I loaded the Mysticism panel.

On his way back to the dormitory after class, Richard passed a newsstand at a corner.

The front page headline read, "The Ypres Imperial Expeditionary Force and the Enemy Force in a Flanders Swamp: A Deadly Tug-of-War."

The accompanying picture was a dull, gray photo, and nothing in it was very clear.

There was only a patch of mud that had been turned upside down, and a few people, no bigger than ants, hunched over in the mud.

The old man at the newsstand huddled behind a thick scarf, his eyes peeking out from the edge of the scarf, reddened by the cold wind.

The small print at the bottom of the photo shows a number.

By the end of October, the Imperial Expeditionary Force had suffered more than 50,000 casualties in Flanders.

Fifty thousand people—that's about the population of a district like Bristol.

Richard looked away from the newspaper and headed towards the teaching building.

On the last day of the editing team, Croft leaned against the podium with his hands in his pockets, his face showing weariness he couldn't even be bothered to hide.

"The system was built according to the peacetime era."

"Now everything has to be compressed into months, weeks, or even days."

"The faster the compression, the higher the probability of something going wrong... and if something goes wrong, there aren't enough people to fix it."

"This crash course manual you compiled."

Old Ke patted the stack of brown paper envelopes on the table.

"To put it bluntly, it's like using plywood to plug holes in a dam."

"But plywood is better than nothing."

Richard put his hand in his coat pocket, his fingertips touching a copper penny.

He rubbed the serrated edge of the coin with his thumb and pulled his hand out of his pocket.

When I arrived at the dormitory building, Edith was jogging towards me from the direction of the library.

The girl clutched her ever-present plant guide, her nose frozen to the color of berries.

"Richard!"

She stopped under the porch and took a couple of breaths.

"Did you hear... Instructor Pollock is adding an extra class next week?"

"What extra classes?"

"I don't know. The notice only said 'Supplementary Topic on Ritual Language,' without specifying any details."

Edith switched the encyclopedia to her other arm and rubbed her frozen fingers.

"There's one more thing: the cafeteria hasn't served a whole piece of beef for three days in a row."

"I know." Richard's expression was equally unpleasant.

The girl's expression was so serious it was almost comical.

"I eat very little, actually not much... um, actually what I wanted to say was..."

"If even the cafeterias at universities in Beijing are starting to cut back on spending, how much more frugally will ordinary families have to go?"

Richard did not answer.

He recalled the increasingly frequent recipe modification notes his sister had written in her notebook after returning from the harvest day, where she had suggested "using beet sugar instead of white sugar."

The two entered the dormitory building one after the other.

Richard returned to his room and first wrote a reply to Demeter.

As the pen moves across the paper, [博闻] automatically arranges all the data that needs to be cited by year.

After writing the signature, he sealed the opening with coarse salt and applied the sealing wax from Hermes' caduceus.

After doing all this, he put the earthenware bowl and the appraisal report into an earthenware jar, waiting for Demeter's bees to come and collect them.

The next morning, Richard picked up the day's newspaper from the dormitory building's porch.

Richard stood under the porch and scanned the front page in the daylight.

The title uses large, flush-top lead type.

"The Ottoman Empire declares war; the Bosphorus Strait is closed."

On the surface, this was the addition of yet another new enemy. The newspaper devoted half a page to discussing the impact of the strait blockade on shipping and the disruption to the food supply lines of allies.

Richard folded the newspaper and tucked it under his arm.

This news story would probably only elicit a few exclamations of "Here comes another one" on the street.

But once inside the Petrie Building, it's a completely different story.

as predicted.

Before the first class in the morning even started, the east corridor was already packed with people.

Lecturers, graduate students, and senior undergraduates—a group of people, all looking exhausted, were either holding newspapers or empty-handed, but their mouths never stopped talking.

"The Mesopotamian region..."

The speaker was a lecturer with white hair.

Richard had seen him a few times before in the editorial team, but he couldn't remember his name. He was holding that newspaper in his hand.

"Babylon, Ur, Nineveh."

He counted them one by one.

"And there's that vast area of ​​Nimrud, the former capital of Assyria... The things sealed beneath those places are on a completely different level compared to the weak points of the empire's homeland."

Another lecturer next to him chimed in; he was a tall, stout man wearing a monocle.

"The Ottomans guarded those ruins for hundreds of years, and the Caliphate had its own system of seals and maintenance passed down through generations."

The Sufi rituals, the ascetic monastic patrol routes... are completely different from our practices, but they work.

The white-haired lecturer tossed the newspaper aside. "There's a war now."

"There's a war going on, and the shells are going to be thrown at those ruins."

He was holding onto the corridor wall as if he would fall if he didn't.

"Just like Mons, the artillery fire smashed through the old seal, and the things that had accumulated underneath came up."

"The foundation under Mons is only a few hundred years old."

The lecturer, wearing a monocle, drew a circle in the air with his index finger.

"If those places in Mesopotamia were to appear..."

"The Tower of Babylon." The white-haired lecturer's voice was even hoarser.

"Its name alone has several layers of seals."

"What does 'name sealing' mean?" a graduate student next to me asked cautiously.

The white-haired lecturer turned and glanced at him.

"It means that the person who wrote the name already thought that sealing it underground was not enough to ensure its safety."

Even the names have to be locked away layer by layer, to prevent anyone from reading them aloud and awakening those sealed things through the names.

The hallway buzzed with noise, becoming even noisier than before.

Richard listened silently, then turned and walked towards the classroom.

As he passed Croft's office, his enhanced perception allowed him to hear some of the conversations inside.

Presumably because this was something that was already going to be announced, they didn't set up an isolation array.

"That's all the people who can be transferred from the Classics Department."

Greer's voice leaked through the crack in the door, his tone nasal.

"We need manpower at the front and at the rear. It's like pulling a rubber band at both ends; it'll snap when you pull it to the end."

Croft's voice was dry and monotone. "What does the department plan to do?"

"What can we do?" Greer sighed heavily.

"Push graduate students to the front lines and let preparatory students and undergraduates fill the vacancies left by graduate students."

"Are preparatory students filling graduate school positions?"

"Or you fill it out?"

Richard walked past the door without stopping.

The last thing he heard was Greer's nasal tone.

"If fighting breaks out on the Ottoman side, the demand for frontline scholars will double."

The inscription system on the eastern front is completely different from that on the western front; I have to learn it from scratch…

Soon, a second message arrived.

"In the Battle of Coronel, two Imperial armored cruisers sank, and more than 1,600 sailors were killed."

The commotion on campus was far greater than that caused by the Ottomans' entry into the war.

The navy is the backbone of this country.

For centuries, the empire has relied on this backbone to maintain its global hegemony, with colonies and trade routes underpinning every inch of its territory.

In most people's minds, the Imperial Navy will never lose.

But on the other side of the New World, the armored cruisers USS Bonhomme and USS Monmouth sank to the bottom of the ocean, taking more than 1,600 lives with them.

Richard learned about this during his lunch break.

The cafeteria was quieter than usual.

The usual sounds of people carrying plates, looking for seats, or chatting with acquaintances have largely disappeared.

Montagu sat by the window, his plate barely touched.

Fisher was talking to him from the side.

He later learned this from the notebook Catherine handed him.

There was a classmate from Yorkshire whose family were sailors on the HMS Monmouth.

After this news came out, he stopped coming to school.

Montagu and Fisher, the two squad leaders, were preparing to visit each other.

Richard wasn't familiar with that classmate; he was thinking about something else.

Sixteen hundred sailors sank to the bottom of the ocean.

As they sank, their fear and pain sank with them, more difficult to dissipate than the deathly aura lingering in the mud on land.

"Would a single incident involving 1,600 people in Coronel be enough to create a new drowning line?"

He couldn't answer that question.

If the answer is yes, then from now on, every large-scale naval battle that results in a shipwreck will add a new scar to the seabed behind the curtain.

The seas of the Old World were already riddled with sinking lines, a legacy of centuries of naval battles and sunken merchant ships.

Modern warships are steel behemoths weighing thousands of tons; if they sink, at least a thousand people will be lost.

If we continue filling the seabed at this rate, what will the curtain beneath the sea become?