Chapter 232: The Library
While the strike was running for their lives inside the forest, back in the village, the guild hall felt strangely hollow in the mid-morning light. The usual noise of adventurers talking, laughing, and planning quests was entirely missing from the guild hall. Only a handful of remaining adventurers and staff moved around the large room.
Pell stood near one of the long tables, going over a report with two older staff members. The absence of Rhuvia, Vessa, and the other veteran adventurers was as noticeable as a missing wall.
Lys stood beside Pell, listening to the morning report about everything he needed to know. Shelter, food, guards, alternating schedule, everything. To him, all of it still looked stable. The guards were rotating properly. No movement had been spotted from the forest yet. Lys nodded along, but his mind kept drifting to other things, as there was nothing where he was actually needed for once. It was as if Vessa had thoughtfully asked him to be in charge of things, knowing he wouldn’t be needed for anything.
That was the kind of feeling he was getting with this whole situation.
Knowing he won’t be needed here at this rate, he had already sent Selene to the church to speak with her father about getting permission to use the library. While he waited, he checked in with Pell about how long the food supply would last and if anyone had sent any kind of messages from the shelters. Pell answered calmly to all his questions, with his usual steady self, but for some reason, the guy looked a little more tired than normal. Probably because of the lack of sleep last night, Lys guessed.
Finally, before Lys really was getting sick of waiting around here without anything to do, Selene returned through the guild doors. Looking at him, she gave a small nod. “Permission granted. Father said we can use the library as long as we need. Let’s go.”
Lys turned to Pell as he got up from the bench he was sitting on. “Well, Mister Pell, we’ll be at the church library if you need us. Send someone over there if anything changes on the walls.”
Pell gave a short nod. “Understood, lad. Stay sharp.”
Lys and Selene left the guild hall and walked the short distance to the church. As he walked, Lys noticed that, though there were too few shops open today, at least people didn’t seem to be that much in panic, considering there was a possibility that their entire livelihood, or even their lives, were at risk because of monsters.
For this calm atmosphere, Lys was very grateful, because even if he hated not being able to contribute to this crisis in any way, being bored out of his mind on top of it, he still didn’t want the hassle of handling a panicked horde of people.
Just thinking about it was stressful for him.
While thinking about this kind thing, they reached the church building.
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The library was a little bigger than Lys had expected for a small village church. It sat in a side room off the chapel itself. Shelves reached from floor to ceiling, filled with books and scrolls. The smell of old paper and lamp oil filled the air. Priest John had clearly taken good care of the place. Everything looked organized by category, though the system only made sense if you had grown up using it.
They started searching right away. Lys couldn’t read the language well yet, so he focused on looking at illustrations and markings on the spines. He pulled out anything that looked like it might be relevant and handed it to Selene.
Most of the books on the weapon section covered standard enchanted weapons, swords, spears, axes, and wands. Nothing about bows appeared for a long time that they searched for.
After nearly an hour of searching, Lys finally paused and looked at Selene. “Are enchanted bows really this rare that there is not even a single book about them?”
Selene set down one of the books she was holding and thought for a moment. “Well, It’s not exactly my area, but from what I’ve heard, yes. Swords and most weapons are straightforward because the enchantment lives in the blade or on the tip of the blade itself. The part that does the actual work. But bows are different. Even in a normal enchanted bow, the bow isn’t really the weapon. The arrow is. A properly made enchanted bow creates its own arrow from mana when the string is drawn. That means the enchantment has to do something that isn’t simple. It has to generate something from nothing. That’s closer to creation magic, which is at the edge of what the four pillars of magic can do cleanly. Only higher-tier enchanters usually work on bows, I heard.”
Lys absorbed the information quietly. It made sense with what he had seen so far.
So, with this understanding, he once again kept looking through the shelves.
Then, finally, after some more minutes searching through countless more books, his hand stopped on a book with a bow illustration pressed into the leather cover. It looked different from everything else. He pulled it out and handed it to Selene.
She read the title and her eyes widened slightly. “Ohh, you found it. An encyclopedia of enchanted bows. Old, but it looks comprehensive. This is what we need, I guess.”
But after finding the said book, the real problem became clear right away. The book was thick and dense with text. There was no way Selene could read the whole thing out loud to him in any reasonable amount of time. Without knowing exactly what to look for, they would waste hours on useless parts.
Lys stood there for a moment, staring at the book in her hands. He had been carrying this secret since the day he received the cursed bow. The system message, Tresta’s curse, his promise to lift it- he hadn’t told Selene any of it. Not because he didn’t trust her. There had simply never been a good moment. Then the dungeon break started, and the right time never came.
Now it looks like the moment has finally arrived. He saw no other choice but to tell her everything.
Lys took a slow breath. He pulled out a chair at the library table and sat down across from Selene. She looked at him, waiting, knowing it was time for him to say why he made her search through hundreds of books searching for anything related to just enchanted bows. He met her eyes and opened his mouth to speak.