284 Cardinal Library

Alex walked out of the room a little early and went to talk with Ma Rong.

"Master, are you there?" he asked as he knocked on the door. He didn't dare use his spiritual sense to check inside as that would be intrusive to his master's personal space and a stupid move in general.

"Come in," she said and called him in.

Alex walked in through the automatically unlocked door and saw Ma Rong cultivating on top of her bed.

"What's wrong? You need something?" she asked.

"It's… I'm actually here to talk about Wan Li," he said.

"Wan Li? What about him?" Ma Rong asked with a weird face.

"Wan Li looks like he is really hardworking and genuinely interested in alchemy. But he seems to be held back by his bad memory. I was wondering if I should give him a Spirit cleansing lily or not," Alex said.

"You have more? I thought you used up all?" Ma Rong asked with surprise.

"I was planning to use them up, but for some reason, I can no longer use them. I was going to check about that in today's visit to the library though," Alex said.

"Hmm… Wan Li is a good boy. He will definitely benefit from the lily if he got one," Ma Rong said. "However, those lilies are something you got. You don't need to hand them over to people just because you feel sorry for them. Keep them to yourself. Just because it's not working right now doesn't mean it won't work forever."

"Maybe you just need to break through to make it work again," Ma Rong said.

Alex got to thinking. "I hadn't thought of that. Of course, maybe I need to be in a higher realm and then it will work," he said.

"Okay, I shall do that master," he said.

"Alright. Are you ready to leave? People should be gathering by now," Ma Rong said.

"Hm…" Alex checked the time and saw that an hour had passed. It was time to leave for the library. He and Ma Rong walked out of the room and saw a few disciples were waiting outside the door.

Wan Li had also come out at some point and was waiting with Fan Ruogang and Zhou Mei.

Ma Rong decided to wait for a few more minutes and started walking down the stairs. Soon, the entire group was out of the hotel.

Alex took out the map he had bought the other day and gave it to his master, but she already seemed to be in the know about the location of the library.

"Haha, disciple Yu, you seem to forget that we come here every year. We are more or less familiar with the layout of the entire capital," the second elder said.

Alex felt a little bashful but didn't let it show on his face.

The Library was located right on the South East side of the capital, about 500 meters away from the Royal Palace. Since it was exactly opposite to where they were in the capital, they had a walk a long while before they finally reached the Library.

"Woah," the disciples said when they finally saw the library. Fan Ruogang and Zhou Mei had come before so they didn't show any intense reactions, but others, including Wan Li were very surprised by the sheer scale of the building in front of them.

The library was a 20 story tall building with about 600 square meters of area. The building itself was painted in reddish-brown and had a design aspect that felt both modern and traditional at the same time.

It looked like it was a pagoda-like building, but it didn't have the traditional slopes of the pagoda on each floor.

"The library itself is free and maintained by the Royal Fu Academy at the behest of the Royal Family. You can read whatever you want as long as you follow those rules written on that wall," Ma Rong said as she pointed to a bunch of texts written along the side of the wall.

The disciple walked forward to better see the rules amongst the crowd that was already gathered in front of it to read it.

Alex walked in close as well and started reading it along with the others.

-Welcome to the Cardinal Library-

-Please feel free to read any book, on any floor as it is public knowledge-

- Please be mindful of the other readers and be as silent as you can most of the time.-

-Please do not fight with the other readers on books you might want to read. We suggest you take a first come first serve approach. However, we have multiple books so that shouldn't be a problem.-

-Please do not destroy any books-

-Please do not steal any books-

-Failure to comply with any of these rules will be an indefinite ban from the library, and in worse cases, a punishment from the local law enforcement-

Alex read all of it and was quite surprised at how serious they were with the library. 'It must contain a lot of knowledge in there for them to be this careful,' he thought.

Once everyone had read the books, they walked in. One by one, the disciples entered the library from the front door and looked around in a weird manner each time they did so.

Alex was curious why they acted as they did, but he soon realized why that was. On the gate of the Library was an invisible barrier that constantly checked the Qi of everyone entering the library.

That was probably something to do with checking if the people were violating the rules written outside.

As soon as Alex entered, he looked around and was a little surprised at the sheer number of readers as well as shelves upon shelves of books scattered everywhere.

There were boards hanging from the ceiling that let the readers know the category of the book they contained.

Ma Rong said in a low voice, "Go ahead and do what you want, but be mindful of the rules." She then left on her own towards a staircase as well.