I loaded the Mysticism panel.

When Richard walked back to the branch office from the edge of the Black Ditch, his legs no longer resembled his own.

【无倦】means keeping the rate of fatigue accumulation very low.

But after a whole night, I was not only physically exhausted, but even more so mentally exhausted.

He leaned against the iron railing at the entrance of the branch office for a while to catch his breath.

Mr. Hutton was taken away by Lieutenant Colonel Odd's men.

The throat and the main trunk of the trachea were burned off; the patient needs to be taken to a physician on the mystical side for treatment.

The old gentleman waved his hand, indicating that Richard should go and rest first.

But he couldn't stop resting.

The branch office was bustling with activity, like an anthill.

Lieutenant Colonel Odd wasn't much better off; he was still on the list of those to be purged.

"No. 3 Lane, East Area, twelve people."

"Four in the northern section of Heigou, plus Lao Lei."

"At the entrance of the North District Funeral Home, the funeral home doorman and his young apprentice."

Lieutenant Colonel Odd read out the names one by one, and Richard helped out as well.

When Wentworth's name was mentioned, he paused for two seconds.

"Wentworth, head of the Briston branch office inspection team, the ether burst to its limit and burned up at the edge of the Black Ditch."

"Gather the scraps and prepare to use the full specifications."

After reading it aloud, the lieutenant colonel turned around and looked at Richard.

"You little rascal." Lieutenant Colonel Ode stared at him for a moment.

"You played the most important role in today's ceremony. I will report everything to the Imperial Capital Administration, and you will also be given priority in the distribution of spoils."

"...Yes, Lieutenant Colonel."

Richard answered very softly.

It was already bright outside.

Sunlight fell on the wet street stones, evaporating the lingering moisture into a thin mist.

Three streets west of the slag alley, there lives the mother who heard a child crying in the drainage ditch last night while she was asleep.

He was standing at his own doorstep, looking bewildered.

She didn't remember walking barefoot outside the door last night.

She only remembers having a very long dream.

In her dream, there seemed to be water, someone counting, and a lullaby she had sung countless times at her daughter's grave.

When she woke up, her dream was shattered into pieces, and she couldn't piece it back together no matter what she did.

In that little house by the canal, the old man who had been leaning over the well last night answered, "It's me, your brother is here."

I woke up early this morning and stared at that well for a long time.

He remembered that he had a younger brother who had drowned.

But he couldn't remember the call that came from the bottom of the well last night.

That memory was erased from his mind with an extremely light and faint touch.

It was wiped very clean, leaving not a single scratch.

Throughout the city, the memories of every ordinary person about what happened "under the veil" last night are fading little by little.

It faded away silently.

They still remembered the lullaby that the old pastor led them in singing;

But they didn't remember that there were hundreds of shadows with dead faces underwater, and they fell asleep one by one, following the tune of that song.

Judgment is not only a judgment, but also a boundary.

When the boundary between day and night is drawn, ordinary people are also drawn to the boundary of "what to remember" and "what to forget".

The city quickly returned to normal, with people going to work and going to school... Oh, it's summer vacation now, and the students are all sleeping in.

The erased memories left them with very vague recollections of their time in the shelter.

Richard looked at the crowd from afar, everything seemed normal, and a feeling he couldn't quite describe welled up inside him.

As Mr. Hutton once said: History records only those who remain.

But that night, even the right to remember was taken away.

They would only feel that they had a somewhat sad but inexplicably comforting dream.

"This is mercy."

A voice came from behind him.

Mrs. McNeil suffered a backlash that was not much less severe than Mr. Hutton's, but Little Master's health bar was definitely thicker.

She was sitting in a wheelchair, her face still ashen, but her eyes were clear.

"Ordinary people can't handle the fact that they've 'seen' it."

"After seeing what's behind the curtain, some people go mad that very night, while others sleep with their eyes open for the rest of their lives."

Richard neither confirmed nor denied it.

Merciful? Perhaps.

………………

Richard walked to the east side of the slag alley and saw Mrs. Weil's black and white cat squatting on the doorstep. It meowed when it saw him.

He bent down and patted the cat's head.

Mrs. Weil came out of the house, saw him, and the wrinkle at the corner of her eye twitched slightly.

"Little Richard, just got back from outside?"

"Yes, Mrs. Wells."

Richard stood on the steps and glanced at her family's coal shed.

The wooden door to the coal shed was locked.

A brand new brass lock was hanging on the lock.

It's completely out of place with Mrs. Weil's old house.

"...Mrs. Wells."

"Um?"

"This lock?"

"I had someone come and replace it this morning."

The old lady waved her hand: "The old lock still works, but I don't know why I just want to replace it."

"Are you alright?"

"What could possibly be wrong?"

"What can an old woman like me be afraid of?"

Richard said goodbye to the old lady and slowly walked home.

It was past nine o'clock when I got home, and my family had already returned from the shelter.

My mother is boiling water in the kitchen.

Evelyn pounced on him as soon as she saw him.

Richard reached out and hugged his sister.

"Brother, you look terrible."

The little girl lifted her head from his chest and looked at him intently for a long time: "Were you not asleep?"

"Um."

"I didn't sleep much last night either," Evelyn said angrily. "The boiler room and the steam whistle were so noisy."

"Didn't you used to say that steam engines sounded nice?"

"...Hmph, I was just being stubborn back then."

Father Rogers came downstairs without saying a word.

Richard glanced at his father.

Rogers put his hands behind his back, turned around, and went to the kitchen.

"Your mom has already fried all the eggs for you."

Richard sat at the dining table.

His mother, Margaret, placed a glass of hot water in front of him.

She didn't ask anything.

She simply reached out and placed her hand on the back of his hand.

Richard's internal circulation was intact and stable, but it had been significantly depleted.

Margaret withdrew her hand.

"...It's good that you're back."

………………

The post-war cleanup took several days and continued intermittently.

The anchor network has thirteen points, and the "anchor" at each point has been steeped in the resentment of hundreds of dead people for a full twelve years.

The secrets of that black soil river basin were revealed in thirteen ordinary objects.

They themselves are not large in weight, but they are all strange creatures nourished by the twelve years of deathly sounds.

Mrs. McNeil laid out the thirteen items one by one.

Richard was driving the "Observe" car and taking notes from the side.

The first item was a broken lantern on the sluice gate.

The lantern was the ordinary kind, covered with oiled paper, with a bamboo frame, and most of the paper covering had long since rotted away.

However, the base of the lantern was wrapped with dark brown straw rope.

Richard's spiritual vision swept over.

"There's something woven inside this straw rope."

Mrs. McNeil used tweezers to unravel the straw rope bit by bit.

Inside the core of the rope was a wisp of dried black moss.

"Multi-eyed black fungus".

"This lamp was originally meant to guide the souls of the dead in the Black Soil River Cemetery."

"A guiding light." She placed the lantern back on the table.

"People from the Black Soil River region believe that when a person dies, they have to pass through one obstacle after another, and each obstacle needs to be guided by a lamp."

"The response will change it. Originally, it guided the souls of the dead to the underworld, but it has been changed to... guide the souls of the dead to the bottom of the Black Ditch."

"Go to the center of that net."

Richard looked at the broken lantern.

The guiding light illuminated the way for twelve years, leading thousands of dead people to the bottom of the Black Ditch.

The second item is a ceramic jar about the size of a palm.

The mouth of the jar was very small and sealed with a layer of black wax.

"Canopic jars," Richard recognized them.

He had seen the complete set in the museum's storeroom.

Mrs. McNeil nodded.

"One liver, one lung, one stomach, and one intestine."

"This one..." She leaned closer to look at the jackal's head on the lid of the jar.

"It's the one with the lungs, and its guardian spirit is Domtef with a jackal's head."

"It's empty inside, but it 'remembers' that it once had lungs inside."

"It will be used to anchor those who died from tuberculosis and lung disease."

"The jar recognizes the lungs, but the deceased's lungs recognize the jar first."

Richard thought of Lizzie.

The third item is a fragment of a stone tablet, inscribed with a line of priestly inscription.

Mrs. McNeill's fingertips lightly traced the inscription.

"This is a passage copied from the Book of the Dead."

When the deceased passes through this ordeal, they must face forty-two gods and deny their sins one by one.

"I didn't kill anyone, I didn't steal, I didn't let anyone go hungry..."

"This is called a 'denial confession'."

Richard listened, and goosebumps rose on the back of his neck.

"Answering will be used in the opposite way." The medium's tone turned cold.

"It doesn't allow the deceased to 'deny,' it allows the deceased to 'admit.'"

"Admit you're poor, admit you're sick, admit you 'deserve' to be exploited."

"To admit even one word, one is branded with a deep mark by this stone tablet."

The serene smile on the respondent's face, the words "That's how it should be done"... that's where the root of the problem lies.

The remaining items were measured one by one, and the last one was a palm-sized clay tablet covered with symbols.

"This is the core." Mrs. McNeil's expression changed when she examined the clay tablet.

"The first twelve items are knots from the internet."

"This clay tablet is the main rope that ties the twelve knots together, and it is engraved with the general outline of that set of 'replacement' rituals."

The medium wrapped it separately in three layers of oiled paper sprinkled with salt.

"It must be sealed and handed over to Manchester City's headquarters."

"Those big shots at the top will use it to compare with the dossiers shared by other countries in the Western Continent."

Richard looked at the old things.

A guiding lamp, a filthy jar, a monument to guilt, a box to seal names…

They were originally used to help the dead pass through the gates of hell and to bring them peace.

When it came into the hands of Ying Sheng Hui, everything was turned upside down.

The guiding light leads the dead into a trap;

The sealed box, stealing the true name of the dead;

The ritual for seeking peaceful sleep was changed to forbidding peaceful sleep.

"lady."

"Um?"

"Can they... be used as ordinary artifacts?"

Mrs. McNeil glanced at him.

"They have already been purified once."

After being refined by that master of the solar tradition, the remaining power and malice were almost completely eliminated.

"Once this case is fully investigated, according to the rules, these artifacts will be our spoils of war."

But when they wanted to continue investigating the case, Mr. Reeve had vanished without a trace.

What completely dissolves it is the golden thread of the "sun expert" that says "what you see is what you weigh".

It was not human to begin with.

It was planted in a "container" by that Black Soil River expert who walked the narrow path.

"I had hoped to psychicize something from Mr. Reeve."

Mrs. McNeil said.

"Which variant of the silencing technique used to kill Biglo was it?"

"How many secrets remain unrevealed within the Empire's borders?"

"All of this should be able to be read from Mr. Reeve, this 'container'."

"But the sun's golden rays burned it all away."

"Ordinary mediums cannot communicate with spirits."

Mrs. McNeil shook her head.

"Spiritual communication needs an 'anchor'."

A corpse, a wisp of ashes, and a personal belonging.

Following this anchor, we can call that person's "echo" back from the spirit world.

"I can't do it."

"...Although I can't do it." Mrs. McNeil smiled.

She raised her hand and placed it on the bone bracelet on her wrist.

"But I can ask a teacher to come."

Ordinary mediums need a central "anchor" to communicate with spirits.

But highly skilled mediums don't need that.