Chapter 20 Chapter fifteen

night After breaking into the maze, they see strange visions and inevitably get lost We went upstairs again to the office, this time by the east staircase leading directly to the forbidden area.I held the lamp high and walked ahead, thinking of something Alienardo had said about the labyrinth, anticipating something frightening to come. When we entered the place that should not be entered, I was surprised to find that I was in a small room with no windows on seven walls. Boring, but nothing scary. As I have just said, this room has seven walls, but only four walls have passages, with stone columns set against the walls on both sides, and the entrance of the passage is quite wide, forming a round arch above it.The other three walls have huge bookshelves standing against the walls, and the bookshelves are full of books and arranged in a very neat way.Each shelf is marked with a number, as are the separate shelves, apparently the same as we see in the catalogue.In the center of the room was a table, also covered with a pile of books.Each book has just a thin layer of dust, showing that someone cleaned them regularly.The grounds are also spotless.Above an archway, the words "Apocalypse of Jesus Christ" are written in cursive script on the wall.Although the font is old-fashioned, the handwriting shows no signs of fading.We afterwards noticed that in other rooms similar cursives had been carved in stone, quite deeply, and the indentations filled with paint, as painters do in church frescoes. ※Bandhammer Academy's E-Book※

We chose a passage to go in, and immediately came to another room with a window in alabaster panels, two dead walls, and a passage—the same passage we had just entered.This passage leads to another room, which also has two dead walls, and the other wall has a window, and there is also a passage.In both rooms, the writing on the wall is exactly the same as we first saw, but the words are different.The first room reads: "Around the throne are twenty-four seats"; the second room reads: "Acknowledge his name before all the angels".As for the rest, although these two rooms were a little smaller than the one into which we had just stepped into the library (in fact, the large room had a heptagonal shape, these two rooms were rectangular), they were similarly furnished.

We go into the third room.There are no books here, and no cursive letters indicating categories.Below the window, there is a stone altar.There were three doors in the room: the one we walked in, another leading to the original heptagonal room, and the last one leading to another room.The room was almost identical to the others, except that the writing on the wall read: "Observe the Sun and Atmosphere," showing the fading sun and atmosphere.From here you can lead to another room. On the wall is written: "The Facts of Riot and Fire", explaining the horror of riots and fire.There is no other passage in this room. Once you get here, you can't go any further, you can only go back.

"Let's think about this," said William, "five quadrangular or somewhat trapezoidal rooms, each with a window, arranged around a windowless heptagonal room connected by a staircase. ...that's a very basic structure. We're in the east tower. From the outside, each tower has five walls and five windows. That makes sense. The empty room is facing east, chorus to the chapel The seats are oriented in the same direction. The rising sun illuminates the altar, which is right and reverent. The only clever idea I think is the use of alabaster panels. The sun shines in during the day, but at night not even the moonlight penetrates .Now let us see where the other two doors of the heptagonal room lead."

My mentor was wrong, and the architect of the library was shrewder than we thought.I can't explain exactly what happened, but when we left the tower room, the order of the rooms became confusing.Some rooms have two doors, some have three.Each room has a window, although when walking to the next room one always thinks one is heading towards the interior of the cathedral.There are the same bookshelves and tables in every room, and the neatly arranged books look the same. A mere glance does not help us identify the location, we can only know the way by the writing on the wall.Once we passed a room marked "Those Days," and after walking around for a while, we thought we were back in that room; but we remembered that facing the window, on the door to another room, was written "Dead "The First Birth of Jesus Christ", but what we see now is "The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ", obviously this is not the heptagonal room we first entered.Only then did we know that sometimes the same word is repeated in different rooms.We find the words "Apocalypse" in two rooms in a row, and the next one says "A star that fell from heaven".

These sentences are clearly from John's Apocalypse - but why they are written on the wall, and why they are arranged in this way, is not known.We also found that some characters were even painted red instead of black, which confuses us even more. After a while, we finally returned to the original heptagonal room (easy to recognize, because it is connected to the stairs), and we went to the right again, trying to follow a straight line through the rooms that entered after entering.After we walked through three rooms, we were faced with an empty wall.There was only one door leading to another room, so we turned around and walked down this passage, and after four more rooms we were again faced with an empty wall.We went back to the previous room, chose an untried one of the two exits, entered another new room, and then returned to the original heptagonal room.

"What's the name of the previous room, the one we turned back to?" William asked. Trying to remember, I felt a white horse running in my mind: "Pure white horse." "Okay, let's find it again." It's not difficult.There, if we don't want to turn around and go back like the previous time, we can only pass through the room called "Glory and Honor of the Nations". Didn't take us back to where we came from.In fact, we passed the "grace of the Holy Spirit" and "heart of wisdom" (as if we had been there not long ago), and then came to a room that seemed to have not been visited yet: "Fire fell from heaven to earth" , but even though we know that a third of the Earth is burned, we still don't know exactly which side of the Eastern Tower we are on.

I took the oil lamp and went into the room below.A giant with teeth and claws wobbled towards us like a ghost. "The devil!" I yelled, turning and throwing myself into William's arms, almost dropping the lamp.He took the oil lamp from my hand, pushed me aside, and stepped forward resolutely, solemnly and proudly.He also saw something and stepped back abruptly.Then he leaned forward again, held the lamp up high, and burst out laughing. "It's wonderful. It's a mirror!" "Mirror?" "Yes, my brave warrior. Not so long ago in the office, you bravely charged against the real enemy, and now you are terrified by your own image. It is your own image that is reflected in the mirror, but enlarged and distorted it."

Holding my hand, he led me to the wall facing the entrance of the room.On a piece of concave-convex glass, I saw images of the two of us, distorted in shape, changing height and shape as we advanced or retreated. "You must have read about optics, right?" William said amusedly. "The man who founded this library must have read it too. The Arabs have the most research on optics. Ahanin wrote a book called "Spectrum", in which he speaks of the power of mirrors in precise geometric figures. Some mirrors, depending on how their surfaces are structured, can magnify the smallest things (my glasses use the same principle) ; but there are mirrors that can reflect things backwards, or obliquely, or two things in the same place; and there are mirrors that can reflect a dwarf into a giant, and a giant into a dwarf."

"For God's sake!" I exclaimed, "then that's what some people say about visions in the library?" "Perhaps. A very clever idea." He read in cursive script written on the wall above the mirror, "'Twenty-four elders seated.' We had seen the inscription earlier, but there was no There is no mirror. Also, there are no windows in this room, but it is not a heptagon. Where are we?" He looked around and walked to a bookshelf. "Adesso, without glasses, I can't see the books What was written. Read me some titles." I took out a book at random: "Teacher, there are no words on it!"

"What are you talking about? I can see the writing on it, read it quickly." "I can't pronounce it. These aren't letters, and they're not Greek. They look like worms, snakes, moths..." "Ah, it's in Arabic. Are there any other books like this?" "Yes, there are many. But here is a book in Latin, thank God. AL... AL-Kuwarizmi, Tabulae'." "Erkuwami's Astronomical Table, translated by Edra of Buzz, a very precious book! Read it again." "Aisha Ali, The Science of Vision; Akindi, The Secret of the Stars..." "Now look at the table." I opened a large book on the table, "Zizhou", and the page I turned to had a very detailed decorative painting on it, and there was a beautiful unicorn. "It's really well drawn." William could see the illustration and exclaimed, "What about that one?" I read: ""Free Marks of Different Genealogies", this book also has beautiful pictures, but it seems a bit old." William looked down at the text: "It was drawn by Irish monks, at least five hundred years ago. On the other hand, the book with the unicorn is a modern work. In my opinion, it is quite French." Style." Once again, I was in awe of William's erudition. We went into the next room, and then passed four more rooms, each with windows, and shelves full of books in foreign languages, as well as works of metaphysics.Then we faced another wall and had to go back.Because these five rooms are connected one by one, and there are no other passages. "Judging by the angle of the walls, I guess we're in the pentagon of another tower," said William, "but there's no central heptagonal room, and perhaps we're mistaken." "But what about the windows?" I asked. "Why are there so many windows here? It's impossible for every room to overlook the outside." "You forgot the central patio. Among the windows we see, there are many windows that look like octagonal patios. If it is daytime, we can see which windows are outside and which are inside by different light. Maybe by virtue of the position of the sun, we can know the direction of a room!" We went back to the room with the mirror, and went to the third door that we didn't seem to have passed.After walking straight ahead through three or four rooms, we noticed a glimmer of light in the last room. I said stiffly, "Someone's there!" "If anyone was there, he would have seen our lights," William said, still raising his hand to block the light.We hesitated for a moment, and the light flickered slightly, but neither increased nor weakened. "Perhaps it's just a lamp," said William, "to convince the monks that the spirits of the dead dwell in the library. We'll have to find out. You stay here and block the light, and I'll go and have a look." Look." I still feel humiliated at the thought of being frightened by a mirror just now, and want to restore Willem's opinion of me. "No, I'll go," I said. "You stay here. I'll be careful. I'm smaller and quicker. I'll just be careful." William agreed.I walked forward three rooms, clinging to the walls, stepping lightly like a cat (or like a novice sneaking into the kitchen to steal cheese—a trick I excel at at Melek), and finally I Go to the threshold of the room where the light shines.I slipped along the wall to the jamb to the right of the door, and peeked into the room.No one was in there, but a lamp was on the table, and the flame danced and smoked.That lamp is not like our oil lamp, it looks like a censer with its lid lifted.Speaking of which, it didn't have any flame, just a little embers, burning something.I worked up my courage and stepped into the room.Beside the censer, a brightly colored book stands on the table.I stepped forward and saw four different colors on the open page: yellow, vermilion, blue and brown.On it was a terrible monster, like a great dragon, with ten heads, and with its tail it swept the stars that trailed behind it from the sky to the earth.Suddenly, I saw that dragon turned into many, the scales on its back became shiny and radiant, flew out of the page, and flew around my head.I threw my head back and saw the ceiling bow down and press down on me.Then I heard a sound like a thousand snakes hissing together, but not scary, almost seductive.Then a woman appeared, bathed in light, and brought her face to mine, breathing into me.I stretched out my hand to push her away, but I seemed to touch the books on the bookshelf on the opposite wall, as if my hand had been stretched a lot.I no longer know where I am, where is the earth, and where is the sky.I saw Berenga standing in the middle of the room and staring at me with an ugly smile on his face that couldn't hide his lust.I stretched out my hands to cover my face. My hands and feet were like those of a toad spider, sticky and webbed.I believe I must have yelled, I had a sour taste in my mouth.I plunged into the bottomless darkness, and then I knew nothing. After what seemed like centuries, I woke up to a rumbling sound in my head.I was lying flat on the ground and William was smacking my cheek.I am no longer in that room, and on the wall opposite me, it is written: "May they rest in peace forever." "Wake up, Adso," William whispered to me, "there is nothing." "There's everything..." I said, still confused, "there, the beast..." "There is no beast. I found you babbling under the table where there was an Arabic Spanish Christian Apocalypse with a dragon drawn on the open page. But I could tell from the smell in the room that you Inhaled something dangerous, so I pulled you out right away. My head hurts a bit too." "But what did I see?" ※Ballet School & Jing School E-book※ "You didn't see anything. It was just a hallucinogenic substance burning in that censer. I could smell it. It was an Arabian drug that the old man on the hill sent his assassins out on a mission. It may be this kind of drug that let them smell it before. This way, the secret of hallucinations has also been solved by us. Someone burns this kind of herb at night, so that people who break into the library will believe that there is a demon guard here. By the way, what did you see?" I'm still kind of dazed and just trying my best to recall my hallucinations.William couldn't help laughing: "Half of what you see is what you read in the book; the other half is your subconscious desires and fears. Certain herbs have this effect. Tomorrow we must talk to Se Talk to Verinus, I believe he knows more than he has told us. It is only herbs, not the magic that the glass master mentioned to us. Herbs, mirrors... This forbidden place was designed by many of the most ingenious Protecting. Using knowledge to hide, not enlighten, I don't like. The sacred library is ruled by a perverted mind. But we are tired enough tonight, let's get out of here. You are not fully recovered, Need some water and some fresh air. It's a waste of effort to open those windows, they're too high, and they probably haven't been opened in decades. How could they think Adelmo jumped from here? ?” William said leaving, as if it would be easy.We all know that there is only one exit from the library, and that is the east tower.But where are we now?We have completely lost our way.We went around and around, I'm afraid we'll never get out of that place.My steps were unsteady and I felt like throwing up.Worried about me, William was troubled by the uselessness of his knowledge.But this walk gave us—or should I say, an idea for him.If we can get out, we'll be back in the library tomorrow with a blackened log, or something to put a mark on the wall. "To find the way out of the maze," William said, "there is only one way. At the first new junction, never seen before, we mark the way we have traveled with three signals. Since at the junction There are marks on the passage at the intersection. If you see that the junction has already been passed, just write down a signal on the passage you have passed. When all the entrances and exits are marked, then you will Go back the way you came. If you come across one or two unmarked entrances and exits, leave two signals on that side. When you pass a single-marked entrance and exit, you mark two more there, In this way, there are three marks for this entrance and exit. You must go through every part of the labyrinth, and when you reach a junction, you cannot go on the passage marked with three marks, unless the other passages are also marked." "How do you know this? Are you a maze expert?" "No, I just told the record in an ancient book I read before." "Did you get out of the maze with this method?" "I've never tried it. But we can try. Besides, tomorrow I'll have glasses, and I'll have more time to read. Maybe it's the swashbuckling that confuses us, and we can learn from books." Arrangements summed up in a rule." "You have glasses? How are you going to get them back?" "I said I will have it, and I will make a new pair. I believe that Master Nicholas must be eager to have such an opportunity to try new things. Besides, there are various sizes, thicknesses and thicknesses in his workshop. There are many different kinds of glass." We continue to wander, looking for a way out.Suddenly, in the middle of a room, I felt an invisible hand caressing my cheek; at the same time, in this room and the next room, there was an inhuman moan, as if a ghost was wandering here swing away.By this time, I should have been prepared for the mysteries of the library, but I couldn't help jumping back in horror.William must have had the same experience as I did, for he was touching his cheek and holding the lamp up high to look around. He raised a hand, inspected the flame that seemed brighter, then licked his fingers and held it up to his eyes. "It's nothing." He said, pointing to the opposite wall, about a person's height, where there were two narrow gaps, and when he put his hand in there, he could feel the wind blowing in from the outside; When you go up, you can hear the wind whistling outside. "Of course, the library must have a ventilation system," William said, "otherwise the air inside will suffocate, especially in summer. Besides, those gaps can also send in proper moisture to prevent the parchment from drying out. Architecture The master's shrewdness can be seen everywhere. Make those slits at a certain angle, so that on a windy night, when a strong wind seeps in through there, it will meet other winds and form a vortex in the room, making the sound we hear .Besides the mirror and the herb, which would make trespassers more frightening, as it was when we didn't quite know it just now. Didn't we think for a second that there was a ghost breathing next to our face? Wait for us I figured it out after I felt the wind blowing in. So, the mystery was also solved. It’s just that we still don’t know how to get out!” As we talked, we walked aimlessly, not even bothering to read the cursive words on the wall.We walked to a heptagonal room we hadn't been in before, passed the adjacent rooms, but couldn't find the exit.We walked back and groped for nearly an hour, not giving any thought to which direction we were.For a moment William decided that we had no hope of getting out, but that we had to find a place to rest and get through the night, hoping that Malachi would find us tomorrow.While we lamented the sad end of our expedition, we suddenly found ourselves in the room adjoining the landing.We thanked God fervently, and went downstairs in high spirits. As soon as we got to the kitchen, we rushed to the fireplace and walked into the hallway of the ossuary, and I swear the skulls were grinning at me like best friends smiling.We went back to the chapel, went out by the north door, and finally sat down happily on the tombstone.The cool night air is like divine balm.The stars in the night sky were shining, and the hallucinations in the library disappeared in an instant. I breathed a sigh of relief and said, "How beautiful the world is, and how ugly the maze is!" "How beautiful the world would be if there were a way to unravel the passage through the maze!" replied my mentor. We walked along the left side of the chapel, past the gate, (I turned my head to avoid seeing the elders of Revelation: "a throne surrounded by a rainbow"!) and through the cloister to the Pilgrim's Guest House. The dean stood at the door of the guest house and stared at us sternly: "I have been looking for you all night." He said to William, "I was in your room, in the chapel...and I couldn't find you anywhere!" "We're following a lead," William said vaguely, unable to hide his embarrassment. The abbot gazed at him for a long time, then said in a low and solemn voice: "I was looking for you as soon as evening prayers were over. Berengar was not present." "What do you want to tell me?" William showed a happy look.In fact, he had now determined who was hiding in the office. ※Bandhammer Academy's E-Book※ "He was not in the pew at Vespers," repeated the Abbess, "and has not yet returned to his chambers. The bell for Matins is about to ring, and we shall wait to see if he will appear again. Otherwise, I'm just afraid that something unfortunate will happen again." Berengar was still absent at morning prayers.