Chapter 32 Part 1

When the dormitory door swung open, the Little White Cat was already crouched obediently in the entryway, waiting.

Tong Yuwu lowered her gaze to her, and a faint trace of warmth, almost imperceptible, softened her otherwise expressionless face.

Meng Yiran, however, couldn’t muster any joy. The moment the Noble Miss appeared, she spotted several easily overlooked patches of dust—uncommon grime—clinging to her clothes.

She trailed after Tong Yuwu into the room, circling her feet and tilting her head up with a plaintive “meow meow,” inquiring about her day.

Unfortunately, the Noble Miss behaved exactly as usual, showing no sign of anything amiss.

After placing food in the Little White Cat’s bowl, Tong Yuwu didn’t leave. Instead, she settled sideways onto a nearby chair. Meng Yiran, despite her lack of appetite, played along and stepped forward to eat. Throughout the meal, she kept glancing up, hoping Tong Yuwu might say something to her. But the Noble Miss seemed there solely to oversee dinner, remaining silent the entire time. She only silently righted the bowl whenever the Little White Cat accidentally nudged it askew.

Meng Yiran forced down barely half her food, licked her paws clean, and refused to touch the rest.

Only then did Tong Yuwu show some other reaction. “Eating so little?”

She scooped up the Little White Cat and reached to rub her little belly. Meng Yiran arched her back in protest. After just two gentle strokes, Tong Yuwu stopped and said, “Don’t bother cleaning up yet. If you’re hungry tonight, come back for a bit more.”

Meng Yiran gave a lazy “meow” in response.

Tong Yuwu patted the Little White Cat’s head, set her down, and turned to head out.

Undeterred, Meng Yiran followed her all the way to the door, positioning herself even farther out than she usually did in the mornings when seeing Tong Yuwu off to school.

Tong Yuwu slipped on her shoes and looked up to find her blocking the doorway. “Do you want to come out with me?”

The Little White Cat let out a single “meow” and dipped her head to sniff the fingers Tong Yuwu extended toward her.

Tong Yuwu lightly scratched under her chin. Her purple eyes darkened thoughtfully, but in the end, she shooed the cat back inside, opened the door, and left.

Once she was gone, Meng Yiran prowled around the dormitory once before leaving a feigning-sleep cat clone behind. Transforming into her human form, she too vanished into the night.

~~~

Inside the First Library.

Tong Yuwu, aproned in white, gently dusted the shelves with her cleaning tools.

Even mundane chores became a captivating sight when performed by her—nothing like the crude business of chasing butterflies in the courtyard.

Yet a hint of displeasure shadowed her expression, growing especially pronounced after she had meticulously cleaned the entire front bookshelf. The insistent call echoing in her mind from the second floor showed no sign of abating.

She set her tools aside, draped the apron over the railing, and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

Eliminating the noise was part of the cleaning, after all.

The second floor lay unlit. Moonlight poured unsparingly through the central skylight, but it was still dim enough to hinder ordinary vision. A half-full kerosene lamp sat by the stairs. Tong Yuwu approached, struck a flint to light it, and carried it forward.

Her path led straight to the central open-air area of the entire second floor.

A gentle evening breeze stirred, and in that instant, the whole second floor seemed to brim with inexplicable delight. Distant rows of bookshelves reached out to one another through their shadows. Tattered pages rustled in cheers. Even the yellowed, blurred portraits on the walls slyly turned their gazes toward her.

Every presence in the space watched this long-absent visitor.

With no cat waiting at home to be fed this time, Tong Yuwu didn’t pause. She strode directly into the open-air area and tilted her head back to gaze at the deep blue vault of the sky.

The heavens were cloudless, marked only by an imperfect moon and a handful of faintly twinkling stars.

Compared to the rest of the library, the open-air section—most exposed to sun, moon, wind, and rain—appeared all the more weathered and decayed.

The moment she crossed into the area, the call in her mind ceased entirely. Tong Yuwu kept walking forward without breaking stride. Her crisp “tap-tap-tap” footsteps were the only sound echoing faintly through the second floor.

As she passed the very center of the open-air area, the footsteps suddenly vanished at one point.

Tong Yuwu paused for a fraction of a second, then resumed. It took another two or three seconds before the “tap-tap-tap” resumed.

But when she deliberately backtracked and repeatedly stepped on that sound-devouring spot, the anomaly didn’t repeat.

She halted to observe and think.

Without the sound of her own movements, the ambient noises resurfaced. The night breeze whispered across her neck and delved into the depths of the second floor, joining the discarded relics in a fragmented, thoroughly discordant symphony.

A moment later, having discovered nothing, Tong Yuwu pressed onward.

She crossed the entire Open-air Area and arrived before the westernmost row of bookshelves on the Second Floor. Most of the Library’s books had already been relocated, but stacks of tattered, thin pages still cluttered this particular row.

Tong Yuwu pulled down the outermost volume and discovered it was an old issue of News Monthly. She specifically checked the publication date: Imperial Calendar 3672, October—nearly two hundred and thirty years ago.

She shook off the layer of dust and read the faded text by the dim light of her kerosene lamp—

【Child of God, the Empire’s greatest Monarch—Hwaser Sevier has successfully advanced to Saint Magus Mentor. At the start of the month, he personally visited the front lines to rally the troops! The cunning Half-Beastmen, heedless of death, mounted a futile last stand, only to fall before the Saint Magus Mentor’s devastating Heavenly Curse Technique. With a leader like this Saint Magus Mentor at the helm, victory is assured for the great Sevier Empire!】

Tong Yuwu lost interest after the first few lines. These events had long been distilled into the simplified accounts of history textbooks. Such contemporary reports held value only for scholars specializing in the era; to ordinary folk, they were worthless. Clarity Magic Academy had no need to preserve them, so the papers had been deliberately abandoned during the Library’s relocation.

She left the periodicals section, lamp in hand, and wandered idly through the surrounding aisles. She passed the Alchemy shelves first, then the Magic Plant section. Both areas had been largely stripped bare. Tucked into a crevice on the fourth shelf of the third row in Magic Plants lingered half a torn page. The plant illustration showed only a barren stem; the fruits that should have dangled from its branches had vanished along with the missing upper half.

The voice that had once called to her in her mind had fallen silent long ago. Yet Tong Yuwu sensed something watching her from the shadows.

She tried to bait it, exposing deliberate vulnerabilities and even seeking it out. But whatever it was maintained a careful distance, observing from afar.

The standoff grew tedious. Minutes slipped by, her shift’s end drawing ever nearer. The Noble Miss, thoroughly bored, turned back the way she had come. As she recrossed the moonlit Open-air Area, her shadow stretched long behind her like a trailing veil of gossamer.

But upon reaching the eastern side of the Second Floor, Tong Yuwu found no staircase in the corner where it should have been.

Before her stood only sparse rows of bookshelves—shelves beside shelves, walls behind them. The stairs might never have existed; they had left no trace at all.

Tong Yuwu knew her memory was not at fault.

She glanced back at the Open-air Area, bathed in pervasive moonlight that gleamed coldly across the heavens, silently mocking the feeble glow of the lamp in her hand.

The unseen watcher still lurked nearby, concealed in the gaps between shelves, the ceiling voids, some pitch-black corner.

A gust of wind stirred the nearest wooden rack, its pages rustling noisily. Tong Yuwu removed one and found another relic from over two centuries past.

【Imperial Calendar 3675, March.】

【The nation in mourning: The great Monarch—Hwaser Sevier has passed away in the Imperial Palace at the age of 157.】

Barely preserved after all these years, the paper was brittle enough to crumble at a touch.

Tong Yuwu lifted her hand to replace it, but the wind snatched at the fragile sheet, tearing away half a page. It spun wildly into the corner before shredding into fragments—mere specks amid the Library’s countless motes of dust.

The Noble Miss’s violet eyes glimmered faintly. She stared at the remnants, her expression as pitiless as the wind that had destroyed them.

In the next instant, her gaze shifted to the serried ranks of bookshelves before her.

Such occurrences were no longer unfamiliar. She had faced them before on that Small Plaza overrun with eerie easels, and in the classroom after class that day.

An indescribable power welled up behind her, swelling rapidly until it pressed against the lofty ceiling. Blocked from rising farther, it snaked downward in a sinuous curve.

Tong Yuwu’s face remained impassive. She regarded the looming shelves and softly uttered two words: “Get lost.”

“Crack.”

“Clack.”

“Bang—”

Time seemed to rewind to that fateful evening, though now the targets were these towering wooden racks instead of the three troublesome students. Beneath Tong Yuwu’s icy stare, the shelves crumpled as if crushed by an invisible force. Devoid of any give, the planks warped, splintered, and shattered one by one in explosive bursts—like the easels on that plaza.

Amid the chaos, a thin card dislodged from the base of one shelf and tumbled helplessly through the billowing dust.

Tong Yuwu extended her hand. The card plummeted straight into the Noble Miss’s palm—pristine and utterly free of dust.

The card was of high quality, with clear, legible writing on it.

“Dear Clarity student or teacher, I have hidden countless identical cards in various corners of the Second Floor of the First Library, hoping to offer you a bit of advice—of course, I hope you never need it.”

“If you’re unlucky enough to get lost here and can’t find a way out for the time being, please don’t panic. Quietly find a place to stay. When midnight arrives and the moon rises directly above the library, everything will return to normal. At that point, you can leave smoothly. The door on the first floor is probably locked, so try slipping out quietly through the side door on the west side.”

“Please remember: while trapped on the Second Floor of the library, do not damage the surrounding items! Do not damage the surrounding items! Do not damage the surrounding items!”

“—From an investigator within the school who is completely clueless, and also a victim of the getting-lost incident.”

Before Tong Yuwu could finish reading the content above, she noticed that the entire library had fallen completely silent.

This silence was different from before; even the most subtle whispers of the wind had vanished. She could only hear her own shallow breaths, amplified several times in the utterly still environment, ringing deafeningly in her ears.

But she remained composed, quietly reading to the very last word.