Blade and Poetry

On the same night, instead of returning to the apartment as promised to Karajan, I visited the residence of another person in the academy.

It was less than midnight, and I guessed that he was still awake, so I went to shake his door knocker.Sure enough, in less than a minute, he was seen coming out in full clothes to answer the door.

"Mr. Smith!" I shouted ahead of him.

The person in front of me has gray hair, and the deep lines on his face seem to be trapped by the remnants of past suffering.His black and gray clothes are always clean and tidy, but he obviously has no fuss about style.

"Vicente?" He opened the door to let me in. "It's not your habit to visit so late."

He asked me to sit down, took out the teapot from his messy laboratory table, and poured me two or three cups of hot tea.

"Tell me, why are you looking for me now?" He supervised me to drink the tea to the bottom, and then said.

"Can you see this too?" I was stunned.

"If you didn't put your mind on complaining about my tea-making skills, you were probably preoccupied with other things."

"Yes, sir," I said, "I admit I'm going to be impressed with you."

The corners of his stiff mouth twisted into an arc that resembled a smile.

When I met him two years ago, most of the professors in the West School were collectively called out for a period of time, and a group of people from the school were temporarily transferred to act as lecturers.

It was in a laboratory class that I met this eccentric Mr. Smith.His tone of voice was as serious as the text in a textbook, which was stripped line by line and thrown straight in front of the students; there was never a smile on his face.This made his solemn face look like a haggard tree.

I wondered if this man was really so hard-hearted, so I often found opportunities to help him clean up the house after the experiment, and tried to make him laugh at the risk of shame-and it turned out that he was not hard-hearted, but just a bad face. He is good at facial expressions, but he is not used to smiling a lot.

"I have something to ask for your help this time." I said to him seriously, "This matter is very important to me at the moment, but if you decide to reject me, I will try my best to find other ways."

He also regained his composure, and sat across from me: "Speak."

"I need your ID badge."

He was silent for a moment: "Why do you need it?"

"I need to enter the restricted area on the second floor of the library." Only staff above a certain level are allowed to enter the restricted area. Although I often communicate with Mr. Smith, I don't know his specific position—I guess to enter the second floor Still enough.

"Third year has nothing to do with it, does it?"

"...Yes." I hesitated, "but I can't tell you what it is for—I can only say that I am very confused now, and I urgently need to solve this confusion. Maybe not, but at least it will get better. I am very interested in magic. Doubts arose, regarding swordsmen and magicians..."

Mr. Smith took up his cane, and began to pace up and down the room.

"The things in the restricted section are mixed." He said after a long time, then turned around and said in a responsible tone, "Can you guarantee that you will stop on the second floor when you hold it?"

I jumped up from the sofa happily: "I promise! I won't take a step! I can swear an oath to express my sincerity!"

"Don't keep the oath on your lips, unless it's an agreement about life and death, it's best not to think about it." He frowned, stuffed a card-like thing in my hand, and took out his pocket watch to take a look . "Give it back to me before dawn today, don't let anyone find out."

I threw myself on his shoulder and yelled: "Mr. Smith, I love you!" As I moved closer to touch his cheek, he turned his head reluctantly, but I stuck him straight.I laughed out loud, but I didn't feel sour in my eyes.

He was like my grandfather—even though their faces were not alike.

I only noticed when I put Mr. Smith's ID card close to the access control on the second floor. His ID said "belonging to the Department of Medicine and Stone" - no wonder he said "stop on the second floor". The authority of this card is indeed higher than mine. Imagine a lot bigger.The Department of Medicine and Stone is the only department established in the Hoftas Academy in the country, probably for the sake of collecting materials-Hoftas is not located in the densely populated city center.It belongs to a branch of the Magic Society, and anyone who is proficient in magic research will be honored to take up a position in the Medicine and Stone Department.As far as I know, this is also the place where Odd most wants to stay in the future.

There were hardly any visitors on the second floor of the library in the middle of the night, only the sleepy administrators were doing tidying up and down, or taking a nap on their seats.I had already taken off the student's black casual clothes in Mr. Smith's cubicle, and put on his coat and hat. Because there was a gate guard, the administrator didn't glance at me much.

"Good night, sir," he said forcefully.

I pressed my collar and nodded, resisting my desire to look back at him.

If the first floor is a palace full of books, the second floor is much smaller compared with it, and the books on the chestnut wooden cabinets can be reached without the aid of a ladder.Calmly, I made myself walk a little faster, searching the spine for the title I needed.

The doubts I have suppressed for many years are about to burst out at this time: Is it possible for the characteristics of the swordsman and the magician to coexist?Is there any person in history who was both a swordsman and a magician and left a mark in the history books?

How many times have I convinced myself with two "nos", my mood is so agitated at this time-it was awakened by Karajan.In the past, apart from literary books, there were very few things related to these majors in my grandfather's library, and they were no longer open to me after my grandfather left.Maybe this is my only chance to get some answers from the Restricted Section.

I hastily flipped through several books that might be related, but none of them took my doubts as an issue. It is regarded as a kind of "variation" that is not excellent.Only a short paragraph in one book mentions research by one person on this theory, and the method is definitely not orthodox.This person has a name that does not belong to the native of Columbus, and should be a foreigner—I eagerly turned over a few pages, and was disappointed to find that this kind of research also failed later.

There is nothing to search for on the second floor.Behind me is the staircase leading to the third floor, which is tempting me to go towards it, and the soles of my feet are nailed to the ground with great difficulty.

"There's deeper exploration, more answers. Don't you yearn for a way out? It'll bring you," I thought.

The area on the third floor seemed so close that I could easily reach it if I just took a step back, but I stopped the thought in time.

"You promised him, you won't go any further." I thought silently, my fingers sinking into the pages of the book. "And Karajan has shown you a way out."

Just as my hand rested on the last page of that book, there was a rumbling sound of something rolling down the landing behind me, and then something hit my heel.I turned around and saw only a furry top and a little bit of flushed cheeks.

"Sorry, sorry to disturb you, sir." He was wearing the uniform of an administrator, and he probably just came down from the third floor, and he was frantically packing up the overturned cart from which a pile of books had just rolled out, "This is really a Big mistake."

"It doesn't matter." I suppressed my voice, trying to make my voice a little different from usual, and then picked up a few scattered books with him back into the car.

He is much younger than the administrator outside the gate.Before, he hardly dared to look at me directly, but now he just raised his head and buried it down again, the restraint in his words was much less.

"I shouldn't have been so sleepy in the first place." He said energetically, "I just swayed my hand-hey. These things on the third floor should have been neatly packed into a place on the front desk. When I met They're unlucky. Thank you, or I'd have to walk around a bit more, and that'll be all right."

He scanned the ground and said goodbye to me as he pushed the cart.

"Do you know what is in this car?" I was a little confused about the authority of the administrator, so I couldn't help asking.

"Of course not, sir," he shrugged. "I'm a man, and these tomes won't even let me open their covers. Good night."

Standing a little further in than him, I noticed that a book had fallen farther down, under the rear corner of the bookshelf.I walked over to pick it up in three steps and two steps. I wanted to call him to stop him immediately, but the cover of this book caught my attention.

It has two big dark golden characters burnt on it in some ancient language: "Fusion".

My heart was beating wildly, and my intuition told me that there was something inside that I needed to see—no sound could stop me this time.I quietly put the original book in my hand back on the shelf, turned out from the corner, and tried my best to make a natural gesture to open this "Fusion", but my eyeballs almost never turned so fast actually, Because I know the administrator will go and come back after checking the number.

As soon as I saw the content of this book, I could imagine why it was classified as a restricted area on the third floor.It is full of bloody and curious content, and there are more pictures than words, and there is a strange wind in the only explanations.It does describe many experimental processes to stimulate the potential of a swordsman in a magician, or vice versa.At first, its content and program seemed a bit comical, like the absurd feeling of a savage eating raw meat and dancing in front of modern people, but then it became almost a little scary-the program in it was in an incredible way. The method is progressing and progressive, and those experiments are dyed with gorgeous and bloody splendor, and its timeline--it is not the current new calendar that is commonly used, but another unknown calendar.

"In 1358, the 198th experiment failed.

"In 1361, the 199th experiment failed.

"In 1362, the 200th, 201st, and 202nd experiments failed."

In addition to the densely printed annotations in various handwritten scripts on the page, these are horribly pale words.Not once did they mention the aftermath of the "subjects," but I'm guessing that probably none of these people survived what went through that process.

The amount of information in it is too large, so that when I came into contact with the end, I still had a gloomy expectation for its result.The page in my hand fell tremblingly to the other side; except for the footnotes, the printed words on the last page were a little longer than the previous records.It says:

"In 1466, which is the 796th year of the new calendar, the 1059th experiment failed, the laboratory was destroyed, half of the experimenters died, and all the results were almost destroyed."

The new calendar year 796 - this is a special year.The end of the war-torn golden age has come to an end, and the entire continent has entered the prelude to a comprehensive peace.

The "Fusion" has been turned to the last page, and all printed content stops here.I still couldn't calm down in my heart, and I froze in place feeling lost.My mind told me to put it back quickly, so I began to shuffle, but something else caught my eye on the open page.

It was a line of small print, crammed together with other printed handwritten notes in the same format as them, and it was very possible to miss its essence if one didn't look carefully.Because it was actually written by hand—that is, after the book was printed.

"All you have seen is falsehood - AC"

I closed the book and stuffed it into another corner while no one was around.When I returned to the original place, I was still confused. Although I was holding another book in my hand, there was a line of small characters floating in front of my eyes.I wonder what it's referring to: is it saying that everything before this book is a lie?But if what I "saw" meant something else, what could it be?

I couldn't help but fell into deep thought.Maybe a quarter of an hour later, a voice interrupted my thinking: "Sir! Excuse me, did you see a book dropped there just now?"

The librarian who came here is no longer the young man who was careless at first.I said to him, "I don't know. If you ask the kid just now, he will tell you that I only searched this area with him. If you go further away," I pointed to the other end, "Maybe there will be some gains."

He gave a brief thank you, and then ran towards the direction I pointed. It didn't take long before he found the "Fusion" and walked back in a hurry.

As daylight approached, and seeing that there would be no more to be gained tonight, I also left the place, and walked towards Mr. Smith's house.He is extremely stingy about sleep and has a fixed schedule. I knocked on the door according to the time and returned the ID card to him.

"Fulfilling the mission." I said to him with a smile.I handed him my overcoat and took back my school uniform.I suddenly wanted to ask him this question:

"Mr. Smith, have you heard of the fusion and coexistence of the talents of swordsmen and magicians?"

There was still the same expression on his face, but I felt the lines on it tighten.I have a feeling that even though I made the question vague, he got it right away.

"What did you read?"

"There is nothing on the second floor... This can only be regarded as the problem I originally brought."

He looked at me seriously, and then said: "Don't touch this field, it will only bring destruction. Will you promise me, Vicente?"

His attitude made me intuit that I should hide that accident, but I was unwilling to make a promise to him to deceive under this direct question, so I chose to remain silent.

There seemed to be anger frozen under the lines of his face.He whispered: "Stretch out your hand."

I held out my palms up in front of him, and he gave it nine savage blows with his bamboo cane.A few visible red marks immediately appeared on the palm of my hand.

"You're always so stubborn," he said after a long time.

"Be happy, Mr. Smith. I hope you don't worry about my business." I looked him in the eyes and said, "But I really can't promise anything about it, at least for now."

He sighed, went back to the room and gave me the medicine for external application.

"Take care of yourself, Vicente. Discipline yourself," he said.

That's the most humane thing I've ever heard from him.

"Yes. Sir, I will. I promise you," I replied.

The sky was starting to turn pale, but I didn't feel sleepy. I was still agitated and even more confused; it was with this feeling that I returned to my apartment.