Chapter 491: Echoes Of The Codex

"The sponsor’s seal covers the party as long as you remain together inside the Library. If any of you wish to enter alone, you will need to be added to the sponsorship record. Do you wish to have your companions added?"

Bruce paused upon hearing this, then he looked at Kael and Theron. Both of them shrugged slightly, neither of them was likely to enter the Library alone in the two months of the sponsorship, and adding themselves formally would create a record that Bruce was not sure he wanted attached to them.

"Not today," Bruce said. "We enter together."

"Then together you stay. The portal is at the back of the main hall. Present the seal at the portal reader. It will admit all three of you as long as you go through within one minute of the reader chiming."

"Understood."

The soul waved them through the entrance.

The main hall of the Library was quiet.

It was smaller than Bruce had expected, perhaps twenty paces long, ten wide, with a high ceiling and rows of soul-stone tables along both walls. Souls sat at some of the tables, reading from small books or writing on soul-paper with small styluses. None of them looked up when Bruce, Kael, and Theron entered. The main hall was, Bruce guessed, the outer library, the freely accessible portion where souls could read materials that did not require sponsorship. The portal to the deeper archive was at the back.

They walked down the length of the hall.

Bruce noticed, as they passed the reading tables, the small varieties of what people were studying. One soul was reading from a thick book with dense diagrams, probably a soul-script manual, more advanced than the one Bruce had bought. Another was writing steadily on a long sheet of soul-paper, referring occasionally to a smaller book at their elbow. A third was simply sitting with a book closed in front of them, eyes closed, hands folded, meditating on what they had read.

The atmosphere of the hall was the atmosphere of every good library Bruce had ever been in. Focused, quiet, warm. He felt, walking through it, a small unexpected wave of comfort. Libraries had been, in his physical-realm past, the places he had done his best thinking. This one was smaller than the medical libraries of his old world, and it operated on very different principles, but it was recognizably the same kind of space.

At the back of the hall was a small alcove containing the portal.

The portal was smaller than any of the hunting portals, perhaps two meters across, and its surface was a deep quiet grey, without the movement or color of the other portals Bruce had passed through. It looked more like a hanging pane of dark glass than a doorway.

A reader was mounted on a small stone pedestal beside it.

Bruce pressed his hand, the one with the seal, against the reader. It chimed softly. Bruce, Kael, and Theron stepped through the portal. ....

The Library of Small Voices was, on the inside, both familiar and strange.

Familiar in the sense that it was a library. That was the first and most obvious quality. Rows upon rows of shelves, filled with bound books of the same cured-beast-leather-and-pressed-soul-fiber construction as the books Bruce had bought from the small stall in the market. The shelves were tall, perhaps three meters, and organized in long parallel aisles that stretched further than Bruce could see clearly. The air was cool and dry. There was the same specific smell of old bound books that Bruce remembered from every library he had ever loved. Some things, apparently, translated across realms.

Strange in the sense that the library was not a physical building. It was a space, apparently unbounded in at least one direction. The aisles of shelves stretched further than they should have, Bruce could see them extending into a soft grey distance where the shelves faded into indistinctness. The ceiling was similarly indistinct, high overhead. The floor was a smooth pale stone that felt solid and real underfoot but had no visible edges. The whole environment felt more like the idea of a library than a physical library, held together not by architecture but by the ordering principle of this is a place where knowledge is kept.

He filed this. Soul-realm space, apparently, could be shaped by function as much as by matter.

A small soul was at a desk near the portal exit. Older, slight, glowing softly with the deep steady glow of A-rank. They were reading a book when Bruce and the others came through. They looked up.

"Sponsored party?"

"Yes."

"First visit?"

"Yes."

"Then let me explain the system briefly." The soul closed their book carefully. "The Library is organized by category, not by author or title. The shelves are marked with category-seals, soul-script characters that indicate what each aisle contains. If you can read soul-script, you can navigate the categories yourself. If you cannot, I can direct you to what you need. What are you looking for?"

Bruce considered how to answer.

He did not want to be too direct about the specific things he was looking for. The librarian was, presumably, a Library employee, not necessarily reporting to anyone, but presumably keeping some record of what sponsored parties requested. Saying records of Codex conversations would put a specific request on his file.

He chose a broader entry point.

"Soul-script manuals beyond the basic. Talent theory at intermediate levels. And" , he paused, then decided to add it, "historical records of high-rank souls. Nonagon histories, if such things are available. Records of past S-rank cases."

The soul looked at him for a moment.

"That is a broad request."

"I am starting from a broad base."

"Are you looking for something specific within those categories?"

Bruce made his decision.

"I am an Ascendant."

The soul’s expression changed slightly, the recalibration of someone who had just been given a significant piece of information without being asked for it. They nodded slowly.

"Then you are looking for records of previous Ascendants."

"Yes. Also records of soul conversations with the Codex, if any exist."