I Loaded the Mysticism Panel

Simon’s speech was conventional. He approached the topic from the angle of universal education, citing data from the history of the field.

His strength was its clear structure, but its weakness was that it lacked any memorable points.

You’d listen and say, "That was good," but a few minutes later, you’d forget everything he said.

Philips’s speech began with the administrative challenges in the New Continent Colony.

His grandfather had been a high-ranking official in the Colonial Affairs Department, and Philips wielded administrative details with effortless ease.

The ordinance numbers of the colony, the appointment procedures for governors, the legal jurisdiction of autonomous zones... His specialized knowledge was solid, and his chain of logic was clear.

But he had turned his speech into a policy analysis report. Not once from beginning to end did he make a single heart in the audience beat faster.

The judges took notes, their pens moving at a steady, unhurried pace.

Catherine’s angle was more incisive.

She walked onto the stage clutching her notes, but after unfolding them for a single glance, she flipped them over and placed them face down on the lectern.

She spoke of the "cleansing" of the Gael Highlands.

Two hundred years ago, the Imperial Government and the landlords of the Gael Lowland joined forces to drive out the Highlander natives, burning their villages and seizing their pastures.

"They call this ’progress.’"

The red-haired girl’s voice echoed between the stone walls, each consonant carrying the characteristic, sharp edge of a Highlander’s accent.

"They call driving my ancestors down from the mountains ’introducing civilization.’"

Her pace was faster than in the first round, but she wasn’t rushed.

She left just enough of a pause between each sentence, giving her anger room to breathe.

"But my ancestors had their own language, their own laws, their own land.

Before they were ’civilized,’ they had lived for thousands of years."

"Thousands of years. Is that not civilized enough?"

She threw this question before more than five hundred people without offering an answer, using it as a starting point to pose an even deeper one:

When one civilization annihilates another in the name of ’civilization,’ can it still be considered civilized at all?

On the judges’ panel, several professors exchanged glances.

A girl from an old Gael noble family, standing in a bastion of academia, accusing the Imperial Government of what it had done to her homeland.

It required courage, but also restraint.

And she handled it with perfect measure.

It didn’t devolve into a mere tirade. She used her accusation to construct a question that everyone was forced to confront.

When the applause erupted, it was far more enthusiastic than in the first round.

But Richard noticed that a few of the judges weren’t clapping. They were simply writing something with intense focus.

On the scorecards, the line between academia and politics was a blurry one.

Montague took the stage after her.

The golden-haired boy stood at the center of the stage, the speech he had prepared in fifteen minutes held neatly in his left hand.

He glanced at the beginning only once before setting his notes on the lectern.

He spoke of the dialectical relationship between Imperial expansion and the dissemination of civilization.

His phrasing was elegant, his structure impeccable.

He acknowledged that expansion brought violence, but also pointed out that from the ruins of that violence, schools, hospitals, and courts had indeed sprung up.

He didn’t shy away from the darker aspects, but always managed to find a path alongside them that led to an enlightened conclusion.

It was a staircase paved with brocade, and each step he took was both politically correct and elegantly made.

Finally, he quoted a famous line from Virgil’s The Aeneid:

"Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento—parcere subiectis et debellare superbos!"

(Remember, Roman, to rule the peoples with your power, to spare the subjugated, and to vanquish the proud!)

The quotation was chosen perfectly. Virgil’s status in Roman literature lent the conclusion both academic weight and emotional impact.

To put it in the slang of Richard’s previous life, it instantly cranked up the ’prestige’ factor.

Several of the judges were now writing furiously, their pens moving noticeably faster than for any of the other speakers.

When Montague finished, the applause was the most enthusiastic yet.

Here in the Imperial Capital, in a chapel regarded as a symbolic monument by the academic world, before an audience of professors and social elites...

The conclusion that "Imperial expansion has its costs, but is, on the whole, beneficial" was the safest and most popular.

The last to take the stage was Richard.

Montague, his predecessor, had been too brilliant. The pressure on Richard was immense.

"Number twenty-three, Richard Williams, Greenwood Middle School."

He rose from the contestants’ section and walked toward the lectern, empty-handed.

The sheet of paper he’d written on during the prep time was already crumpled into a ball and stuffed in his pocket.

On his way to the lectern, he passed Montague, who was returning to his seat.

The two brushed past each other in the aisle.

Montague turned his head to glance at him and gave a slight nod.

Richard nodded back.

Standing before the lectern, the Seven Sages on the domed ceiling gazed down at him.

In the mural, the seven philosophers were discussing the nature of "the Curtain" under the moonlight. What ordinary people saw, however, was seven sages debating philosophy.

More than five hundred pairs of eyes were fixed on him.

Mr. Holland sat in the front row of the audience, his hands resting on his knees, his bald head gleaming faintly in the afternoon light.

Mr. West was beside him, arms crossed over his chest, his face impassive.

Lady Gran sat farther back, her glasses glinting.

Palmer and Hutchinson were sitting in a corner of the audience section, two paper-wrapped parcels placed before them.

They were probably pies they had gone out to buy, getting ready to eat them during the intermission.

At the judges’ table, all six pens were poised.

Isabella Ashford sat on the far right, her sleeve cuff holding down her scorecard.

Her pen was tucked between her index and middle fingers in a casual pose.

Richard began. "When you stand in a room, you might say that the room is your world."

His voice spread between the domed stone walls, clear and steady. It wasn’t loud, but every word carried to the back row.

"The walls are your borders, the doors and windows your exits, the roof your sky."

"You eat, sleep, read, and think in this room. You believe you know everything there is to know."

The people in the audience, who had just been listening to Montague’s grand oration, were now pulling their minds back from the imperial narrative.

With three short sentences, he had pulled everyone into a room with him.

"But what if one day, you hear the sound of pipes in the walls? What would you do?"

The atmosphere in the hall grew tense.

The previous contestants had all spoken of colonization, law, cultural conflict... grand narratives and elite perspectives, looking down from on high.

His opening was a room, a wall, and a water pipe.

Everyone lives in a room. Everyone has heard mysterious noises coming from inside the walls.

"Most people would say, ’It’s just the pipes. It has nothing to do with me.’"

His gaze swept from the judges’ panel, across the audience, and back again.

"Their civilization is everything contained within this room.

Within the walls is the known world. What’s outside the walls? It doesn’t exist."

"They can hear the sounds from the pipes—an occasional CREAK or GURGLE in the dead of night—but they choose not to investigate."

"Because to investigate would mean admitting one thing."

His voice dropped half a shade.

"On the other side of the wall, something is at work."

"It is always at work. It was at work before you were born, and it continues to work after you have fallen asleep.

Your room, your life, your entire daily existence—all of it is built upon those pipelines you cannot see."

"And you know nothing about it."

The stone walls carried the echo of his final words, letting them circle beneath the dome before fading away.

At the judges’ table, Professor Sirdon’s pen stopped moving.