Chapter 64: Strictly No Borrowing

The day before leaving the Imperial Capital, Richard woke up earlier than anyone else in the family.

Dawn had not yet fully broken; in the dining room, only the butler was up, setting the table.

"Young Master Richard, what would you like for breakfast this morning?"

"The same as yesterday is fine, thank you."

The butler bowed slightly and withdrew toward the kitchen. The perfectly measured attentiveness in his movements had remained constant for days—never too much, never too little.

Once his breakfast was served, Richard quickly finished the fried eggs and toast. He drained his tea and stood up from his chair.

He shouldered his satchel, walked down the corridor, and left through the side door.

The early morning streets were mostly empty. The only sounds were the rattle of a milk cart's wheels and the clock tower chiming the hour.

By the time the sixth chime faded, he had already reached the bus stop at the corner.

After about a ten-minute wait, a double-decker bus approached from the east.

He climbed to the upper deck and found a window seat.

The bus crossed the Imperial Capital's urban district, heading east from the west side before turning northeast.

The scenery outside the window constantly shifted: terraced shops, churches, parks, and bridges gave way to widening expanses of grass and sparser buildings.

Whenever the bus hit an incline, the engine roared in struggle, and the heavy stench of gasoline welled up from beneath the floorboards.

Richard covered his nose and mouth, realizing for the first time that the Greenwood school buses were actually rather high-end.

About thirty minutes later, the bus pulled to a stop at the terminal.

The driver yanked the handbrake, sending out a shriek of brake pads scraping against steel rims, and Richard hopped off.

Stepping onto the pavement of the university district, his first impression was the quiet.

The ambient background noise of the Imperial Capital's city center—the blend of car engines, street hawkers, and factory whistles—had vanished.

Richard walked further down the main street. The main gate of Imperial Capital University sat near the midpoint.

The school motto was carved into the lintel in Latin. Washed by rain for hundreds of years, the strokes of the letters had worn smooth and rounded.

He glanced up at it as he passed:

"Tempus fugit, scientia manet."

"(Time flies, knowledge remains.)"

At the university entrance, Richard pulled his recommendation certificate from the Classical Society out of his pocket.

"I would like to use the library."

The porter took it, gave it a glance, handed it back, and pulled a temporary pass from a drawer.

"The library is on the east side of Bell Tower Square. Go through here, follow the main road, and turn left at the second intersection. You can't miss it."

He filled in the date and the valid time frame, adding a word of warning as he handed the pass over:

"No food or drink allowed inside. Access to the third floor and above requires an additional application."

"Thank you."

Richard took the pass and walked through the gates.

About twenty steps in, the warmth within his Seat of the Sun gave a sudden throb.

Richard didn't break stride, but the rhythm of his breath automatically shifted into the cycle of Fourfold Breathing.

As his Perception range expanded, sensory information began flooding in.

In the roughly six hundred steps it took him to walk from the archway to Bell Tower Square, he sensed at least seventeen ether nodes in various locations.

The density was far higher than on Flower Moon Street.

Flower Moon Street's ether field was an underground river, flowing beneath the floorboards of shops and taverns, occasionally splashing up through the cracks.

Imperial Capital University's ether field was more like a vast groundwater system. The entire town was soaked in it, every building's foundation plunging deep into the ether layer.

No wonder the porter hadn't given him a second glance.

In a town so packed with ether nodes, all sorts of visitors were probably the norm.

Everyone shared an unspoken understanding: don't ask where others came from, don't ask what they were doing, and keep your distance.

The library sat on the east side of the square.

The building was plainer than he had imagined—a three-story stone structure with a row of high windows across the front.

At the entrance counter sat an old woman with snow-white hair, writing on an index card with an iron stylus.

Richard presented his pass to her.

After verifying it, the old woman pulled a thin booklet from beneath the counter and handed it over.

"This is the collection index, categorized by subject. The first and second floors are open for reading. Books cannot be taken outside the library, but you may transcribe them here."

"If you need any help, just ask."

"Thank you."

Richard took the index, found an empty desk by the window, sat down, and paged through the booklet from beginning to end.

The categorization was extremely detailed, ranging from literature to archaeology, all the way down to natural philosophy.

Each major category was broken down into over a dozen subcategories, which in turn had their own sub-directories.

His goal was clear: sealing theory.

Naturally, there wouldn't be a category in the index titled "sealing theory," just as the Greenwood library didn't have a shelf labeled "occultism."

But his experience at Greenwood had taught him one thing: knowledge hid in the cracks of the framework.

He searched through the index following three separate leads.

The first lead was Inscriptiology.

The core of a seal was its inscription, and the inscription's syntax determined the seal's function and structure.

The books on the third floor of Greenwood had given him a foundational framework, but that was far from enough.

He needed a more systematic breakdown of inscription syntax, especially regarding the processes of breaking and reconstructing seals.

The second lead was alchemical literature.

The mediums used in seals—silver, copper, wax, and holy water—were all foundational materials within the realm of alchemy.

Only by understanding the occult properties of these materials could he grasp why a seal used one over another.

Only then could he deduce what would happen if a given material was altered or removed.

The third lead was Ritual Studies.

Setting a seal was inherently a small-scale ritual, and breaking one also required following ritual logic.

One reason he hadn't found a method for breaking seals on Greenwood's shelves was that introductory materials only taught fire prevention, never arson.

But the depth and breadth of the Imperial Capital University Library's collection sat on an entirely different level.

A firefighting manual wouldn't teach you how to start a fire, but an engineering textbook would inevitably cover the principles of explosive demolition.

At a sufficiently high academic level, "construction" and "demolition" were merely two sides of the same body of knowledge.

Richard quickly penciled the index numbers into his notebook, then got up to find the books on the shelves.

The open collection on the first floor mostly consisted of general academic literature. After flipping through a few books, he confirmed that the truly valuable materials were up on the second floor.

Up in the second-floor gallery, the lighting was noticeably dimmer than below.

The bookshelves were packed tighter together, leaving aisles only wide enough for a single person to squeeze through sideways.

He didn't flip through the books one by one. He didn't have the time.

He first ran a rapid filter based on spine titles and publication years, eliminating anything that clearly deviated from his target.

That left about forty potentially valuable books.

Forty books. Forget finishing them in a day—just opening them all to skim would take far too long.

But he could do something else: rapidly screen each book's table of contents, foreword, appendix, and footnotes.

From that, he could judge which books were hiding real substance and which were purely academic literature.

The screening process he had honed at Greenwood could now run efficiently on a much larger collection.

The first round of screening alone took him about an hour.

Decrypting anything on the spot in the library was completely impossible.

He had no reference books, he lacked the time to sit quietly and work through deductions, and other readers occasionally walked past in the aisles.

Richard made a pragmatic decision: no decrypting, only copying.

Flipping open his notebook, he transcribed the paragraphs suspected of containing hidden writing, character by character.

The transcription work was extremely tedious.

The character density in some paragraphs was outrageously high, the printed strokes crammed so tightly together that he could barely distinguish them even when leaning in close.

His pencil flew across the notebook, his handwriting growing smaller and smaller as he squeezed the absolute limit out of every page.

One book in particular left him itching with curiosity. A line of small text was printed on its title page:

"This book is exclusively for the internal teaching reference of the Department of Classics at Imperial Capital University. Strictly no borrowing."