Chapter 518: Reading Area

As the horizon gradually brightened, the Wild Hunt's "joyride" came to an end.

Richard decided to see things through to the end and led the six candidates back to the hall's entrance.

The group dismounted and looked back. The Wild Hunt procession still stood atop the clouds. Tens of thousands of riders remained motionless, as cold and imposing as a mountain.

"From now on, we'll leave matters concerning the lord of the hunt in the Envoy's hands."

"Of course."

The group stepped through the doorway, and the hall dismantled itself.

A moment later, Richard heard a rustle behind him. The red-coated lobsterback had already unbuttoned his crisp military coat.

"Are they gone?"

"Now that they're gone, I can finally speak."

The lobsterback planted both hands on his hips.

"When that little girl got on her horse at the end, she was holding the reins backward!"

The axe-wielding young man laughed so hard he nearly slipped off his mount.

"I saw that, I saw that! I've been holding it in all night."

"You really held it in. You were standing there like a wooden post earlier."

"That's called having an imposing presence."

"Your legs just went numb."

The barefoot rider also stretched his feet out from his mount's shadow. "I hardly dared to move tonight, either."

"What were you afraid of?"

"I was afraid they'd notice I wasn't wearing shoes and I'd lose face."

"You haven't worn shoes for hundreds of years. You're still afraid of that?"

"It's different. We rarely get living guests."

Richard finally relaxed. He no longer had to keep a straight face.

The lord of the hunt's mount moved over.

He pointed his horn at Shadow. "You did well tonight. I can make an exception and grant you one request, but don't go too far."

As soon as the words left his mouth, Richard could sense the other party regretting it. A small patch of frost even fell from his antlers.

Perhaps he was afraid Richard would immediately ask for some rare material or artifact. He couldn't bear to part with a single piece from his collection.

Richard looked around, noticing that not only the surrounding riders, but even the warhorses and hounds were staring at him with bright, piercing eyes.

A plan formed in his mind. "How about this: I want a Spirit Realm Messenger."

The frost falling from the lord of the hunt's antlers suddenly stopped. "Just that?"

"Yes, just that.

"Also, from now on, I hope my messenger can use your channels so I can ensure my communications won't be intercepted or blocked."

The lord of the hunt burst into laughter, and the warhorses of the entire procession pawed at the ground in tandem.

"That is easy. I have plenty of messengers here.

"However, they are all transformed from the dead. They aren't very useful and might even get lost trying to find their way."

He surprisingly offered an alternative. "How about this: when you have time, I'll personally take you to the Spirit Realm to catch a good one."

The procession instantly exploded into an uproar as the riders joined the commotion.

"Going to the Spirit Realm to catch a messenger?"

"I want to go too! I want to go too!"

"I know where the good ones are! The moths down south are bigger than anywhere else."

"What's so good about moths? They might scatter halfway through the flight."

"Then what do you think is better?"

"It has to be a deer. The deer in the Spirit Realm are the best at finding their way."

The old scholar looked up helplessly and reminded him, "Lord of the hunt, if all of them tag along, there will be no one left to watch over the procession."

"It's fine. We aren't fighting a battle right now."

The lord of the hunt shook his reins. "What could possibly happen while catching a messenger?"

The horizon continued to brighten.

The lord of the hunt glanced at the skyline and reminded Shadow, "It's about time. You should head back."

In the past, he would have loved for Shadow to stay and become an eternal member of the hunting procession.

But now, having Shadow operate in the outside world brought him far greater benefits.

After all, he had even connected with a Master of the Classical Records Tradition.

Just as the lord of the hunt was about to leave, he turned back.

"Right, you still haven't used the hunting opportunity I gave you last time.

"Remember, you have three years. It will expire after that."

Several names immediately popped into Richard's mind: Loki, Apophis, Hecate... and that Black Earth River Master hiding in the deepest depths of the veil.

He could forget about the Black Earth River Master—he wouldn't even need to ask. If given the chance, the lord of the hunt would hunt him down himself.

"I understand," he replied.

The lord of the hunt turned his mount around, raised his horn, and blew a very short tune to signal the end of the night's work.

Tens of thousands of riders scattered toward the southeast. The few at the very tail of the procession were still arguing about whether that shoe was made of sheepskin or some other leather. Their voices eventually faded into nothingness.

The clouds dispersed, revealing the plains below. The white light along the banks of the Isonzo dimmed.

Dawn broke.

Inside the hall, the morning light fell from the high windows, spilling over the wooden boxes.

Richard opened his eyes.

Professor Mortimer was sitting in a wicker chair, dozing with a newspaper draped over his head.

Hearing Richard getting up, he instantly woke. "You're back?"

"I'm back."

"Are you tired?" the old professor asked.

"I'm alright."

"That means you're tired. Don't copy any manuscripts today; take a day off to rest."

He folded the newspaper and stood up, leaning on his cane.

"Let's go. Let's get some breakfast."

"Today is November 1st. It's a holiday here, and they'll be selling a pastry on the streets called bones of the dead."

Richard stood amid the hall of wooden boxes, momentarily stunned. "What did you say?"

"Bones of the dead. That's what the pastry is called. It's made of almonds and is hard enough to hammer nails.

"The reason they eat it today is to accompany the dead."

He then headed for the door.

Richard followed. When he reached the atrium, he found the scribes already bent over the long tables. More than twenty pens moved across paper, their rustling blending into a continuous drone.

Luca was at the innermost table, yawning as he copied.

Seeing Richard, he waved in greeting, and Richard nodded back.

The fog outside had dissipated. People carrying chrysanthemums were still walking down the street.

A small pair of shoes sat outside a doorway, filled with candies.

...

Over in Copenhagen, once November arrived, the sun barely managed to drag itself above the sea by eight in the morning.

Loki woke up in an attic in a back alley of the Freeport. His first action was to touch his face.

As he washed his face, he laughed at the water in the basin.

"Look at yourself. Dismantled and divided in a single night.

"You lost half a year's worth of drinking money and were told in front of a room full of people that you could be replaced at any time."

The water in the basin obviously didn't answer him, and Loki hadn't expected it to.

After washing his face, he grabbed a notebook and started calculating.

There were only two areas where he had taken a loss. First, the profit shares no longer passed through his hands; he couldn't even scrape the grease off his fingers.

Second, Hermes's information would have to go through the Envoy from now on. The drinking money, gold coins, and forced smiles he had handed out over the past six months couldn't be recouped for a single copper.

Loki wallowed in misery for only a moment before beginning to plot his next move.

Exactly eleven candidates had stood by the walls last night wrapped in cloaks.

Those eleven had seen the hall doors open with their own eyes. They saw the path of fire burn from the threshold to the cloud peaks, and they saw tens of thousands of cavalrymen flip the backs of their blades simultaneously.

A scene witnessed by that many people couldn't be kept under wraps.

He figured that by this morning, quite a few of them would have already mentioned the incident to others.

When they brought it up, they would likely lower their voices and add, "You absolutely cannot tell anyone else."

Usually, people who reminded others not to tell a soul were the ones who spread news the fastest.

Loki knew very well that information was only valuable when it could be hidden.

When it couldn't be kept secret, he had to cash in on it quickly before it lost its value.

He smoothed out a piece of letter paper and wrote:

"Lord of the hunt: recently, there are several times more desperate people in the Northern Lands than in previous years.

"I am willing to recruit more living people into your procession on your behalf, free of charge.

"—Loki"

When dealing with the lord of the hunt, the most important rule was to never make him pay.

Since it was free of charge, the reply came exceptionally quickly.

A slip of paper soon fluttered onto Loki's desk.

It contained only perfectly neat handwriting, likely penned by the old scholar on his behalf:

"Approved. If you recruit people into the procession, there will be no upper limit on the number.

"However, the seats at the Theogony Salon's table cannot change, and the shares will remain as before."

The seven chairs were the skeleton of the entire ritual. No one had the power to turn seven chairs into seventy; if they changed, it would no longer be the same ritual.

Loki quickly convened another gathering that very night. The hall was lit with fires as usual.

The number of heads hanging in the darkness of the dome was the same as last month. Fenrir's chair remained empty; it had been nine months now, from February to November.

Loki stood on his high chair and held up the reply. "The lord of the hunt decreed that the seats will never change from now on."

He was deliberately misinterpreting the lord of the hunt's meaning. The lord of the hunt meant that no seats could be added beyond the seven, but Loki made it sound as though their specific positions were now permanent.

The crowd immediately boiled over. This essentially abolished the core rule of the displacement battles.

Loki nodded. "The displacement battles are abolished starting tonight, but the empty seats must be filled."

He walked over to the empty chair left by Fenrir and rested his hand on its back.

"Starting tonight, I will recruit more candidates from the outside.

"From Copenhagen to Bergen, all the way to Christiania—anyone interested can sign up. There will be no cap on numbers."

The discussions in the hall grew even louder.

Loki raised his head and looked at the circle of candidates standing by the walls.

"Even if you candidates don't sit in this last vacant chair, you can still mount up with the procession and ride for a night in the Wild Hunt.

"Furthermore, none of the harvest shares will pass through my hands. They will be determined by the lord of the hunt."

These candidates had witnessed the spectacle the previous night, as well as the various benefits promised by the Envoy. They were already coveting the Wild Hunt.

Hearing that they too had a chance to participate, every single one was tempted.

Loki nodded. This was exactly the effect he wanted.

He began to lay down the rules. "First, to join, you must pay an entry fee. Materials, cash, intelligence, connections—anything goes.

"This entry fee goes to me. After all, I have to introduce you to the procession on your first night, so this is my due."

Freyja instantly understood what Loki was plotting.

She mused that, in this way, Loki would regain a portion of the initiative.

If this news spread and enough candidates came, his hands would cramp just from collecting the entry fees alone.

Moreover, this was a promise only the head seat could make.

Freyja's eyes darted as a plan instantly formed in her mind. "Then can we pull in people we know?"

"Of course."

Loki wanted exactly this kind of spread.

He had been about to suggest it, but Freyja brought it up first.

The more people they dragged in, the larger his cut would be.

"As for the entry fee, if you pull someone in, I will only take fifty percent... No, I'll only take thirty percent."

"Twenty percent," Freyja immediately began bargaining.

Loki feigned indignation. "Twenty-five percent! I was the one who negotiated with the lord of the hunt to get this opportunity. Don't get it twisted!"

Freyja sneered inwardly, but she couldn't be bothered to haggle any further.

"Fine, let's leave it at that. You take twenty-five percent, and the rest goes to the person who brought them in."

Tyr snorted from the side. "Does that mean we all have the right to recruit people?"

"Of course," Loki answered directly.

"But you have to go through me. I will screen them first before reporting to the lord of the hunt, which is why I take twenty-five percent of it all."

Tyr then asked a crucial question. "And if someone dies in the procession, whose responsibility is it?"

Loki laughed boisterously. "The lord of the hunt's, of course."

"Let me be clear with all of you, since I couldn't hide this anyway: the majority of those who ride with the procession will die.

"At least half will die in the first year, and even more of the survivors will definitely perish in the second year.

"But everyone has seen the decaying, chaotic state of the war outside.

"If you die following the procession, you might still have a chance to be recorded in the ledger, and you could continue to ride within the ranks of the Wild Hunt."

Upon hearing this, the candidates signed up without hesitation.

Many of the people here were either down on their luck in the outside world or desperately needed a fast track to grow stronger.

Otherwise, why would they risk their lives just to fight for a seat?

Even Lillian herself—when she walked the Path of the Abyss, fought a ba for the first time, and survived those perilous displacement battles—had constantly put her life on the line, dancing on the edge of death.

Loki had said it himself: joining the Wild Hunt only meant there was a probability of death.

That wasn't nearly as cruel as the displacement battles, where one person was guaranteed to die in every match.

If they dared to participate in the displacement battles, why would they fear the risks of the Wild Hunt?

Lillian remained silent on the sidelines the entire time.

She could sense that whenever Loki or anyone else mentioned the Wild Hunt or the hunting procession, her Skadi mask would faintly heat up.

Skadi was, after all, the goddess presiding over winter and the hunt.

After the meeting dispersed, back in her attic in Prague, Lillian conducted an experiment.

She put away the Skadi mask and stood in the middle of the attic. Without relying on any external objects, she attempted to summon a blizzard on her own.

The blizzard flared up quickly, and it felt much smoother to control than it had last month.

Last month, she had to diligently circulate her breathing method and concentrate completely just to condense a speck of snow above her palm.

Tonight, she only had to will it, and frost immediately crawled across all the windowpanes in the attic.

Lillian opened her notebook and began to record the extent of her ability's improvement.

She had a premonition that once the Wild Hunt procession expanded again, she would be able to reap even more benefits from it.

After finishing her notes, Lillian closed the notebook and stuffed it back into the bottom of her trunk, placing it next to the glass jar containing the titmouse specimen.

The box of pastries still sat by the head of her bed, the frosted rabbit on the lid slightly lopsided.

There were still two almond crisps inside, which she couldn't bear to eat.

Thinking of the person who had given her the pastries, Lillian hugged the box and peacefully drifted off to sleep.

Tonight, she mercifully did not have any nightmares.

...

In the atrium of the Ambrosian Library, an old man had appeared at some unknown point.

He liked to set a chessboard on the table. The white side was missing a bishop, which had been replaced by a brass button.

The old man had a quirk: he loved playing chess against himself.

After making a move for white, he would stand up, go to the opposite side to make a move for black, and then circle back to the white side.

In a single morning, he would make that trip over forty times. Onlookers mostly shook their heads in pity.

Yet, it was this seemingly unhinged old man who had set up a makeshift circulation desk in the atrium. All borrowing and returning of books had to go through his hands.

No one in the entire library could remember who had arranged for the circulation desk or when it had been placed in the atrium.

Moreover, when it came to borrowing and returning books, everyone subconsciously deferred to the old man's authority—even the head librarian.

The scribes called him "Old Sir."

Luca said that on his very first day of work, the old gentleman was already sitting beneath the pillar.

The tall scribe from Padua, Marco, also claimed that the old gentleman was already there when he started at the library.

Richard went to ask the head librarian. The old priest thought for a long time before answering.

"When I first started working at this library, he was already here."

"How many years has he been here?"

"My child, I asked the previous head librarian, and he told me that when he came to borrow books as a little boy, the old gentleman was already sitting beneath that pillar."

Richard figured that every old library had someone like this—as if they had been bricked into the walls along with the bookshelves when the building was first constructed.

His first confrontation with this old man was over a book.

The book Richard needed to use was the 1580 library catalog. It had over six hundred pages, and he had to constantly cross-reference it while compiling the index.

"I need to borrow it for three days."

The old gentleman reached out and glanced at the borrowing slip.

"The library's lending period is two hours."

"I need it to cross-reference an index. Two hours isn't enough."

"If you can't finish, come back and borrow it again tomorrow."

"For two hours tomorrow as well?"

"It is two hours tomorrow as well."

Richard thought about it. "Then I'll borrow it four times a day."

"You can only borrow it once a day. Those are the rules."

"Are there any books in the library that can be taken outside?"

The old gentleman gave it some thought.

"There is one."

He pulled a thin booklet out from under the circulation desk and slid it over to Richard.

Printed on the booklet's cover was: Library Borrowing Regulations.

Richard took the book and returned to his seat. In truth, two hours was enough time for him to flip through those six hundred pages several times over.

[Erudition] ensured that once he read through it, the entire content would be etched into his brain.

He had asked to borrow it primarily because he wanted to take the catalog back to the hostel and flip through it slowly while lying in bed.

During his break, Luca brought him a small white porcelain cup, per usual.

Richard stood in the corridor, took a sip, and frowned.

"No sugar today either?"

"There won't be any for the entire year. All the sugar has been supplied to the army."

The old man, who had woken up at some point, snatched the cup out of Richard's hands from the side.

Although the movement wasn't fast, Richard felt an irresistible force behind it.

"No drinking coffee in the reading area!"

"...I'm standing in the atrium corridor."

"The corridor counts as the reading area."

"What part of the library doesn't count as the reading area?"

The old gentleman jerked his chin toward the main doors.

"The street outside the main doors."

Richard had no choice but to carry his cup outside the main doors. The November wind howled through the alley, blowing his coffee cold.

Iced coffee > hot coffee > coffee blown from hot down to room temperature. Even a dog would shake its head at the last one.

At that moment, Professor Mortimer walked into the atrium holding his chipped cup. The old gentleman extended a hand to stop him in the corridor just the same.

The old professor was forced to stand at the main doors to finish his half-cup of weak tea. He muttered a sentence in the Albion Language, "Stubborn old coot."

Everything to be copied that day consisted of seventeenth-century receipts, each one more boring than the last.

As Richard copied, his mind began to wander. He scribbled a few lines on the back of a blank card.

The Romans had occupied all the lands of Gaul, leaving only one small unconquered village by the sea.

The village druid would brew a cauldron of potion, and any villager who drank it would gain superhuman strength.

The smallest man in the village had the quickest wits, while a fat man spent all day walking around carrying a menhir.

The fat man had fallen into the cauldron of potion as a child, so the village adults forbade him from drinking anymore. The small village was surrounded by four Roman military camps.

This was the world-famous Asterix the Gaul from his past life, a national-treasure comic that even presidents would bring as gifts for foreign heads of state.

Just as Richard was writing about the four military camps, a hand reached over his shoulder and snatched the card away.

"You are not allowed to write anything unrelated to your transcription work in the reading area."

The old gentleman stood there and read through the card. His mouth twitched, and then he stuffed the card directly into his pocket.

"...Confiscated."

"Hey! You aren't my mentor. What gives you the right to confiscate it?"

"Come to the circulation desk before two o'clock to retrieve it."

Richard went to retrieve his card at 1:58 PM.

The old gentleman returned the card. A line in pencil had been added to the back: "Not bad. I hope to see the continuation."

Richard simply thought the old man had been sitting in the atrium for so long he was looking for amusement.

As for the Apennine language, he no longer needed the vocabulary list his aunt had written for him.

With his reading and writing skills boosted by [Learning] and [Speculation], he first managed to comprehend most of the curses Luca and the others threw around at the dinner table.

Sure enough, no matter the language, swear words were always the fastest to learn.

Slowly expanding his knowledge from there, Richard had now effectively eliminated all barriers to his reading comprehension.

But his spoken language still wasn't very good.

Whenever he opened his mouth, all of his stresses landed precisely where someone from Albion would put them.

When the tall Marco heard him discussing manuscript dating with someone, his glasses slid down to the tip of his nose.

"How long have you been in Milan?"

"About two weeks."

"You've been here for two weeks, and you're already reading this?"

In Richard's hand was a sixteenth-century Lombard dialect notarization document. Even locals had to rely on guesswork to slog through it.

"The Apennine language grew out of Latin to begin with, so there's some overlap."

Marco opened his mouth.

"Then why do you still stutter and stumble when you speak?"

"...I lack speaking practice."

Professor Mortimer was rarely in the library these days.

Once his meetings ended, the old professor would head out with his cane and wouldn't return until evening.

The Braidense Library, the School of Theology's archives, a few old bookstores behind the cathedral, and a shop in the south of the city that specialized in old sheet music.

He asked everyone he met: "Does your establishment have a librarian around forty years old, of medium height, with a pencil tucked behind his ear?"

Most people said no. Even when some said yes, the person they brought out was completely wrong.

One bookstore owner claimed that he himself was around forty with a pencil behind his ear, and asked what the professor wanted with him.

Mortimer looked the man up and down, muttered never mind, and left after buying a prayer book he had absolutely no use for.

He had also asked the old gentleman in the atrium.

In the afternoon, the old man was playing the white side of the board.

"Excuse me, does this library have a librarian in his forties with a pencil tucked behind his ear?"

The old gentleman couldn't even be bothered to look up.

"Never seen him."

Mortimer turned his head and said in the Albion Language to Richard:

"At his age, it's normal for his eyesight to be poor."

Another time, he took advantage of the moment the old man stood to go to the opposite side and play black.

Mortimer sat in the only cushioned chair in the atrium—the one on the white side.

The old gentleman finished his black move and returned, standing next to the chair.

Mortimer had pulled his hat over his face and was already snoring.

The old man was forced to play the white side standing up for an hour.

During that hour, Mortimer would occasionally lift the brim of his hat to offer a critique.

"No one has played this opening for a hundred years."

"Someone played it a hundred years ago."

"Who?"

"Me."

Mortimer chuckled, assuming the old man was just joking around.

Returning to the hostel in the evening, they found food saved for them in the dining room.

The hostel proprietress was from Lyon. Despite having married and moved here, she unflinchingly baked a batch of baguettes every morning and evening.

Mortimer picked up a piece of bread and knocked it forcefully against the edge of the table.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

"I hid all the way from Dover to Milan, and I still couldn't escape this."

Richard stifled a laugh and kept quiet.

Professor Mortimer returned later and later each day, and his words grew fewer and fewer.

He snapped a piece of the baguette in half.

"Little Richard, if that person doesn't want to see you, you'd probably ignore them even if they stood right in front of you. Such is a Master!"

He popped the broken piece of bread into his mouth, sighing as he chewed.

"...I suppose I just don't have the luck."

Mortimer was still uneasy about breaking through the Virtuoso rank. He kept hoping to find that Master to ask a few questions, but the man refused to show his face.

Meanwhile, the matter of evacuating the precious texts was also gradually hitting a stalemate.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, the official from Rome stood up and read a telegram aloud.

The telegram contained four points, but they all conveyed a single meaning:

Any document slated for evacuation must be compiled into the National Catalog of Artistic and Historical Properties.

Professor Tagliaferro asked him how long the committee in charge of studying the formatting had been established.

The official looked down at the footnote on the telegram.

"...Since 1902."

"And who decided to establish that committee?"

"A committee from 1899."

"What did that committee study?"

The official choked on his words for a moment. "...They studied whether it was necessary to unify the format."

Someone in the gallery dropped their pen on the floor and spent a long time bending over to pick it up.

But that wasn't even the most fatal issue.

The most fatal issue was on the last page of the inventory: the archives of the cathedral workshop.

From 1387 to the present day, every detail was recorded: where every single stone was quarried, which boat transported it, which stonemason carved it, and exactly how many copper coins they were paid.

In addition, there were over two hundred manuscripts donated to the workshop by previous generations.

All these items shared one thing in common: every single piece bore three stamped letters—A.U.F.

Professor Tagliaferro pulled out one of the pages and smoothed it flat in the middle of the long table.

"Ad usum fabricae, meaning 'for the use of the worksite'."

"Over five hundred years ago, the Duke of Milan established a rule: any stone transported to the cathedral worksite was to have these three letters stamped on its crates. It would pass through every toll and checkpoint along the way without a single copper of tax being collected."

"Eventually, when Milanese people refer to something as being free, they call it 'a ufo'—a term derived from these very three letters."

Someone in the gallery chuckled.

The crux of the matter was that the Milan Cathedral had never truly been finished. Its construction had proceeded intermittently for hundreds of years.

The Milanese even had a saying: to describe something as never-ending, they would say it was "like building the cathedral."

On the mystical side, anything stamped with A.U.F. would never decay or rot.

This was the collective subconscious understanding of the entire city over five hundred years: everyone tacitly agreed that the work was not yet finished.

That was why the ink on those fifteenth-century papers still looked as fresh as if they had been written yesterday.

The meeting's original plan was to transport the precious documents to the cellars of the neutral country of Helvetia to escape the flames of war. But once they left Milan, that status would no longer be recognized.

Three years ago, Professor Tagliaferro had tried taking a single page with him across the lake on a boat to Locarno. By the time he disembarked, the words had already faded by half.

Upon leaving Milan, five hundred years of unaging time would suddenly catch up in a matter of days.

Copying them was useless as well. Words could be replicated, but the traces of Ether accumulated over five hundred years could not.

The entire room subsequently erupted into a chaotic argument.

Moving them meant ruin, leaving them meant they might get bombed, and copying them was inadequate.

Even Professor Mortimer explained to Richard that not even a Major Adept could pack up and take away the five hundred years of time belonging to an entire city.

Meanwhile, the official from Rome insisted that regardless of whether they were moved or not, they had to be compiled into the master catalog.

After the meeting was dismissed, Luca and the others dragged Richard off to eat under the arcades.

It was the same restaurant as last time. The mosaic bull on the floor had been polished yet another shade brighter by countless footsteps.

As soon as the waiter saw Richard walk through the door, he turned his head and shouted into the back kitchen.

The fat chef walked out, leaned against the doorframe, and crossed his arms over his chest.

Richard ordered a portion of saffron risotto and a breaded veal cutlet, devouring them in no time.

"Another round."

He finished the second round as well. Two other kitchen helpers poked their heads out from the back, one of them still holding a half-peeled potato.

"How did the meeting go?" Luca asked.

Richard put down his knife and fork, pondering how best to describe it.