Chapter 164: Boundary Stone

Leaving the small lounge, Richard returned to his room.

He opened his notebook and recorded every detail he had observed during last night's ritual, one by one.

He filled six whole pages. Just as he started on the seventh, someone knocked on the door.

"Richard."

It was Maggie's voice.

He closed the notebook and went to open the door.

The freckled girl stood in the corridor, clutching a small Cloth Bag.

"We're going down to the third basement level."

"To the Boundary Stone Array?"

"Yes. Mrs. MacNeil gave us permission. She said the veil has already closed today, so just taking a look won't be dangerous."

"All right."

Richard grabbed his notebook and pencil from the desk and followed Maggie downstairs.

The entrance to the mill's cellar was still that same low door.

After the ritual last night, Mrs. MacNeil had stuck a new silver strip across the doorframe.

The two of them ducked inside. The first level of the cellar was the main hall where last night's ritual had taken place.

The stone sarcophagus was still in the center, tightly wrapped in iron chains and silver foil. The leftover wax from the seven candles had congealed on the floor.

"Further down." Maggie pointed to an even narrower flight of stone steps behind the sarcophagus.

The steps were steep, and the height of each tread varied—some were half a foot high, others a full foot.

Richard kept his left hand on the wall as he descended. The limestone on the walls was pitted and uneven, eroded by centuries of dampness.

The second level was much lower than the first; the ceiling practically brushed against their heads.

Soot blackened several patches of the walls, and a few loose stones were scattered across the floor.

"Further still."

The entrance to the third level was hidden beneath a loose stone slab in the northwest corner of the second level.

Maggie crouched down, hooked her fingers under the edge of the slab, and heaved it up.

The slab was heavy, so Richard helped her lift it.

Below the slab lay a vertical stone ladder recessed into the wall. Each rung was only half a foot wide.

They climbed down the ladder for about three meters.

When his feet hit the floor, Richard looked up to take in his surroundings.

It was a circular stone chamber.

Roughly five paces in diameter, it had a perfectly hemispherical dome and completely bare walls.

Right in the center sat a circular stone altar.

Its surface had been polished extremely smooth, completely unlike the rough limestone of the upper levels.

Richard approached the altar and crouched down to examine it.

Twelve circular grooves were carved into the altar's surface, each about a fist wide in diameter.

The grooves were arranged in an irregular ring with varying spacing between them.

An inscription was carved into the bottom of each groove.

"This is the master map for the Boundary Stone Array," Maggie explained beside him. "The positions of the twelve Boundary Stones are all marked on this altar."

"And the Boundary Stones themselves?"

"Underground." Maggie pointed at the floor. "Each one is buried in its corresponding position. You can't see them from the surface."

"This altar is the master control."

Richard placed his palm flat on the altar's surface.

The stone was ice-cold, but he could feel an extremely faint ether pulse rising from beneath the surface.

"The inscriptions are in pre-Roman Old Celtic." Maggie crouched beside him. "I recognize some of it, but not all."

"How much can you read?"

"About thirty percent." She pointed to the nearest groove. "I've seen a few of the root words in this section, but the way they're combined is different from what I was taught."

Richard activated his Spirit Vision.

Under Spirit Vision, the inscriptions in the grooves became much clearer.

Every stroke carried a very faint grayish-blue light. The intensity and flicker frequency of the light corresponded to the current "health" state of that specific Boundary Stone.

The light in a few of the grooves was noticeably dimmer than the rest.

"Are those dim ones the most severely degraded?"

"They should be." Maggie nodded. "Last night's ritual only repaired the top two levels; this one was left untouched."

"Mrs. MacNeil said repairing the Boundary Stone Array requires a completely different ritual. This mission doesn't include that."

Maintaining his Spirit Vision, Richard began to apply a fixed gaze to the inscriptions in each groove, one by one.

The fixed gaze had to be held long enough to clearly see the direction, turns, and connections of every stroke.

Maggie pulled a stack of thin paper and a charcoal pencil from her bag.

"You maintain the fixed gaze, I'll trace."

"All right."

Richard locked his Spirit Vision onto the first groove.

The inscription consisted of seven lines, with three to five symbols per line.

The symbols' strokes were predominantly curved, occasionally interspersed with square turns.

Curves provided guidance, and square turns acted as restraints—basic grammar he had learned from the bookshelves on the third floor.

"First line, left to right. The first symbol is a double curve with a vertical stroke..."

As he described them, Maggie copied the symbols onto the thin paper with her charcoal pencil.

The two of them coordinated seamlessly.

Richard was responsible for using his Spirit Vision to "illuminate" the strokes that were invisible to the naked eye, while Maggie translated what he saw into lines on paper.

The first groove took them about twenty minutes.

The inscription in the second groove was longer than the first, taking nearly half an hour.

By the fourth groove, Richard's Spirit Vision began to slip slightly.

He paused and completed two full cycles of Fourfold Breathing before the leaves of his Light Tree stabilized again.

"Are you still alright?" Maggie asked with some concern.

"I'm alright." Richard rolled his neck. "Let's continue."

The fifth, the sixth, the seventh... The stone chamber had no windows and no source of light.

They relied on a thick candle Maggie had brought down and Richard's Spirit Vision.

The candle flame remained completely motionless in the stone chamber; there was not even a trace of airflow.

By the tenth groove, Richard's temples began to ache faintly.

It was a normal reaction to maintaining high-intensity Spirit Vision for so long.

He suppressed the ache using Breathing: Healing, and most of the pain receded.

"Just two left." Maggie had already gone through three charcoal pencils.

The inscription in the eleventh groove was the shortest, comprising only four lines.

The inscription in the twelfth groove was the longest, a full nine lines, and its strokes were far more complex than all the previous ones.

Pushing his Spirit Vision to the limit, Richard read it stroke by stroke.

The very last symbol on the final line was a structure he had never seen before.

Three curved lines originated from the same center point, extending in three different directions, with a small dot at the end of each curve.

"This symbol..." He frowned.

"I haven't seen it either." Maggie drew it exactly as it was. "We'll ask Mr. Hutton when we get back."

Three hours later, they had finished copying the inscriptions from all twelve grooves.

Maggie stacked the thin sheets of paper in order and tied them together with a piece of string.

Richard stood up, his knees popping twice.

He had been crouching in the stone chamber for three hours, and his legs were numb.

The two climbed the ladder back to the second level, walked up to the first, and finally slipped out through the low door.

The daylight outside stung his eyes, making him squint.

The sun was already leaning to the west, dyeing the entire wilderness dark gold.

Back at the inn, they went to Mr. Hutton's room.

The old gentleman was sitting by the fireplace brewing tea, organizing the documents at hand.

Maggie handed over the stack of copies.

Mr. Hutton took them and flipped through them one by one.

When he turned to the third page, his hand paused;

when he turned to the seventh page, he set down his teacup;

and when he turned to the twelfth page—to that symbol with three curves and three dots—he held the copy up to his eyes and looked at it for a long time.

"Sir, is there a problem?" Richard asked from the side.

Mr. Hutton placed the copies back on the table.

"Do you know where these twelve sets of inscriptions stand in the entire system of sealing studies?"

The two Newcomers shook their heads.

Mr. Hutton picked up his teacup, took a sip, and set it back on its saucer.

"The construction era of the Whitcom Boundary Stone Array is over a thousand years earlier than the most recent layer of seals.

When the pre-Roman Celtic inscription masters raised these twelve Boundary Stones, the Roman Legion was still crossing the Alps."

He stacked the copies and placed them back in the center of the table.

"From that era to today, it has been nearly two thousand five hundred years."

"They have passed through the hands of at least four different civilizations in between, each of which has made repairs, added overlays, and provided re-annotations."

"The twelve sets of inscriptions ultimately preserved are no longer just Old Celtic.

Their foundation is Celtic, sandwiched with traces of Romanization, and the surface is covered with Latin annotations from the Medieval Church."

He raised his eyes to look at the two young people.

"In other words, these inscriptions were stacked on layer by layer.

Some of the strokes belong to the earliest inscription masters, some to the restorers of the Roman period, and some to the medieval monks who performed the sealing rituals."

Maggie understood.

"So that's why they don't match any single system I've studied."

"Correct." Mr. Hutton nodded.

"The Old Gaelic you learned can cover the bottommost layer, but the middle and surface layers require a foundation in Romanized inscriptions and medieval ritual Latin, respectively."

Richard rubbed his chin.

"Are you saying, sir, that all twelve sets of these inscriptions need to be deconstructed and restored individually?"

"Deconstructed, restored, retranslated, and annotated." Mr. Hutton counted out the four steps.

"If this can be accomplished..."

He flipped over the top sheet and pointed to the starting symbol of one of the inscriptions.

"...it would fulfill the probatio task for advancing to Practitioner."