I loaded the Mysticism panel.

That day, after dinner, the Williams family had finished eating, but the father was still working overtime and hadn't returned home yet.

After Evelyn finished her homework, she lay down on the dining table for a while before her mother sent her back to her room to sleep.

He was still muttering "I'm not sleepy," but his steps had already started to drag.

After washing the dishes in the kitchen, Margaret dried her hands on her apron.

Richard has recently been practicing the cover-up technique of the Stone Armor.

He was standing at the top of the stairs, ready to go up, when his mother called him back.

"Richard, come and sit down for a while."

Her tone was very casual, almost as if she were just asking her son to take out the trash.

But Richard noticed that his mother had closed the door from the living room to the hallway, and also closed the door to the kitchen.

The two sat on the living room sofa, with only a floor lamp lit next to the fireplace.

There was no fire in the fireplace.

Several unburnt charcoal embers sat on the grate, looking like a group of small gargoyles squatting there.

The mother did not provide any prior warning.

She extended her right hand, palm facing up.

"Put your hands up here."

Richard hesitated for a moment, but still placed his hand on it.

My mother's fingertips were still icy cold; they hadn't warmed up in over a decade.

When Evelyn was little, there was a time when she was particularly afraid of her mother touching her forehead, afraid of those popsicle-like hands touching her.

But the moment their skin touched, Richard sensed something else.

A very faint etheric pulse emanated from my mother's palm.

It's intermittent and the frequency is erratic; sometimes it jumps twice in a row, and sometimes it pauses for a long time before it comes once.

Compared to the steady, warm pulse in his chest, that thing was like a bellows that had been broken for a long time.

But it was indeed moving, and... more powerfully than he had anticipated.

Margaret was using the residual loop to sense the etheric state within her son's body.

She could never have done this before her trip to the capital.

The remaining circuits are already doing their best to maintain normal operation, and there is simply no extra ether available to probe the condition of others.

Things have been quietly changing over the past month.

The tin bottle Richard handed her the night he returned from the capital; she recognized the daisies on it at a glance.

Isabella loved daisies since she was a child.

As a child, in the back garden of Ashford Manor, she would braid daisies into wreaths, wear them on her head, and then run into the living room to announce to everyone, "I am the Daisy Queen."

As Isabella grew up and became more modest, she stopped making flower wreaths, and daisies became her personal symbol.

This habit hasn't changed in twenty years.

Margaret had no idea how much Isabella had told Richard.

But she knew that the fact that her sister was willing to take the initiative to contact Richard said a lot.

About half a minute later, Margaret withdrew her hand:

"The loops within you... are more complete than I thought."

She put her hands back on her knees, her fingers interlaced.

Richard's internal pathways showed none of the broken and blocked marks found in his own body.

Actually, it was the panel skills that were at work.

But Margaret was unaware of this and could only attribute the outcome to her exceptional talent or good luck.

Although she had anticipated this based on her son's various behaviors, she still breathed a sigh of relief:

"If you had even the slightest sign of a broken cycle, I wouldn't be saying these things today."

Her gaze fell on the pile of cold coals in the fireplace:

"I will do everything in my power to stop you from going any further, even if it means tying you up in Briston."

But you are whole.

Richard tentatively asked, "So, Mom, about your health...?"

"You should already know what the Ashford family is doing in the capital."

Margaret interrupted him.

"Um."

"So, you probably have a good idea of ​​how many resources it takes to train a mystic."

Without waiting for Richard's reply, she continued:

"The costs of rare artifacts, alchemy materials, the time of high-level guides, the right to use the ritual site, and the cleanup costs after failure... For practitioners trying to reach a minor level of expertise, the costs increase several times over."

"Because the ritual might fail. If it fails, people might not necessarily die, but the loop will most likely be ruined, and if it is ruined, it will require extremely expensive cleanup."

"Back then, my whole family had high hopes for me, and I found the 'path' when I was 26."

So I rushed into breaking through to minor proficiency, and the ritual failed. The Ashford family had invested ten years' worth of resources in me, and it all went to nothing.

She said this casually, as if she wasn't the one who had failed at all.

"Your maternal grandfather didn't get angry at the time."

Mother smiled:

"You've met him yourself; he never gets angry. Getting angry is the most inefficient emotion."

He simply sat in the study and calmly asked me, "Are you still planning to continue?"

"I said no, I'll definitely die if I try again."

Hearing this, Richard finally couldn't help but ask:

"Then why were you in such a rush to break through to minor proficiency, Mom? Couldn't you have prepared for a little longer?"

"The Ashford family is not as respectable as you see them in the capital, especially in their urgent need for the next generation of talent."

Margaret explained.

Richard recalled what his grandfather had told him on the phone last time.

The mother slowed down her speech:

"What you learned from the books... hunter, secretive, scholar, three paths, right?"

"right."

"These three paths seem to be completely equal options, and you can choose any one of them, but in reality, they support completely different things."

Have you ever met any families of scholars?

This question surprised Richard.

He went through it in his mind.

The traditions and hierarchical systems listed in that book, "On Ascending Behind a Curtain," did not mention any family that had passed down the status of scholars through generations.

Isabella pursued an academic career; she was an associate professor at Imperial University and held a formal academic position in the Department of Classics.

But she was from the Ashford family, the daughter of a family of hunters.

"You can't figure it out, can you?" the mother said.

"Because the path of a scholar is inherently unsuitable for family succession."

She seemed to be searching for the right words in her mind.

"You know... the reason why scholars are called scholars is because the core of this path relies on their brains."

Deciphering codes, identifying rare artifacts, interpreting inscriptions, and constructing theoretical models—each ability is built upon intelligence.

"Intelligence is not something that can be stably inherited."

"A brilliant scholar may have a son who is mediocre."

The daughter of a genius of her time might not even be able to memorize a basic conjugation table properly.

This isn't anyone's fault; that's just how the human brain is structured—the distribution of intelligence and comprehension is almost random.

"You can't pass on 'intelligence' as an inheritance to the next generation in your will."

"The same principle applies to the hidden direction."

Sealing, divination, spiritual communication... these skills require even more talent than academic expertise.

Some hermits possess skills that are unbelievably exquisite, but their apprentices come from all corners of the world, with only a small fraction being their own children.

"The way the secret path is passed down is always through the master finding the disciple, one by one."

Richard mentally cross-checked this information with what he had read before.

This is true.

In those steganographic texts, the author's name is always abbreviated or anonymous.

The phrases "son of so-and-so" or "the nth generation of so-and-so's family" have never appeared.

Each document was left by an independent individual, and there is no trace of a family relay.

"But hunters are different."

"The foundation of a hunter's path lies in the body: bone density, muscle fiber composition, nerve reflex speed, and ether tolerance threshold."

"These things are all written in our genes."

"A hunter with an extremely high ether tolerance threshold will likely have offspring who inherit a high threshold."

A mother whose nerve conduction speed is abnormal has a high probability that her child will inherit a similar physical condition.

"While we can't guarantee that every generation will produce a genius, we can at least ensure that each generation is 'not too bad'."

"The Hunter family's succession logic is built on this 'not too bad' principle."

The mother placed her hands on either side of her knees.

"The training of hunters can be scaled up."

They start ice water breath-holding, weighted running, and pain tolerance training at the age of twelve or thirteen, each with a standardized procedure.

"If ten children are sent to the training camp, one or two will die, three or four will be eliminated, and the rest will all become qualified practitioners."

"This is the logic of the Hunter family: use bloodlines as a safety net, use training for mass production, and use scale to hedge against risks."

Her gaze shifted a few inches downwards, looking at the back of her hand.

"The prominent surnames that appear in the newspapers in the capital—Montagu, Adams, Graham—are all families of hunters."

"That's the reason."

"Only a hunter system can produce a sufficient number of practitioners who can be incorporated into the organizational structure."