Ma Tuan only felt a sudden piercing chill on the back of his neck, causing him to unconsciously tense his shoulders.
This was not right—he was clearly in a tavern deep in the forest, and the warmth of burning oak should have filled the entire space, but at this moment his nostrils were filled with the smell of the cold wind howling through the glacier crevasses.
The coldness that carried with it fragments of ancient ice crystals, mixed with the salty smell of the deep sea, made his temples throb.
He frowned slightly and his right hand twitched involuntarily.
The hand that was moving through his hair continued to ruffle it, the action being so intimate that it made him feel uncomfortable.
Ma Tuan felt that he could no longer bear it and raised his hand to slap away this annoying touch——
The moment their fingertips touched, his blood nearly froze. That was not the feeling of human skin at all.
The temperature under my palm was abnormally low, as if I had touched a hagfish that lives near a hot spring at the bottom of the deep sea. Its slippery skin was covered with a layer of sticky deep-sea mucus.
What was even more terrifying was that at that moment of contact, he clearly felt countless tiny protrusions wriggling under the other person's skin, like some kind of parasite, or like... scales growing under the skin.
Ma Tuan suddenly retracted his hand, and the remaining mucus on his fingertips glowed with a strange mother-of-pearl luster under the kerosene lamp.
He looked down and saw that the skin on his fingertips was slowly turning an unnatural bluish-gray color, like the corpse spots of a drowned person.
What frightened him even more was that when he blinked hard, the marks disappeared again, as if everything that had just happened was an illusion.
"What's wrong?"
A man's voice came from above his head, his tone so gentle that it was almost eerie.
When Ma Tuan looked up, he saw that the other person's pale pupils split into a hexagonal honeycomb structure in the dim light, and each grid reflected his own distorted face.
The shadows in the corner of the tavern suddenly became as thick as ink, and something there made a wet, squirming sound.
Ma Tuan smelled an even stronger scent of the deep sea, mixed with the smell of rotten ship wood and coral skeletons that had been soaked in sea water for thousands of years.
His eardrums began to swell and ache, as if they were bearing the pressure of sea water thousands of meters deep.
"Just call me Sesame Ball..."
The man's voice had an inhuman resonance, as if it came from underwater and overhead simultaneously.
"After all, you gave me that name, cub."
As he leaned over, fine drops of water suddenly seeped out of the wooden floor.
Ma Tuan noticed that the water droplets glowed with a strange blue-green fluorescence under the candlelight, and the shadow of Zhima Wan - it was not a human outline at all, but more like a hybrid of some multi-legged creature and vines.
Nan Song curled her lips behind the bar. The glass in her hand was suddenly covered with tiny barnacles, and tiny jellyfish floated in the carbonated drink.
Time seemed to flow at this moment, but Ma Tuan clearly saw that the hands of the clock on the wall were rotating counterclockwise.
"Is that you?"
Ma Tuan heard his voice trembling.
He suddenly thought of that place, that book, and that afternoon.
He was alone, trapped in the soft abyss woven by millions of ancient books.
The twilight shines through the thirty-meter-thick glacier dome and is refracted by ice crystals into a flowing amber river of light.
The light streamed between the pages, dyeing the yellowed parchment a honey-like gold and making the gilded text glow faintly in the shadows like a sleeping galaxy.
He lay on his back, his hair spread out on the spread-out Atlas of Polar Flowers, each end of which was stained with tiny ice crystals, sparkling like diamond dust in the sunset.
The ice outside the dome is a dreamy cobalt blue, and a forest of frost flowers grows in the cracks.
Whenever the twilight shifts, those icy branches cast ever-changing shadows on the wall of books - what is slowly unfolding at this moment is a camellia tree made of shadows.
The white peach camellia leaves between Ma Tuan's lips are melting, and the sweetness is mixed with the chillness of snow water, and the tip of the tongue is filled with the unique mineral aroma of ancient glaciers.
"Is it tasty?"
The sound seeped out from the spine of "＊＊＃＊；：" like a wisp of mist.
Entire rows of bookshelves were suddenly covered in a thin layer of frost, forming feathery patterns of ice crystals.
Tiny particles of light floated in the air, dancing a waltz with the vibrations of sound waves.
The book wall on the west side began to move silently, and the ancient books automatically made way for a passage, allowing the last ray of sunset to shine on Ma Tuan's hand - an ice-carved teacup appeared there at some point, filled with pink and orange scented tea, and camellia petals floating on the water were the same structure as the frost flowers on the dome.
From deep within the ice came a resonance like whale song.
Frost flowers on the dome suddenly bloomed simultaneously, reflecting a rainbow halo and forming a constantly rotating aurora curtain above the pile of books.
The white mist exhaled by Ma Tuan condensed into tiny words in the air, and was quickly and gently brushed away by an invisible existence.
The entire library was immersed in honey-colored silence, with only the occasional sound of pages turning automatically, as if a transparent figure was gently flipping through time.
"Uh-huh."
He actually didn't even expect it himself.
That was the last time he set foot in the forbidden library.
Even though he still dreams of that afternoon, the sunlight flowed through the cracks in the ice like melted gold, casting tiny spots of light on the ancient books.
He lay among the books, holding the piece of white peach camellia that fell from the "Polar Flora" in his mouth. The moment the sweetness melted on his tongue, he suddenly heard the sound of something shattering in his heart.
The pages rustled, as if the entire library was gently asking questions.
He looked at the slowly moving sunset outside the dome and suddenly realized that he had been waiting for such a moment - an afternoon so ordinary that it was almost sacred, with the perfect sunlight, the perfect silence, and even the musty smell of the pages of the book.
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