The Hardback Book That Doesn’t Exist

A small dark room.

A dozen children slept on a large bunk.

All boys of twelve or thirteen.

They were all curled up, not really sleeping soundly, and they didn't even dare to stretch their hands outside the covers.

"Snort!"

The candlelight on the left wall suddenly lit up.

The boy sleeping on the far left, his eyes shaken by the candlelight, curled up under the covers and kicked the boy on the right with his foot.

The boy on the right was kicked and became confused and kicked the boy on the right again.

And so one kicked the other, and the other kicked the boy on the far right against the wall.

"Well ..."

Saul grunted lowly and rubbed his dull aching knee, getting up in a daze and staying frozen for a moment to clear his head.

"Hurry up and go ... You'll be made into flower fertilizer by the Wizard Lord if you're late." The boy next to him reminded him like a murmur.

Saul pressed the old wound on his forehead, the slight stinging pain waking him up as he finally moved sharply.

He quickly climbed out of bed, put on his servant's clothes that were hanging on the wall, pushed open the door to the hut, and walked out.

Outside the door was a long, curved corridor, with doors every few meters on either side of the corridor, and a candelabra lit on each side of the door, doing their best to dispel the ghostly coldness of the corridor with their faint, dim light.

Saul looked over his left shoulder by candlelight.

There hovered a hardback book less than the size of a palm.

"Hasn't it disappeared yet? Maybe it's not a hallucination of mine."

The book had been hovering over Saul's left shoulder since he crossed over a few days ago.

Visible, untouchable, and invisible to others.

Saul had called out to the system and begged the chip, all without getting a response, and in the end, he could only chalk it up to a hallucination from his own head injury.

But the hallucination should not last for so many days and not disappear.

Whether it was a hallucination or not, Saul had his own things to do and didn't have time to keep studying it.

The place where he was, was a wizard tower.

Since crossing over, Saul had never stepped out of this tower.

Moreover, as a servant here, he had to get up at around four in the morning every day to mop the floors of the corridors on the eleventh to thirteenth floors. There couldn't be any obvious stained garbage left on it, or it would be chopped up and used as flower fertilizer.

The job of cleaning the corridors had to be completed before the candle flame turned from a ghostly yellow to a bright white flame, or else, if he bumped into the sorcerer's apprentice who was going out, he might be arrested and experimented on.

Those sorcerer apprentices, all of them look strange, and their temper is also very bad and very quick, as if they are being chased by the Grim Reaper on their asses every day.

Saul's predecessor was smashed to death by a sorcerer's apprentice with a book. The body was left in the utility room and almost disposed of as garbage.

When he crawled out of the utility room with a face full of blood, even the butler almost thought it was haunted.

And that housekeeper, after confirming that he was still alive, immediately assigned him work, and Saul didn't even have time to nurse his wounds before he was sent to work.

Until today.

Memories over, Saul first went to the utility room next to the Chase room and grabbed a mop, bucket, and trash can, placing it on a small flatbed cart and pushing it forward.

The wheels of this cart were supposedly inscribed with a silencing spell to prevent disturbing the wizard apprentices with their incredibly frayed nerves.

Saul had scrutinized the pattern on it two days ago, and had gotten nothing but a mild case of the heebie-jeebies.

He yawned and started the day in the slight cool of the morning.

The corridor was a semi-circle to be exact, with doors every few meters on the left and right.

Those doors had door tags hanging on them, and the characters on top of the tags represented room numbers.

The body that Saul traveled through was literate, and after a few days of exploration, he had retrieved some basic common sense from his shattered memories.

While cleaning the eleventh floor, Saul heard a whimpering cry behind one of the doors.

Whenever the cries sounded, the candle flames on either side of the door would gently sway, and the light and shadows shifted in a way that was incredibly ominous.

Saul tightened his collar, all doze waking up from the cold.

He hastily pretended that he knew nothing, heard nothing, and quickly finished mopping the floor of the place.

There was a weirdo on the twelfth floor who liked to throw garbage at the door.

Hair, torn paper, unknown pieces of meat ...

Saul had taken to walking by and volunteering to go up and clean it up. He took the small shovel hanging by the trash can to collect all the garbage and turned to take it out when he heard a faint scuffling sound.

He turned around in a hurry to see the door behind him opened a small crack, and nothing could be seen behind it in the pitch blackness.

Immediately, Saul felt the hairs on his body stand up in sweat, his hands trembling gently, wanting to run again and fearing that the sorcerer's apprentice in the room would think he was behaving rudely.

He hadn't traveled through this strange and horrible place for a few days, and the thing he had been taught the most was to maintain the utmost respect and humility for all sorcerer apprentices.

Saul was now just a twelve year old with no powers and a skinny body.

A powerful sorcerer's apprentice could hold him down with the move of a finger.

As for wizards, meh, he couldn't meet a wizard with his status.

Saul waited for a while with his heart pounding.

There was no movement behind the door.

With time running out, he kept his guard up behind the door, mopping the floor while keeping a close eye on the crack.

Finally, he stepped through, the door blocked by the curved hallway.

Saul's tense shoulders relaxed slightly as the cart made its way down the ramp to the upper level.

The thirteenth floor.

As a traveler, Saul was more sensitive to this number.

Even if he was originally a materialist, when he came to the weird world with witches and monsters, he still chose to be a bit more submissive.

It was said that the last servant in charge of cleaning died on the thirteenth floor.

Saul had also cleaned the place two days ago and found nothing out of the ordinary, but this floor would still make him feel uncomfortable.

The kind of fear that would still make the hairs on his sweat stand up and his fingers couldn't help but tremble lightly even though it was obvious that nothing had happened.

Saul lowered his head and mopped the floor hard, borrowing physical labor to dispel the uneasiness in his heart.

However, his greatest fear still happened.

While passing the third door, the door ... of the room in front of Saul s right suddenly oozed a pool of bright red blood from under the door.

That blood was bright red, sticky, and had a thick fishy odor.

At a glance, it was not something good.

The blood flowed to the middle of the corridor and finally stopped spreading.

As per the steward's request, Saul had to clean up any obvious filth.

He clutched the mop in his hand, gritted his teeth, and stiffly prepared to step forward.

Just then, the hardback book over his left shoulder suddenly flew to his chest and clattered open.

Saul froze, this was the first time the hardback book had changed.

He was delighted in his heart, could it be that Goldfinger knew that he was in a crisis, so he took the initiative to come out and save him?

Saul glanced at the blood on the ground with his afterimage, most of his attention was on the book.

The hardcover book settled on a blank page, and a few lines appeared on it in rapid succession:

[May 21st, 314th year of the Solstice Calendar.

You were cleaning the hallway floor when you saw a pool of blood oozing from behind a door. Although you feel horrible, in order to complete your task and not be made into flower fertilizer, you stiffly step forward to scrub the floor.

But it's so hard to scrub the floor. Why is there more blood on the floor the more you scrub?

You looked down and realized that you were bleeding continuously!

The next day, in the garbage room of the wizard's tower, there was one more dried corpse.

Saul's legs went weak and he almost didn't sit in the trash can behind him.

He propped up his body with a mop stick and looked at the blood spread with a palpitating heart.

"So my golden finger is a death crisis warning. It's practical in this scary and eerie place."

It hadn't occurred to him that the hardback book would lie to him.

And what value did he have in being lied to?

Saul pushed carefully, trying to get around the blood, when the hardback book in front of him changed again.

[You fear the unknown puddle of blood and decide not to clean this ground.

In the morning, you are called away by the butler because the floor is untidy.

The next day, new flower fertilizer is added to the flower room and you are very pleased with your smelly new form.]

Sol: "..."

Shit!

What's the alternative, death?

(End of chapter)