Chapter 10 #3
“The dragons amassed an army of the north, humans, beasts, and everything in-between that was too terrified to fight them. They descended from the mountains, together with the dragons. The war erupted. The human kingdoms hastily united into an alliance against the dragons. The war lasted for three years and ended with a crushing defeat of the humans.”
As it probably usually happened when humans fought dragons.
“The dragons took over the cities, forcing people to serve them, or else they would burn them down. They burned down the cities that refused and had their armies pillage them. All kings died, their bloodlines ended by the sword.”
“What did the dragons want?” Luna asked. “It couldn’t have been just about food.”
“They had one clear order. Destroy all temples. And so we did. Every temple, every shrine, every religious book, down to the very last divine necklace, all got destroyed.”
Alsen narrowed his eyes. “Even when it comes to this library?”
“Yes.” Mirella sighed, eyes watering. “If you are here about the formation of six stars, you will find no answers here. The Spiral was a religion like all the others. All their texts, all their temples, everything that made the religion a religion was destroyed.”
Alsen took it in. Not much he could say to that. He could ask about the religion’s old temples, but he had caused enough trouble here already. “How long ago was it?”
“About thirty years ago,” Mirella said. “I wasn’t even young when messengers brought in the news that the kingdoms fell.”
So, he could find old members of that religion and ask them for details. That helped. To find some, the best place to start would be a major city. “Thank you,” he said. He glanced at Luna to see if she had any questions.
She only looked up at Mirella for a second. “Did you have the Thousand-Faced God? Or God of Thousand Faces, or something along those lines?”
“We did.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“No reason.” She smiled. “I just found the name really cool.”
That was apparently a god from her world. He left the discussion about that for another time. “Thank you. Not to keep you any longer, do you have any literature section about spells and curses? I need it for standard research of my own magic.”
“But of course.” She smiled. “Come.”
Mirella led the way deeper into the library. Long spiral stairs took them downstairs, where bookshelves lay integrated into the oak’s root system. Strange lights illuminated the chamber, like lanterns with no flame, providing eerie, teal light.
Alsen stopped by one of them. “How do these work?”
Mirella flashed a smile. “You truly must be from the middle of nowhere. Those are mistlamps. They use the magical residue from the tree to provide light. They are quite common.”
Not where he came from. Alsen stared for a bit. Luna walked to the library, already picking a book to study. Alsen remembered why he was here, nodded to Mirella, and searched the shelves himself.
“I wish you well,” Mirella said and left.
They went on to search the books. Alsen searched for spell inspiration. The one thing the System didn’t provide was mana. The stats had nothing related to it, nor did the skill tree. At least not anything positive.
That made his ability to process mana an absolute bottleneck of his power. No matter what spells he had prepared, they didn’t matter if he couldn’t cast them. His mana reserve, as far as he understood it, was practically bottomless.
That solved one part of the equation. The other, the crucial one, was his body. He had to be able to channel enough power through it.
While his breathing exercises and meditations helped increase its capacity, they didn’t progress it nearly as much as he had hoped they would.
Then again, they were made in a world with little magic left, so they were focused on squeezing water out of a rock while he needed to channel a sea through himself.
He found a couple of tomes about breathing and meditative exercises and got to study.
Luna, instead, found records of battles of mages. They more resembled epics. From the quick look Alsen gave them, he got the general idea.
She came from a world full of powerful mages, so she wanted to compare the scale and style of this world with hers.
He found too many exercises, from different schools, for different classes of magic. He spent the rest of the day studying them. After sunset, a scholar came to remind them that the library closes for the night and that it will begin reconstruction tomorrow.
He switched from studying to writing things down. In the last hour, he wrote down four different breathing exercises and three meditations into his spellbook. Inspired, he named them meditation one, meditation two, and meditation three. He used the same convention for the breathing exercises.
They finally kicked them out when the moon already hung high in the sky. On the way, they saw Mirella, seated by the table nearest the exit, trying to fix a drenched book.
As they walked, Alsen reached into his pocket. He pulled out his pouch of gold. He still had something in it left. He put the pouch on the table in front of Mirella. “This should help with the tributes and reconstruction.”
They left the library and headed for Vellhorn.