Chapter 882 — Fragments of an Ancient Book
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
This was the last library in Frostgate City that had yet to be catalogued and sorted. Most of what was stored here were manuscript copies of books gathered in various eras, along with "books of the faithless" having nothing to do with Yaochen doctrine. Such books were held in little regard in Xuanyuan City, and so their storage conditions were rather poor: the ancient arrays that filtered the air in the library labored like a broken bellows, and the blessing effects on the shelves meant to slow the books' moldering and weathering were patchy and incomplete. Many precious materials that might have been saved had thus slowly crumbled to wreckage in that sunless gloom—and to rescue these precious books, the finest bookbinders and copyists and grammarians of the Luan region had all been assembled together; even so, progress here remained the slowest of all.
Fortunately there was progress every day; more and more precious materials were being discovered and restored, or copied, duplicated, or transferred to new media before they were utterly destroyed.
Just then a church acolyte in a short gray robe came hurrying over from the side and bowed his head respectfully before Sevin Terry. "Archminister, we've found a book—it looks rather strange."
Archminister—that was the new title after the church's reorganization, replacing the former cardinal bishop or diocesan Yaoxi priest. Sevin Terry had never imagined that one day he would occupy such a seat, but given that the bishopric of Saint Sunil had all been martyred in a single day, that most regional bishops had been driven out, and that the southern diocese's clergy above the middle ranks had been reshuffled from top to bottom, it was simply unavoidable that a priest in Mingyuan City with both seniority and sufficient progressive credentials should rise through successive promotions within a few years to become Archminister.
"A rather strange book?" Sevin frowned. "Take me to see it."
A book lay spread open on a worktable between the shelves; the dust and mildew on its surface had already been cleaned away once, and the smell of some alchemical reagent drifted in the air. Beside it lay neatly arranged reagent bottles, copying implements, and the tools for restoring old books—scrapers, tooth boards, slips of parchment—which made the book on the table look like a corpse awaiting dissection: all around were the instruments of an autopsy, and the menders and copyists were waiting for this corpse to speak its secrets.
Sevin Terry shook his head and flung that far-fetched nonsense from his mind. After confirming the book's condition with the mender beside him, he sat down, carefully turned the pages, and asked the man next to him, "What have you found?"
"This is a book pieced together—the collector seems not to have understood its complex and profound origins, but treated it like some rustic chronicle, crudely stitching several wholly unrelated fragments together," said a gray-haired scholar standing nearby. "At first we noticed only the few rural tales at the front and some annotations a down-and-out noble had made in the margins, and we nearly missed what came after..."
A crudely pieced-together book—Sevin Terry was no stranger to such things. Impoverished nobles in remote places did this sort of thing; they were no cleverer than the peasants in the fields, yet they had to maintain their aristocratic dignity and their "image of wisdom," and collecting and binding scattered, lost fragments of books was one of their ways of displaying their learning and aristocratic pedigree—and yet true restoration of fragments was work only a deeply learned scholar could do. All those ignorant fellows could manage was to cobble together a batch of battered books they could not even understand themselves.