I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood

Chapter 263: A Frozen Instant

It was a sickly, solidified glow—like a twilight that didn’t belong to this timeline—spilling from nowhere, painting her face. The light made her skin look like semi-transparent wax, even the shadows of her eyelashes frozen perfectly still.

Amanda stepped aside, giving Pandora her first unobstructed view of the scene ahead.

It was a grand hall. A colossal, magnificent structure caught forever in the throes of its own apocalypse.

The architecture was classical, almost austere. Vaulted ceilings soared overhead, held aloft by massive, ancient stone pillars carved with dizzying, mind-bending geometries and sigils that Pandora couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

The hall was packed with bookshelves. Uniform, dark wood, towering all the way up to the vaulted ceiling. They stretched out in a single direction—straight ahead of her—extending into infinity. They marched on until they hit the vanishing point, far beyond the limits of human sight.

Yet... everything was collapsing.

No, more accurately, it was frozen for eternity in the exact split-second before total collapse.

The ancient pillars were snapping and toppling, massive stone blocks hovering in mid-air, locked exactly on their downward trajectories. The soaring ceiling was webbed with fractures, leaking that same sickly, frozen, dark-gold twilight.

The colossal bookshelves were falling like dominoes, one after another. But every single one of them had frozen at a forty-five-degree angle, suspended in an egregious defiance of the laws of physics.

Countless books were spilling from the tumbling shelves, hovering in the air like a flock of birds frozen in time. Their pages fluttered open, the paper curling. That eerie, deathly still dark-gold afterglow bled from countless micro-fractures in the very fabric of space—like shattered glass—washing over the tomes in a silent, even shower.

The light itself seemed to have solidified. Along with the shadows of the suspended books, the light had congealed into the relics trapped within a massive block of amber.

Staring at the apocalyptic tableau, even Pandora couldn’t hide the profound shock on her face. Her own breathing sounded deafeningly loud in this absolute dead zone.

It took a long moment before she finally found her voice, keeping it to a hushed whisper as if afraid to wake something up. “Where is this...”

Aside from her and Amanda, there was zero sound.

No wind. No pattering of settling dust. No groaning of giving-way timber.

Everything was locked in the exact instant before annihilation.

“Laplace’s Demon Library. Ever heard of it?” Amanda’s voice sliced through the eternal silence.

“It’s a thought experiment proposed by philosophers from other worlds. A library that records every scrap of knowledge, every iota of information in the universe. Supposedly, you could learn anything you ever wanted to know in this place.” She raised a hand, gesturing at the frozen, hovering books.

“From the grand laws governing the birth, operation, and heat-death of the cosmos, down to the exact quantity and precise coordinates of the hairs you shed in the shower on a random Tuesday morning. In theory, Laplace’s Demon Library records everything.”

Pandora’s pupils shrank. “So this is...”

It was the same question, but her tone was entirely different.

Amanda just shrugged. “As you can see, it might be that very library the philosopher conceptualized. Or it might not be.”

“Regardless,” her gaze swept across the frozen, hovering tomes, “it has been perpetually encased in... the exact second before its destruction.”

The exact second before destruction? The phrase echoed in Pandora’s mind.

One hand was still loosely held by Amanda, but her free hand had already lifted, reaching out to brush against a heavy, hovering tome suspended in its eternal freeze-frame.

Then—her fingers phased right through it.

It wasn’t a physical object; her fingertips met empty air. The book’s image shimmered slightly, like a stone breaking the surface of a calm pond, before snapping back into its frozen state. It was more like a blurred holographic projection; it had an outline, but no texture.

Pandora wasn’t deterred. She tried again, slower this time, more deliberate, trying to pinch the book’s spine.

The result was the same: a handful of nothing.

Amanda stood off to the side, observing with a faint, amused smile, making no move to stop her.

Pandora crouched down, craning her neck at an awkward angle to peer at the pages of a tumbling book that had fallen open.

She focused her gaze on the downturned page.

Yet... the text was either a smeared blur of color or a tangled, chaotic mess of squiggles. Not only was it incomprehensible, but staring at it for too long brought on a throbbing headache, like needles lightly piercing her temples.

“Can’t read it,” Pandora frowned, stating the obvious.

Amanda nodded. “Correct.”

“The destruction isn’t limited to the physical structure of the library. It applies equally to the totality of the knowledge stored within it. So, whether this is the actual Laplace’s Demon Library or not, all that theoretically infinite knowledge is functionally useless to us.”

Pandora’s frown deepened. If it was useless, why drag her here?

And... she subconsciously glanced at the hand Amanda was still firmly holding. There was an unspoken, lingering sense of danger in this place.

“Where are we going?”

Ever since stepping into this “Laplace’s Demon Library on the brink of annihilation,” Amanda hadn’t let go of her hand, guiding her steadily forward. They only paused when Pandora stopped to inspect the books. Except, it wasn’t entirely clear if Amanda actually had a destination in mind. It looked like she had just picked a random direction and started walking. She hadn’t made a single course correction.

Could it be... A thought began to form in Pandora’s head.

“Hmm, that was fast this time,” Amanda cut in, a satisfied lilt to her voice. “There it is.”

Pandora followed her gaze forward.

At the furthest edge of her vision lay the convergence point of the endless bookshelves.

It turned out, the shelves of this magnificent library didn’t all point in the same direction. They radiated outward in six distinct vectors, arranged and expanding in a strict geometric pattern! Their starting position just hadn’t been at the center, nor at any intersecting junction, making it look at first glance like the shelves only stretched out in one direction.

Now, after their seemingly random stroll, they had arrived at the outskirts of the central hub. This was the point where all six radial paths converged.

Right in the middle of this chaotic, frozen avalanche of toppling shelves and hovering debris... sat a desk.

A lone desk, perfectly stable, untouched by the chaos. Its surface was a polished, mirror-like black marble.