I loaded the Mysticism panel.

He judged at the time that this was a textbook-level standard seal, dating back to shortly after the oil lamp was cast.

The standardized seal means that the structure can be analyzed, and if it can be analyzed, it can be dismantled.

The problem is that there is a huge gap between what is theoretically possible and what is actually possible.

He also considered the simplest and most brutal solution: to smash the oil lamp.

The copper lamp body is very brittle; it can be smashed with a few hard blows of a hammer.

Once the sealing medium is physically destroyed, the seal will naturally fail, and everything stored inside will be released.

But he quickly rejected this overly foolish idea.

There are two main reasons.

First, he didn't know what was sealed inside.

The oil lamp seal structure is a standard priestly inscription seal, and the purpose of this type of seal is usually to lock something inside and prevent it from coming out.

If what's sealed inside is just pure ether deposits, then breaking it open will simply cause the ether to disperse and evaporate.

But what if it's a physical object sealed inside?

The mutated species behind the curtain, the remnants of rituals, the deliberately isolated filth... As mentioned in Appendix C, the permeants behind the curtain are not all gentle.

Breaking the seal is like tearing down the prison door; whether it's a cat or a tiger inside, they're all released at once.

Doing this kind of thing in your own bedroom is not much different from suicide.

Suicide is one thing, but it also drags your family down with you.

Secondly, very few of the rare items from the Black Soil River Basin circulate in the market.

He was able to buy the oil lamp for two pounds only because Clement's unsold items channel happened to have this one available, and no local buyers in Bristol were willing to make a move.

It's lucky to have bumped into something like this once; you can't expect to be so lucky next time.

Therefore, the option of smashing it was ruled out from the beginning.

He must find a way to pry open a controllable crack without damaging the overall structure of the artifact.

But how do you pry it open?

This problem had been swirling in his mind for a whole week, but he still couldn't find a breakthrough.

That very night, he finally managed to decipher a seal maintenance manual from among the pile of original materials in the Imperial Capital University library.

The core content focuses on how to determine if a seal is aging and how to perform preventative maintenance before aging occurs.

Richard organized the deciphered information in his notebook in logical order.

The manual first discusses the general laws governing the aging of seals.

All seals will age, without exception.

Regardless of whether the medium is silver, copper, stone, or wood, no matter how well the inscription is carved or how complete the ritual is performed, the seal begins to weaken from the moment it is set up.

Maintaining the seal is also a science, and the manual will focus on the weak points in the seal structure.

This part made Richard's eyes light up.

The author used a very vivid metaphor.

The sealing inscription is a closed chain, and the connection point between the links is the weakest point of the entire chain.

These connection points are called "turning points" in epigraphic terminology.

Turning points are where the direction of the inscription changes; a straight line becomes an arc, an arc becomes a broken line, or two inscriptions in different directions converge at this point.

The maintenance manual recommends regular inspections of the pivot points and immediate repairs if any signs of weakened constraint are detected.

The repair method was also written down, and it was similar to the work Mr. Hutton had done in the basement before.

The manual also emphasizes that during repairs, reverse pressure must never be applied to the turning point.

But what if the goal is not to strengthen the seal, but to weaken it?

The author of the manual probably never dreamed that while his disaster prevention manual clearly stated "keep fire sources away from flammable materials," the arsonist would read "keep fire sources near flammable materials."

Richard's drowsiness vanished instantly; he recalled the engineering accident cases his elective course teacher had discussed in his previous life.

"Students, do you know about the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919?"

A steel tank full of molasses exploded, flooding the entire street with over two million gallons of molasses and killing twenty-one people.

Why did it explode? Because there was stress concentration at the riveting joint.

Stress concentration—these four words are like a key, clicking as they are inserted into the lock.

Bridge fractures begin at the welds, ship hull damage begins at the riveting joints, and aircraft skin fatigue begins at the rivet holes.

All structural failures begin at the weakest point.

The situation with the sealed inscriptions is almost identical.

You can't break a steel wire by bending it once, but if you bend it repeatedly in the same spot dozens or hundreds of times, the wire will definitely break from there.

Richard stood up from his chair and paced back and forth in the room.

Excitement made his heart beat faster than usual, but he quickly calmed it down.

It's one thing for a theory to be plausible, but another thing to be able to implement it.

Richard glanced at his pocket watch; it was 9:40. In this era when the poor had little entertainment, his family would have been asleep long ago.

He placed the oil lamp in the center of the table.

The next step is simple: place your right index finger on the seal point and start "tapping".

He closed his eyes and entered a state of quadrupedal breathing.

After the two etheric conductions ended, he felt an extremely faint change in his fingertips.

This shouldn't be an illusion.

The fourth, fifth, sixth... By the seventh round, the changes were already clearly perceptible.

However, he stopped at the end of the seventh round.

Each round of ether conduction depletes his already meager ether reserves.

The seven-wheel transmission experiment has proven the method to be feasible.

The sealing elasticity at the turning point is indeed decreasing, and the fatigue effect is accumulating.

According to his estimate, after two or three more rounds of transmission of the same intensity, the seal might develop micro-cracks at that location.

But there was always something on his mind that he was keeping in check.

The candles only went out during the divination ritual.

But oil lamps are something of a completely different scale.

Artifacts from the priesthood era of the Black Earth River Basin, with at least a thousand years of history of erosion, have been preserved by textbook-level standardized sealing, preserving the vast majority of the ether.

Even before the oil lamp actually cracked, you could already feel the copper surface heating up.

If the seal really breaks and some strange things escape...

He didn't know what would happen, but he absolutely couldn't let it happen at home.

The father slept downstairs, the mother's bedroom was at the other end, and the younger sister's room was right across from him.

Regardless of whether I can handle the consequences myself, I absolutely cannot expose my family to risks.

After resting for a while, Richard got out of bed.

Wrap the oil lamp tightly in thick velvet and stuff it into the large inside pocket of the coat.

He then took out the trainee inspector's documents from the drawer and put them into his breast pocket.

If he encounters a patrol officer, this document can at least save him a lot of trouble.

The door opened, and the corridor was pitch black.

He didn't turn on the light and groped his way along the wall towards the stairwell.

The back door was opened a crack, and the night wind blew in, carrying the chill of the year-end and the smell of coal smoke.

Richard pulled his coat tighter, squeezed through the crack in the door, and gently closed it from the outside.

Briston is a completely different city at night and during the day.

All the daytime noise was swallowed up by the night—the hawking, the sound of horses' hooves, the factory whistles, the roar of school bus engines…

Occasionally, a dog bark or two could be heard in the distance, or the sound of the night watchman's wooden clapper.

He didn't choose the alleyway in the flea market, nor did he go to Grafton Street; instead, he chose a place further away.

If you walk south along the slag alley, there is a dead end called Nail Alley.

There's a public phone booth at the alley entrance; the red paint is peeling off, and the glass panel is cracked in two places.

Next to the phone booth was a high wall, behind which was an abandoned oil pressing factory.

The oil mill closed three years ago. The windows of the factory building were sealed with sheet metal, and the yard was overgrown with weeds.

At the end of the alley is a dead wall; there is no other way out except for the phone booth entrance.

The nearest residence is fifty yards away from the alley entrance, across a row of shops on the main street.

At this distance, and with the solid walls of the abandoned factory blocking the view, even if something were to happen, it would be difficult to affect others.

When Richard reached the entrance to Nail Alley, he glanced at his pocket watch.

I left home at 10:45 and walked for 35 minutes.

A public telephone booth stands on the left side of the alley entrance.

The light in the phone booth was broken long ago, and someone had scribbled a few lines of vulgar language on the glass, the writing mostly washed away by the rain.

Richard didn't go into the phone booth; instead, he stood in the area between the phone booth and the high wall.

He took out an oil lamp wrapped in velvet from his inner pocket.

The outline of the Sphinx's face is faintly visible.

That face neither smiled nor showed sadness, but indifferently gazed at everyone who approached it.

Richard placed the oil lamp on his coat, squatted down, and first performed several complete breathing cycles to get the breathing technique running smoothly.

He pressed his right index finger onto the seal's pivot point.

He was already very familiar with that small contact area between his fingertip and the copper surface.

The ninth round begins, with ether pulses sent out close to the fingertips.

The force and direction are exactly the same as the previous eight rounds.

Compared to before, the elasticity of the seal at the turning point is now significantly reduced.

After the ninth round, he stopped to catch his breath.

In the tenth round, he gritted his teeth and squeezed his ether reserves to almost nothing.

Richard's heart was racing.

With a crisp "snap," a crack appeared.

Ether flowed out of the crack.

The flow was so fast that his fingertips were pushed back by the burning sensation, forcing him to remove them from the bronze surface.

The panel has changed.

Available points: 0.22 → 0.31

The numbers began to climb: 0.31…0.39…0.44…

The panel was absorbing the surging ether, converting it faster than any other artifact he had ever encountered before.

But he didn't have time to stare at the numbers.

Richard's neck hairs stood on end; he could feel the etheric field around him changing.

The first thing to make a sound was the shadow of the phone booth.

It slid away from its original position, like a piece of cloth soaked in water moving across the ground.

Then came the shadow of the high wall, its edges twitching like a living thing, sometimes bulging forward, sometimes shrinking back.

Richard straightened up and took two steps back.

His vision was undergoing an extremely bizarre split.

Nothing itself was moved; the phone booth was a phone booth, the wall was a wall, and the floor was the floor.

But the shadows of these things no longer belong to them.

The shadow moves independently of the object.

The numbers on the panel are still changing: 0.58... 0.63... 0.71...

The absorption continues, but the extent of the runaway etheric field is also expanding.

The shop windows of the row of stores outside began to resonate under the impact of the etheric field.

The buzzing sound was very soft, but it was exceptionally clear in the dead of night.

Richard's heart clenched suddenly.

The etheric field has spread beyond the alleyway.

He quickly walked to the alley entrance and peeked out.

The streets were deserted, and all the shops were closed.

But across the street, there was a row of shops: bakeries, hardware stores, tailor shops, pharmacies... Each one had a signboard, and each signboard cast a shadow.

Now all those shadows are moving.

The shadow of the bakery's signboard peeled off the wall and crawled along the brick wall.

The shadow of the hardware store's GG rack was distorted into an impossible angle; even though the GG rack was upright, the shadow was bent into an arc shape.

And the shadow of that half-length mannequin in the shop window...

Richard stared at the shadow, feeling a chill run down his spine.

The mannequin had no arms, only a torso and head, and was used to display the clothes.

But its shadow has arms, reaching out across the shop window as if trying to grab something.

The buzzing grew louder.

Not just the row of shops across the street, but the shadows of all the buildings visible on both sides of the street are in motion.

The shadows throughout the entire block came alive.