Lu Yuan pinched the letter paper and looked at it for a long time.
Not a single word in the entire letter said that Mo Shui was doing badly.
Yet as Lu Yuan read it word by word, sentence by sentence, all he saw were sour, stale archives, an underground basement no one maintained, and the plight of being assigned to guard a tiny archive room.
Ah, and that final line: It was fine if he did not come.
He wanted someone to come, yet refused to say it outright no matter what.
That was so like Mo Shui.
Lu Yuan thought of the underground Library in Grim Port.
A pitch-black shadow hanging upside down from a lamp to sleep, throwing a tantrum when it was woken up, the books it spat out still wrapped in slime, and even complaining about the taste after eating expired archives.
The last time he left, it had fussed awkwardly for ages before spitting out a thin book it had treasured for years and telling him to find it in the main city.
Back then, he had thought meeting again in the main city would be easy.
Who could have imagined that Grim Port would simply be gone?
Ah, they did not remember me either.
Lu Yuan had actually guessed it long ago.
On the night Grim Port sank, it had been perfectly normal for Mina and Brent to forget him.
But guessing was one thing. Seeing those words written on paper still stirred something in his heart.
The people in that city who knew him had either forgotten, scattered, or died.
In the end, the only ones who still remembered the name Lu Yuan were himself and the Book Spirit far away in a basement beneath the main city, secretly eating sour archives.