The Boundary
“It’s me.”
Kyle pointed to the dense forest ahead.
“The Hetia Library should be in that direction, right?”
“No. The forest itself is the library.”
“…?”
But this was not inside Fredric Manor. It was the Hermitia Plain region.
A place where monsters could erupt at any moment, without warning.
“How do the staff even get here for work?”
We couldn’t just stroll around protected by soldiers every time.
“Staff? There are none. This is just the library itself.”
I stared at his face as Kyle spoke slowly.
“You’ll see for yourself. How insane this land must be to create such a place on its own.”
“…?”
The Gilorian Empire was a place where anything could happen.
Magic that defied the laws of physics ruled here, and monsters burst forth from the ground.
But the idea that the forest itself was a library—and that the library operated on its own—was shocking.
Kyle meant the Hermitia Plain had grown a library straight out of the forest.
A vast forest stretched before us.
A forest wrapped in a shimmering transparent veil looked like it existed in another dimension.
The boundary of the veil stretched to the horizon, and within it towered enormous trees whose growth patterns defied logic, stabbing toward the sky.
While I stood silently staring at the forest, Kyle sat down on the trunk of a massive tree.
“There are no monsters in this forest, so I won’t go in.”
“Any other warnings?”
Kyle narrowed his eyes in response to my question.
“Watch out for the insane ones!”
After that, Kyle dropped his hammer to the ground and lay down flat.
Nora stepped forward.
Only a few steps in, she froze.
“Ah… what…!”
Nora couldn’t finish her sentence.
Before her stood a dense thicket of cypress-like trees.
Their branches twisted at impossible right angles, piercing one another in ways that should not have been possible.
Looking up from below, the branches spiraled upward like stairs, tangled together in an endless climb toward the sky.
And at the very top, exactly where the sun should be.
The branches, twisted into spirals matching the orbit of two suns.
“……!!!”
A scene that felt deliberately constructed by some entity.
And then, at the exact point where sunlight pierced between the branches:
“There’s a book there.”
A book was hanging there.
“……?”
Instead of fruit, books grew on the trees.
Arrangements that could never be mistaken for a library.
No, they looked more like temples.
The ancient great mages had projected their personal desire to reach the heavens onto the sky itself.
And the books were filled with symbols I couldn’t read. They looked like ancient language.
“Can you read them?”
As a descendant of a magic family, Nora should know ancient languages.
“No… I don’t recognize the characters. Do they even make sense?”
Nora shook her head.
Symbols that could never be called human language.
The same went for the other books.
Then a cold wind blew, and a chill crawled over my entire body.
A silence as if time itself had stopped settled in, and within it, a faint whisper echoed.
“ŸΞ▶ΨǼ.”
I drew my dagger from my waist.
Rustling.
Something strange was approaching.
“Who’s there. You smell fresh.”
“Blue currents flowing around your heart?”
“The one next to you is murky. Divinity and negation mixed together.”
It was clearly voices, but it wasn’t human language.
They came in waves, crashing and vanishing like echoes.
“Huh? But what is this energy?!”
“What? What?”
“Tell Anderson.”
“Anderson! Anderson! Anderson!”
The voices of things that were not human filled the space.
Thousands—tens of thousands—voices vibrating at once.
“Something strange is coming. Be careful.”
“Black and white chaotic energy. Beings that are neither alive nor dead.” It seemed Nora sensed it too.
She raised her black aura warily and watched the approaching presences.
But that was all.
The only thing making noise was the echoing presence around us; no one showed themselves.
We could not relax our guard until the sun set.
We moved carefully through the deep forest of the library, avoiding blind spots.
And there, uniquely, stood a massive tree absorbing the last rays of the setting sun.
“It’s quiet here.”
The strange sounds that seemed to eat souls no longer echoed.
No wind. No monster howls. No rustling of leaves brushing against one another.
This place was absolute silence.
“Let’s rest.”
Nora steadied her breathing.
“Wait a moment.”
And closed her eyes.
Black aura poured from her body.
She was probably trying to find some other hidden being.
I spread my perception too, searching for unfamiliar presences around us.
A technique I had learned over the shoulders of nameless elves during my days as a dungeon hunter.
“They have no intention of attacking us.”
She sighed.
The beings were right there, but they only watched us.
No further approach.
“We can rest.”
Nora soon withdrew her aura.
I leaned against the massive tree trunk and looked up at the canopy.
I saw branches twisted together.
And at the very end of those staircase-like branches, a single book hung silently, glowing.
The same light was leaking from my pocket.
* * *
“That book must be read.”
A book resonating with the same light.
The closer I got, the more violently the Elf’s Bone artifact in my pocket began to vibrate.
That was the reason I had come to this absurd library: to learn the nature of the Elf’s Bone artifact and the possibility of identifying heretic souls.
Of course, I hadn’t expected to learn everything at once.
I figured any small fragment would be enough.
But finding a book that resonated with the Elf’s Bone artifact.
I stared at the Elf’s Bone artifact in my pocket, pulsing like a heartbeat and emitting faint light.
The closer I approached the book, the more violently the artifact vibrated.
Then I tapped the book hanging on the branch.
The Elf’s Bone artifact rang once like a bell and went silent.
I sat back down and opened the book.
“……”
But the symbols were still incomprehensible.
No matter how hard I stared, the magic that turned symbols into letters never triggered.
But surely there was hidden meaning between the resonance of the artifact and the book.
Either the book would transform into one containing true meaning if I combined the two, or it would become a guide pointing toward the direction of the true book.
In that case, I had to use the Elf’s Bone artifact.
“What if I bring this over here?”
A spark of interest lit Nora’s eyes.
She seemed interested too.
“Would shining light on the Elf’s Bone artifact make the letters readable?”
“What if we pour elven blood into the artifact?”
“……”
Nora looked at me with sticky eyes.
“…Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“……”
I thought she was just frustrated because she had no answer.
But suggesting we do the same scam as the street con artists at Jacob’s General Store was ridiculous.
I ignored it.
Until the sun grew dark, we tried everything to decipher the book filled with cryptic symbols.
Holding the Elf’s Bone artifact to the book, chanting strange words with closed eyes.
Then…
“Ah! Inspector, isn’t this it?”
“What? Did you find something?”
“This is offering it as a sacrifice. Burning the Elf’s Bone artifact and feeding the book.”
We had finally reached that level.
“…Let’s rest for a bit.”
I lay flat on my back.
Stars visible through the dense trees above.
“Are you giving up?”
Nora asked with a worried expression.
She didn’t know my situation. She probably worried I might give up here.
Unlike her, I had no urgency to uncover this secret.
But no.
I had absolutely no intention of giving up. This was directly tied to my survival as a heretic.
“Looking at the stars is rare.”
I changed the subject.
I didn’t feel like revealing my inner desperation.
Under the surface it was intense, but on the surface I maintained the appearance of a relaxed 1st Grade detective of the Capital Defense Force.
“Ah… the ring the director gave me is related to the flow of celestial bodies.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. Do you see that star pattern, detective?”
I followed the star streaking across the sky with my eyes.
“It looks like a centaur’s bow.”
“That’s right. But around dawn it’ll look like a goblin’s dagger. A squashed, broken little dagger.”
This was a strange point about the Gilorian continent.
Even the same star pattern changed completely with time.
It wasn’t like the southern or northern hemisphere of Earth appearing and disappearing.
If the star pattern was a rabbit now, in a few hours it could become a pile of rabbit poop. No one would find that strange.
Probably because the planet’s axis was different from Earth’s, or the orbital movement didn’t match the astronomical knowledge of the time.
Either way, the celestial coordinates here showed extremely strange movement.
As a result, the same star pattern changed completely with time.
Then a thought crossed my mind.
I had definitely passed here during the day.
But back then, neither the book nor the artifact had reacted.
The difference now was that it was night and the star pattern had begun to appear.
I held the Elf’s Bone artifact up to the sky.
Now, between the lost red gem, sixteen stars were precisely positioned.
‘This is it!’
I opened the book.
Looking at the pages closely, regular dots appeared between the symbols.
Like a precise grid pattern, like a Go board.
“Nora, what time is it now?”
“Almost midnight. 47:25.”
I started tracing the symbols engraved in the grid pattern with my fingers.
‘If the vertical lines are observation time, then the horizontal lines should be the positions of the stars.’
I organized the thoughts rising in my head and swept my fingers across them.
And at their intersection.
“There!”
When the exact spacetime coordinates matched, the symbols began to change slowly.
The meaningless symbols had aligned into a sentence.
“Detective!”
Excitement filled Nora’s voice.
The author of this book had hidden the content inside the grid of time and space.
“This is the ancient language of the centaurs.”