"Mr. Tamada, may I call you that?"
Tamada, who had been silently organizing the bookshelves, jumped at the voice behind him. When he turned around and saw it was the little boy he had run into earlier, he secretly breathed a sigh of relief. "Ah, it's you. Thank you so much for earlier. If you hadn't helped me, the director would definitely have punished me."
Worse still, if he had let his emotions get the better of him and dropped the box, then when the director came looking for him, if he saw those boxes Tamada had opened...
Tamada Kazuo let out a breath.
"It was nothing." Conan smiled and shook his head, looking like an ordinary child who had just been praised by an adult. His eyes quietly drifted toward the box in Tamada Kazuo's hands.
He was doing perfectly ordinary sorting work: checking the barcodes on new books, entering them into the system, storing some in the warehouse, and placing the rest in their proper locations.
In a library the size of Beika Library, plenty of tedious work like this was unavoidable.
For Tamada Kazuo to be so frightened of that mean-looking director, he must have discovered some incredible secret. At the very least, it had to be something incredible to the director.
Among tens or hundreds of thousands of books, any volumes discovered by an employee like Tamada Kazuo, who handled sorting and storage, must have possessed some special characteristics...
Thinking of the foreign-language books Tamada had carried out of the children's reading room earlier, a sharp glint flashed through Conan's eyes.
For example, full English original editions that had inexplicably appeared in the children's section, all brand-new, seemingly still sealed in plastic...
Many hefty original English books were quite expensive, especially those involving professional fields.
Even