I loaded the Mysticism panel.

Chapter 523 Beans of the Dead

Halloween was just ten days ago, and according to the hunting season, the next one is Yul's Twelfth Night, which is still more than a month away.

"I've arranged everything you asked me to do."

The hunter's voice was full of impatience, as if he had been dragged into talking about serious business, and he even coughed at the end.

Richard thought to himself, "The matter of capturing the messenger?"

The hunter replied, "...Yes, I'll catch one for you while I'm at it. I have other things to do in the spirit world."

After he finished speaking, the communication was cut off.

It's impossible for an expert to make a special trip to the spirit world just for themselves; Richard had anticipated the Hunter's answer.

He was a little unsettled, feeling that his trip to the spirit world wouldn't go too smoothly.

Back at the hostel, his room was dark during the day and quiet at night.

Two creaking sounds came from the side; Mortimer had taken off his shoes and thrown them on the bedside.

The old professor accompanied him across half the city today, and upon returning, he only drank a cup of tea before going back to his room. Before leaving, he said, "You can handle the cursed items you bought yourself for now, just don't set the inn on fire."

Richard turned on the table lamp, and four antiques were placed side by side on the table:

Red coral, lead rolls, double-bellied whistle jars, and smoke glasses covered with burlap and facing up.

He took the coral branch first, which required the least effort.

This is not a cursed object, so the purification process can be omitted.

As the still water spread out, the coral became visible within it.

The locals call this "an eye for an eye," and Richard thought of his own "perception and reflex."

There were three holes on the coral, which he initially thought were for threading ropes.

But you only need one hole to thread the rope; three are too many.

He pressed still water against the opening and discovered that it was a deliberate flaw.

A tightly sealed amulet leaves no opening for malicious attacks; instead, they will bypass it and seek out the true eyes.

The fishermen didn't understand anything about etheric structures; they simply knew, generation after generation, that you had to leave the other side a place to bite. He put the coral back on the table and re-examined the fake file he had edited using [Perception and Reflection].

After a moment's thought, Richard once again refined the characteristics he displayed.

One's own signature artifact should make those who come to investigate think, "Oh, that's all."

The traces of the changed breathing technique should be revealed, so that others will feel sorry for him after noticing it;

Furthermore, the flaws at the end of branching paths should be more subtle, requiring careful observation to detect their shortcomings, thus giving people a sense of satisfaction that "I understand him."

After finishing writing, Richard placed his palm on the coral.

Ether flows directly in along the conduction path, and its purity is generally low. Fishermen don't pay attention to the purity of their items.

Available points: 2.49...2.63...2.78...

He stopped at 2.91, leaving some ether inside.

He didn't intend to sell the coral branch; he would take it back and hang it on his desk to constantly remind himself of its significance.

Mortimer's previous lesson was right; he's been getting a bit too cocky lately.

Then came the second item, the Carthaginian cursed tablet. The still water was laid across it, but nothing was read.

Richard frowned and tried to suppress the fluctuations further, but it still didn't work.

Lead is the worst conductor of ether.

In the industry, if you want to block something you don't want others to read or that you don't want to leak out on its own, the first thing you do is look for lead.

Richard withdrew his hand from outside the salt circle, gathering his strength to open the seal.

With his right palm facing the lead scroll, he forcefully poured ether into it.

The curse must dissipate as soon as it is cast.

Richard was well-prepared; he had become increasingly proficient at this process.

A vacuum was exhaled and landed in the salt ring, sealing it in that stagnant water.

Then he pasted the still water on it and read it.

The text was read aloud in Latin. The writer was literate, but not very knowledgeable, and misspelled several words, even reversing a letter in one place.

"Bind the horses' hooves." "Bind the charioteer's eyes."

"Bound by his hands, he cannot hold the reins."

This person doesn't seem to be completely evil; the curse didn't mention "let him die" at all.

Richard stared at the small mass of curse sealed in a vacuum.

He raised his hand, separated his index finger and thumb, and made a square in front of his eyes. With a "snap," only a small part of the ether in the microcirculation was drawn away, and a photo appeared on the table.

Richard turned the photo over; the back of the photo showed the scene on the other side of the curtain, where the curse formed a closed loop.

Seventeen hundred years have passed. The driver and the horse have long since turned to dust. Only the foundation of the racetrack remains, but the curse in the lead scroll can still be run.

He decided to leave the curse in the Carthaginian scroll as a sample for now, and then absorb the points. He placed his palm on the scroll.

Available points: 2.94...3.06...3.18...3.21.

Not bad. In the past, the cursed objects he purified had very little ether left after purification.

In the center of the table sat a whistle jar from the Andes Mountains, the third cursed item of the night.

Richard first tried reading the whistle jar, and the whistle jar seemed to sense the intrusion and began to move. A short, hoarse sound squeezed out from a small hole behind the bird's head.

Richard's first reaction was to mute the whistle can. He had practiced silencing so much over the past six months that he could do it with a simple gesture.

The whistle stopped immediately when a vacuum was exhaled, and all sound disappeared along with it.

The entire hostel fell into an unsettling silence at the same moment.

The sound of the landlady washing dishes downstairs has stopped, the dogs in the alley have stopped barking, and the pigeons under the eaves, which used to flutter a couple of times at night, are now completely silent.

Even Mortimer's long, drawn-out snoring from the room across the street stopped.

Richard quickly dispelled the silencing spell, and his microcirculation was jolted back, causing a dull pain.

The silence was created by Richard's breath of air.

The effect was immediate; the pigeons flapped their wings again, and the dog in the alley let out a pitiful bark.

The snoring from across the street resumed, even louder than before.

Richard wiped his sweat and realized his hands were still shaking.

He recalled the two chapters in the middle of Lady Mary's manuscript, "Three Attitudes Towards Cursed Objects: Coaxing, Deceiving, and Wearing Them Down." The key to dealing with cursed objects was to confront them directly; forcibly suppressing them would only bring more terrifying consequences.

He tried using the word "open" again.

Ether was poured into the bird's belly through a tiny hole the size of a pinhole, gradually squeezing out the air.

It took about ten minutes to squeeze through.

The air coming out of the small hole carried the dry, cold air of the plateau.

After squeezing it clean, he carried the jar to the basin and poured water into the round belly on the left.

He filled the jar to about half full, then held it in both hands and shook it back and forth.

Water flowed from the left jar down the short pipe to the right, and the bird finally let out a complete song.

That sound spread out like a road beyond the curtain.

A person on the Andean plateau, a thousand years ago, lifted this jar of water on an evening to bid farewell to someone.

Before he could finish his ritual, it was interrupted.

A thousand years later, Richard finished his work for him. He opened his notebook and wrote: "Most cursed objects are not malicious."

Place your palm on the jar.

Available points: 3.22...3.44...3.61...3.83.

A sacrificial vessel from the Andean highlands that has never been touched by anyone, given in a very real way by ether.

Richard leaned back in his chair. He couldn't handle the last piece of smoke-filled mirror; he could tell the moment he got his hands on it.

………………

At the breakfast table, Mortimer picked up a croissant and casually asked him a question.

"What were you fiddling with in the house around 10 PM last night?"

The old professor tore open the croissant and ate it with yogurt.

"...I was sleeping when suddenly something blocked my throat."

Richard put down his coffee cup.

"I'm sorry, Professor, I've already dealt with that one, but there's one more thing I can't handle..." The old professor chewed on his croissant, offering no comment: "Alright, let me take a look."

Richard went upstairs and brought down the obsidian mirror.

Mortimer lifted only a corner of the burlap sack, looked at it for a while, and then covered it up again.

"I can't handle this either."

Richard was somewhat surprised. Even a highly knowledgeable scholar couldn't handle this?

"I don't understand why you always like to collect these weird and unusual things..."

The old professor wiped his hands on the tablecloth with some disgust, as if they had gotten dirty.

"The position of the Smoke Mirror in the Aztec pantheon... You know Apophis of the Black Earth River, right?"

"Know."

"These two are actually about the same, and the one with the smoke glasses is even a little higher."

Apophis was nothing but chaos from beginning to end, unlike the Smoke Mirror.

He has a name, a temple, priests, and a complete worship ritual. The smoke mirror was actually particularly dangerous for Richard because he was following the mirror tradition.

He put the mirror away, and the scene from last night resurfaced in his mind.

When you look at yourself, the mirror can't read you at first (reverse aspect + perception and reflection).

So the mirror was redesigned: it reflected a long dining table with cutlery on it, and behind each set of cutlery sat someone he recognized.

Evelyn, her parents, Grey, Catherine, Coleman, Montagu, Phillips, Sophia… exactly the same as that dream of the results being announced in May 1915.

This time, however, there were even more empty chairs.

But he gradually discovered something interesting: the mirror seemed to bully the weak and fear the strong.

It didn't include my maternal grandfather or the two professors;

The little experts like my aunt and senior Clara were also placed far back, making them seem vague.

Or perhaps it's not about bullying the weak and fearing the strong, but simply about saving energy, since the energy consumption of the "Great Mastery" projection is too high?

"It doesn't judge you, it judges what you care about."

Mortimer wasn't surprised at all. "As long as you ask who those empty chairs belong to, it wins."

"I suggest you take it to a professional, such as Mrs. Mary."

"But you can only see Lady Mary when you return to the capital. Didn't you say you know her brilliant student...?"

Richard raised his hand, interrupting helplessly:

"Mr. Matthew can indeed be contacted now; I have the leaf he gave me."

Mortimer looked at him: "Then why don't you look for one?"

Richard made an "uh" sound, looking somewhat embarrassed.

"I owe him a story. I promised him in early June, but I haven't written a single word of it yet."

After the old professor realized what was happening, he laughed so hard that all the wrinkles on his face smoothed out.

"You little rascal... you're afraid it'll rush you to finish the manuscript, aren't you?"

"...I really don't dare to see it."

"And that administrator..." "He'll only push harder." Mortimer gloated.

Richard pushed the mirror forward.

"Professor, could you please keep this smoke glasses for me for now?"

Mortimer frowned:

"Okay, but I won't take it apart for you, nor will I study it for you."

Richard nodded; he already had a plan in mind.

"Of course, I'll figure it out myself, after all, it's my idea to buy it..."

Mortimer took a roll of silver thread from his bag and wrapped it around the mirror in layers.

Each time he went around in circles, he would say a word, but it wasn't in any language Richard could recognize.

After finishing, he put the mirror into his briefcase.

"Alright."

"Thank you." Mortimer patted his bag.

"How about this, I'll set a storage period for you, just like that administrator did."

"A year, no, six months... If you don't come to collect it in six months, I'll donate it to the Royal Society of Anthropology."

Richard smiled and nodded.

"Alright." The old professor took his cane off the back of the chair.

"We have to wait for the goods to be shipped over, but waiting here is just sitting there doing nothing."

Mortimer stood up, leaning on his cane.

"There is a monastery in the nearby mountains. It was built 1,300 years ago by an Irish monk who led a group of people over the mountains."

"I want to see their library."

The two set off immediately, first taking a horse-drawn carriage from Genoa northwards along the coast for a while, and then turning inland.

In mid-November in the Apennines, the mountainsides are still covered with leaves that haven't all fallen.

The red and yellow hues were mixed together, scattered all over the ground by last night's heavy rain. By the afternoon of the next day, the driver reined in the horses.

"Gentlemen, we need to cross a bridge ahead. Vehicles cannot pass on the bridge."

Richard got out of the car, looked up, and was somewhat puzzled to find that the bridge was crooked.

Moreover, it wasn't built straight from the beginning; it didn't become crooked just because it was about to collapse.

The bridge is slanted, so you have to walk to one side when you walk on it.

The bridge railing stones were uneven, indicating that the person who built it was just laying them wherever they could get to.

"It's one thing for the tower to be crooked on the Apennine side, but how come the bridge is crooked too?" Richard thought to himself.

"This bridge..."

The driver explained that it was called the "Hunchback Bridge," a local feature, and then casually made the sign of the cross on his chest.

Mortimer walked up, leaning on his cane, completely unafraid.

He was knowledgeable, skilled, and daring, and turned to introduce himself to the students behind him.

"There's a bridge like this every few dozen miles in these mountains, and they all have the same story." "What story?"

"The village needs a bridge, but we can't build one."

A saint made a pact with the devil: "If you build me a bridge in one night, I will give you the first living creature to cross it."

Richard followed them onto the bridge; the bridge was indeed slanted, so one had to be careful when walking on it.

"The devil agreed, and it was completed overnight."

Mortimer continued.

"At daybreak, the saint chased a dog across, and the devil, having worked all night and only getting a dog, was so angry that he smashed half of the bridge... So you see, there's a section of stone over there that's new."

Richard glanced across the river.

Indeed, the stones three or four yards away from the opposite bank were much lighter in color and laid in a different way.

"Then why is the bridge crooked?"

"Because the devil's men do a sloppy job."

The coachman followed behind, saying, "It has to be built overnight, so who cares about whether it's straight or not?" Richard walked to the highest point of the bridge arch, where inspiration struck.

There are weak points under the bridge, but the seal is terribly made.

The inscription was carved hastily and haphazardly, with no regard for the beginning or end of the strokes.

There are two places where it is obvious that the mistake was discovered halfway through carving, so they simply started a new stroke next to it.

Richard felt something was off the more he looked at it.

According to what he learned in the department, this kind of seal... wouldn't last more than fifty years.

The two walked down the bridge, and the coachman was watering the horse.

The stream rushed against the bridge piers, creating white, surging waves.

It was still half a day's journey from the Humpback Bridge to the monastery. The carriage moved slowly up the slope, so Richard began to study the Mahabharata.

As soon as the teak board was lifted, the aroma of the compound spices wafted out.

It smells like turmeric mixed with an oily aroma; that's the smell of the backyard storage room in Grey's house.

He pulled out the top leaf. The text was in Sanskrit, engraved on the leaf surface, and he rubbed it in with a mixture of oil and turmeric, which brought the strokes to life.

Another kind of word crawls along the edge of the leaf.

These characters are round, with almost no discernible beginning or end to the strokes, making each character appear almost glued together.

It's completely different from the square, straight lines of Sanskrit in the main text.

Richard opened the database for "Knowledge and General Knowledge" to search and reason.

This must be a marginal note written by someone later in another language.

The manuscript has been passed down in the tropics for hundreds of years. Each time it was copied, the copyist would add a few lines to the side.

As the manuscript was passed on further and further, the characters changed more and more.

He looked at the footnotes and then at the main text.

The main text is about Karna.

This demigod was born with a suit of armor and a pair of earrings, given to him by his father, the sun god, making him invulnerable to swords and spears.

Later, someone came to ask for it, and that person disguised himself as a Brahmin. According to custom, if a Brahmin asks for it, you cannot refuse.

Karna knew who the other party was, why they had come to ask for it, and that if he gave it to them, he would surely die.

He still cut the armor off his body and handed it over along with the earrings.

The person who wrote the annotations in the margin wrote a line of circled words next to this paragraph.

Richard struggled for a long time before he could barely read out the basic meaning.

That line actually read:

"Everything that we are born with can be taken away."

What one earns oneself, no one can take away.

This coincides with my long-held beliefs.

The carriage bumped down the hill, and Ye Zi slipped off his knees.

Richard put the leaf back in its place and then turned the page.

The story gets a bit boring after that. A large family is arguing about who should get the throne.

After arguing about the throne, what should be done about the marriage? After arguing about the marriage, what should be done about who sits in which seat, who enters the door first, and whose son should address whom?

They've argued over dozens of leaves, but haven't even started a fight yet.

Richard flipped through the leaves for a while and couldn't help but yawn, then slammed them onto the teak board.

"What's wrong?" Mortimer opened his eyes.

"The characters in the book are always arguing, it's boring."

"What's all the noise about?"

"Who should sit at the head of the table if we argue?"

The old professor grunted and closed his eyes again, pretending to sleep.

"That's similar to a departmental meeting at our university."

Richard chuckled and decided to jump and flip backwards.

He quickly flipped to the section on weapons. Mentioning that immediately perked him up.

The book says that the most powerful weapons in that world are called divine weapons.

Divine weapons are born of nature and each has its own temperament. Every time a divine weapon appears, it needs to be invited with respect, and a spell must be recited during the invitation.

Each divine weapon comes with two incantations: one for summoning and one for recalling.

Both incantations must be learned word by word from the teacher; learning by watching, studying in seclusion, or copying them from another book and reciting them is not acceptable.

The book gives an example.

The teacher in the book who teaches spells is named Delona, ​​and Delona's son is named Massi.

Derona taught Ma Si how to summon a divine weapon called "Brahma's Head," but he didn't teach Ma Si how to take Brahma's Head back.

Richard continued reading. The eighteen-day battle in the book was over, and Ma Si was unwilling to accept it. In the night, Ma Si released Brahma's head.

The demigod who fought against the horse was Arjuna, the son of Indra (also known as Sakra).

Arjuna also unleashed a divine weapon, and the two weapons fought to a standstill. The whole world began to heat up, and the book described it as "the grass and trees were scorched, and things in the water floated to the surface."

The two immortals arrived at the battlefield and ordered Ma Si and Arjuna to quickly recall their divine weapons. Arjuna, having learned the incantation for recalling them, did so swiftly.

Ma Si hadn't learned the spell to take it back, so he couldn't.

The book states very clearly: once the divine weapon is released and not taken back, it will not stop.

The two immortals said to the horse, "If we can't bring it back, we must point out a landing spot."

The horse's neighing finger pointed to the bellies of all the pregnant women in the Bandhu tribe.

Richard was amazed when he read this, and turned back to read it again.

After reading it, he suddenly realized that all the techniques he had learned seemed to only teach him how to release them, but not how to retract them.

Stone Armor, Moon Nail, Silence, Broken Branch—my deeply ingrained belief is that once a spell is cast, it's done and you don't need to worry about it anymore.

After the knife cut the branch, Richard never thought of putting the severed part back together.

The carriage bounced again on the slope.

Mortimer's hat slipped off his face, and the old professor mumbled something indistinctly before putting the hat back on.

Richard recalled Professor McFee's freehand handwriting, where he seemed to leave a single stroke unfinished. What if one day he made a mistake with his knife?

Mortimer pulled his hat back a crack: "What are you laughing at all by yourself again?"

"It's nothing, Professor. I just thought of something happy."

Mortimer: "The last time you laughed like this was when you came up from the fourth floor of the library."

Richard's reason for laughing is on the panel.

He brought up the unlock conditions that had been displayed on the panel:

[The requirement for advancing to Speculation Level 5 is to independently reconstruct the complete operational logic of a lost technique.]

He mentally repeated the keyword "complete".

The Shadow Reversal technique involves thoroughly understanding the placement, direction, and intensity of the spell, and then rewriting it backwards.

Richard closed his notebook and said to Mortimer, "Professor, I think I know how to improve my branch-breaking technique."

The old professor buttoned his hat back up: "Don't rush to try it on."

Richard asked, "Why?" Mortimer said, "Because the boy in the book called 'Horse-Neighing Boy' is eager to try."

Richard was somewhat amused and exasperated: "...You were clearly sleeping just now."

"My ears are most alert when I'm sleeping."

Richard secured the teak board and tied a knot twice with red cotton rope.

The red cotton rope and teak planks have been on the fourth floor of the library for over a hundred years, saturated with ether.

While Richard was reading, ether was slowly seeping out, and now it has been almost completely absorbed by Richard.

Available points: 4.46.

It was almost five o'clock, and Richard brought up the control panel:

Breathing lv.5, Eating lv.4, Sleeping lv.4, Walking lv.4;

Knowledge level 5, critical thinking level 4, perception level 5;

Spiritual countenance 50/50, three strands of energy leaving the body.

The unlock conditions for [Critical Thinking] are finally clear today. As for level 7, it requires five points.

He couldn't guess what the skill would be like at level 7.

The level 5 skills [Reflection], [General Knowledge], and [Fountain] have already benefited him immensely, so what will level 7 be like?

In short, he'd collected five points this time and kept them for a preview; he was genuinely curious about what the level 7 traits would be like.

I currently have 4.46, and the remaining half point can be made up with one or two ordinary rare items.

Donald, Mercury, Ashford's family, and the Greek table;

In addition... with the split of the bill from the Nordic table, I've unknowingly accumulated a lot of channels, so reaching five points won't be difficult.

He put the panel away and rested his hands behind his head.

The carriage rounded a bend, and the valley came into view.

Richard yawned, closed his eyes, and began to sleep.

.....................

Mortimer went into the monastery's library and didn't come out. Richard carried his luggage into the guest room and went back to look for him. The old professor was already sitting at the long table, his nose almost touching the paper.

"Professor, dinner..."

"Go eat by yourself."

Richard withdrew.

An old monk led him downstairs.

The man was clean and tidy, no different from the old men in Briston Slag Lane who had coughed their whole lives.

But the incident with the masters of classical texts terrified Richard, and he dared not underestimate anyone who appeared near the library or the stacks of books.

The old monk spoke with a mountain accent, which Richard found difficult to understand.

"Gentlemen arrived today, just after All Saints' Day, so we cooked some beans."

"What beans?"

"The beans of the dead, if you are still alive tomorrow, you may have a dish of them."

"I'm not from this parish." The old monk turned around, a hint of a smile in his cloudy eyes.

"The pot for boiling beans doesn't ask which parish you're from."

The monastery was busy from the morning onwards the next day.

Richard stood in the yard and saw that they went to the field to harvest beans first.

Below the slope where the beans were planted was a burial ground, which was a church-run cemetery.

After the harvest, the village women sat down by the east wall of the courtyard and began to peel the beans, squeezing the pods open and letting the beans fall into their aprons.

As they peeled the shells, they spoke in a mountain dialect that Richard couldn't understand a single word of.

By noon, the large cauldron was set up in the center of the monastery.

The old monk stood by the pot, his hands tucked into his sleeves, doing nothing but watching.

At 3 p.m., villagers lined up to receive the gifts, and they had to register before receiving them.

Richard joined the queue, initially assuming it was just a rural festival, but out of politeness followed along.

Ahead of him in line were a woodcutter with frostbitten fingers, a mother whose son was on the Isonzo River, and two Serbs who had crossed the snow-capped mountains to escape. In last winter's massive evacuation, hundreds of thousands of people crossed the snow-capped mountains of Albania from Serbia, but less than half made it back.

It was Richard's turn.

He gave his first name, Albion, whose surname was difficult for the locals to pronounce.

After finishing writing, the monk looked up and asked, "For whom is this to be collected?"

Richard stood in front of the table, speechless for a moment.

After a while, he couldn't help but ask, "Could you write down a few more names?"

The monk nodded, and then Richard recited a long list of names.

After he finished writing, he didn't mind that the young man was greedy and pointed to the pot.

The old monk lifted the wooden spoon out of the pot, and everyone lined up, each holding an empty plate.

He walked to the pot, handed out the plate, and the old monk scooped a spoonful of beans into it.

The person who had finished serving carried the plate to the side and handed it to another person.

He could hand it to anyone—his neighbor, someone he'd just met, or even those two Serbians dressed in clothes that weren't local. Only the person who received the plate could eat. Richard carried the empty plate forward.

When it was his turn, the old monk dipped his wooden spoon into the pot and scooped a spoonful into his dish.

The beans were dark brown and cooked until very soft, with the broth coating them and giving them a unique, indescribable flavor.

The old monk finished scooping the food, looked up at him, and said something in the mountain dialect.

"Accept it; this is not something you earned."

Richard, holding the plate, handed it to the woodcutter next to him.

The woodcutter stared blankly at the extraordinary young man before him for a moment, then quickly reached out his hands to receive him.

He took it without saying thank you, and then walked to the wall and sat down.

At that moment, someone handed Richard a plate.

The woman handing over the plate was the mother whose son was still on the battlefield.

The woman held out the plate forward, tears welling in her eyes, and touched Richard's face as she handed it to him.

Richard looked down at the dish of beans, unsure whether he should eat them. In his spiritual vision, the beans had already revealed the ether.

The land where beans are planted is right above the heads of the dead. The bones turn into soil, the soil grows beans, the beans are cooked in a pot, and the beans in the pot are passed from one plate to another.

This has formed a complete ritual, undoubtedly a product of the veil.

"……Hello!"

Someone was calling to him from the side.