Chapter 65: Easy to Descend, Hard to Return

Copying by hand ultimately had its limits.

Fortunately, the physical improvements from activating all three Body skills simultaneously had already begun to show over the past few days.

Deeper sleep elevated his daytime cognitive function, a change most directly reflected in his memory.

The memory enhancement from [Learning], compounded with the optimized cerebral blood flow from his improved physical foundation, yielded remarkable results.

Whatever he couldn't finish copying he committed to memory, jotting down just the keywords in his notebook so he could slowly reconstruct and organize the text once he returned to Briston.

When his wrist began to ache from all the writing, he looked up and glanced out the window.

The sun had already passed its zenith, dipping significantly to the west.

It was probably past one in the afternoon.

He put down his pen, rubbed his wrist, and walked to the window to rest his eyes.

Outside, two old men sat on a bench playing chess, taking a long time to consider each move.

Two cups of tea rested beside the chessboard. The steam had long since dissipated, but neither old man reached for a cup.

When he turned back from the window, he noticed a new figure in the first-floor reading area.

The person sat near the south window, a porcelain cup and a saucer of biscuits resting in front of him.

The library signs clearly read "No Food or Drink."

The old librarian behind the counter glanced at him and frowned, but said nothing.

Richard recognized the profile.

It was Phillips, the student from Harrow School who had placed fourth in the Cicero Cup.

He was also the one who always managed to get his hands on tea.

Right now, he was leaning back into a soft leather sofa. With a teacup in his right hand and a book in his left, he looked as completely at ease as if lounging in his own living room.

By contrast, Richard had spent the entire morning hunched over a desk on the second floor. His cuffs were stained with pencil dust, and his hair was likely a mess.

If anyone saw the two of them, they would probably assume one was an ascetic monk pursuing scholarship, while the other was a gentleman on holiday.

Which, to be fair, was pretty close to the truth.

Richard returned to his desk on the second floor and continued working.

After roughly two more hours of copying, he had filled more than half his notebook.

When he got up to swap books at the shelves, he ran into Phillips coming up the stairs at the landing.

Richard stepped to the side to make way.

Phillips paused on the stairs and recognized him.

"Williams?"

There was a hint of surprise in his tone, but not much. He sounded like someone who never found running into anyone, anywhere, all that strange.

"Phillips." Richard gave a brief nod.

"Here to read as well?"

"Yeah."

Phillips glanced at the heavily worn book in Richard's hand, then at the smudged pencil lead on his cuffs.

"Have you been here since this morning?"

"Since a bit past seven."

Phillips looked down at his Pocket Watch.

"It's half past three now."

"Yeah."

The corners of his mouth curved up slightly. He looked like a cat watching another cat dig through the mud in the pouring rain, completely unable to fathom why the other would work so hard.

"Have you had lunch?"

"I forgot."

This time, the amusement in Phillips's smile was far more apparent.

"There's hot water on the first floor, and you can borrow a cup from the old woman at the counter. I brought the biscuits myself. If you don't mind..."

"Thanks, but I'm good."

"Alright then."

Phillips continued up the stairs with his teacup. His pace was slow, his footsteps so light they were practically silent.

He probably wasn't here searching for hidden passages or encrypted inscriptions. Richard could tell that much just from his demeanor.

A man leisurely flipping through books with tea and biscuits in a library, and a man hunched over a desk from dawn until dusk with graphite-stained hands, were operating on completely different wavelengths.

Still, Richard was a little curious about what Phillips was reading.

...

About another hour passed.

Richard finished copying the key passages and closed his notebook.

His wrist was incredibly sore. If he kept writing, his handwriting would warp and become impossible to read later.

He stood up and stretched. His joints popped several times, the cracks exceptionally loud in the quiet second-floor corridor.

At the far end of a row of bookshelves, Phillips was leaning against a windowsill.

His teacup rested on the sill and his book lay open on his knee. His posture was almost completely unchanged from an hour ago.

As Richard walked past, he involuntarily glanced at the pages of the book.

It was Latin, arranged in verse. The left margin was uneven, staggered in the rhythmic line breaks of dactylic hexameter.

Virgil's Aeneid. It was the ancient Roman epic that Montagu had quoted during the Cicero Cup.

Phillips must have noticed his gaze, because he lifted his head.

"You recognize it?"

"It's Virgil. Of course I've read it," Richard said.

"Mm." Phillips dragged his thumb across the page.

"The passage Montagu recited on stage is actually just the most superficial layer."

He flipped a few dozen pages back and pointed to a specific stanza.

"The truly interesting part of the entire Aeneid isn't the line 'spare the defeated and cast down the proud'."

"Then where is it?" Richard asked.

Phillips flipped the pages to the sixth book. "Have you read Book Six?"

"I've read the whole thing."

"Then you should remember that Aeneas met his father Anchises in the Underworld."

"Yeah. Anchises was waiting for him in the blessed lands of the Underworld."

"Right." Phillips picked up his teacup from the windowsill and took a sip.

There was no steam rising from the liquid. It had probably gone cold a long time ago, but he drank it without his expression changing.

"Before Aeneas descended into the Underworld, the priestess Sibyl told him something."

Phillips didn't bother flipping to the page, simply reciting it from memory:

"Descending into the Underworld is easy; the gates to the abyss stand open day and night."

His pronunciation of the Latin was slightly more relaxed than it had been during the Cicero Cup, falling much closer to the rhythm of everyday speech.

Richard raised an eyebrow and picked up the second half of the quote:

"But to return to the world of the living—that is the true hardship, that is the true test."

"Easy to descend, hard to return." Phillips nodded, closing the book and resting it on his knee.

"I've always felt that this is the core message of the entire epic."

Out on the lawn, the two old men still hadn't finished their chess game.

"The quote Montagu used, 'spare the defeated and cast down the proud', was spoken by Anchises in the Underworld while describing Rome's future mission to Aeneas."

"Empire, conquest, glory. A truly grand narrative."

He paused.

"But before that, Aeneas had to descend into the Underworld.

Even before that, he lost Troy, his father, and the people he loved."

"Only after enduring all of that did he earn the right to hear his father speak those words about the future to him in the Underworld."

Phillips rubbed the spine of the book with his thumb, as if stroking an old possession he couldn't bear to part with.

"Most people read the Aeneid and only remember the glorious prophecies at the end."

"But the prophecies aren't what made Aeneas into Aeneas."

Richard leaned against the bookshelf, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

As Phillips spoke, his demeanor was completely different from when he delivered his speech at the Cicero Cup.

The Phillips during the competition had been like a perfectly brewed cup of tea: neither scalding hot nor freezing cold, leaving absolutely no impression once finished.

The current Phillips had put his cup down. He was no longer calculating the temperature or the taste, simply speaking the words he truly wanted to say.