"Khadgar, my lord. The young man responded.

"It's the new assistant," said the old mage, "of course, sorry, my memory is a little vague, and I don't know if my memory is real. So many things have happened over the years, and I don't know what will happen in the future. ”

"Is there anything you can help with, my lord?" Khadgar asked.

The old mage seemed to think carefully about this for a moment, and then said, "That library, young trust. How's things going in the library?"

"Shun lì," Khadgar said, "quite shun lì." I've been busy sorting books and falling papers. ”

"Ah, by discipline or by author?" the astral mage asked.

Those who want human lives and those who don't, Khadgar thought to himself, but he said, "I think it's by subject." A lot of books don't have writers. ”

"Uh-huh," Medivan looked satisfied, "the name represents the glory and credibility of a person, and even the work that the name does not dare to sign is not trustworthy, very good, continue to insist." Sue me, what do the mages of Kenrito think of King Lane, have they mentioned him?"

The progress of the classification work is as slow as the melting of a glacier, but Medivan doesn't seem to care about the time it takes to complete or even the matter of tidying up the library itself. In fact, he seemed to make a pleasant and gentle routine surprise at the fact that Khadgar was still alive every morning, and then after a little talk about progress he moved on to something else that was of more interest to him.

"Speaking of libraries," he would say, "what are the plans of Kenrito's librarian, Querrigan?"

"What do the people of Lordaeron think of the Elves, and have they ever been there?"

"Is there a legend in Violet City about a man with the head of a bull?"

One day in Khadgar's second week here, Medivan suddenly didn't show up again.

"Gone," Moros explained.

"Where have you been?" Khadgar asked.

The old butler curled up, and Khadgar could even hear the bones in his body loosening: "He's not someone anyone can tell. ”

"What the hell is he doing?" Khadgar asked.

"No one can tell. ”

"When will he be back?"

"No one can tell. ”

"Is he so relieved to leave me alone in the Tower?" Khadgar asked, "and he's not afraid I'll ...... his coveted books?"

"I can stand by and watch you," Moros said, "if you need to." ”

Khadgar shook his head, but he remembered something else: "Moros?"

"What's the matter, young sir?"

"Those illusions ......" the young man didn't know how to say good.

"Do you want a blindfold?" said the old servant.

Khadgar shook his head again: "Are they revealing the future or the past?"

"Yes, I mean the ones I noticed. But usually I'm "Moros Dao," and I'm used to ignoring, ignoring. ”

"So those images of the future, will they really come true?" said the young man.

Moros let out a creepy exhale. Khadgar thought it could only be that he was taking a deep breath: "In my experience, yes, young sir. Cook once saw me break a piece of crystal in a vision, so she hid it all. A few months later, the owner suddenly wanted the crystal to use. She just moved it out, and two minutes later I broke it by mistake. Completely unintentional. He sighed again, "The next day she went to get those quartz glasses." Anything else?"

Khadgar didn't say it at the time, but fell into deep thought as he went to the library. He has done his best to organize the library to the present time. The sudden disappearance of Medivan left him feeling very empty and losing his further direction.

The young future apprentice enters the library. Half of the room is now stacked with books (and fragments of books) that have been presumed "safe" by crickets, and the other half is stacked with those deemed to have traps (which are also usually preserved in relative integrity).

There were noticeably fewer sheets of paper and unopened letters on the larger tables, which were stacked into two semi-regular piles. The bookshelves were now completely emptied by him, like a prison with no prisoners.

Khadgar's next step is to start sorting the papers, but apparently getting books on the shelves is relatively simple. The problem is that most books don't have titles, or they have titles but the covers are peeled off, torn, worn, and simply unrecognizable. The only way to confirm the contents is to open them.

And this will cause the mechanism to be activated again. Khadgar glanced at the burnt marks on the floor. Shook his head.

He began to observe, first looking at books with traps, then turning to those without traps, and finally finding what he was looking for—a book with a key on the cover.

But it was locked, and a long loop of heavy metal latched around it, locking a lock. Khadgar searched through the library and couldn't find a key, but that wasn't all that strange. The seal is very strong, but the cover of the book itself is a sheet of metal covered with a red leather cover.

Khadgar tried to pull the metal plate out of the sleeve, but the big lock tied them tightly. Eventually, by the scrape of his knife. Khadgar finally got the book out of the lock, and it didn't tick horribly when he brought it home.

Khadgar glanced at the cricket on his desk, which didn't have any warning of danger.

Hold your breath. The young mage opened the thick book, and a bookish scent peculiar to ancient books rushed into his nose.

"Traps and Locks," he read aloud, the ancient characters were rather difficult to read, "as ...... What makes a great ...... Protection Mechanism...... Crack...... He who. ”

Khadgar moved the chair in the room (shorter than before since he sawed three of his legs short to keep his balance). Began his reading.

Medivan had been gone for two weeks, during which time Khadgar had taken the library into his own entirety. He got up early every morning for breakfast, gave Moros a few perfunctory remarks about the progress of his work (in fact, neither the old butler nor Cook showed any interest in the matter), and then buried himself in the treasury. Lunch and dinner would be delivered to him, and he often worked late into the night with the light blue glow of the planetar.

He also gradually adapted to the special environment in the tower, and various visions were often reflected in the corners of his eyes, one of which would disappear when he turned to pay attention. There are often unfinished words floating in the air. Sometimes there is a sudden chill, or an inexplicable change in the air current, as if the doors and windows have been suddenly opened. Occasionally, the tower itself sighs in the wind, and the tower's ancient rock has endured countless centuries. It was already old before it was built.

Slowly, he began to learn one thing, and that was to crack the trap that covered the most valuable books in the library. The study has been helpful in his recent collation work. He quickly became an expert at cracking and erecting spells and heavy traps, just as he had done with the secrets of Dalaran's heavy gates. In fact, there are many commonalities between the two. For example, in order to avoid detection, he needs to create the illusion that the trap is still unsolved in the cracked book. Deciding how to crack a trap, whether it's powerful or a small trap or completely unprotected, is only half the battle.

The books that he had cracked by all means and with that dexterous knife were far beyond his knowledge. Their content was already at the highest level, and Khadgar was determined to understand them one day, either with his own knowledge or from Medivan.

When he thought back to it much later, he was still puzzled. What the hell is this library for? No matter how you look at it, it seems that he has never really used it except for throwing precious books and old stationery on the floor. The mages of Kenrito are basically more or less protective of their archives and materials, and they will definitely hide the most precious ones well. But Medivan threw everything together as if he didn't actually need them at all.

Unless it's a test, Khadgar thought, one that keeps this future apprentice in the dark.

Now that all the books have been put back on the shelves, the most valuable (and at the same time the most unsightly) ones are placed on the upper floors and protected by chains, and the lower ones are filled with folktales, histories, diaries, and other books. Other scrolls are placed here, ranging from the most mundane Stormwind item purchase and sale slips to the most precious epic records, and finally the information about Egwen, the mother that Medivan claims to be, of particular interest to Khadgar.

If she did live for eight hundred years, she must have been a powerful mage before, Khadgar thought. The spell-protected books on the upper shelves may have more information about her. To date, however, the books had resisted all of his attempts, and attempts to break their seals and mechanisms had not been able to move him any further. Every time he tried to open the books, the crickets that detected the trap always wailed in horror.

Still, there are many other things that can be done. For example, collecting and repairing fallen pages, reassembling loose books, sorting (or at least reading) correspondence. Several recent letters are written in Elvish, and they also include a script that Khadgar is completely unknown to (judging by all sources. Probably some kind of secret word). The lacquer markings on the letters indicate that they came from different parts of the world, Azeroth, Kazmodan, and Lordaeron, and even places that have never been marked on the map. Khadgar saw a vague outline: a large secret organization was communicating with each other in ciphertext letters, and Medivan was one of them......

Several Ancient Grimographs have also been encrypted with this ciphertext, and most of the content has been processed into black language and reversed alphabetically. None of the ciphertext interpretations that Khadgar knew could be used for. Perhaps they organically combined various encryption methods to create their own ciphertext.

As a result, he relied on the elementary tutorials of Elven and Dwarven languages in the library. Finally, one afternoon, Khadgar found his way to decipher the codex—just as Medivan suddenly returned.

Khadgar neither heard nor felt any noise from Medivan, and the air around him suddenly changed violently, like a herd of beasts hiding from the fires of the forest. The young mage turned in his chair to see who it was not Medivan, his broad shoulders filling the foyer, his robes and cloaks churning in the air and the sound of hunting.

"My lord, I'm ......" Khadgar half-stood up in his chair, smiling and preparing to report the situation, only to find that the Master Master's hair was disheveled, and his usually soft and bright green eyes were now staring at him with angry eyes.

"There's a thief!" Medivan shouted at Khadgar, "Someone has broken into the tower!" The astral mage pointed to his assistant and began to chant a spell in a terrifying voice that was impossible for a human to make.

In desperation, Khadgar raised a hand and drew a protective mark in front of him. But in the face of Medivan's spells, all his efforts were essentially nothing more than random gestures of rudeness. A wall of air spawned in front of Khadgar, enveloping him along with the chair. The tomes and tutorials paddled across the table and fell to the ground like ferries in a strong storm. Scattered notes and papers flew and swirled in the air.

Surprised, Khadgar was forced back by the wall of air and hit a bookshelf behind him. The bookshelves trembled, and the future apprentice was afraid that it would fall and undo all the hard work he had worked so far. Thankfully, the bookshelf was just rightly balanced, but the invisible force that pressed against Khadgar's chest grew stronger. (To be continued.) )