The Trembling of Penglai Academy!

Kazuma Shinya
Illustration: Hirofumi Nakamura

“Penglai Academy” is a solitary island in the South Pacific, floating 1,800 km south of Tokyo—Utsubune Island. At its center stands the massive residential private high school, Penglai Academy. With a student body numbering 200,000 and including faculty and staff, the population reaches nearly 300,000. Everything here is excessive. Under the banner of autonomy and self-reliance, countless clubs, hobby groups, committees, unofficial organizations, and even illegal factions secretly thrive—allowing students to enjoy a uniquely unconventional school life. This legendary series, originally born from PBM (play-by-mail) and later expanded across various media, returns here, set in Penglai Academy of the 2020s, where an ordinary new student stirs up fresh chaos.

Episode 04: The protagonist seems clueless about how to save—or even what exactly to do with—the academy. Even the author appears unsure. But the protagonist has just entered the old library! (Part 5)

The spiral staircase was narrow at first, but soon widened, and we safely reached the second basement level.

Glancing left and right, everyone’s headlamps pushed back the darkness like searchlights.

Before us stretched an enormous space… a dance hall? A blackout-stricken New York Central Station? A quarry of large granite blocks?

High ceilings. Pale bluish floors.

Bookshelves were almost nonexistent—more accurately, they had vanished entirely. Scattered around, some toppled over or tilted sideways like the Moai statues on Easter Island—very sad indeed.

Looking up at the ceiling, we saw faintly glowing threads—some pale blue, others light violet—floating in wisps across the space. It felt like a quiet deep sea—or perhaps the depths of outer space.

Speaking of which… why is “deep” used to describe space? Is there such a thing as “shallow” space?

“Deep Space,” I suppose, comes from the Japanese translation of English ‘deep space,’ referring roughly to the region around Earth in our solar system. But recently…"

Keita started listing off facts like this, but we’ll ignore him.

More importantly: Azami-sama.

Azami-sama stood gazing upward at this quiet and majestic expanse as if deeply moved.

“There is a world here—”

That was her whisper.

“—it’s not that Penglai Academy has an old library tucked away in its corner. Rather, it’s just a random part of the old library where the academy happens to be located,” she added with a wry smile. “Well, I picked up this idea from one of my respected alumni.”

“…But actually, it was popularized by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, often considered a pioneer of modern science fiction—though the term ‘deep space’ had already been used earlier, as far back as the 1860s… Aaaah!”

Keita’s monologue abruptly cut off—and his terrified scream echoed through the second basement.

What now?

An otherworldly color? The servant sent by a star? An endless demon lord? Or perhaps Cthulhu herself has finally arrived?

“No Wi-Fi! It’s not connecting!”

Keita set down his self-propelled backpack (or maybe just stepped off it), then started fiddling with the tuner and antenna.

“Waaahh! No wireless either! Aaaaah, what a disaster!”

Aimi-senpai and Azami-sama exchanged glances and shrugged in unison.
Meanwhile, I dropped my shoulders, opened my mouth wide, and stared at him with an expression of utter dismay.

“It’s not recovering! Uuuuuhhh! This—this one thing—I don’t know what to do, what to do! Oh right, reset! Nooo, that won’t work either! Battery? There’s a battery! Signal? The signal isn’t reaching me! Signal, signal, DAMNIT, I need more signals!”

At this point, Keita curled up into the fetal position on the floor and rolled around helplessly.

“Damn it, why?! Why don’t you give me more signals, more signals—give them to me, give them to me!! Ahh… The vast information of the internet… slipping forever beyond my reach, into infinite distant shores, eternal oblivion… silence… ultimate emptiness. Come to think of it, why does the Chinese character for ‘void’ look so much like ‘playful’? Maybe this time-space continuum we’re trapped in is nothing but a toy created by some grand abyss? Yes! That’s right—exactly that! I can see it—the cracks! And just as well—I can even see the final episode of Alien Earth, even though it hasn’t aired yet!

Yesss! Finally, with my real body… I’ve managed to access digital information… I’m absorbing everything… grasping it all… Yes, Master—indeed, we’re all inside a black hole. But I still don’t understand the origin of ‘playful’—because without internet, how can I look it up? Ahh, ignorance! Great and terrible ignorance! O other being! Are you… God… hair… gushhh…”

“…Uh… is that over?”

“Looks like it.”

I nod at Aimi-senpai. Keita lies curled up like a fetus, snoring peacefully.

“Classic internet addiction,” I say.

“Really?” she replies.

“Yeah. It’s quite common these days. Even in the girls’ dormitory—after power outages, some students won’t come out of their rooms for days.”

“Well, we can’t just leave him here.” Azami-sama sighs. “Aimi… could you help me?”

“Of course!”

With a radiant smile, Aimi-senpai lifts Keita up with one hand and pulls him close to her chest.

※

Then—third basement level.

Descending yet another spiral staircase from the vast dark space of the second basement, we found ourselves in… an enormous bright area!
No joke—it’s really true!

The end of the spiral staircase opens into a straight hallway. But why on earth did the old library not have a direct vertical stairway all the way through? It’s incredibly annoying.

“There’s light ahead—”

Indeed, as Azami-sama said, a soft pale pink glow appeared in the distance. As always, Azami-sama is correct!

Walking calmly down the long hallway, we reached… a small balcony. The light came from outside!
Wait—outside?

The third basement of the old library… has an outside?!

We squinted hard.

And there, beyond, was what lay before us!

“—This can’t be!” Azami-sama gasps.

“No way!!” Aimi-senpai shouts.

“Eeeeeeeh!?&Pahyuu!” I and Ap-chan shout together. The protagonist, yet treated as part of a duo with the pet.

Why?
No—forget that. What lies before us is breathtaking.
Before our eyes: an impossibly vast space… above, below, left, right—all directionless expanses softly glowing.
Hundreds of meters away? No, much farther—perhaps kilometers or even tens of kilometers ahead—a faint shape appears. Blurry and indistinct. That spot, with no other name to describe it than “the opposite side,” stretches endlessly along sheer cliff walls on both sides. Staring hard, we can make out layer-like patterns in the rock. I clamped my mouth shut with both hands—then immediately opened it wide again in shock.

“Bookshelves…” Azami-sama mutters, stunned.

“Huh?”

“The shelves… that’s what they are—the sheer cliff on the far side… And look at our side too—horizontally, downward—all the way to infinity… It’s all bookshelves made of books. This place—it’s just a tiny corner of an infinitely large library!”

I sneezed.

Where exactly is the edge of infinity? I couldn’t help wondering—but I understood what Azami-sama meant.

We were standing on a small balcony, perched on a wall inside an enormous space far larger than the Grand Canyon—perhaps hundreds or even thousands of times bigger—a colossal atrium. And below us: a view stretching into endless depth—the vast “atrium” of a super-mega-wide library!

The ceiling—no, should we call it sky?—should be attached directly to the floor beneath this third basement level, but due to its immense distance above, it creates a faint, hazy halo effect. We couldn’t make sense of anything.

And below?

If this is the third basement level, then just underneath lies the target destination: fourth basement… and beneath that, fifth, sixth, tenth, two hundred fiftieth… By the time I reached “three koti-sho,” I gave up counting.

※

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※Next installment scheduled for November 8th.

Series Page: “The Trembling of Penglai Academy!”