I loaded the Mysticism panel.

On the first Wednesday of August, Richard was halfway through wiping the third shelf at Donner's shop when he was called out from the back room.

The person who came was a errand runner from the branch office, and he was covered in sweat.

"Mr. Williams! Professor McFee wants you to come to the back entrance of Petrie Building at six o'clock this afternoon!"

"Where to?"

"Grey Weir."

Donald looked up from the low stool and reacted when he heard the place name.

"The Fourth Factory?"

"Yes."

The short man took off his monocle and wiped it with his sleeve.

"Young man, I went to that place once twenty years ago."

"Back then, it was a dye factory. I went to collect a batch of old copper movable type."

The factory manager invited me for tea, and the girl who served it had purple hands.

"Purple?"

"Yes, purple." Donald tossed the cup around.

"And it can't be washed off; the purple color comes through from under the nail."

He gestured with his chin toward the back room.

"When going out on missions, remember to grab a handful of coarse salt and take it with you."

"I brought my own."

"Then grab another handful."

At 6:00 p.m., two cars were parked at the back door of the Petrie Building.

Ahead was the branch office's black van, still painted with "Municipal Sanitation Inspection Team" on its side.

The open-top truck behind them had toolboxes and metal buckets piled up in its bed.

A person was squatting on the hood of the car, arguing with the driver.

He was in his forties, and his beard was cut very haphazardly.

This is Greer, the bearded professor from the Faculty of Engineering at Imperial University. He has a pretty good relationship with Isabella, Croft, and others.

:

Richard enrolled last year and worked with this associate professor in the editorial group, so he was fairly familiar with him.

"I said I'd take East Embankment Road!"

"Dongdi Road is closed tonight, sir."

"It's locked down? Why didn't anyone tell me yesterday!"

"It wasn't sealed off yesterday."

Greer jumped off the hood of the car and turned to bump into Richard.

"It's been a while." He sized up the young man who had recently become the most popular in the preparatory group.

"Associate Professor Greer," Richard nodded in acknowledgment.

"Don't call me Associate Professor." Greer's eyebrows furrowed.

"Tonight I'm just a laborer who had my job stolen and ended up going along with it."

"You know Professor McFee's personality," the bearded man said, pointing to the car ahead with a blueprint.

"Yesterday afternoon, I went to the department office and pulled my form off the desk."

Greer spread his hands, looking helpless: "He told Pendleton: This trip is mine."

Why?

"How would I know?" Greer refolded the drawings.

"But this task doesn't require extensive expertise, yet they specifically dragged you here... I guess it's to give you a crash course."

"When I was a student, my advisor wouldn't even bother to treat me to a meal."

"I did the odd jobs in his lab for three years."

The bearded man shook his head, his face full of sorrow, even though he now felt the same way about his graduate students.

Just then, the door of the car in front opened.

McFee got out of the car, ducking to avoid hitting the door frame.

"Greeel, did you bring the factory plans?"

"I brought it, a new one."

Greer picked up the blueprints.

"The latest version, which was renovated in March of this year, was just copied back from the Quartermaster Department by graduate students last week."

:

Forty minutes east of the capital, the brick houses become shorter and fewer, and the roadsides are lined with gray-green mudflats.

The wind blows up from the river mouth, carrying a salty taste and a hint of something sweet that's hard to define.

Greer, standing nearby, said, "Don't inhale that."

"What is it?"

"Trinitrotoluene is the most common pollutant found in chemical plants."

Greer rolled up the window for him, and the carriage was quiet for a while.

Richard, who habitually maintained still water observation, discovered that Greer's ether did not dissipate outwards.

Whether you're an ordinary practitioner or someone with a minor expertise, ether always seeps into the surface of your body along the pathways, rubbing against everything it touches. Richard has seen far too many people this year.

Montagu's ether was flat, Catherine's was sharp, and McFaye's was pressed out from between the bones.

Greer's ether is all being drawn in.

The only official website address for this novel is: ".". The website owner has only this one website, and other websites may be discontinued at any time.

Is this the little expert in the tradition of hearth fire?

The bearded man smiled at him.

Croft complained in the department office that a student who walks on mirrors had suddenly appeared in the Classics Department this year.

When this guy was yelling, besides being arrogant, he also seemed to think you were ungrateful.

"And what about you?"

"Me?" Greer reached into his pocket with his left hand and pulled out a pair of calipers.

Under the influence of the ether, the calipers instantly disintegrated into various parts floating in mid-air: the main scale, vernier, locking screw, spring plate...

"Those old guys in the Classics Department look down on us, saying that industrial research is less than a hundred years old, and they think it's worthy of being called scholarship?"

"But we are the darlings of this era. Although scholars cannot build things like craftsmen, they can disassemble and modify these structures."

He slapped the reassembled vernier calipers onto Richard's hand and stroked his large beard.

"If a real accident happens, they'll still come looking for us."

Richard examined the vernier caliper and found that its shape had completely changed, but it still fit perfectly as before.

As the car rounded the embankment, the Fourth State-Owned Filling Plant of Huiyan stood in the middle of the mudflats.

Dozens of single-story sheds stand squarely, with narrow tracks laid between them, and small flatbed carts parked on the tracks.

:

Looking down from above, you see a whole box of matchboxes lined up on the muddy ground, only these matchboxes are rather large.

The car was parked at the factory gate.

The room borrowed by the branch office is behind the security room. It was originally the factory doctor's clinic, but tonight the factory doctor was sent to the dormitory to be on duty.

The three people inside were all logistics staff from the branch office, wearing the uniforms of the municipal sanitation inspection team.

The branch office staff had arrived at the factory several days in advance and had basically investigated the situation:

Last month, the front lines were in dire straits, so the Quartermaster Department increased the nightly ammunition loading quota for workers.

Meanwhile, the new law stipulates that female workers must obtain a certificate from the factory to resign, but the factory will not issue such a certificate.

After the workload increased, many female workers developed symptoms such as headaches and insomnia within just two weeks, but the factory doctor did not treat them as illnesses at all.

One of them said that his hands would still uncontrollably repeat the loading action after he got off work;

The foreman said that late at night, he could hear rhythmic muffled thuds under the long worktables, exactly like the beat of a tambourine being played.

On the other side, the curtain was also moving.

Before the war, there were at most three to five abnormal cases a month across the country, but last month there were dozens.

McFee explained it this way: War forces millions of people to repeat the same set of actions and the same commands at the same time. Such ceremonies, which were previously only held by churches and royalty, are now being held four times a day by the Quartermaster Corps.

By the end of July, major newspapers also began to refer to the female workers at the filling plant as "our canaries."

They were described as having "yellow skin for the country," and thus 320 named female workers were lumped together by a single term.

Richard recalled the concept of "life-changing" that he had learned in class: as long as a name is used for a long enough time and is believed to be true enough, it can usurp the place; this is called the right to define.

When the group arrived at the scene, the clerk lifted the canvas, and a sweet smell wafted out.

Richard then noticed a crack in the ground.

It was about three fingers wide, and the wind was blowing up from the crack.

Greer crouched down and pried out the broken bricks from the edge of the crack, which were covered with a layer of indelible purple stains.

He flipped the brick over and pointed to the broken edge.

"Look at this side, there's slag from the phosphorus furnace embedded in the bricks."

Richard leaned closer and saw a few whitish particles embedded in the broken surface.

"Before the 1970s, this land was a match factory."

Greer had clearly done his homework before he arrived.

:

"After the match factory collapsed, the kiln was not dismantled, and the slag was not removed."

When the dye factory was built in the 1980s, the foreman, to save time, mixed the slag into the bricks before firing them.

"The wall was demolished this March, and the pile of bricks was left on the east side of the land, and no one took care of it."

McFee, standing nearby, asked the most direct question: "Just tell me how many people have died."

Greer shook his head: "Not many people died at the match factory."

"What about the dye factory?"

"Not many people died in the dye factory."

"But it's just that these workers didn't die while on duty..."

"If a bombing kills twenty people, it's considered an accident, and a hearing will be held, and compensation will be paid in the newspaper."

Greer sneered, "Those workers at the match factory weren't killed in the explosion."

"Their gums will rot, and yellow phosphorus will get into their teeth. First, their teeth will ache and their jaws will swell, and then their bones will start to rot."

At night, their chins glow green; I've seen cases like that with my own eyes.

"Medically it's called phosphorus-induced osteonecrosis of the jaw, but the factory just calls it dental disease."

"In the end, everyone died in their own homes, and the death certificates all stated that they were physically weak."

"What about the batch from the dye factory?"

"The dye factory produces aniline purple."

As Greer spoke, he rubbed his hands together: "My hands are purple, and so is my urine. After working for ten years, I started urinating blood. Doctors would say it was kidney stones, and it wouldn't go down in the accident log."

"You're right!" the clerk realized.

"We searched the records up to this afternoon, a full fifty years, and the first name on the accident log only had a few machine accidents."

The sweet smell in the shed suddenly became even stronger.

"So this small weak point is not just a cause of death like a normal blood saturation point."

McFaye slowly summarized.

"They all work themselves to death, which is also a side effect of the modernization of the curtain."

Greer turned to the clerk: "By the way, are all the factories shut down today?"

"It's stopped. The factory reported fumigation and disinfection, and all the workers are resting in the dormitory. We sent two people to guard the door to prevent them from coming out."

:

"That's good."

McFee took off his coat and draped it over the long table.

"You all can go out now. It's up to us professionals to do the work now."

The clerks responded respectfully and quickly withdrew, their eyes filled with awe.

Richard activated the Mirror Condensation Technique, and information from the entire shed flooded in, including products that had been rotting in the cracks of the rubble for fifty years.

"Professor, there's something under the curtain."

"I know," McFee said, rolling up his sleeves. "I smelled it at the door."

"Today is a live teaching session, so don't think you can just sit on the sidelines and watch."

Richard still didn't understand what the other party meant.

Then they saw the white-haired giant raise his leg and stomp his foot at the edge of the crack, causing the entire shed to shake.

The bearded associate professor, who wasn't very familiar with McFee, was horrified, wondering if this was still a scholar, how could he be stronger than a hunter?

With a single stomp, the wind in the crack stopped abruptly.

Then, the wind started to be drawn in backwards.

Richard's hair was pulled down, and the yellow powder that hadn't been swept off the table was sucked into the crack.

"Okay, it heard you." McFaye stood ramrod straight.

The concrete in the crack was lifted up from the middle and flipped to both sides.

A hand reached out from the crack.

The hands were human hands, and they seemed to belong to a young woman, but they were yellowish in color.

The yellow hand gripped the edge of the crack, then a second, then a third...

Although there were hundreds of them, they didn't each pick their own.

They're on the same beat on the assembly line... gripping together, pulling hard, then releasing together.

The curtain has been flipped over, and the concrete beneath our feet has become our head.

The entire shed was folded in half from the middle.

Richard looked up; the armored canopy was hanging upside down above him.

There were two rows of long tables and 320 low stools. Half-filled bullet casings were placed on the tables, standing upright without falling down.

:

Further up, there was another shed.

Thirty-odd women sat at the table, their hands turning over the contents of the vat.

Each time they stirred the water in the vat, the color deepened, and the purple on their hands extended all the way up to their wrists.

Further inside, the third factory was so low that it was almost impossible to climb in.

There were no electric lights in the room, only rows of wooden racks with tens of thousands of matches dipped in hot oil, their heads facing upwards as densely packed as a wheat field.

The girls sitting there were even younger, and their chins glowed green.

The three sheds nested together, stacked upwards to form a well that seemed to stretch endlessly.

A huge, strange worm, tens of meters long, arched upwards segment by segment from the crack.

The body is made of iron, and each section is the outer cover of a conveyor belt roller. It is rusted black and has rivets left on the edges.

The strange insect's head was a funnel, and it was so black inside that you couldn't see the bottom.

Its sides were covered with human arms, growing out of the seams of the iron shell one after another, densely packed from head to tail.

The arms are layered in color, with the section closest to the head being yellow and shiny.

As you walk further on, the yellow fades into a dirty purple.

Further on, the purple faded into a very faint blue... that part of the arm would glow with a green light in the dark.

The three colors, arranged from beginning to end, represent the three generations of people in the factory who have been poisoned by chemicals over the past fifty years.

Richard frowned, instinctively feeling uneasy upon seeing this malevolent creature, more twisted than any ghost in a horror movie.

"Professor, what is this?"

"Don't you see those metal shells and chemically contaminated hands? That's the factory itself."

The strange worm in the shed stretched out and paddled with hundreds of arms at the same time.

It crawled over.

"Kid." McFee suddenly turned his head.

"Run to the left."

"What?"

"run!"

Richard obediently activated his flying shoes and ran off, but the giant worm immediately turned around and chased after him.

:

When the strange insect turned, its many arms remained perfectly still, completing the change of direction wave after wave from head to tail, just like someone plucking a row of piano keys with their fingers, producing a dense and crisp sound.

This eerie sight made Richard's heart tighten even more, and he increased his levitation speed even further.

But the worm was too big; all it took to catch up with it was to twist its body.

The bottomless funnel-shaped opening loomed over us.

Richard gritted his teeth, pushed the ether onto the small wings at his feet, and appeared dozens of meters away.

The funnel-shaped mouth slammed into the spot where he had just been standing, swallowing an entire long table whole without even chewing it.

After the table was swallowed, only a pile of sawdust fell out from behind the funnel.

Richard leaned against the wall, panting.

"Your reaction time is pretty good, kid." McFee was still standing there with his arms crossed, watching the show with amusement.

He pointed to the pile of sawdust: "If you were swallowed... your hand would be sewn onto it, becoming its hundred and first leg."

Where are they?

"It doesn't want the rest of the human body."

The giant insect had turned around and was now aimed at the center of the shed again.

McFee stood there motionless as the funnel tip came crashing down.

Although Richard knew that the professor didn't need him to worry, he still couldn't help but feel a little nervous.

Amidst the smoke and dust, McFaye had already raised his right hand.

The index and middle fingers are held together, and the thumb is loosely tucked underneath; that's the gesture for holding a pen.

He made a diagonal motion in the air.

It was so fast that Richard almost thought he had just waved his hand casually.

But the next moment, the first thirty segments of the giant worm broke off cleanly in the middle.

Richard's still waters reflected the spot where the knife had fallen.

That stroke was erased from the edge, and the thirty sections of the iron shell lost their reason to move forward, collapsing to the ground on the spot, dozens of arms stretched out straight and motionless.

The funnel head fell down, hit the concrete, and rolled a long way.

Richard's mouth was agape, and he couldn't close it for a long time.

"You..."

:

"This is the broken branch." McFee lowered his hand.

"Catherine's booklet says to do it in three steps: read, cut, and wipe, but I can reduce it to one step."

"However, we can't kill it for now."

Upon hearing this, Richard turned his head away.

The broken metal shells on the ground were then reassembled by pulling back all thirty broken sections.

The interfaces aligned, the rivets engaged, and the funnel was lifted from the ground by a bunch of arms and put back on its head.

McFaye shook his hand and looked at him.

"I only cut the leaves; to completely solve the problem, you need to cut the roots."

"You find this root."

Richard's expression was not good: "Professor..."

"Alright, stop talking nonsense, otherwise why did I bring you here?"

The white-haired giant rolled up his sleeves a little further.

"I can chop it into a pile of scrap metal in less than ten minutes by myself, and you won't learn anything from that."

Next time you encounter something similar, you'll still just have to stand there and watch.

The giant worm charged forward again, and McFee took a step forward.

This time, he didn't even lift his hand before stepping down.

The traditional etheric field for moon hunting was spread out, and the distances between the entire sheds became disordered.

Richard could clearly see the worm was only thirty meters away, but upon another glance, it seemed to be hundreds of yards away at the edge of the wilderness.

The thing rushed into the cold glow of the moon, and its speed was reduced by more than half on the spot.

McFee strolled leisurely in the cold light, making a mark with each step he took.

Arms fell off the metal shell in rows, only to be pulled back and reattached repeatedly.

Connect it, then disconnect it, then connect it again—McFee is playing with this bug.

"Kid!" McFee called out to Richard.

"I'll hold out until you find the root of the problem!"

"Of course, it's okay if you can't find it."

:

The white-haired giant laughed heartily:

"If I can't find it, I'll chop it up piece by piece until tomorrow morning."

"Then you go back and keep copying the book until next year."

Richard had no choice but to take action, first using the Mirroring Technique to shine a light on the giant insect.

The moment he looked back, he felt something was off.

The giant insect didn't have a proper name; it only had a string of numbers from the deceased's employee ID card.

The numbers were densely packed, with new ones overlapping old ones, and the outermost layer was still being updated.

The voice of the white-haired giant echoed down.

"The workers have been doing this job for fifty years, and by the end they don't even remember their own names."

"So now it only remembers how to do the work."

If you can't understand it, then talking about breaking branches is just empty talk.

Greer, standing next to him, wasn't idle either, pressing both palms firmly onto the concrete.

Ether walked close to the ground, climbing up the giant insect's segmented iron shell along the cracks in the rubble.

Richard could sense that the bearded man was also reading the worm through the rusty skin.

In less than half a minute, Greer had completed the entire iron shell process.

Greer looked up.

"Kid, I'll give you a hand and make things easier for you."

As the bearded man clenched his fist, the iron shell on the giant insect began to fade segment by segment.

The furnace can forge, and it can also do the opposite.

The insect crawled halfway across the ground and suddenly stopped.

It felt no pain, but could feel its metal shell becoming brittle and crunchy.

The white-haired giant seized the opportunity, raised his hand, and slashed horizontally, instantly cutting the giant worm in half.

"..."

McFee himself was stunned for a moment, then quickly got into lecturing mode.

"Kid, remember what you just saw."

:

The last sixty sections pulled back the forty sections that had been broken and reconnected them.

Greer sat on the ground.

"I only read its outer shell, and in the end..."

Before he could finish speaking, the giant insect turned around and charged at the bearded man sitting on the ground.

Greer raised his hand and slapped it on the ground.

The ground crackled as hundreds of abandoned factory parts simultaneously came loose from their clips.

Within Richard's field of vision, there were over three hundred idler roller covers, over one hundred shafts, several boxes of rivets, two rolls of scrap steel belt... they all came over.

The parts started lining up on their own, rivets flew out of the box and landed in the holes they were supposed to, and steel straps stuck on to hold them in place.

The fight was swift; in the blink of an eye, a thick, curved wall rose up in front of Greer.

The giant worm crashed into it head-on.

The funnel head struck the center of the curved wall, causing the entire wall to dent backward.

But the curved surface diverted all the force of the impact to the sides and into the ground.

"This is……"

"Railway snow shelters, that's the beauty of engineering." Greer gave Richard a thumbs up from behind the wall.

"It's very durable; it can withstand 200 pounds of pressure in one session."

However, when an insect crashes into a single point, the curved surface doesn't exert much force.

The giant worm retreated a little and crashed into it again, causing the curved wall to cave in once more.

Greer shouted, "I've calculated it, I can still hold on for seventeen more!"

"Don't worry, if you're still not done after seventeen strokes, I'll take it apart and install something else!"

Li sensed the pressure was mounting, so he retreated behind a partially collapsed concrete pillar.

As his back pressed against the cold surface of the pillar, he took a couple of breaths before realizing something was very wrong.

From the moment he darted out in his flying shoes, the giant worm never turned its head in his direction again.

It went to ram Greer, circling McFee's cold glow, but never once looked at him.

With a silver ring, a hawk hook, and [Perception & Reflection], even without considering the Hermes Mask, he already has three layers of protection.

...The first time he was chased was probably because McFaye deliberately teased him, letting him run first.

:

The other two people stood still, so the one who started moving first naturally chased first.

Richard leaned against a pillar, regaining his composure.

[Critical Thinking] Begin high-speed long-distance turning.

Since reading directly from the body doesn't work, why not try mirror reflection? That's what I'm best at.

Richard caught a glimpse of light out of the corner of his eye and discovered a row of thin glass panels on the side of the shed.

It was a one-tenth-thick flat glass, nailed to the wall panel, covered with an indelible yellow powder.

The yellow powder reflected off the entire shed: scattered iron shells, Greer squatting on the ground emitting white steam, and a huge, strange insect being chopped up piece by piece and then put back together.

Richard felt he had grasped the key.

The traditional reading for a mirror should be "reflection".

That night, McFaye taught him how to build the door frame of the village of Fire-Smothering.

"Ogwen is engraved on the edge."

"The edge is the boundary, and the boundary is where it belongs."

When a branch is severed, the knife strikes its sharpest edge.

Richard looked up at the row of glass windows.

A piece of glass, the boundary between the inside and the outside is the edge.

So the reflection falling on the glass was originally lying on this edge.

Richard turned his back to the battlefield and faced a row of glass windows.

McFaye glanced back in the cold light and smiled.

"Good lad."

In Richard's view, the small scene behind the curtain was reflected through the glass.

The giant insect inside the glass was very small, only the size of a palm.

Those densely packed arms shrank into a thin row, and the funnel-shaped mouth shrank into a black dot.

Richard pressed his eyes to the small patch of reflection and began to read intently.

On his first viewing, he couldn't see anything clearly; there were indeed too many—hundreds of arms, a hundred sections of metal shell, and a funnel-shaped mouth, all moving.

The second time, he narrowed the range to one arm, which was used to push off the ground and slide backward before releasing.

:

Then gradually expand, and all the arm movements are the same.

The root cause has surfaced.

Starting from the funnel-shaped opening, follow the spine along the entire body backward, ending at the tail.

From the day that batch of phosphorus slag from the match factory was poured into the brick kiln, it has only written this one chapter in the past fifty years.

Once you've read it aloud, the next step is to strike.

Thanks to the multiple senses shielding, it was only at this moment that the person in question realized their vitals were being held in someone's hands.

The rhythmic, clear sound that had been constantly drawing lines around Greer, like the crisp sound of a piano being played, suddenly became disordered.

The worm suddenly veered off course, turning back from in front of the curved wall. Dozens of its metal segments scraped a long white mark across the concrete, heading straight for the row of glass windows.

Blocking can only conceal one's existence, not one's actions.

"Kid!" Greer peeked out from behind the curved wall.

McFaye raised his hand, then lowered it halfway down.

The white-haired giant stood motionless in the cold light, only slightly tucking his chin in.

The meaning was crystal clear: You draw it yourself.

The sweet taste from the giant worm's mouth had already seeped through.

Richard maintained his pen-holding posture and tentatively swung the knife first.

"Cheer".

Since no casting medium was used, the blow was very light.

But the crisp sound of hundreds of arms scraping the ground, the dull thud of metal shells snapping together, and the relentless erasures in the cold light... were all drowned out by this one sound.

The worm's twelfth joint was torn open, and it was still pushing forward, but the first eleven segments could no longer push forward.

It stopped halfway, its entire body twisted into an awkward angle from the middle.

Richard reached into his inner pocket and touched the antlers that were wrapped with the reins.

He had only recently realized that since the antlers could be used with [Moon Nail], they would be even more effective as a medium for the Branch Severing Technique.

Richard took it out and turned it so that the horn was pointing downwards.

The beginning, direction, and ending of the strokes in that small reflection on the glass were all laid out on his watery surface.

The horn tip pressed against the glass, and suddenly turned cold the moment it entered the execution line.

:

The antlers trembled in his palm, trembling with particular excitement.

Without hesitation, Richard sliced ​​the corner diagonally downwards along the edge.

: