I was surrounded by three old men. they were weird by any standards. I was sleeping in a bed that oddly reminded me of a surgical bed. luckily these men held no scalpels or I would have fainted then and there thin old man - the little kid is awakened, now what do you want to do with him, no matter what the other can't know. he will cause a civil war just by living in the city.

normal-looking old man - something, let me talk to him first. if possible I want to send him to the phantom city.

old man with a cool scar - do you want to kill him, the phantom zone is a place where we feel trouble fighting and you want to send an outworlder there, especially one that has the book.

normal-looking old man - leave that be let's talk to the kid first, he must be completely confused about the situation here. we will have to spend a long time explaining everything.

thin old man - no worries about that I will directly transmit everything to his brain. you have to take care of the two dragon kids also. if I remember correctly their name should be slayer and mist.

scarred old man - such weird names, are they the orphans that we have been hearing about nowadays thin old man - we can't seal their memory and we can't have them blabbing out.

normal old man - why?

thin old man - that old wolf is tricky. when I found the kid it was in response to an alarm bell. before he died he managed to fall on mist, leaving me no chance but to alter her memory. since mist is an orphan it might take some time, but she will figure out who that wolf is and what his appearance means if she remembers it exists. since she seems to have a mental-based ability, even if I modified her memory, she would discover it and breakthrough my seals to remember the true memory

normal old man - then I think it's best we send them to the dragon Outpost. the fighting over there shall keep her busy.

as I said before I was surrounded by three old men . one of them was so thin that he seemed more like a bag of bones, another had a pretty cool scar over his face and the last one had no real distinguishing feature .he seemed like plain old man you would meet down the street. therefore I had directly named them based on their features.

thin old man - welcome kid to the city of madness, I would appreciate it if you went to sleep for a couple of minutes.

that was not a request, as I found myself feeling sleepy and everything became blank. but not for long as I opened my eyes to see a black void surrounding me.

thin old man - be careful kid, you know you are seriously disrespecting us. calling us old men.

what should I say, ah yes

thin old man - don't you even dare to say anything, young man. what you are about to say is going to piss me off and you won't like me angry. I shouldn't be wasting my time like this. by the way my name is overlord. you shouldn't speak for some time or my flow will be ruined.

overlord - ah better, anyways let me first tell you about my world. this world we live in is what your kind likes to call a dream world because your kind tends to access this world through their dreams, though nobody remembers it when they wake up. you seem to have come to various parts of our dream world since a pretty young age.

while the overlord was speaking, I could see scenes. of many dreams that I had almost forgotten, some bloody, some weird, and some pretty nice.

overlord - you are the few among your kind that can enter this world without any problems and even remember it, though you do need to reach a certain age to fully enter. anyways, these are the basic stuff you need to survive in our world.

the thin ol....overlord, stopped speaking as the scenes in my head rapidly intensified. time seemed to have slowed down and stuff just entered my brain. it was like I was living life in fast forward, not exactly my life but still, it was a weird feeling.

( after a while )

finally, the fast forward had ended. I had learnt language, the basic knowledge about the world, like the people In it and cultures around the world which the locals pronounced as ambrosta. I think I will stick to translating the language to English because I really can't teach you people a new language.

overlord - that should be enough for you right now. you know enough as any of the local ten-year kid would know. if you act as an amnesiac, you should be able to pass off as a local. now you have to listen to what I have to tell you very carefully.

me - yes what is it

overlord - I can't use a memory boost for this, so listen carefully. I have told you about abilities. don't worry about your log. I will keep an explanation at the end. there are artifacts in this world that can grant abilities to people also and you happen to own a particularly dangerous one.

even we know pretty little about it but do know that it is dangerous to use artifacts to those people that have an ability. naturally, there is no risk for your kind.

I will give you a brief intro to the artifact. the artifact is called 'book of the bloody mage '. as for the ability that it possesses, even we do not have an exact idea .though we do know that it has something to do with life force .now go back and rest kid because you are supposed to learn how to use this book and from what I have heard it is mind screwing. by the way, when you wake your mind is going to screw for a couple of months, with the amount of information your brain has processed in a few instants, you are lucky you're brain didn't suffer any permanent damage.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

and the world became dark again. though it brightened up later and became much brigh....

( from here on out I will be screaming like crazy. it was a side effect of the memory transfer. I literally had years of information dumped in my head in a few seconds. there were side effects, like the pain that came next. it was like my head had become heart, beating in its rhythm. and each beat brought a new wave of pain like somebody had put fire instead of blood in my brain at least.)

( I lost my sense of time, so I don't really how long that pain persisted, but it was for a long time or it was for a few seconds. I really could not tell. finally, the pain began to decrease, first negligibly, and then it became significant. )

( finally, the pain decreased enough that I could think about other stuff .after a period when the pain was almost negligible, I had begun my studying of the book long ago and achieved some mastery with it )

the old men were nowhere to be seen, who were the only people that I had met in this world. they had imprisoned me in a blank room, with a table and a bed. there was no cupboard, nor any form of decoration. there was a trunk that was full of rationed meat.

this was the meat of an animal, whose name I won't even bother to pronounce. these beasts were the main food supply to the people of this city.

the meat appeared almost like blocks of grey-colored rock. but once one bit into it, they would discover that it was soft. it would release a blood-colored liquid, which looked really like blood. to be honest, it gave me the feeling of eating the raw meat, but luckily the taste of rationed meat was fine.

but still, it would take me a lot of time to get used to it. anyways, I had more important stuff to do. before I begin talking about the book I would like to tell you about abilities. abilities are just like how you think they are . to explain it is best to take an example, I will talk about that old man who just kept poking in my head and even promised to explain what abilities are, though he seemed to have forgotten about it.

master overlord ability was called ' mind snake ' .he named it himself, it seems. he could sneak into another person's mind and trap them inside their own head like a snake trapping its victim. the black void that I was in was my mind it seems.

that's what abilities are. there are an infinite variety of abilities that exist in this world. there were element manipulation, mind control, necromancy, and everything that had a possibility of being in a fantasy novel.

as for my ability, I had none. I was not of this world to enjoy its benefits ( at least that's what master overlord told me then ). that where the book came in . 'the book of the bloody mage ' would give me something similar to an ability though it was not accurate to call it an ability. it was more like a skill that I would acquire by studying the book.

the book was thin and had only nine pages, though each page seemed as hard as iron. it was covered by some kind of animal skin which was red-colored. man, I don't even understand why everybody had this kind of obsession with the colour red, man. I didn't even like red, I preferred blue over red.

the book was written in a language that I had no idea how to read. but the meaning appeared directly in my head. thankfully, it did because even if I could read that language. I would need a microscope just to see the letters. the words were so small that the pages of the book would seem blank to any other person though I could still understand it.

the vast quantity of information that a page in this book had shocked me. I felt like I could write a thousand paged book using just the first page.

as for what the first page of the book contained. it was titled the armour page. and it contained information on blood energy, including how to cultivate and then the method has that energy condense around me forming an armour.

as for what blood energy was. the bloody mage believed that the universe around us was filled with an infinite source of energy he called as neutral mana. the neutral Mana was literally what powered the abilities that everybody used. he managed to figure out a way of taking this neutral energy and converting it to blood energy that could be used to do stuff like make armour or other stuff. the first half of the book gave me this complex theory. if people thought their studies were hard you have to read what I had to suffer through.

the second half gave me the method of creating an armour around me using this blood energy.

as for what I have been doing this past few days was the second half of the page. the first part was mostly easy to understand, but my mind literally could not handle the strain which was involved in creating blood energy. bear with me for some time, but I will explain the process of turning neutral Mana into blood energy now so that I won't need to do it later, especially since I was really bored right now. the neutral mana was basically like a blank paper. my mind would act as a brush changing the very nature of this Mana making it into blood energy. the first half contained tricks on how to create this energy, how to reduce strain on the mind while making it, and other such stuff. my mind was not in the least capable of making blood energy because basically, the brush had no colour, so no matter how much I painted, no painting would emerge. therefore I had to rely on the book itself, which was a reservoir of blood energy left to me by one of the previous owners . as for how the armor looked like, it looked like a blood-red armour I had before, which I must say looks very impressive. it even had something I called a blood view, which allowed me to sense the life force of living things. I do wonder where that armour came from.

I created the armour using the information I acquired from the gauntlet which vastly differed from the standard armour designs that I had in the book.