I came back to the dorms, got fresh and headed to the lion’s den. Aka, the white tower’s third floor, where our new clubroom was.

The first clubroom was in the basement. A little small but it got the job done. Our resident priest Mr. Zarbantha wanted a bigger room and asked my permission to speak to the headmaster. I didn’t see any issues with that and agreed. At best he was going to get a new somewhat useable room. At worst, nothing would have happened.

However….

“Good evening, my lord!”

Big. No, not a classroom size big. But rather it was an auditorium size big. You could probably have a literal play in here with a thousand spectators.

Of course, we didn’t have that many club members. Just about two dozen. Mostly girls but there were some boys.

Bright. White. The ceiling was quite high, almost made me think if this place took a few floors all by itself or something.

I didn’t have any speeches today, so I sat down near the front desks, next to Nisa, and Shia. Nisa was club president, so of course she’d be here. Shia though, wasn’t even part of the club. She just showed up every now and then when she had too much time on her hands. She contributed absolutely nothing to the club. She was just here for fun times.

“Now then, with the Baron here,” The priest started off. He had a podium of sorts. This whole thing felt like those commencement speech auditoriums. No one was graduating though, at least not anytime soon. “I’d like to continue where we left off.”

These last few weeks, I tried finding more and more information on the church and Askavan and used my somewhat broken Sea tongue to decipher anything I could find. While I did find some new information, I could not verify them. Mr. Zarbantha helped a ton and taught me the ‘right’ history of the church and how it all came to be but that just felt like indoctrination so I hardly paid attention.

The gist was: Church good, weakness and disobedience, bad.

Who’d have thunk!

Ahem. Since I couldn’t find anything substantial, I let the Priest educate us weekly about the matters of the church and Askavan without forcing anyone to pray or even be religious. If I asked them to pray or force them to do something, how would I be any different from the church? Of course, I did have plans to gradually change their minds and use them eventually, but that was for the future and I never had any intention of directly forcing them to do something had no consent in.

It was going to take the priest at least two more months to fully go through everything. And then I was going to have to take over and do stuff. But if I didn’t have any proper material, I couldn’t do anything with this group. Some of these people genuinely didn’t want to be here but had to because of their families. And some others although did show some interest, they weren’t really into the whole church shenanigans either.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Meaning, I have to make it engaging and fun and influential at the same time.

But how?

I never taught a class. I never influenced anyone. Heck, I never even motivated a friend! Well, you didn’t have friends to begin with.

Anyway, not only did I not have any proper methods, I didn’t have any information that I could alter and… wait… alteration. Just because information didn’t exist, didn’t mean I couldn’t create it.

I knew a fair share about the church and I could use that. I could use the priest and I could use the library and frankly, I could definitely use this.

There was just one problem though.

Finals was only two weeks ahead.

***

I didn’t have classes. I applied to take a break from my library duties but the librarian denied that on the basis that I was spending too much damn time in my room.

Strange. My mother kind of liked when I did that. She loved it when I studied for hours on end and did well in my tests. Yet, people here, people who seemed to care about me, didn’t want me to study all day. Some of them did want me to do well in the tests but, but I guess my test scores weren’t more important than my health. Kind of almost made me tear up.

Almost.

I still studied though. Just in the library.

Sure, I probably had this one in the bag too. But I sure wasn’t going to fall behind on the leaderboard. I’d clawed myself up and I was going to keep clawing forward, not backward. Being complacent wasn’t an option.

“If only you were this diligent about learning languages,” sighed the librarian.

“I’ve already memorized 100 different words and their meanings, just so you know.” I didn’t glance at her.

My work was done and she was still working. Or she should have been working but I guess she was done too and came here to take a break.

“I know. But if you kept going at this rate, you could have already mastered the Sea tongue and even learned the Demon tongue.”

“I doubt I could learn the demon tongue that easily. Besides, my memory isn’t that good.”

“You’re a child. It’s good enough.” She grumbled. “Good luck with your finals. I’ll introduce you to someone one of these days.”

“Sure.”

I guess that someone was going to be a demon who was going to help me learn the demon tongue? I didn’t see anything wrong with that. Learning the demon tongue was going to be a boon. Demons were the oppressed race in this world and just like any oppressed races, they probably had literature dedicated to explaining how they were abused and discriminated against and such. I doubted whether the church would let them publish those kinds of things but if the church couldn’t read the books, how would they know?

No, if someone ‘can’ read, then that basically screws over that theory. If there was going to be books in demon tongue about the church or the gods, they were going to be either disguised in fiction or just down right cryptic.

Enough about the church and the demons!

Focus!

Focus!

Focus on the damn stories and remember the damn history!

I genuinely thought learning stories, and stuff about the church was going to help me academically. But that was only partially true. I had to study anyway. And thanks to my shitty memory, I had to study a bit harder than usual. I had to make flash cards, I had to try different study methods and I even tried just not studying at all!

I tried a lot of shit and although I was surely making progress… I wasn’t sure if this was enough. I wasn’t sure if I was enough.

What if I wasn’t?

If it’s as easy as midterms, wait… that was the first exam. It was designed to be easy. It was designed for kids to just give them a sense of what was coming.

No, no, don’t think about it. Just study!

Worrying wasn’t getting me anywhere. It was only making me stressed. The best way to prepare was to not stress about it. I’d studied all year and I wasn’t going to mess this up just because I doubted my abilities. Studying was making me even more stressed.

So… enough of this!

“Think I’ll go run,” I said.