The library was old.

  Not museum or antique-shop old. It was something deeper. It was the kind of oldness that pressed against your skin, that made the air taste different, like breathing in centuries of accumulated dust and forgotten words.

  The floors were dark mahogany, polished to a mirror finish despite their obvious age. The shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, carved with intricate patterns that must have taken craftsmen years to complete.

  There were also leather reading chairs set in alcoves, positioned near brass lamps, ready for anyone who wanted to enjoy a good reading session. The walls were lined with wood paneling that had deep, rich colors.

  It looked like the rest of the ship: overly expensive, borderline obscene in its display of wealth.

  Arata had been searching for the last hour, unbothered by anyone.

  That was strange, when he thought about it. The Harbor Group hadn't made a move on him since the corridor encounter. They'd let him roam freely around the ship, exploring compartments and restricted areas without interference.

  Wasn't he an intruder?

  They could have immediately flagged him as a dangerous criminal trying to harm people aboard the vessel, mobilized ship security, and locked down sections to contain his movement.

  Instead, nothing.

  Maybe they didn't have connections within the ship's administration?

  The idea amused Arata. He pictured the Boss on his knees, begging the wealthy elite in the ballroom for help dealing with a high school boy who'd broken through their security. The mental image was absurd enough to make him smile despite the circumstances.

  Still, searching unbothered didn't mean finding Mika would be easy. This ship was massive––finding her was like searching for a needle in a haystack. All he could do was look for evidence, trace patterns in crew movement and check compartments that seemed particularly useful for hiding someone.

  While moving through multiple rooms, Arata had stumbled into the library by accident. The door had been unmarked, tucked into a corridor junction that seemed designed to be overlooked.

  And this place stood out immediately.

  A feeling hung in the air. Not quite magical, but close. Energy gathered here, concentrated in ways that made his skin prickle with awareness.

  The sensation was eerie; he felt strange in a way he couldn’t articulate. Maybe it was just the cliché of old libraries being haunted, and the fact that he was completely alone in such a space contributed to the unease.

  Either way, Arata didn't have time to dwell on atmospheric discomfort.

  He moved methodically through the space, analyzing the ground for unusual details. At this point, anything could be used to advance the investigation. Scuff marks indicating recent movement. Disturbances in dust patterns. Displaced objects. Hair strands. Fabric fibers. He needed to find anything that suggested recent human presence.

  He couldn't ignore any spot. Everything had to be searched, cataloged, assessed for relevance.

  Arata noticed a table on the right side of the bookshelf he was searching.

  Despite his reluctance, he crouched and stretched his arm beneath the hardwood reading table, fingers sweeping the underside for anything taped or hidden. When he pulled his hand back, it was coated in a generous quantity of dust and what felt like old cobwebs.

  Arata looked at the gray film covering his palm, disgusted.

  Then he sneezed violently and moved to the next section.

  ***

  Two hours.

  It had taken him two goddamn hours to search a single room, and he still wasn't finished.

  The library was far bigger than what he imagined when he entered, its structure complex in ways that violated normal architectural logic. Some corridors between the shelves were twisted at odd angles. Some reading alcoves appeared in random locations that shouldn't really have space for them. The whole layout resembled a maze designed by someone with a very disturbed mind, or perhaps a creativity that couldn’t be comprehended by anyone.

  Who was the weird architect who came up with this?

  Arata felt genuine irritation building. This person was probably paid a hundred times more than him and his little student job, and they'd created something objectively bad at fulfilling its basic function. Wealthy people really did waste money on bizarre things, not that it affected their bank accounts anyway.

  Besides, talking only about floor space was underestimating the problem.

  Arata looked up. The bookshelves extended so high that stacking four of him wouldn't reach the top. Ladders on sliding rails allowed access to upper levels, but that meant every section required vertical searching in addition to horizontal coverage.

  He had to be thorough. Mika could be hidden anywhere on this ship, and the library's isolation made it a potential location for holding someone you didn't want found. The room's complexity provided a multitude of different hiding places––dozens of alcoves, hidden reading nooks, storage compartments behind false shelving.

  But at the end of the day, this room was annoying him more than anything.

  He'd searched countless bookshelves, stretched his hands under dozens of tables, checked behind curtains and inside decorative cabinets, and found absolutely nothing. Not even a hair strand. Not a single piece of evidence suggesting anyone had been here recently. Even worse, it looked like no one had stepped foot inside the library for decades.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  He approached the last table in the final section, which was a semi-circular room where bookshelves curved in ways that created optical illusions, making the space feel larger and more distorted than geometry would normally allow.

  At least the engineers had done competent work ensuring these structures were stable.

  Arata sighed and quickly checked behind the books on nearby shelves.

  Well, at least he'd be done after searching this section.

  ***

  Unfortunately, all he could find was dust. He approached the table with visible contempt––this would be the last spot, then he would move on to more productive areas.

  He stretched his arms beneath the table one final time, expecting nothing, and, surprisingly, his fingers brushed something solid.

  It wasn’t useless dust or a forgotten piece of wood; it was something with texture, with considerable weight.

  Arata grabbed the object, hope rising despite himself. Maybe a secret lever to activate some mechanism that would lead to a hidden compartment where he would finally find Mika. Maybe––

  Just a book.

  His disappointment was immediate and crushing. The first impulse was to rip the thing apart, tear it into pieces and scatter the remains across the library as catharsis for wasted time.

  But then he looked at it closely.

  What the fuck is this?

  He'd never seen a book like this before. The cover was in deplorable condition, decayed almost beyond recognition, but fragments remained visible beneath the damage.

  Two angels stood face to face; one held what seemed like a trumpet, and the other bore an unknown object, not fashioned for this world nor bound to its measure. Around them were scattered many sigils and forms, still discernible though partly blotted out, set in unequal sizes as if written and unwritten by the same hand. At the very summit of the cover was placed the title, The Sun of Knowledge. Looking at the book slowly decayed rational thinking.

  Despite his sharp mind, Arata couldn't form any hypotheses about what the cover depicted. He couldn't construct theories about the figures' purpose or the sigils' meanings. His mind simply refused to engage with the information, any idea he tried to form immediately aborted.

  Their existence intrigued him, but nothing more.

  Then Arata realized something that he should have noticed sooner.

  It was the first book he'd actually looked at since entering the library.

  He had no idea what kind of books filled this space. Thousands of volumes surrounded him, and he hadn't examined a single one beyond surface-level searching.

  Why hadn't he thought about it?

  Arata turned and walked to the closest bookshelf, pulling down a book at random. Then another. And another. He moved through the sections quickly, checking titles, opening covers, rapidly skimming through the contents.

  What the hell?

  Arata wasn't a literature enthusiast, but his general knowledge was pretty good. He had read widely across subjects, encountered hundreds if not thousands of different texts during his research, absorbed information from dozens of academic disciplines.

  Not recognizing even one book among two hundred was unexplainable.

  Every volume was in the same deteriorated state. Covers cracked and faded. Pages yellowed and brittle. Bindings barely holding together. He didn't know where they came from, who had written them, or when they'd been created.

  It was as if these texts didn't exist outside this library.

  Arata set down the book he was holding and started thinking.

  He recalled titles he'd seen while searching, trying to construct patterns, identify common themes that might indicate origin or era.

  The titles were the following, or at least those he could actually identify:

  The Assassin's Prayerbook.

  Blood & Eucharist I.

  The Book of Unanswered Prayers.

  The Book of Unanswered Prayers.

  The Book of Unanswered Prayers.

  The Breviary of Fear.

  The Forgotten Names.

  Creation of Life I.

  Creation of Life II.

  The Crown of the Silent King.

  The City of Unceasing Prayer.

  Necronomicon.

  Litanies of Love and Torment.

  Studies of the False God.

  The Fellowship of the Bound Oath — Fragment II.

  The Knights of Sacred Penance.

  The Sun of Knowledge.

  Judging by the state of the books and the titles, Arata estimated some were written around the fourteenth century, probably in Western European theocratic kingdoms where religious texts dominated literary production. Others appeared to originate from medieval Arabic scholarship––Arabic script visible on spines, geometric patterns characteristic of the region. A few seemed connected to destroyed temple archives in dynastic China, characters written in variants that predated standardization.

  Most had significant portions missing. Pages torn out, entire sections degraded beyond legibility. Paper degraded through hygroscopic deterioration, the phenomenon that resulted in moisture absorption breaking down cellulose fibers over centuries until text simply vanished, leaving blank yellow pages. The ink faded through photochemical reactions with light exposure, and the bindings dissolved as animal-based adhesives lost molecular cohesion.

  The recoverable content fell into several categories.

  Religious texts dominated––prayers, theological arguments, descriptions of rituals that seemed designed to contact entities Arata had no context for understanding. Others presented theories about life's creation, cosmological models that science had disproven centuries ago. Some were simply biographies of adventurers and explorers whose names had been completely erased from historical record.

  But two books resisted comprehension entirely.

  The Necronomicon, written in archaic Latin that predated classical forms, and Studies of the False God, whose language Arata couldn't even identify.

  These gave him the same feeling as the first book, The Sun of Knowledge––that sensation of his mind refusing to engage, thoughts sliding away before forming coherent analysis.

  Looking at their covers felt like staring into something vast and hostile. His brain actively rejected the attempt to understand, as if processing that information would cause fundamental damage to his mind.

  Arata returned the books to their shelves and left the section, then the library entirely.

  Right before stepping through the exit, he glanced back at a wooden plaque mounted above the doorframe:

  E–EN

  A letter was missing. Probably damaged over time, leaving only fragments behind.

  Arata walked into the main hallway and paused.

  Maybe it meant “Eden”.

  The word hung in his mind, heavy with implications he didn't want to bother with too much. He had other priorities.

  He kept moving, leaving the library behind, but the feeling followed him into the corridor. That sensation of energy gathering around him, of information that resisted understanding, of books that contained strange knowledge that couldn't be processed.

  The ship's engines hummed below his feet. He heard distant conversation echoing from upper decks.

  And Arata couldn't shake the certainty that he'd just interacted with something he wasn't supposed to find.