Chapter 497: Execution Line

On the first Wednesday of August, Richard was halfway through dusting the third shelf in Donner's shop when someone called him out from the back room.

It was a runner from the Branch Office, dripping with sweat.

"Mr. Williams! Professor McPhee wants you at the back door of the Petrie Building at six o'clock this evening!"

"Where to?"

"Grey Weir."

Donner looked up from his low stool, reacting to the name.

"Plant No. 4?"

"Yes."

The short man took off his monocle and wiped it with his cuff.

"Kid, I went there once, twenty years ago.

"It was a dye factory back then. I went to collect a batch of old copper movable type.

"The factory manager treated me to tea, and the girl who served it had purple hands."

"Purple?"

"Yes, purple." Donner swirled his cup.

"And it wouldn't wash off. It was a purple that seeped right out from under the fingernails."

He jerked his chin toward the back room.

"Remember to grab a handful of coarse salt when you head out into the field."

"I brought my own."

"Then grab another."

At exactly six o'clock, two vehicles were parked at the back door of the Petrie Building.

In front was the Branch Office's black van, its side painted with "Municipal Health Inspectorate" as usual.

Behind it was an open-bed truck, its cargo bed piled high with toolboxes and iron buckets.

A man squatted on the hood of the truck, arguing with the driver.

He was in his forties with a sloppily trimmed full beard.

This was the bearded Associate Professor Greer from the School of Engineering at Imperial Capital University, who was on fairly good terms with people like Isabella and Croft.

After enrolling last year, Richard had worked with the associate professor while in the Compilation Group, so he was fairly familiar with him.

"I said take East Embankment Road!"

"East Embankment Road is closed at night, sir."

"Closed? Why didn't anyone tell me that yesterday?"

"It wasn't closed yesterday."

Greer jumped down from the hood and turned around, bumping right into Richard.

"It's been a while." He sized up the young man who had recently been making the biggest splash in the Preparatory Group.

"Associate Professor Greer." Richard nodded in greeting.

"Don't call me associate professor." Greer's eyebrows knit together.

"Tonight, I'm just a laborer whose job got snatched, tagging along for the ride."

"You know MacFie's temperament." The bearded man pointed at the van in front with a rolled-up blueprint.

"Yesterday afternoon, he ran into the department office and snatched that work order right off my desk."

Greer spread his hands, thoroughly exasperated. "He told Pendleton, 'This run belongs to me.'"

"Why?"

"How should I know?" Greer tucked the blueprint back under his arm.

"But this mission didn't require a Major Adept in the first place, and he specifically dragged you along... He's probably giving you a makeup lesson, kid."

"Back when I was a student, my Mentor couldn't even be bothered to buy me a meal.

"I handled all the grunt work in his lab for three years."

The bearded man shook his head, his face full of resentment—though he treated his own graduate students exactly the same way now.

As he spoke, the door of the van in front opened.

MacFie stepped out, ducking his head to avoid hitting the doorframe.

"Greer, did you bring the factory blueprints?"

"I brought them. The new ones."

Greer held up the roll of paper.

"The latest version from after the remodeling in March. I just had a grad student copy them from the Ministry of Munitions last week."

Heading east from the Imperial Capital for forty minutes, the brick houses grew shorter and sparser, giving way to grayish-green mudflats on both sides of the road.

Wind blew up from the estuary, carrying a salty scent mixed with a faint, indescribable sweetness.

Beside him, Greer warned, "Don't breathe that in."

"What is it?"

"Trinitrotoluene. The most common pollutant from chemical plants."

Greer rolled the window up for him, and the cabin fell quiet for a moment.

Richard habitually maintained his Still Water observation and noticed that Greer's Ether did not leak outward.

Whether an ordinary Practitioner or a Minor Adept, their Ether would always seep along their circuits to form a layer over their skin, rubbing off wherever they went. Richard had observed too many people over the past year.

Montagu's Ether lay flat and even, Catherine's was sharp, while MacFie's pressed outward from the very marrow of his bones.

Greer's Ether was drawn entirely inward.

Was this a Minor Adept Scholar of the Hearth Fire Tradition?

The bearded man smiled at him.

"Croft was shouting in the department office, saying the Department of Classics produced someone walking the Mirror path this year.

"When that guy was shouting, besides pride, he also sounded a bit annoyed that you didn't know what was good for you."

"And you, sir?"

"Me?" Greer reached his left hand into his pocket and pulled out a vernier caliper.

Under the effect of Ether, the caliper dismantled in the blink of an eye into various components floating in mid-air: the main scale, the vernier, the locking screws, the spring plates...

"Those old fogeys in the Department of Classics look down on us. They say industrial research has a history of less than a century, so how can it even be called scholarship?

"But we are the true darlings of this era. While Scholars might not be able to build things like craftsmen, we can dismantle and modify these structures."

He slapped the reassembled vernier caliper into Richard's hand and stroked his bushy beard.

"When an accident actually happens, they still come looking for us."

Richard flipped the vernier caliper over, finding that its shape had completely changed, yet it fit together just as seamlessly as before.

The car turned past the embankment, and Grey Weir State-Owned Filling Plant No. 4 stood right in the middle of the mudflats.

Dozens of single-story sheds sat squarely arranged, with narrow-gauge tracks paved between them, where small flatbed carts were parked.

Looking down from above, they looked like a whole box of matchboxes lined up on the muddy ground, only these matchboxes were rather large.

The vehicles stopped at the factory's main gate.

The room the Branch Office had borrowed was located behind the security room. It was originally the factory doctor's clinic, but tonight the doctor had been sent to the dormitories on duty.

The three people inside were all logistics personnel from the Branch Office, wearing the uniforms of the Municipal Health Inspectorate.

The Branch Office team had arrived at the incident factory days in advance and had basically investigated the situation thoroughly:

Last month, with the frontlines strained, the Ministry of Munitions raised the workers' nightly quota for filling shells.

At the same time, a new law stipulated that female workers needing to quit must obtain a certificate from the factory—and the factory simply refused to issue any.

After the workload increased, in just two short weeks, many female workers developed symptoms like headaches and insomnia, yet the factory doctor refused to treat them as an illness.

One of them claimed that even after her shift ended, her hands would uncontrollably repeat the motion of filling shells;

A foreman reported hearing rhythmic, muffled thuds from beneath the long workstations late at night, perfectly matching the tempo of filling shells.

On the flip side, the veil was also shifting.

Before the war began, there were at most three to five anomalies across the country in a single month; last month alone saw dozens.

MacFie explained it like this: war made millions of people repeat the exact same actions and shout the exact same slogans at the exact same moment. In the past, rituals of this scale could only be organized by the Church or the Royal Family; now, the Ministry of Munitions conducted them four times a day.

By the end of July, major newspapers had also started universally referring to the female workers in the filling plants as "our canaries."

They claimed their skin was "yellowed for the country." Three hundred and twenty female workers with real names were thus absorbed into a single term.

Richard recalled the changeling they had studied in class: as long as a title was called out long enough and believed deeply enough, it could usurp the nest like a cuckoo. This was the power of definition.

The group arrived at the incident site. A clerk lifted the canvas tarp, and the cloying sweetness surged out.

Only then did Richard clearly see a crack in the ground.

It was about three fingers wide, with wind blowing upward from within.

Greer squatted down and dug out a piece of broken brick from the edge of the crack, which was stained with an un-washable layer of purple.

He flipped the brick over and pointed at the fractured surface.

"Look at this side. The slag from a phosphorus furnace is embedded in the brick."

Richard leaned in. A few whitish granules were wedged into the break.

"Before the seventies, there was a match factory on this plot of land."

Greer had obviously done his homework before coming here.

"After the match factory went under, the kilns weren't dismantled, and the slag wasn't hauled away.

"When they built the dye factory in the eighties, the foreman cut corners by mixing the slag into the bricks when firing them."

"When they tore down the walls this March, the pile of bricks was just left sitting over on that patch of dirt to the east, totally ignored."

MacFie, standing to the side, asked the most direct question: "Just tell us how many people died."

Greer shook his head. "Not many died at the match factory."

"And the dye factory?"

"Not many died at the dye factory either."

"But that's only because those workers didn't die during their shifts..."

"If an explosion kills twenty people, that's an accident. It requires a hearing, newspaper publications, and compensation."

Greer sneered. "Those workers at the match factory weren't blown up."

"Their gums would rot away. White phosphorus got in through the gaps in their teeth. First, the toothache would cause their jaws to swell, and later, the bone would start decaying.

"At night, their jaws would glow green. I've seen such cases with my own eyes."

"Medically, it's called phosphorus necrosis of the jaw. The factory just crudely labeled it all as toothaches."

"In the end, everyone passed away in their own homes, and their death certificates all listed physical debility."

"What about the batch from the dye factory?"

"The dye factory made aniline purple."

Greer rubbed his own hands together as he spoke. "Their hands turned purple, their urine turned purple. After working for ten years, they would start pissing blood. The doctors would say it was kidney stones, so it never went into the accident logs either."

"You're right!" The clerk realized it as well.

"We checked the archives all the way up until this afternoon. For a full fifty years, the only names in the accident logs were from a few machinery accidents."

The sweet smell in the shed suddenly grew thicker.

"So this minor weak point isn't just about deaths like an ordinary blood-soaked point."

MacFie slowly summarized.

"They all worked until they died. You could call this a peripheral manifestation of the veil's modernization."

Greer turned to look at the clerk. "By the way, did the factory halt operations today?"

"Yes. The factory reported it as fumigation and disinfection. The workers are all resting in the dormitories. We posted two people at the door to keep them from coming out."

"Good."

MacFie took off his coat and draped it over a long table.

"You guys step out too. What comes next is work for us Practitioners."

The clerks replied respectfully and quickly withdrew, their eyes filled with awe.

Richard circulated the Condensed Mirror Method, and the information of the entire shed flooded into his mind, including what had been festering in the cracks of the gravel for fifty years.

"Professor, there's something beneath the veil."

"I know." MacFie rolled his sleeves up a notch. "I smelled it at the gate."

"Today counts as an on-site teaching session. Don't think you can just stand off to the side and watch."

Before Richard could figure out what he meant, he saw the white-haired giant raise his leg and stomp his foot beside the crack, causing the entire shed to shudder.

The bearded associate professor, who wasn't overly familiar with MacFie, wore a look of horror. He wondered if this man was really a Scholar—how was he packing more physical power than a Hunter?

With that single stomp, the wind blowing from the crack instantly ceased.

Then, the wind reversed, sucking downward.

Richard's hair was tugged downward, and the un-swept yellow powder on the table was entirely sucked into the fissure.

"Alright, it heard that." MacFie stood straight.

The concrete around the crack peeled up from the center, folding back on both sides.

A hand reached out from the fissure.

It was indeed a human hand, and it seemed to belong to a young woman, only its color was a sickly yellow.

The yellow hand gripped the edge of the crack, followed by a second, then a third...

Though there were over a hundred of them, they didn't act independently.

They moved to the singular rhythm of an assembly line... gripping and pulling together, then releasing all at once.

The veil completed its inversion, and the concrete beneath their feet became the ceiling above their heads.

The entire shed folded over on itself.

Richard looked up. The shed hung upside down above him.

Two rows of long tables and three hundred and twenty low stools were fixed there. Half-filled artillery shells stood upright on the tables without falling.

Further up hung another shed.

Over thirty women sat at tables, their hands turning items over the rims of vats.

With every turn, the water in the vats grew darker, and the purple hue on their hands extended past their wrists.

Deeper still was a third factory, so low one could barely crawl inside.

There were no electric lights in the room, only rows of wooden racks holding tens of thousands of dipped matches, their heads pointing up like a dense wheat field.

The girls sitting there were even younger, their jaws glowing with a green luminescence.

The three sheds nested within each other, stacking upwards into a seemingly bottomless well.

A massive, bizarre worm dozens of meters long arched upward from the crack, segment by segment.

Its body was made of iron plating; each segment was a roller housing from a conveyor belt, rusted black with rivets still lining the edges.

The worm's head was a funnel, pitching into an unfathomably dark abyss.

Human arms grew thickly along both of its sides, sprouting side-by-side from the seams of the iron plates, densely packed from head to tail.

The colors of these arms were stratified. The segment closest to the head was yellow and newly shiny.

Moving backward, the yellow faded into a dirty purple.

Further back, the purple faded into an extremely pale blue... and in the dark, those arms emitted a faint green glow of their own.

The three colors spanning from head to tail represented the three generations of people poisoned by chemicals in the factory over the past fifty years.

Richard furrowed his brows. Seeing this evil creature, which was even more twisted than the monsters in horror films, gave him a visceral sense of discomfort.

"Professor, what is this?"

"Didn't you see those iron shells and chemically polluted hands? It is the factory itself."

The bizarre worm in the shed braced its hundreds of arms all at once, paddling together.

It was crawling toward them.

"Kid." MacFie suddenly turned his head.

"Run to the left."

"What?"

"Run!"

Richard obediently activated his flying shoes and bolted, and the massive worm immediately whipped its head around to chase him first.

When the worm turned, its multitude of arms didn't tangle in the slightest. From head to tail, they completed the shift in waves, like someone running a finger down a row of piano keys, producing a rapid, crisp clatter.

This chilling sight tightened Richard's chest even further, pushing his flight speed up a notch.

But the worm was too huge; catching up to him only required twisting its body.

That bottomless funnel mouth slammed down over his head.

Richard gritted his teeth and pushed his Ether into the little wings beneath his feet, instantly reappearing dozens of meters away.

The massive funnel mouth crashed into the spot where he had just stood, swallowing a long table whole without even chewing.

After devouring the table, nothing but a pile of sawdust spilled out from the back of the funnel.

Richard leaned against the wall, panting.

"Your reaction speed isn't bad, kid." MacFie was still standing in the same spot with his arms crossed, watching the show at his leisure.

He pointed at the pile of sawdust. "If you get swallowed... your hands will be stitched onto its body to serve as its hundred-and-something-th leg."

"And the rest of the person?"

"It doesn't want the rest of the person."

The huge worm had already pivoted around, aiming itself squarely at the center of the shed once again.

MacFie stood there unmoving as the funnel mouth slammed down toward him.

Even though Richard knew the professor didn't need him worrying, he couldn't help but break into a cold sweat.

Amidst the dust and smoke, MacFie had raised his right hand.

His index and middle fingers were pressed together, with his thumb loosely hooked beneath them—it was the posture of holding a pen.

He made a diagonal slashing motion in the air.

The speed was so fast that Richard almost thought he had just idly waved his hand.

But the next moment, the massive worm's front thirty segments were cleanly severed right down the middle.

Richard's Still Water illuminated the spot where the blade had fallen.

That stroke had been wiped away from the edge, so the thirty iron segments lost their reason to move forward. They collapsed onto the ground on the spot, their dozens of arms sticking straight out, completely motionless.

The funnel head detached and smashed into the concrete, rolling far away.

Richard's mouth fell open, unable to close for quite a while.

"You..."

"This is branch-severing." MacFie lowered his hand.

"That booklet Catherine gave you says it takes three steps: read, cut, and wipe. With me, it can be reduced to just one step."

"However, I can't kill it just yet."

Hearing this, Richard turned his head.

The paralyzed iron shells on the ground were being reeled back in by the rear section; the severed thirty segments were pulled back and reattached.

The interfaces aligned, the rivets locked into place, and the funnel was lifted off the ground by a swarm of arms and reattached to its head.

MacFie shook his hand out and looked at him.

"I only chopped off the leaves. To thoroughly resolve this, the roots must be cut."

"You're going to find this root."

Richard's expression looked a bit strained. "Professor..."

"Enough, stop spouting nonsense. Otherwise, why would I have brought you here?"

The white-haired giant rolled his sleeves up a bit further.

"I could chop it into scrap metal all by myself in less than ten minutes, but if I do, you'll learn nothing.

"Next time you run into something else on your own, you'd still just be left standing around watching."

The huge worm charged forward again, and MacFie took a step forward.

This time he didn't even raise his hand; he just brought his foot down.

The Ether field of the Moon Hunting Tradition unfurled, scrambling the distances within the entire shed.

Richard clearly saw the worm a mere thirty meters away, yet with another glance, it felt as though it was at the far edge of the wilderness, hundreds of yards distant.

The creature charged into the cold lunar glow, its speed halving on the spot.

MacFie strolled through that cold glow as if taking a casual walk in a courtyard, swiping his hand with every step he took.

Rows of arms fell off the iron plating, only to be continually dragged back and reattached by the rear sections.

Reattach, sever, sever, reattach. MacFie was just playing with this worm.

"Kid!" MacFie shouted toward Richard.

"I'll hold out until you find the root!"

"Of course, it doesn't matter if you can't."

The white-haired giant laughed heartily:

"If you can't find it, I'll chop it up segment by segment until tomorrow morning.

"And then you'll go back to copying books, and keep copying them until next year."

Richard had no choice but to take action. He first used the Condensed Mirror Method to illuminate the massive worm.

The moment the reflection hit it, he realized something was wrong.

The huge worm bore no proper name on its body, only a string of employee ID numbers of the deceased.

Those numbers were densely packed, new ones layered over old ones, with the outermost layer still updating.

The white-haired giant's voice carried over.

"The workers slaved away for fifty years. By the end, they didn't even remember what their names were.

"So now, it only remembers how to work."

If he couldn't read it, branch-severing was just empty talk.

Beside him, Greer wasn't idle either; he pressed both of his palms flat against the concrete.

Ether hugged the ground, crawling along the cracks in the gravel all the way up onto the segmented iron shell of the great worm.

Richard could feel that the bearded professor was also pressing against the rust to read this worm.

In less than half a minute, Greer had completely analyzed the industrial processes of the iron shell.

Greer looked up.

"Kid, I'll give you a hand too. Make things a bit easier for you."

As the bearded man clenched his fist, the massive worm's iron shell began to lose its color, segment by segment.

The Hearth Fire Tradition could forge, so naturally, it could reverse the process.

The worm froze halfway through an arch on the ground.

It felt no pain, but it could sense its iron shell becoming brittle and crumbly.

The white-haired giant seized the moment, raising his hand and swiping horizontally. The massive worm was instantly chopped in half at the waist.

"..."

MacFie himself was stunned for a moment, before quickly slipping back into lecture mode.

"Kid, remember what you just saw."

The rear sixty segments pulled the severed forty segments back, reattaching them.

Greer sat on the ground.

"I only read its surface iron plating. Ultimately..."

Before he could finish speaking, the massive worm whipped its head around and charged at the bearded man sitting on the floor.

Greer raised his hand and slammed it onto the ground.

The ground rumbled as hundreds of discarded factory parts released their mortises all at once.

Within Richard's line of sight, over three hundred roller housings, more than a hundred axles, several boxes of rivets, and two coils of scrap steel bands... all flew over.

The parts began lining up on their own. Rivets flew out of boxes and dropped precisely into their designated holes, while the steel bands clamped tightly around them.

The assembly was extremely fast. In the blink of an eye, a thick, heavy curved wall bulged out in front of Greer.

The great worm slammed headfirst into it.

The funnel head bit into the very center of the curved wall, buckling the entire structure backward.

But the curvature directed all the force of the impact to the sides and down into the ground.

"This is..."

"A railway snow shed. This is the glamorous moment of engineering." From behind the wall, Greer shot Richard a thumbs-up.

"It's very durable. A single section can withstand two hundred pounds of pressure.

"However, with the worm ramming into a single point, the curved surface isn't taking the point load very well."

The huge worm backed up slightly and rammed it again, caving the curved wall in even further.

Greer shouted, "I calculated it—it can still hold for seventeen more hits!"

"Don't worry, if you aren't done after seventeen hits, I'll dismantle it and build something else!"

Richard felt the pressure rising. He first retreated behind a half-collapsed concrete pillar.

Pressing his back against the icy surface of the pillar, he panted twice before realizing something very strange.

Ever since he had darted away using the flying shoes, the great worm had never turned its head his way again.

It went to ram Greer, and it circled endlessly around MacFie's cold glow, yet not once had it looked at him.

The Silver Ring, the Eagle Hook, [Perception; Reflection]—even ignoring the Mask of Hermes, he had three layers of concealment.

...Being chased the first time was likely because MacFie had deliberately messed with him, making him run first.

Since the other two were standing still, whatever moved first would naturally be chased first.

Leaning against the pillar, Richard regained his composure.

[Speculation] began operating at high speed.

Since reading its body directly wouldn't work, could he try a mirror reflection? That was what he excelled at, after all.

From the corner of his eye, Richard caught a gleam of light. He noticed a whole row of thin glass panes on the side of the shed.

It was one-fen-thick plate glass, nailed to the wallboards, obscured by a layer of un-washable yellow powder.

Beneath the yellow powder, the entire shed was reflected: the iron shells scattered across the floor, Greer crouching on the ground radiating white steam, and the massive worm being chopped apart segment by segment only to be reattached.

Richard felt he had grasped the key.

What the Mirror Tradition read was supposed to be reflections in the first place.

That night by the doorframe in Covered Fire Village, MacFie had taught him hand by hand.

"Ogham script is carved on the edge."

"The edge is a boundary. The boundary is where it is meant to stay."

When a branch-severing blade struck, it struck the edge.

Richard looked up at the row of glass.

A pane of glass—the boundary between inside and out was the edge.

Therefore, the reflection cast on the glass was inherently resting upon this edge.

Richard turned his back on the battlefield, facing the long row of glass panes.

MacFie glanced back from within the cold glow and smiled.

"Good kid."

In Richard's line of sight, this small patch of scenery behind the veil shone through the glass.

The great worm was very small in the glass, only the size of a palm.

Those densely packed arms shrank into a thin line, and the massive funnel mouth dwindled to a black dot.

Richard fixed his eyes on that tiny reflection and began to read with rapt attention.

The first time, he couldn't see anything clearly. It really was a bit too much: hundreds of arms, a hundred segments of iron shell, and a giant funnel mouth, all moving at once.

The second time, he narrowed his focus to a single arm. That arm braced against the ground, paddled backward, and let go.

Then he slowly expanded his focus. The movements of all those arms were exactly the same.

The root stroke surfaced.

Starting from the funnel mouth, it traveled backward along the spine of its entire body, ending at the tail.

Over these fifty years, from the day that furnace of phosphorus slag at the match factory was dumped into the brick kiln, it had only written this single stroke.

Now that it was read, the next step was to bring down the blade.

Thanks to the multiple layers of perceptual shielding, it wasn't until this moment that the target realized its vital weakness was grasped in someone's hands.

The rapid, piano-like clatter of arms constantly paddling the ground around Greer suddenly broke rhythm.

The worm sharply veered off, pivoting away from the curved wall. Dozens of its iron segments scraped a long white streak across the concrete as it charged straight for the row of glass.

Shielding could only hide one's presence; it couldn't hide an attack.

"Kid!" Greer leaned halfway out from behind the curved wall.

MacFie raised his hand, only to lower it halfway up.

The white-haired giant stood unmoving in the cold glow, merely tucking his chin in.

His meaning was crystal clear: You slash it yourself.

The sweet smell from the giant worm's gaping maw had already wafted over.

Richard held his pen-gripping posture and tentatively swung a blade first.

Crack.

Because he didn't use a Spellcasting Medium, this strike was very light.

Yet the crisp clatter of hundreds of arms paddling the ground, the dull grinding of the iron shell locking together, the erasure of blade after blade in the cold glow... all were overpowered by this single sound.

The twelfth set of joints on the worm was ripped open. The rear half was still arching forward, but the front eleven segments could no longer budge.

It stalled midway, its entire body twisting from the middle into an awkward angle.

Richard reached into his inner pocket and felt the segment of antler wrapped in reins.

It had only occurred to him not long ago that since this antler could employ the Moon Nail, its effectiveness as a Spellcasting Medium for branch-severing would only be greater.

Richard pulled it out and aimed the tip downward.

The starting brushstroke, the trajectory, and the closing stroke in that tiny reflection on the glass were completely laid out in his own Still Water.

The tip of the antler pressed against the glass. The moment it entered the Execution Line, it turned abruptly cold.

The antler trembled in his palm—trembling with intense excitement.

Richard did not hesitate. Following the edge, the tip of the antler slashed diagonally downward.