Chương 13: Chapter 12: Behind the Catalogue

Elizabeth spent the next week learning how the library moved. Its routines were more complicated than those of the laboratory. Students arrived and left according to lesson schedules, librarians rotated between desks, and assistants pushed book trolleys through passages that did not appear on the public maps. Even the floating lights followed patterns, dimming in unused sections and gathering around crowded tables. She observed whenever her timetable allowed.

At breakfast, she noted which older students carried restricted catalogue slips. Between lessons, she watched them enter the western stairwell and recorded how long they remained inside. In the evenings, she sat with an open textbook near the central reading hall while tracking the librarians' patrols through her peripheral vision. The main desk changed staff at six. The eastern reading rooms closed at nine, followed by the public archives at ten.

At half past ten, two assistants collected abandoned books and carried them through a service door beside the second-year stacks. The door required a metal badge from the public side. From the service corridor, it opened with an ordinary handle. Alexander's map had marked another entrance farther inside the mountain, but Elizabeth preferred a route she had personally confirmed. She also continued visiting the laboratory. Not every night. Repeating the same risk without changing the method would have been foolish.

Instead, she entered twice more, each time after observing the assistants' schedules and ensuring no evening courses had been arranged. Her experiments remained limited to materials already available on open benches. She compared how thin plates of copper, iron and glass altered the coloured traces visible through Mana Sensitivity. She measured the periodic variation in her depleted crystal's output and tested whether temperature changed the interval between peaks. The results were inconsistent but useful.

The crystal's output slowed slightly when cooled and accelerated when warmed. Copper redirected part of the visible mana along its surface, while iron reduced the perceived intensity more uniformly. Glass produced much weaker effects unless several layers were stacked together. Elizabeth resisted assigning a mechanism. Conductivity, absorption and interference remained separate possibilities, and her instruments were not precise enough to distinguish them. Her skills also increased in level.

Mechanistic Replication remained unchanged. She still lacked the information required to use it. At the end of the week, the System interrupted her while she was comparing two sets of measurements in her room. Verified observations accumulated. Experimental procedures completed: 7 Registered hypotheses resolved: 3 Practical applications recorded: 1 Experimentalist has advanced to Level 2. The familiar cold sensation passed through her chest and settled behind her eyes. A second panel appeared.

ELIZABETH WHITE Level: 2 Class: Experimentalist Strength: 6 Dexterity: 8 Agility: 7 Vitality: 6 Spirit: 3 MP: 49/49 Unassigned Attribute Points: 2 Elizabeth considered the distribution for less than a minute. Strength offered little immediate value, while Dexterity was already her highest physical attribute. Vitality would make future experimentation safer, but the most urgent limitation remained Spirit. She assigned one point to it. Spirit: 3 → 4 The change was subtle.

Her thoughts did not become faster, nor did she suddenly feel more intelligent. Instead, the faint strain produced by holding several System panels open at once eased slightly. The second point went into Agility. Agility: 7 → 8 Sneaking through laboratories and restricted archives was not a progression path she intended to cultivate permanently, but faster reactions had broad applications. Combat Foundations had also made it clear that correct decisions were useless if her body could not execute them in time.

She opened the skills section. Class Skills Research Log — Level 4 Working Hypothesis — Level 3 Variable Analysis — Level 3 Controlled Procedure — Level 3 Mechanistic Replication — Level 1 General Skills Mana Sensitivity — Level 2 Mental Calculation — Level 2 The uneven development was expected. Mechanistic Replication could not improve through intention alone. She needed to observe a System skill, understand its internal stages and reproduce at least part of the process.

The restricted library might provide that knowledge. Elizabeth dismissed the interface and looked towards the clock. Ten twenty-three. Her preparations were already complete. She changed into a plain academy uniform, tied her hair back and removed anything carrying the White family crest. A notebook would have been useful, but paper could be discovered. Research Log provided a safer alternative and allowed her to preserve far more than she could write by hand. She left North House at ten thirty.

The academy grounds were quieter than during the day, though they were not empty. Older students crossed between residences, and light remained visible in several classrooms. Elizabeth carried a second-year mathematics text beneath one arm so that she appeared to be returning a late book rather than wandering without purpose. The library's main doors remained open. A tired assistant sat behind the eastern desk, speaking with two students about an overdue reference text.

Elizabeth passed without attracting attention and climbed to the second-year gallery. She selected a desk with a clear view of the service door. At ten forty-one, the first return trolley arrived. Two assistants entered the second-year stacks, collected abandoned books and sorted them by floor. One carried a badge attached to a chain at his waist. At ten forty-eight, they opened the service door. Elizabeth continued reading. The assistants pushed the trolley through, leaving the door to close behind them.

Its locking plate emitted a faint amber glow through Mana Sensitivity, which faded over approximately four seconds. Too short. She waited. At ten fifty-six, one assistant returned alone. He opened the door from inside, crossed to a nearby shelf and searched for a misplaced volume. Elizabeth watched the door swing slowly behind him. This time, she moved. She rose without rushing, rounded the end of the desk and reached the door just before the latch settled. Her fingers slipped into the remaining gap.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. The assistant found his book and returned to the corridor without looking towards her. Elizabeth entered after him. The service passage was narrower than the public halls and lit by fixed blue crystals embedded in the ceiling. Unpainted stone replaced polished wood, while metal tracks ran along the floor for the book trolleys. She allowed the door to close.

The assistant walked ahead, turning left at the first junction. Elizabeth waited until his footsteps faded before moving in the opposite direction. Alexander's map indicated that the restricted stacks lay below the western archive, connected to the service network by a maintenance stairwell. The route required three turns and passed behind a cataloguing chamber used by the night staff. Elizabeth moved carefully, using Mana Sensitivity to watch the wards embedded in the walls.

Most appeared as thin amber lines around doors and storage cabinets. They reminded her of electrical circuits, though there was no evidence they operated through anything comparable to current. Some pulsed slowly. Others remained static until she approached. She did not touch them. At the second junction, voices approached from ahead. Elizabeth stepped behind a recessed trolley alcove and held still. Two assistants passed while discussing a damaged preservation enchantment.

One complained that the third-floor archivist had refused to approve replacement materials until the following month. Neither looked into the alcove. Once they were gone, Elizabeth continued. The maintenance stairwell appeared exactly where Alexander had marked it. It descended through a narrow shaft cut directly into the mountain, ending at an iron door without a visible handle. A pale silver ward covered its surface. Elizabeth studied it from several steps away.

Unlike the amber locks, the silver pattern did not remain stable. Thin lines moved across the door in repeating sequences, converging around a circular plate at its centre before separating again. She had seen authorised students enter the restricted wing using library badges. The badge likely supplied an identifying signal that caused the ward to release the lock. She had no badge. Alexander's cross had been drawn beside the wall to the left of the door rather than the door itself. Elizabeth examined the stone.

At first, she saw nothing unusual. Then Mana Sensitivity revealed a weak gap between two silver lines near the floor. The ward continued across the main doorway but did not fully cover a narrow maintenance panel set into the wall. It was held closed by four metal fasteners. She removed a thin tool from her sleeve. The implement was intended for adjusting the screws on laboratory stands. Elizabeth had taken it from an unlocked student equipment drawer and planned to return it before anyone noticed.

The first fastener resisted. The second loosened more easily. Mental Calculation helped her track the rotations so she could restore each one to approximately the same position later. After several minutes, the panel shifted. Cold air moved through the gap. Elizabeth lifted it just high enough to crawl beneath. The space beyond was not a corridor but a narrow maintenance channel running beside the restricted wing. Pipes and mana conduits lined one wall, leaving barely enough room for her shoulders.

Her smaller body was finally useful. She replaced the panel behind her and followed the channel until she found a metal grate overlooking the restricted stacks. The room beyond was vast. Shelves rose from floor to ceiling, connected by narrow walkways and rolling ladders. Most books had been bound in dark leather or stored inside sealed glass cases. Blue-white lights floated between the aisles, illuminating catalogue symbols painted directly onto the floor. Only three people were visible.

An elderly librarian sat at a raised desk near the authorised entrance. Two older students worked at separate tables with stacks of reference books beside them. Elizabeth remained behind the grate and watched. One student left at eleven twenty. The second gathered her materials eight minutes later. The librarian inspected both tables, returned several books to a trolley and disappeared through a door behind the desk. Elizabeth waited another ten minutes. No one returned.

The grate was secured from her side by a simple latch. She lowered it carefully and entered the restricted section. The air felt different inside. Preservation mana clung to the shelves in pale gold layers, mixed with traces of water and earth mana designed to regulate humidity and protect the paper. Some sealed cases carried red wards that were bright enough to obscure the books within them. Elizabeth avoided those. The catalogue symbols divided the room by subject rather than year.

She passed sections on advanced alchemy, spatial instability, soul medicine and skill corruption. She slowed at the soul-medicine shelves. Their titles referred to spiritual injury, failed resurrection and System effects that persisted after clinical death. Elizabeth memorised the shelf mark. She lacked even the accepted vocabulary needed to separate evidence from doctrine, and investigating her own survival without controls would produce speculation rather than knowledge. Skill architecture came first.

The question of what had crossed the execution chamber could wait; it would not be forgotten. SYSTEM MEDIATION AND SKILL ARCHITECTURE There were hundreds of volumes. Elizabeth began with the titles nearest eye level. The Behaviour of Intent During Skill Activation. Mana Conversion Structures in Elemental Classes. Safeguards, Interruptions and Catastrophic Failure. Observed Similarities Between Related Skill Families. She selected the first and carried it to the nearest table.

The book assumed knowledge far beyond the first-year curriculum, but the terminology was consistent enough to reconstruct. The author divided skill activation into six recognised stages. First came intent recognition, when the System interpreted what the user was attempting to do. Second came mana allocation, during which the required quantity was drawn from the user's reserves. Third was conversion, where neutral or mixed mana acquired the properties necessary for the effect.

Fourth was structuring, which determined shape, direction and duration. Fifth was stabilisation, where the System corrected errors and protected the caster. The final stage was termination, which ended the process and dispersed or reclaimed unstable mana. Elizabeth recorded the framework immediately. It was not a complete mechanism, but it transformed a single hidden process into several smaller problems. A Fireball was no longer simply mana becoming fire.

It required the System to recognise the intention, allocate power, transform mana, establish a contained structure, protect the caster and determine when the effect ended. Each stage could be investigated separately. The next book contained comparative diagrams of three fire skills: Spark, Flame Jet and Fireball. The diagrams did not reveal the System's complete internal instructions, but they mapped mana movement through the caster's channels and identified which stages differed.

Spark used almost no independent stabilisation. The converted mana was released immediately as a brief electrical and thermal discharge. Flame Jet maintained a continuous channel between the caster and the effect. Fireball formed a separate structure outside the body, sealed it and launched it after the connection had been severed. That distinction explained why Fireball was more difficult and expensive. It required the System to create an autonomous temporary structure rather than a continuous output.

Elizabeth added the information to Mechanistic Replication. The skill responded. Compatible theoretical framework identified. Target skill analysis may now be initiated after direct observation. Current mechanistic understanding: Insufficient for replication. Progress. Not much, but the first measurable progress the skill had displayed. She continued reading. A third text focused on System safeguards.

It described automatic processes that prevented mana from rupturing channels, redirected excess heat away from the caster and dissolved unstable structures before they could collapse inward. Several early researchers had attempted to suppress those safeguards in pursuit of more powerful effects. The results included blindness, missing limbs, permanent channel damage and the creation of an uncontrolled fire construct that had burned for nineteen days. Professor Lorne's refusal made more sense.

Elizabeth copied the procedures anyway. Not because she intended to repeat them immediately, but because failed methods revealed as much about a mechanism as successful ones. If disabling one safeguard caused internal burns while disabling another caused structural collapse, then the failures identified what each safeguard had been doing. She moved deeper into the section. The books became older and less standardised. Some used obsolete terminology.

Others had been written before the kingdom adopted its current measurement system. One narrow volume carried no author's name. Its title had been pressed into the cover in faded silver: On the Artificial Reconstruction of Lesser Skills Elizabeth stopped. The book was not sealed. She opened it. The first page contained a warning. The System provides skills as complete structures because incomplete structures kill their users. The following work is not an argument against this mercy.

It is an examination of whether understanding may reproduce what inheritance grants. Elizabeth read the line again. Then the lights above the restricted section shifted. The blue-white glow dimmed, and a bell sounded once from somewhere beyond the authorised entrance. Midnight. Footsteps approached the librarian's desk. Elizabeth closed the book. She had found exactly what she needed. Now she had to remain long enough to read it.