This room was a connecting room with 3 doors set up in a triangle. One he looked through, the one into the dining and sitting room and the last that pointed diagonally away from the other two. The room was otherwise empty with no furniture or Devoured inside. He checked the room for traps as he had with every other room up to this point but nothing triggered when his Force Bombs collided with the walls and floors.

Felix walked in slowly and saw that there were a few empty crates in the corner he couldn't see from the door but nothing of interest. He walked over to the adjacent wall and opened the door, confirming it led to the sitting room as he had suspected. The last door remaining was the one that pointed outwards diagonally, the first door to not be perpendicular in the finished area of the vault. The doorway held a large double door but otherwise seemed perfectly normal. Felix inspected it for traps but found nothing to indicate danger so he gingerly opened the door. He was immediately struck in the chest and sent flying backwards into the corner of the room, his head smacking the wall and stunning him for a few moments.

Felix looked down once his head recovered and saw a massive solid metal crossbow bolt sticking out of his chest. It was about 2 or 3 inches in diameter but luckily it had only gone halfway into his body. Checking his health pool, he was sitting at around forty percent and was slowly dropping a few points a second. After taking a minute or two to dull the pain, Felix mentally inspected his body and found that he had a few broken ribs but luckily the bolt had pierced the right side, entirely missing his heart.

He also had significant bruising in the area, his robes and shirt underneath had resisted the bolt as much as possible, spreading the impact but ultimately failing to stop it entirely. Inside, the found the bolt had lodged itself just behind a rib with a large barb stuck just behind it. He either needed to push the bolt the rest of the way through, or pull it out and risk ripping out his organs and possibly a rib along with it. Even though his robes had dulled the blow, if the bolt had just gone through, this would have been a much better situation.

He needed the bolt to go through cleanly but not all the way because there were metal fins on the back that would tear through him. First things first, he had to remove the back of the bolt, he could heat and try and melt it off but he knew that would burn him at the same time. It was possible cauterizing the wound would help, but it also might do enough damage to commit suicide. Instead, Felix pulled out his staff and formed it into a fine toothed saw then he manually enchanted the bolt to be slightly softer.

With one hand he held the bolt steady and with the other, he began running the saw blade back and forth. Even with his hand holding the bolt, it still shook back and forth slightly so he had to stop every few minutes to let his body repair itself, flooding his system with mana and energy to help the process. Every time he did so, his health would rise then he would keep cutting and it would fall again. He continued with the balancing act until the bolt had been cut all the way through. It wasn't the cleanest cut but it would have to do. He then morphed his saw into a file and made the end as smooth as possible, removing the burrs so no metal bits would be left behind in his body.

With that done, he stowed the staff and walked over to the wall, kneeling in front of it. He made sure to heal himself as much as possible with a massive metal bar inside of him and flooded his cells with excess energy to help after the fact. He carefully pushed the bolt to the side, plotting it's course through his body as carefully as possible to minimize the risk of killing himself. Finally, he lifted up the back of his shirt to expose his skin. Once he was ready, Felix mentally counted down to work up the courage then used a force spell to push himself into the wall.

The severed end of the bolt hit the wall in front of him and his body continued forwards, the bolt forcefully pushed through his body and out the back. Felix collapsed just barely conscious enough to make sure he didn't fall on the bolt. While he could dull pain a lot, he still felt the cells being ripped apart, his organs being shredded, his blood vessels opened and tissue torn. It was a different sensation but still overwhelming and shocking all the same. The feeling was reminiscent of pain but it was more nuanced and different. In this moment though, it still felt like agony.

Once he was conscious enough to inspect what had happened, Felix saw his health sitting at around a third and rapidly increasing due to the energy he had flooded his cells with. The barbs had nicked two ribs but hadn't broken them at all, which was what he had hoped for. The back of the bolt was still in his chest but the hard part was done, now he rolled over to his side and cast a force spell directly into the metal rod pulling it all the way out. That part wasn't even painful really, his blood lubricated it and with his sense of pain dulled, nothing but cool air passed through the hole in his body.

He lay there on his side manually flooding his cells until he was certain he wouldn't bleed out then entered his soul garden. In there, he could still feel his body repairing itself, still feel the agony, but it was distant and far away like a faint voice in the back of his head which meant he could almost entirely ignore it. He found Grim sitting under a tree reading a book of some sort and walked over.

Well that was… Not my finest moment.

You should probably keep Mana Shields up all the time, especially when opening up doors.

Yeah, that was really stupid. I also need to rethink the enchantments on my armor. The mana shields are fine but they require me to know when something is going to hit me.

They also don't cover your head.

Yeah, I'll figure that one out too. I think I'm going to redo it entirely. I want to have the armor react to being hit so I can deal with surprises. It's already pretty durable, I figure if I enchant it to go really hard when something with force hit's it, that should distribute the blow better and hopefully stop bolt's like that one entirely.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Sounds like a good idea.

Did you know something like that would happen? That I should have had a Mana Shield going all the time?

Sometimes people need to experience something to truly learn it.

You cou-

No I had no idea. That just sounded wise. Honestly, you're the first person I've been this… intimately aware of? Everyone else I've bonded too kept me far away and locked up. They didn't carry me around with them or let me organize their memories.

Wait, what do you mean organize my memories?

I just organize and index the library, that's all.

Oh, that makes sense. Guess we'll both be learning then.

Grim simply noded.

What are you reading?

One of the books you found in the Rothden manor library.

What language is it in?

No idea, but you can read it so, I can as well. Likely the tongues skill.

Oh cool. Anything interesting in there?

Nope, it's a romance and smut book.

Felix snorted. Really?

Yeah.

You're reading smut? Can you even…

Nope. Human interactions are interesting though, I'm mostly reading it for the romance. Not sure if it's our bond or something else, but the romance is… cute? Warm and fuzzy? Just a little.

Uh huh.

Grim just shook his head.

Were any of the books interesting?

Hell no. The books were a combination of self help, how to be persuasive, basic economics and fantasy with a small section of romance and smut.

Did you go through them all?

Yeah the self help stuff was obvious and garbage, the persuasive was silly and the economics was, well basic.

To you?

No, to you. I made sure to reference your memories and you knew everything in them already.

Oh, that's boring. No diaries or historical accounts?

Nope. Lots of dragon based fantasy but that none of that was historical.

Alright. I'm off, have fun with the smut.

Romance.

Whatever.

Felix returned his consciousness to his body finding it mostly repaired thanks to his meditation skill increasing his health regeneration. His robes and shirt still had a hole in it though so Felix pumped mana into them until they were completely repaired. The inscribed spells in that area were still damaged, but Felix planned on maintaining a Mana Shield in front of him at all times from now on anyways, so he didn't bother to fix it for now. He summoned the shield and walked to the doorway looking inside and finding a very simple trap, a string on the door wired to a massive crossbow, almost ballista even.

He carefully looked around but saw no other indications of any traps. He made sure to remove the doors from the hinges so he couldn't be locked in and then ventured into what seemed to be just a long hallway. At the end of it, there was a sliding door that Felix very slowly opened, inspecting it from every angle as he did so. It didn't seem to be trapped though so he opened it all the way. Before walking into the room though, he pulled out his staff, that was still in the shape of a file, and morphed it into a large bar with plates on the ends of it. He set the bar in the doorway to make sure the door couldn't close then ducked under it and into the room.

The room was a large circle with no doors other than the one he had walked through. Around the outside of the room were nine suits of armor on stands of all kinds of designs and materials, all plate armor though. In the middle of the room, on what seemed to be a cylindrical pedestal was what appeared to be a hand made of entirely of marble. It started from about halfway down the forearm protruding from the pedestal and the fingers were open but relaxed. On the ring finger of the hand was a single ring that look like a simple metal ring with some kind of insignia on the flat face. Inspecting it closer, Felix thought it looked like some kind of arcane inscription, similar to a spell form or enchantment, though he didn't recognize it. He tried inspecting it but as with everything he'd found since the tutorial, it simply said ring with no major details.

He inspected the armors as well as the hand statue but couldn't find any sign of a trap of any kind, anywhere. Cautiously, he walked over to the ring and touched it, but nothing happened. He slowly removed the ring from the marble finger, pulling it completely free and immediately heard a loud grinding sound then a bang. Felix spun around and heard a loud hissing sound coming from all around him. He ran towards the door and dove below the bar running a few meters before turning around and seeing nothing.

His face contorted in disgust though as he realized he was smelling something that was both sweet and bitter at the same time. He immediately held his breath and cast Gust to keep the gas in the chamber. He had every intention of retrieving the suits of armor in the room, he just had to figure out how dangerous the gas was. He looked internally and felt motes of the gas in his lungs ripping through his cells. It caused minor damage, but his body cycled the minute amount out relatively quickly. It didn't seem to affect his skin much at all, it was mildly irritating but more than manageable.

Since the only danger was him breathing the gas in, he decided to walk back into the room, with his breath held, and as quickly as possible he retrieved and stowed every single suit of armor. He maintained the Gust spell the entire time which contained most of the gas in the room. Once he was done, he walked back to the door and pulled his staff free, which was definitely more lodged into the wall then he had left it originally. The sliding door seemed to be stuck though so he used a force spell directly in the door to pull it closed then dissipated the gust spell. He was tempted to put the ring on but he wasn't sure it wasn't cursed or wouldn't mold itself under his skin without being able to identify it so he simply stowed it and moved on. The only passage at this point he hadn't explored was the one in the blood water fountain room that headed north, if the entrance was the southern most point and the one over the lake.

He walked back through the rooms he had before into the blood fountain room and continued north into what was just a weirdly shaped room. There was nothing in the room other than an empty bucket so Felix continued onwards to the west and into a more regularly shaped room. Across from him was a large door at the top of a couple of steps and to the right there was another passageway to the east. In the center of the room was a stone statue of a Dragon's head.

The head was a few times bigger than Felix and it's maw was wide open, advertising it's large fangs, one of which was missing, and tongue. Felix did his best to check for traps but found nothing, which was becoming less and less reassuring as he had accidentally stumbled into two traps in this one vault. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .