“And once again I’m considering burning this book so if you don’t do something interesting quick then it’s going to happen.”

He knew the statement would do nothing, if only because his sacrilege was telling him something he could have easily guessed at. That wasn’t Galwax, the god still just as dead as when Ben had suffered through his trial. No, instead it was another prerecorded message designed to wait for anyone who managed to get so far, with his entry into the room activating it.

“A mind craves knowledge and challenge to grow, the fact that you’ve gained access to the archive shows that’s something you’re well aware of, but by learning all it has to offer you’ve taken a step further,” The recording began. “What you’ve shown is an appetite for knowledge incomparable to merely being focused on your chosen field, something that needs to be rewarded.”

“Well, it was an interesting challenge at least, and… Wait, I’m hearing you in worldspeak. I don’t care how powerful you are, there’s no way you were able to modify the archive when you basically dropped your tower off and dipped. You son of a whore! You’re getting the language from my mind and translating it! Why couldn’t you do it for the rest of the books? Appetite for knowledge my ass, you just wanted to be difficult, didn’t you!”

He didn’t get an answer, the recording incapable of providing him such a thing. Instead, it gave him his reward, or at least what he expected was supposed to be the reward despite a level of pain that brought him to the ground, clutching his head as notifications screamed out at whatever had just been done to him by the god’s lingering power bound to the book.

“Oh my god, what the fuck was that!”

From his last encounter with the god, he knew Galwax wasn’t able to give him skills through the recording, meaning whatever he’d just tried to do had caused the levels and new skills Ben had just gained and was still reeling from, even if he had no idea what had just been done to him.

He was pretty certain that on top of the nearly five hundred new minds he’d just gained he was also going to be seeing a substantial boost to his intelligence, but that didn’t explain the extreme pain, nor the new feeling in his head as every single mind he had just changed, numerous strands of consciousness that made up each of his minds altering on a fundamental level. If all of those individual strands had twisted and clumped together to create powerful ropes that were each of his minds, then the change had just left them barbed, altering his thoughts in a way he didn’t know how to react to.

What the fuck is alien thought structure?

With the recording still going, ignorant of the effects just inflicted on him, it wasn’t long till he got his answer.

“The most valuable tool any person can have is the power of their thoughts and by getting here you’ve shown how much you value that trait. It’s only right that I aid any individual promising enough to get here so this is my gift to you, a boost to your ability to learn and strengthening your mind as a whole.”

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“...Oh my god. Oh my god, you fucking idiot! No wonder this just sucked and I got another weird skill! You just tried to do whatever generic changes you would do to a galwaxian brain to a human one! You short-sighted asshole, if I didn’t already think with my soul that might have killed me! Did you just assume nobody on this world would ever get this far or did you just forget you left this little feature in here? Augh, I wish you were alive so I could kill you myself and finally get that level I need!”

His head and soul were both pounding from the change as he pushed his mind speed skill to its new maximum and took stock, examining the way he thought in full and comparing it to the way he did in the past based on his memories.

He was fairly sure whatever just happened to him hadn’t driven him insane, a small blessing that he’d still confirm with Myriad the moment he got out of there, but there were no doubt changes in the way he thought that couldn’t help annoy him. Not because it had fundamentally altered who he was as a person. He still loved Thera and the friends and companions he had on the world, he still wanted to go out and make things, he was still generally annoyed with any interaction he’d had to have with Nati, Xilly, and Zallith and he couldn’t immediately see any thought or opinion that had been altered due to the change, even with each of the nearly three thousand minds in his head acting to check. No, what immediately annoyed him was that he could instantly tell that despite how careless that dead god had been which resulted in the change to his mind, overall, it was beneficial.

As he was examining his thoughts, the way he viewed the world hadn’t changed, it was more like it had allowed him to look at things from different angles than he had in the past, letting him re-examine the projects he was working on or thought he had already finished to see how he might do things to improve or find things to test that could have had some payoff so long as some rather hypothetical alteration would work as he expected. With the pain he was under already beginning to fade.

“Huuh, okay, this is fine. I’m just annoyed because I hate the guy but it looks like this worked out for me so I’ll take this as a win. The better I can think, the better I can advance my projects. Plus I can still destroy the archive if Myriad or Helori says anything’s gone wrong in my head and maybe destroying the last record of this god will give me the little push I want. Or it will at least be cathartic.”

“But that’s just the beginning of your rewards,” The recording went on. “The real one begins now.”

There was already a snide comment on Ben’s lips but he never got it out, with the area behind Galwax lighting up as shapes and pathways appeared where there’d been none before to create a complex structure comparable to only one other thing he’d seen during his time on that world, along with a far smaller collection of new books to be read, only reaching ten piled up on a table along with another one to the side with a different cover and a pen, clearly meant for him to record his own thoughts on.

“Oh, holy shit.”

Ben knew what he was seeing, even if he couldn’t believe it. Something that he’d never have expected to find in the archive, something that's very existence had the potential to change so much of his work, with Galwax having plenty to say on what had just appeared.

“What you’re seeing,” Galwax went on. “Is a purchase. Some might say a foolish one yet one I was powerless to resist when the void god flew through my system offering to sell her knowledge. A spell that was supposedly found engraved on the embering remains of a dead star, its purpose unknown. I’m not insane, my dear believer, but I am a hobbyist, happy to get another opinion from anyone who might have the motivation to give this a look and take their time to continue my own goal of decoding the mysteries it contains. While I could always activate it myself to see what it could do, I’d rather not find out that this complex array of mana is what killed the star it was found on in the first place, leaving me with no choice but to work out how it functions before I think of touching it. A goal that you could contribute to if you'd be so bold.”

“...You got lucky Galwax, your book survives another day.”

Ben was already walking through the spell, taking it all in as a single truth was evident to him. Something he couldn’t deny and made his heart pound.

What he was seeing was smaller than the summoning spell. Simpler too. In all, if he was asked to compare he’d have said it was maybe an eighth as complex, tops, but that didn’t matter. Whatever the spell might have been, it had a single evident truth to it for anyone with the right knowledge to see.

Whatever mysterious god or race had created it in some long-gone age, it was the same one who’d created the summoning spell that had brought him to that reality, with new things to be learned within it.