The basic Scholarship course was a general one. Both classes attended together, and the content was mostly the same.
What truly separated the students were the sessions outside of the basic courses, offered only to the special class:
small-group classes with a Mentor, Q&A sessions, and a "special supplementary topic" whose full name was a mystery to outsiders.
The first class was taught by an associate professor named Croft. Richard arrived in the classroom early.
Croft arrived right on time.
He was a skeletally thin middle-aged man with high, jutting cheekbones and eyes sunk deep in their sockets.
His thinness was reminiscent of a Hunter, but a Hunter’s leanness was like cured ham—wiry and muscular. The moment they activated Burning Blood, their entire frame would bulk up.
This man, however, looked like he was nothing but a skeleton.
As the man entered, his gaze swept across the classroom.
When his gaze fell upon Richard, it stopped.
"Williams." He called out his name. "I heard you were ’carried’ in."
The classroom fell silent for a moment. The gazes of several nearby students all turned to Richard.
"Today, I’ll see for myself."
The corners of Croft’s mouth turned down.
"Just what kind of person is standing under Professor Mortimer’s banner."
Richard remained seated and said nothing.
Croft turned, picked up a book from the lectern, and slapped it open on the desk.
"Thucydides." He announced the title. "History of the Peloponnesian War."
He tapped the page with his fingertip.
"This passage is Kleion’s speech from the Mitilini Debate. It’s full of nested clauses; a single sentence drags on for over half a page."
Richard recognized the passage.
It was the most syntactically convoluted part of the entire book, designed specifically to torture students.
"Translate it into the Albion Language. On the spot."
Croft began to call on students.
"And after that, translate it back into Ancient Greek."
The first student he called on was a well-dressed scion of a noble house.
He stood up and made a start, but got stuck by the third clause.
He just couldn’t recall the conjugation of an irregular verb.
His face flushed crimson, utterly embarrassed before the entire class.
The second student called upon also got stuck on a conjugation.
Croft said nothing, turning his gaze to Richard.
"Williams, your turn."
Richard stood up.
[Erudite] imprinted the entire original text in his mind, right down to the flaws in the print.
He looked at the page, and an image of the text appeared in his mind’s eye, its structure already deconstructed.
[Rationality] stripped it down to its load-bearing main clause.
Kleion’s speech was convoluted because of its layers of concessive and conditional clauses.
But the core message was simple: The Athenians could not show mercy to the rebellious allied states.
Once he grasped that core, the tangled clauses surrounding it naturally fell into place.
Richard began to speak.
The Albion Language translation flowed from his lips, steady and precise.
He restructured the syntactically convoluted parts using the logic of the Albion Language, losing none of the original meaning.
He didn’t stumble in the slightest when he reached the most treacherous irregular verbs.
After finishing the Albion Language translation, he began to translate it back into Ancient Greek.
His [Breathing] Skill gave him a vocal instrument of perfect precision, allowing him to enunciate every syllable clearly.
His [Scholarship] Skill gave him an understanding of each Greek word that went far beyond rote memorization.
The retranslated sentences even captured Kleion’s uniquely aggressive tone.
The room was silent.
The two scions who had stumbled looked particularly displeased.
Croft stood behind the lectern, staring at Richard for a moment before snorting.
"Not bad."
The oral translation in that first large lecture was only the beginning.
The basic Scholarship course was a large lecture, with over a hundred people in a tiered classroom.
But aside from the large lectures, there were also small-group classes.
A Mentor would lead fewer than ten students, gathered around a single table for direct questions and tests. It was the perfect way to expose anyone with a weak foundation.
Over the next two days of small-group classes, Croft grilled all thirty-odd students of the special class one by one.
He wouldn’t have had time for that in a lecture with over a hundred students, but the small-group classes had only seven or eight people per session.
He had all the time in the world to find each student’s weaknesses, especially Richard’s.
In history, he threw the most obscure passage from Tacitus at him, demanding Richard analyze the author’s political leanings hidden beneath the narrative.
Richard’s answer was methodical, perfectly dissecting Tacitus’s style of "seeming neutrality that was, in fact, relentlessly scathing."
For the fundamentals of Epigraphy, he produced a Rubbing Copy that mixed the writing systems of three different eras and told Richard to date it.
Richard drew upon the foundation he’d built during the Whitcomb Boundary Stone incident, along with the specialized training from his aunt, and managed to peel back the three overlapping Inscriptions layer by layer.
Rhetoric, textual criticism... He pressed Richard with one subject after another.
The other top students each had their own strengths, but they also each had an Achilles’ heel.
One student’s rhetoric was brilliant, but his grasp of grammar was shaky.
Another had solid textual criticism skills and could determine the precedence of two manuscripts from the slightest discrepancies, yet he couldn’t stomach lengthy historical works; long narratives gave him a headache.
Richard was different.
Croft tested him in subject after subject, only to find that this student was a seamless wall.
His Latin was in a league of its own; no one else in the class could touch him.
And while he wasn’t top-tier in every other subject, he wasn’t weak in any of them either.
He could field any question, and it was impossible to find any major flaws.
This "well-roundedness" astonished Croft more than excellence in any single subject would have.
A person’s energy is finite.
To become the best in the class at Latin would have required investing countless days and nights.
Yet this student, on top of his mastery of Latin, was also proficient in history, Epigraphy, rhetoric, and textual criticism.
Such flawless balance could only come from one of two things.
Either it was a Child’s Skill, practiced nonstop for over a decade since the age of five or six.
Montague was that kind of person.
Or, it was some kind of "talent" that Croft couldn’t comprehend.
According to the student file, Richard was the son of an engineer from Brighton.
A year ago, he was still frail and sickly, with grades at the bottom of his class.
The Child’s Skill explanation clearly didn’t add up.
That left only the other explanation.
Croft couldn’t figure it out, so his expression grew even more severe, and his challenges became even more relentless.
His classmates all saw this, and each had their own thoughts on the matter.
Some sympathized with Richard for being targeted by such a harsh Mentor, singled out as a target day after day.
But beneath their sympathy, they all understood one thing.
For an associate professor to go out of his way to challenge you was, in itself, a form of recognition.
He couldn’t even be bothered to give a second glance to the noble scions he’d indifferently cast aside.
Philips took the opportunity during a break to sidle up to Richard.
"Old Ke has taken a liking to you."
He handed over half a pastry he’d swiped from somewhere.
"Taken a liking to me?" Richard accepted the pastry. "He’s trying to trip me up every single day."
"The fact that he’s trying to trip you up *is* how you know he’s taken a liking to you."
Philips lowered his voice.
"You see him paying any attention to me? He just glances at the textual criticism homework I submit and tosses it aside. Doesn’t even bother to mark it up."
"That homework of yours..." Richard was rendered a little speechless.
"What’s wrong with my homework?"
"Half of it was copied from last year’s model answers, wasn’t it?"
Philips stuffed the other half of the pastry into his mouth and mumbled indistinctly.
"...At least I copied it very carefully."
On Thursday, the schedule listed an "Advanced Seminar on Classical Languages."
The "Advanced Seminar on Classical Languages" was open to all students, and a few motivated members of the regular class came to audit it.
Croft finished lecturing the part of the class that was open to all and put down his chalk.
"Students from the regular class." He glanced at the heads of the few auditors in the back row.
"That concludes today’s advanced seminar. You may leave now."
The students from the regular class looked confused.
But they were only auditing, so when told to leave, they didn’t dare ask questions. They just packed their things and left.
The door closed.
Everyone left in the classroom was someone with an Ether Loop.
Richard sat up straighter.
’So this is how they teach the "special supplementary topic" Pendleton mentioned.’
Croft waited until the door was shut tight, then activated a Sound Insulation Technique.
He wrote a term on the blackboard: Life-Swapping Spirit.
"This is our topic for today."
Richard’s interest was piqued.
"When you were children, most of you probably heard this type of story."
Croft began.
"A perfectly normal child takes a walk near the edge of a forest and comes back... changed."
"They have the same face, they’re about the same height, but the parents always feel that something is wrong with their child."
"The Immortal Spirit, or you can call it an Elf, if you prefer."
He continued his explanation.
"They snatch human children and hide them deep in the forest."
"Then they take on the child’s appearance, return to the human world, and live with the child’s parents."
"What about the real child who was taken?" someone asked.
Croft let out a sinister laugh.
"The child taken into the forest becomes one of the Immortal Spirits."
"Forever wandering the forest in the guise of a seven-year-old child."
"They are Elves, and they are children who never grow up."
A chill went through Richard as he listened.
"The replaced child will be frozen at the age they were when taken."
Croft’s voice was dry and cold.
"Their bodies stop aging, and bit by bit, they forget their original language, their name, their past."
"Once they have forgotten everything, they become one of the Immortal Spirits."
"They learn all the abilities of a Life-Swapping Spirit and become one themselves."
The classroom was unnervingly quiet.
"As for the Life-Swapping Spirit that replaces the child and infiltrates a human family..."
Croft paced a few steps.
"It must perfectly imitate the life of the one it replaced, keeping its true identity carefully hidden."
"The pressure of this task is immense."
"The impostor lives in constant fear of being exposed."
"Some impersonate for so long that they break down under the weight of their own guilt."
"Their powers are very weak," Croft said, putting the chalk down.
"They can barely manage to change their shape and perform a few minor tricks."
"Once they fully become ’human,’ all their other spells besides shapeshifting will slowly fade away."
"So if their identity is ever exposed, their fate is a grim one."
Croft paused.
"Old wives have been telling these tales for centuries."
"When you were children, you dismissed them as scary stories."
"But now, you have entered this circle."
He tapped the term on the blackboard. "It’s time you looked deeper."
"A creature like the Life-Swapping Spirit succeeds by making you ’believe’ it is your child."
Croft’s expression grew serious.
"As long as you call the Life-Swapping Spirit ’my child,’ it has every right to occupy that child’s place, to eat your food and drink your drink, and to slowly hollow out the family from within."
"But the day you see through its deception, the day you redefine it and call it a ’filthy impostor’..."
Croft tossed the chalk nub into the wastebasket beside the lectern.
"Its petty little shapeshifting trick will no longer be enough to protect it, and its end will be miserable indeed."
Richard sat in his seat, his mind reeling.
The bell rang, signaling the end of class, and Croft deactivated the Sound Insulation Technique.
"That is all for today."

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