Chapter 318 - 251: Successive Eliminations

Class ended. Isabella walked past Richard without so much as a glance in his direction.

’Professional decorum,’ Richard understood.

He didn’t look too long at his aunt, either.

Over the week, several different associate professors had come to teach the class.

One came from the Divinity School, dressed in a meticulous black Priest’s Robe.

He lectured on the steganography within the Church’s ritual Latin, comparing the hidden Sacred Rites to Techniques.

He didn’t speak quickly, but from the moment he opened his mouth, no one dared to lose focus for the entire class.

An associate professor from the School of Engineering came as well, a man with a large beard.

He spoke of industrial accidents from the steam age and how, one by one, they created new points of vulnerability.

He discussed the Ether pollution accumulated beneath a textile factory in Manchester North District;

the unusually high accident rates on certain sections of the Imperial Railway System;

and an industrial accident investigation he had personally participated in several years ago.

Richard read something else into that lecture.

Industrial zones, industrial accidents, railway systems, piers, mining districts.

’This is where they’ll be sending us to work in the future.’

This training wasn’t the end. It was the entrance.

.........

After class on Wednesday afternoon, Croft placed a stack of manila envelopes in the center of the lectern.

"Here is some supplementary material for you all."

"There’s one for each of you with your name on it. Come and get it yourself."

"Look at it when you have time. If you’re busy, just set it aside for now."

After saying these few words, he gathered his lecture notes and left without a backward glance.

The classroom immediately started buzzing with conversation.

Richard walked to the front of the room and sorted through the stack of envelopes to find the one with his name on it.

The envelopes in the stack varied in thickness.

Some were as thin as two or three sheets of paper, while others were bulging, nearly bursting at the seams.

His own was not the thickest, but it wasn’t thin either.

Philips sauntered over, picked up the envelope with his name on it, and weighed it in his hand.

"So generous?" He gestured toward Richard with his envelope. "Customized handouts for everyone?"

"I have no idea what’s going on."

Richard didn’t open his envelope until he got back to his dorm. Inside were seven documents in total.

The first was a test on textual criticism of different versions in rhetoric;

the second was a diagram-reading problem in Sealing Art;

and the third was a historical dating problem.

Richard felt the way these first three sets of problems were designed was reasonable enough.

They were tricky, but not malicious.

The person who created them had clearly reviewed his assignments and in-class performance, picking out the very problems he had struggled with the most to test him on again.

In rhetorical textual criticism, he truly lacked the solid foundation of those like Montague, who had the benefit of a Child’s Skill.

The three blank spots the Sealing Art diagram problem asked him to fill in were precisely the types he had never encountered in practical application.

As for the historical dating section... he knew with a single glance that Croft had set it.

He was confident he could score over eighty percent on these three.

Then, he turned to the fourth document.

The fourth one had no source indicated, but the handwriting was all too familiar.

After spending so much time in his aunt’s office looking at manuscripts marked up with a red pen, Richard had long since memorized her sharp, distinct strokes.

The fourth document was a Double Overwrite exercise.

Erudite immediately pulled up the source: the seventy-ninth footnote in the commentary section of the fourth Chapter of Isabella’s own doctoral thesis.

Richard sighed softly.

’If I hadn’t memorized her thesis, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with this problem.’

He flipped to the fifth document. It was his aunt’s handwriting again.

This one was even more brutal. It provided a rubbing of an Inscription with an Ancient Greek Language foundation.

Every interconnected step was designed to hit him right where he was most uncomfortable.

The sixth and seventh documents—each one precisely targeted his Achilles’ heel.

Richard sat at his desk and looked through all seven documents from beginning to end.

The first three were from the other associate professors. They targeted the shortcomings he had revealed in class, but they had acted with a degree of restraint.

The last four were from his aunt. There was no restraint at all; they were all problems that went far beyond the curriculum.

’Truly my own aunt,’ he thought. ’She doesn’t pull any punches whatsoever.’

Richard stacked the documents and placed them on the left side of his desk.

He brewed himself a pot of strong tea, positioned the inkwell that never seemed to run dry, drew his fountain pen, and began the arduous battle.

.........

At noon the next day, Richard was looking for a seat in the cafeteria, holding his food tray.

Philips was already sitting at a corner table with a leisure book open in front of him—it was *Metamorphosis* again.

The envelope lay next to him, looking only half-opened.

A few crooked sheets of paper stuck out, placed between his plate and cup, nearly buried by breadcrumbs.

"Have you done yours yet?" Richard asked as he sat down across from him.

"I glanced at it." Philips didn’t even look up. "Interesting problems. Well-designed."

"Interesting or not, when do you plan on doing them?"

"...No rush." Philips turned a page. "They’re not collecting them for grading. Just looking at them is enough."

Richard put down his fork and looked at him seriously.

"Philips."

"Hm?"

"Have you ever considered that the very fact they aren’t being collected or graded makes them even more important?"

Philips finally lifted his gaze from his book.

Richard lowered his voice.

"Take out your problems. Let’s compare them with mine."

Philips pulled the papers out of the envelope and pushed them toward Richard.

Richard scanned them.

Among the documents Philips had received, two were tests on textual criticism.

This was Philips’s strongest subject, and the difficulty had been cranked up to the extreme.

One was on historical analysis, which was precisely the question Philips had answered most casually during the small-group oral exam.

There were also three mixed problems on Epigraphy and Ritual Language, specifically targeting his true skill level in the subject where he was known to have "copied last year’s template."

The last one, Richard saw after flipping through, was surprisingly a problem on the practical application of rhetoric.

Philips had never even been called on to answer a question about this during the large lectures.

But Richard remembered a time Philips had been chatting with him between classes and casually mentioned his views on the rhetoric of legal documents.

He had made a couple of insightful remarks, then immediately changed the subject with a joke.

Someone had heard those remarks and taken them to heart.

"Your problems are completely different from mine."

Richard handed Philips’s documents back.

"Oh?" Philips closed his book.

"Four of my seven documents were from my aunt, and all of them targeted my Achilles’ heel."

"As for yours, someone has dug up every instance where you slacked off in class."

Philips’s expression changed.

"...Customized for each person?" He slowly sat up straight.

"One for each person," Richard stated his conclusion.

"This group of associate professors worked together to create a unique set of problems for every single one of the thirty-odd people in the special class."

Philips’s brow furrowed for a moment, then relaxed.

"How much effort must that have taken them?"

"I don’t know." Richard shook his head. "But since they went to all that trouble, do you really think they won’t look at the results?"

Before the first class of the afternoon, Richard went to find Catherine.

The red-haired girl was in a corner of the classroom, head down, working on the problems. He glanced at the documents spread out on her desk.

"Your problems are customized, too," Richard said, standing beside her.

Catherine looked up at him, her gray-green eyes showing no surprise.

"I figured it out the first day I opened them," she said.

Her voice was quiet, but certain.

"The person who wrote this set of problems has read every single answer I’ve ever written in class."