I loaded the Mysticism panel.

Three new notice boards have been installed in the corridor of the teaching building.

The largest section was covered with blackout regulations, several pages of them densely packed together.

The second section was full of notices regarding the distribution of supplies, including rationing of sugar, fresh meat, and eggs distributed per household.

Someone added a handwritten note next to it; it was posted by someone from the student council:

"The cafeteria butter has been replaced with margarine. Please bring your own if you are not comfortable with it."

The last piece of text was worded very politely, an initiative encouraging students to volunteer at hospitals in the rear during their holidays.

"Your hands can also contribute to this war."

Several names were signed below, all of them the most senior professors in the department.

Grey also recently wrote him a letter.

Richard:

The toast at our school no longer has jam on it.

Chocolate is also limited; each person can only receive two pieces per week.

Some students in the class started bringing their own snacks from home.

Heidi stole half of Cunningham's jam jar, and the two of them argued so loudly in the dorm that the whole floor could hear them.

How's the food over there?

Have you eaten enough?

At the end of the letter, she drew an emoji that she had invented herself.

A round face, eyes that look like two small dots, and a mouth that curves downwards.

Sad face.

Richard folded the letter and put it in the drawer.

The changes to the canteens at Imperial Capital University are indeed very noticeable.

Steak has disappeared from the menu for two weeks, replaced by a grayish stuff that the kitchen ladies have worked hard to turn into a paste.

It's supposed to contain beef, but all you can taste is oatmeal porridge and flour mixed with soybean oil.

The butter is completely gone.

The whitish, odorless lump on the table was the "margarine" mentioned in the notice.

When Richard first spread margarine on bread, the level 3 [Eating] skill's [Filter] trait performed a full scan of the bread.

The feedback he received made him realize that he could actually just eat plain white bread.

But he ate it anyway.

Wasting food is wrong, and his mother's words echoed in his mind: "Wasting food is worse than failing a grade!"

The cafeteria lady still sighed every time she saw him come.

When Richard handed over the plate, the woman was scooping food from the pot with a spoon for quite a while.

She poured more than half a spoonful of food than others onto his plate, then rolled her eyes at him.

That glance probably meant: "You're so thin, yet you eat so much. I wonder where all that food goes."

Richard thanked him, picked up his tray, and found a corner to sit down.

He had gotten used to sitting in the corner.

If he sits in the middle, the students around him will be speechless when they see the amount of food he eats, which is piled up to the edge of his plate.

Halfway through the meal, Catherine came over with her plate and started writing in her notebook.

How many servings did you eat today?

She sat down opposite her; there was very little food on her plate.

A piece of bread, half a bowl of soup, and a small portion of vegetables.

Three portions.

Catherine glanced down at her half-bowl of soup, then at the small mountain in front of Richard.

"A hunter eating this much will build muscle." She broke off a piece of bread and dipped it into the soup. "You'll only grow brains from eating this much."

"I'd rather have a brain."

Catherine glanced at him with her grey-green eyes and began to eat her lunch.

Speaking of which, Richard noticed that Montagu had recently started wearing a silver ring on the little finger of his left hand.

He has handled many old silver items, and it's clear that the ring is quite old.

Montagu remains very steady in class, his discussions during breaks are well-organized, and he can still be seen in the training room every night.

But the other person's usual smile... even the fake smile was gone, and his classmates didn't dare to talk to him anymore.

Based on what he had said about his brother before, Richard probably guessed something.

That afternoon, Richard packed up the actual Cretan figurine and all the rubbings together and knocked on Croft's office door.

Croft had several papers waiting to be reviewed spread out in front of him, and on the table was still that cup of tea so bitter it could make one question the meaning of life.

"Come in."

Richard closed the door and placed the terracotta figurine and the envelope together on the only small empty space on the table.

"Associate Professor Croft, this is a Cretan labyrinthine ceramic figurine."

Its original function was as a maze guide; the inner contents have leaked out, but the background inscriptions are well preserved.

"The rubbing and the authentication report are both in the envelope."

Croft frowned, casually opened the envelope, and pulled out the report to read.

"You drew this section yourself."

His finger tapped on the seventh page of the rubbing.

"Yes."

"Well done." Croft closed the rubbing.

After inspecting the clay figurines, he took out a rubber stamp from the drawer and pressed it hard into the lower right corner of the report.

A red owl wreath was imprinted on the paper, next to Richard's signature.

"This is the fourth physical reference in the department related to the Cretan labyrinth tradition."

Croft handed the stamped report back.

"The collection register will indicate the donor—Richard Williams, preparatory class of the Department of Classics, Imperial University."

He turned around, a familiar, sinister smile on his face.

"If anyone uses this in the future, your name will appear in the footnote."

"You left your name too, kid."

Richard left the office and closed the door behind him.

As expected, Instructor Pollock added an extra class next week.

The notice read "Supplementary Topic on Ritual Language," without further explanation.

On the day of class, not only were all the preparatory students present, but even several senior undergraduates squeezed in.

"What I'll be talking about today," Pollock said, pressing the chalk onto the blackboard.

"It's related to war."

The chalk slowly wrote a line of words on the blackboard:

"requiem aeternam dona eis, domine."

(Grant them eternal rest, Lord.)

Everyone sitting in the lecture hall recognized this sentence; it is the most famous line from the Requiem Mass.

It is sung in churches year after year, month after month, at funerals, and on memorial days.

Pollock pulled another sheet of paper from under the lecture notes.

"Feedback from the front lines." He spread the paper out on the podium.

"Those young scholars who have just graduated from school use only the prayers from the church's version of the Mass, because that's what they learned in school."

"When they arrived at the front lines, their cries of death went unheard."

Pollock turned the paper around so that people in the front row could see it too.

"The ceremonial terms taught in current textbooks, the scholars recited for half a day on the front lines, but the words didn't change at all."

He picked up the chalk again.

"Therefore, the higher-ups demanded that the original text be returned."

"At least I'll teach you the original versions of those keywords, so you'll have more options when you get to the front lines."

The class lasted two hours.

Richard copied every paragraph into his notebook.

[博闻] automatically created a mental index comparing the original text with the Mass text.

When get out of class ended, Pollock tapped the chalk on the podium.

"I don't know how many of you here will go to the front lines in the future, based on what I've said today."

"But even if you spend your whole life sitting in an office in the capital, knowing what these extracted teeth look like is better than not knowing at all."

He put the chalk back in the chalk tray.

"get out of class dismissed."

On the last Monday of November, Croft reopened the windowless classroom.

Among the people who came in today, in addition to the veterans from the editing team last time, there were also quite a few new faces, including preparatory students and undergraduates.

None of the graduate students came; they all had other fieldwork assignments.

Fisher, sitting in the corner, was still munching on bread, not even bothering to brush off the crumbs that had fallen onto his collar.

Croft leaned against the podium.

"We have a field job coming up."

"Foxstone Harbor, refugee reception camp."

He wrote the place name on the blackboard with chalk; the characters were large and took up almost half of the blackboard.

"You should have read about what happened at the end of October in the newspapers."

The allies retreated to the Iser River defense line, and when they couldn't advance any further, they opened the river sluice gates.

Several students nodded.

This incident was featured on the front page of newspapers for several days, described from various angles.

Some say it was a "heroic self-sacrifice, with allies sacrificing their territory to hold off the enemy."

Some used only one line of small print:

"About 1,200 square miles of low-lying plains in western Flanders were submerged by seawater."

Twelve hundred square miles—that's a huge area.

It is roughly more than twice the size of all the administrative districts in the entire capital city.

"The seawater overflowed and submerged the entire plain."

Croft laid the report on the table and pressed his fingertips against the paper.

"They washed away the trenches and artillery positions, as well as the soldiers on both sides."

The tactical objective was achieved, but it also soaked what was originally buried beneath that piece of land.

No one in the classroom responded.

Croft turned the page of the report.

"That low-lying area of ​​Flanders was the territory of the ancient Gauls thousands of years ago."

You should have learned a bit about the relationship between the Gauls and water in Pollock's class.

"Of course I've studied it," Richard thought, searching through the information in his mind.

The ancient Gauls worshipped water, and rivers, springs, wells, swamps, and any place where water could accumulate could become a site of worship.

They threw offerings into the water, mostly miscellaneous items such as weapons, jewelry, and coins, and occasionally some living things were thrown in as well.

The saying goes, "It takes a thousand years to dry, and ten thousand years to wet," meaning that things submerged in water are preserved very well.

Krov pointed to a section of the report that was underlined in red.

"Once the sluice gate was opened, saltwater rushed in, disturbing and reviving the sealed structure of the freshwater sacrificial site."

"What's awakened?" Montagu was the first to speak.

"There are no definitive test results yet," Croft shook his head.

"The expedition team is still conducting assessments near the waterline, but one thing has been confirmed."

He laid out the second and third pages of the report side by side.

"The refugees who escaped from that flooded area were covered in a layer of... dampness."

Croft looked up after reading the line.

"The frontline assessment team said that the dampness was stuck to the refugees' fear, so thin that it couldn't be detected by conventional clairvoyance."

You can't read anything using standard testing methods, but the areas where refugees have passed through will experience dampness.

"What kind of dampness?" an undergraduate student asked.

Croft shook his head.

"It has nothing to do with ether; it's just water vapor condensing on the floor and walls."

The volunteers at the reception camp thought it was damp from the sea breeze and tried to dry it with a mop for three days, but it wouldn't come off.

He turned to the third page of the report.

"What follows is more interesting."

"During the first week, three children at the reception camp said they saw 'people in the water'."

"The adults thought it was a nightmare, but it's perfectly normal for those kids to have nightmares after just escaping from the flooded area."

"In the second week, the temporary water supply line set up at the camp leaked salty water between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. for two consecutive days."

The port authority inspected the pipelines and water sources, and everything was normal.

The pipeline is connected to the local water supply, and the water from the local water treatment plant is desalinated.

"But the water coming out of the pipe was salty during those two hours."

"Week 3," Croft continued.

"A volunteer nurse on night shift discovered during rounds that all the sleeping refugees in a row of tents had completely synchronized breathing rhythms."

Richard felt a chill run down the back of his neck.

"Inhale and exhale simultaneously, with the intervals precise to the second. The nurse woke one of them up, and the person said he was dreaming."

Croft looked up from the announcement and at the students below the stage.

"I dreamt that I was sinking to the bottom of the water, and something was breathing for me."

He closed the notice.

"The Beijing branch office has already sent the first group of people to conduct an assessment. The conclusion is that the danger level is not high, but the area affected is expanding."

Refugees are arriving in droves, pouring into the port every day, their numbers accumulating with that layer of 'dampness'.

"All those who could go to the front lines were withdrawn. The final plan was for the Internal Affairs Department to transfer young professionals to Folkestone for training."

Croft slammed the report onto the podium.

"This is a good opportunity for practical training. You guys are just sitting around doing nothing anyway, so why not go and gain some field experience?"

He glanced around at the people in the audience.

"It's voluntary. If you want to go, come register with me after class."

After class, Richard stood on the windowsill in the corridor for a while before registering.

The same familiar faces enrolled with him in the preparatory class.

Edith was the first to sign up this time, still resentful about being left out of the editing team's work last time.

She certainly wouldn't let this opportunity to put her skills into practice slip by.

After Fisher finished signing, he muttered something to Richard:

"Should I bring a few more spare shirts? I heard it's very cold at the port..."

"It's fine whether you bring it or not," Richard said. "You won't have time to change once you get there anyway."