Occult Studies

Richard opened to the first page.

The preface was impeccably standard, its academic tone steady and restrained, with footnotes numbered from 1 to 47 and citations formatted with meticulous correctness.

It discussed how agricultural communities in remote regions of the Western Continent organized labor and ritual activities according to the weather.

A perfectly ordinary ethnographic study, so steeped in academia it was enough to make anyone sleepy.

If this had been his previous life, he would probably have classified the book on a forum as:

"Serious academic literature. Nothing juicy. Safe to skip."

But when he reached the third page, a line of small print caught his eye.

There was a quotation in the text, with its source noted in parentheses:

"See Appendix C. Presented in the original text, untranslated."

Every other quotation in the main text came with a translation, or at least a summary.

Only this one offered nothing but a page number, without any explanation.

He turned to Appendix C. Three full pages were written entirely in Latin.

The densely packed letterpress type was a size smaller than that of the main text.

The line spacing had been compressed tightly, cramming quite a lot of content onto those three pages.

His mind began working at high speed:

The accelerated learning provided by Scholarship Lv.1 meant that whenever he encountered an obscure word, its related roots, etymology, and derivatives would be pulled from his memory and neatly arranged.

And then there was the intuition he had accumulated from spending years on folklore forums in his previous life.

There had been a classic post on one such forum:

<You think you can't understand it because your skills are lacking? No. It's because those words were never meant for you to read.>

It explained how religions and secret societies across the world used language itself as an encryption tool.

There was coded language in this book. Appendix C had been encrypted.

Richard closed the book, took out the note Mr. Hutton had given him from his notebook, and unfolded it.

Once unfolded, the thin sheet was about the size of his palm.

It was densely covered in writing made with an extremely fine steel pen. The handwriting was neat, the pressure light; unless one looked closely, it was almost impossible to tell that it was writing.

At the top was a tiny line in Albion Language:

"Only one copy exists. Keep it safe after reading. Show no one. Do not lose it."

Below it was a reference table.

The left column contained ordinary Latin words, while the right column contained another set of corresponding terms.

Some were obscure archaic Latin words, while others were specialized terms found only in religious texts.

There were also several he had never seen before, whose meanings he could only roughly guess from their roots.

Beside each pairing were tiny handwritten annotations explaining the substitution contexts and applicable rules.

It covered only part of the core vocabulary substitution patterns. He would have to work out the rest himself.

Richard closed the book and looked around.

The third floor remained empty. The fluorescent lights hummed, and the broken one flickered now and then.

The nearest voices came from the second floor below, along with the sound of pages turning and chair legs scraping through the floorboards.

He stuffed the book into his backpack, zipped it up, and stood to head downstairs.

As he passed the second floor, he slowed down deliberately, circling past the bookshelves and brushing shoulders with several students checking out books.

With his backpack slung halfway over one shoulder, he looked no different from any other student who had come to borrow books during lunch break.

After dinner, Richard helped his mother clear the dishes.

His father read the newspaper in the living room while Evelyn lay sprawled over the dining table doing her homework, her pen scratching softly over the paper.

"I'm heading up."

"Have you finished your homework?" his mother asked, poking her head out from the kitchen.

"More or less. There's still a little left, so I'll finish it upstairs."

His mother hummed but said nothing else.

Halfway up the stairs, Evelyn called after him from below:

"Bro, you've been hiding in your room every day lately. You don't even go out on weekends. What are you doing?"

"Homework."

"...Liar."

"A lot of homework."

Evelyn muttered something he did not catch, probably something along the lines of, "You've been acting weird lately."

He closed the door and drew the curtains.

He switched on the desk lamp, and orange light spread in a circle across the desk.

Richard took the book from his backpack, laid it on the desk, and opened it to Appendix C.

He unfolded the reference table beside the book, holding down its corners with copper clasps to keep it from shifting.

He tore several blank sheets from his notebook. On the left side of the top sheet, he wrote "Original," and on the right, "Correspondence," then began analyzing it word by word.

Before long, the sky outside had gone completely dark. Downstairs, the sound of his father turning newspaper pages stopped, and the lights went out.

Richard rubbed his eyes and lowered his gaze to his notes.

The white paper was densely filled with matching word groups, with several spots of ink smudged by his hand.

The first page of coded language had been roughly restored.

He took out a clean sheet of paper and copied out the restored Latin, translating it sentence by sentence into Albion Language beside it.

The first translated passage read:

"You who have read this far possess, at the very least, sufficient grounding in classical languages and the intuition to recognize concealed texts."

Richard's pen paused.

"The overlap between these two abilities is exceedingly rare among ordinary people."

"The following content concerns 'Occult Studies.'"

"If you do not know the meaning of this term, it is recommended that you close this book, return it to its original place, and forget that you ever read these words."

"If you do know, or if you still choose to continue..."

"Then welcome."

He set down his pen and immersed himself completely:

"Here is the first fact that beginners must understand: the world does not operate as you were taught in class."

"Or rather, what you were taught in class was merely the surface of the truth."

Richard stared at the final line he had copied onto the paper.

His fingers were terribly cold. He did not know whether the night air had grown colder or whether it was something else.

The desk lamp cast its light across the pages before him. The pencil marks were fresh, their dark strokes gleaming.

Occult Studies.

The things Mr. Hutton had mentioned in class—the priests of the Black Soil River Basin, the temple information networks of the Aegeus Sea, the redacted conclusions in colonial archives from the New Continent...

They had all been circling around a central core without ever stating what that core was.

Now someone had said it outright, in Latin code, hidden in the appendix of an obscure academic monograph published decades ago.

Richard folded the translated pages twice, tucked them into his notebook, and locked them in the drawer.

He put the book in as well and locked it away with them.

There were still two pages of Appendix C left undeciphered, but his mind was already exhausted today. Forcing himself to continue would make him inefficient and increase the chance of errors.

Tomorrow, then.

He turned off the desk lamp and sat in the darkness for a while.

His breathing was steady. In and out, in and out. The numbers at the edge of the panel quietly ticked upward.

[Breathing] Lv.1 Experience: 159/200

[Scholarship] Lv.1 Experience: 77/200

Almost there. He was looking forward to seeing what changes Breathing would bring when it reached Lv.2.

Richard lay down on the bed, the coded phrases he had translated still replaying endlessly in his mind.