Chapter 114: Stars and Ants

Old Biggs returned to his side of the table, scratched his head, and began to explain in earnest.

"If your Inspiration is too high when your rank is still low, it's easy to see things you shouldn't see."

"What kind of things?"

"Things behind the veil."

The smile lines vanished completely from his round face.

"Inspiration is a window. The larger the window, the more of the outside scenery you can see."

"But a window goes both ways. You can see outside, and the outside can see you."

His gaze shifted from the lamp to Richard's face.

"If your Inspiration is high enough to perceive the depths of the veil while you are still at the Newcomer stage, those things will perceive you too."

"Think of a freshly lit candle. If the flame is too bright, distant eyes will spot it instantly."

He drew a circle in the air with his index finger.

"But your flame is only so big. If those things in the distance actually noticed you, how would you deal with them?"

Richard recalled that passage from On Ascension Within the Veil: the brighter the candle, the more eyes that see it.

That text devoted a massive amount of space to explaining this exact logic.

Keeping a low profile at a low rank was the first rule of survival.

"Too high is a curse," Old Biggs concluded, his tone heavy.

"But too low won't work either. You would just live your whole life as an ordinary person, unable to perceive even the most basic free ether."

He tapped his finger against the tabletop.

"At your level, your perception isn't particularly intense.

"Even though you got eight right just now, you hesitated for more than five seconds on three of them.

"That shows those signals were right at the edge of your sensory range. You could catch them, but not clearly."

"Your window is exactly the right size. It's large enough to clearly see things up close, but not so big that it draws the attention of things far away."

He leaned back in his chair, picked up the copper kettle, and poured himself another half cup of tea.

"Once your strength increases, your rank rises, and your ether reserves deepen, your Inspiration will naturally grow with them.

"When that time comes and your window gets bigger, you'll actually have the ability to handle the gazes from outside."

"What's truly terrifying are the kids born with Inspiration off the charts.

"Their windows are frighteningly large, and they're standing right in front of them in thin shirts while a violent storm rages outside."

He took a sip of tea and smacked his lips.

"My sect once had someone like that. On the day he joined, he took the Spirit Vision test and correctly distinguished all twenty items the teacher provided.

"He didn't just tell which ones contained ether and which didn't; he rattled off the relative strength of every single one."

"Twenty for twenty, plus their exact order." Old Biggs gave a thumbs-up. "If not a once-in-a-century talent, he was at least a once-in-several-decades genius."

"What happened to him?"

Old Biggs slowly lowered his thumb.

"Later..." He stared at the tea dregs at the bottom of his cup and didn't finish the thought.

The room fell quiet.

The filament in the lamp buzzed, and the yellow cloth lampshade swayed slightly.

"Anyway." Old Biggs blinked hard twice.

"Your Inspiration is sufficient for now. Build a solid foundation and take it slow.

"There's no need to rush to pry the window wider. It will grow on its own as you do."

Richard silently digested these words.

He still had one unallocated point left.

His initial plan had been to decide its use based on the results of today's Inspiration test.

If his Inspiration turned out to be too low, he would have added the point to Perception as an emergency supplement.

But as it stood, his Inspiration was at a perfect level.

Meanwhile, at his current rate of accumulation, the progress bar for Breathing would naturally max out before long.

When that happened, he could directly invest his saved point to break Breathing through from Lv.2 to Lv.3, acquiring the Healing trait.

With a continuously self-repairing body, his energy capacity would increase, his sleep would deepen, and his immunity would strengthen. The efficiency of any activity relying on his physical condition would rise in tandem.

Having finished his explanation, Old Biggs's expression relaxed from its earlier severity.

"Speaking of Inspiration... my teacher's Inspiration wasn't particularly high at first, either."

"Madam Marie?"

"Right. When she was young, her test results were only a bit better than yours. Upper-middle tier, nothing particularly outstanding."

Old Biggs set his tin cup on the table and spun it.

"When she started out, she was just a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl working as an apprentice in a pharmacy in the Imperial Capital's South District.

"One day, an old woman walked into the pharmacy to buy peppermint oil, casually pinched her forehead, and took her in as a student right on the spot."

He rubbed his hands together, sighing with a touch of nostalgia.

"After the test, her teacher said something that she later passed on to us."

"What did she say?"

"She said, 'The best apprentice in a pharmacy isn't the one with the sharpest nose, but the one most willing to sniff.'"

Old Biggs downed the rest of his tea in one gulp.

"For her to reach the position she holds today, her baseline Inspiration might have played a role, but it was much more about her subsequent hard work combined with an exceptionally high level of comprehension."

At this point, Old Biggs suddenly stopped talking.

He blinked a couple of times, showing obvious regret.

His big mouth had just been blabbing away, and only now did he realize he'd revealed something he shouldn't have.

"Anyway," he mumbled, clumsily steering the conversation back.

"Talent is the floor, and effort is the ceiling. Your floor is solid enough; the rest depends on how you train."

Richard made a mental note of the fact that Madam Marie's Inspiration level was upper-middle tier.

Combined with what Gerard had revealed over the phone earlier, Madam Marie had an excellent reputation in the central and northern regions of the Empire. Her network of contacts was massive, and her students were scattered across every industry.

For someone with only above-average Inspiration to build such a vast enterprise, she definitely couldn't have relied on talent alone.

Gerard said she "cast a wide net," and Old Biggs said her teacher favored "the one most willing to sniff."

Putting those two pieces of information together formed a clear picture.

She was someone who used diligence and shrewdness to make up for her shortcomings in talent—and did so incredibly successfully.

He probed with a question:

"Then what rank is Madam Marie at now?"

Old Biggs scratched his chin.

"That's not really a secret. She's at the Major Adept rank."

After saying that, he thought for a moment and added, "Major Adept is the ceiling on the Old Continent."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it literally.

"The Old Continent comprises the Western Continent and the Eastern Continent, including our Albion Empire.

"Among the practitioners known to be alive right now, there is basically no one at a rank higher than Major Adept."

Above Major Adept, the ranks recorded in the texts were Virtuoso, Master, and Archon.

Now Old Biggs had added a new piece of information: among the actual practitioners active on the Old Continent, Major Adept was the absolute peak.

Richard asked curiously, "No Virtuosos? No Masters?"

"If there are, they aren't on a level we could ever come into contact with."

Old Biggs spread his hands.

"When our teacher was instructing us, she would occasionally mention certain things, but she never went too deep into them."

His gaze fell upon the old brass buckle on the table.

"Here is what she said... 'Those above the rank of Major Adept no longer need to be known by us.

"'Whether they exist or not has no impact on our daily lives.

"'Whether a star in the sky shines or not doesn't affect whether you eat dinner tonight.'"

Richard listened quietly.

"But she also said one more thing..."

Old Biggs's expression grew even more solemn.

"'If one day you see a star falling in your direction, run—run as far away as you possibly can!

"'Because when a star falls, it doesn't care whether the thing it crushes to death is an ant or an elephant.'"

Richard nodded.

The phrasing in On Ascension Within the Veil and Madam Marie's metaphor were talking about the exact same thing.

Stars did not care about ants; flames did not care about moths.

To those beneath them, the high-ranking figures of those tiers were nothing short of natural disasters.