After I had opened the door, I returned to the orb so I could retrieve some of the items from inside of its storage. While the thing was rather massive, it had still retained its spatial-item features unharmed, and was the size of a literal warehouse on the inside, having only about half of its entire capacity filled with the many items of a stationery nature. When I attempted to store something new inside by putting some of the leftover platings of the detonated Golem in the repository of the orb, the items went in without a problem, so it was usable in both directions, which made it an invaluable item albeit with the caveat that it was so goddam heavy to lug around. The only real-life use I could see it perform was that of some sort of mobile Guild Vault to store buff items before delving deep into a Dungeon with an entire raid party.
We spent the next half an hour gathering all of the leftover pieces from the blown up Golem that we could find into a large pile. Unfortunately, most of it had been turned into molten slag by the explosion, and the leftover golden-bronze material that was now plastered all over the walls had lost all of its miraculous defensive properties, turning into something similar to literal bronze which you could bend with your bare hands and scratch with your nails.
Whatever had given the Golem’s metal its defensive properties had obviously come from the forging and tempering method, which had now been totally ruined by the meltdown. After storing all of the remaining Golem debris inside of the orb, I proceeded to analyse the rest of its inventory.
Since I am obviously a man of culture and did not want to miss out on any possible types of information, I immediately pulled out one of those Angelic 5X-rated magazines and attempted to read it. Once I got through a few of the strangely-runed pages, I had grasped a general idea about what these magazines were all about.
Angel Porn is...weird!!! When you are an entity that is neither male nor female, because all Angels seemingly lack any kind of genitals and even excretory holes when they decide to manifest themselves within this plane of existence, as an Angel is considered a “too pure” of a being to lower itself to the acts of taking a wee-wee or a plong like any of us mere mortals, that leaves them with very few options to enjoy themselves in a “regular” mortal fashion once they descend into this world.
Instead, they toss out the concept of sex and bodies altogether, and instead focus on a sort of spiritual mingling of two or more entities. Opening one of the Angelic Porn magazines was an entire weird experience in and off itself, since “reading” one was almost like entering a half-step illusory reality, where you could hear, feel, taste, smell and interact with the objects inside of the booklet, while still remaining in control of your normal senses and faculties on the outside. And the content was not as much as incomprehensible, but rather so fucked up that it would put to shame all of the existing doujin authors in my previous world altogether. Additional holes? No problem. Additional schlongs? No problem. Tentacle rape? Well, that just comes with the basic package. Weirdly cross-dressing girl-boy-animal-alien-robot thing? No problem. Any sort of messed up action that you could think of, the Angels would easily be able to perform it with their shapeshifting formless bodies 100 times better than any humanoids. No wonder that these magazines had five X's on the cover!
Still, these things were probably worth a fortune to the right collector, so I decided to confiscate them and store them inside of my own ring for some later “proper research” time.
Moving on to the next item, I wondered what that Mysterious Ancient Key was for. It was probably meant to open something deeper inside of the Library, if we were to follow the normal game-logic rules that the Mother System seemed to love so much.
Meh...whatever...we’ll discover its purpose when we get to the item in question. But before that...let's have some fun...hehehehe! I laughed malefically in my own head like a sadistic little bastard while tucking the cracked Golem Core sphere which was the size of a soccer ball under my robes, placing it near my stomach.
"Aaah aaah...oh noooo! I can feel the Golem's magic overtaking me! It's accelerating my body's growth towards the future! It's growing! It's growing inside of me!" I began to scream.
I immediately saw Fungus rush towards me with a worried look on his face.
"Are you alright, Trina? What's growing?"
"The baby! The baby is growing! AAARGH!"
...
"Your baby!" I yelled as I turned my frame back towards Fungus, revealing the bloated sphere on my stomach.
"Holy crap, what the fuck is that?" Fungus jumped back like he had been electrocuted.
"Why of course, it's your child, Fungus! What, you won't admit it's yours? Even after we held hands so many times? And we did all of those other things together in the forest?"
"What? No! But that's not how…! EEEEK!"
The look of absolute panic and confusion that was painted on Fungus's face, you could have never bought even with million spirit stones.
"Here, come touch it! I think it's moving!" I approached Fungus even more until he could place his hands on the orb.
"Haha! I knew that you were guilty, Fung! There's no way that you two weren't up to...t...t...that sort of stuff...during all of those trips in the forest! And now you even dare to lay your hands on her?"
Wait, Jin is taking this whole thing seriously? It can't be that he is that stupid, now can it?
As soon as Fungus got near me and barely touched my belly, I immediately dropped the bowling ball of a Golem Core, and pretended that I had just had an abortion.
"Oh no, Fungus! Such a brutal man you are! How could you do that to our own baby! It was barely a couple of minutes old and you already falcon-punched it out of me! I'm never holding hands with you ever again, lest I get pregnant with twins the next time."
Staring down at the exposed golem core on the floor, Fungus was going through all of the shades of the rainbow on his face before finally figuring out that it had all been a joke. But turning back to Mr. red spiky hair, I gave him a long and doubtful look.
"Jin, I do not mean to pry, but do you have any idea where babies come from? Specifically, how they are made!??"
"Well of course! They come from their mother's bellies, after the Yin and the Yang energies of the couple mix together and give birth to a whole new life. I saw it happen back in my village all of the time!"
"Ok, again with that stupid cultivation sh...tuff! No Jin, I mean how babies are ACTUALLY, PHYSICALLY MADE. The whole bow-chicka-bow squish-squish boing-boing action!"
"The what action?"
Ok, so he seriously IS that stupid.
As everybody else was snickering and patting Fungus on the back, giving him their “sincere condolences for his recent tragic loss”, I found myself relegated to the role of a lecturer once more, as I explained the whole birds-and-the-bees mechanisms to Jin, causing him to turn red from top to bottom.
"So you mean you take the...that and you put it in the...and then stuff comes out and … Oh wow, that's…disgusting!"
Ok, that's a typical response. At least, if you were a grade schooler! WTF Jin!
But then again, Jin had never seemingly excelled in the intellect and awareness department... so I did not know what I expected there. I don't think that even the Demon was aware that he was this stupid. Or maybe he was, and just ignored it.
"Trina! Oh my Gods, please don't joke with those sort of things!" Fungus began to berate me. "Ever since I've been hanging out with you, my sense of what's normal and what's not has totally gone out the window, so of course I would think that there was a slight chance that what you said could be true! Don't scare me like that! I'm totally unprepared for fatherhood! I can't even keep a pet properly! Even my plants wither away because I forget to take care of them!"
"HAH! Don’t worry big guy, I’m sure you’ll make a great Dad some day, if and when you’ll find that special someone stupid and blind enough to marry you. BUT! What you CAN do for now is pick up Mr. Fungus Core Jr. from the ground over there, and see if you can store it inside of your ring. If it won't fit, then just take off your shirt and make it into a carry sack. I'm not letting all of those stationery goodies go to waste! Do you have any idea how expensive a mere stack of clean-white writing paper can become during this age? Having an almost unlimited supply of those things would be a blessing for anybody!"
*Bzzzt*.
"Yep, I can't store that thing inside of my ring. The System says something about conflicting storage spaces."
"Right, I thought as much. Well, then just pick it up manually the way I just told you to. Come on, show everybody all of those manly pecs of yours as you haul little Fungus Core Jr. around."
"Please stop calling it that. Knowing you, it might just become reality because of some sort of strange reason further down the line into the future."
As Fungus was raising flags on his own and giving the System ideas, our whole group proceeded to enter the Library at a very slow and careful pace, since we had no idea what might lie in waiting in there for us. We most certainly did not want to face another one of those Golems like the Librarian Boss.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
After we went past the foyer of the Library which was a cramped tunnel-like entrance, we stepped into the Library’s interior proper, which was an immense expanse of shelves stacked full-to-the-brim with books and scrolls in every direction we could look at.
Immense containers that were hosting a vast number of Jade tokens and Jade discs also littered the entire landscape, which were something similar to an USB memory stick and Cd, except that they were activated by using Qi, and interfaced directly with your spiritual roots.
The ceiling was so high that we could not even see it, because the illumination was currently active only on the first floor, and the light just simply lost its strength before it could even reach the top, giving the entirety of the upper levels of the Library an ominous shadow-filled look, as we did not know what could be lying in wait inside of that wide expanse of Darkness.
The Library probably occupied the whole interior of the entire Blue Mountain of Books, and had probably been here even before the Sect had ever been established.
I was personally left agape by the immensity of the place, feeling like a child that had suddenly walked into an unguarded candy store and had been told that he could take whatever he wanted. Sooo much knowledge!
ACK! NO, WAIT! That's TOO MUCH knowledge! There is no fucking way in Hell that Mother System is going to let this thing fall into our hands just like that!
The moment I saw Lingfeng try and reach for one of the books that were stored on top of the shelves, I rushed as fast as I could possibly move my frame and gave him a full-slam body tackle.
"AAAUCH! WHAT THE HECK, TRINA? WHAT GIVES?!!"
"NOBODY MOVE A FINGER! Do not touch, for any fucking reason whatsoever, any of the books!"
"Huh? Why?"
"Because when something becomes TOO valuable, the Mother System will make sure to bury or destroy it before the object can fall into the hands of the uninitiated. Do you want to have the entire mountain come crashing down on top of us? Do not touch any of the books and do not make any loud noises, lest you attract even more misfortune on top of us!"
"Then how the hell are we supposed to get out of here?"
"I do not know, but I am pretty certain that we are not supposed to get out of here with any of these books. We should probably first explore the entire place, and see if we can find something else that we could use. We still have this Mysterious Ancient Key with us that probably opens some sort of a keylock somewhere deeper inside of the Library. We should probably find that thing first. And for no fucking reason should we ever split apart from each other, even if by doing so we would be able to cover more ground. Hopefully, this is not a race against time, and we will be able to take it slowly and explore every nook and cranny of this place. Keep an eye out for any traps, Librarian Golems, and anything else that might stand out as “weird-looking”. We most certainly do not want to trigger another Boss fight. And again, do not, for any reason whatsoever, TOUCH ANY OF THE BOOKS! DO YOU HEAR ME, JIN?
As we all huddled together and moved in a circular formation, we began to slowly explore the first floor of the Library. From time to time, we could hear muffled thuds and feel the earth beneath our feet rumble, reminding us that a conflict was still occurring uptop. I was hoping that the summoned Templars would be able to cope with the assault of the Demonic Sects, since we had absolutely no way of helping them from inside of here at the moment. After we spent a few hours walking around the entire place and mapping out the general layout, we decided to take a break and rest for a while, since us youngsters still needed food and water to replenish our energy reserves. Fortunately, both myself and Fungus had some edible items to spare inside of our rings, which we shared with the rest of the people. I also took the time to give Jin and Xibei a few of the “better quality” spirit stones that I had with me, so that they might recharge their own depleted Qi reserves. As both of the boys began “sucking” on my spirit stones, poor Carmine began to cry as she struggled to chew on a piece of smoked and dried jerky that I had shared with her, as she had not tasted any proper meat in over twenty years of being stuck inside of the tunnels because she had only been able to eat glowing mushrooms and insects during the entire period. I was quite surprised at how healthy she still looked, because usually eating only such a limited Menu would result in a severe case of vitamin and other critical substances deficiency, especially vitamin D from the lack of solar exposure. But then again, she WAS a dwarf, so I had no idea how they metabolised stuff in comparison to normal humans, since their race had adjusted to living underground for very long periods of time, sometimes even for their entire lives without coming to the surface to enjoy the rays of the Sun. The Dark Dwarves, which were also known as the Dwergars, most certainly never came up top, and lived their entire lifespans stuck in the Under-Dark fighting other Under-Races like the nightblue-skinned Dark Elves of the Banished Races, or the Demons that sometimes escaped from below.
While we were eating, I spotted on one of the walls a symbol that I recognised, which was plastered on a poster that had guiding arrows pointing in every possible direction and detailing what could be found in those particular sections of the library, since the stuff like the history books were being kept separately from the other stuff like the geography books etc. in a quite logical and normal arrangement that could be found inside such a vast library. Yet the symbol that caught my eye did not even have any verbatim description attached to it, as everybody that ever came in here should have already known by default what the symbol meant without needing any explanation, similar to the Red Cross, Infinity, Peace, Heart and other similar types of symbols that anybody would be able to recognise.
As I urged our entire group to follow the path depicted by the guiding arrows, we found ourselves a few levels higher into the Library, and we were almost reaching the “darkness” zone. Fortunately, we had a glowing dwarf at hand to fend off the encroaching shadows just for that. Strangely, nothing had jumped at us, as the entire Library still remained as silent as a tomb.
As we reached what was probably the 9th or the 10th floor of the building, we indeed found something weird, just as I had expected. Nestled between walkways of the central Library support pillar which was ending exactly at this floor and accessible only by four wide bridge-like paths, we stumbled upon a skeleton that lay dead on top of a Scribe’s desk while still clutching a goose feather quill, as the user's last will and testament could be still seen on top of the desk.
Intending to seemingly mock the entire world even after his passing, the Skeleton Scribe had left the following message in bold letters on the scroll that lay on the table, misspelling included:
NO REGERTS! YOLO! NOLEGE IZ POWAR!
Behind the Scribe’s desk, exactly on top of the main central column of the Library, a very heavy-looking Tome of Knowledge was floating in mid air while being shackled from all directions by very large and powerful-looking chains, which seemed to be there to keep it imprisoned.
On the cover of the Tome I immediately spotted the symbol that I was looking for, which was the Angelic sign of the Earth’s Counterpart for Archangel Michael. The symbol itself was easy to recognise, since it looked like somebody's jittery stick-figure signature with a ball at the end, and it also made me realise what this whole “Library” narrative setup was all about.
I was almost certain for now that this was all part of Jin’s narrative chain, since Archangel Michael was also known as the Archangel of Fire, and would make for quite a fitting replacement for Jin’s missing Fire Tome, after Jin had ridden himself of the Evil Book that contained Ifritt’s soul during his story progression, probably before he could get possessed by the Demon. Of course, because of my intervention, that whole storyline had gone down the bucket, so we were now facing an unexpected “alternative” route to the whole situation, as the Mother System was seemingly adjusting the threads of Destiny by forcing the poor idiot to come down here earlier than expected.
Fortunately, Mother System had also been kind enough not to throw the entire Dungeon on top of our heads by swarming us with mechanical automatons, and had given us a “safe” route out of the previous fight by having that Librarian Golem exhibit an exploitable vulnerable point that we could take advantage of.
"Alright everybody! Do not trigger the obvious trap on the Skeleton Scholar, or touch any of the chains that are holding up that Grimoire. If my assumptions are correct, then this is something that only Jin can solve by himself, and only then will we be able to get out of here in one piece."
Still, my greedy little heart could not resolve itself to accept the loss of the entire Library, which would probably be the predictable outcome if we retrieved that Grimoire in the way that Mother System intended us to.
So my greatest dilemma at the moment was how to get the Tome, but also keep the entire Library as well. I somehow knew it in my heart that it would be one or the other, but since this was NOT my narrative, I knew exactly what I had to do next. I had to BREAK the Mother System’s scripted sequence and do something totally insane that nobody would expect me to.
"Jin...come over here, because we need to have a very long talk. I personally hate your guts, and I would never share this information with you in a million years if we weren't stuck in this horrible situation, but for now I have to put my grudges aside, and teach you the Cultivation Method that will get us out of this predicament. This whole Library was supposed to be a part of your Hero of the Flame Destiny, as in YOUR Destiny, but things have branched off in a totally unexpected direction, so we have all trekked far away from the beaten path for a while now, and we are now alone in the middle of the danger fields. So what I'm going to have you do is BREAK your “Destiny”, and forge a new path for yourself with your own two hands. Or in this case, your own many branch-tentacles."
"My WHAT?"
"AAAAAAND this is the part where you have to listen to me very carefully, and do exactly what I tell you to do. Ok, so, here is the whole spiel:"
I spent the next few hours detailing my “tentacle” cultivation method to Jin, as I prepared him for the insanity that was to come. While I was detailing all of my Cultivation Techniques to the young boy, Xibei and even the crazy dwarf lady had joined-in on the lecture, and were also following the steps that I was describing. Fung and Lilliam were already privy to my Cultivation Methods, so they were only reinforcing their knowledge by listening to my lecture alongside with Lingfeng, which was now actually taking notes after having summoned a small notepad out of his own ring.
Of course, I had noticed a time long ago the Keyhole that was in the middle of the lock that held all of the chains together, but I was not stupid enough to actually use the Ancient Key inside of that padlock and trigger all sorts of nasty stuff as a result. No, I was going to make sure that Mother System would go and shove her Key McGuffin up her bumhole, as I would destroy her entire narrative script.
Unsurprisingly, the first people that had managed to grasp the new cultivation method had been Xibei followed by Carmine, with numbskull Jin coming in third and taking the last place. Fortunately, in the end he had actually managed to get the whole point of my method after many rounds of complaining and derailing the entire discussion, as he had built his own branch-tentacles which were now wiggling out of his Third Eye chakra and grasping the motes of white Qi from the environment. Personally, somewhere inside of my heart I was afraid that I had just created a monster by giving the power over energy manipulation to someone that was supposedly destined to become a pyromaniac, but I dreaded the loss of the entire Library more that whatever Jin would be able to do in the nearby future by using my Cultivation Method. If the boy became too dangerous because of my Cultivation Techniques, then I would just have to swallow the bitter pill and kill him by myself if it came down to that.
After experimenting with the energy manipulation aspect of the branch-tentacles on a few items that I had retrieved from my spatial ring which had nothing in common with the Library and achieving positive results, I finally gave Jin the green light to go and attempt to do the same thing to the suspended Fire Tome. I also told him to make sure to avoid touching any of the chains, because we could risk triggering something unpleasant If they ever came in contact with ourselves.
I passed a bunch of empty spirit stones over to Jin, as he furiously began to drain all of the thermal Qi away from the Tome and into the empty spirit stones. It took about 100 empty spirit stones filled to the brim before the Tome ran out of juice, and turned into an inert block of ice. The moment that the last piece of energy had left the Grimoire, it had shattered in a million pieces in a similar fashion to what had happened to Ifritt’s book, causing the chains that were holding it up in place to go crumbling down onto the floor with a metallic clatter noise.
As soon as the book broke apart, an immense blinding light appeared in its place, slowly coagulating into the form of a humanoid.