Chapter 341: The Angler

Dawn hadn't yet broken. Richard rolled over.

Wild Sleep brought him from deep slumber to complete wakefulness in a single breath.

There was something else in the room, buzzing incessantly.

He opened his eyes. A golden bee hovered about a foot above the nightstand.

A Spirit Realm Messenger.

Richard sat up and rested his open right palm on the edge of the bed.

The bee hovered for about two seconds.

Its compound eyes swept him from head to toe, confirming something with a person far away.

Confirmation complete, the bee's abdomen swelled, squeezing a small, wax-sealed clay jar from its tail end. A clear wheat-sheaf crest was stamped into the wax.

It was from Demeter.

The bee dropped the jar and dissipated.

Richard carried the small clay jar over to the windowsill.

The wax seal was intact. The impression had been made by hand with uneven pressure.

Though Demeter was a woman, her palms were large and her fingers stubby, leaving the stamped crest deep on the left side and shallow on the right.

He ran a fingernail around the wax rim and peeled the seal off.

He tipped the jar upside down, and a small clay bowl tumbled out. A few repaired cracks lined its outer surface.

He brought it to his nose and caught the scent of dry dirt.

Richard flipped the bowl over and brought out the Sacred Ibis Bronze Paperweight and the Small Bronze Balance for a preliminary weighing.

The sacred ibis angled its long beak toward the side of the bowl, taking a reading.

The ether saturating the bowl was incredibly ancient and pure.

The balance weighed its age at around three thousand years.

Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, tracing back to an agricultural settlement somewhere deep in the heartland of the Western Continent.

He read its original purpose too—a grain sacrifice bowl.

Every year, before sowing or after the harvest, the first handful of grain was placed in the bowl as an offering to the earth below.

The ritual was simple. There were no complicated incantations—just burying the bowl in the dirt and waiting a while.

Yet this simple rite had been performed by one generation and passed to the next, and from that generation to the next.

Through countless repetitions over the years, the bowl had become thoroughly steeped in ether.

He inspected it for a long time without finding anything amiss. It seemed like a perfectly normal supernatural item.

Demeter had also stuffed a note into the jar.

The handwriting was large, and the ink had smudged in two places, likely because she started writing without wiping something wet off her hands.

“I bought this bowl two years ago from a traveling peddler.

He said he dug it out of the cellar of a demolished farmhouse in the southern countryside of Franc.”

“Its background was completely clean when I took it. I used it as a supplementary tool for my field rituals for the better part of a year, and it was always very handy.”

“Things started feeling off six months ago. The ring of scratch marks on the bottom of the bowl had nearly worn away.

“Now it's deepening again. I watched with my own eyes as it slowly carved itself back in.”

“Any seeds held in this bowl before planting grew into shoots that were taller and thicker than normal, but if you snapped them open, they were completely hollow inside.”

“I didn't dare use it anymore, but I also didn't dare just throw it away.”

“Help me decipher what that ring of scratches on the bottom actually says, and figure out why it's growing back.”

There was no signature at the end, just a drawn sketch of a wheat sheaf.

Richard folded the note and tucked it into the title page of his notebook.

“Hollow.”

They grew fast and they grew strong, but crack them open and there was nothing inside.

Demeter had mentioned something at their last gathering: the grain was growing too fast and too hollow.

At the time, he had assumed it was a metaphor for the thinning of the veil.

Now, it seemed the actual field she guarded was already having issues.

Richard pressed his Inspiration back into the ring of scratches on the bottom of the bowl.

The inscription system was incredibly ancient; it failed to match the Celtic, Black Soil River, or Alexandrian School systems he had mastered.

[Learning] lv4 gave him a massive spiderweb, with every node of knowledge interlinking.

But no matter how vast the web was, he first needed a node to make a connection.

He needed to find someone.

His aunt's words echoed in his mind.

“Asking your mentor for help is a student's privilege. If you don't use the privilege, it expires.”

He didn't need his aunt to lead the way this time; he would go find Professor Mortimer himself.

In the eastern corridor on the second floor of the Petrie Building, the door was left slightly ajar.

Richard pushed it open and went inside. The office was indeed empty, and a thin layer of dust had gathered on the windowsill.

A stack of documents lay on the desk, the signature block on the top page still empty.

The teacup was unwashed, the residual tea stains at the bottom completely dried out.

The professor wasn't here, and it looked as though he hadn't been in for days.

He closed the door and headed down the corridor to find Pendleton.

Pendleton was in the department office, behind that desk forever buried under clutter.

“You're looking for Professor Mortimer?”

“Yes. I have a few things I wanted to ask him to look at.”

Pendleton threw his hands up.

“I want to know where he is even more than you do.

Last month, Associate Professor Greer was hounding him to sign an urgent dispatch for the frontlines. He staked out his office for three days and still didn't catch him.

Associate Professor Hollis is looking for him too. He's been standing at his door with a stack of old manuscripts, practically ready to move in.”

Richard thanked him and backed out.

His aunt was already out of town on business. A phone call would work, but he didn't want to bother her with every little thing.

Richard returned to his dorm room, hesitating as he took the Tarot Cards out of his bag.

Should he directly divine Professor Mortimer's location?

Don't even think about it.

A Major Adept Scholar's shielding against remote perception meant that a Practitioner like himself trying to probe would be no different from splashing water onto an iron plate.

But divining for himself was perfectly fine. The phrasing was key.

He mentally drafted the question three times, settling on the final version:

“Which direction should I travel today to have the best chance of finding the help I need?”

This was a question about his own actions, bypassing any probing of the professor himself.

He shuffled the deck and flipped three cards over.

The first card: [The Fool - Upright].

The person standing at the cliff edge held all his worldly possessions, his face turned to the sky, a sheer drop right at his feet.

Set out, walk into the unknown, bring no preconceptions.

The second card: [Four of Cups - Reversed].

Three cups were arranged neatly before him, but the drinker no longer wished to touch them.

Weary of familiar places, needing to step out of the comfort zone.

Not in the school, not in the building, not anywhere he was supposed to be.

The third card: [Page of Wands - Upright].

A young man held a sprouting wooden stick aloft, his face full of curiosity.

Curiosity, a new beginning, a message, or a path pushed forward by curiosity.

Richard lined the three cards up side by side on his desk.

The Fool, Four of Cups, Page of Wands.

It meant the professor wasn't in any formal setting; he was somewhere no one would ever expect him to be.

And Richard had to act like the Fool—setting no goals or directions, just following his intuition out the door.

He drew one more card.

The fourth card: [The Star - Upright].

Hope, guidance. Being led forward by something.

The Star Card appearing in the fourth position—a hidden clue.

Something had inadvertently already pointed to the professor's location.

He put the four cards away, put on his coat, and slung his canvas bag over his shoulder.

Bring no preconceptions, follow his curiosity, step out of his comfort zone.

He stepped out the dormitory doors and stood on the sycamore-lined path.

To the left was the direction of the Petrie Building.

To the right was the exit of the Academy District, leading to the Imperial Capital Urban District.

He casually stood a twig on the ground; when it tipped to the right, he went right.

On the outskirts of the Academy District was a stone-paved road he almost never took.

The end of this road connected to an old market.

Sellers of secondhand goods, used books, and scrap metal dug out of various attics and cellars.

The stalls that could be set up in the middle of the street before the war were now all shrunk into a single row along the wall.

The market had grown even more deserted after winter set in, the stall owners bundled up in thick coats, huddled behind their respective stalls.

Some were reading newspapers, while others had simply pulled old blankets over themselves from head to toe to doze off.

Richard wandered aimlessly, his pace slower than usual.

He stopped when he passed a used bookstall.

The stall owner was a sour-faced middle-aged man wearing a filthy gray wool scarf, the tip of his nose frozen purplish-red.

The items on the stall were extremely jumbled.

Outdated bound volumes of the Imperial Capital Morning News were piled at the very front to serve as a signboard;

behind the bound volumes was a row of moth-eaten popular novels;

and further in was a pile of old booklets dug out from who knew which attic, crammed into a cardboard box in various sizes.

Richard riffled through that pile of old booklets.

When his fingers touched the fifth or sixth one, his Inspiration gave him a very faint signal.

He immediately pulled that booklet out.

Dark blue cloth cover, only about twenty pages long.

Imperial Capital Canal Fishing Guide: 1889 Supplement Edition

Richard stared at this line of text, unable to keep the corners of his mouth from lifting.

Anglers really did appear in every era and every nation.

He slowly flipped through it. Starting from the fourth page, penciled annotations appeared in the blank spaces.

“Seventh piling downstream of Lock Three. The riverbed silt layer is about two feet thick, resting on a sandstone layer.

“The sandstone has an east-west fissure about three fingers wide. Inferred to have an underground water vein passing through.”

He closed the fishing guide.

“How much for this one?”

The sour-faced man revealed half his face from the scarf.

“Two pence.”

Richard paid and left, heading toward the canal.