"This kid's got a pretty sharp brain!"
Roselle held a bag of five-spice sunflower seeds, spitting the shells out with no regard for his image as he enjoyed Klein's little deduction show.
Sno squeezed a few salted edamame beans into his mouth, casually tossed the pods aside, and nodded.
"After all, he's going to be competing on the same stage as Ammon. Without some tricks up his sleeve, he probably wouldn't even have bones left."
"That's true. By the way, aren't you interested in that book?" Roselle gazed at the rulebook from afar. While cracking its rules would be troublesome for Klein, it was extremely simple for Sno and Roselle.
They could even stroll around during curfew, spit sunflower seed shells and toss edamame pods on streets where littering was forbidden, or walk straight into the library and pick up the book without the slightest difficulty.
The fundamental reason was that neither of them was bound by the rules newly added by the Brass Book—
They were neither "living beings" nor "things."
A living being first had to be alive, and a thing first had to objectively exist.
Roselle had been dead for nearly two hundred years, while Sno existed in a "nonexistent superposition of life and death."
Never mind "living beings" and "things"—even if the Trunsoest Brass Book added "undead" and then "existence," Sno would still fall outside its restrictions. He had ceased to "exist" when he advanced to Sequence Three.
If the Brass Book still used proper legal clauses as it had before, forbidding theft, fraud, peeping, and the like, it might have caused Sno and Roselle a little trouble. But now, in its desperate flailing, it kept writing clauses like "No living being or thing may touch the Trunsoest Brass Book," which was practically opening a back