Firstheart City, second floor of the library.
Angel sat by the window, letting the radiant sunlight spill over him. In his hands was a thick hardcover book titled Architecture and Art, which he slowly turned through page by page.
After reading roughly a third of it, the gray-haired little old man sitting across from Angel let out a regretful "Aiya."
Angel looked up. The first thing he saw was a wisp of dust drifting through the air, followed by Nis's helpless, miserable expression.
"At the forty-eighth node of the third wandering route, I chose the wrong activation path." Nis sighed and casually swept the gravel and dust from the tabletop into the wastebasket below.
—That gravel and dust had come from the stone slab engraved with a representative symbol of Quest World. When the deciphering failed, the slab shattered.
By now, the wastebasket was already filled to the brim with sand and stones.
Nis took a notebook containing data records from beside him. It documented every failed deciphering route, to prevent him from making the same mistake next time. Ten pages had already been used, each crammed full with notes. It was clear just how many times he had failed over the past few days.
After recording this latest lesson from failure, Nis looked up at Angel across from him. Rubbing his hands together, he said with a shamelessly ingratiating smile, "Angel, look... it failed again."
Nis did not voice any request, but his eyes and expression brimmed with intense expectation.
Angel fell silent for a moment, then set down the hardcover book compiled by Jon and slowly said, "This is already your fourth failure today. Adding the failures from the previous days, you have failed at least twenty times. Are you planning to fail once at every node?"
With