There was water.
That was the first thing. Not cold, not warm—just water that had no temperature, pressing against him from all sides with the soft insistence of something that had been there for a very long time and saw no reason to move. He was in it completely, and he was not breathing. His lungs had a strong opinion on that matter.
What—
He pushed. His arms met resistance, then found direction, and he drove himself upward through the water with everything he had. When he broke the surface, the breath that exploded out of him was anything but elegant.
"PUAH—!"
He doubled over the edge of whatever he had surfaced on—a broad, pale stone platform, slick with the same water now streaming off his jacket and hair—and stayed there for a moment, simply breathing. In. Out. The way breathing works when you've just been reminded that it is a privilege.
When his vision cleared, he looked up.
"Wow…"
The word came out small and involuntary—the kind that arrives before the brain catches up with what the eyes are seeing.
The place was enormous.
It had the structure of a building—walls, a ceiling, some suggestion of floors—but its scale had nothing to do with anything built for humans. The ceiling was so far above him that it vanished into a layer of pale, luminous haze. The walls—if they were walls—rose on every side in vast pale slabs that disappeared into the same haze before he could find their tops. Between them, in every direction, stood the bookshelves.
They were huge. Not library-huge. Forest-huge. Each shelf unit was the width of a building and the height of several stacked on top of one another. They stretched away in rows that receded into the distance until they blurred into a single pale mass, the way trees blur in a forest when you stand in the middle without a map.
Zhao Wei stood on the stone platform and turned in a slow circle.
"…It's like a ruin," he said.
He was not wrong. The stone beneath his feet was cracked in long diagonal lines, and at the base of the nearest shelf-towers, debris had gathered—fragments of stone, broken furniture at an absurd scale, things that might once have been fixtures or structural elements that had simply given up. The place carried the feeling of somewhere that had been vast and purposeful long ago and was now vast and purposeless, which felt lonelier than emptiness.
He cupped his hands around his mouth.
"Zhongyi! Yangde!"
His voice rolled across the ruined library and returned to him in broken fragments—ya, ya, yua—growing weaker, never answered.
"Zhongyi!"
The same. Silence, then the echo of silence, then only silence.
Zhao Wei lowered his hands.
I seem to have been sucked in here alone. The thought settled in with the quiet resignation of someone who had learned to update his expectations quickly. Come to think of it, the others might have been pulled somewhere else.
He looked at the bookshelves, then at the vast pale space between them. He remembered what Wuxian had said—retrieve Quanshu's Inheritance—and thought about the place he was standing in, which he was fairly certain was called Callague, or something close to it. Wuxian had said the book was here.
He rolled up his sleeves.
"First things first," he said to nobody. Then, with the particular energy of someone converting anxiety into motion: "Find the book!"
The bookshelf-forest was not, as it turned out, a forest with books in it.
He walked for a long time—between the first row of shelves and the second, between the second and the third, down aisles wide enough to park ten buses side by side. Shelf after shelf rose into the luminous haze above him, each one bearing—on its countless tiers of ancient, weathered wood—precisely nothing.
Empty. Completely, comprehensively empty. Every shelf he could see, in every direction, was bare.
He stopped walking.
"I walked for a while," he said, "but there's not a single book." He turned around. It looked the same behind him as ahead. "It's the same over there, too."
He looked up at the highest tiers of the nearest shelf-tower. They disappeared into the haze. Whatever was up there, he couldn't see it.
If I can't find a book down here…
He craned his neck back further.
Then I've got to go higher.
He grabbed the lowest shelf edge with both hands. The wood was solid—very solid—dense and cold under his fingers, the kind of old that had passed through decay and emerged harder. He pulled himself up, found a foothold, and pulled again.
He climbed.
The first book he found was wedged sideways into a shelf about thirty meters up, crammed between two supporting struts as if someone had shoved it there in a hurry. He noticed the corner of it first—a pale edge sticking out slightly farther than the strut—and his heart did something embarrassing in his chest.
"Th— THAT!!"
He lunged for it. His fingers closed around the spine. He pulled.
It came free in a cascade of dust and a sound like an ancient complaint. He nearly fell off the shelf catching it, but clutched it to his chest and stared at the cover with eyes already composing a victory speech.
The cover had writing on it.
The writing was in a language that bore absolutely no resemblance to anything he had ever seen in his life.
He opened it. The same inside. Page after page of dense, flowing script in characters that were elegant and completely meaningless to him.
He stared at it for a long time.
"…Dang," he said finally. "This isn't any language from home."
He sat down on the shelf thirty meters up, holding a book he couldn't read, in a place he couldn't leave, completely alone.
How do I find a book I can't even read? And those guys aren't even here…
He thought about it. The logic of the situation arranged itself slowly, the way cold logic does when you'd rather it didn't. I'm bound to come across something useful if I just keep gathering books. Luckily, it doesn't seem like there are many books here—maybe there's someone who can help…
He tucked the unreadable book under his arm, grabbed the shelf strut again, and started climbing back down.
He was halfway to the ground when his body made a different kind of announcement.
"AAAHH— really— DAMN!"
He hit the stone floor hard, sat there for a moment with his legs stretched out in front of him, and stared at the ceiling with the expression of someone taking stock.
"My body's heavy." A pause. "My stomach's hungry."
He lay back flat on the cold stone.
From somewhere in his chest, an involuntary sound emerged—low, sustained, and deeply undignified.
"…Am I really dead?" he said to the distant haze above him. "A dead person's stomach keeps begging for food."
The Beyond Realm sky—if it was a sky—offered no answer.
He heard them before he saw them.
High and thin, the sound came from somewhere above and to his left—a rapid, erratic buzzing with the quality of many small wingbeats operating at different frequencies at once. Not a pleasant sound. The kind that triggers something ancient in the part of the human brain that learned, very early on, to pay attention to certain kinds of buzzing.
Wait. He sat up. Even in an indoor space, there are birds. So maybe I'll find people nearby…
He got to his feet and followed the sound.
The buzzing grew louder. He turned a corner between two shelf-towers, and the source became immediately and extremely apparent.
It was black.
It was enormous.
It had wings—actual, membranous, jointed wings—and they were the source of the sound, moving at a speed that was both impressive and deeply unwelcome. Its body had a shape that evolution had not been kind to. And it had, pointed directly at him with flat focus, a face that no reasonable creature should possess.
"AUGH! BUG—!"
He threw himself sideways. The thing swept past him in a rush of displaced air, banking with a speed that should not have been possible for something so large, and came around for another pass.
"DAMNIT! IT'S BLACK AND ENORMOUS!!"
He ran. It followed. He ducked under a shelf strut; it clipped the edge, scattering splinters. He burst out the other side, turned, and swung the unreadable book he was still—somehow—carrying.
The book connected. The sound the creature made was that of something being hit that had not expected to be hit. It spun away, struck the stone floor, skidded, and stopped.
Zhao Wei stood over it, breathing hard, book raised for another swing.
The creature was still.
He looked at it more carefully now that it had stopped moving. Flatter. Less alarming.
He crouched. "…A book? Not a bug?"
He reached out and turned it over. Pages. Actual pages, densely covered in the same flowing script as the first book, slightly crumpled from the impact but intact. The wings—he touched one gingerly—were pages too, extended and rigid, catching air the way a paper plane does, but with far more commitment.
"That buzzing noise came… from this?"
He sat back on his heels and stared at the flying book.
The flying book opened its pages and buzzed its wings experimentally.
"No way," he said.
Then it launched itself at his face.
"WAAUGH—!"
He fell backward, both hands grabbing the book as it thrashed against him, wings beating, pages fluttering with what felt very much like outrage. They wrestled on the cold stone floor of Callague—a boy who had been dead for two weeks and a book that apparently had strong opinions about being hit—until Zhao Wei managed to get a firm grip on the spine, held it at arm's length, and the wings slowed. The book settled into a resentful, contained flutter.
He looked at it.
It had writing inside. Dense, flowing, ancient script covered every visible page.
"Ohh," he said. "This thing even has writing in it."
He turned it slightly. The wings adjusted to maintain balance, like a living thing compensating for a weight shift.
"But how is it moving?"
It even flies.
He stood up, tucking the book firmly under his arm with both hands—which required some negotiation, as the book had opinions about this too—and looked around the vast empty shelves of Callague.
I'm bound to find something useful if I just keep collecting.
Somewhere in Onus, far from the library district and the Callague entrance, a corridor ran long and quiet between arched windows that let in the pale Beyond Realm light in strips.
Xue Lian walked it fast.
Her footsteps were too quick for the corridor's dignity. Bai Feng waddled behind her with the expression of someone who has delivered bad news twice already and expects to deliver it at least once more.
"Mistress—"
"Mistress Xue Lian—"
"Mistress." He put slightly more into the word this time. She stopped. Did not turn. "Being upset won't solve anything."
"I am not upset." Her voice was even. Too even. The specific evenness of someone enforcing a quality they do not naturally have access to at the present moment.
"The Elder's command is absolute." He said it gently, the way a person says a thing they know won't land well but must be said. "We can't do anything about it."
She turned then. Her eyes were doing something that was not quite an expression and not quite the absence of one. She looked at the window—at the pale Beyond Realm light coming through in strips, at the nothing useful that windows contain—and something moved through her face that she didn't bother to hide because she had decided it wasn't worth hiding.
"The Removal Squad will be moving soon anyway," Bai Feng added. "So—"
She cut across him. "I can't feel Zhao Wei's presence."
Bai Feng blinked. "What?"
"I've been releasing demonic energy for a while now." She raised one hand—the air around it shifted fractionally, a dark current that moved and then settled. "And I simply cannot feel his presence."
Bai Feng went quiet. Then, carefully: "…No. Then…. He's already d—"
"The location," she said. Sharp. Precise. Like a door closing. "It's not that. Something is wrong with the location." She looked at her hand. "Should I release more energy?"
The voice came from down the corridor before she could answer herself.
"Uh-hu…"
It was unhurried. Slightly amused. The voice of someone who has been watching from a comfortable distance and has decided to make their presence known on their own terms.
"I was wondering who it was… who was so carelessly releasing demonic energy in the halls."
Xue Lian turned.
The woman at the far end of the corridor was tall. Pale-haired, the colour of old ivory, her hair falling loose around a face that had high cheekbones and the particular quality of beauty that has stopped caring whether it's being noticed. She wore something dark that fitted her closely and had no unnecessary features. At one ear, catching the strip-light from the nearest window—a small skull, delicate and precise.
"So it was you, Xue Lian." The woman moved closer with the unhurried ease of someone who knows they have all the available time. Her eyes had a warmth to them that her smile had more of. "Lost your servant, have you?"
"…"
"Surely you're aware," the woman continued, her voice dropping to something almost gentle, "that he's not the only one looking for you."
Bai Feng was very still. His eyes moved between Xue Lian and the woman with the rapid calculation of someone running a lot of assessments simultaneously.
The woman tilted her head. The skull earring moved. "By releasing your energy so openly like this—are you trying to tell everyone in Onus about your very first servant?"
The words hit. Xue Lian's jaw tightened by exactly one degree.
"…"
"I didn't think so." The woman smiled—not unkindly. Not kindly. Something in between. She reached up and touched one finger lightly to her own chin in the manner of someone sharing a considered thought. "Just wait quietly. I've been hiding that boy for now."
Bai Feng's composure, which had been holding admirably under the circumstances, gave way slightly. "You've been—hiding him?"
"Teacher has been hiding him?" Xue Lian said. Her voice was low. Flat. It contained a question that was also a recalibration of several assumptions.
The woman looked at her with an expression that was doing a great many things at once. "He's such an interesting kid." She said it the way a person says something they have already decided is true. "I've been thinking for a while now about making him my apprentice."
The silence that followed had a specific texture.
Bai Feng looked at Wuxian. At the skull earring. At the particular quality of composure, she wore the way other people wear clothing. "Mistress Wuxian—" His voice had gone slightly thin. "The teacher who has rejected every student until now… is going to accept Zhao Wei?"
Wuxian looked past both of them, toward the corridor's far end, toward the part of Onus that contained Callague and everything inside it.
"Well—" The word came out with a small, private quality—the sound of a thought completing itself. "A human who made it all the way to the Beyond Realm." The skull earring caught the light. "Doesn't that sound considerably more appealing?"