answering Head hadn’t considered him a threat at all that day.
Aside from being ignored due to his Low Tier, the silver ring had also played a crucial role.
He had initially thought of it as just a basic shield.
It blocked scans from Middle Low Tier beings and the gaze of the distant "Mother Who Eats Shadows" that reached through Whitcomb’s passage.
But now, it seemed the ring was far more useful than he had originally imagined.
The evening before last, the Messenger deer had been waiting at the school gate.
It waited at the gate, not appearing in the third-floor storage room or on the bus.
The fact that the deer waited at the school gate instead of coming directly to his side or his front door meant the silver ring prevented even a Spirit Realm Messenger from pinpointing his location.
The deer could only stake out the general area of his activities and wait for him to appear.
Richard blinked, his gaze falling back to the drawing paper.
The increase in his [Perception] progress and the concealing effect of the silver ring would make his upcoming investigation much more convenient.
Before art class was even halfway over, Lillian, as expected, asked for leave and left early again.
She left the classroom building, but instead of heading for the main gate, she circled around behind the main building.
Behind the Greenwood Main Building was an old garden. Years ago, a school board member had used it to grow roses.
That board member had been dead for over a decade. The rose bushes were ruined, and after the gardener retired, the school never hired a replacement. The garden grew more desolate with each passing year.
Now, only a scraggly boxwood hedge and a few drooping Holly bushes remained. The gravel path was half-covered in fallen leaves.
At the back of the garden was a greenhouse. Attached to it was an even smaller shack, piled with broken tools and old lab equipment.
No one came to a place like this in the winter. Even the students on cleaning duty couldn’t be bothered to come this far.
Lillian’s figure appeared at the end of the gravel path, heading toward the small shack.
Richard stopped at the entrance to the garden.
The smell of coal smoke drifted over from the distant factories, mingling with the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves.
He retracted his Spiritual Line of Sight and slowly walked deeper along the gravel path.
He stopped when he reached the greenhouse.
Several panes of the greenhouse’s glass roof were broken and patched over with oiled paper. The plants inside were long gone.
But from under the wooden door of the adjacent shack, a very thin sliver of light was visible.
A metallic clink came from inside the shack.
It was the sound of tweezers tapping the rim of a glass bottle—light and brief—followed by the sound of a young woman’s breathing.

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