In the six centuries Belmesion had been in business, the academy had amassed what was likely the largest catalog of written works in the whole Kingdom, if not the continent, rivaling even the Royal family’s private collection. The achievement didn't take great effort on the school's part, considering many of the books were theses and research journals penned by alumni and freely donated.

  The library had its own dedicated brownstone building inserted between the main house and the training halls. The library looked plain enough on the outside, but venturing deeper in past the entrance hall asked for courage. The interior was a sprawling architectural mess with galleries on four floors, laid out like a dungeon maze made up of tall, closely spaced shelves, each packed full of titles from end to end and floor to ceiling.

  Scorning symmetry and building conventions, a gap in the ceiling might connect rooms on multiple floors, only accessible via one flimsy stairway. An otherwise plain and straightforward room might bulge out at one part to reach a groping tentacle out to the floor above or below it, leading the visitor to tight intestinal tunnels of literature where no natural light reached.

  To add to that, the library was divided with gates into three main areas: the public section, the faculty-only section, and the forbidden archive in the basement, where nobody could go without a special committee permit. The genuinely useful books were probably all behind bars, with nothing especially insightful left in the collections open to public. But I had to try my luck there first.

  A tense, watchful silence filled those dim rooms. I saw hardly any students around, but strongly felt I wasn't alone. There were inhuman forces at work, spectral observers that made sure no one could bring harm to the invaluable reservoir of knowledge, intentionally or accidentally. The air quality was magically controlled, not too dusty or smelly, and the smartly placed windows and lamps lent barely enough light to see the way but not be damaging to paper.

  I followed the infrequent signboards looking for the service desk buried deep in the gut of the bibliomanic labyrinth, and in time stumbled upon a lone station at the junction of wider passages, marked with an engraved brass placard.

  “Good day?”

  Behind the desk sat a very small young woman with comically big glasses. Or, I suppose the spectacles were the standard size, but on her tiny nose, they were more like a mask of framed glass. The goggles’ scale was emphasized by how short she had trimmed her dark bangs, so that they wouldn't fall over the lenses. She seemed a specimen of that particular species of bookworms, which always found its way into libraries and couldn't be extracted without pesticide.

  There was no heating in the building, and the girl wore a thick, hooded robe over her uniform to keep warm. Because of that, I couldn't tell if she was a freshman or a senior, or how I should’ve treated her. But it was just the two of us there, so I ended up skipping the song and dance.

  I showed her the space magic book and asked,

  “Is this from here?”

  “Huh? Oh?” She leaned far over the desk to look closer, but soon replied, without even opening the tome or consulting the records, “Yes! It is, yes.”

  “Then I'm returning it now.” I passed the tome to her hands and asked, “Are the other parts of the series available?”

  “J-just a moment, please…”

  The librarian excavated a great hardcover record from under the table and leafed through the latest entries. There was supposed to be a computer installed here too, but I guess more time was needed for the technology to be adopted to daily use. In a while, the girl hesitantly looked up past the edge of the record and met my steadily expectant stare.

  “...I'm sorry to tell you, but volumes 2-8 are currently unavailable.”

  A terrible foreboding wrung my gut.

  “May I ask who has them?”

  “They were all checked out on the same date by…Professor Couren of the Arcane department.”

  “...”

  I knew it! He was going to make me grovel and beg for them all along!

  Aaah, I'm going to kill him! Kill him dead! Garrr!

  “I'm sorry!” The clerk raised the register as a shield and hid behind it.

  I accidentally let my murderous rage flow over and hurriedly suppressed it. But if the books weren't available and there weren't other copies, I had no more reason to loiter in this place. The vibe here was unpleasant.

  “Sorry about that. Thanks for your time.”

  I left the service desk and headed back towards the main entrance, trying to recall the path I'd come. But backtracking and seeing each corner from a new angle made the place look inexplicably foreign, and I was becoming disoriented. Where I was sure I had to go left was actually a dead end, and where should've been a straight aisle was a corner that took me backwards.

  Wandering around, another idea hit me then.

  Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

  Now that I'd come all this way and the place didn't seem to want to let me go, I might as well seek out books on dragons.

  I had little faith I'd find a breakthrough in the public collection, but any information on the wyrms and their properties could be helpful.

  Unwilling to go back to rattle the librarian again, I searched by myself, roaming less than systematically in the deep canyons between the overloaded shelves, letting my gaze pass over the titles standing out in the sea of spines. Nothing too interesting caught my eye.

  The lion’s share of arcane literature was only reiterations of what brighter minds had learned before and since declared obsolete; summaries of summaries, selling half-truths and conjecture as the road to enlightenment. They didn't teach their reader the secret to life, the universe, and everything, but were printed solely to make money for the author.

  Older tomes clung desperately to the teachings of the bygone ages, when magic walked its own esoteric path apart from natural sciences. Their tenets were not only misleading, but outright detrimental to technical progress. That such works were available at all was another show of the mean spirit of mages; if you didn't have the wit to tell the nuggets gold apart from the useless sand, you deserved to remain lost forever. It was all part of the so-caled path to ascension.

  Then I almost stumbled on a student crawling on the floor between the shelves.

  "—?"

  It was Alice Silla.

  She'd gathered a wide array of books around her and pored over their contents on the spot, too impatient to even bring them to her room. Or maybe she didn't want her roommates to learn about her reading habits? The young woman's eyes flashed with a start when she recognized me, and at once she cast herself over the pages she’d been reading in a last-ditch effort to hide the subject. I caught a glimpse of thin geometric forms and magic circles.

  So predictable.

  I crouched by my classmate's cowering figure and snatched one tome from the array.

  “Are you studying engrams?” I asked. “‘Sacred Geometry’ won't take you very far there, I'm afraid.”

  “No!” Silla yelped and her flushed head popped up to steal the book from my grip. “This is…!”

  “Why hide it? It's not like I forbade you from looking into it.”

  “Huh…?”

  “Yes. Feel free to remove the engram if you can. I can even tell you how to do it.”

  “W-what are you talking about…?”

  “Make sure you take all elective courses on Ritual Architecture and Form Security. Master Third Eye and Telekinesis. Hone your circulation technique and reserve at least an hour per day for meditation, and you should be able to pull it off by your third or fourth year.”

  I didn't think I'd see the graduation day and by the time I was out of here, it didn't really matter what she told and to whom. Any records of my stay would likely be erased, anyway. The engram didn't even have the charge to last that long. Its effect was mostly placebo and theatrics. The key was to not let her forget about it as long as it mattered.

  “Third Eye? Telekinesis?” Silla echoed and staggered up to her numbed, wobbly feet. “You're telling me to become a Mysterium grandmaster!? Are you messing with me!?”

  “Shhh.” I put a finger across my lips. “This is a library, you know? Keep your voice down.”

  “To have all this technical knowledge despite being a mere Tier 2...Who on earth are you, Ruthford?”

  Damn. And here I thought I'd go easy on her.

  I rose and stepped over to Silla and struck out my palm against the shelf by her, leaning closer to her scowling face that tried to look very tough but couldn't fully hide the dread sneaking into her gaze.

  “Did you already forget?” I asked quietly. “That's the forbidden question. I cut you a little slack and you start tugging the leash immediately? What a naughty dog you are. Want me to discipline you again?”

  “Hng…!” Silla gritted her teeth at the rising heat of the engram. She jerked her head back, squirming against the shelf of Visual Symbolism in Antiquity.

  Not wanting to take the risk of being overheard by anyone, I leaned further in, to whisper close to her ear, carefully pronouncing,

  “There is no ‘me’. Get that into your thick head now. You never ask about me. You roll over and play dead like a good girl, and once these four years of school are up, I might remove the engram for you. But push too much and I can make things very…very hard for you...”

  I was about to heat up the seal a bit more to drive home the point but was there distracted.

  The situation was off, somehow. It wasn't the way intimidating a person usually went.

  There was no strict science to it, each case was a little different, but I'd done quite a bit of this and knew how it was supposed to be, and it wasn't supposed to be like this.

  Silla panted and squirmed under me, red up to her ears and hot, and a vague sweetness surrounded her that made my head spin. A right fog of feminine chemistry hovered about her, firing off conflicting signals in my head and making my heart throb dryly and painfully. She didn't hold the cold tension of someone afraid for her life, but was closer to melting lard in appearance.

  I retreated a step in disbelief.

  “...You're actually enjoying this?”

  “No!” Silla cried, startled. Voice quaking. Pupils dilated. “That's—not true!”

  Someone hurts and threatens you, and instead of righteous hatred, you start to find pleasure in it? And this person was the one our classmates looked up to as the ideal student, the most gifted and virtuous and noble among us? So starved for thrills, her life so safe and gray and dull, that just about anything would do to break the sheer monotony of it?

  “Pervert.”

  “I hate you!” she insisted, but her voice lacked conviction.

  “Degenerate.”

  “No, I'm telling you, you're wrong!”

  She wasn't convincing even herself and she knew it. Silla hid her face in her hands and took off, fast vanishing into the library maze.

  Running and being noisy like a kid, there was our mature role model. She abandoned all her books scattered in the aisle too. Damn.

  Guess it was on me to clean up…