He is a true student. A vessel.
Wan Shi Tong cocks his head and verifies this yet again, by tracing the way the mortal has bent like gnarled boughs beneath a downpour. Indeed, the hook of his spine is quite avid.
He accepts all things, takes them unto himself as an offering.
Wan Shi Tong has recognized this urge many times, stronger even, in others. But he has never gotten the chance to observe, to verify, just what any of them would do, their wish granted. He has dreamed of this.
If only in passing.
There is a single candle in this last mangled snatch of Library. It never quite goes out. The roof, likewise, never quite gives, though it bellyaches daily at the weight.
The single red spark reflected in Wan Shi Tong's bottomless, lidless black eyes never moves as his neck dutifully twitches his gaze in the desperately dark space. The professor's misshapen jaw. The ever replenishing stack of papers.
Zei grips the bindings with inhuman fingernails. Gnarled freakshow claws. Their hook is also quite avid. One of them cracks, gashing into a neglected nail bed and Zei does not notice, because there is another page, and he cannot swallow the last.
In accedence to the spirit's role as an even-handed overseer of all there is to be known in this world or the next, it should be recognized that it had not, in fact, been Wan Shi Tong's choice to bring Zei into this place. He had merely done his duty. Mortals were free agents, the gift to choose was their luxury. An experiment, one that probably got away from them all long ago.
But who was he to say... if this was truly what the mouse of a man had wanted, then he had used it properly.
Wan Shi Tong cannot hide his interest as the mouse licks at rivulets of paper-let blood carefully, swiping them from his chin and onto his begrimed clothing so as not to stain the literature. He crams another page into his mouth, tongue a ragged, barren waste.
Though it would be wrong to say the man has lost his faculties wholesale. He is not such a forlorn creature as that, Wan Shi Tong assures himself.
As evidence, Zei's right hand is much more hygenic. Being the most indispensible. Every day, or every time Zei is reminded, in his reading, what a day is, he chews each nail down meticulously. Each but the index. And only because it isn't necessary. Zei's index finger is black, stained with the minds of a thousand years, unfettered by sensation, and slowly being worn down to the nub. The nail fell off some time ago, and has not been missed. Without it, the finger has met every word in every language, every character and sign.
It has not followed one of them, steadfast in its journey down the page.
Zei chokes, briefly, but recovers, admirably... swiping at his eyes with the backs of his palms... so as not to stain the literature.
The more literal ingestion of the resources at Zei's command had not been his first impulse, but a later decision. To keep track, the Professor mumbled to himself, in those brief moments where he could not fill his mind with other people's words.
To keep it.
To encapsulate.
To become.
He is, Zei snickers to himself quietly in the darkness, a delirious joy in the tome-torn curve of his mouth, what he eats.
Wan Shi Tong wonders, briefly, how it will end, and imagines for an instant the man finally folding in on himself, but the thought does not last long. He is too busy - he cannot tear his eyes, nor his mind from the sight.
There are so few open-ended questions left for an all-knowing spirit being. And the suspense is killing him.