Chapter 60
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Translator: MadScientist
Chapter: 60
Chapter Title: Library Committee Chair (5)
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Voice. Presence. Echo of existence.
All of it made one thing clear: the foreigner standing before him was the presence from the room with the light on last night.
‘…Dangerous.’
He sensed it on instinct.
The man before him was no weakling outmatched by the professor.
‘Then is this guy someone who’d harm the committee chair?’
A torrent of possibilities rose and fell in his mind.
They boiled down to one conclusion.
‘She said she was kidnapped, right? High chance that was a family-staged act.’
The devil statue and the utterly inscrutable family crest.
And finally, this shady foreigner holding court in the family’s inner quarters.
Putting it all together, they’d likely staged the kidnapping and were now moving to execute their scheme.
The problem was, he couldn’t get involved just yet.
‘This world is a dream built from the committee chair’s memories.’
It wasn’t reality. Nor had he returned to the past.
These were mere events from memory—meddling wouldn’t change the real world.
Bihyeong quietly surrendered to the actions of the child called “Eunyu.”
He needed to figure out what sort of mischief she’d been subjected to first.
‘There’s got to be a way in these memories to break the curse or whatever it is. I just need to find it.’
Meanwhile, the committee chair was already gazing wide-eyed at the foreign teacher’s tales of distant lands.
“So, mister, you’re from Romania?”
“Nope. Romanian, sure, but not ‘mister.’ I’m still a spry twenty-something...”
“Mister.”
“Oppa.”
“Mister.”
“......Call me whatever feels right.”
The committee chair emerged victorious in their little tussle for dominance, turning back with a bold smile.
She spread her index and middle fingers into a V-sign, brimming with vitality.
So this was what she’d been like as a child.
It was different from the relaxed aura she exuded now.
Bihyeong watched her for a moment before taking a step forward.
Not by his own will, but Eunyu’s.
“Teacher. So what are we learning?”
The foreign teacher smiled faintly at the head-tilted question.
“Hmm, I’d love to teach you magic if possible. But you two seem to have already awakened your affinities as exorcists from a sorcerer family. I’ll help you sense and understand them better.”
“How?”
“Like this, for example.”
Snap!
As he snapped his fingers, a song of energy began to resonate naturally around them.
At their feet, a magic circle etched with a pentagram—slightly different from a ritual array—began to take shape.
Where the East had sorcery, the West had magic.
It drew from the four elements—fire, water, wind, earth—distinct from the five phases, and commanded spirits born from the myriad things of creation.
Magic circles were paramount for wielding such magic, and the number of “rings” within one revealed its hierarchy rank at a glance.
‘One, two, three… five?’
Hierarchy Rank 5.
Bihyeong’s gaze sharpened for an instant.
‘He’s concealing his true power.’
Even as that fact hammered home relentlessly,
Bihyeong focused on the sensations washing over him now.
A wind blew from deep within his body.
At the same time, a prickling blaze stirred inside him.
Then came the earth’s firmness and grit, followed by water’s dampness and flow mingling through his bloodstream.
The four elements of magic.
They bore a striking resemblance to sorcery’s foundational five phases.
‘…Hm?’
This realization granted Bihyeong a subtly novel experience.
‘This… if I play it right, I could boost my five phases proficiency?’
Bihyeong committed the sensation to memory.
Somehow, he’d come hunting for clues to the committee chair’s issue and stumbled onto a path for his own growth.
Anyway.
Bihyeong probed the magic’s structure with greater focus.
The pentagram and the jumble of runes inscribed within.
He couldn’t read their meaning, but he deciphered the ritual by tracking the energy flows emanating from them.
‘Energy amplification. Minor accumulation in the body. And sensory enhancement?’
Not bad on its own. No, for genius training, it was more than ample.
But,
‘Didn’t that bastard just say he’d help us sense energy better?’
The verbal sleight-of-hand was the issue.
‘Sensory enhancement looks like he’s keeping that promise.’
But what about the “accumulation” in the “body”? How did he explain that?
‘He said he’d only help us sense energy, so why’s accumulation getting the emphasis?’
He shot a sidelong glance at the committee chair.
Not just him—energy was seeping into her body too, settling into her bloodstream bit by bit.
‘Why pull this stunt?’
The question flickered through his mind, but the answer came swiftly.
‘Sacrifice.’
Yeah.
Just like the kids who’d perished at Yoo Kyung-soo’s hands.
The committee chair had been born into a fate sealed from the start.
‘Those so-called parents…!’
Would her parents truly be clueless about this foreigner’s machinations?
Bihyeong’s answer was a resounding no.
‘A family tied to the association’s power structure? The family head’s got eyes wide open—no way they pull this off without everyone knowing.’
The entire clan was in on it.
‘…….’
As Bihyeong’s eyes turned ice-cold,
the day’s lesson wrapped up.
“Well then, miss. Young master. This way, please.”
The committee chair and Bihyeong followed the maid’s gesture back to their room.
It felt like imprisonment, or like birds caged for keeping.
Of course, they were the birds inside.
‘Hmm.’
As Bihyeong sat on the bed deep in thought, the committee chair sidled up and gently stroked his hair.
“Eunyu. Something wrong?”
“...Huh? Nothing.”
“But… your face looks so glum.”
Bihyeong reflexively touched his face, then nodded.
He admitted it.
He was glum.
‘…Because I know the committee chair’s future.’
The woman who’d become the academy’s library committee chair and morals enforcer.
The kindness of the senior who’d helped him out.
And,
Bihyeong knew the villainous end she’d met.
Witnessing the scene that served as its origin story, he couldn’t hide his melancholy.
‘Why do these things always happen around me?’
Or maybe he was the one drawing in such karmic ties.
Bihyeong scratched his head and flashed a goofy grin.
“Ehehe! It’s not working as well as with sis. Guess I got sulky.”
“...Really? Ahem! Of course. I’m your big sis!”
The child committee chair accepted his words without suspicion.
She planted her hands on her hips, nose in the air—utterly adorable.
Gazing at this carefree child oblivious to the trials ahead, Bihyeong made a silent vow she’d never hear.
‘…I promise you, committee chair.’
He’d uncover what happened to her.
And free her from that godforsaken fate.
From morning through lunch, a light meal, and on to evening, they held classes with the foreign magic teacher.
“Excellent. Young Master Eunyu, your energy detection speed is impressive. At this rate, you’ll be ready for the next stage in four months.”
Bihyeong’s eyes flashed at the teacher’s words.
‘This world was ten years and four months before reality.’
In other words, four months before the committee chair’s kidnapping.
Yet the magic teacher had zeroed in on exactly four months when speaking to him.
Something was coming.
But Bihyeong feigned ignorance, keeping up the innocent child act.
The training dragged on.
Sensing energy—no, accumulating it—inside the magic circle was the core practice.
Once done, servants dragged them off for baths before virtually locking them in their room.
They’d play together until sleep claimed them.
Then, when the full moon asserted its presence in the night sky, Bihyeong slipped from bed.
‘First, the committee chair’s energy.’
He took her wrist and channeled the energy she’d recently built up.
This world was the committee chair’s memories manifested as a dream.
He couldn’t tap the yokai power or spiritual force he’d cultivated in reality.
‘It’s fine. I planted safeguards.’
Thinking of him, Bihyeong slowly “absorbed” the energy accumulating in her body.
That was why the magic teacher had praised Bihyeong’s progress over hers.
‘I siphoned off all the energy settling into her body before it could take root.’
Thus, Bihyeong positioned himself as her “substitute.”
‘I’ll endure it in her place and figure out what happens.’
Then use that to excise the root problem from her real body.
‘…I tweaked a few settings in this world, so not much time should pass outside.’
Thanks to the yokai realm and the forbidden book he’d added: Connectivity of Past, Present, and Future.
‘It looks like it links past to future at first glance, but it’s really a forbidden tome that traps you in a frozen space.’
If past and future were connected, shouldn’t time cease to flow between them?
It posed that paradox to shatter the mind—a breed of yokai sophistry.
Ridiculous casuistry,
yet handy in situations like this.
‘The other book, Lucid Dream. It lets me intervene in the dream by my will, if only for a moment.’
Once he gathered enough intel, he’d summon his true presence, shatter this space, and escape.
‘Four months.’
Bihyeong’s eyes darkened as he pulled an all-nighter.
And so,
four months passed.
A dim expanse.
No. It felt like his vision and every sense were shrouded in darkness.
In the blank void devoid of all,
Committee Chair Eunha opened her eyes.
‘…What?’
She’d clearly entered the forbidden book’s domain with her junior...
‘And summoned the library yokai...’
In that instant, unfamiliar scenes began flooding her mind.
Not visions through her eyes, but a sense of perceiving the world with her mind.
Her child self was rummaging through the garden with a “little brother.”
‘…Eunyu.’
Eunha’s pupils trembled fiercely.
Seeing his face jogged the memory that such a person had existed.
Why had she forgotten someone so important until now?
‘…Ah, no.’
She hadn’t forgotten.
She’d been forced to forget.
Like a nightmare that surfaced every night,
he existed yet never rose to awareness—like a shadow.
But the moment you recognize a shadow, you realize it’s always in the same spot.
Like a dam bursting,
the forcibly forgotten memories came pouring into the committee chair’s mind.
‘Eunyu. The family… and… magic.’
Countless fragments.
From the eerie statue in the house to the memory of gathering leaves to blanket it.
She remembered it all.
At last, time flowed onward in the visions playing in her head.
The day she was kidnapped.
And,
...Creeeak.
Ruuuumble...!
The day she confronted it:
a colossal “existence” incomprehensible from a human vantage.