Behind the plaza stood a small, secluded archive. Mist clung to its stone walls, causing the building’s silhouette to bleed into the air, half-dissolved.
Withered vines, like brown skeletal fingers, gripped the masonry where the mortar had crumbled away. The lacquer on the wooden door was a web of cracks, revealing glimpses of pale wood beneath. Only the metal hardware of the handle looked incongruously new—a sign that someone had been using it until very recently.
Asahi rapped on the doorframe, testing the thickness of the timber. Finding no sign of danger, he gave a sharp jerk of his chin, signaling for Koyoi to lead the way.
As the door swung open, the heavy scent of aged paper spilled out—a mixture of mildew, ink, and the faint, honeyed sweetness of wax. It was a stagnant air, thick with the lingering presence of those who had once spent sleepless nights wrestling with these records.
Within the archive lay a mountain of failed endeavors. The shelves soared toward the ceiling, their wooden planks bowing under the sheer mass of paper. There were scrolls, bound volumes, and haphazard bundles of scraps pasted together—all shoved into place without order, as if discarded in a final act of despair.
Koyoi picked up a single bound volume.
A name must once have graced the cover, but that section had vanished as if scorched away, leaving only a dark, brownish stain. She flipped through the pages; the first few entries were filled with meticulous handwriting detailing coordinates and bearings. But further in, the script began to fray and scatter. On the very last page, the record broke off with a single word: Enough.
Koyoi gently returned the book to the shelf. A fine dust of paper clung to her fingertips.
Kuon unrolled his catalog, the azure light from his prosthetic eye sweeping across the stacks of records. The glow crawled along the shelves, tracing each bundle in turn. Characters danced in silhouette against the walls as the light hit the white pages, only to dissolve back into the shadows.
"...Every single one of them is hollowed out," Kuon murmured.
The light of his eye pointed toward a bundle of records shoved deep into the back of a shelf. The edges of the pages had been consumed from the inside out, leaving ragged holes. These were the records of those who had tried to use the power of the Order to fix reality's coordinates in place.
Each attempt at stabilization left another hole in the page.
"Every record in this room shares the same end. Those who sought to define the center of the Order... every last one of them was swallowed by the Void."
"The Void...?"
"As you see. The center shifts. To try and fix it in place is to break the person doing the fixing."
Koyoi looked around at the towering heaps of parchment. Each one was a testament to failure. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of people had come here to try the same thing, only to vanish in the same way.
"...These people were trying to mend the Order, too."
"Yes. What remains here are the diaries of the defeated."
Kuon unfurled a scroll. As the blue light illuminated the text, countless tiny holes appeared between the lines. Their edges were charred.
"By writing, they interfere with the Order. But they consume their own existence in equal measure to that interference. The more you write, the more of yourself you lose. And yet, if you do not write, nothing can ever change."
Asahi leaned back against a shelf, arms crossed. "...So, we're in for the same thing?"
"I cannot say if we will follow the same path," Kuon replied. "But this archive serves as a clear warning."
Koyoi thought back to the book she had just held—the final page that ended with "Enough." That person must have reached the limit of what they could pay for their words. Yet, unable to stop themselves from writing entirely, they had used the last of their strength to scrawl those two syllables onto the paper.
Inside her pouch, the Drop of the Rain God pulsed with a faint rhythm. The deities, which had remained dormant since their arrival in Churyo, were finally reacting to something within this tomb of failures.
Kuon continued to cross-reference his catalog with the archive’s records. Every time the blue light swept a page, the characters of the catalog and the archive overlapped for a fleeting second before pulling apart. He was searching for a match.
"Is there any connection to the names of the holes in Toumimachi?" Koyoi asked.
"I cannot tell yet. However, these records and the names in Toumimachi belong to the same era. It is highly likely that those who left their marks here knew of that town."
Kuon closed the catalog. The blue light faded, and the archive returned to a heavy twilight.
"This place alone is not enough. There must be a core record kept somewhere deeper."
"Deeper?"
"Past the cloisters. At the furthest reaches of Churyo, there is a place where the very seams of the Order lie exposed."
As they headed for the exit, Koyoi stole one last glance at the shelves. A place where hundreds of failures were piled high. Pages full of emptiness. The ghosts of lost words.
This place was a graveyard, but it was also a map that had led them this far. From here, they would have to walk the path on their own two feet.
The three stepped out of the archive. The plaza’s mist struck their cheeks with a biting chill.
In this trial, the three chose the caution of a deliberate procedure over the haste of a blind rush. Kuon began by severing fact from uncertainty, and Koyoi recorded his order in her notebook. To fix the sequence was to guard against the shadows of misinterpretation. In the heat of a crisis, anchoring the first move steadies the whole system more than simply piling on more work.