I loaded the Mysticism panel.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

When I opened my eyes, the only light coming from the streetlights was a sliver of light filtering through the gaps in the curtains.

Richard lifted his head slightly from the pillow and glanced at the bedside table.

Ten thirty-seven.

He remembered turning off the lights around 9:20.

A little over an hour.

The entire theological salon, from the moment he opened his eyes between the temple pillars, to Ares displaying the three-ringed enchanted bullets, to Hecate saying, "The gathering should end now."

He felt that about 30 minutes had passed, which was not much different from the actual time of more than an hour.

The other party probably needs to wait until everyone is in the dream before pulling people in, so a difference of several tens of minutes is normal.

Richard mentally singled out this message.

If the other party can manipulate the flow of time in the dream, stretching a few seconds in reality into several hours in the dream.

Or conversely, if you compress a night in reality into a few minutes in a dream, then it truly becomes unfathomable.

That means the other person can either take away a whole period of time from him, or fill a whole period of time with him.

A person whose time is controlled by others has no choice but to be manipulated by them.

But the other party didn't.

Dream time and real time are basically equal.

Hecate and the possible organization behind her use a relatively "natural" dream connection technique.

It simply involves bringing multiple invitees to the same dream node, allowing them to meet, talk, and trade there.

It has boundaries; it doesn't manipulate time or rewrite memories.

It is not a "miracle".

Richard exhaled slowly.

He had originally thought that he might be able to get close to a group of high-ranking people who could potentially reach the depths of the curtain tonight.

Now he realized that this was still a group of people, just a group of people who were temporarily stronger than him.

This is enough.

Apart from Hecate, the core members of the Roundtable are mostly at the professional level.

Minor proficiency levels may exist, but the probability is low. Theoretically, there might be special cases like "the stingy or the prisoner among the minor proficiency levels," but the probability is very low.

At this level of strength, even if the deal falls apart or relations deteriorate, it wouldn't be too difficult for a single member of the Round Table to hunt him down.

The only ones truly invincible are Hecate and others who may be behind her.

They have no way of knowing his current strength limit, but there is no need for them to deal with him personally.

If they really wanted to deal with a sixteen-year-old high school student, they wouldn't need to invite him to the round table at all.

They simply let the pottery coins burst open when they received them.

The fact that they didn't do that shows that what they wanted wasn't elimination, but recruitment.

As long as they don't actively cross the line, they will maintain their position as the inviters.

This gave me enough time to develop.

He lay back down in bed and fell into a deep sleep again.

The next morning, Evelyn's voice came from downstairs.

"Brother! Get up! If you don't come down now, the fried eggs will get overcooked!"

Richard glanced at the clock on the wall.

It's 7:20. I went to bed a little late.

He got dressed and went downstairs.

Evelyn stood in front of the stove, her back to him, humming a tune she'd picked up from somewhere as she fried eggs.

"Is there cheese today?" Richard asked.

"Yes," the younger sister said without turning her head. "Go and get it from the cellar yourself."

"it is good."

Richard went to the cellar through the back door of the kitchen.

The cellar was chilly. He walked down three steps and reached out to take down the pottery jar hanging on the wooden shelf.

Richard carried the jar of cream upstairs back to the kitchen.

Evelyn scooped the fried eggs onto his plate.

"elder brother."

"Um?"

You seem a bit excited today.

"Yeah?"

"Yes." His younger sister tilted her head and glanced at him. "Did you sleep well?"

"Yeah, I had a dream."

"What did you dream about?"

Richard wiped his mouth and dipped the bread in the egg yolk.

"I dreamt that you opened a bakery in the future."

"...What?" Evelyn turned around.

"I dreamt that you opened a bakery and invited me to be a taste tester."

"...Are you serious?"

"Dreams don't lie." Richard nodded seriously. "You'd better start saving money."

Evelyn grabbed a burnt piece of bread and tossed it into his plate.

"Did you dream that I threw bread crusts at you?"

"..."

Richard shook his head, dipped the crust of the bread in the egg yolk, and took a bite.

The egg yolk was warm, and the burnt bread flavor spread in my mouth.

Evelyn sat down opposite her, propped her elbows on the table, and quickly finished her breakfast.

Sunlight streamed in obliquely through the small window, falling on half of her face.

As Richard ate his breakfast, Hecate, the temple gathering, the caduceus and the balance whip... these things were temporarily locked away in another drawer.

A factory whistle sounded in the distance, and the wheels of a milk delivery cart rattled on the street.

My mother's footsteps came down from upstairs; she seemed to be in better spirits today than yesterday.

My father was already dressed in his work clothes and tying his shoelaces at the door.

Everything at home is as usual.

………………

The next day, after history class, the old man and the young man tacitly stayed in the classroom again.

Richard glanced at the old man's expression and spoke first:

"Sir, I have a few questions."

"explain."

Did you send anyone over last night?

"Indeed, a little elf from a hidden direction went through." Mr. Hutton collected the workbook.

"It's someone we both know, but you don't need to know exactly who it is."

After she arrived, she performed a protective ritual for you, then left without alerting your family.

The classroom was quiet for a while.

Downstairs, students were moving desks, their wooden legs dragging across the ground, making a continuous, piercing screech.

This time, it was Mr. Hutton who spoke first.

"Richard, do you feel that your grandfather has disappointed you?"

"……No."

"You have it in your heart, but you just don't say it."

His gaze lingered on Richard's face for a moment.

"Listen carefully: an elder who is honest about their family background will be ten times more helpful to you than an elder who portrays themselves as omnipotent."

Richard did not respond.

"Now I'll say what I want to say." Mr. Hutton pulled another piece of paper from the drawer and placed it on the table.

That was a map of Briston, with seven or eight points circled in red pencil.

"This is the local node I can mobilize within two hours."

The coroner, the two elderly pastors from the parish, the doorman of the North District funeral home, the owner of the secondhand shop in the south of the city… these people are all practitioners of local guilds; together, they could handle a medium-sized pollution incident without any problem.

"But for dealing with something like a 'spirit messenger'..." The old man shook his head: "It's not enough."

"This matter itself has exceeded the processing capacity of the local node."

"So the person who performed the ceremony for you last night was transferred down from a higher level."

What she did was to provide a safety net, not to retaliate.

She finished and left, leaving no trace that could be tracked down by the other party.

Mr. Hutton looked at Richard.

"You don't have a family like Montagu or Gretham, who can summon half a company with a single ring of a bell in the capital."

"If there isn't such a tree behind you, don't try to find one to lean on."

The old man spoke these two sentences very slowly.

"The first thing a person learns to do when leaning against a towering tree is to look up."

Look up at the sky others block out, look up at the shadows others cast.

When he himself stands in the same spot one day, without the trees, he'll have forgotten how to walk.

"I've seen far too many children like this."

"Their family background is better than yours, they have more resources than you, and their mentors are of a higher rank than me."

But then they stopped walking, standing under a big tree, and wouldn't take another step.

"That tree fell, and they fell with it."

Mr. Hutton made a vague circle in the air, encircling Richard's entire body.

There are no trees where you are standing right now.

Richard met her gaze.

"I see."

Mr. Hutton did not ask any further questions about the details of last night's dream.

He didn't ask who the other person was, where the gathering was held, how many people were at the table, what price he had offered, or what he had received.

He only gave that piece of advice and then stopped.

The old man reopened the exercise book, and the red pen was unscrewed from its cap.

"School's over. If you don't have anything else to do, head home early."

"it is good."

………………

Back home, Richard continued to lock himself in his room.

The pencil twirled halfway between his fingers and landed on a blank page.

Two horizontal lines were drawn to divide the page into three columns.

The leftmost column should read "Shareable".

In the middle column, write "Middle Layer".

The rightmost column reads "Top Secret".

The "Shareable" category is the least valuable; you won't lose anything by sharing it.

Appendix C: Introductory content: The existence of the veil, three types of breathing, and the concept of ether as a diffuse substance.

The first paragraph of "On Ascending Behind a Curtain": The first two levels of the hierarchical sequence.

Five traditional names.

He wrote them down one by one, but each time he wrote one, he felt bored.

The effect of placing these things on that round table was probably only slightly better than buying a copy of the Albion Evening Post from a street newsstand.

The weakest of the three people sitting opposite him last night probably knew more about these things than he did.

The "Shareable" section quickly ran out of space.

First, move the pen tip to the "Top Secret" column:

The Ashford family's connections; Mr. Hutton's role as a mentor; the school he actually attended.

As for essential skills like panel skills and point absorption mechanisms, these are even higher than the "top secret" level.

He never writes anything down on paper; he just keeps his thoughts to himself.

He paused and thought for a long time before returning to the middle column.

The "middle layer" is what he really needs to fill.

It can be exchanged without revealing one's identity.

It makes the people at the round table feel like they have leverage, without making Hecate want to turn him upside down.

But after thinking for a long time, he still couldn't write it down.

Even those rare artifacts that were left as remnants of ether could not be traded.

Putting aside whether others would want them, the rare items he possesses were mostly purchased under his real name or given as gifts by elders, with clear provenance.

If these strange items are exchanged with people, the buyer will be quickly exposed if they really want to investigate.

The Haldane model has already been used once; bringing out the same thing again won't make it worth anything.

In the first line of the "Intermediate Layer" column, he wrote only two words: To be supplemented.

There were about twenty blank lines below.

As I closed the notebook, I heard the sound of dishes clattering downstairs.

Richard came to the kitchen to help.

He took two plates from the cupboard and scooped the potato pancakes his sister had fried into them one by one.

But half of his mind was still on the middle column of the notebook in the drawer upstairs.

Those twenty blank lines need to be filled.

It's not just for the gathering next month, but also for the one after that, and the one after that.