I loaded the Mysticism panel.

The day before leaving the capital, Richard woke up earlier than his entire family.

It was still dark, and only the butler was setting the plates in the restaurant.

"Young Master Richard, what would you like to eat this morning?"

"Same as yesterday, thank you."

The housekeeper bowed slightly and retreated towards the kitchen, his movements displaying just the right amount of attentiveness that had been consistent for several days, never exceeding or diminishing.

When the breakfast cup was served, Richard quickly finished the fried egg and toast, and after drinking his tea, he stood up from his chair.

He slung his backpack over his shoulder, walked through the corridor, and went out through the side door.

The streets were nearly deserted in the early morning, save for the sound of milk carts and the hourly chimes from the clock tower.

By the time the clock struck six, he had reached the bus stop on the street corner.

After waiting for about ten minutes, a double-decker bus came from the east.

He went up to the second floor and found a seat by the window.

The bus travels through the capital city, from west to east, then turns northeast.

The view outside the window kept changing: rows of shops, churches, parks, bridges, and increasingly wider lawns and increasingly sparser buildings.

The engine began to roar laboriously every time it went uphill, and a strong smell of gasoline wafted up from under the car.

Richard covered his mouth and nose, feeling for the first time that even Greenwood's school buses were considered high-end.

About thirty minutes later, the bus stopped at the terminal station.

The driver pulled the handbrake, and the brake pads screeched as they rubbed against the rims. Richard jumped out of the car.

Stepping onto the streets of the academic district, the first impression is one of tranquility.

The background noise in the capital city, a mixture of car engine noise, hawking noise, and factory horns, has disappeared.

Richard walked along the main street, where the main gate of Imperial University was located in the middle of the street.

The school motto is engraved on the lintel in Latin, the characters worn smooth and rounded by centuries of rain.

He glanced at it as he passed by:

"Tempus fugit, scientia manet."

(Time flies, but knowledge endures.)

Upon arriving at the university gate, Richard took out a certificate of recommendation from the Classical Society from his pocket.

"I want to use the library."

The doorman took it, glanced at it, returned the certificate to him, and took out a temporary pass from the drawer.

"The library is located on the east side of the clock tower square. Go in from here, walk along the main road to the second intersection, and turn left to see it."

He wrote the date and validity period on the pass, and added one more thing when he handed it over:

"Eating and drinking are prohibited inside the building. Additional applications are required for areas above the third floor."

"Thanks."

Richard took the pass and entered the school gate.

After walking about twenty steps, the warm object in the Sun Seat suddenly jumped.

Richard did not stop walking, but his breathing rhythm automatically switched to the framework of four-stage breathing.

Once the range of perception expands, information begins to flood in.

He sensed at least seventeen different ether nodes along the approximately six hundred steps from the archway to the clock tower square.

The density far exceeds that of Huayue Street.

The Ether Field in Flower Moon Street is an underground river that flows beneath the floors of shops and taverns, occasionally bubbling up from cracks.

The etheric field at Imperial Capital University is closer to an underground water system, and the entire town is submerged in it, with the foundations of every building anchored in the etheric layer.

No wonder the doorman didn't react to him at all.

In a town filled with ether nodes, visitors of all kinds are probably the norm.

We all tacitly agree to keep our distance: you don't ask me where I'm from, and I don't ask you what you're doing.

The library is located on the east side of the square.

The building was simpler than he had imagined, a three-story stone building with a row of high windows on the front.

At the entrance counter, there was an elderly woman with completely white hair, writing on index cards with a stylus.

Richard showed her the pass.

After confirming, the old lady took out a thin booklet from under the counter and handed it over.

"This is the collection index, categorized by subject."

The first and second floors are open for reading. Books cannot be taken out of the library, but copying is permitted inside.

"Feel free to ask me if you need any help."

"Thanks."

Richard took the index book, found an empty table by the window, sat down, and flipped through the index from beginning to end.

The categories are extremely detailed, ranging from literature to archaeology to natural philosophy.

Each major category is divided into more than a dozen subcategories, and each subcategory has its own subdirectories.

His goal was clear—the theory of sealing.

There will certainly not be a category called "Sealing Theory" in the index, just as there will not be a row of bookshelves labeled "Occultism" in the Greenwood Library.

But Greenwood's experience taught him one thing: knowledge is hidden in the cracks of the frame.

He searched the index book along three lines simultaneously.

The first clue is inscription literature.

The core of the seal is the inscription, and the grammar of the inscription determines the function and structure of the seal.

The books on the third floor of Greenwood provided him with a basic framework, but it was far from enough.

He needs a more systematic inscription syntax, especially for the part about unlocking and reconstructing seals.

The second clue is alchemical literature.

The mediums used for sealing—silver, copper, wax, and holy water—are all basic materials within the realm of alchemy.

Understanding the mystical properties of materials is essential to understanding why a seal uses one type of material instead of another.

Only then can we deduce what will happen after changing or removing the material.

The third clue is ritual studies.

Setting up a seal is itself a small-scale ritual, and breaking the seal also needs to follow ritual logic.

He never found a way to break the seal on Greenwood's bookshelf, partly because the introductory materials only taught disaster prevention and not arson.

However, the depth and breadth of the collection at Teito University Library are on a completely different level.

Fire safety manuals won't teach arson, but engineering textbooks will certainly include the principles of demolition by explosives.

At a sufficiently high academic level, "construction" and "demolition" are two sides of the same coin.

Richard quickly jotted down the index numbers in his notebook with a pencil, then got up to find a book on the bookshelf.

The open collection on the first floor mainly consists of general academic documents. After flipping through a few books, he confirmed that the truly valuable items were on the second floor.

Upon reaching the second-floor corridor, the light was noticeably dimmer than on the first floor.

The bookshelves are arranged more closely, and the aisles between them are only wide enough for one person to pass sideways.

He didn't read through each book one by one; he didn't have the time.

First, quickly filter by the title and publication year on the spine, eliminating those that are obviously off-target.

There are about forty books left that might be valuable.

Forty books—it would take a very long time to even open each one, let alone read them all in one day.

But he can do another thing: quickly sift through the table of contents, preface, appendices, and footnotes of every book.

Determine which books contain hidden information and which are purely academic documents.

The selection process he developed in Greenwood can now operate efficiently on a larger collection.

The first round of screening took about an hour.

Deciphering the code on-site in a library is completely impossible.

He had no reference books, no time to sit quietly and deduce, and occasionally other readers walked by in the aisles between the bookshelves.

Richard made a pragmatic decision: if he didn't understand, he would just record it.

He opened his notebook and copied down the paragraphs that appeared to be steganographic, character by character.

The copying work was extremely tedious.

Some paragraphs have an outrageously high character density; the strokes of the lead type are crammed together, barely legible even when you get very close.

His pencil moved swiftly across the notebook, the handwriting getting smaller and smaller, squeezing every last bit of space out of each page.

One book in particular piqued his interest; its title page had a line of small print:

"This book is for internal teaching and reference use only at the Department of Classical Studies, Imperial University, and is strictly prohibited from being lent out."