I jogged through the hundreds of parallel alleys made up of intricately carved bookcases.

The smell of leather and ageing wood was prevalent throughout the whole library and I smiled as I enjoyed the refreshing scent. After weeks of only smelling smog, mould, and rotting corpses, this was a more than welcome change.

My gaze leapt from sign to sign, searching for the section where they kept the useful stuff.

Once again I was astonished by the size of the section under which resided the various religious texts. They had different parts for official Ecclesiarchy documents, religious tales and things like that.

With a small shake of my head, I ignored those and searched for history or geography with a focus on anything that might contain stuff not available to the public. I thought there might be some of that in a library this far up in the palace but those might be kept in a private library or even locked up in a vault. I wouldn't put anything past one of the elite of the Imperium.

I didn't quite know what I was searching for, maybe military history or some sort of astral map but I didn't know where that would be. I didn't hold out much hope for finding out about relevant threats this planet faced in the near past.

Likely those latter ones would be somewhere more secure which made me wonder why did I even bother going through this library in the first place.

Yes, a map and history, that might be useful. Oh well.

I was gonna read at least a few books here even if they are useless. It'd be a great change of pace.

With that idea in mind, I grabbed a few books as I passed them by even if they didn't hold much significance just because their title sounded interesting.

Soon enough I had both of my hands full with books and I plopped down into a comfy armchair that was hidden away among the many alleys of bookcases. With a slight smile, I opened the book titled 'The Great Angel's Sacrifice' and breathed in deeply to savour that nostalgic scent of ink on paper.

I always liked the smell of books, I of course had an E-reader for most of the books I read but when I had the money to waste I liked to buy the real physical books instead. It was good to just hold a book in your hand and flip the pages and while these books didn't have that authentic new book smell thankfully neither of them was mouldy.

It would have been embarrassing for the person who owned this place if his books were like that after all.

I flipped the first page open, blinking my eyes in surprise as information blasted into my mind as soon as my eyes took in the page. I somehow managed to forget that I upgraded my brain with the Lictors for a moment there.

With that upgrade my cognitive speed was inhuman and my mind translated the letters my eyes saw into usable information in an instant. I could think faster and more now and let's not even talk about my new reaction speed in my upgraded human form. That was somewhat dragged down by my slow eyesight at first so I had to upgrade that too, as a human it would have been incomprehensible how quickly a visual image turned into information in the mind of a lictor.

Before a human would register that something was in front of it the lictor would have already reacted. To replicate this I had to scrap my whole neural network along with my eyes and recraft both with my new understanding of biology.

I blinked again, reorienting myself.

I flipped to the second page, then the third, fourth, fifth, and then before I noticed the next page to turn was the leathery backside of the book.

Huh.

This would make reading through these books quite a bit faster. I think that book which was more than a thousand pages only took twenty or so minutes and that was only because turning the pages any faster would have had me ripping them by accident which I didn't want to do.

Even if the book was filled with bullshit it didn't deserve ripping. I liked books, they were a great escape from my normal life back home.

By the way, the book was as I'd assumed about the Primarch Sanguinius and his heroic sacrifice at the end of the Horus Heresy. I read through it as I was interested in how people remembered that time almost ten thousand years later.

It was impressive in a way how much they remembered. For context back on earth ten thousand years ago was 8000 BC and Mesopotamia was the most advanced community of humans back then with their use of the wheel and pottery and agriculture. The wheel would only come in another 4 millennia.

I gently put the book down onto my right into my soon-to-be 'read' pile and got back to reading.

Some books I discarded once my bullshit-o-meter was close to blowing up and for others I read through every line, absorbing the information like a sponge.

After a time I made a small game out of trying to find where some catastrophe was glossed over or covered up by some sort of bullshit in the history books. It was funny how gaslighted the whole human species was in this galaxy.

Sooner than I wanted I got to the end of the final book and threw it onto the top of the towering 'read' pile.

By now night was setting on the planet and the last lingering rays of the local star were lost behind the ever-present smog covering the city. I couldn't help but wonder, would this planet that looked utterly devoid of any flora or fauna recover now that humans seemingly got eradicated or was it beyond even that?

I was done with this library, on my first round I saw a bunch of other books that might be interesting to read but none of them were a must-read. I found a few books with more or less detailed astral maps and made sure to memorize them down to the smallest drop of ink.

The history books were utterly disappointing. There wasn't a single battle or war recorded in them where the Imperium lost.

When I realized that after the fifth I was somewhat upset and as the target of my annoyance the book had most of its pages turned into origami to help me calm down, it was at least nice to look at it like that.

I left the library behind myself with a disappointed shake of my head, after hours of reading the only useful stuff I had was the map I'd memorized. The rest were giving me the context of the galaxy at best and useless at worst.

I stuck close to the side of the tower as I took my time ascending the floors this time instead of rushing through it like before. The walls on the side of the spire had many panoramic windows on them through which I looked down on the hive city below.

It was somewhat addicting and when I imagined the billions of small, inconsequential humans scurrying along down there I thought how the nobles would have done the same from up there. Feeling so superior and self-important.

I smirked as I thought how they probably ended up just like the rest in those piles of corpses, used up as sacrifices.

The Imperium of Man was a fun setting to read about but an utter shithole to live in. Living in a hive world like this was hell, you had no worth, no dignity and no rights. You only lived as long as you served your role as a tiny little cog in this malfunctioning machine.

I felt thankful that I wasn't dropped down here as a normal human, even with the way I was right now I had doubts about my chances of surviving this hellish galaxy.

Annoyingly I couldn't even look at the stars from here due to the shitty smog. I was curious how different it would look with my upgraded vision, I knew they used telescopes with ultraviolet or infrared or other light filters back on Earth to observe the galaxy more accurately and with the help of that generous Lictor I could do that too but without the telescopes.

Soon enough I could barely make out the skyline of the city far below me as I neared the top of the spire. The lights were still up and running here which made me realize that they weren't before this floor.

It was obvious, looking back on it but with my night vision, the dark night didn't look any different than a rather cloudy day back on Earth. Even with it though the smog made it hard to see the city from up here with the sparse light.

The lights meant security might be up too.

I didn't slow my steps but my attention was now back on my surroundings instead of drifting through memories. I was trying to make sure I didn't forget the stuff I remembered from Earth while climbing the stairs.

Thankfully this building was designed by a single architect and its stairs were right atop of each other, making it easy if a mindless task to make my way upwards.

I strode through the obscenely luxurious hallways, I kept myself alert even though I hadn't seen nor sensed anything that might have been a security system or something like that. I knew the Imperium was backward and had a hard-on for archaic technology while anyone who wanted to invent new stuff soon found themselves at the wrong end of a bolter. Still, the lack of automatic stuff was staggering to my 21st-millennium self.

I knew they had sensors, radars and tech like that but in the books as far as I knew all of those needed a human to directly control and interpret them.

By the way, the spire was suspiciously clean, unlike any of the previous buildings I've been in this one had not a single drop of blood. I could still smell the blood in the air along with the stench of rotting human remains so there were a few unfortunate victims here but it was far from how many I'd have assumed.

I raised my alertness that bled out of me a bit on the way once I reached the third floor down from the top. The last few floors had huge halls capable of hosting thousands of guests and many smaller guest residences along with very compact servant quarters.

I found most of the poor servants in a bloody pile. They barely showed any signs of resistance and many of them had small burn wounds on their backs or even on the back of their heads.

I consumed them all the same but couldn't help but feel a bit of pity for them.

It didn't help that most of them were beautiful young girls, the oldest barely twenty.

The wounds were distinctly different from the ones I found on the many other corpses before. These spoke of efficiency and pragmatism that I wouldn't associate with people that ripped people to shreds and tore them in half.

Laser weapons were the most common ones in the imperium if I remember correctly. A las-gun or rifle could blow a limb off with a single shot while a las-cannon could obliterate a human. The smallest laser weapon was the las-pistol, a small sidearm.

These wounds would match those made by a las-pistol I think.

Even though this left a sour taste in my mouth I already tried to untangle this mystery in my mind.

Hmmm, maybe there would be something even more interesting here than military history.

I felt an expectant smile form on my face as I left the room behind me.