I loaded the Mysticism panel.

Richard kept everyone in suspense for a moment:

"The committee held a meeting for three hours this morning and finally made a decision."

Luca was putting a potato into his mouth, waiting for him to continue.

"What decision did you make?"

"The decision is to continue the meeting this afternoon."

Upon hearing this, the restaurant fell silent; everyone seemed speechless at Richard's lame joke.

The scribe from Naples sat at the far end of the table, spreading sauce from a plate with bread.

"Oh, that's how it is... That's how officials from Rome are."

Meetings in the morning, meetings in the afternoon, and then back at the hotel at night I still have to write meeting reports. I absolutely hate it.

The man from Genoa stared wide-eyed.

"Aren't you from Naples? How do you know the Romans were like this?"

"I studied at the university in Rome for a year."

The people of Rome had a peculiar habit: they liked to cast these four letters on public objects.

The Neapolitan scribe wrote "p" (an abbreviation for the Senate and the Roman people) on a plate with sauce.

"The fountains, streetlights, municipal garbage trucks, and even the manhole covers over there are all p-shaped."

If you walk down a street in Rome and glance down, you'll see the Senate and the people of Rome standing beneath your feet.

Upon hearing this, the tall scribe asked a question slowly.

"When you were studying in Rome, did you ever spit on the manhole covers of the Senate or the Roman people?"

Neapolitans no longer wipe plates.

He remained silent for a long while before painfully admitting, "I threw up once."

Everyone at the table moved closer to him.

"I drank some alcohol that day, and I regretted it as soon as I threw up."

Just imagine, under that manhole cover are Caesar, Augustus, Diocletian... a great empire spanning a full thousand years.

I rinsed my mouth three times before lying down in bed, and I kept feeling like Emperor Ramzan was watching me from the ceiling.

"And then?"

"Then in the second semester, I was expelled and returned to Naples."

The tall man nodded: "Everyone sees that? This is the Roman Senate's punishment for those who are disrespectful!"

The whole table burst into laughter.

Luca slammed his fist on the table, gasping for breath. The Genoese man laughed as he quickly moved his wine glass away.

Richard laughed for a while, then stopped.

Indeed, in the illustrations of Greenwood's history textbooks, the eagles of the Roman legions bear this abbreviation;

There is also a rubbing of the Arc de Triomphe in the archives of Imperial University, with the character "p" engraved in the center of the lintel.

These four letters represent the Roman Senate, which was dissolved 1500 years ago, but the four letters themselves have survived to this day and are integrated into every aspect of the city of Rome.

He then recalled what Professor Talia Ferro had said about af at yesterday's meeting.

The committee then met again the following morning.

As soon as Professor Talia Ferro, representing the scholars, sat down, she opened a small wooden box and showed it to all the representatives.

The wooden box contained a small piece of white marble, only the size of a thumb, carved into the shape of a human nose.

The professor, in his usual calm tone, said something rather pessimistic.

"Ladies and gentlemen, three days ago the committee attempted to move a workshop document."

We just retrieved a scroll of documents from 1402 from the cathedral workshop archives and delivered it to Brera Palace.

That very night, the nose of a saint's statue fell off the south spire of the cathedral.

Look, this is the nose that fell off the statue.

The atmosphere on the field immediately changed after those words were spoken.

The saint's statue lost its nose, and by such a coincidence.

If placed in the mystical realm, this is an ominous sign.

There was one more person at the meeting today, an old foreman who had worked in the cathedral workshop his whole life, and Professor Talia Ferro had specially invited him.

The old foreman spoke up at this moment, his voice rough and hoarse.

"The saint statue with the missing nose was sculpted in 1403."

The official from Rome coughed. He had been in Milan for a month, and his fatigue was deepening day by day.

"Professor, craftsman, I understand your feelings."

However, from a scientific point of view, marble cracks after being exposed to frost and then peels off...

"It's early November, Milan isn't frost yet," the old foreman scoffed.

"That statue of a saint stood on the spire for five hundred years, through five hundred winters without falling off, but it fell off this November."

The official opened his mouth, then managed to utter, "...Perhaps it's tired too."

Professor Talia Ferro held the marble nose in her palm.

"The construction of Milan Cathedral has been ongoing since 1386, so they have to stay on the construction site."

"But the construction site was right at the foot of the cathedral, and the Austro-Hungarian airships had already reached Verona."

During the meeting, the crowd continued to argue and shout.

Richard propped his head up, utterly bored.

He listened for forty minutes, chin in hand, and finally understood the two conclusions of the argument:

Things cannot be moved, and things cannot be left unmoved.

Mortimer, sitting in the front row, glanced at his watch and silently handed over a folded piece of paper.

Richard opened it, and on it were the old professor's crooked pencil writing:

"If you're hungry, go eat lunch first. Anyway, people who are arguing will continue arguing in the afternoon."

In the end, Professor Mortimer and Richard slipped out to have lunch first.

After lunch, Richard went directly to the Ambrosian Library.

The old man still set up his chessboard under the pillar in the courtyard.

Richard borrowed a Milan Cathedral workshop yearbook, intending to take it to the side to read.

A thin, dry hand pressed him down.

"What were you arguing about this morning? Even the street sweepers outside are asking if a fight broke out at Brera Palace."

Richard briefly recounted what had happened that morning.

The old man listened while keeping his eyes fixed on his chessboard.

"According to your committee, those precious documents will become old and rotten once they leave Milan."

"Yes, the local professor mentioned this rule at the meeting."

The old gentleman then asked, "You should be able to recite all these rules of this building by now, right?"

Richard thought the old man was joking with him again, and casually said, "The books are yours as long as they are in the reading area, but the street outside the library gate is not considered part of the reading area."

The old gentleman nodded: "The library's reading area has boundaries, and so does the cathedral construction site. Have you thought about where the cathedral construction site actually ends?"

Richard paused for a moment: "The construction site of the cathedral... should end at the edge of the cathedral square."

The old man frowned, snatched the yearbook back from Richard's hand, and turned to a very early page:

"Milan Cathedral took five hundred years to build. Do you think the stones used to build it fell from the sky?"

The yearbook was turned to a page containing a charter issued in October 1387 by the Lord of Milan.

The inscription reads that the Lord of Milan granted the cathedral workshop an entire marble mountain called Caendoria, located north of Lake Maggiore in the Tocce Valley.

Workers chiseled stones out of the Caendoria Mountains, loaded them onto boats, and the boats sailed down the Toche River into the Ticino River, which flows out of Lake Maggiore.

Then it turned into the Grand Canal, drifted all the way to the south of Milan, and finally docked at a small pier specially dug out behind the cathedral.

The last sentence of the charter clearly states: "Mount Caendoria and the entire waterway for transporting the stone belong entirely to the workshop."

Richard immediately understood what the other person meant: "Sir, according to the terms of the charter, the entire waterway from Mount Caendoria to the south of Milan is considered part of the cathedral's construction site?"

"The small pier behind the cathedral was filled in and turned into a street sixty years ago."

The workshop on Mount Caendoria remains unsold to this day.

Richard suddenly understood: to move the documents out of Milan, all he had to do was follow the waterway specified in the charter.

He stood up and turned to leave.

The old man reminded Richard from behind, "Return the book before two o'clock."

Richard turned back, closed the almanac, and handed it back to the old man: "I've finished reading it."

The old man held the almanac in his hands, watching Richard jog across the courtyard.

At 2 p.m., the committee continued its meeting at Brera Palace.

Richard wrote the entire charter from memory on a single sheet of paper and asked Professor Mortimer to pass it on to Professor Taliaferro.

After reading the permit, Professor Taliaferro's dozing, uninterested old face suddenly turned serious: "Old foreman."

The old foreman stood up from the chair by the door: "Professor, what are your instructions?"

Are there any empty caves left in the Caendoria Mountains?

"Yes, there are several tunnels deep inside the mountain, even the workshop itself has almost forgotten about them."

"The old tunnels don't freeze in winter and don't leak in summer, making them perfect for storing account books."

The long hall suddenly became lively. The official stood up, his voice filled with genuine apology:

"Gentlemen, I would also like to help. According to Roman regulations, an application for allocation must first be registered in the General Catalogue of Artistic and Historical Properties."

The long hall fell silent again. Professor Mortimer, sitting in the front row, sighed, took a small pair of scissors from his pocket, and began to trim his nails.

On the third day, the committee did not hold a meeting; the official said he needed to send a telegram to Rome for instructions.

Richard sat in the courtyard of the Ambrosian Library, copying receipts from the 1620s.

Tired of copying, he continued writing the story he had started a few days earlier on the back of the card:

There was a small village on the French coast, and in that village lived a fat man with great strength.

This time, the story describes how the fat man first overturned the fence of the Roman barracks, stood amidst a pile of helmets, scratched his head, and muttered, "These Romans are crazy."

He casually translated the insult into Apennine and wrote it down next to him:

n pazz t man.

The letter 'p' is the same as the abbreviation for the Senate and the Roman People in the manhole cover.

Richard stared at the first letters of the four words for a while, then couldn't help but laugh out loud.

Luca sidled over from the next table: "What are you laughing at by yourself?"

Richard pushed the card over.

Luca read it once, didn't understand, and then looked at it with the others.

In less than a minute, all the scribes in half of the courtyard had seen it.

At the opposite table, the tall scribe adjusted his glasses: "So, it turns out that the manhole covers in ancient Rome were insulting their own people!"

The Neapolitans finally let out a sigh of relief after seeing the whole thing.

He slapped his thigh: "I knew it! I didn't spit in the wrong place!"

"Then dropping out of school and coming back won't be considered retribution," the tall man said.

"No! They're the ones who've gone mad!"

Overwhelmed with excitement, he rushed to the small blackboard by the pillar, grabbed a piece of chalk, and wrote four huge letters under the sign "No Noise in Reading Area": ​​p

"n……"

"pazz..."

"t..."

One of the people in the courtyard could no longer hold back and shouted, "Man!"

Laughter erupted.

Just then, footsteps came from the direction of the archway.

The official was carrying a briefcase; he appeared to be at the library looking up information.

The laughter in the courtyard stopped abruptly.

Richard saw the tall scribe's face turn from red to white, and Luca buried his head in the manuscript paper.

The Naples man covered his mouth tightly with both hands, facing the official along with four huge letters behind him.

The official's gaze passed over a row of scribes and landed on the blackboard.

He stared at it for a long time.

Then he turned around and looked at the young people filling the courtyard, his eyes slowly reddening.

"Gentlemen, I spent a whole month in Milan and listened to Milanese people complaining about Rome every day."

In the morning, the hotel doorman complains about Rome; at noon, the restaurant owner complains about Rome; and after a meeting in the evening, even the shoeshine boy knows to curse Rome a bit.

He sniffed.

"But just now outside the door, I heard you all shouting 'Romans' together."

Today is the first time I've seen someone write the Senate and the people of Rome on a blackboard in Milan.

No one dared to utter a sound.

"Thank you... thank you for remembering that we share a common ancestor!"

Not a single scribe in the courtyard dared to answer, but the official bowed solemnly to the Neapolitan.

The Neapolitan covered his mouth and quickly returned the bow.

The official walked to the door of the reading room, then turned back: "I will include this in tonight's report."

The door closed behind him, and the courtyard was silent for only three seconds.

"He said he would include it in the report," the Genoese man said, his voice trembling.

"The report needs to be sent back to Rome," the tall man said.

The Neapolitan finally removed his hand from his mouth, his eyes glazed over: "Rome will know that Milan has a group of young people... who especially love Rome."

Luca was the first to give in, collapsing headfirst onto the table, letting out a strange scream through the gaps between his fingers covering his mouth.

The old man stood up from under the pillar: "No noise is allowed in the reading area."

Then pick up the eraser and wipe the bottom of the letter "p" clean.

After wiping himself, he shook his beard twice before returning to his chessboard with his hands behind his back.

In the afternoon, the official came out of the reading room with a very bad expression.

He stood under the corridor with a cup of coffee in his hand, only to be glared at by the old gentleman across half the atrium. He had no choice but to walk to the library entrance with his coffee.

On the morning of November 7th.

More than a hundred packed wooden crates were piled up at the docks south of Milan.

The old foreman held an old brush, applying force with each stroke as if he were carving marks on the stone.

The three freshly baked letters a, f on the wooden box glowed faintly on Richard's sensory surface, their color somewhat resembling the fire in Donald's backyard brazier.

A large crowd gathered at the dock: stonemasons from the workshops, the caretaker of the archives, scribes from the Brera Palace, and a group of children who had come from who-knows-where to watch the spectacle.

Upon seeing the letters on the wooden box, the children began shouting, "AF! AF! Free! Free!"

The official, dressed in a black suit, signed his name in the "recipient" section of the handover form.

A photographer sent by Brera Palace set up a tripod and took a group photo of everyone on the dock.

A dozen packhorses were tethered to the towpath on the shore.

With a shout from the coachman, the ropes slowly tightened, and the pack animals pulled the first barge away from the dock.

For five hundred years, the stones in the canal have been floating down the Caendoria Mountains to Milan.

Today, these precious books will travel upstream, all the way back to Mount Caendoria.

Professor Taliafero looked down at the paper on his lap; the writing was still black and shiny, without any fading.

Meanwhile, Professor Mortimer has been returning to the hostel later and later these past few days.

In the evening, the old professor sat down at the dining table and cut up some baguette bread to put into the cream soup.

"Little Richard, this is the first time I've ever been unable to find someone."

Professor Mortimer shook his head.

"Among the people I know, there are ruthless killers, people who have been hiding from me for thirty years, and people who have appeared to me in my dreams after they died. There is not a single person I cannot find."

Richard poured the old professor a cup of tea.

He took a sip and, for the first time ever, didn't complain that the tea was too weak.

Once the committee's business was finished, the committee dispersed. For the remaining two days in Milan, Richard spent each day in the Ambrosian Library compiling indexes.

When Richard got tired of writing, he started writing a new story on the back of the card.

In the new story, in 1387, there was an eleven-year-old quarry worker's son in the Toche Valley who came down the mountain with the first boatload of stones.

The quarry worker's son saw the vacant lot that was to be built on for the first time at the docks south of Milan.

Richard is preparing to name his new story "The Pillars of the Earth".

It is written that in 1400, the workshop invited a master architect from France to determine the proportions of the spire.

The old stonemasons of Lombardy disagreed, and the two sides argued for three days in the meeting.

The Frenchman slammed his fist on the table and said: "Skills without knowledge are worthless."

The Lombard slammed his fist on the table and replied: "Knowledge without skills is worthless."

He read these two sentences in the yearbook, in the minutes of a meeting in 1400, in black and white, without a single word changed.

The old man reached behind Richard's shoulder and snatched the card away: "Reading area..."

Richard finished speaking for him before he could: "No writing or copying anything unrelated to the reading area is allowed. I've already memorized your rule."

Today is Richard and Professor Mortimer's last day in Milan, and he said goodbye to the administrator in this somewhat special way.

The old man stood and read the card aloud, then handed it back to him.

Did the Frenchman win in the end?

"Historically, he lost and was driven out of the workshop."

"Then you let him win once in your story, and the person who lost in history should also win once in the book."

The old man suddenly asked again, seemingly out of nowhere:

"You promised Mr. Matthew of the New World you'd write a story. Where are you now?"

Richard's half-stretched yawn suddenly froze in mid-air.

He slowly turned his head. The old man was standing by the table, twirling a brass button between his fingers.

Richard promised Matthew the story in his dormitory at Imperial University in early June.

The only people present were Matthew, who had come out of the wall, and himself; at most, Matthew might tell Mrs. Mary later.

There was one more thing that he only remembered at this moment.

For the past two weeks, the old man has spoken to him entirely in authentic Albionese with a Beijing accent, even more fluent than the radio announcers.

No one in the entire courtyard seemed surprised.

"...Sorry, I didn't write a single word." Richard heard his own voice.

"Oh, I see." The administrator put the brass button back into his pocket.

"Then come with me."

He turned and walked into the deepest part of the building, and Richard could only stand up and follow.

The staircase was so narrow that two people couldn't walk side by side; the books on the shelves were older as they went down; and the lights were dimmer as they went down.

They didn't stop on the third floor of the stairs, but continued down.

At the end of the fourth floor, there is a counter.

Richard stood at the top of the stairs, recalling the person the old professor had described in the hostel:

He was in his forties, of medium height, with a pencil tucked behind his ear, and led him down to the fourth floor.

The administrator went around to the back of the counter, bent down, and pulled out a stack of papers from under the counter. Each paper had a number written in pencil in the upper right corner.

Richard looked down at the top sheet; it was his own handwriting.

"A gentleman returned from a very far place and stood at the station for a long time, only to find that he didn't recognize himself..."

He crossed it out himself after writing that part.

He wrote it at the hostel on the first night of his first week in Milan, then crumpled it up and threw it into the wastebasket.

The second image: "That winter, the snow at the mouth of the River Styx..."

Cross it out.

Richard flipped through the pages one by one, until he reached the oldest one, which he had written in early July in his dormitory at the Imperial University. He tore it in half as soon as he finished writing it.

"Your dorm room has bookshelves, so any area with bookshelves is under my jurisdiction."

The administrator said it was only natural.

He collected a total of twenty-three drafts, each with a small red stamp at the bottom that read "To be continued".

Richard stood in front of the counter and finally understood his situation.

Matthew, a New World expert, waits for Richard to send him a postcard every Christmas and a copy of "Strange Tales" every two months.

The master of classical tradition before him picked up every story beginning that Richard had thrown away.

How could I possibly be urged to submit my manuscript by two important figures at the same time?

The administrator pulled out two more cards from under the counter: one was "Asterix and Gallic" and the other was "The Pillars of the Earth".

"How do you plan to distribute these two?"

"I plan to have someone draw it into a comic strip, panel by panel."

"Readers who can read look at the words, while those who cannot read look at the pictures."

The administrator nodded: "The young man who drew 'The Prudent Gentlemen' for you, his lines are too rough. I can recommend a few better candidates for you."

He bent down and took out various samples from under the counter.

The first thing is that the thin paper has very fine warp and weft lines printed on the edges.

"Pulkovo was a master of classical texts and traditions, and an expert in drawing."

Richard opened the paper, and there was a drawing of a cat jumping down from the windowsill, in four panels.

Once drawn, every single whisker of the cat is clearly visible.

But in the first square, before the cat could even jump, a faint dotted line had already traced out from under its paw, following a perfect parabola all the way to the carpet in the fourth square.

Next to the landing point, there is a line of small print: "The error is no more than one grain of rice."

Richard flipped to the fourth square, and the cat landed on the spot where the grain of rice was.

"Mr. Pulkovo's cats are not suitable for comic strips."

Why?

"Readers can tell where the cat will land just by looking at the first panel, so there's no suspense in the next three panels."

The administrator remained silent and pushed the second painting in front of Richard:

"The person who drew this lived in Leiden, was a member of the star chart tradition, and was also a great expert."

It was a portrait of a municipal councilor.

Richard glanced at it a couple of times and noticed that the moles on the senator's face had connected themselves to form a small star map.

He briefly activated his spiritual vision and read from the star chart the exact year, day, minute, and second of the senator's birth.

As Richard read on, he came to the date of the congressman's death and quickly turned the portrait over.

"...What happened to that congressman afterward?"

"He quit his job the day he saw the painting, moved to the countryside to grow tulips, and lived eleven years longer than the death date calculated in the portrait."

The third item was a bit heavy; it was an copperplate print.

The paper used for copperplate engravings is warm; it feels a little hot to the touch.

"The person who draws copperplate engravings follows the traditional furnace firing method and is a master of it, especially skilled at engraving copper plates."

Every line drawn was burned into the paper, creating deep grooves.

Richard asked, "How many pictures can be printed from one copperplate plate?"

"One copperplate can only print three pictures."

"What will happen if we print a fourth one?"

"When printing the fourth sheet, the copper plate will melt on its own."

That meant it wasn't a comic book anymore. The administrator realized this and quietly took the sample back.

The fourth item is a sheet of parchment, outlined with gold foil.

"This was painted by a great master of the Sun Tradition; his family has a long history of painting for churches and courts."

The painting depicts a group of people haggling over prices at a market. Each person has a halo above their head, and even the baker who cheats on the weight has a kind face.

The administrator spoke slowly:

"They were commissioned to draw a tax collector."

As a result, the tax collector drawn by the artist looked exactly like a saint.

After the painting was handed over, the tax collector went into the church and was kissed on the hand by the worshippers who knelt down.

Richard couldn't help but laugh out loud.

"The Turin Observatory also has a great expert..."

"That one in Turin won't do," Richard blurted out.

Why?

Richard thought for a moment and picked up the first drawing of a cat jumping on the windowsill.

"Sir, these paintings are all finished."

"A cat jumps off the windowsill, and the reader should be on tenterhooks for the cat until they turn to the fourth panel."

"If a tax collector appears in a painting, the reader should immediately want to punch him."

"The lines are so precise that readers will stop and admire how well they've drawn them."

"There are weekly newspapers for children in Milan."

Richard gave an example:

"The content is very interesting; all the speech bubbles above the characters' heads have been removed and replaced with two lines of poetry."

"Isn't this a good thing for children? They can learn something while looking at the picture books." The administrator was a little puzzled.

"No, children will just get bored and stop buying the weekly."

Richard shook his head.

"The most important point of a pictorial magazine is to make the content easy to understand, directly feeding the information into the reader's mind; all extra thinking is useless."

"I have friends who can do these things."

The old gentleman remained silent for a moment, then put the sample under the counter.

"Okay, then let your friend continue to try."

He took out a blank card and wrote a line on it.

"The painting doesn't need to be too detailed, but it should be able to make people understand what the people in it are doing. —l"

Richard's words were included in the archives as a famous quote from the author.

Of course, I didn't see it.

"Thank you for your book. As a reward for reading it in advance, you can choose any book from the library to borrow."

Richard immediately thought of this illustrated fragment from The Iliad, and Da Vinci's manuscript seemed quite good too.

He then remembered a certain unlock condition that was stuck on his panel.

[Critical Thinking Level 4, Progress 96%]

[Condition for unlocking the transformation: Independently reconstruct the complete operational logic of a lost technique.]