“Mind if I sit here?”
A slightly raspy voice suddenly broke the silence from across the table.
Ryan looked up. The speaker was a tall, thin young man with somewhat messy hair. He wore a well-fitting but visibly frayed dark blue uniform, its collar meticulously buttoned all the way to the top.
His face bore the characteristic pallor of someone who regularly pulled all-nighters, and his large eyes were shot with fine red veins. Out of place in his hand was a thick, ancient book whose cover had been crudely reinforced with rough kraft paper.
“Help yourself,” Ryan said with a slight nod, casually sliding his bread plate to the side.
The young man sat down. He didn't elegantly switch to silver cutlery like the public school boys in the center of the long table. Instead, he rather crudely shoved a piece of beef into his mouth with a fork, then heavily set the ancient book down on the corner of the table.
Ryan's gaze swept over the rough leather spine—An Examination of 17th-Century Parish Land Deeds and Archival Alterations.
“Karl,” the young man said, swallowing his beef as he introduced himself in a hushed whisper. “Fourth-year history. You're that preparatory student who ranked first in English Composition, right? Ryan?”
Ryan's eyes flickered with a hint of surprise. “You know of me?”
“The top three for each subject are posted on the bulletin board next to the registrar's office.” Karl twitched the corner of his mouth, offering a weary, self-deprecating smile. “Those public school boys only care about the top ten overall. But I could tell at a glance that there was something off about your composition—that appalling bureaucratic evasion, where every long sentence is just a smoke screen for the Home Office. That's not something those coddled chicks from public schools could ever be taught.”
Ryan looked at him. “You're also in the history department, Mr. Karl?”
“Just the second son of a ruined noble. I won't inherit any land, and I can't afford a commission in the army. So, I can only hide in the underground stacks of St. Blaise, auditing the messy accounts left behind by dead men for the professors.”
Karl tapped the heavy volume with his fork and picked up his goblet to take a sip of unsweetened black tea, his gaze drifting toward the center of the long table. “Ignore those fellows talking about futures, stocks, and parliamentary bills. They think sitting here means they rule the empire. In reality, they are nothing more than the most obedient screws in this massive machine.”
Karl did not pry into Ryan's background, nor did he display any of the rare zeal or excessive friendliness sometimes found in the West End. He simply finished the cold beef on his plate in silence, picked up his heavy volume, and slipped away from the table as quietly as he had arrived.
At six-thirty, the evening bell of the black bell tower tolled heavily, marking the end of the opening banquet.
The students dispersed in twos and threes, heading to private clubs in the West End or secret salons organized by the preparatory students themselves. Ryan left the hall alone, walking slowly along the cold stone corridor toward the west wing.
As he passed the sunken courtyard where the main building met the wing, his footsteps paused slightly.
Standing by the path was a massive black stone building—the St. Blaise Royal Academy Library.
Night had fallen, and heavy snow was once again drifting down from the leaden sky. Yet, from the library's tall, Gothic arched windows, a bright, warm, but excessively quiet yellow light spilled out. Through the massive leaded glass windows, rows of towering oak bookshelves were faintly visible.
Ryan stood in the snow, letting the flakes settle on the shoulders of his coat.
At this moment, the 【Lantern】 in the depths of his mind glowed with a faint warmth.
At eleven in the evening, the wind and snow were at their fiercest.
Ryan arrived before the heavy, double-leafed black iron doors of the library.
Surprisingly, they were unlocked, and even stood slightly ajar in the howling wind and snow.
Ryan slipped inside through the gap.
The dome inside was incredibly vast, with rows of towering bookshelves standing silently in the darkness. Yet, amidst these ordinary stacks, right in the center of the first-floor hall, a spiral stone staircase enclosed by bronze railings wound abruptly downward.
Ryan stepped onto the cold stone stairs and made his way down, step by step.
Below was a massive underground labyrinth formed by interconnected cast-iron archival shelves.
At the deepest end of the labyrinth, a single windproof kerosene lamp burned in isolation. A man dressed in a black academic robe sat before a cast-iron workbench, using a delicate silver scalpel to carefully scrape open a blackened, historical fragment.
Professor Adrian.
Ryan did not disturb him, standing quietly in the shadow of the iron shelves with his hands at his sides.
Two minutes later, Professor Adrian placed the scalpel into a porcelain dish, producing a crisp clink. He removed the monocle with the blue rhetorical filter from his right eye and turned his pale amber eyes toward Ryan, who stood in the darkness.
Deep within Professor Adrian's pupils, three overlapping, jagged lines faintly gleamed with a piercingly bright light—an embodiment of the 【Lantern】 far purer and more colossal than the Principle within Ryan. A massive pressure of absolute rationality surged forward like a tidal wave, threatening to completely shatter Ryan's mental structure in an instant.
Ryan merely stood in place, unmoving. After a brief flicker, the 【Lantern】 within him showed not the slightest trace of fear or frenzy.
Professor Adrian stared intently at him. Two seconds later, the terrifying pressure of rationality vanished as abruptly as it had come.
The professor turned around and pulled a heavy file sealed in dark lead plating from the bottom shelf of the black iron rack behind him. The file hit the table with a heavy metallic thud, its seal already neatly sliced open by a blade.
Instead of pushing the file to Ryan immediately, the professor gently pressed his finger—stained with yellow spots from years of handling chemical reagents—against the lead plating.
“Ryan, if you were in the East Port Archive and discovered that a ledger from 1860 was missing one hundred pounds, and the accountant of that year had already died in a gutter, what would you do?”
“I would falsify the ledger and balance it using this year's customs surplus, Professor,” Ryan replied calmly.
“Very good. That is the game those mortal bureaucrats play their entire lives.”
Adrian straightened his posture. “But what if what was erased wasn't a hundred pounds, but every single trace of a person's existence in this world?”
The professor leaned forward once more, his amber eyes gleaming with a near-maniacal rationality. “Ryan, do you believe that a physical body stripped of all its memories, unable to even recall its own name... is still the same person?”
“Or, as long as a physical body possesses all those memories, is it indeed the original person?”
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