The underground archive fell silent once more.
The only sound left was the occasional crackle of condensing oil burning in the windproof kerosene lamp, and the whistling of the wind blowing through the cast-iron shelves.
Adrian did not wait for an answer.
He slowly pulled open the lead-plated file weighing down the cast-iron workbench. Inside was not a massive dossier, nor were there dense documents blacked out by the Suppression Bureau, but a single, solitary photograph.
The photograph was heavily yellowed, its edges tattered and torn with jagged, ripped marks, looking as if it had been forcibly torn from some official register that had long since been destroyed to erase all evidence.
A young man stood in the photograph.
He was around twenty years old, wearing the highly complex and stiff public school formal wear of a bygone era. His hands were pinned somewhat rigidly to the seams of his trousers, and a hint of the awkward smile characteristic of facing a camera lingered on his face.
He looked completely ordinary, just like any respectable middle-class youth walking through the London fog.
Adrian stretched out a withered finger and slid the photograph across the cold, cast-iron tabletop toward Ryan.
“Do you recognize him?”
Ryan looked down, his gaze falling upon the tattered photograph.
The face in the photo was extremely unfamiliar. He searched all the memory fragments belonging to his original body in his mind, but could not find a single trace of correspondence.
“No,” Ryan replied calmly, looking up.
Adrian nodded. His amber eyes reflected a cold, hard gleam under the pale light, as if he were not at all surprised.
“Of course you don't.”
The professor's voice was very soft, yet it stirred a faint echo among the spacious cast-iron shelves. “Because in the entire empire, even in the whole of London, there is no longer anyone who knows him.”
Adrian gently tapped the face of the young man in the photograph with a spotted finger.
“No family.”
“No friends.”
“No archives.”
“No census registry.”
“No public school graduation records.”
“No parish baptismal records.”
“You cannot even find a single grave marker belonging to him in the charity cemeteries of London's East End.”
“Every trace of his existence in this world was completely erased... on a single day twenty years ago.”
Ryan listened quietly, his dark pupils showing no emotion, his hands remaining steadily tucked inside his coat pockets.
Adrian looked deeply at him and continued:
“But the interesting thing is—”
“He didn't die.”
Ryan's gaze finally shifted.
Adrian let out a tiny sliver of a smile. Placed upon his marble-stiff face, the smile appeared incredibly cold and eerie.
“Twenty years ago, I heard that someone had seen him in the barren northern mining districts.”
“Ten years ago, someone else saw him on a plantation in a southern tropical colony.”
“His appearance did not age, his years did not increase, and even the stitching of the collar button on that old public school formal wear of his... showed not the slightest change.”
The kerosene lamp swayed gently in the breeze that let in the wind and snow, casting the massive shadows of the towering cast-iron shelves back and forth between the two of them, like a giant beast slowly breathing.
Adrian leaned forward. Deep within his amber pupils, those three overlapping jagged lines representing the high-level 【Lantern】 Principle faintly emerged. He stared into Ryan's eyes and dropped the knotty riddle once more:
“If a person is completely forgotten by the entire world, and all secular registers have expunged his name... yet he himself still clearly remembers who he is.”
“Then, does he actually still exist?”
“Or—if another person stole all of his memories and lived in this world in his place.”
“Who is the fake? Who is the real one?”
The underground archive fell into absolute silence.
Adrian did not press. He merely stood like a cold scholar patiently waiting for the results of an experiment, locking his eyes onto every minute muscle twitch on Ryan's face.
A long time passed.
Ryan slowly raised his head. His dark eyes appeared clear yet bottomless under the pale kerosene lamplight, and even the frequency of his breathing had not changed in the slightest.
“What do you think, Professor?” He tossed the question right back, his tone as calm as if they were discussing an insignificant official document format.
Adrian's shriveled lips curved into an arc, and he gave a slightly raspy laugh.
“I don't know.”
“That is why I have studied this question for twenty whole years.”
With that, the professor withdrew his hand from the photograph and instead drew an extremely thin, old booklet from the darkest, bottommost layer of the lead-plated file.
The booklet was sewn with some kind of kraft paper that had undergone a special anti-corrosive oxalic acid treatment, its edges already blackened. The cover was exceptionally clean, without any text or title, bearing only a simple symbol painted in dark red—
Three geometric jagged lines intersecting one another and extending infinitely outward.
The moment he saw that symbol, the 【Lantern】 within Ryan's body vibrated violently without warning. It was an instinctive resonance.
Adrian naturally noticed the instantaneous contraction of Ryan's pupils.
But he asked nothing, said nothing. He merely placed the thin booklet onto the cast-iron tabletop and slid it gently before Ryan, as if treating a common scholastic lecture note.
“Translate it.”
Adrian turned around, picking up the delicate silver scalpel once more. With his back to Ryan, he said, “If you can translate its first page... I will take you to see the truly interesting things of St. Blaise.”
“What price must I pay?” Ryan asked.
The professor's finger lightly tapped the edge of the porcelain dish, producing a crisp, metallic ring. “None for now. Head back first.”
By midnight, heavy snow had completely sealed off the St. Blaise Royal Academy.
Returning to Dormitory 304, only the cold kerosene lamp inside the cramped stone room cast a faint yellow glow.
In the distance, the black bell tower heavily tolled one in the morning, its resonant hum cutting through the drifting snow and echoing layer by layer through the silent corridors.
Ryan did not take off his coat. He sat before the black oak desk with its peeling lacquer, laying the thin booklet he had received from Professor Adrian flat on the tabletop.
Ryan set his dip pen aside, lit a second paraffin lamp on the corner of the desk, and began trying to read the first page.
However, with just a single glance, his brow furrowed deeply.
This was not any secular language he was familiar with.
It was not the rigorous and rigid Latin, nor was it the ancient Greek with its classical charm, and it was not even the Hebrew or Arabic calligraphy occasionally seen on cargo ships at East Port.
What was presented on the page was an extremely bizarre, even physically unsettling system of symbols.
They looked like exploded diagrams of some precise mechanical gears, or perhaps highly complex architectural planar topologies, with every stroke filled with cold, hard right angles and disorderly intersecting jagged lines. If an ordinary person stared at them for too long, a wave of dizziness would rise from the depths of their mind.
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