Squinting his sleepy eyes in confusion, the light momentarily blinded him. Myrddin rubbed his eyes as he sat up, and the sheets that covered him slid down. After a moment, his mind began to clear, but a slight confusion lingered as his eyes scanned the room.

It was a room neither too small nor too large, but undoubtedly the most luxurious he had ever seen in his life. From the small chandelier that emitted a soft and precise light to the scarlet carpet covering the entire floor, every detail radiated wealth.

The furniture was exquisitely preserved antiques: a desk, nightstands, bookshelves filled with books, chairs, and a huge mirror, as tall as the wall itself. Each piece was adorned with intricate decorative patterns, and the mirror's frame was embedded with jewels that, at a glance, revealed their high value.

At first, the opulence dazzled Myrddin, but soon the surprise gave way to doubts. ‘Where am I?’

Images of the moments before he lost consciousness flashed through his mind at a dizzying speed, and a suffocating feeling tightened in his chest. He clutched his hands to it, and his breathing became erratic.

In the midst of that confusion, his thoughts focused on the brief and fleeting moments when he had experienced a full life for the first time. As his breathing calmed and his heart stopped pounding so hard, a slight unease remained.

‘What happened?’ Looking at his hands nervously, he wondered, ‘Why did I change? What was different this time?’ In the past, when he lived in the orphanage, he had wondered if having emotions would give color to his world. His attempts to feel something never bore fruit.

‘Wait,’ the image of the man dressed in colors appeared in his mind, ‘Yes, he was the one who caused the change. I was dying, and even that couldn’t change anything, but he… what did he do?’

‘Magic?’ As he clenched his hands, a brief longing reflected in his eyes. He remembered how the world didn’t just stop with a snap of fingers but also came to life in color.

However, that excitement quickly faded. ‘The “how” isn’t so important right now. I... changed,’ he felt it; in those brief moments, he had experienced more emotions than in his entire life. It was as if his black-and-white world had gained some more shades, an abyssal difference.

The most significant thing was that he no longer felt completely empty. Even though life or death still seemed indifferent to him, living now seemed... pleasant, interesting, curious?

‘I don’t know,’ he shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, but he felt strangely refreshed.

As he uncovered himself and got out of bed, he noticed something peculiar when his feet touched the soft carpet. First, what he was wearing was very fine white silk clothing, something strange for him. However, what caught his attention was that, as he remembered, his knees had been shattered. Given the impact of the storm, if he wasn’t dead, he should at least be unable to move as he did now.

‘More magic, perhaps?’ he reasoned as he stood in front of the mirror.

Reflected in the mirror was a skinny young man, short in stature, with short black hair and gray eyes, dressed in fine white silk. He felt nothing, but the memory of his reflection in a puddle overlapped with the image in the mirror.

‘I could never say we are the same person,’ he thought. It was curious how a person could look so different just by being clean and in different clothes. Even Myrddin himself wouldn’t have recognized him.

After looking at himself for a few more moments, his gaze shifted toward the door. ‘Well, now what?’ he wondered, aware that there was something new in him. He wasn’t stupid, and it wasn’t a mystery: if everything had stayed the same, he wouldn’t have gotten out of bed until he was hungry. But now there was something he didn’t have before: an initiative driven by a faint curiosity.

‘Should I go out or wait?’ he pondered calmly, but deep down, he had already made the decision since he got up. Although it was a curiosity as weak as a mosquito bite compared to before, now it felt like a firefly in front of the moon. It was a faint impulse, but it was hard to resist, and there was no reason to do so.

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Without further ado, he approached the door and placed his hand on the doorknob. With a small ‘Click,’ the door opened.

Pushing it with his hands, a hallway came into view.

Upon stepping out and feeling the cold wood beneath his feet, he looked to his left and right. It was an expansive hallway, with dark wooden floors and white walls adorned with small lamps that illuminated it every meter.

‘How big is this place?’ he wondered, frowning as he looked in both directions of the seemingly endless hallway.

He decided to choose a side at random and started walking, his curiosity now clearly driven by a faint desire to explore, causing the wood to creak with each step.

Maybe because he was in very good condition, he advanced quickly for just walking.

He passed by several doors on his way down the hallway, but after opening two and seeing rooms similar to his own, he stopped paying attention to them and focused on moving forward.

Soon he found something different in the repetitive hallway; although it continued, it was interrupted by two staircases, one going up and the other going down.

Without even considering, he took the one going down; after all, he was practically lost, and it didn’t matter which path he took as long as it wasn’t where he came from.

He didn’t have to go down much to see something different. About twenty steps down, he found a double door, an enormous door, at least to him, as the handles reached almost his face.

After briefly wondering if he could open it, he simply tried. He placed his hands on the handles, and with a soft ‘Click,’ the door opened.

“Huh?” Despite their size, the doors were as light as feathers, and with no effort at all, they swung wide open. Myrddin, who had applied too much force, couldn’t help but stumble and fall forward.

Luckily, he managed to react in time, or he would have smacked his forehead on the floor. Who knows how long he would have been lying unconscious here if that had happened? But that didn’t bother him; he felt interested. He stood up and lifted his gaze, then his mouth dropped open along with his eyes, just like the door behind him.

In front of him was a library, an enormous and majestic library.

‘No, enormous is an understatement. This is immense, and even that might not describe it,’ he thought, astonished, unable to see the end of the library before him.

It was an unimaginably vast place. From where he stood, he could see countless floors stretching upward, and the ceiling was nowhere in sight.

Each visible floor seemed endless; he could only see the colossal number of black bookshelves filled with books as thick as his thigh and even larger, and some others filled with scrolls.

It was hard not to feel small in such a panorama. If he could, he would stay gazing at the place for a long while, not just because of the majestic view but also because of the growing curiosity that kept increasing explosively at the sight of the place. He would have liked to see how strong his curiosity could grow; unfortunately, it guided him to explore the place, and he couldn’t resist the impulse.

‘What would it be like to see the site from the highest point?’ he wondered, taking one last look before starting to walk around the place.

As he wandered, he didn’t bother to move quickly; in fact, he slowed his pace while appreciating everything around him, and the smell of old paper assaulted his nose.

He noticed several things. First, although the bookshelves seemed to be made of wood, they felt as cold as metal when touched. He also observed that there were some white words on each bookshelf; it seemed like some kind of division. Sadly, Myrddin couldn’t read, but that didn’t affect his mood in the slightest.

It was as if no other emotion but curiosity could take hold of him.

‘I wonder what these books contain? Judging by the division, each shelf seems to cover different topics. Would one talk about magic? It would be interesting to find a magic book you could read without knowing how to read. That would be magical,’ he thought as he got lost in his musings, uninterested in the fact that he had been lost for a while.

Despite walking slowly, almost lazily, he had been wandering aimlessly for quite some time, changing direction almost randomly.

‘Oh, wait,’ he suddenly stopped. ‘Books don’t have to be just words. Maybe some have pictures or images.’ He remembered those few storybooks he had seen at the orphanage and thought that among so many books, at least one could have images that gave some clue about its content.

He approached the nearest bookshelf and tried to grab the most striking book he saw, but something stopped him—or rather, someone. Just as he was about to grab the book, a hand grabbed his wrist.

“What are you doing!?, You little brat!” boomed an irritated voice, marked by a rough tone that indicated advanced age.

‘Brat?’ Myrddin repeated to himself, confused, and looked up to see who had stopped him.

In front of him stood a man with skin as black as coal, dressed in a white suit that, along with his white beard and hair, contrasted sharply with his skin tone. But the most striking features were his scarlet eyes with snake-like pupils and the two red horns protruding from his white hair.

‘A... demon?’ Myrddin thought, surprised.