The candle flame flickered weakly.
Lein’s gaze fell on the dense print.
The discussions about rent, profit, and labor value were arranged neatly, like countless ants marching in formation.
His eyeballs moved slowly along the text, line by line, without pause.
The content in the book was incredibly boring—familiar words that turned into something completely different when formed into phrases or sentences, let alone the unfamiliar jargon that made no sense at all, nearly destroying his brain.
But gradually, things changed.
Lein couldn’t say exactly when it started.
Maybe it was when he turned to the fortieth page, or maybe earlier or later.
The originally dry and boring text suddenly became smooth under his repeated gaze.
The content was still uninteresting, but his reading speed inexplicably increased by a large margin.
His eyes swept across a line, and the meaning of those letters automatically flooded into his mind, without any need for deliberate comprehension.
This feeling was too strange.
Lein tried to analyze it.
It was like a state of intense focus, where everything outside was shut out, leaving only him and the page in front of him.
He could hear his own breathing, feel the warmth of the candle flame brushing across the back of his hand, but all these sensations retreated far away, becoming blurry and irrelevant.
His entire mind was absorbed by the text, turning page after page in succession, as coherent as a flowing river, without interruption or hesitation.
He didn’t know how much time had passed.
Maybe an hour, or more.
Lein lost his sense of time.
His consciousness was immersed in the river of text, moving forward with it, not knowing where the end was, nor caring.
When he turned to the last page, his fingers touched the blank paper, and he suddenly snapped back to reality.
‘Finished reading?’
Lein quickly estimated in his mind.
This book was over five hundred pages, each one packed with dense arguments.
Forget understanding, just reading through it word by word would take at least two or three days.
But he had done it.
And it wasn’t skimming—it was a thorough reading, word by word and sentence by sentence.
Lein didn’t have time to think—his hands were already moving.
His right hand closed the book, and his left hand gripped the spine, suspending the entire book directly above the candle flame.
The fire touched the edge of the page.
In that instant, the weak flame leaped up fiercely, attacking the book with extreme ferocity.
Orange-yellow light exploded in front of Lein’s eyes.
The paper curled, blackened, and fragmented.
Flames spread rapidly along the edges of the pages, devouring the dense print.
Lein watched with a pounding heart.
This was in his rented room, full of flammable materials and himself.
If the fire spread by accident, tomorrow’s newspaper would have a small headline about a fire on Ash Lane.
But the flames only consumed the book, ignoring everything else.
Lein stared at his left hand, which was steadily holding the burning spine, only a few fingers’ width away from the flame.
The heat should have burned his skin, but he felt nothing.
The flames only gnawed at the book, ignoring his hand, as if some invisible barrier separated his skin from the fire.
The pages turned to ash one by one.
Black fragments floated in the air for a moment, then fell in a gentle shower, landing on Lein’s knees, on the bed, on his shoes.
When the last page burned up, all that remained in Lein’s hand was a handful of warm ash.
The grayish-white powder was fine like crushed bones, with a faint bitter smell of burned paper.
Lein’s left hand brought the ash to his face, and before he could react, that hand stuffed the ash into his mouth.
Lein: “…”
The taste of the ash was neither good nor bad.
It dissolved on his tongue and mixed with saliva as he swallowed.
The whole process was uneventful—no sharp pain, no strange sensation, as if he had just swallowed a mouthful of water.
There was nothing special about it.
Lein didn’t feel any different in any way.
‘I’ve worked so hard, it can’t be for nothing, right?’
If this hadn’t been done under the control of that existence, he would have thought he was being fooled.
But just as Lein thought that, his right hand moved on its own.
The nib of the dip pen was inserted into the ink bottle and dipped full of black ink.
His left hand spread a stack of white paper on the bed board in front of him, smoothing out the wrinkles with his palm.
Then, the tip of the pen landed on the paper.
Lein began to write.
The handwriting was so neat it didn’t seem like his own.
The curves of the letters, the spacing, the force of each stroke were all just right.
He wrote quickly, the nib scratching against the paper, line after line, page after page.
It was all the content from the book he had just read, starting from the first word of the first page, writing it down word for word, sentence for sentence.
Rent theory, labor value, profit distribution…
All that content which Lein had found excruciatingly boring was now flowing endlessly from his pen tip, without any hesitation or pause.
After an unknown amount of time, Lein put down the pen.
Beside him lay a stack of written pages, the entire book copied verbatim, with speed and accuracy far beyond human limits.
Lein didn’t have time to think about what this meant, nor the energy to feel surprised or delighted.
His body had already picked up the second book.
That book, A Study of Ancient City-States, was opened to the first page.
Lein read on.
This time, he hardly experienced any boring phase.
From the first word, that state of intense focus enveloped him tightly.
Words flowed through his vision like a river, their meanings automatically flooding into his mind.
He turned page after page without interruption or pause.
He was completely immersed.
Outside the window, the sky changed from gray to black, from black to deep blue, and from deep blue to grayish white.
The candle burned to its end, the flame jumping a few times in a final struggle before dying out.
Lein replaced the candle and continued.
In the end, he didn’t know whether his body was moving on its own or being controlled by that existence.
He simply repeated reading and writing, losing himself in it.
Adeline yawned.
Leaning against the headboard, her amber eyes reflected the constantly rotating clock on the card.
The fire in the fireplace had long gone out, and the room was so cold she had to pull the blanket up to her chin.
It had been a long time since Adeline gave that Arcane Card to Lein.
From noon to evening, from evening to late night, and from late night until now, the clock never stopped, but its progress was excruciatingly slow.
Adeline was afraid she might miss something, so she stayed awake until now.
Waves of drowsiness washed over her, her eyelids heavy, and she nearly fell asleep several times.
But each time, she forced her eyes open and continued staring at the hand.
Finally, when the first hint of gray appeared at the horizon, the clock completed its last notch.
Adeline perked up.
The ink that had drawn the entire map began to stir, as if a seed buried in the soil was finally taking root and spreading.
Thus, a brand new world unfolded before Adeline’s eyes.