The going was a lot slower for a while. Guinevere wouldn’t let me carry her while we were around her party, so our pace was slowed to a crawl as she limped along. Luckily as Gifted we healed fast and she was back on her feet fully after only two days. We continued to move down the twisting tunnels.

The hordes of monsters did not return which made me uneasy instead of happy. I kept anticipating an ambush around every corner. My plant paranoia made the white vines and flora I saw a threat even though Voidra insisted there was no emotion at all coming from any of them. We made camp every ten or twelve hours though it was hard to tell any sort of time. I just made guesses based off how long it took us to walk a mile and then using that as my internal measuring device.

We arrived at another cavern before we stopped for camp that day. Here the area was far less in ruins, the walls around the underground village were still intact. There was much less flora in this cavern and the air was dry and the air still. I jumped the wall into the ghost town.

Can you detect ghosts? I asked Voidra.

Of course, they have just as much if not more emotions as flesh and blood creatures, Voidra answered.

Thinking of Karnen I had to agree with her.

I pushed open the metal gates, noting the runes along them. Nothing about them seemed like they were a trap and instead were focused on durability and resistances likely why they weren’t rusted into red paste by now. There was a central building and I headed there as Guinevere and her party entered the village behind me. Following the thread of magic, I went to the door of the central building which was built like a fortress and tried the double doors, but they were locked from the inside.

Ramming my shoulder into the door over and over didn’t get me anywhere. Teleporting to the room I found another door. This door broke after about a dozen kicks, and I descended down a set of spiraling stairs. Crumbling skeletons in battered armor were scattered around showing the remains of some battle. I went to the doors of the fortress and pulled aside tables, chairs and heavy stone blocks that had been put in front of it. Unbarring it I let Guinevere inside her party setting up camp in the main foyer.

I found the enchantment on the floor at the center of the building. Now the trouble was their was a lot of background feedback. Imagine being in a room with hundreds of people talking and trying to pick out one conversation, that was what I was dealing with. There were so many nearby enchantments and magical aura in the area getting the trail was nearly impossible.

Following my nose I found enchantments on doors, broken weapons and armor. Putting the fragments into my storage for later study and to remove the feedback. I also took the doors off their hinges and through painful effort also put them in my storage pouch. With the feedback being removed I discovered something I never would have if I hadn’t been manhandling a set of iron doors. When I finally pried it off its hinges it went flying and struck a wall. The stone cracked and a stone block was knocked free. A black space behind it let out an icy cold draft with the dry smell of a tomb and death.

Pulling at the bricks I opened up a hole deep enough for me to crawl through. A narrow shaft led straight down and a ladder had been carved into the stone. I just put my hand and feet against the sides of the shaft and slid straight down.

Dropping down my eyes looked about the pitch-black room able to see thanks to one of their mutations. It was another workshop though this one was very different; the walls were chalkboard black and just like a chalkboard were covered with white markings. Runes, pictures and various sigils covered every surface.

There was a workbench in the center of the room was a dais with a book chained down across it. Its cover was a black crystal similar to obsidian, its edges trimmed in gold with glowing red runes along its edges. I looked around but couldn’t find a key so eventually I just took out my chisels and broke the lock. I opened the book ready for eldritch secrets and was greeted by blank pages. There was a stylus next to the book and I looked it over. It was made of black obsidian like the book and had similar glowing red runes on it. I could read them, but they didn’t make any sense to me.

This was like knowing what numbers were, being perfectly capable of reading them but not understanding a string of code. I recognized some of the runes and pulled out my sketch book and pulled it out setting it next to the other book to compare them.

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The book went full Harry Potter on me. Teeth sprouted from its edges and it freaking ate my sketch book. Papers were shredded and devoured into the tome.

“You son of bitch!” I said about ready to pulverize the tome into a pile of pulp and crystal.

It flipped onto its side and opened up revealing the pages of my sketchbook copied inside it on its once blank pages. I turned one page hesitantly, ready to yank my hand back if it went all chompy again. After a while I saw it had perfectly copied all my drawings although all the pencil marking had been converted to black ink. I picked up the tome and saw there were two eyelets on either end of its spine. Taking some of the chain that had been used to bind it to the dais, looped it through the eyelets and hung it off my belt. I tried putting it in the storage pouch, but it was like there was forcefield preventing me from putting it inside.

I started going over the designs on the walls on the walls and copying them down in my new tome. The stylus stabbed a needle into my skin and drew on my blood as an ink. It dried instantly turning black on contact with the pages. I tested it and found I couldn’t draw on other surfaces with it.

The tome proved to be invaluable. I drew a rune wrong and watched as the tome automatically corrected it on the page the black lines twisting to properly match what I was seeing on the wall.

“You know what this is?” I asked the two spirits in my head. “What are you getting from it Voidra?”

Feels similar to my family, Voidra said. It is hungry.

What does a book eat? Besides other books apparently? Karnen asked.

“Knowledge,” I said.

As I copied the diagrams into the tome, I began to understand what I was seeing. A design for a spell or enchantment, I couldn’t tell what the difference between them was when they were written. That gave me pause, what was the difference? Was an enchantment just the written form a spell? I knew a few spells and I would have to experiment with seeing if I could translate them into enchantments.

For now, I kept copying the diagrams. Not all of them were about the portal but most were. The portal was constantly changed in every diagram, and I kept reading phrases about breeching, passing beyond and piercing the veil, one of the last diagrams gave me the most pause. Enter other universe, the diagram was unfinished, but it was mostly identical to the other besides that.

Enter another universe, like I had come here from my world. These magi people had been trying to enter other worlds? Why? I thought about it, would they bring back weapons? Unlikely and not helpful as I was now, I could rip apart a platoon of hardened marines. Their bullets would bounce off my skin and even a tank round would just knock me off my feet. Abilities let you become far superior to anything short of a nuke and I was sure there was some magical equivalent of that out there.

Putting aside the uses for the portal for now. I kept copying the diagrams, no matter how much I drew I never seemed to progress in how many pages I was using up in the tome. Shrugging and chalking it up to magic I kept at it. Not all the enchantments were about the portal they’d been working on, some of them were patterns for armor enchantments.

I learned some enchantments for hardening armor, adding acid resistance and a ring for storing a spell cast into it. I came across what I believed was a spell not an enchantment although I now theorized it could be made into one. It would create a pure beam of lighting from my hand lasting for a few seconds before ending.

Copying it down I held out my hand and tried to use it. It took a few dozen tries before the lighting burst out, it extended nearly six feet out and lasted for around five seconds before vanishing. It also filled the room with thunder and slammed my back against the wall like I’d been launched from a rocket. This spell had obviously been experimental, but I admired it for its destructive potential. There were still spots in my eyes from the brilliant light emitted.

“Oh yeah, I need to find a way to use that,” I said.

I’m pretty sure I heard your spine snap when you hit the wall, Karen said. Maybe you should avoid self-damaging spells and not think about using them during combat.

“It’ll be fine,” I insisted.

There was nothing left to study. So, l left the hidden workshop with my new tome and stylus and climbed back out. The air was free of the feedback and magical static and I was able to find a trail. No one wanted to spend a bunch of time in the ghost town, so we all agreed to head out the next morning. I took my own private watch in a tower atop the fortress away from the others.

I was examining the ruined enchanted weapons and armor trying to piece back tighter their enchantments, most of the magic had headed from them but enough still lingered in them. I might have been able to have repaired them in I still had access to all my abilities. That gave me a thought.

Voidra you can turn off my passive abilities, does that mean you can also turn them on? I asked.

Of course, I can turn them back on, Voidra said.

“No,” I corrected her. “could you activate one of my spoken abilities like Hell Dragon’s Armory or Chain lighting?”

Voidra was quiet. Maybe, she finally said hesitantly.

“Start trying,” I said. “That is now yours and Karnen’s job if you can figure out how to bypass this system block and get all my abilities working again it will open a lot of options for us.”