Chapter 189: Dual Chain

After returning from school on Monday, Richard resumed working through the remaining encrypted documents.

By the time he reached the last one, he could separate the double-layered strokes by sight alone—strokes that had previously required Spirit Vision to stabilize and read.

The third set was the actual exercise meant to test his progress.

On the cover, his aunt had written an even shorter note: "No answers attached."

Richard pulled the set out and started with the top page.

The underlying plaintext was a report analyzing a failed sealing attempt.

The surface layer overlaying it looked like a rough draft of that same report.

Both shared the same page and the same ink.

Richard laid the paper flat on his desk and stabilized the entire page with Spirit Vision.

He no longer searched for which words had been repeatedly bypassed. Instead, he treated the entire page like a web, looking for which threads were slightly out of place at the most critical nodes.

About twenty minutes later, he set his pen down.

The true report hidden beneath the overwrite was an early proposal for the Whitcom Seal.

Parts of that proposal had offended the Church and were subsequently purged from official records.

The copy in his hands was a private replica, hidden by some scholar in their lecture notes using a dual-overwrite method.

[Learning] Lv.2 Progress 100%.

The progress bar on the Panel had stopped moving.

Richard closed the notebook and opened the Panel.

[Available Points] 2.0.

He tapped the [Learning] column.

1 point was consumed. On the Panel, [Learning] Lv.2 changed to Lv.3.

Richard's gaze fell on the corner of his desk, landing on the copy of his aunt's thesis pinned beneath a book.

He casually recalled the seventeenth page of the thesis.

The small line of text in the footnote surfaced in his mind.

“...This involves the transmission path of late-stage variants of the Alexandrian School in the Western Continent.

See Raphael Mendes’s The Late Alexandrian School, published in the 34th issue of Classical Review in 1882, pages 127–129.”

He remembered that footnote.

He even remembered the line of even smaller text below it, which the graduate student handling the printing had accidentally misaligned by half a letter.

He then pulled up the third edition of Introduction to veil Dynamics, which he had flipped through at the Imperial Capital University Library last autumn.

Page 216, paragraph three.

“...The correction coefficient for the veil’s annual decay rate, starting from the New Calendar year 1820, was adjusted from the initial model’s 0.003% per year to the current 0.0037% per year. See Appendix A for the specific basis of this correction.”

Richard's finger paused on the edge of the desk.

He remembered this paragraph.

He even remembered the line graph printed below it.

The vertical axis was the decay rate, the horizontal axis was the year, and the grid line for 1820 was printed slightly thicker than the rest.

He had only skimmed a few pages of this book at the Imperial Capital University Library.

He had scanned it page by page, lingering on each for less than ten seconds.

Yet at this moment, every page was fixed in his mind, accurate down to the wording, punctuation, and printing flaws.

Richard's gaze returned to the Panel.

[Learning · Erudition: All texts that pass before the eyes shall leave their mark upon the brain.]

In the past, his reading had relied on spreading a few stacks of books across a limited mental workbench.

For every new book he opened, the earliest stack had to be put away to make room.

If he tried to recall those put-away stacks a few months later, all that remained were hazy outlines and a handful of the most important sentences.

Things were different now. The workbench was gone.

Every page he had ever laid eyes on stood ready in his mind.

Whichever page he needed, he could just walk right up to it and pull it off the shelf.

Richard let out a soft breath.

He didn't need to think hard to understand what this bonus meant for someone on the Scholar path.

Aside from sheer processing speed, a Scholar's greatest bottleneck was whether their mind could hold enough raw material.

From this moment on, running out of capacity was no longer an issue.

He still had 1 point left on the Panel.

Richard shifted his gaze to the [Mind] column.

The third item under [Mind], [Speculation], hadn't been unlocked yet.

He tapped the [Speculation] column.

A prompt popped up on the Panel.

"Consume 1 point to unlock [Speculation]."

Richard confirmed, and 1 point was consumed.

[Speculation] Lv.1 unlocked.

He sat there waiting for a moment, but didn't perceive any obvious change.

Richard frowned slightly.

He pulled the copy of his aunt's doctoral thesis out of his drawer.

The Influence of Late-Stage Variants of the Alexandrian School in the Sealing Studies of the Western Continent.

He had read through it roughly over the past few days.

He could recount its general outline, but he hadn't fully grasped the specific argumentative details within each section.

Now, he read it again.

“...It is precisely due to the coupling effect of the first two characteristics that the late-stage variants were able to spread rapidly in the sealing studies of the Western Continent.”

He had read this sentence twice before and found nothing wrong with it.

Now, when he reached the phrase "coupling effect of the first two characteristics," the entire paragraph seemed to shift slightly before his eyes.

[Erudition] came into play at this moment; he could instantly recall all seven preceding key paragraphs referenced in this section.

He cross-referenced them one by one.

Two main argumentative threads had been laid out independently from different sections of the thesis, converging right at the paragraph before him.

The convergence of these two threads formed the load-bearing beam.

If that convergence point failed to hold, half the chapter's argument would collapse.

Richard set his fountain pen aside.

"Reading a thesis is about finding the structural beams supporting it."

"If the beams hold, the entire thesis holds."

"If the beams fail, no matter how beautifully written it is, it's nothing more than lumber neatly arranged on an empty lot."

He raised a hand and rubbed his temples.

After a few rubs, he gradually realized exactly what the bonus from [Speculation] was doing.

Unlike gaining the [Erudition] trait, this bonus didn't immediately kick in at full power.

Its physical sensation was passive.

When [Perception] was unlocked, it had felt like his entire being had grown "clearer";

When [Speculation] unlocked, it was like swapping flat overhead lighting for an angled sidelight.

Flat lighting illuminated everything but failed to reveal depth.

When a sidelight was cast, all the bumps and hollows were thrown into sharp relief.

The theses, the textbooks, the articles by philosophers he had read in the past...

Previously, relying on [Learning] Lv.2, he could remember them, recount them, and pinpoint their exact locations within a text.

Now, he could start picking them apart.

Richard couldn't stop himself from smiling.

He immediately shifted his focus to [Stone Armor].

Previously, he had followed every step recorded in the inscription, executing it methodically.

Now, he mentally pulled up the inscription from the Gargoyle.

[Erudition] rendered every page, every diagram, and every little annotation written by the creator in exacting detail.

Then, [Speculation] activated.

The load-bearing structure of the entire [Stone Armor] Spell Formula slowly manifested before his eyes.

The "Trigger" stage was the foundation;

The "Coating" stage was the load-bearing wall;

The "Maintenance" stage was the roof.

When he practiced [Stone Armor] in the past, he had subconsciously treated all three stages as equally important.

He had allocated an equal amount of practice time to each every day.

[Speculation] told him he was wrong.

Both "Trigger" and "Maintenance" were fixed structures.

The marginal returns on practicing fixed structures diminished rapidly. Once they were mastered to a certain extent, no amount of further training would yield anything new.

"Coating" was a variable structure.

Hidden within this variable structure were two weak points he had previously overlooked.

Richard grabbed a piece of drafting paper and redrew the circulation diagram for [Stone Armor].

When he finished, he added two small auxiliary lines into the originally thinnest segment of the "Coating" process.

Richard set the paper aside and retrieved the rubbings of the twelve sets of Boundary Stone inscriptions from his drawer.

He had previously deciphered a third of these twelve rubbings before getting stuck.

Later, aided by his comparative research on the parchment and the Bronze Fragment, he had advanced a few more steps.

Now, he laid his restored drafts and the original rubbings side by side.

[Erudition] pulled every symbol, every trace of wear, and every minute deviation left by the carver's trembling hand across those twelve rubbings directly to the forefront of his mind.

[Speculation] slowly began to churn.

The load-bearing structure of the Boundary Stone Array took shape inch by inch before his eyes.

Groups one through six served the function of "keeping the thing inside from getting out."

Groups seven through twelve served the function of "preventing anyone outside from casually getting in."

This much was known; Richard had deduced it in the past.

What [Speculation] revealed to him now was a detail he had completely overlooked.

The second load-bearing inscription and the fifth load-bearing inscription were structurally mirrored.

This kind of mirrored correspondence had a name in Celtic rituals—"Dual Lips."

The Dual Lips were the true mouthpiece of the ritual.

Richard set his pen down and leaned back in his chair.

In the past, when trying to write his probatio text, he had always wanted to draw something new from the twelve sets of inscriptions, yet whatever he came up with had always felt lacking in weight.

Now, he knew exactly what he needed to write.

Richard reached out and pulled the ink bottle a little closer.

"Now, the truth is nothing but lovely."