Chương 19: The book that choose him

Ch 19: The book that choose him I made it as far as the checkout desk with all five sect histories stacked under one arm before a voice, dry as the pages I was carrying, stopped me at the threshold.

"Three." I turned. The man behind the desk hadn't been there a moment ago or if he had, I'd simply failed to notice him, which felt, in hindsight, like the kind of mistake that got people killed. He looked easily two hundred years old, skin gone thin and weathered as old parchment, a beard the colour of bleached bone spilling halfway down his chest.

And, absurdly, planted over his eyes in a dim library lit entirely by suspended Qi-light, a pair of dark, round sunglasses that had no business existing on this continent at all.

"Library rule," he said, tapping one gnarled finger against a small brass plaque bolted to the desk.

"Three books per visit. Doesn't matter whose grandson you are." Sunglasses. Indoors. In a library that didn't so much as flicker, let alone burn bright enough to need them. A laugh built somewhere low in my chest before I could stop it, halfway to my mouth already— WARNING Presence Detected: Supreme Realm Threat Assessment: EXTREME Death Probability: 100% IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL RECOMMENDED and died there instantly, along with, very nearly, the rest of me.

The pressure hit a half-second after the warning did, not aimed at me so much as simply existing in the same room I did, the way a bonfire doesn't aim its heat at anything in particular and still manages to burn whatever's standing close enough. My knees buckled. The stack of books hit the floor before I did, and only pride kept the rest of me upright.

"Something funny, boy?" The old man's voice hadn't changed at all still bored, still faintly put-upon, which somehow made the pressure crushing the air out of my lungs worse rather than better.

"Go on. Say it. Laughing at an old man's taste in eyewear?"

"N-No, Senior." I dropped into as deep a bow as my legs would allow without actually collapsing.

"I offer my sincerest apology. It won't happen again." The pressure lifted as suddenly as it had arrived, and air rushed back into my lungs all at once, sharp enough to sting.

"Hmph." He crouched, unhurried, and gathered the fallen books off the floor himself before I could reach for them and went very still the moment his eyes landed on the two I'd carried up from the vault. Whatever boredom had been sitting on his face a moment ago simply wasn't there anymore.

"Where," he said slowly, "did you get these?" I said nothing. Two hundred years of presence pressing invisibly against the edges of the room had a way of making silence feel like the only safe answer available. He studied me a moment longer, then set the ancient volumes carefully aside from the others, like a man handling something considerably more dangerous than paper and ink.

"Come," he said.

"Tea. My room's quieter than a library aisle for a conversation like this one." I hesitated. We'd never met. He knew nothing about me beyond a stack of stolen family history and a face too young to explain how I'd come by any of it, and yet here he was, inviting a ten-year-old stranger to sit alone with him over tea like it was the most natural request in the world.

He caught the hesitation, and something almost amused crossed the lower half of his face, beard shifting where a smile would have been visible on anyone without quite so much of it to hide behind.

"If I meant you harm," he said, not unkindly, "there isn't a single soul in this kingdom who could stop me before I'd already finished. You've felt that much for yourself." He turned, already walking.

"Believe me or don't. Either way, you're following me." I believed him. That was the problem. Only two people on the entire continent of Chronos had ever been confirmed to reach the Supreme Realm in living memory. One was Alfredo Van, a reclusive elder of the Vortexian bloodline whose own descendants rarely claimed to have met him in person. The other had died officially, publicly, mourned by half the mage academies on Chronos fifty years ago. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve.

Read this novel on the original website. Master Dororo. Except dead men, in my admittedly limited experience, didn't usually complain about being laughed at over their choice of sunglasses.

"... Master Dororo," I said, quiet enough that it came out closer to a question than I meant it to. He didn't stop walking, but one hand lifted, unhurried, in something that might have been acknowledgment.

"There's a bit of wit in you after all. Good. I was starting to worry the entire new generation had traded thinking for cultivation speed." A pause.

"Well? Are you coming for that tea, or not." His quarters sat behind an unmarked door three floors below the archive proper, small and cluttered in a way that suggested two centuries of a man who'd simply never found a reason to organize anything he owned.

He poured two cups without asking whether I wanted one, set mine across from him at a low table crowded with half-finished notes in that same curling, unfamiliar script from the vault books, and settled into his chair like a man finally allowed to stop performing his own age.

"Tell me," he said, "where you found those books. And before you decide whether to lie to me I'll take an Oath of the Arcane on it first, if that eases your nerves. Mages who swear falsely on that oath lose their mana entirely, same as your Qi cultivators lose theirs to deviation. I have no intention of losing fifty years of study over a conversation with a child."

He said the oath itself in a language I didn't recognize, low and precise, and something in the room's air shifted subtly at the words a weight settling into place, quiet but absolute. I told him everything. The gap behind the shelf. The mark that matched a portrait I'd only seen once, half-burned, in a hall nobody in my family liked to walk through slowly. The blood. The vault. Two books neither of us could currently read a single word of.

Dororo listened without interrupting, and by the time I finished, his tea had gone cold in front of him, untouched.

"A blood-locked hereditary vault," he said finally, "hidden behind a public archive, on a mark keyed to a bloodline the rest of the world believes went extinct with a dead sect." He shook his head slowly.

"In fifty years cataloguing every scrap of arcane script on this continent, I have never once heard of a source that precise. Not from any surviving sect. Not from any archive older than this one." His eyes sharp behind those absurd, dark lenses settled on the books themselves.

"May I?" There wasn't a version of that question I felt able to refuse, not from him. I slid the topmost volume across the table. The instant his fingers closed around it, the book detonated. Not fire. Not sound, not really but a violent gout of raw mana tore itself loose from the cover the moment his hand made contact, hurling him backward out of his chair hard enough to crack the plaster behind him, the teapot shattering where it sat as the shockwave rolled outward and rattled every loose page in the room.

I was on my feet before I'd decided to move.

"Master Dororo—" He was already laughing winded, disheveled, blood at the corner of his mouth where he'd bitten through it on the way down, and laughing anyway, in the particular unhinged way of a man who'd just been handed a genuine surprise for the first time in longer than he cared to admit.

"Fascinating," he wheezed, dragging himself upright with one hand braced against the wall.

"Simply fascinating. Do you understand what just happened, boy? I am a Supreme Realm archmage. I have handled cursed relics that ate the arms off men foolish enough to touch them unprepared. And this" He gestured, disbelieving, at a book that hadn't so much as shifted an inch off the table it sat on.

"—this refused me. Outright. Like I was nothing more than an unwelcome draft."

"How is that possible?"

"It isn't. Which is exactly why I find it so interesting." He crouched slowly, wincing, and studied the book from a careful, respectful distance without touching it again.

"I've heard rumors, once or twice, in fifty years of digging through things better left buried. Blood-bonded texts. Written not merely to be read, but to recognize the one it was written for sealed against every hand that isn't the correct one, regardless of how much mana or Qi that hand happens to carry."

"Mine."

"Yours." He looked up at me, and whatever bored, grumpy performance he'd worn at the front desk was entirely gone now, replaced by something far more careful.

"I cannot decode this for you, child. I cannot even hold it long enough to try." A long breath.

"Which means, unless I intend to walk away from the single most interesting discovery of my very long life out of pure stubbornness I don't appear to have much choice left in the matter." He reached for his cup instead of the book this time, found it in pieces on the floor, and sighed at the mess with the particular weariness of a man reconsidering several of his more recent life decisions.

"Very well," Master Dororo said.

"You'll bring that book back here, once a week, whenever your training allows it. I'll teach you to read it yourself properly, patiently, the way it apparently insists on being read. And in exchange," he added, eyes narrowing behind those dark lenses, "you'll tell no one in this academy that the dead archivist upstairs is quite so alive as he currently appears to be. Are we understood?" I looked at the shattered teapot.

At the crack in the wall where a Supreme Realm cultivator had just been thrown by a book with no visible hands. At two centuries of careful boredom finally cracking open into something that looked, for the first time since I'd met him, almost like hope.

"We're understood," I said.

"Good." He allowed himself a faint, tired smile.

"Then let's find out, together, exactly what your bloodline was so afraid of that it locked itself away from everyone in the world except you."