The library wasn’t laid out in the antique, old-fashioned style you’d find in a xuanhuan novel; it was as clean and tidy as a big-city library back in the modern world—only the books on the shelves looked a little worn with age.
There weren’t many people left in the library by now; at this hour most everyone had gone off to eat.
Mir and the others came up to the front desk, where a mild-looking, generously built girl with purple hair and eyes narrowed into permanent smiling slits stood watch.
And she’d noticed Mir’s group too.
“Ah, are you little ladies here to read? Just tell big sis what sort of thing you’re after and she’ll help you find it~” Vills greeted them warmly.
Little ladies?
The cross-dressing trio traded a glance.
Ugh—they’d forgotten to change out of the dresses on the way over.
Still, at least they’d managed to fool that idiot City Guard captain; if she’d kept shrieking about charging them with some public-decency offense any longer, it really would have been unbearable.
“Vills, it’s me. Mir.”
Vills looked the four of them over, startled.
“Then this is Carlo?” She pointed at Carlo.
Mir: “Yep!”
“And this is Sak?” She pointed at Sak.
Mir: “Yep!”
“And this is Ura?” She pointed at Xia Ye.
Mir: “Yep…
huh?”
“That’s not Ura.
Her name’s Xia Ye—she’s the new student who just got assigned to our class, and she’s a real, genuine girl.” Mir explained to the seemingly half-blind squinter in front of him.
Xia Ye felt personally wounded.
In what way did she resemble that muscle-bound blond oaf whose entire vocabulary was “MUDA MUDA”?
Now that she knew the truth, Vills looked a bit embarrassed too.
“Sorry about that, Xia Ye. These four are always clumped together, so I just figured Ura had used some trick to change how he looks…”
Xia Ye still felt a little put out, but since the woman had already apologized it would’ve been petty to make a scene, so she gave Vills a small nod in reply.
Girl, keeping people at arm’s length like that is how you end up with no friends!
Watching Xia Ye’s reaction from the side, Mir fretted on her behalf.
Vills didn’t mind Xia Ye’s coolness in the slightest.
Did you awaken something…
weird?”
“Yes.
We awakened something weird,” Mir answered with a perfectly straight face.
Then his buddies behind him pinned him to the desk in a joint effort.
“Shut it, you!
It’s that nonsense-spouting mouth of yours that landed us in this miserable mess in the first place!”
“Haha, they really do get along, don’t they?” Vills said to Xia Ye, cradling her cheek with a smile.
Xia Ye frowned faintly.
“It feels hard to fit in among them, though.”
“Haha, no need to fit in,” Vills said, raising an index finger to her own temple.
“The moment you fit in with that lot, your head stops working right too.”
Stops working right, hmm?
Xia Ye quirked the corner of her mouth, ever so slightly.
Living like that might actually be less exhausting.
“Vills, whatever you do, don’t listen to this brat’s nonsense! Today this little punk used that twisting, no-good tongue of his to land us all in a police station!” Even as he held down the utterly unresisting Mir, Sak didn’t forget to explain himself to Vills.
If word ever got out, this old man’s lifelong good name would be ruined!
“Hm?
A police station?
What happened?”
“It’s a long story…” Sak gave Vills a quick rundown of the day’s events.
“Mm… so that’s how it is. There are quite a lot of books on magic rituals, though the sacrifice angle is a bit of a special case… Well, I’ve got nothing on right now, so I’ll help you look.”
Vills walked ahead, waving for them to follow.
She led them to the section on magic rituals—where there were so many related volumes that Mir and the others felt faint just looking at them.
“So, let’s pull the books out one by one and let Sak check each one. Once he’s done, remember to put them back exactly where they were~” Vills said with a smile, delivering the terrifying instructions.
Xia Ye picked up a book, flipped through it, couldn’t understand a word, and put it back.
“If you’d just remembered what the book was called, none of this would be happening.” Xia Ye’s single remark plunged Sak into silence.
“Well, we’ll have to do it the dumb way for now… I hope we find it fast. I haven’t even eaten yet.”
At Mir’s words, everyone suddenly realized they hadn’t eaten either, and promptly steeled themselves for battle.
“Let’s do this! It’s not like we’d find a free table if we went to eat at this hour anyway!”
Mir gave the newly fired-up group a baffled look, pulled a book off the shelf, flipped it open, took one glance, and then…
was out cold in an instant!
“Damn it! Don’t you fall asleep, you bastard!” Carlo grabbed Mir by the collar and shook him violently.
“I’ve come down with an illness where reading anything educational puts me to sleep.”
“There’s no such illness!
Is it a curse?”
“Then I’ve been struck by a curse where reading anything educational puts me to sleep.”
“Do you or do you not still want to catch the culprit, you little punk?!” Carlo bellowed, at his wit’s end.
“So why are we in such a hurry to catch the culprit anyway?” Mir lay on his side on the floor and scratched at his backside.
“We don’t even know for sure what that ritual’s for. Didn’t Sak say it was a sacrificial ritual? Sure, we ought to track the culprit down as soon as we can, but right now we’re basically just wasting time here.”
It was true—finding the one book that recorded a sacrificial ritual among this sea of volumes was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Just then, Sak let out an excited shout from off to the side.
“Oh! Found it!”
Mir: ???
I got proven wrong that fast?
Nobody bothered to mock Mir; they all rushed over to Sak to see what exactly this ritual was meant to sacrifice.
On the page was a picture much like the photo Sak had taken—except the corpse in it had both hands perfectly intact.
“It says here this ritual is called the ×× Sacrificial Ritual, used to offer the soul of the dead to some great being in exchange for the power granted by ××…” Sak read off the page, but since parts of the text had been blotted out with some strange substance, his reading came out patchy.
“What the hell? Who’s got so little decency they’d scribble all over a book? All the important bits are blacked out, come on!” Carlo griped indignantly.
“At least now we know this ritual isn’t meant for large-scale destruction,” Xia Ye said, letting out a long breath.
“Don’t relax yet—there’s more.” Sak read on.
“This ritual must be completed three times to take effect; the ritual may be reused; side effects ××××.”
“Meaning the culprit’s going to strike again?”
That was not good news…
“What I’m more concerned about is why the corpse we ran into had its left hand cut off, while the one in the book is completely intact,” Mir put forward.
“Maybe the culprit’s got some weird fixation,” Sak said, half-joking.