Chapter 528: The Chicken and the Egg, and Rolling Snowballs

Not charging a fee would at least draw people in.

As for whether the appraisals turned up genuine articles or fakes, Mercury had some degree of discernment himself.

Besides, this was also an opportunity to build a good relationship with the other party.

Once the news spread, the first person to seek them out was an old woman from Camogli.

Camogli was a fishing village east of Genoa, where the men of every household went out to sea.

The old woman brought over three painted wooden boards, left by her brother's family.

Each board depicted a ship listing in a storm, with waves cresting higher than the masts.

The Virgin Mary sat in the clouds in the upper right corner, and four letters were carved underneath: V.F...

Richard translated the letters: "A vow made, a grace received."

In the past, when sailors encountered danger at sea, they would pray to the Virgin Mary.

If they made it back alive, they would paint boards like these and hang them in the sanctuary on the mountain. These three boards had never been hung; they had sat in the old woman's house for forty years.

Richard placed his hand on the boards, saying he wanted to examine the paint closely.

[Available Points: 4.46... 4.59... 4.71.]

Sealed within each board was the most sincere gratitude.

The sailors had thought they would die beneath the waves, but they had survived.

That terror, along with decades of lingering gratitude, had all been sealed into the wood.

He nodded at Mercury. "They are genuine. The painting is quite good, and they've been preserved well."

Mercury honored his assessment, offering a price much higher than the dealers in the rear hall.

The old woman looked down at the three boards, handed over only two, and hugged the remaining one to her chest.

"The man who came back on this board was my brother. It isn't for sale."

Soon, a second person arrived. It was an old fisherman from Lerici.

He came carrying an oar to sell, tapping its handle with his finger in all seriousness. "Boy, I heard you're from Albion.

"Well, it just so happens that in 1822, a poet from Albion drowned in our waters.

"His boat capsized back then, and this is the oar from his boat, straight from 1822."

A poet? Richard scoured his memory bank and quickly retrieved a matching record.

That summer, Shelley had been sailing his boat, the "Don Juan", from Livorno back to Lerici when he ran into a storm halfway.

It wasn't until ten days later that his body washed up on the beach, with a volume of Keats's poetry still inside his coat.

When he recited these facts with flawless accuracy, the bystanders, including Mercury, looked at him in surprise.

'Hermes doesn't possess the ability of photographic memory,' Mercury thought.

In other words, this was the young man's own innate capability.

But in the very next moment, Richard flipped the oar over, inspected a tiny merchant mark at the bottom, and pointed it out to Mercury.

Mercury let out an awkward cough.

"This is merchandise from a ship chandlery in Livorno, and that shop only opened forty years ago." At these words, the old fisherman's face flushed.

"The oar is a fake, but the story you told is true."

Richard smiled and took his hand off the oar.

[Available Points: 4.71... 4.83.]

At least he had harvested some points, even if they weren't many.

Mercury deliberately coughed beside him, signaling that he didn't want this item.

The old fisherman shrugged and walked away.

He shouldered his oar and headed toward the main hall, shouting at the top of his lungs to a foreign buyer wearing a Panama hat:

"Sir! The very oar the great poet Shelley held before he died! Do you want it?"

Several more people arrived one after another, but none of the old items they brought were saturated with ether.

Richard waited calmly, figuring that an opportunity would eventually arise.

Even if it didn't work out this time, he could always scrounge around the antique shops Mercury had recommended later; he would definitely scrape together five points. At two in the afternoon, a man in his thirties approached their stall.

His face was heavily tanned, and he silently placed a small gourd on the table.

A silver straw was inserted into the mouth of the gourd, and the tip of the straw featured a flat, perforated spoon.

He rubbed the back of his head and asked hesitantly, "Is this worth any money? I've asked a lot of people, and they all said they don't recognize it."

Richard examined it closely and recognized it as a mate gourd.

The herdsmen of the Pampas would stuff dried leaves into hollowed-out gourds, pour in hot water, and sip it through that silver straw.

A single gourd like this could be passed around a circle of people for an entire night of drinking.

The man explained, "I have a relative who lived in Buenos Aires for eleven years. In May of this year, the king recalled all the reservists abroad to fight in the war. He took a ship back and gave this to me.

"Later, he went to the Isonzo in July and lost his life there, so this thing ended up in my hands."

He patted the gourd. "Over there, the locals called these foreigners Apennines. When they returned to the village, people called them Americans. Neither side treated them as one of their own."

Richard placed his hand on the gourd and could smell a bitter scent of grass mixed with smoke seeping from the wood.

Sealed inside were the memories of countless evenings: a man sitting on the threshold in a foreign land, watching the sun sink into endless grasslands, sipping bitter tea mouthful by mouthful while thinking of the ocean back on the side of the Western Continent.

The panel shifted.

[Available Points: 4.83... 4.95... 5.07.]

Richard lowered his hand. "It's a good gourd, and it's been kept in excellent condition."

Mercury only cared about the silver straw.

He stated that since the straw was made of real silver, it would be priced according to the market rate for silver.

At four o'clock, the venue began to pack up.

Mercury had Piero lock their acquired items inside an iron box, then told Richard it was getting a bit stuffy in the exhibition hall and invited him upstairs for some fresh air.

The two took the public elevator.

Through the glass, Richard watched the rock walls recede layer by layer until they reached the top, where the view suddenly opened up.

The entirety of Genoa was spread out beneath their feet.

There were overlapping rooftops, cranes by the harbor, and the lighthouse perched on the edge of the cliff. He also spotted a hospital ship painted white, its red cross catching the setting sun in a somewhat blinding glare.

The two leaned against the railing and enjoyed the evening breeze for a while.

Richard casually chatted with him. "Sir, when I first entered this line of work, a senior once told me that Major Adept was the ceiling of the Old Continent."

As he spoke, he stared at the distant lighthouse.

"But ever since the war began, I feel like I've been hearing about or encountering more and more Virtuosos."

Mercury replied in a similarly conversational tone.

"That senior you mentioned wasn't wrong."

He also rested his elbows on the railing and pointed at the rooftops below.

"In the material realm of the Old Continent, the ceiling truly is the Major Adept.

"As for Virtuosos, their dwellings are not in the material realm. They reside either in the central regions of the New Continent, or behind the veil."

"Have you ever seen an entire ship full of quicklime being unloaded at the docks, only to be caught in a sudden downpour?"

Mercury narrowed his eyes. "I've seen it once. The lime practically boils over on its own, billowing white smoke, burning the stone slabs of the pier until they crack.

"The ship's owner ended up paying a massive sum in compensation. He said he would have rather the ship sank that day than have to pay that much."

"If the true body of a Virtuoso were to actually stand on the soil of the Old Continent, they would become that ship full of lime... No, it would be much worse than that."

He shared an example.

He said that in the summer of 1783, the entire northern territory of the Western Continent was blanketed in a layer of yellow fog for months.

The noon sun turned red, entire swathes of crops withered and died in the fields, and people simply collapsed after fits of coughing.

"Although it was publicly attributed to a volcanic eruption in Iceland, over on the mystical side, it was a tragedy caused by the advancement of a certain Virtuoso."

Richard thought of the nuclear weapons from his past life, feeling that a Virtuoso's manifestation had an effect akin to nuclear radiation.

Generally speaking, a Virtuoso will cast down a sliver of their gaze at most.

Occasionally, if you offer enough, they might be willing to lend you a bit of power or help you modify the battlefield.

That night in the City of Seven Hills, the entity in the furrow drew boundaries across the entire city—that was modifying the battlefield.

"Of course, there are also times when they make a personal appearance." At this point, he glanced at Richard, recalling the man with hair like dead grass who had arrived that night.

Even then, it is never their true body that descends.

They usually borrow a vessel, pave a path, or ride a horse.

"The true body of a Virtuoso... In all my years in this trade, I've never heard of anyone seeing it. And those who have likely wouldn't survive to tell me about it in person."

Richard thought about all the Virtuosos he had encountered, and realized that was indeed the case.

Setting aside the three from the Black Soil River, the Sun, and the Hearth...

Although the lord of the hunt had always appeared riding a horse and bearing antlers on his head, that was definitely an avatar as well.

And when Matthew had squeezed out from the wall, even he had mentioned that the body had been painstakingly cobbled together.

Years ago, Old Biggs had relayed Madam Marie's words, saying that there were "no physical examples" of Virtuosos to be found on the Old Continent.

They couldn't be physically found—it didn't mean they didn't exist. She hadn't been wrong about that.

Mercury turned around and looked him straight in the eye.

"The only things that can prompt a Virtuoso to make a personal trip are either someone they highly value, believing that person might one day stand at the same Rank; someone who can acquire benefits on their behalf; or someone who is backed by an entity that even a Virtuoso would have to carefully weigh. I just wonder, which category do you fall into, sir?"

Richard didn't answer, and Mercury didn't mind.

"Do you know what has happened to Mars now?"

Richard shook his head.

"He asked the one in the furrow to intervene, wagering everything he had."

Mercury sighed.

"I heard that after his house was completely emptied out, his wife took the children and returned to her hometown in the countryside, while he himself has gone missing."

Going missing usually meant a fate far worse than death, and both men present knew it.

The wind on the observation deck grew stronger, biting painfully at their ears.

Mercury brought up another example he had witnessed:

"My grandfather actually invoked a Virtuoso once as well. At the time, he only received a single glance in exchange.

"But for that single glance, he mortgaged our family's entire grand fleet in Gibraltar to them." He looked at Richard, asking with a mix of curiosity and caution:

"What did you pay to mobilize that Virtuoso from the New Continent?"

Richard decided to tell the truth. No one would believe him anyway.

"Oh, he asked me to write an article for him."

Mercury froze for a moment before letting out a polite, fake laugh. "You really know how to joke."

After laughing, his expression sobered, and he patted Richard on the shoulder.

"I know the rules. If it's not convenient for you to say, then never mind.

"I know the feeling. The more you talk about the price you paid, the more it hurts."

Richard lowered his head, biting the inside of his cheeks to keep from reacting.

He really hadn't paid anything from start to finish. He had even managed to meet a Master by sheer coincidence.

Yet Mercury's grandfather had wagered an entire grand fleet just for a Virtuoso's gaze.

Mercury mistook Richard's restrained expression for him recalling some painful memory he didn't want to bring up. Very considerately, he turned his gaze back to the sea and changed to a lighter topic.

"In Canto XXXIII of the Inferno, Dante cursed us Genoese.

"He said we possessed every vice imaginable, and asked God why he hadn't yet wiped us from the earth."

Richard played along. "Petrarch, on the other hand, called Genoa the 'City of Pride.'"

Mercury laughed proudly. "We are indeed proud of that.

"As for the vices, when we Genoese read that passage, we only wonder: since he cursed us so harshly, was it because no one slipped him any money back then?"

By the time he returned to the inn, it was already dark.

The professor's room was lit. Richard returned to his own room, lit his lamp as well, and called up the panel.

[Available Points: 5.07]

It was enough to preview. With a hint of excitement, he clicked open the interface.

[Preview: Breathing Lv.7]

[Advancement Requirement: Breathe unassisted for a full day and night in a vacuum (void of air and ether).]

[Deep within sealed rock strata, inside a fully evacuated urn, or in the breathless voids of the veil all qualify.]

[Breathing - Element: Micro-circulation transitions from "retention" to "self-generation".]

[A single breath draws upon earth, water, wind, and fire.]

[Where ether is thin, it self-generates ceaselessly; where ether is abundant, it is drawn upon at will with every breath.]

Richard's expression soured when he saw the unlock requirement.

'A vacuum?'

Setting aside the current technological limitations, creating a vacuum or sending him to such a place would be incredibly difficult.

...And he had to stay in that kind of place for a full twenty-four hours.

He pressed his hand to his chest, feeling his ribs through his shirt.

Breathing Lv.3 had granted Healing, and Lv.5 had granted Gushing Spring—both were for curing ailments.

He had once felt very frustrated, thinking about how Hunters maxing out their breathing could erupt with blood ignition, or even form tangible wind-pressure bullets;

Yet he had been constantly patching things up along the way, mending his own old injuries and the injuries of others. Now, he finally understood.

To advance to Element, he first had to mend his own body until it was strong enough.

The problem was surviving for twenty-four hours in a place with no air. Was he supposed to rely on the life breath stored during his Gushing Spring breathing?

Saving up Gushing Spring for three whole months was enough to give his mother a fifty-minute physical therapy session.

If he truly had to cut off all external air and use it solely on himself, it would last him fifteen minutes, maybe thirty, or at the absolute most, the better part of an hour.

Between the better part of an hour and twenty-four hours lay an insurmountable chasm.

This brought him back to the age-old chicken-and-egg problem.

Element would allow him to breathe in an airless place, but the unlock requirement for Element demanded that he breathe in an airless place...

Without Element, how on earth was he supposed to hold his breath for twenty-four hours?

Richard thought it over and concluded that he could only wait and see if other methods presented themselves later.

The second line, Perception Lv.7, lit up next.

[Advancement Requirement: Perceive an object you completely fail to comprehend, and independently analyze its structure afterward.]

[Perception - Suspension: When the perceived target exceeds your own threshold of tolerance, the bearable portions will be retained, while the rest will naturally shatter into isolated suspended fragments to be viewed one by one (the perceived target cannot reversely detect you).]

Richard fished Venus's silver mirror out of his canvas bag, keeping the Latin phrase on the back facing himself.

The perceiver is also perceived.

Old Biggs had thoroughly drilled this rule into him during his first month of learning Spirit Vision.

He had spent all this time pushing "concealment" to its absolute peak, never daring to look upward.

Suspension would allow the mirror to contain something larger than the mirror itself.

Whatever could not be contained would shatter into pieces on its own, hanging suspended piece by piece, without touching each other.

And precisely because no single piece would be complete, the entity on the other side wouldn't be able to find "a self being looked at" in the reflection.

If they couldn't find it, they would have no path to follow the reflection back.

A window that only opened one way. Richard slowly rubbed his finger along the edge of the silver mirror.

This was what he wanted most—to move the battlefield back behind his desk.

He raised his head and glanced at the small mirror above the washbasin. The mirror reflected his face, his hair a flattened mess.

A mirror could reflect all things, save for itself.

Richard flipped the silver mirror over, and pushed it aside, back facing up.

Then he looked back at the advancement requirement: "Perceive an object you completely fail to comprehend."

How was he supposed to analyze something he couldn't even comprehend?

He slumped against the desk and looked at the final item.

[Preview: Learning Lv.7]

[Advancement Requirement: Cause a piece of dead knowledge to be used anew by at least 100,000 living people.]

[Learning - Passing the Torch: Any knowledge remembered and utilized by others will recursively enhance yourself.]

Richard immediately brightened. This was the only requirement that wasn't an endless loop demanding he obtain something before he could accomplish it.

The first thing that popped into his head was the six rules from his own Collection of Strange Tales.

Evelyn standing there with her hands on her hips, a group of kids jumping rope and chanting "no answer to the first call, no answer to the second," the swinging rope smacking against the frosted stone slabs—snap, snap. He had been passing by on his way home and had merely thought his sister looked very impressive at the time.

Then there was the overstuffed mailbox that had burst at the Duckworth Printing Factory.

The check signed by the Ministry of Finance, the five thousand copies distributed to all the patrol officers in the Imperial Capital, one in every pair of hands.

And that night of the Day of Mourning, when people behind hundreds of thousands of doors really did sprinkle lines of salt across their thresholds.

He had always thought that what he was doing was just keeping a few more people from dying.

Now, every single rule remembered by those people would flow right back to him.

But his joy was short-lived. He quickly calmed down and began to carefully break down Learning's requirements.

This required him to retrieve a piece of dead knowledge.

Obscure didn't count; if someone was still studying it, it couldn't be considered dead.

For a piece of knowledge to be completely dead meant that the very last person who knew how to use it was already lying in their grave.

Finding that kind of dead knowledge would take a tremendous amount of effort.

Furthermore, if the knowledge had died out, it likely had some fatal flaw. There was also a huge gap between "being used" and "being read." A hundred thousand people reading a line in a newspaper and a hundred thousand people actually acting upon that line were two entirely different things.

Richard turned his notebook to a fresh page and jotted down his most optimistic estimates.

Right now, his highest progress was in Breathing, and even at Lv.5, it was barely past the halfway mark.

And Breathing was the easiest to level up and the skill he had unlocked earliest.

He factored in fieldwork, the Wild Hunt, and all the various special events he might encounter.

If he could max out all his skills at 100% of Lv.6 within five years, that would already be quite impressive.

If he didn't count those rare, unpredictable special events, Richard estimated by the most conservative measure that it would take ten years.

In ten years, he would be nearing thirty.

He also figured that as long as any single skill managed to rush to Lv.7 first, it would undoubtedly tear a hole open in his situation.

Once Element was unlocked, he would never run dry no matter what barren wasteland he walked into.

Those depths of the veil where the ether was so thick it burned, places others couldn't hide from fast enough—those would all become Richard's supply stations.

Once Suspension was unlocked, the number of people who could reversely read him would decrease even further. Conversely, the amount he himself could read would increase.

Once Passing the Torch was unlocked, all the various writings and pamphlets he had scattered purely out of the desire to do good deeds would turn into a river flowing back to him.

And these were merely the traits for three of the skills; there were still four more behind them.

Moreover, "Spirit" also needed to be unlocked, requiring all seven of his skills to reach Lv.7 before opening up new functions yet again.

Then there was the third seed: "Quantity, Boundary, Bestowal," whose planting requirement was for all four Body stats to reach Lv.5.

As well as Shadow Inversion, the Recorder's Pen, Divinely Crafted Armament... all of them possessed immense potential.

Unwittingly, the snowball was rolling bigger and bigger.

He didn't even dare to imagine what the scene would be like once he became a full professor like Williams one day.

Richard went to the washbasin and quickly splashed his face with cold water.

He refused to think any further, otherwise he wouldn't get any sleep tonight.

Then he scrolled the panel down and stopped at the Speculation line.

[Speculation Lv.4, Progress 100%. All advancement requirements met. Required Points: 2.]

He had already finished the previews, so there was no need to hoard points. Advancing earlier meant benefiting earlier, and he could start accumulating progress for the next level.

He clicked it.

[Available Points: 5.07 → 3.07]

[Speculation Lv.4 → Lv.5.]

[Morphostructuring: Original Speculation effects are vastly enhanced. When dealing with logical structures on the ether level, all constructs will possess a built-in 'self-check': you will immediately perceive where instability will occur during the identification process.]

He decided to test it out with Silence first.

With all his practice thus far, he could practically spit out this Spell Formula with his eyes closed.

As the vacuum formed, he inexplicably felt that a side on the bottom right corner of the vacuum cluster was making him slightly uncomfortable.

Once he patched it up, the formula instantly stabilized considerably.

Immediately after, all sorts of minor flaws surfaced.

By the time he finished resolving all the various odds and ends and expelled the vacuum again, he felt his formula was so stable it was almost absurd.

"...It's like I turned on autocorrect." Richard blinked, his excitement surging. It looked like he wouldn't be getting any sleep tonight after all.

Over the next two hours, he ran self-checks on every Spell Formula he had mastered, one by one.

Stone Armor, Moon Nail, Shadow Armor... all were vastly improved.

Finally, it was the Condensed Mirror Method. Morphostructuring dismantled its structure:

The Still Water condensed through his breathing method and the formula to be used were originally supposed to walk their own separate paths, yet he had chained them together in a single sequence.

His ether would first prop up the surface of the water, and after finishing that, split a strand to condense a nail... So whenever the front shifted, the back would collapse.

So he tried splitting them into two parallel paths.

The Seat of the Sun sent out two strands: one spread out to reflect, and the other sank down to condense.

The water surface remained perfectly steady, and simultaneously, the Moon Nail condensed into shape between his right fingers.

The clock downstairs struck twice. It was 2:00 AM.

Richard hurriedly dispersed the nail and put away his notebook.

...The next morning was the last day of November.

The librarian had marked Richard's borrowing period up until December 9th, meaning he only had ten days left.

Thinking of dates suddenly reminded Richard of Lillian's library card application form he had seen.

Back then, after the final Easter of the middle school spring semester, she had returned to the Imperial Capital with her uncle.

The librarian at the Greenwood library needed to clear her library card, which still had a botanical illustration book checked out that she'd forgotten to return.

Knowing the two of them had shared that abandoned house behind the main building, the librarian had asked him to help sign for its cancellation.

He had flipped through her file folder from beginning to end at the time, which included the application form she had filled out when she was fifteen.

He recalled that form: every field on it had been filled out exceptionally neatly.

Only in the date of birth column had she first written "12/3", then crossed it out and rewritten "3/12" next to it.

People from Albion wrote dates with the day first and the month second; she had probably just been too nervous and written it backward.

November 30th was St. Andrew's Day. The night before was the day young women in the Central European countryside would cast molten lead to divine their future husbands.

The six-day holiday started on November 30th and ended on December 5th. This winter, every sanatorium across Helvetia was scrambling to secure people.

The warring parties were in talks, spearheaded by the Red Cross with the Holy See acting as a middleman, aiming to send prisoners of war with severe injuries or lung diseases from both sides to neutral countries for internment and medical treatment.

The first batch was expected to enter the country in January of the following year.

Davos, Leysin, Montana, Leukerbad—wherever there was a bed on the mountains, the proprietors were all clearing rooms.

The war had been going on for over a year, and the sanatoriums' guests had long since fled.

Nowadays, a single prisoner of war equated to a sum of government money settled per head, and it was paid out in francs to boot.

He had caught wind of it while chatting with Mercury at the exhibition yesterday but hadn't taken it to heart at the time.

Now, he turned the matter over in his mind.

The clearing out of beds meant that any place still willing to accept regular patients was a place whose beds hadn't been fully booked yet.

As for the fully booked ones, there was no need to even ask.

His newly advanced Speculation allowed him to make these deductions much more smoothly.

The deductive materials he had on hand were: a directory of neutral country hotels and sanatoriums appended to the back of the "Genoa Shipping Yearbook" (last year's edition), and a stack of flyers he had grabbed at the exhibition that Mercury had shoved into his hands.

Plus, there were the two Helvetian newspapers he had flipped through in the inn's parlor last night.

The newspapers had advertising columns for sanatoriums.

The ones anxious to attract guests would print their rates and write things like "Open Year-Round" and "Three Meals a Day, Milk Included" to pull people in.

The ones that had already signed contracts with the government only published a single line with their address and the director's name, not even bothering to list prices.

He cross-referenced the directory with the advertising columns.

Thirty-seven establishments. First, cross out the nineteen that published their director's name due to contracts.

Then, cross out the ones in Davos and Leysin; those two locations had been running newspaper ads for nurses since October, and the more desperately they recruited, the fuller their beds were.

Eleven remaining.

He crossed out another four located down in the valleys where the sun couldn't reach them during winter.

Those were high-altitude, freezing mountainous regions. If they went four months without seeing a single ray of sunlight in the winter, even the doctors would flee.

Seven remaining. He read through the wording on their ads one by one. Three of them had added a line of fine print at the bottom of their ads: "This establishment also accepts resting guests without lung diseases."

The ones willing to write this line truly had empty beds, so much so that they weren't picky about their patients.

Three locations. One was by Lake Neuchâtel—too far, and too close to the Franc border.

One was in Appenzell, which had no train access.

For those two, the journey would be too difficult coming from Prague, where Lillian was.

That left only the final one, situated on Mount Rigi.

Richard put down his pen and searched on the folded route map at the back of the directory.

Mount Rigi was sandwiched between Lake Lucerne and Lake Zug, with Küssnacht at the foot of the mountain.

The very first cogwheel mountain railway in the Western Continent had been built there in 1871. It operated during the winter as well, running two trains a day.

The sanatorium on the mountain had placed an ad only three lines long. The last line read: "South-facing panoramic views, a few resting rooms still available."

And on the other side of Lake Lucerne was the very monastery Mortimer was heading to.

Richard drew a line under "Küssnacht." He wasn't entirely certain, but since it was on the way, he might as well go take a look.

A cough sounded from next door.

"Little Richard."

"Here."

"What are you muttering to yourself about in your room?"

"...Reciting Latin."

"Which phrase?"

Richard casually picked a phrase: "Spiro, spero (while I breathe, I hope)."

There was a hum of acknowledgment from the other side. "That's a good one, but it's been used to death."

Richard chuckled and asked through the wall, "Professor, when are we leaving for Helvetia?"

"Let's make it tomorrow morning," Mortimer grumbled from the other side.

"I've already finished my good tea. Otherwise, if I bring it on the train, customs is going to question what kind of leaves I'm carrying again."