Midnight.
The oil lamp on the second floor of the Old Bookstore had long since gone out.
Benjamin lay on the bed upstairs with his eyes closed, his fingers resting lightly over his abdomen, his breathing as steady as a pool of dead water.
Anyone who saw this scene would have thought he was merely a sleeping young man, dreaming harmless dreams amid a roomful of old books. Then, suddenly, the bookstore walls trembled faintly, and something sliced through the air.
The thing approaching followed the thread-thin connection between itself and Benjamin, silently seeping in.
For a moment, every crack in the bookstore seemed to welcome it.
The gap beneath the doorframe, widened by the years; the less-than-two-millimeter crack where the wooden floor met the wall; the dark layer between the drawer and the tabletop...
All the tiny spaces ordinary people never paid attention to seemed to come alive, trembling faintly as if whispering to one of their own. Then, the Crevice Dweller seeped out from the gap between the wall and floor.
The Crevice Dweller's physical form resembled that of the Shadow Thief: an extremely faint, dark human silhouette. Seen from the side, it was merely a line that almost did not exist. Its surface was covered in tiny patterns, like fingerprints magnified countless times.
After leaving the crevice, the Crevice Dweller's body crawled from the foot of the bed onto it.
The process was slow—so slow it was like a black plant struggling to grow from a crack in stone.
Its body spread upward along the fibers of the bedsheet. The sheet's weave was fine and smooth to an ordinary person, but to its senses, it was like a series of broad rivers.
Following the currents of those rivers, it crawled inch by inch over Benjamin's ankle, over