I loaded the Mysticism panel.

Deep within the veil lies an area where light has never reached.

That inverted pyramid silently floated in the center of the black tide formed from the sound of death.

The pyramids have no doors; they are doors in themselves.

The interior space is much larger than the exterior, and geometry fails here.

In the deepest stone chamber, a faceless human figure crouched in the darkness.

Time, deep within the curtain, is a viscous river, flowing extremely slowly.

For those beings who have reached the deepest depths, a year and a day are not much different.

It was waiting for its wounds to heal, waiting for the great fire that was about to ignite in the Old World to bring new nourishment to its mouth.

At that very moment, the deepest, most fundamental principle began to vibrate.

The string wasn't broken or deformed, it was just... touched by something.

It hadn't felt that way in many years.

The last time I felt this way was when I was still a person.

In a small mud-brick temple in the Black Soil River Basin, a young priest guards an increasingly deserted shrine for the dead.

At that time, its biggest fear was that someone would call out its name at night.

When a name is called out, the soul will follow the sound and run away.

Once the soul leaves, the body becomes an empty shell.

Once the empty shell is occupied by something, you can never come back.

Children in the Black Soil River Basin are taught this way from a young age:

"If you hear someone calling your name at night, do not answer."

It was afraid of this when it was alive, and it was afraid of it even after it died.

After reaching the sage, it thought it no longer needed to be afraid.

It discards everything related to "people" one by one, leaving only shadows.

You cannot grasp the name of a shadow, for a shadow is simply the projection of a name onto a curtain.

For so many years, nothing has ever touched its real name.

Even those two experts who stayed in the capital only drove it away from the material world; they never actually touched that nerve.

But now, the string has been struck.

The inverted pyramid slowly turned in the black tide.

It is trying to find out who touched it.

...Time passed quietly, and after exhausting all its own means, it made a decision to seek help from outsiders.

This incident itself is a disgrace.

But the string rang, which means someone knows where the string is.

Knowing where the string is means you can touch it again anytime.

Next time it might not just be a touch, it might be a pull; this can't wait.

It rummaged through the pile of junk for a long time and found a bronze mirror.

"have not seen you for a long time."

After the ether was entered, the woman's voice came from the other side of the mirror.

The last time you came to me was before that plague.

What year is it in the Gregorian calendar, sometime in 1660?

"1665." The Black Earth River expert didn't need to speak; the curtain itself would speak for him.

"It's been over two hundred years," said the woman on the other side of the mirror.

"You came to me this time because your heart was stirred."

The woman seemed somewhat gloating.

"You checked it yourself before you contacted me, didn't you?"

"I checked."

"Shadow threads, mirrors, proxy networks, death divination, and tracing disconnected lines."

"We checked everything, but we couldn't find anything."

"That's why you came to find me."

The frost patterns on the mirror began to spread, crawling over the edge of the bronze surface and extending upwards along the chain that hung the mirror.

"Elena," it called out the other's name.

"I need your deep dive."

Elena Savolova.

A highly skilled medium from the Abyss tradition, she emerged from the frozen wasteland at the northernmost tip of the Ross Empire.

She has been in this world for over three hundred years since that year.

This is not the lifespan that a true master should have. Generally, a master should live to be 150 or 160 years old before passing away peacefully.

But Elena wasn't burning her own oil.

"You know the price of deep-sea diving," Elena said.

"I can afford it."

"Okay." Elena didn't haggle over the price anymore. "I'll take a look for you first."

The frost on the mirror began to recede inwards, eventually condensing into a tiny, rotating vortex at the center.

The Abyss's traditional spiritual vision looks downwards, focusing on the side of things that they least want to be exposed.

Elena's senses followed the resonant memory provided by the Black Soil River expert, penetrating deeper and deeper into the various layers of the curtain.

Layer upon layer.

From the shallows to the middle layer, and from the middle layer to the deep.

The ether in the deep water is as thick as adhesive; ordinary masters should turn back here.

Elena continued.

After about fifteen minutes, the vortex stopped.

"We found a trace."

"Where?"

"It can only be found within the territory of the Albion Empire."

Elena's voice slowed down.

"I tracked down to the last point of contact after your wisp of ashes was destroyed."

Someone at the destruction site took a wisp of the mystery you scattered.

Inside the pyramid, the crouching human figure changed its posture.

"Where are the people who were intercepted?"

"I can't catch up with her," Elena said helplessly.

"The only thing that can be confirmed is that the interception occurred at the Imperial Museum, a week after your wisp of ashes was destroyed by the authorities."

Two experts from the Imperial Capital Museum are keeping a close eye on the situation, and the museum's sealing array remains open.

In that environment, someone was still able to intercept its scattered secrets without being discovered by anyone present... The Black Soil River expert was horrified upon reflection.

"There's one more thing," Elena added.

"I can confirm that there were traces of Thoth in your divination."

"Thoth won't help anyone."

The Black Earth River expert was inherently incompatible with Thoth's power, even though Thoth's power came from its homeland.

"Thoth doesn't help people, but he recognizes people," Elena corrected it.

"The path taken by this scholar is the same as that of Thoth."

"You mean, it was a scholar who took the seeds?"

"Highly likely."

"What rank?"

"I don't know. Someone who could steal the seed silently in that situation, with such sophisticated concealment that I couldn't even track the complete trajectory, could definitely not be a minor expert."

"But if he is at least a minor expert, those two masters in the capital couldn't possibly have been unaware of it."

Elena was quiet for a while.

"There is another possibility."

"explain."

"Someone covered for him."

Elena's power receded layer by layer from the depths, and the vortex also became shallower.

"There's one more thing I'd like to ask you. In recent years, several small cliques have sprung up in the Old World."

"These circles have low barriers to entry, ranging from four or five to seven or eight people, and the leaders are basically young experts."

"The operation methods of the circles are very uniform."

The leader assigned each new member a title, all of which were from the Old Gods system.

"You've been an undercover agent within the Empire for over a decade. I wonder if you've made any discoveries?"

The expert from Heituhe did not hide the information he possessed.

"What you're saying sounds familiar. There are indeed gatherings on my network that use the mythology of my hometown."

"I have intelligence from four locations."

Elena and it exchanged information.

"Marseille in southern France, Cologne in western Germania, Kiev and St. Peter in the Rus' Empire."

"I have a student who spent two years in Marseille."

She told me that someone she knew called herself "Hecate," and that her approach was a combination of three elements.

With the three phases overlapping, the experts at Heituhe pondered silently.

Those who can do this are either born with extraordinary talent, or they disassemble themselves into three parts and then glue themselves back together.

"Are all these circles controlled by the same person?" it asked.

"I'm not sure," Elena said honestly.

"The leaders have different names and their etheric characteristics are not entirely consistent."

It could be one person using different shells, or it could be several students taught by the same teacher.

"But one thing remains the same."

"What?"

"The underlying logic of how the masks are made is exactly the same."

"The name is the bait, and the tube is the hook."

Those who join believe they are climbing the social ladder by using God's name, but in reality, they are welding themselves to a building whose full form has not yet been revealed.

"What building?"

"I don't know, but judging from the scale, all these places combined have taken in at least forty people or more."

"Among the forty-odd people, there are several highly skilled experts and countless less skilled ones; this force is already quite formidable."

The Black Soil River expert remained silent for a long time.

"Is what you're saying related to the incident where my string was touched?"

"Maybe, maybe not."

Elena's voice returned to its calm tone.

"But what if the person who stole your seed happens to be from one of these circles..."

"Was the mask he wore the reason he was so well concealed?"

She herself was unsure when she said this.

"That's all I can do."

"I can't get through the blockade over Albion, and I can't give you the answer you want."

"Your payment." The expert from Heituhe did not haggle.

A faint, extremely dense sound of death emanated from the bottom of the pyramid, flowing along the inner wall of the curtain towards the bronze mirror.

For practitioners of the Abyss tradition, the purer the death cry, the more valuable it is.

The purity of the necrotic sounds extracted by the Black Soil River expert is something Elena couldn't buy through her regular channels, no matter how much money she spent.

On the other side of the bronze mirror, Elena caught that dying sound.

"This debt is settled."

Her voice added a sentence at the end.

"Old friend, your string was touched, but it didn't break or deform."

This means the person they bumped into wasn't of a high enough rank.

"But once the string has been played, it's played. That person knows where the string is and will come back sooner or later."

"You're hiding deep inside recovering from your injuries, hoping that the battle in the Old World will save your life."

But what if that person raises the string before you've fully recovered...?

Elena didn't finish her sentence.

The vortex dissipated, and the bronze mirror dimmed.

The expert from the Black Soil River squatted in the deepest stone chamber of the pyramid.

It has sat in this position for so many years and has never felt uneasy.

Tonight, for the first time, I felt that the walls of this pyramid weren't thick enough.

And then there are the circles Elena pointed out.

It lingered in the empire for decades, only smelling the scents but never seeing anyone.

It is only now that it realizes the source of that smell is much larger than it imagined.

Someone on the map of the Old World is using God's name as bricks and living people as cement to build something, one by one.

As it crouched inside the pyramid pondering these matters, another thought flashed through its mind.

Elena's surname is Savlova, and the woman on Flower Moon Street also has a Slavic surname.

The two women are going in completely different directions, but they share some similarities.

For example, they all live alone in a certain place, have a large number of students under their tutelage, and have expanded their businesses to a wide and far-reaching extent.

What bothered it most was another coincidence.

The face of the medium from Flower Moon Street was not clearly visible.

The person behind the bronze mirror has the same problem.

If there really is some connection between these two women.

How much of the information Elena just told it was true?