Chapter 330: A Good Omen

The pyramid completed another rotation within the Black Tide.

Even after the turn, it still felt uneasy.

It drew an extremely fine shadow filament from itself and released it toward the material realm.

It needed to walk the path Elena had pointed out for itself.

Deep within the veil, the Black Tide churned as usual.

But its direction of rotation had changed.

..................

Richard woke and checked the Pocket Watch on his nightstand.

It was just past six in the morning.

Level 4 [Breathing: Healing] hadn't stopped once while he slept.

He sat up, the blanket slipping to his waist.

The tree of light within the Seat of the Sun in his chest remained perfectly intact.

Yet he could feel something exceedingly small added to the very tip of a canopy branch.

It was different from the Shadow Inversion the seed had granted him the first time.

Shadow Inversion was like a tool he could pick up and use at any time, its operation instructions laid out plainly: what to input and what it reversed into.

He picked up the Sacred Ibis Bronze Paperweight from the nightstand.

The ether on the bronze surface had smoothed out even more than when he finished the ritual a few days ago.

It had finished its job.

Yet as he squeezed it in his palm, the bronze still felt warm to the touch.

"Thanks," he told it.

He placed it back on the nightstand alongside the Gargoyle and the Sphinx Lamp.

The three beast-shaped artifacts crouched by the bed in different postures.

The Gargoyle had its mouth open, the Sphinx kept its eyes half-closed, and the sacred ibis stared at the floor.

One fierce, one serene, one gentle.

They looked like three gatekeepers of completely opposite temperaments standing watch for him through the night.

Richard folded his blanket, slipped on his shoes, and headed to the washroom.

Splashing cold water on his face washed away the last of his sleepiness.

He pondered his next steps as he dried his face.

Naming couldn't be rushed.

For his first attempt, he planned to practice on inanimate objects.

Stone, metal, wood... these simple materials had a singular nature, making them easy to fully parse.

He would start with the simple things, hone his feel for the process, and then branch out.

He hung his towel on the rack and glanced out the window.

The morning light over the Imperial Capital had shifted from gray to pale gold.

The old plane trees by the Petrie Building had lost most of their leaves, stretching bare branches into the morning breeze.

Today was Tuesday.

He had Inscriptiology and Ritual Language in the morning, and the Compilation Group had a batch of urgent frontline dispatches to process in the afternoon.

The time for the gathering was also drawing near.

He took his coat from the wardrobe and slung his bag over his shoulder.

The corridor was empty when he stepped out.

He ran into Edith beneath the porch as he exited the dormitory.

Clutching the book she never parted with, the girl was squatting by a stone pillar to tie her shoe.

"Morning," Richard said.

"Morning." Edith looked up, her cheeks flushed from the cold wind.

She finished her laces and stood, walking alongside Richard toward the academic building.

They walked in silence for a while before Edith spoke.

"Richard, you seem to be in a really good mood today."

She had tentatively dropped any formal honorifics, carefully watching his reaction.

"Do I?" Richard naturally didn't mind.

"Yeah." Edith seemed to relax. "The corners of your mouth have been turning up the whole time we've been walking."

Richard touched his mouth. He was indeed smiling.

"Probably because..." He paused, considering his phrasing. "...I had a very good dream last night."

"What kind of dream?"

"I dreamed about a bird."

"What kind of bird?" Edith's interest was piqued. Her passion for birds far exceeded her interest in people.

"A bird with a long beak. It wrote a really long note for me."

Edith tilted her head.

"A long beak... was it a sacred ibis?"

"I think so."

"The sacred ibis is a divine bird in the Black Soil River Basin." Edith's eyes lit up. "An incarnation of Thoth."

"Do you know what Thoth governs?" Richard asked.

"Records, of course," Edith answered immediately. "And writing, measuring, and keeping accounts for the dead."

Then she tilted her head again.

"For a Scholar like you to dream of Thoth's bird... it might be a good omen."

"How so?"

"The old texts say that whoever has Thoth's bird fly onto their windowsill will..."

She flipped through her notebook to a specific page.

"...gain the ability to 'speak the correct name.'"

Richard smiled into the morning breeze.

"You're right, Edith. It's a very good omen."

..................

His second class of the morning was Ritual Language.

The lecturer, Pollock, was in his forties with an old scar on his forehead—allegedly earned during fieldwork in his youth.

He had a classroom habit: every time he stepped up to the podium, he twirled a piece of chalk through his fingers twice, speaking only once he had a steady grip on it.

Today, the chalk twirled three times before stopping.

"Today, I am going to discuss something obscure."

Pollock wrote a line on the blackboard.

Exorcizo te, immunde spiritus.

"You've all seen this phrase in Church missals." He rested his chalk in the tray.

"'I exorcise you, unclean spirit.'"

"You've listened to priests recite it for a dozen years, chanted it until your lips callused. Have you ever wondered about one thing?"

He swept his gaze across the students.

"Why is it that, despite chanting this phrase so many times, nothing has ever happened?"

A few students exchanged blank looks.

Pollock stuffed his hands in his pockets and paced.

"Because for the past few centuries, the Church has been doing one thing."

He returned to the board and drew a rough sketch of a row of teeth beneath the text.

It was an ugly drawing, but it conveyed the point.

"They took those ritual incantations with actual lethal power and, one by one... pulled their teeth."

"With the teeth gone, they left only the gums for the congregation to chant."

The classroom fell silent.

"The faithful recite those words, believing they are praying, exorcising evil, and speaking to God.

"In reality, they have a set of dentures in their mouths. They can't bite through a damn thing."

Pollock pulled a yellowed rubbing from beneath his lecture notes.

"This is an old prayer from a rural exorcism ritual in Albion—a thirteenth-century manuscript.

"The original text is a mix of the celtic language and Church Latin."

He placed the rubbing on a wooden easel and marked the line numbers beside it with white chalk.

"The first line, 'Exorcizo te, immunde spiritus', survived in the Church missal. But it is followed by three more lines."

"The first points east."

"The second points west."

"The third points... down."

He drew a thick line beneath the word 'down' for emphasis.

"The lines pointing east and west were deleted by the Church at the end of the twelfth century. They claimed the phrasing was too coarse and lacked decorum.

"In truth, those two lines corresponded to two actual, medium-sized weak points in southern Albion. Chanting them created a directional resonance in the ether."

"The third line, which points 'down', survived a bit longer, lasting into the fourteenth century."

Pollock pulled his hands from his pockets.

"It points to a massive weak point.

"When the Church removed it, the reason recorded in their internal memos was: 'The Latin grammar in this section is erroneous and requires correction.'"

"'Erroneous grammar.'" He scoffed.

"A group of clerics—masters of Latin grammar—suddenly discovering a grammatical error in a prayer they had used for centuries. Does that sound plausible?"

Someone in the audience laughed.

Pollock arrayed the two texts side by side on the easel.

"Classwork. On the left is the current version from the missal; on the right is the thirteenth-century manuscript.

"Compare them and find where the teeth were pulled."

Richard flipped his notebook to a blank page and began comparing.

He felt entirely relaxed.

He had just completed the seed trial and acquired the Naming ability; the mental excitement hadn't fully faded.

On the podium, Pollock used his chalk to point out the missing teeth one by one.

Here, the Church had deleted a modifier; there, they had replaced an imperative mood with a gentle optative.

Every single alteration was exceedingly minor.

In isolation, any one of them looked like a mere phrasing adjustment.

But dozens of them added together turned the prayer from a dagger that could draw blood into a plastic toy knife of the same shape.

Richard studied the two texts for a moment, his pen gliding along the margin.

He wrote a single line:

"Equipping a toothless thing with teeth and pulling the teeth from a toothed thing are the same craft."

He read it over, then appended half a sentence beneath it:

"The difference lies in whether you stand with the dentist or with the teeth."

When the break arrived, Edith gathered her things for her next class.

Clutching her bestiary, she glanced at his notebook as she passed.

"Did you come up with that yourself?" she asked, looking at the text.

Richard nudged the notebook toward her. "I suppose."

Edith tilted her head, studying it for a few seconds.

"Then if you put teeth in a sacred ibis, would it turn into a crocodile?"

Richard found it amusing; her logic was impressively abstract.

"...It wouldn't turn into a crocodile." Richard stifled a laugh. "It would turn into a crane with a very hard beak."

"A crane with a hard beak." Edith thought for a moment. "Wouldn't that just be a pelican?"

"Pelicans don't have hard beaks. They just have big ones."

"Doesn't a big beak count as a kind of tooth?"

"...Edith, having a big beak and having teeth are two different things."

The girl nodded, half-understanding, and walked away hugging her bestiary.

Richard wrote a new line in his notebook.

"Naming is installing teeth; deconstructing is pulling them. They are two sides of the same pair of pliers."