Three Major Directions

The fifth book was disguised even more cleverly:

<Flora Records of Medicinal Plants in the Temperate Regions of the Western Continent>

—With an Overview of Major Medicinal Material Processing Techniques.

The publication information was printed on the title page: a Royal Botanical Society serial, New Calendar 1819.

It was older than the previous books, nearly a hundred years old.

The main text was richly illustrated, with hand-drawn botanical line drawings. Beside each plant were its scientific name, place of origin, and medicinal properties.

Richard flipped through a few pages, and the scent of herbs wafted from the paper.

This book had genuinely been used as a flora record. The creases in its pages and the traces of fingerprints showed that it had been read far more often than the other candidate books.

He nearly thought he had made a mistake in his selection until he reached Chapter Seven.

The chapter title of Chapter Seven was: "On Morphological Identification and Safe Collection of Poisonous Ferns."

The initial letter of every paragraph in the main text had been deliberately enlarged by half a size.

Richard copied out the initials of the first twelve paragraphs: P-N-E-U-M-A-V-I-T-A-E-S.

Pneuma vitaes—Aether life, or the life of Spirit Breath.

Another acrostic. It was probably the most widely used encryption method since ancient times.

He copied out all the paragraph initials and rearranged them into complete sentences on a blank sheet of paper.

The workload was immense. Copying alone took him forty minutes.

Fortunately, acrostic encryption was not particularly sophisticated. The first layer could be solved with a reference chart, while the second required an etymological handbook to fill in the gaps.

By the time he stopped work at dusk, most of the contents had come to light.

This was the most information-dense book he had unearthed from the shelves so far.

The first decoded section concerned the branching paths of extraordinary professions.

It explained clearly that after Novices completed the foundational Aether Micro-circulation, they needed to choose a specific path to pursue in depth according to their natural gifts and the type of Breathing Technique they cultivated.

Three major directions were explicitly listed.

First, Occultus—the Occult.

Sealing, exorcism, Divination, spirit communication, curses, barriers... it possessed the most methods and the widest variety of classifications.

The text used "a hundred arts" to describe Practitioners of this direction. They could dabble in anything, but mastering any one art required lengthy specialized training.

The gap between the upper and lower limits of the Occult direction was enormous.

Top-tier Occultists could set up alchemical arrays that covered entire cities or even nations, and curse-kill someone from thousands of miles away.

The worst Occultists were no different from the fraudulent witches and shamans who cheated people out of money in ordinary marketplaces.

The text specifically mentioned that Occultists excelled at ambushes. Setting traps and predicting an enemy's movements were their strengths.

The price was extreme vulnerability in direct encounters.

Once forced into a head-on confrontation without preparation, an Occultist's survival rate plummeted off a cliff.

The medium hired by the Warren family probably belonged to this direction.

Second, Venator—the Hunter.

With direct confrontation against Evil Beings behind The Veil as their core duty, Practitioners of the Hunter path mostly cultivated the Blood-Burning Path.

The description closely matched what he had read in Appendix C: extreme training involving holding one's breath in ice water, explosive breathing, and forcing Aether into the blood.

Hunters valued immediate combat power and Aether Burst. In a face-to-face clash, a Hunter could crush Practitioners of the other two paths at the same rank.

The price was also stated bluntly:

"Those who cultivate the Blood-Burning Path often shine brilliantly in their prime, yet few enter old age in peace."

He had seen this exact sentence in Appendix C. The two books cited the same source.

Hunters were the most dangerous and the shortest-lived.

The Witcher tradition in the northern forests had endured to this day. What lay in its bones truly had never changed.

Third, Eruditus—the Scholar.

Richard lingered over this section the longest.

Practitioners of the Scholar path were generally not known for combat.

Their duties were interpretation, appraisal, translation, and even the creation of texts and artifacts.

The text used an exquisite analogy: Hunters were the blades before The Veil, Occultists were the nets between the Veil, and Scholars were the lamps behind the Veil.

Blades were responsible for killing, nets for capture and control, and lamps for illumination—letting people know what to cut down and what to catch.

Scholars possessed the largest body of knowledge among the three major directions.

Ancient philology, extraordinary archaeology, artifact appraisal, inscription grammar, sealing theory, Aether Field studies, Veil ecology... every one of them was a specialized discipline with formidable barriers to entry.

Precisely because those knowledge barriers were so high, Scholars held the highest status within the entire structure of the Occult Side.

The text mentioned that Scholars were also the most deeply integrated with the political and academic systems of the real world.

Some tenured professors in the universities of the Imperial Capital were esteemed academic authorities in the newspapers, while in the world behind The Veil, they were likewise respectfully called "sir."

Mr. Hutton was probably one of that kind.

An old gentleman who taught history at a local secondary school also maintained the seal beneath the school's foundations, prepared Initiate materials for promising newcomers on the bookshelves, and occasionally went to the Imperial Capital for gatherings in small circles.

Everything he taught in class brushed against the edge of The Veil.

He wrapped the core of Occultism in an academic shell and passed knowledge along through legal and proper means.

That was the Scholar's way of doing things.

Richard wrote the three major directions side by side on a blank sheet and drew a line from each one to his current position.

His cheat ability was tied to extraordinary ancient artifacts.

Artifact appraisal, seal structure analysis, inscription interpretation, coded-language deciphering... everything he had done over the past month fell within the Scholar's domain without exception.

Scholar—steady, profound, far-reaching. It perfectly matched the development path he had set for himself.

If he chose a direction to pursue in the future, Scholar was practically tailored for him.

The second section decoded afterward was more obscure and used a great number of analogies.

"Water extinguishes fire, fire tempers metal, metal cuts wood. This is an eternal principle of the world, and Practitioners follow the same rule."

Richard copied down the sentence and studied it several times.

Elemental counters? No, only three sets of relationships were mentioned here.

The text did not provide clear correspondences, but its implication was already strong enough: there were natural advantages and disadvantages between different Practitioners.

He was not certain, but the phrase "Practitioners follow the same rule" was enough to put him on guard.

The world behind The Veil did not contain only conflicts between humans and Evil Beings. There were also relationships of prey and hunter among Practitioners.

Only a short fragment remained in the third section:

"Above the Practitioner rank, every advancement requires the completion of its corresponding Ritual.

"The essence of a Ritual is to declare to The Veil that one is prepared to endure a deeper level of..."

It broke off again.

He tried extracting multiples of seven, shifting according to the golden ratio, and reading along diagonals. None of them worked.

The encryptor's rules did not belong to any pattern he currently understood.

Richard set down his pen and leaned back against the chair.

The last ray of daylight streamed through the third-floor window, while the fluorescent tube buzzed overhead.

He wrote a line on the blank paper: Ritual, advancement requirement, contents unknown.

He circled it and added a question mark.

Just like the missing content after "all require" in the fourth book, another wall stood here.

He already had many proper terms in hand:

Novice, Practitioner, Adeptus Minor, Adeptus Major, Virtuoso, Magister, Archon.

He had the three major professional directions: Occult, Hunter, Scholar.

He knew that advancement Rituals existed between ranks, and that different Practitioners possessed natural advantages and disadvantages against one another.

There were already quite a few fragments, enough to piece together a rough outline.

But an outline was still only an outline.

Detailed introductions to higher ranks, more specific Ritual contents, and the details of the countering relationships between different directions—the answers were not on this row of bookshelves.