This world has no light and no shadow, by design: every surface is one flat ink with a single cool shade step on faces turned from a notional north window. The contour lines are not drawn geometry; they are a screen-space edge pass on the depth buffer (and, on desktop, on a normals buffer), thinning with distance. The misregistration is a shader offset applied to each ink separately; it grows with the beats and with your own movement, and tightens on whatever you attend to in Volume XI. The projection is a hand-lerped blend between a perspective matrix and a cabinet-oblique one, and it changes only on page turns and when the tissue lifts. The mirror in the corridor is a live reflection whose inner recursion is a one-frame-late copy capped at two depths (a static darker fill on phones). In the postscript the mirror is not a reflection at all: a second room is built behind the glass. The cone is the only lit object. The map's cross-references really do loop. Everything is drawn procedurally at load; there are no image files.

You have just spent five plates building a world by looking at it, and every look was paid back in register, in labels, in line. Now the room you began in is printed badly, its inks sliding off their keys, and behind the glass stands the same room drawn perfectly, captioned, gridded, still. You will want the clean one. That wanting is the whole story: Borges shows reality yielding not to force but to tidiness, to the relief of an ordered page over a smudged one. The narrator keeps translating and pays no attention. The relief you feel choosing Plate XI is how a world gets replaced.