After leaving Mr. Hutton's office, Richard headed down the corridor toward the school gates.
Evelyn waved at him from the line at the school bus stop, her braid whipping about in the wind.
He called out to his sister, "I'll be home late today. You go ahead and take the bus."
"Library again?"
"Yes."
"Are you planning to move into the library or something?"
"Almost."
The girl glared at him before the crowd swept her onto the school bus.
Before the doors closed, she stuck half her head out the window. "Be back before dark!"
Richard waved to her, then turned and headed for the library.
There were still a few students studying on the first and second floors, while the librarian recorded borrowing records behind the counter.
By the time he reached the third floor, there was no one there.
Just as before, the fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead. The broken one flickered twice before going dark again.
He walked to the section of shelves between geography and agriculture, crouched down, and began taking inventory.
There were twenty-six books in total, varying in size and thickness.
Some were finely bound, some had cracked spines, and some had covers so worn that even their titles had vanished.
Their publication dates ranged from 1790 to 1860 in the New Calendar, spanning nearly seventy years.
Richard first conducted a quick screening.
He pulled out each book and flipped to the table of contents or the final pages, checking for appendices, non-body text, or unusually dense passages.
After excluding the obviously legitimate academic works—those with proper citation formats, clear footnotes, and no suspicious markings anywhere in the text—eleven remained.
Of those eleven, three had felt distinctly wrong the moment he opened them.
In the first book, several footnote numbers skipped ahead. Missing numbers did not appear out of nowhere; either it was a typesetting error, or the gaps had been deliberately left blank.
In ordinary academic publications, it would be the former. On this shelf, he had to assume the latter.
The second was even more obvious. The initial letters of one chapter's paragraphs formed a short sentence.
An acrostic—the oldest and simplest encryption method.
The third had two handwritten supplementary pages tucked into its appendix. The handwriting was completely different from the printed text, and even the ink was a different color.
Richard pulled the three books from the shelf, stacked them on the floor, and began examining them one by one.
Since finding Mr. Hutton's copy of <On the Organizational Forms of Early Agricultural Communities on the Western Continent>, he had developed a complete decryption process.
First, identify the encryption layer. Then peel it apart layer by layer using reference tables and etymological manuals. Finally, cross-check the results.
The first book took about forty minutes. It appeared to concern the use of mineral mediums in Rituals.
Useful, but not urgent. Once he understood its contents, he stopped decrypting further.
After solving the acrostic in the second book, it pointed him to a specific paragraph on a particular page in the main text.
On the surface, that passage discussed hunting Rituals in the northern forests. In reality, taking every fifth word and stringing them together produced a description of the Blood-Burning Path.
It had some reference value, but it was not suitable for him.
The Blood-Burning Path was too extreme. Its Initiate training included brutal alternations between holding one's breath in ice water and explosive breathing. His body could not handle that.
He carefully flipped the third book open to the two inserted pages and brought the desk lamp closer.
The handwriting was neat but tiny, written with a dip pen. The ink had already faded to brown, suggesting it was at least several decades old.
There were only two pages, but they were densely packed with information.
The first line read: "Aurea Via—Fundamenta Respirationis Primae."
"Golden Path—Foundations of the Initiate Breathing Technique."
Richard's fingers trembled slightly.
He looked up at the window. Night had already fallen completely.
The fluorescent tubes on the third floor still buzzed, their white light stretching his shadow into a long strip across the bookshelves.
He lowered his head and kept reading.
The text described the Golden Path's most basic Initiate Breathing Technique. It had no name; throughout the passage, it was referred to only as the "Initiate Breathing Technique."
There were no mystical descriptions in its steps, nor anything like "opening the Ren and Du meridians."
The entire passage read more like a medical instruction manual:
Adjust the breathing rate, control the ratio of inhalation to exhalation, and maintain focused attention at the center of the chest under a specific rhythm.
The final section was a warning:
"The Initiate Breathing Technique must not exceed three quarters of an hour per day, approximately forty-five minutes. Beginners are advised to keep it under one quarter of an hour during their first week;
"Excessive practice may cause headaches, dizziness, and chest tightness. If tinnitus or spots of light at the edge of one's vision occur, stop immediately and lie down to rest. Otherwise, mild shock may result."
Practical, safe, and clearly bounded. As expected of a cultivation method derived from medicine.
No matter how hard one pushed it, the worst outcome was only mild shock. It was nothing like the Blood-Burning Path, where one could genuinely suffocate or freeze to death. No wonder it was the preferred entry method for most legitimate organizations.
Richard read the two handwritten pages from beginning to end three times. Once he was certain he had memorized every word, he closed the book and returned it to its place.
He did not take the book with him. There was not much he needed to record this time.
Taking one book could be explained as borrowing it. Taking several would draw attention.
If these books stayed on the shelf, he could come back and consult them again in the future.
Richard stood and stretched, his joints crackling in a rapid series.
He raised his wrist to check the time... Damn. It was already past seven.
The last school bus had left at six-thirty. He had not noticed the library's closing announcement at all, and apparently no one had come up to clear the third floor.
Outside, the night was thick, with streetlamps glowing sparsely along the road.
It was over three miles from the school to his home, more than half an hour on foot.
Walking during the day counted as exercise. After dark, it was another matter entirely.
The old district of Briston was not particularly safe at night, and there were plenty of thieves and pickpockets around.
In his previous life, he could walk at night without a care. His homeland had comprehensive public infrastructure and surveillance cameras everywhere. In this life, he had no such confidence.
He slung his schoolbag over his shoulder and went downstairs. When he pushed open the library's side door, a cold wind rushed into his face.
The campus was completely empty now. Only the window of the guardhouse still glowed.
Richard hunched his neck and walked toward the school gates.
The old gatekeeper stuck half his head out the window, muttered something, then pulled back inside.
A Stone Griffin crouched atop the gatepost, bird droppings on its wings gleaming white beneath the moonlight.
The moment he stepped out through the gates, he spotted an old-fashioned car parked beneath a streetlamp.
Wire-spoke wheels, whitewall tires, and a pair of gooseneck lamps set into either side of the windshield—features found only on top-tier sedans.
The entire car sat quietly beneath the lamp, utterly out of place amid the drab street scene around it, like a pampered hunting dog tied outside a marketplace.
The window soon rolled down, revealing a pretty and somewhat familiar face.
It was Gray.
She was not wearing braids today. Her chestnut hair fell over her shoulders, mostly gathered beneath the collar of her scarf.
The girl's blue eyes looked even clearer at night than they did in daylight, and her lips carried a faint pink tint, as if she had applied lipstick.
"Williams," she greeted him.
"Gray?" Richard stopped beneath the streetlamp. "Why are you still at school?"
"I stayed behind to catch up on some coursework. When I came out, I saw that the lights on the library's third floor were still on."
She closed her book, pushed open the car door, and stepped out.
"Not many Greenwood students stay late at night. I guessed it might be you."
She said it naturally, as though they had merely happened to meet.
But Richard noticed that the dew on the hood had already gathered into droplets. The car had been parked there for at least half an hour.
Before you continue