Rank

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

Classes, afternoon tutoring, hanging out in the library, and practicing his Breathing Technique at home in the evening... his schedule was packed so tight there wasn't even a gap left to space out.

There was no tutoring on Tuesday afternoon because Mr. Holland had gone on a business trip to the Imperial Capital to attend a regular meeting of the Classical Society.

He was also going to scout out the current list of participants and any changes to the format for this year's Cicero Cup, so the private tutoring session was postponed until next week.

Richard used this free time to head to the third-floor bookshelves.

He had marked the fourth candidate book last week.

The cover was printed with a title so long and sleep-inducing it was practically a sedative:

<A Comparative Study of the Administrative Systems of the City-States in the Lower Black Soil River Basin, with a Focus on the Priest Council System>.

It was published in the New Calendar year 1843, and the author was listed as two sets of initials, P.H.R. and J.E.W., likely a co-authored work.

The main text was indeed about administrative systems.

Council composition, election procedures, fiscal authority, military chains of command... the academic flavor was so thick it was suffocating, with footnotes numbered from 1 to 112, and the bibliography alone taking up four full pages.

But starting from the third chapter, the footnote numbering ran into issues.

The skipped numbers were distributed unevenly; there were none in the first two chapters, four concentrated in the third, three in the fourth, and six in the fifth.

There were thirteen missing footnotes in total, and he recorded all the locations of the skipped numbers on a blank sheet of paper, organized by chapter.

Thirteen empty numbers corresponded to thirteen segments of hidden content.

The person who encrypted this had a clean technique, rooting the footnotes out of the main text entirely and filling the gaps by reordering the adjacent numbers.

If one hadn't compared the sequence of numbers page by page, it would have been impossible to notice.

But "removed" did not mean "destroyed."

Richard flipped to the very last page of the book, where there was about three centimeters of blank binding margin after the page number.

He pried the spine open to its maximum angle and leaned in close to look.

Tucked into the gap between the binding thread and the edge of the paper was an extremely thin strip of paper, invisible unless the binding was dismantled.

Richard pulled a wire bookmark from his notebook and carefully fished the strip out from the gap.

The writing on the strip was minuscule, with a density even higher than that of Appendix C.

All thirteen deleted footnotes were right here.

He laid the strip flat on the desk and used a magnifying glass to decipher it section by section.

With the reference table and etymology manual spread out beside him, he pressed the strip down with his left hand to keep it from curling, while his right hand held a pen to reconstruct the text sentence by sentence on a blank sheet.

The boost from Scholarship Lv.2 made the decomposition of word roots almost instantaneous; once he grasped the pattern of the nested substitutions, the subsequent sentences fell into place like a row of dominoes.

Within two days, all thirteen footnotes had been fully restored.

The content, of course, was not about administrative systems, but rather the structure of the occult organizations that Richard was most interested in.

The text began by defining a term: Neophytus, translated literally as "Novice."

The definition was: "One who has initially established a complete micro-circulation of Aether within the body."

Richard set his pen down and stared at this line for a long time.

A complete micro-circulation of Aether.

His current Breathing Technique practice had already established the prototype of Aether retention in his chest, and a warmth remained when he exhaled.

But this prototype was still a short distance away from a complete micro-circulation.

Mr. Hutton had also said in the basement that the Aether micro-circulation in his body was extremely weak.

In other words, he didn't even count as a Novice yet.

The Novice stage was the lowest threshold for entry, and also the fundamental dividing line between "non-ordinary people" and "ordinary people" in the world behind The Veil.

Only by crossing this line could one officially step over the threshold into that world.

If one couldn't cross it, they would forever remain a bystander outside the door, able to smell the food inside but never able to taste it.

He pulled his attention back to the strip of paper.

The text went on to list the hierarchy of ranks above the Novice.

The second rank, Practitioner.

"One who has established a stable and self-consistent system of Aether circulation within the body, capable of actively invoking Aether to complete occult tasks."

The things Mr. Hutton did in the basement:

Snapping his fingers to open the iron door, using holy water to activate the engraving knife, and completing the entire process of reinforcing the seal—every step required the active invocation of Aether.

The old gentleman was at least a Practitioner, and judging by his operations, he was far beyond the level of a mere beginner.

The third rank, Adeptus Minor.

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

"From Practitioner up to Minor Adept, one must select a specific supernatural path for in-depth development to touch the threshold of this rank."

Fourth rank, Adeptus Major.

Fifth rank, Virtuoso.

Sixth rank, Magister.

And the seventh rank—Archon.

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

Virtuoso was described in only a few words, Magister was left with half a sentence, and Archon didn't even have a definition, leaving the term hanging there all alone.

The author certainly wasn't ignorant; he/she chose to reveal only this much.

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

He was currently at the very bottom of that axis, not even touching the line for Novice.

Mr. Hutton was somewhere above Practitioner, though it was impossible to judge exactly how high.

Mrs. McNeil, hired by the Warren family as a professional medium, was likely also at the Practitioner level or above.

And those truly prominent supernatural figures in the Imperial Capital: the power behind the Ashford family, the people who redacted the conclusions in government reports—at which level were they?

The nested layers of the cipher in the final lines of the note suddenly deepened.

He managed to reconstruct one root—"Ordo", order.

And half a sentence: "From the third rank upward, every advancement in rank requires..."

Requires what?

The characters that followed were locked by a third layer of substitution. His reference table could only decode the first two layers; the substitution rules for the third were completely foreign.

He tried several possible combinations, but hit a wall every time.

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

Richard put down his pen and rubbed his temples.

He had hit the ceiling; this was the first time he had clearly felt the boundaries of his abilities on this row of bookshelves.

He had been able to brute-force the previous ciphers using his reference table and etymological manuals, but this time, he couldn't.

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

He tucked the note back into the gap in the book spine and returned the book to its original place.

He waited a full day before starting on the fifth book.

During Thursday afternoon study hall, Richard asked his homeroom teacher for leave in advance, claiming he needed to go to the library to look up research materials.

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

A student whose grades in every subject were skyrocketing, and who had been personally recommended by Holland to participate in the Cicero Cup, wanted to look up research materials?

That was a good thing; look all he wanted, look to his heart's content.

He was finally enjoying the exclusive privileges of a model student.

Thinking this to himself, Richard arrived at his usual spot on the third floor.