I loaded the Mysticism panel.

It was past dinnertime when we returned to Ashford House.

The butler heated up some soup and bread for him, and he ate it at the stone table in the back porch.

The wind came around from the garden, carrying the scent of pruned rose branches and damp earth.

After finishing his meal, he went inside and called Briston. It rang six times before someone answered.

"Feed?"

"Mom, it's me."

"Have you eaten yet?"

"have eaten."

"What did you eat?"

"Soup and bread."

"Only soup and bread?"

"A piece of cheese was added."

The mother muttered something like, "What good is cheese?" on the other end of the line, then changed the subject.

"Evelyn made a huge mess of the kitchen today; she was testing a meringue cake recipe that uses honey instead of sugar."

"Did you succeed?"

"It's only half done." There was a hint of bitterness in Margaret's voice.

"The egg whites were whipped, but they collapsed when I put them in the oven."

She lay in front of the oven for twenty minutes, watching it slowly sag.

"and then?"

"Then she took the collapsed cake out of the oven, cut it into pieces, and said it was called a 'flat cake,' a new variety she had invented."

"Your dad tried it and said it tasted good but was too flat. She glared at your dad."

Richard almost burst out laughing.

"Mom," he got back to the point. "Has anything strange happened in the slag heap alley lately?"

There was a two-second silence on the phone line.

I heard the sound of a chair being moved from my mother's side; she probably changed her sitting position.

"People on the street are frantically searching for mediums."

Margaret's voice turned somber.

"Last week, Mrs. Wells spent one shilling and sixpence on a psychic book and took me to her house to 'invite the spirit' together, saying that she wanted to talk to her deceased husband."

"What did you say?"

I refused.

The mother's tone was very decisive.

"I told Mrs. Wells that if you really want to talk to him, just go to church and light a candle for him. Don't touch any of that nonsense."

Richard breathed a sigh of relief.

Did she listen?

She said I was superstitious.

Margaret herself was speechless.

"Someone who wants to invoke spirits called me superstitious."

Richard leaned against the telephone partition.

"Mom, could you please stop Mrs. Wells a little? Don't let her actually follow the steps in the book."

"Don't worry, the old lady is actually quite timid. She flipped through two pages and then said she couldn't understand it and put it down. But the lady who sells smoked fish at the alley entrance..."

Her sigh came through the phone line.

After Richard hung up the phone, he stood in the corridor for a while.

He instinctively wanted to call Wentworth, and his hand was already on the phone.

Then he withdrew his hand and suddenly realized that Wentworth was no longer there.

Richard dialed the branch office's public number, and after three rings, it was answered.

"Bristol Branch Office, Duty Desk."

The voice was young, with a northern accent, and not someone Richard knew.

"Hello, I am Richard Williams, a trainee inspector, and a very diligent staff member."

"Oh... hello, sir."

The duty officer's tone became a little warmer.

"How can I help you?"

Have there been more spirit-summoning events in the Briston area lately?

"Ah, the branch office has already taken note of this."

The duty officer was rummaging through something.

"Several folk séances were indeed reported around Christmas."

There's one on West Lane, two on Black Ditch Road, and someone is doing it near Slag Lane.

"Did they intervene?"

"No, for the time being. It has been classified as a folk superstition activity and has not met the standards for intervention."

The duty officer paused, seemingly checking if the wording was accurate.

"No ether anomaly was detected," he emphasized.

"Okay," Richard said. "If anything unusual happens, please notify Lieutenant Colonel Odd."

"Received, sir."

Richard hung up the phone.

Briston is a small town. That great battle wiped out the Unspeakable Pit and the Black Ditch, and the entire town's ethereal field was completely subdued by the two experts.

In the short term, Briston is unlikely to encounter any problems.

But the capital city is different.

The capital city has an ancient sealing network that is hundreds of years old, with underground pipes that are even denser than those above ground.

If the summoning of spirits in the capital continues to spread, the loopholes exposed by those amateur séances will sooner or later resonate with the group of dead who woke up on Christmas Eve.

Richard went upstairs to the second floor and closed the door.

He sat down at his desk without turning on the desk lamp.

A sliver of moonlight peeked through the gap in the curtains and fell directly on the lid of the frost-covered box on the table.

Besides the brass clasp, the box also contained the identity plaque.

Hercules said that some people are alive in the no man's land.

Those deserters, dressed in cobbled-together uniforms, huddled in shell craters and bunker ruins during the day and came out at night to drag away the corpses of the dead.

School started early on January 6th.

Before dawn broke in the capital, Richard walked into the Petrie Building with a canvas bag on his back.

The corridor was empty, and his leather shoes echoed as they stomped on the stone slabs.

A new notice has been posted at the corner on the first floor:

"Due to adjustments in wartime teaching arrangements, this semester will begin one week earlier. Students in all classes are requested to register by January 6th."

He didn't go to the classroom, but went straight up to the second floor and turned into room 314.

Before he even opened the door, he could smell the aroma of grapefruit tea, a signal that his aunt was there.

"Close the door." Isabella said without looking up.

Richard closed the door, walked to the table, and looked down at the map.

"From Christmas to yesterday, there have been 31 psychic incidents in two weeks."

My aunt moved the teacup away.

"Before the war, the capital city only saw about ten such cases a year."

Richard instinctively used [speculation] to make spatial comparisons.

He mentally marked each location on the 31-page map, then drew lines on them.

Finally, three arcs extend out, all converging in the same direction.

The southeastern direction of the strait is also the direction of the front line.

"Auntie," Richard frowned, "this shouldn't be spontaneous."

"Someone is exploiting the 'spirit summoning' craze."

Isabella looked at the red markers on the map one last time before speaking.

"Oh, right, there are two more things I'd like you to take a look at."

Richard opened the frost branch box and placed the lead-sealed tube and cornflower copper clasp on the table.

"Where did these two things come from?" Isabella asked first.

"I have a hunter friend at the front who asked someone to bring it back."

Richard had already planned it out.

"He was clearing out the ruins of a bunker that had been blown over by artillery fire in Flanders, and he pulled it out from inside."

He couldn't understand it himself, so he asked me to help him identify it.

Isabella took a pair of cotton gloves from the drawer and put them on, then turned the lead cylinder over twice.

"Have you checked it yourself using any methods?"

"I tried to probe the inspiration once, but it bounced off as soon as I applied it; the concentration of ether inside was extremely high."

She pressed the lead cylinder to weigh it, then put it back on the table.

"The lead wall is too thick; we can't probe it out."

Isabella took off her cotton gloves, walked to the old bookshelf by the window, bent down and rummaged through it for a long time.

He pulled out a flat leather bag, which, when opened, revealed a set of silver tools.

A blunt silver needle, a delicate vernier caliper no longer than a finger, three small glass tubes filled with different liquids, and a bronze mirror no bigger than a fingernail.

"People in the traditional textual tradition disassemble things by copying their structure from the outside."

My aunt stood the bronze mirror there, with the mirror surface facing the lead cylinder.

Richard secretly scanned it with his spiritual vision.

The bronze mirror lit up, reflecting the inner wall of the lead cylinder, revealing layer by layer what lay behind the lead walls.

On the third layer... the complete outline of a token appeared on the mirror.

The token is octagonal and slightly larger than a copper penny.

The surface is covered with vertical lines and diagonal knife marks, which are runes.

The token has a main symbol engraved in the center of the front – ?, with the phonetic value p.

Richard's "Knowledge" database automatically displayed the corresponding entries.

In Nordic tradition, it is called pertho, and its meaning is debated. However, in ritual settings, it is usually associated with "fate," "dice," and "hidden objects."

More importantly, there's a small floral pattern in the lower left corner of the front of the token.

The five petals with a dot in the center are also cornflower petals.

The token contained a ritual instruction, which was an anchor.

Isabella put the bronze mirror away, her expression already frosty.

"The no-man's-land stretches for hundreds of miles. If we buried one of these anchors at regular intervals..."

"The entire corridor is like a pipe, one end of which is filled with the dead bodies from the front lines, and the other end..."

Richard's gaze shifted to the map of the capital city on the table, marked with red dots.

"On the other end is the soul-summoning ceremony in the capital."

"Cornflower and Rune Mother Pattern," Isabella stated the information she knew.

"I've seen the German military's 'Rune Brigade' in the intelligence summary of the Imperial Capital University's exchange database."

"Auntie." Richard put the lead tube back into the frost branch box.

"Does the higher-ups know about this intelligence?"

Isabella remained noncommittal: "What do you think?"

Richard certainly didn't think he was the only smart person in the world.

He was able to discover and connect the clues, and those higher up would only find out sooner.

Isabella put the bronze mirror into her leather bag.

"I'll prepare the identification report for the lead cylinder tomorrow and submit it along with the map showing the distribution of psychic incidents in the capital."

"Let your grandfather hand it over; his words carry more weight than all of ours combined."

That same afternoon, after Gerald submitted his report, the secretary of Inspector General Phillips called and arranged to meet at an old-fashioned gentlemen's club near the Interior Ministry.

Richard went there with his maternal grandfather.

The club's leather sofas were worn smooth and patina-covered, and the air was filled with the smell of cigars.

Old Phillips had already taken a seat in the corner.

Compared to his son, old Phillips was thinner and had his hair shaved very short.

Richard noticed that the chief inspector also had graying temples and could be considered to be of the same generation as his maternal grandfather, so it seemed that the other party had a son late in life.

"Gerald." Old Phillips stood up and shook hands with his grandfather.

Then his gaze shifted to Richard.

Richard is here too.

The three people sat down, and a waiter brought them tea.

Old Phillips opened the report, read through Richard's assessment, and stopped at the section on rune anchors.

"The Rune of the Rune Journey..." He closed the report and leaned back in his chair.

"I saw this kind of thing in an intelligence summary three years ago."

At the time, this organization had just been established in Germania, and our internal assessment concluded that it had "limited effectiveness and did not pose a threat at the moment."

Old Phillips turned his attention to Gerald.

"Gerald, your grandson is quite something."

"It's alright," Gerald said, holding his teacup, appearing completely unfazed.

"His academic performance is okay, but everything else... is so-so."

"Barely?" Old Phillips's lips curled down.

"You've met my youngest son."

"I've met him." Gerald nodded. "A very good kid."

"Pretty good?" Old Phillips chuckled.

"I hired tutors for him when he was six, he learned Latin at eight, and memorized conjugation charts at ten. I paved the way for his education."

"During the summer training assessment, 20 out of 30 people passed, but he didn't."

"He would rather read a book on Ovid than even glance at the pile of documents in my study."

Gerrard took a sip of tea, his face showing no sign of smugness.

"Young people, take your time."

As he said this, Richard noticed that his grandfather's micro-expression was a bit off.

My grandfather, who usually has a stern face, has now smoothed out all the wrinkles on his face.

Whether old Phillips noticed or not, he simply sighed.

"Your grandson is not only good at studying, but also excels in fieldwork."

"To be able to write such an appraisal report at the age of seventeen, disassembling each cursed object with crystal clarity."

"My son is eighteen years old, and all he brought back were several boxes of old books that other people had discarded and a belly full of tea."

He pushed the report back to the center of the table.

"Never mind, let's not talk about it."

The group chatted for a while longer about official business and arrangements for the trip to Whitby, then old Phillips put the report into his briefcase.

"I'll pass this up."

He stood up and tugged at the hem of his coat.

"But let me tell you something upfront."

"Submitting it is one thing, but whether it gets approved or not is not up to me."

Gerrard also stood up.

"I know."

The two shook hands, and old Phillips' gaze lingered on Richard for a final moment.

"Next time you see my son, could you please help us talk to him?"

"Please speak."

Old Phillips frowned and thought for a moment, then shook his head at himself.

"Forget it, there's no need to say anything more. He won't listen anyway."

He picked up his briefcase and left, walking quickly.