Around this time, Alz was standing by the lake, silently gazing at the dark sky with a book in hand. The book he held was titled “Wondrous Sights of Nature”, a photography book which was a compilation made in the past by a landscape photographer.

He squinted his eyes as he looked at the sky, trying to peer beyond the blanket of darkness which shrouded the sky, to see even a little hint of that which was hidden beyond.

In the past month, he had read and learnt much about the world, but it was only when he found this photography book about two days ago that he truly understood the differences between the world he lived in and that of the past.

In the pictures of the book, the sky was clear blue at times, with fluffy white clouds which acted like white ink, painting a beautiful picture of serenity across the wide blue canvas.

The sky had vibrant shades of red at times, as if there was a grand blaze beyond the clouds, and at times, it was a shade of black, but the black did not signify darkness, as there were bright shining stars which adorned the sky, illuminating the night sky.

Above the heads of those who lived in the past, the everchanging sky always showed a new face to them, allowing them to go through their whole lives without seeing two same skies as the sky freely showed off its majestic beauty to all who looked up at it.

Yet, when they raised their heads today, all they saw was a blanket of darkness darker than the darkest of nights. There was never any light, there was never warmth, only the never changing layer of darkness which filled the skies, as though it had always been this way.

Several minutes later, Alz looked back down at the book with a look of disappointment.

He threw a stubborn look at the sky before sitting down and continuing to flip through the pages of the book. He skimmed through the pages and soon stopped at a picture of a clear blue lake within a verdant green forest, filled with a diversity of trees and animals.

He raised the picture with both his arms and looked at the lake before him in comparison. The lake before him was a murky shade of green when compared to the clear blue lake of the picture.

The trees in the forest also looked duller than those in the pictures and the trees all looked the same, lacking the diversity found in the forest of the past.

Most of all, there was no wildlife diversity in the lake before and only wolves were known to inhabit this region of the forest, something which Alz had always thought of normal, until he found this book.

These were things he never noticed before, things which he did not have the right to notice, things he would probably have remained oblivious to for the rest of the life, if not for his encounter with the archives.

The other pictures he had seen in the book started playing out in his mind, pictures of wide bodies of water with no end to them, of mountains and plains covered in white, of volcanos spewing red hot lava, of the auroras in the northern skies.

These all ignited the adventurous spirit in the young Alz’s heart as he resolutely decided, to set out on a journey beyond these woods, to explore the vast world that lay outside what he had previously thought was his entire world.

Five months later, in a part of the forest near the entrance of the archives, a young elven boy was looking expectantly at a large sand mound that stood before him.

The boy’s bright yellow eyes looked as though they were about to pop out of his head at any moment, his gaze not leaving the mound before him for a single second. This boy was naturally Alz, who had just begun his first experiment using knowledge obtained from the archives.

Last week, he had read a book which had described many ways to start a fire, and within it, there was also a section on the methods of preparation of various types of fuel.

As Alz was looking through this section, his eyes lit up when he reached the section on charcoal preparation. The section had listed various methods which could be used to prepare charcoal and the characteristics and uses of charcoal.

Among the methods mentioned, Alz noticed a method which he could prepare all the materials for, exciting him greatly as this was the first chance he had to verify the information from the books, the first chance he had to apply a part of the technology of the human race from the past.

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He immediately jumped into preparations and built a mound using the sand in the area, according to the instructions from the book. He then placed pieces of wood he previously prepared into the mound and ignited it, which according to the book, would convert the wood placed within the mound into charcoal, bringing us back to the present.

He had been cleared out most of the grass around this area and had even prepared many bags of water before this, scattering them around his feet in case something went wrong.

He was now watching excitedly while praying that this would go smoothly as he watched the orange flame flicker about at the air hole on the top.

After a few minutes passed and Alz suddenly walked up to the mount and started to block the air holes on the mound using soil from the surroundings in accordance to the instructions in the book.

When he completed this, he sat down at the position he had been standing at earlier and took out the book from his bag, verifying that he had done everything according to the instructions stated. After checking everything in his head, he closed his eyes and begun to rest while waiting for the process to complete.

About six hours later, Alz snapped open his eyes and walked up to the mound. He quickly started prying open the front of the mound, revealing numerous small charred black objects within.

Alz picked up one of the pieces and started to inspect it closely. Next, he walked over to the side and tried to start a fire on the black object using the method he was taught back in the village.

The charcoal did not disappoint as Alz managed to generate embers much faster than he had ever done so with the wood from the shelves with significantly less effort.

A wide grin surfaced on Alz’s face as he looked at the pile of charcoal he had created. Alz was extremely happy but it was not only because of the charcoal.

While he did not believe it to be false, a part of him had always harboured doubt towards everything in the archives, particularly when he learnt of the great differences of the world recorded and his own.

However, this was the first time he had applied knowledge obtained from the archives in the world, and it had achieved great results with it which indirectly gave weight to everything in the archives, easing the small doubt which lay in his heart.

Ever since he found the catalog six months ago, he had been using it to browse through books in the archives. He read about many things, from math and sciences to arts and humanities, but the type of books which captivated him were the books in the fiction section, books that were commonly known as fairytales.

Then again, being a young 12-year-old elven male, and the conditions they lived in, it came at little surprise that fairytales, fiction stories of the old, filled with colourful pictures and stories geared towards a young child his age were the most appealing to him.

The first story which got him hooked was a classic tale of a princess captured by an evil wizard. Her personal knight was then commissioned by the king to rescue her.

Thus, the knight embarked on an epic journey to save the princess, slaying demons and saving villages with the comrades he met along the way, finally slaying a dragon which guarded the tower the wizard lived in, defeating the wizard and obtaining the princess’s hand in marriage.

However, what touched Alz the most was not where most would expect. He got touched by a small plot point in the story, where most in the past probably would not have given too much about, yet it struck Alz at the softest regions of his heart.

There was an elven race in the story which shared similar traits to his race, even the name of the race, Elf, sounded similar to the term they used for their race in their native language.

Alz made a mental note of this and proceeded to do research on the subject subsequently, but it yielded little results as all he found was more fictions depicting elves, but there were no results of elves in reality, so he buried this deep in his mind.

In the story, an elven magician was struggling in a forest against some evil demons, when the knight and his comrades appeared to help, fending off the demons with the elven magician.

The magician then welcomed the knight and his companions to their village, but when they arrived at the village, they saw that it was being invaded by demons.

The squad then jumped into action, repelling the demon invaders and saving the village. The elven magician then joined the knight and him comrades on the quest to defeat the evil wizard.

Alz reread this part of the story multiple times, shedding tears of joy each time he reached the part when the elven village was saved. It was this which got him hooked onto fairytales, on the fantasy stories of swords and magic.

He was reminded of the scenes where the wolves overran the village and the last moments of his parents, thinking of how nice it would have been if a hero from the stories appeared and saved his village.

His daily routine since that day consisted of an additional timeslot for reading fairy tales, the only time of the day he actually resembled a child of his age as his mind wandered off into these stories.

However, due to the wide assortment of knowledge in the archives, he had been lost towards which direction he should focus on reading on.

Apart from fairy tales, he had just been reading books which had interesting descriptions in the glossary, which helped him obtain a lot of knowledge, but most of it was useless to him.

Now, with this success, he had finally decided on a direction, to focus on obtaining practical knowledge which might aid him on his future journey and knowledge which would be beneficial to his tribe.

With this in mind, Alz started to carry the spoils of his first experiment into the underground passageway.