Rank

After the basement incident, the past few days of school life had been uneventful.

Classes, lunchtime tutoring, hours in the library, then going home at night to practice the Breathing Technique... His schedule was packed tight, leaving barely any time even to stare into space.

There was no extracurricular tutoring on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Holland had gone on a business trip to the Imperial Capital to attend the Classical Society's regular gathering.

He would also look into this year's Cicero Cup contestants and whether there had been any changes to the rules. Their private tutoring session was postponed until next week.

Richard used this opening on the bookshelves on the third floor.

He had marked the fourth candidate book last week.

Its cover bore a title so long it could put anyone to sleep:

<Comparative Research on the Administrative Systems of the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Black Soil River, Centered on the Priest Council System>.

It had been published in New Calendar 1843. The authors were listed under two initials, P.H.R. and J.E.W., so it was probably a coauthored work.

The main text really did discuss administrative systems.

Council composition, election procedures, fiscal authority, military chains of command... It reeked of academia, with footnotes numbered all the way from 1 to 112 and a bibliography that took up four full pages.

But starting from Chapter Three, there was something wrong with the footnote numbering.

The skipped numbers were unevenly distributed. There were none in the first two chapters, while Chapter Three had four, Chapter Four had three, and Chapter Five had six.

There were thirteen missing footnotes in total. He wrote down every skipped number on a sheet of white paper and arranged them by chapter.

Thirteen blank numbers corresponded to thirteen hidden passages.

The encryptor's method had been clean and efficient. They had uprooted the footnotes directly from the text, then filled the gaps left behind by renumbering the adjacent notes.

Without comparing the number sequences page by page, no one would have noticed.

But "removed" did not mean "destroyed."

Richard turned to the final page of the book. Beyond the page number was roughly three centimeters of blank binding margin.

He bent the spine as far open as it would go and leaned closer.

An extremely thin strip of paper had been tucked into the gap between the binding thread and the edge of the pages. It could not be seen without taking the binding apart.

Richard pulled a wire bookmark from his notebook and carefully teased the paper strip out of the gap.

The writing on the strip was tiny, packed even more densely than Appendix C.

All thirteen deleted footnotes were here.

He spread the strip flat on the table and deciphered it section by section through a magnifying glass.

A reference chart and an etymology handbook lay open beside him. His left hand held down the paper to keep it from curling, while his right hand restored each sentence onto a blank sheet.

The boost from Scholarship Lv.2 made breaking down word roots almost instantaneous. Once he grasped the pattern of the nested Replacements, the remaining sentences fell one after another like dominoes.

Within two days, he had restored all thirteen footnotes.

Naturally, they were not about administrative systems. Instead, they concerned the organizational structure of the Occult Side, precisely what interested Richard most.

The text first defined a term: Neophytus, literally translated as "Initiate."

Its definition was: "One who has preliminarily established a complete Aether Micro-circulation within the body."

Richard set down his pen and stared at that line for a long while.

A complete Aether Micro-circulation.

His current Breathing Technique practice had already formed the rudiment of Aether retention in his chest. A lingering warmth remained when he exhaled.

But the rudiment was still some distance from a complete Micro-circulation.

Mr. Hutton had also said in the basement that the Aether Micro-circulation within Richard was extremely weak.

In other words, he did not even qualify as an Initiate yet.

Initiate was the lowest threshold of entry, as well as the world beyond The Veil's basic dividing line between "ordinary people" and "non-ordinary people."

Only by crossing that line could one be considered to have officially stepped through the doorway into that world.

Those who could not cross it would remain onlookers outside forever, able to smell the food inside but never taste it.

He returned his attention to the paper strip.

The text then listed the sequence of ranks above Initiate.

Second rank: Practitioner.

"One who has established a stable and self-consistent Aether operating system within the body, capable of actively drawing upon Aether to perform Occult Side work."

Everything Mr. Hutton had done in the basement:

Snapping his fingers to open the iron door, activating the chisel with holy water, carrying out the entire process of reinforcing the seal—every step had required actively drawing upon Aether.

The old man was at least a Practitioner, and judging from his actions, he was far beyond the entry level.

Third rank: Adeptus Minor.

The text's description of Adeptus Minor suddenly became sparse, consisting of only one sentence:

"To advance from Practitioner to Minor Adept, one must choose a specific supernatural direction for deeper development before one may touch the Limen of this rank."

Fourth rank: Adeptus Major.

Fifth rank: Virtuoso.

Sixth rank: Magister.

And seventh rank—Archon.

Starting from Adeptus Major, the wording in the text visibly tightened.

Virtuoso received only a few words of description. Magister had only half a sentence left. Archon was not even defined, left hanging there as a solitary term.

The writer definitely knew more. He or she had simply chosen to reveal only this much.

Richard copied the seven ranks onto a sheet of white paper in order, drawing a vertical axis from Initiate to Archon.

His own position was at the very bottom of the axis. He had not even touched the line for Initiate.

Mr. Hutton stood somewhere above Practitioner, though Richard could not judge exactly how high.

Mrs. McNeil, the professional medium hired by the Warren family, was probably also a Practitioner or above.

And those truly influential supernatural figures in the Imperial Capital—the power behind the Ashford Family, the people whose conclusions had been blacked out in government reports—which level were they on?

In the final few lines of the paper strip, the nesting of the coded language suddenly became much deeper.

He barely managed to restore one word root—"Ordo," order.

As well as half a sentence: "From the third rank onward, every rank advancement requires..."

Requires what?

The characters after that had been locked behind a third layer of nested Replacement. The reference chart in his hands could only decipher the first two layers, while the rules for the third-layer Replacement were completely unfamiliar.

He tried several possible combinations, but every one led to a dead end.

The correspondence between roots and affixes had been completely scrambled in the third layer of encryption, using a restructuring method he had never seen before.

Richard set down his pen and rubbed his temples.

He had reached the ceiling. This was the first time he had clearly felt the limits of his ability among this row of bookshelves.

He had been able to grind through the previous coded texts with the reference chart and etymology handbook, but not this time.

The third layer of encryption required new tools, and those tools were not among these twenty-six books.

He tucked the paper strip back into the gap in the spine and returned the book to its place.

He did not begin on the fifth book until a day later.

During Thursday afternoon's self-study period, Richard informed his homeroom teacher in advance that he needed to go to the library to look up materials.

His homeroom teacher's attitude toward him was now completely different from what it had been a month ago.

A student whose grades had skyrocketed in every subject, and whom Holland had personally recommended for the Cicero Cup, wanted to look up some materials?

That was a good thing. Look up whatever he wanted. The library was wide open to him.

So this was the special treatment reserved for good students.

Thinking that, Richard had already arrived at his usual spot on the third floor.