I loaded the Mysticism panel.

Chapter 185 "Coriolanus?"

Over the next two days, Richard first arranged the entire stack of documents according to their thickness.

I opened the top duplicate text, read two pages, and then closed it again.

Directly attempting to decipher something beyond one's current level of knowledge will be extremely inefficient.

To break an encryption, you must first find out who wrote it, who they learned it from, and which school of thought it belongs to.

Encryption systems, like handwriting and composer styles, have their own "schools".

The Alexandrian school was just one of them.

It originated from alchemical texts of the Ptolemaic era, emphasizing layers of wrapping and annotations within annotations. The two comparison tables Mr. Hutton gave him followed this approach.

But Imperial University has more than just the Alexander School.

Every institution of higher learning with a classical studies department maintains its own set of "faculties".

Richard flipped through the "Comparative Table of Later Variations and Extensions of the Alexandrian School" sent by his aunt, and the more he looked at it, the more he felt that it resembled a dialect.

The Department of Classics at Teito University prefers to break down keywords into Latin subjunctive mood, using changes in tone to conceal information.

A certain college in the north, which originated from theology, has a habit of sewing codes into the chapter numbers of the Bible.

Some even more obscure ones simply use alchemical symbols as a substitution table. To the untrained eye, it looks like a recipe, but those in the know can read the entire structure of a spell from the mercuric sulfate.

My aunt included a handwritten note with the package, placing it on top of the extended comparison table.

The note contained only three lines of text:

"First recognize the academic style, then decipher the text."

"The trick to recognizing the style of a literary work: see which word it is most reluctant to break up."

"The more convoluted the demolition, the more important the hidden items are."

Richard slipped the note into his notebook.

He spent an entire night comparing several Latin commentaries and Gaelic rubbings of church rites that his aunt had sent him.

I specifically look at those parts where the encrypted user goes around in circles, or where they could write a single word but insist on splitting it into three parts.

The most difficult part to navigate is often the "birthmark" of a sect.

By the evening of the following day, he had roughly figured out the trick.

The Imperial University system dictates that whenever the word "curtain" is encountered, it is never written directly; it is always broken down into "thin section" and a subjunctive verb.

The medieval monks' annotations on the Whitcomb Boundary Stones changed "Seal" to "Saint's Protection" and "Spell" to "Sacrament".

This is something Edmund said at Whitcomb, which Richard took notes of and is now putting to good use.

After figuring out the sect, looking back at that beginner's exercise, the symbols that were originally a mess can at least be seen as the "skin" and the "core".

Richard leaned against his desk and glanced at the control panel.

[Knowledge] Lv.2, progress 95%.

I haven't deciphered any text in the past two days, I've just been figuring out the encryption methods, and the progress bar has already climbed several notches.

He put the panel away and stretched.

Evelyn's voice came from downstairs.

"Brother! I made crème brûlée!"

"several?"

Six.

"Only six in one afternoon?"

"Are you coming down or not?"

Richard smiled, got up, and went downstairs.

When the pudding was served, Evelyn deliberately poured an extra spoonful of caramel on the one in the very center.

"This one is yours."

"Why should I get an extra spoonful?"

"Because these past two days, you've been locking yourself in your room as soon as you get home, like an old scholar, your eyebrows are practically all furrowed together."

The little girl shoved a spoon into his hand: "Eat something sweet to relax your eyebrows."

Richard scooped up a spoonful.

The pudding melts on the tongue, the bitterness of caramel hits first, followed by the sweetness of milk.

"tasty."

"Of course," Evelyn said, hands on her hips.

His mother was cutting bread nearby, and without saying a word, she added half a pudding to Richard's bowl.

………………

On Saturday morning, Richard went to 24 Highfield Road as usual.

The lessons at Dawn's house are completely different from what they were last year.

Tom sat at his desk with a Latin verb conjugation table spread out in front of him.

There was no slingshot on the table, nor was the pirate map with eight islands on the wall.

"Amo, amas, amat," Tom mumbled, but didn't completely stop: "Amamus, amatis, amant."

"Present conjugate to past tense".

"amabam...amabas...amabat."

Richard didn't interrupt him. He waited until Richard finished reciting the six pronouns of the first conjugation before putting a checkmark on the spot where Richard had finished.

"Where's the slingshot?"

"It's hidden away." Tom glanced at the drawer.

"Where's the map?"

"I've already received it." Tom scratched his head. "I can remember the variadic form now without even looking at it."

"Remember this word today - corpus."

Richard thought for a moment and wrote two extended meanings under the word "corpus" he learned today:

"Legion (a group of soldiers)"

"Collected Works (written materials that have been gathered together)"

Tom looked at the two lines of text and suddenly looked up.

"Teacher, why didn't you say this sooner?"

"Because you couldn't sit still back then."

Richard tapped him on the tip of his nose with his pencil: "Now you can sit still and talk about something else."

Tom chuckled and didn't argue.

In the next lesson, Richard told a story.

He talked about Coriolanus, a tragedy written by Shakespeare in ancient Rome.

This was a Roman general who was given the honorary title "Coriolanus," meaning "the one who conquered Coriolis."

Later, he was exiled from Rome and fled to the enemy country, where he personally led the enemy army to the gates of Rome.

His mother knelt outside the city gate, urging him to withdraw his troops.

"Did he leave?" Tom asked.

"They've withdrawn."

"and then?"

"Then he was killed by the enemy as a traitor."

"He listened to his mother, and yet he died?"

"Um."

"Then why did you tell me this story?"

Richard looked at Tom for a while.

"Latin, a language."

"Almost everyone who talked about it or wrote about it back then is dead."

"But what they left behind still influences how we speak, how we write, and how we think."

"The word you memorized today."

He made a dot on the corpus with a pencil:

"Its inventor has been dead for two thousand years."

"What he wanted to express was 'a force that brings together scattered things'."

"Two thousand years from now, it will still be in your mouth."

Don't you think this is kind of interesting?

Tom held the pencil in his hand without saying a word.

After a while, he drew a small picture next to his notebook.

A Roman soldier is holding a flag, and a group of little people are being gathered around the flag below him.

After he finished drawing, he looked up.

"Teacher, is Coriolanus also being gathered by some force?"

"Um?"

"On one side is Rome, on the other is his mother, he's caught in the middle."

"If he doesn't withdraw his troops, his mother will die."

"He withdrew his troops, and then he himself died."

"No matter what he chooses, he's being pulled along by that force."

Richard did not respond.

In his memory, this child had always been a mischievous and troublesome fellow.

But judging from what he said today, those three tutors didn't actually make the child stupid.

"You're right," he replied after a moment. "Coriolanus was ultimately killed by two forces pulling him to his death at the same time."

"If he were smarter, could he avoid dying on either side?"

"No one can avoid choosing either side."

Richard turned to the next page of his textbook:

"The only thing you can do is choose a side before you're torn apart."

Tom didn't ask any more questions and buried himself back in his textbook.

Richard watched him write, somewhat lost in thought.

He told children the story of Coriolanus, simply using the story to connect the words.

Halfway through his explanation, he himself became somewhat confused.

It was being pulled by two forces at the same time.

He himself is one of them at the moment.

The academy system, the pantheon salon, home, branch offices, folk guilds...

Each one has expectations of him, and he cannot easily abandon any of them.

He also wanted to try the paths behind the curtain: the scholar's path, the secret path... even the hunter's path.

There's also the sun, the abyss, the web, change... so many traditions. With my own cheat codes, wouldn't it be a waste not to try out more paths?

However, on the other hand, the cheat system currently doesn't allow him to be in two places at once. If there are too many things to handle, he will be completely overwhelmed...

Richard took a breath, suppressing his slight confusion.

After class, he spent some time going over the essay manuscript with Charlotte.

After Charlotte finished reading, she poured tea for both of them.

"Richard, this draft of yours is a wonderful surprise."

"Thank you for giving me this opportunity."

"Don't flatter me. The quality of your manuscript is so good that any magazine would accept it."

Charlotte handed him the teacup.

"However, I have a few suggestions for you regarding grammar."

Every point she raised was about the details.

In other words, he wasn't asked to make any further changes to the punctuation, sentence rhythm, or character identification.

"After correcting these minor issues, it should be fine to submit it to the editor-in-chief."

"The deadline is February 15th. Just hand it in to me on the last weekend of this month."

Charlotte closed the manuscript and wiped the title with her hand.

"What's wrong?"

"It's nothing."

She shifted her gaze back to the manuscript:

"After reading your piece... I felt a chill in my heart."

Which part made you uncomfortable?

"It's not that I'm uncomfortable."

Charlotte frowned.

"There is not a single 'cold' part in the whole article. You wrote with great restraint, without excessive sentimentality or embellishment."

But when I closed the manuscript, a chill ran down my spine.

"I can't say what it is."

She smiled and brushed it off: "I'm probably just being paranoid, don't worry about it."

Richard took the manuscript.

The young woman in front of him was not from the mystical side, but after reading the text, he could feel an indescribable chill.

When he wrote this draft, he did fill in the blanks with something.

The sheer density of death in the industrial city, the last breath of the Burns as they lay on their wooden beds, the cold indifference of the entire poor relief system at work.

He deliberately omitted the mystical aspect from the text, but that aspect is right there in the skeleton.

Richard put the manuscript into his backpack.

"Thank you, Miss Charlotte."

"You're welcome."

I finalized the manuscript on Saturday morning and then met with Coleman in the afternoon.

Richard carried his backpack, which contained the Webley revolver and the enchanted bullet.

After all, he wasn't very familiar with Coleman, so bringing a gun would make him feel more at ease.

Coleman's house is on the corner; it's a two-story building.

The exterior walls were cleaner than the neighbors', and the brass door handles were polished to a shine.

Richard rang the doorbell, and the door was quickly opened.

A woman opened the door, and when she saw Richard, a smile immediately spread across her face.

"You must be Richard?"

"Are you Mrs. Coleman?"

"Come in quickly, come in quickly."

Mrs. Coleman made way for him to enter the room, but her gesture was a bit excessive; she leaned her entire upper body forward as she did so.

Richard stepped into the entryway.

There was an old-fashioned coat rack in the entryway, next to a small table.

There was a small silver plate on the table with several business cards on it.

Richard glanced at the business cards out of the corner of his eye; three were from doctors, two from lawyers, and one from a certain parish.

Mrs. Coleman took his coat and hung it up.

"Were you cold on the way here?"

"fine."

"Would you like some hot tea? I just brewed a pot."

"No need to trouble yourself, Coleman and I agreed that I would arrive this afternoon."

"No, that's not true. Have some tea and rest for a bit."

She had already ushered Richard into the living room.

A middle-aged man was sitting by the fireplace in the living room reading a newspaper. When he saw him come in, he quickly put down the newspaper and stood up.

The man was not tall, but his shoulders were broader than those of men with an office job.

"I am Coleman's father, just call me Old Coleman."

"Hello."

"Sit down, sit down," old Coleman said, gesturing to the sofa opposite the fireplace. "Don't be shy."

Richard sat down.

Mrs. Coleman soon came out with a tea tray containing teacups, a sugar bowl, a milk jug, and a plate of cookies.

"Try it." She handed me the teacup. "I baked this myself."

Richard took the teacup and picked up a cookie.

The cookies were baked quite well, with a strong milky flavor, and the sugar granules crunched crisply when you bit into them.

"Thank you, Mrs. Coleman."

"We heard from Coleman that you're number one at Greenwood?"

"It's not that exaggerated," Richard replied truthfully. "He did well in some classes last semester, and the top student in the entire grade was someone else."

"That's still very impressive." Mrs. Coleman pushed the milk can over. "Coleman came back and told me that you got second place in the Latin speech competition in the capital."

"Yes."

"First place goes to Eton...?"

"Montagu".

"Yes, yes, Montagu."

Mrs. Coleman paused on the surname "Montagu".

She clearly knew what that surname represented.

"You managed to push that Montague kid to only a half-point victory in the speech contest?"