Within the hour, the archive had organized itself into two groups without anyone having to announce the division.
Sam was at a reading table with Victor and Thomas. Sam had Heart of Storms open in front of him. Victor had Mountain Foundation. Thomas had Forge's Root. All three of them were reading the same way — slowly, carefully, making mental notes.
None of them had said so explicitly. But the arrangement was clear — three people who had chosen paths they knew would be slow, who were going to build the foundations first and come back for everything else later.
The other five had drifted toward the immortal arts section.
Maya led. She'd been in the archive longer than anyone except Claire, and had a rough mental map of what the shelves held — though "rough" was generous. There was more here than she had read, much more than she had read carefully. Most of what she knew came from what Claire had mapped the night before and what she'd skimmed in the early morning session.
"There's more than I realized," she said, standing in front of the section. The shelves stretched further than any of the others. Dozens of categories. "He's been expanding this overnight."
They started at the nearest shelf.
The first discipline was Formations.
Claire pulled the overview volume and read the opening section aloud for the group.
"Formations are dynamic patterns that require active cultivators' energy to maintain. They can create defensive barriers, illusions, or enhanced attacks — mostly during battle." She looked up. "So it's not immediately useful to us."
"Arrays might be, though," James said.
She put the volume back.
James pulled the arrays overview from the next shelf down.
"Arrays are static patterns inscribed into physical space. They passively channel spiritual energy without requiring the cultivator to input anything once the array is established. They're no less powerful than formations in raw effect — permanent, self-sustaining, and scalable across large areas. The trade-off is setup time." He kept reading. "Common uses include cultivation acceleration within a defined space, slow terrain modification over long periods, environmental conditioning for spiritual plant cultivation, defensive barriers, illusionary barriers, killing arrays. Arrays are made for terrains and bases."
June looked at her son. "That sounds complicated."
"It is. But it starts being useful from low-level arrays, made by cultivators at a lower stage than the usage assumes. The problem for us is the environment. We're in a sparse spiritual environment, and on top of that we don't have any of the spiritual stones the text mentions as the standard energy source. Not even low-grade ones."
Ruth pulled a different volume from a nearby shelf and frowned at it for a moment before saying, "This spiritual farming section might help with that. It says some spiritual plants require very specific environments to grow, and then later it mentions that certain arrays can use spiritual plants as an energy source to modify the environment around them." She looked up. "So maybe we grow an ordinary spiritual plant, whatever ordinary means here, and use it to power an array that produces spiritual stones? Or something close to it?"
James considered that. "We can't be sure. We'd have to look into both properly."
June went to Ruth and started reading the spiritual farming volume over her shoulder — it pulled on her own lifelong interest in growing things, and Maya drifted toward the same shelf a moment later.
While reading through spiritual farming, they came across the adjacent shelf — Alchemy.
"Pills and potions," Maya said. "Alchemy can only be practiced from Stage 4 of spirit Gathering onward — a cultivator needs enough spiritual energy to properly refine the medicinal effects of plants and other ingredients. But the effects are massive. Basic pills boost median recovery, which extends the cultivation duration a practitioner can sustain in a single session. Higher pills — something called spirit fountain pills — provide raw cultivation energy directly, meaning the same time spent cultivating produces more progress. And there are ordinary pills for cultivators that can almost bring a dead person back to life."
"That's—" James said.
"Absurd. Yes."
"The problem is materials," Ruth said, reading ahead. "Alchemy requires spiritual herbs and plants as ingredients. Ordinary plants can only be used as auxiliary ingredients in some of the lower-grade pills. Spiritual-grade ingredients have to be grown in conditions that concentrate spiritual energy." She kept going. "There's also a side effect the text calls tolerance — a body gets used to the medicinal effect if the same pill is taken too often in too short a time, and the pill stops working. Plus impurities. Unless a pill is transcendent grade, it leaves toxins in the body. Too many pills and the foundation becomes unstable. There are cleansing recipes for that, but of course, those are also pills."
"So everything is interdependent," June said.
"Yes. You need the spiritual plants to make the pills. You need arrays or existing spiritual environments to grow the plants. It builds on itself."
At this point, Victor walked over from the arrays section. The five of them looked at him, curious what had pulled him away from Mountain Foundation.
"Mountain Foundation requires me to grow a mountain," Victor said, by way of explanation. "The stronger and more flourishing the mountain, the faster my cultivation will be. For that, I need a specific terrain-modification array. I came here to find which one."
"You're going to grow a mountain," Ruth said. Her mouth was slightly open. She wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. The world kept getting more absurd the longer this morning went on — if someone had told her any of this a week ago, she would have called them mad and phoned the police. After everything she'd now seen, she couldn't do that. She could only make peace with it and get used to it.
Victor didn't respond to the "grow a mountain" line because Victor did not generally respond to rhetorical questions. He went back to the arrays section to find what he needed.
A moment later James called them from a different part of the immortal arts section.
He was holding a slim volume. "This one looks important. Talismans — expendable paper-and-ink inscriptions that store single-use effects. Defensive, offensive, movement, concealment. Any cultivator who's going to be outside the house carrying protection should have some of these on them. The only requirement to craft them is ink and paper refined from spiritual plants or spiritual animals' blood."
Five heads turned toward him, and all of them simultaneously thought of the same thing.
Gerald.
"Well," June said, with her most provocative tone, "I would like to see you try, James. Considering the love Gerald has for you, I'm sure it'll be easy."
James felt his lip twitch at his mother's sarcasm.
Maya and Claire let out small chuckles. Ruth just shook her head — clearly expressing how impossible the whole idea looked.
Thomas came over at that moment.
June spotted something in his walk and asked, "Does your cultivation method require one of the immortal arts as well?"
He nodded. "The method is made for craftsmen. So the way to cultivate is through artifact refinement — or forging other things."
He turned to Claire. "Yours should be the same, given the similar name. The Forging Heart. Have you checked?"
Claire was briefly shocked. Then she shook her head. "No — I came here right after choosing the method, without reading the details carefully. I'll go check now."
Thomas nodded and went back to his own reading.
Maya and the others kept moving through the shelves. There was a great deal more.
The shelves went further than any of them expected.
Beast taming — June stopped at that one and said, "Gerald," and nobody disagreed. Divination — arts that drew on the fortune and fate mechanics they'd already been introduced to, reading patterns of possibility at a depth that made ordinary fortune-telling look like guessing. Soul arts, body cultivation, movement arts. A dozen martial disciplines with subcategories. Sound arts, dance arts, calligraphy, tea arts — disciplines that seemed unusual but had evidently been foundational enough somewhere to warrant shelf space.
And then the deeper shelves — disciplines whose titles didn't fully resolve into meaning. Arts concerned with time. Arts concerned with space. Arts concerned with concepts that the overview texts only gestured at.
James stopped at one of those shelves and read the opening paragraph of a volume whose title he couldn't fully parse. He put it back after a moment.
"There's more here than I understood there could be," he said.
"Yes," Maya said.
"Even the things we can't use yet — just knowing they exist—"
He didn't finish.
They stood there for a moment.
Ruth was at the end of the immortal arts section, still at the sound arts shelf where she'd stopped longest. She had a volume open and was reading more slowly than she'd read any of the others.
"I'm going to read this one properly," she announced. "Not skim. Properly."
"You can't take it home," Maya said. "The books don't leave the archive, and you have to be within a certain range of the tree to come inside — though I don't actually know the exact range yet."
"I see." Ruth thought for a beat. "Well, that's not a problem. I'm sure June doesn't mind us staying here longer."
June didn't miss a step. "Of course you can stay as long as you like. Staying together at a time like this seems like the wisest choice anyway."
"I agree," Ruth said.
Claire had come back to the immortal arts section and was at the artifact refinement shelf, now working alongside Thomas. Victor was still in the arrays section, slowly pulling together what Mountain Foundation actually required of him. Maya and June had settled into spiritual farming and alchemy together. Ruth opened a volume on sound arts — something that had quietly interested her for a long time — and sat down to read.
The archive was silent except for the occasional turning of pages.