After waking up the next morning, Elric made his way to the royal library without any trouble. At least, not if you didn't count the people standing directly behind him.
Their focused gazes felt like watching an elephant calf surrounded by its entire pack while a hundred lions roamed outside. The guards were so tense that Elric was certain they'd jump into action without wasting a single second the moment they noticed anything remotely suspicious.
"Roy, do you really have to stare at me like this?" Elric finally asked, unable to take the intensity anymore. "We're inside the castle. There shouldn't be any trouble here."
"How could you say something like that, young lord?" Roy responded immediately, his tone suggesting genuine distress at Elric's casual attitude. "Last time, because of our negligence and lack of preparation, you were hurt. Until Lord Ronga returns, we need to be extremely careful."
Elric couldn't help but feel speechless. "To prepare, you need to know about the threat first."
"Yes, exactly!" Roy agreed earnestly. "Now we know that someone evil enough exists in this world who wants to harm our innocent young lord. We won't make that mistake again."
Innocent young lord? Elric thought with internal amusement.
He'd already tried explaining his perspective to Roy many times over the past day, so he didn't expect much progress on this front. The knight's protective instincts had clearly gone into overdrive.
"Okay, but can't you just wait outside?" Elric tried again.
"We still don't know if they sent more assassins," Roy countered immediately. "And we don't know what unique skills they might possess. The previous assassin had some kind of gravity manipulation blessing. What if the next one has something that can directly ignore walls and distance? They could attack at any moment from anywhere."
"Okay, okay, just follow me then," Elric conceded. Truth be told, he was a little worried about this matter too. The memory of that knife sliding into his heart wasn't something he'd be forgetting anytime soon.
A thought occurred to him. "You told me you caught the assassin alive. Did he say who sent him?"
Roy's face suddenly changed, showing clear hesitation. "No... but we already have a guess."
"Oh? Who is it?"
Roy hesitated further, clearly uncomfortable. "I think... we should tell you after confirming it properly. Making accusations without solid proof could make thing more complications."
After remaining silent for a moment, Elric decided not to press further. He could slowly figure it out on his own through research and observation. Pushing Roy when he was clearly under orders not to speak would just create unnecessary friction.
His focus shifted back to his main goal: the library.
They approached a set of enormous double doors made from dark wood reinforced with ornate metalwork. As guards pulled them open, Elric's expectations were immediately shattered.
The huge doors swung inward, revealing two-story-tall bookshelves that contained at least thousands of volumes. Fresh air greeted him, carrying the distinct scent of old paper and something else—something alive and growing.
But aside from the books, nothing in this library matched what he'd been expecting.
The room looked as though time itself had taken root and refused to move.
At the center stood a colossal tree—if it could even be called that anymore. Its trunk twisted upward like the body of a slumbering dragon, bark spiraling in elegant, suffocating coils. The wood was pale, almost bone-white, yet veined with faint shadows that made it feel alive... watching.
Its roots did not burrow into soil. They devoured the room.
One massive root had crushed through the polished floorboards, splitting them apart like fragile glass. Another coiled around a grand, overturned clock whose face was frozen mid-tick, its hands trapped beneath the slow grip of creeping bark. Shelves, ornate frames, and decorative ornaments were being swallowed piece by piece, as though the tree had been feeding on memories for generations.
High above, where a normal ceiling should have been, a vast glass dome arched overhead. Pale light filtered through it, soft and dreamlike, illuminating drifting dust motes that sparkled like suspended stars. The effect was ethereal, almost otherworldly.
From the upper trunk, branches spread outward—long, elegant, and impossibly deliberate in their placement. Despite the destruction below, they carried life. Small leaves sprouted from the gnarled wood, delicate and fresh, in defiance of the ruin surrounding them.
Some branches curled around hanging chains that suspended unlit lanterns. Others pierced through walls lined with crooked picture frames, their contents faded beyond recognition. Vines threaded through the iron fixtures, binding metal and wood into a single, inseparable organism.
A narrow staircase leaned nearby, warped and tilted at an angle that should have made it unusable. Yet somehow, despite how much the tree seemed to be trying to consume everything in the room, it had not yielded at all where it truly mattered.
Every book remained lined up cleanly on the shelves. Every reading surface was spotless, completely free of dust despite the age evident everywhere else. It was as if the tree understood its purpose—to guard knowledge rather than destroy it.
The contrast was striking: chaos and order existing in the same space, destruction and preservation intertwined.
"That's a White Oak," a voice suddenly interrupted from the side while Elric was still taking in the sight. "Planted by your great-great-grandmother, the former Queen Elara."
Elric turned to see an elderly man emerging from behind one of the bookshelves. He was thin, almost fragile-looking, with wispy white hair and spectacles perched on his nose. His robes marked him as some kind of scholar or librarian.
"She was a scholar herself, you know," the old man continued, approaching slowly with a slight limp. "Believed that knowledge should be alive, growing, protected by nature itself rather than locked away in dead stone. So she planted this sapling in the center of her library and infused it with her own mana."
He gestured to the tree with obvious affection. "Over the generations, it's grown into this. The tree protects the books from fire, flood, decay—even from theft, though few know that last part. Try to remove a book from the library without permission, and the branches will... discourage you."