The Library Committee Chair (3)
Again today, she dreams without end—a corridor sunk wholly in darkness, darkness wavering like fog, and herself.
……
The lights were out. She walked the hallway alone, night having laid it into silence. Like a child holding her breath after some mischief, the girl she had been in those days even shortened her breathing, lest anyone catch her awake at such an hour. Even so, she could not hide the laughter welling up from inside her. The corners of her mouth had climbed high, bright with mischief.
As if she were only playing at exploration, she peered into every corner of the house—from the ornaments her mother had scolded her never to touch, to the difficult books her father had gathered. And then—
A bat?
—even the unidentifiable statue left abandoned in a corner of the garden.
It's a bat. So why does it have a human body?
And why was it naked? She didn't know the reason. Still, there were things she could do even without knowing. She gathered the leaves from around it and laid them over the statue, warm, so it would not be cold. Only then did she nod, satisfied, and return to her room. When morning came, it would be good to bring her younger sibling here to see it.
She fell asleep on that thought, and the next day...
The day...
· · ·
"Hah—!"
A woman shot upright from the bed on a ragged breath. Cold sweat ran down her in streams. The room was dim, and only silence moved through it. Within that silence she clutched her own arm, trembling without quite realizing she was.
"...That dream again."
From some point on, she had kept dreaming the same dream. But the moment she woke, the memory went hazy—something that had happened in a time she could not perceive. That, again and again, set her skin crawling.
Ha... hahaha.
A hollow laugh escaped her on its own. When she told her friends, they said a dream was usually forgotten almost entirely the moment you opened your eyes. That was all they had for her. They would never understand. Not now, and not later—how unpleasant it was, to have been forgotten.
Just then she frowned at the heat gathering in her lower abdomen. She lifted her head toward the full-length mirror beside the bed. Black hair clumped with cold sweat. Dark eyes, as if they had melted down the night around them, flickered with an ill omen.
Library Committee Chair, and Discipline Committee Chair.
"......"
Unlike the languid smile she usually wore, the figure in the mirror looked endlessly cold.
"...I've had all the sleep I'm going to get."
With a bitter smile she rose from the bed. It was only a few hours before Wednesday morning.
Wednesday. Late afternoon.
"All right, all right. Don't forget to review. That's all for today's class."
With the professor's words, the day's lesson came to an end. Most of the cadets spilled out of the indoor training hall, airing their grievances over the day's fatigue. Amid all of that, only Bihyung remained, staring straight at the professor in charge. The reason was nothing special. He had simply been told to stay.
There's still time before the appointment... It should be fine.
He had something to say to the man anyway, so a moment like this was all right for a little while. When Bihyung looked at him with that thought, the professor grinned.
"You've picked up a Sensory Art, haven't you?"
"......!"
"What's with the stunned face? Hmm. The technique looks pretty high-grade, too. Not bad."
"How did you know?"
"If I couldn't see that, I wouldn't be a professor, kid... is what I'd love to say. But I've learned a Sensory Art of my own, you see. It told me."
He said it playfully, yet his expression soon turned serious.
"Speaking of which—something's been eating at me since yesterday. So I looked into it on my own, and would you look at that? The man's vanished, hasn't he?"
And then—
"I looked at you, and the instinct of my Sensory Art started pointing straight at you."
He came to it without preamble.
At that question Bihyung felt his heart drop.
What kind of instinct is that?
Instructor Yu Gyeongsu, unseen since the weekend—and himself, carrying internal injuries from that same stretch of time. The circumstances were more than enough, and yet not everyone would assume he had been involved. Why? Because his rank back then had been nothing more than 3rd Rank. Yu Gyeongsu, by contrast, had been 6th Rank. A single step of difference was already heaven and earth, and the gap here was twofold—yet the professor had set all of that aside and grown certain, on instinct alone, that it was him.
The professor's eyes stared straight through him. Strangely, Bihyung felt as if he stood stripped bare before the man. As if there was nothing he could hide. As if a lie would be caught the instant it left his mouth.
......
Bihyung met the gaze that had been fixed on him in silence, and nodded. He had meant to tell this man anyway. From the club where he had stored them, he drew out Yu Gyeongsu's materials and research journal and handed them over.
Rustle. Rustle. With every page turned, the professor's expression grew colder. But at the voice that followed, his eyes flew wide.
"......!!"
The professor stared at Bihyung with those bulging eyes, then suddenly let out a hollow laugh.
"...Hah. Even if I ask how, you won't tell me, will you?"
"Trade secret."
"Honestly, you mysterious brat. You certainly earn that name."
He shook his head, and for an instant his expression turned severe.
"What Yu Gyeongsu did is enough to call him a villain—an Evil Seed, even among that lot. Killing a man like that is no problem."
But—
"If something like that happened, you should have told me. What were you going to do if you went in alone and got yourself killed?"
The scolding was a plea to treat his own life as precious. Bihyung had no excuse, so he bowed his head and apologized. Only then did the professor ease his face, flipping through the papers as he spoke.
"The Gwiryeong Yu Clan. I'll see to it those bastards can't lay a hand on the victims again."
"Thank you."
"...Enough of that. If anyone ought to be thanking someone, it's me. Tch. To think this kind of thing has happened again."
"If you say again... did it happen in the past as well?"
"Hm? You didn't know? It happened now and then. Then—must've been ten years ago? There were bastards back then, too, running experiments with children as sacrifices. The Association went properly berserk and swept the place they were holed up in clean. Didn't leave a single blade of grass, if I remember right."
"......"
"...Ah. Now that I think of it, I do remember—there's someone right there in your own circle who got caught up in that incident."
"What?"
"The Committee Chair."
"......!"
"A few of the children survived back then, and one of them is the Library Committee Chair. So don't bring this up in front of her. It's a wound that runs deep."
"...I understand."
"Good. Then I'll go see to my work. Tch. Overtime's locked in for today."
He was scratching the back of his head on his way out of the training hall when he suddenly turned, looked at Bihyung, and spoke.
"The wind felt nice, didn't it?"
"......"
Hearing that, Bihyung wore a smile whose meaning was impossible to read.
He headed for the place he had promised to meet the Committee Chair. The academy's central plaza. Even within the academy's vast grounds, that plaza sat at the center, and at the center of the plaza stood a single fountain. A woman was there, sunk in thought over a book.
Library Committee Chair, and Discipline Committee Chair.
Seeing her already waiting, he remembered what the professor had said.
He said she went through the same sort of thing.
A past unrecorded in the official history of the Reader's Chronicle—and nowhere in the setting, either.
Did the curse come from that?
...No. Probably not.
The gap in time is too wide.
What she had suffered was ten years ago. The curse, though, had not arisen so long ago. He was turning that over when he came back to himself.
Thud!
The woman closed her book and rose. Black hair, black eyes. When that characteristically sharp gaze curved, a faintly decadent air seeped from her.
"Junior. You made it?"
"Yes. The professor asked to see me for a moment, so I'm late."
"Mmm. It's fine. These things happen."
She took one step closer and spoke.
"Junior, you remember our promise?"
"Yes."
"Then from here on, you'll have to help sort the forbidden books. And if you can..."
"Yes. Finding a way to lift that. Right?"
"Mm. That's right."
Bihyung did not believe there would be a way among the forbidden books to lift her curse.
Even in the game, they never found a solution in the end. If a method had been sitting in the forbidden books, there's no way the veterans couldn't have lifted it...
And then a small doubt stirred.
Come to think of it, she said the pain of the curse was gone.
Originally, the moment she circulated her energy, her dantian felt as if it were being torn open, and a pain like countless needles stabbing through her meridians came with it. Set beside that, a body running hot, a warmth spreading through her, had belonged among the minor symptoms. That pain, she said, had vanished. And it had vanished in the instant she confronted his presence.
And... ten years ago.
She had been kidnapped into the same sort of affair as Yu Gyeongsu's—people offered up as sacrifices. Here, he turned the thought over.
Was there really no one, all this time, who thought the way Yu Gyeongsu did?
No. There would have been. By the professor's account, things like this had happened fairly often. Then the reason her pain had disappeared...
Bihyung's eyes gleamed cold.
I'll have to make some use of the library anomaly.
First, he needed to learn a little of her past. And whether that thing was truly a curse at all. He walked on with that thought, and before he knew it the library stood before them.
"...Walking in so openly feels a little strange."
"Hehe. Well. The first time I met you, junior, was when something just like that was going on."
Trading small talk of that sort, the two of them climbed to the second floor, where the forbidden books were kept.
"Then, senior, would you raise a barrier around us?"
"What sort of feel?"
"One that erases our presence from other people, converts the energy around us into yin, and also blocks anyone trying to come in from outside."
"Mm. Understood."
She nodded, unruffled, and waved a hand. That alone was enough. Embers of spiritual power began to seep into the shelves here and there, and drew a single vast formula. Her specialty—the art of barriers—had unfolded.
As expected. She really is incredible.
And so the surroundings were swallowed in darkness. As if night had fallen, a bleak energy wavered through the air. It felt as though the midnight library he had once entered with Mina had been called back into being. Wrapped in a strange comfort, Bihyung called to her.
"Senior. Would you pull out that forbidden book over there?"
"All right."
"Only halfway. Pull it all the way out and you'll be dragged in."
"Mm."
So saying, the Committee Chair drew the volume he indicated halfway free and left it resting across the shelf.
Know Thyself? A philosophical title.
While she was thinking that, Bihyung was drawing out several other books as well—Lucid Dreams, On Dreams, The Nexus of Past, Present, and Future—and more besides. He drew them halfway out and waited, and the library within the barrier began, little by little, to tremble.
And then—
"...It's done."
Before he knew it, Bihyung was standing at one side of a dim corridor. A moment from the past. The instant he had stepped into a fragment of the memory the Committee Chair carried.