Jingyi Bo had been eager to abuse her new position as custodian (or, in truth, glorified cleaner) of the library, but there were so many pitfalls involved that she was starting to regret the entire mad-cap scheme in the first place.

The very next day after she had the role handed to her, Bo had gone to the library to scope out some books that might be helpful to her. Anything about advanced mana theory, especially esoteric elements, would really fill in the gaps that the Everchanging Way Sect scrolls and slip had left for her. Likewise, she hoped to find books about martial arts techniques, or spells and formations to expand her repertoire. Unfortunately, an all-you-can-read smorgasbord was not on the menu.

“Jingyi Bo.” A voice had rung out from behind her, causing her to nearly drop the tome in her hand - Bo had barely read a single page. Turning around and attempting to hide the volume behind her back, she came face to face with Elder Hwang.

“E-Elder! I, um, do you, eh, need something?”

“I need you to put that back, Miss Jingyi.” His face was far more stern than usual, and Bo was beginning to understand how an owl’s face might look to a mouse. Doing as she was told, Bo put it back on the nearest shelf. She offered a deep, almost obnoxiously low bow.

“M-M-My apologies, Elder! I traded places with the previous custodian as a favour to him!”

“I am aware of the new arrangement. However, it seems Mr Seo has failed to explain to you all of the rules. … And calm down, Miss Bo! I am not here to do anything as crass as harming you for a bit of light reading. I merely want you to understand.”

Hwang gestured for Bo to follow him to a table, sitting down and motioning for her to do the same. Stiff as a board, Bo creaked into place and stared at him pale-faced. She would have trembled with fear, if she wasn’t afraid such a flagrant act would annoy him further.

“This repository of knowledge is vast, and holds many things acquired at great cost. Only last year, the three nations might have fought a war for some of the teachings held in this library. For now, we have chosen to restrict access to this place to only the instructors - to better serve our needs in instructing, and fill in the gaps in our own knowledge from other lands.

“While we require someone with … substantially more free time to tend to the more practical matters of keeping books and scrolls in order, understand that it would be a greatly unfair boon to grant to any one student unrestricted access to this place.”

Hwang stroked his beard and smiled meaningfully. Bo nodded her head as if doing it harder would soothe her nerves and save her life.

“For that reason, Miss Jingyi, we cannot have you freely reading the books here at leisure. Mr Seo was quite fond of bringing his own reading to the library, but he did not look into the works here except for … practical reasons.” There was a small smirk on Hwang’s face, and she sensed he was going to start implying things.

“We understand that it may be difficult to categorise some volumes without knowing their contents, or perhaps one might need to open said books to repair damaged paper. There may even be circumstances in which a book accidentally falls open to a particular passage, and one can’t help but glimpse its contents. Such things cannot be helped, and we will overlook them.”

Is he giving me an excuse to sneak a bit of reading in? Doesn’t this smack of favouritism? Or is he about to hit me with a downside?

“We will, however, not overlook dereliction of your duties. There are thousands of works in this place, all suffering from the passage of time. Even now, there are books with pages near to falling out, scrolls becoming threadbare, volumes of works growing faded. You are not just a glorified cleaner, you are an archivist. The instructors expect to find the works here intact and well looked after. While I’m not much for punishments, I’ve heard Qin Zhao can be quite strict about the state of his tomes! Ohoho!”

Bo gulped and, once again, nodded shakily. What Bo was not expecting was for Elder Hwang to place on the table a gemstone the size of her fist.

“Wh-what is this for … ?” 

“I thought, while I am here, I might see how your spiritual technique is progressing. Make no mistake - I am aware of how you have been using it thus far, but always you are using it on mundane things. I wanted to see how you might fare with an unfamiliar material! Consider satisfying an old man’s curiosity your payment for entry to this place. Ohoho!”

Hwang made requests and asked questions of Bo that she realised she had never particularly considered. Perhaps a mage’s perspective on spiritual cultivation was an example of why this academy even existed. While Bo had little trouble changing the shape of the gemstone (which she discovered, to her great worry, was a rather valuable lump of ruby), some of his questions were a bit more difficult.

“What elements make up this gem?” Hwang asked with a small smile.

“At its most basic, gems are filled with elemental Stone, so Earth and Yin. But … I suppose you wouldn’t ask me something so basic, Elder?”

“Yes, quite. How confident are you in positively identifying esoteric elements?”

Bo frowned. She didn’t really get to work with those - they were called esoteric for a reason. However, she recalled something she had read in one of the Everchanging Way Sect scrolls - namely, that awful, dry list of elements and their corresponding physical manifestations. Looking deeper with her technique, she concentrated.

The first step (in many meanings of the phrase) to the Endless Steps of Transformation technique was to effectively wrap whatever you wanted to affect in qi. The feedback would help clarify exactly what was being affected, without which it would be entirely impossible to change anything in a predictable manner. Bo’s awakened mana sense gave her a slight perk, in that she could ‘look’ from two directions, gauging the shape of the matter with her qi and the elements it contained with her mana sense. Mana was everywhere, and mana had elements, and elements were matter, sort of. It all wrapped itself together in some strange way that still eluded Bo’s understanding.

Jingyi Bo typically glossed over this step (she could metaphorically ‘step’ past it), but an early training exercise for the technique involved using that part of the technique to just stare. With the ruby in her hands, Bo ‘stared’. Luckily for her, she already knew the name of what she was looking for, and through this chance encounter she had a ‘face’ to go with that name. Jostling about on some other ‘layer’ (Bo couldn’t think of a better way to describe it, except that it was ‘below’ the normal elements) was Wealth, an esoteric element that clung to valuable objects. Bo couldn’t tell if there was a lot of the stuff in there, but it didn’t seem like much. Esoteric elements were rare, after all, so it stood to reason that this might have been quite a bit. Or possibly this ruby wasn’t ‘valuable’ enough?

Half an hour had passed in quiet contemplation of this gemstone, and Bo looked up from it just in time to see Elder Hwang’s reappearance. The man had evidently thought that his physical form being stuck there staring at Bo wasn’t much of a good use of his time.

“There’s Wealth inside this gemstone,” Bo couldn’t help but smile, “An esoteric element.”

“Very good! It took you, well, quite a lot longer than I expected to figure that out, but I’m very impressed. Now, I want you to extract it.”

Bo blinked. “E-Extract it? But that would turn the ruby into worthless stone.”

“It is not magical in any way - to me, it is hardly more valuable to me than a pebble found on any roadside. What is valuable to me is to see how your technique works.”

With Elder Hwang staring expectantly at her, Bo gulped. She took the ruby in her hand and concentrated once more. Her awareness and her qi isolated the Wealth essence within the gem, basically catching it in a bubble. Slowly, steadily, she drained away tiny motes of Wealth and cycled it through her meridians into her soul. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t simply sit in the opened meridians that were being used for essence storage - it was slurped greedily into the element collector residing in her dantian. I hope I can get some of that back when I need it, Bo sighed internally.

As she extracted the essence, two things happened. First, her understanding of Wealth expanded. Passing the stuff through her soul gave her a better glimpse at what exactly it was, and she realised that wealth was largely arbitrary - an excess of things considered valuable would create, in the minds of people, wealth. Thus, the esoteric element of Wealth would come into being. Second, the ruby was becoming distinctly less ruby-like.

By the time she was done, the once gleaming lump of beautiful red crystal was now a dull, grey, slightly flakey stone. It seemed quite weak and crumbly, and Bo knew immediately why - she had removed matter from within it that gave it a valued appearance, and now it was riddled with holes where that had been. It was like only a worthless husk remained where the gemstone had been.

Hwang took the husk with great interest. “Extremely fascinating. All of that essence slipped straight into that artifact of yours. My, I would rather like to study it some day! I don’t suppose it can be removed?”

Bo paled a bit. “It’s, um. I think it’s part of my soul now? I’m not particularly clear on the matter.”

“Oho! Has it attempted to take anything from you that you haven’t freely given? Spoken with you? Tried to control your actions?” Hwang looked excited, and Bo realised that, yes, it had done all those things. Sort of.

“It, um, collects essences, I think. It’s called a--” Bo coughed suddenly. “Erm. It’s a-- Ack!”

A small coughing fit assaulted her body, and Hwang waited patiently for her to finish. “Artifact got your tongue?”

“I, um. Guess so?” Jingyi Bo attempted to name the thing - the world index - one more time. Every time she did though, it felt like her body was physically incapable of saying it.

“How intriguing. It doesn’t seem to be harming you, so I will refrain from attempting to extract it for now. I would refrain from telling others about it - they may not share my purely academic interests.” Hwang’s words dripped with warning, and Bo nodded emphatically. With little more to do, Hwang took the ruby-husk, bid Bo adieu, and vanished.

--

The next couple of weeks slipped by in relative peace, and with surprising levels of boredom. The Chao gang had all been focusing their time outside of Saoka practice to mental awakenings, which they had all been having surprising trouble with. The rest of the boys were often busy with their own meditation, as they attempted other awakenings themselves - evidently, awakening new disciplines became harder if you practiced one singular discipline for too long.

Izumi had all but vanished, only sometimes showing up for Saoka. She never actually ‘played’ with them anyway, but her absences meant losing her constant, helpful advice. Not to mention, Bo found her heart sinking slightly whenever she wasn’t there.

“I’ve been practicing my magic alongside my main martial arts group,” Izumi explained, “Alongside one of the half-spirits, Hyeong Daesung. He’s an absolute prodigy when it comes to magic, and one of Lee Jia’s friends besides.”

While Bo couldn’t help but feel weirdly jealous that Izumi was preferring to spend time with another group, she couldn’t blame her in the slightest. Lee Jia was a name on everyone’s lips recently, especially after her climactic duel with Yan Zhihao. In fact, Izumi’s page on this Lee girl was the most extensive of all. While Lee's ‘relationship’ connection was an unusually certain match with one of her Yamato friends, the amount of other people connected to Lee in some way was staggering. A Goryeon princess of the Seong dynasty, nearly every half-spirit of note, a sizable chunk of the Yamato martial artists … and barely any Qin students.

Lee aside, this Hyeong character’s teachings did filter through from Izumi to Bo, though only tangentially. In Hizashi’s house, the three girls practiced talisman-drawing using Izumi’s guidance - Hizashi Kokoro had undergone her mana awakening, but seemed to have little interest in her spiritual one for the time being. An unusual technique, using Hyeong’s startling genius and the martial knowledge of Izumi’s other allies, lead to an interesting kind of mana shield talisman that could (with some work) protect against even physical attacks. Not that it would really work for Bo, as it required a kind of layering. Still, she knew how to make one, and her unique method of transforming talismans into their shape instead of drawing them was getting way better.

Without getting to see her friends particularly often, Bo threw herself into her work at the library. True to Hwang’s promise, she was able to get away with reading little snippets of books as she did her duties keeping the place clean and the volumes intact. It meant slow reading, but it was a boon that no one else had right now. There was even a kind of indication of how much she could get away with reading - if she looked too long, paused in her duties for just a few seconds longer than necessary to finish a paragraph, a sense of dread would slowly fill her. It was as though an eye was slowly turning towards her. Every time, Bo would simply put the book back on the nearest shelf - she did not want to find out what happened if she was ‘seen’.

All that reading had a couple of tangible effects. Mostly, Bo had some better ideas about mana theory and some greater conceptual images of certain elements. It wasn’t anything particularly actionable, but it would improve her ability to transform between certain elements. She also had picked up snippets of useful information for her other disciplines - descriptions of formations that Bo might one day be able to inscribe, or supplementary maneuvers for her martial arts. Nothing extremely useful, but it was all slowly building to make her better at what she could do.

The other, rather less desirable effect was the state of the library itself. Jingyi Bo’s technique could repair tears and holes in works, and she had quite thoroughly eliminated dust from corners of the library no one had visited since it was built, but her haphazard method of putting books back when she was about to be in trouble for reading them meant that the place had become a mess. Under Seo In-Soo’s custodianship, the library was a well-organised, neat and tidy place. Under Jingyi Bo’s care, everything was scattered. With the sole exception of the forbidden section, which Bo was told to never enter for any reason, her secretive reading and subsequent discarding had entirely ruined any semblance of organisation the library ever had.

“Man,” Jingyi Bo sighed, staring around at the mess, “I sure hope no one needs to find anything in here in a hurry.”