I loaded the Mysticism panel.

Among the strikers in the western suburbs, there were a few faces that didn't belong to this strike in the first place.

They were dressed in overalls, wearing the same gray cloth caps, and carrying crowbars.

The way these people positioned themselves was completely different from that of the workers who genuinely just wanted their wages.

They scattered one by one at the edge of the crowd, next to the military and police fence.

At some point, they exchanged a glance.

Someone rammed into a young guardsman, and the two ended up grappling on the ground.

Then the crowbar was raised and then lowered again.

A pool of blood immediately appeared on the ground.

Blood splattered on the faces of the workers closest to the incident.

An elderly miner in the front row was pushed from behind again.

He stumbled and bumped into the pickaxe handle of the disciplinary team, cutting his forehead and drawing blood down his graying temples.

The crowd erupted in chaos.

"Someone got hit!"

"They killed someone!"

The shouts came clearly from the back row; someone had already prepared them in their throat.

The coerced laborers were already furious, and the sight of blood extinguished all their reason.

The wall collapsed, and the crowd surged northward.

From this moment on, the striking crowd was no longer a striking crowd.

They were a surging tide, propelled forward by blood and roars, a tide that no one could stop.

The military and police defenses collapsed on that street.

The first spark landed in the dry firewood.

Beside Black Ditch in North Briston.

Richard's perception and contemplation unfolded beneath his feet.

That layer of still water was originally only enough to overflow the banks of the Black Ditch.

In the time it takes to breathe, the water spread outwards to both banks of the canal at a speed imperceptible to the naked eye.

His inspiration is certainly not that strong, nor can it cover such a wide range.

It was the underwater anchor net that had been stretched to its limit.

The water in the Black Ditch has faded.

That pool of inky blackness begins at the central flow line, the pigment retreating towards both sides of the riverbank, and then sinking deeper into the soil at the river's edge.

Through the curtain, Richard saw another river lying on its side underwater.

The "Black Ditch," which had been cursed by the workers for decades, was actually a roofless water prison on the other side of the curtain, filled with people who refused to sleep.

They were once nailed to the bottom of the water as anchors.

Now that the anchor nets are boiling over, they are standing up one by one from the bottom of the water.

The upright posture is the posture of a drowning person in their final struggle.

My head came out of the water first, followed by my shoulders, and my chest swelled up.

They wore the faces they had in life.

There was no hatred or sorrow on those faces.

They are all empty.

Reverend Hawkins stood beside the line, clutching the holy water bottle in his hand.

He has officiated at funerals for thirty years and recognizes most of these faces.

Richard heard the old pastor squeeze out something through his teeth.

It sounds like they're saying "My God," and it also sounds like they're saying "kids."

The curtain has been turned over.

This time, the flipping didn't just stop at the riverbank.

It covered the entire city and all areas connected to this large-scale ceremony.

Three streets west of the slag alley, a mother heard a child crying in a drainage ditch in her sleep.

It was that son who died before he was even a month old.

She sat up in bed and walked barefoot to the door.

As soon as the door opened, her own shadow on the ground stood up first and came to greet her.

In a small house by the canal, the old man heard someone calling his childhood name from the well.

It was my younger brother who drowned when I was a child.

The two brothers were swimming in a river in the countryside when the younger brother failed to come up.

After all these years, that voice hasn't aged at all.

The old man leaned over the edge of the well and looked down, replying, "It's me, your brother's here..."

The person who responded had their shadow rise from the ground before their body.

It walked towards its owner, wearing the owner's face.

Richard stood by the Black Ditch, watching the gas lamps that should have been lit in the north area gradually dimming.

One lamp goes out, then another one goes out.

The light goes out faster than a person can run.

"Stop looking," Mrs. McNeil said beside him.

Her gray dress was so dark in the lights at the gate that it was impossible to tell whether it was gray or black.

"Do it the way we agreed."

………………

Mother Margaret stood by the living room window, clutching a half-knitted ball of yarn.

The husband sat on the sofa, and Evelyn sat at her father's feet, holding a bag of flour in her arms.

She had originally planned to sleep in her own room for another night.

When the gaslight went out, Margaret's residual circuit lit up.

This dramatic change in background noise abruptly revived the inspiration that should have long since ceased to flow within her.

"Rogers," Margaret turned around immediately. "Let's go now."

Rogers looked up.

"Now?"

"Right now."

Rogers glanced at his wife's face and asked no further questions.

"Evelyn, put on your coat."

"dad……"

"Put on your coat," Rogers repeated. "And grab the flour bag."

Evelyn had a bellyful of "whys" stuck in her throat.

She glanced at her mother and hugged the bag of flour even tighter.

Rogers grabbed a shotgun, while Margaret's small cloth bag was a tin bottle with a daisy logo.

The three of them hurriedly went out the door.

South of the slag alley lies the refuge in the southern part of the city.

The moment Rogers locked the door, the light on in a house on the east side of the slag heap went out.

The lady of the house called out from the window, "Annie!"

"Annie! You're back?"

Rogers gripped his wife's hand tightly.

"Walk."

Throughout the entire northern district, shouts echoed everywhere.

With every shout, a shadow rises up.

Every shadow followed the street edge, the windowsill, and the drainage ditch, heading towards the Black Ditch.

The entire North Briston area is becoming a giant water dungeon.

"Proceed according to plan."

Mrs. McNeil stood beside the sluice gate of the old Black Ditch sluice.

"Set the anchors one by one, starting with the nearest one."

Mr. Hutton delivered the first verdict.

"audite, mortui aquae."

(Listen, you who have perished in the water.)

The old gentleman spoke Latin, the language he had spoken since his student days.

「Nomen vestrum jam scriptum est.」

(Your names have been recorded.)

"domus vestra parata est."

(Your destination has been prepared.)

When the old man recited the third sentence, his expression changed.

After those three Latin lines were uttered, they were not nailed into the curtain as usual.

They walked onto the surface of the Black Ditch, only to be stopped by an invisible wall of water.

A burst of laughter was heard, along with the sound of counting.

"...One, two, three, four..."

One by one, the floating corpses that had risen from the bottom of the water were reconnected.

"...One, two, three, four..."

The shadows that had just been collected were also counted.

The entire river is being counted.

Mr. Hutton's voice is hoarse.

He readjusted the rhythm of the Latin.

"pax vobiscum."

(May you rest in peace.)

(May you rest in peace forever.)

"In nomine patris, et filii..."

(In the name of the Father, the Son, ...)

Before he could finish reading, hundreds of floating corpses rose from the water, throwing the Latin text back to him verbatim.

"Pax vobiscum, sir."

(May you rest in peace, sir.)

"Requiem aeternam, sir."

(May you rest in peace, sir.)

"...Please give us back our bread, sir."

Laughter mingled with the counting sounds underwater.

Mr. Hutton staggered.

"teacher!"

Richard reached out and helped him up.

The old man's face turned pale, and he suddenly coughed up a mouthful of blood.

"...Latin won't work, I mispronounced it."

Richard also frowned.

All the books he had read, all the teachers he had followed, and all the inscriptions he had deciphered... all told him that the sleep ritual should be performed in an ancient, sacred, and encrypted language.

Celtic ancient script, Black Earth River priestly inscriptions, Alexandrian school commentaries, church Latin... a lineage of transmission, hundreds of years of accumulation, a system built on the backs of countless generations of scholars.

But the pastor at the poorhouse did recite prayers to the poor in Latin.

Before they received that bowl of porridge, it was read aloud to them as part of the humiliation.

The power of a judgment always lies in whether the deceased acknowledges its authority.

If you use men's language, they'll just bury their faces in the water, even deeper.

All the scholar's knowledge was rendered utterly ineffective in the face of a river that brought poverty to the poor.

At the other end of the gate, Mrs. McNeil, as the anchor of the ceremony, was also violently struck by the backlash.

She coughed up blood.

Before she could even swallow her second mouthful of blood, the floating corpses that had risen from the bottom of the water stretched out their arms toward her.

The anchor net flows back against the current.

What they need is a host for this slumber ceremony.

Her shadow and her name will be taken away on the spot at this moment.

Mrs. McNeil made her decision amidst a mouthful of blood.

A wolf shadow suddenly sprang up behind her, its front paws lashing out, spitting out several strands of golden silk from its throat.

Golden threads formed a net in front of the gate.

That net effectively blocked hundreds of arms reaching out from underwater.

The outline of the beast faded by half in the short time it took to block it.

Immediately afterwards, Mrs. McNeil pulled the coral earring off her right earlobe.

The coral earring landed in her palm.

She blew on the earring.

The earring made a buzzing sound.

The ears of all the practitioners along both sides of the Black Ditch, as well as the hunters from that local guild, were covered by something invisible.

The "Ear-Covering Song" began.

The sounds of counting, laughter, and calling out names that pierced the eardrums and tugged at the throat to "respond" slid past the layer of ear coverings.

Richard felt the string that had been taut in his heart finally loosen.

But in the next moment, the coral earring began to crack in the medium's palm.

On the other side of the beast's shadow, the golden threads also began to scatter.

It made one last flutter before the gate, and the golden thread broke into several strands.

The beast-like figure turned its head and bowed slightly to Mrs. McNeil.

That was the gesture of a servant bowing to his master in farewell after completing his last shift.

The beast's shadow dispersed.

Next up was the coral earring.

The earring shattered into several pieces in Mrs. McNeil's palm.

Before it shattered, a very soft female voice hummed from the earring.

Both spirits have departed.

Mrs. McNeil knelt down by the gate.

Blood dripped into the pool of dirty water seeping up beneath her skirt.

The force of the reverse flow of the anchor net broke through her outermost layer of defense.

A clump of water wrapped around Mrs. McNeil's ankle.

Her shadow was pulled up from the ground by the pool of water before her body.

"lady!"

Richard activated his spiritual vision and immediately realized what was happening.

When the shadow is taken away, a person becomes an empty vessel.

The real name follows the shadow, and the next moment Mr. Reeve will have another dead man wearing Mrs. McNeil's face.

Mr. Hutton tried to use his magic to help, but his body, still weakened by the backlash, couldn't hold on and he collapsed onto the muddy ground.

Richard's shadow was already beneath his feet, moving before he could.

After training, Shadow was more than twice as good as before, when he was clumsy.

It slipped off Richard's heel and sank to the bottom of the Black Ditch.

They plunged headfirst into the shoal below, into the thick, greasy middle layer.

In that middle layer, it stretched out its arm and grabbed Mrs. McNeil's shadow as she was being pulled into the water.

The shadow lasted only three seconds in that middle layer.

But those three seconds are enough.

Mrs. McNeill's bone bracelet shone.

Mrs. Mary reached out further and gently pulled her apprentice back to anchor.

Mrs. McNeill slowly straightened up from the muddy ground.

"……Thanks."