Aya couldn’t get over the fact that the damn bird was over three times her level. Looking at his stats, she noticed his attack and defense points were slightly higher than hers. It explained why their initial bout had been so evenly matched. Unfortunately, she also unearthed his health points. They were three times higher than her own. That in turn explained why he had been so hard to kill in their first fight, before he decided to permanently attach himself to her.

‘Good times.’

She sighed before looking at the stack of scrolls before her. It bothered her that none of the other players had bonded creatures, at least not from what she could tell. Part of her wanted to immediately open up the forums or at least send Donovan a message. Instead she fed Henry blood until his dehydration and hunger warnings went off, bound him up and went back to work. She would need to investigate the nature of the bond later but there was nothing to be done about it now. The damn bird had already taken too much of her time in the library. She had no idea when and if one of the librarians would show up to check on her and her work. The contents of the scrolls were too good to pass up for a bird she wanted to get rid of.

Aya carefully placed a pile of finished scrolls on one of the emptied shelves. Her work was finally showing results and with the emptied space, she was able to organize herself and create a working system. She sifted through the scrolls she wanted to copy first, giving them a quick glance to make sure they would be of some use to her in the future. The previous batch had unfortunately proven that some scrolls were completely useless or simply less-detailed renditions of other scrolls. She opted for the more complex scrolls with more pertinent details.

The pile of finished scrolls continued to grow along with her Scribe skill. Setting up a visual progress bar, she was able to keep track of the growth of her skill. Over time, the documents started to bore her and she began running into near-identical accounts of the same event. By the time she noticed, she had three different copies of the Vernabur Dungeons. They were creations from three different individuals in three different time periods. Although they allowed Aya to see how the dungeon slowly shifted over time, it was still a redundancy she didn’t enjoy.

Going through so many scrolls also let her see that some scholars, like Sir Reynolds Mann, created completely useless work. She completely avoided his work after his second scroll detailing the pollination of the SerVirak plant. Later she came across a scroll by Sen-Tem Tian, a rivaling scholar of lesser birth. Although the scrolls were created around the same time, Tian’s work was in much greater disrepair. The scrolls were literally falling apart with the lesser-quality material and even the ink itself was barely legible, having faded through the centuries. But even with the much lower quality material, the contents themselves were of much higher quality.

It was obvious that Reynolds Mann had used Tian’s work to propel himself into scholastic fame. It annoyed Aya how money and status overpowered skill and intellect even in a game’s history. Even if she couldn’t change the past and help Tian gain recognition for his talents in his time, it gave her pleasure to create perfect replicas of the man’s detailed work. She had good paper and ink at her disposal and she didn’t let a single annotation go by unnoticed. Later, after piling all of his finished copied scrolls together, she put Sir Mann’s scrolls in the deepest, dankest corners of the musty little room that she could find.

Although Aya tried to keep to her working system, every now and then she would encounter a work, like Tian’s, for which she felt a special affinity. She didn’t know how it happened, but by the time she noticed it, she could almost differentiate the authors of the scrolls before even touching them. It was like the room was coming alive around her, like the scrolls had lives of their own. Her eyes veered toward the progress and time bar she hadn’t given much thought to for a while. It was almost time for the second meal and her Scribe skill had suddenly jumped up to ‘Tolerably Slow’. She wondered if the new way in which she viewed the scrolls had anything to do with her skill.

Aya looked at her pile of finished scrolls, which were now taking up three whole shelves. She was quite proud of her work and thinking of her latest chosen scholar, Sir Willis Taim, an aristocrat with a brain - a rarity, when she looked around the room at the piles upon piles of stored scrolls until they began to shine with almost imperceptible light. Eventually, two of them shined slightly more brightly than the rest and Aya approached them. She picked them up, noticing the paper had the same age and feel as the rest of Taim’s work. Opening it, she immediately recognized the man’s bold, looping hand.

She bit her lip and absentmindedly headed to the desk, immediately activating her skill. At first she hadn’t paid it much mind, assuming that the game was somehow helping her sort through the room’s contents but with the last couple of ‘searches’ she had done, it was quite obvious that her ‘ability’ was growing stronger. As her hand continued to copy the mentally laid out lines of the document, the Taim family lineage, a document she was now unsure why she was even copying, she thought of one of the earlier scholars she had come across, an unnamed priest. A couple of scrolls immediately lit up around the room. They were mostly placed on high shelves and as her eyes shifted upwards, they were distracted by something else.

Little beads of light hung around the ceiling. Some hummed and vibrated in place; others swung wildly about and others swirled back and forth as if pushed around by an invisible wind. Aya was stunned; there were hundreds of them and she hadn’t noticed them until that very second. The brightness of the room sudddenly made sense. She remembered entering the room lit by the simple, flickering light of a torch, yet for hours she had been surrounded by a clear, white and unfiltered light that had nothing to do with any torch or any muddy light forcing its way through the cracked grime on the window.

She was completely unable to tear her eyes away from the luminous spectacle above her. Her attention was only forced away minutes later when her skill timed out. Aya looked down at the scroll before her, noticed the system assist had left some of the lines out, and completed them quickly before returning her attention to the ceiling. Over half of the lights were either gone or dimmed.

Scrunching her brows, she watched as more and more of them disappeared. Henry wriggled against her arm, tearing her attention away from the ceiling. She looked down at her arm and considered him, her arm, her quill and the lights. Taking out her notebook, she started drawing out her personal smaller copy of the Taim lineage. She doubted she would ever have use for it again, but her real aim was something else. Halfway through her drawing, she looked up in time to see more of the lights flickering back to life.

Concentrating on her work again, she set out to copy more documents. The more documents she copied in a shorter amount of time, the more lights she would find in the room with her. Over time, she noticed that their colors were all slightly yellowish with only a few bluish ones in between. Some were brighter than the others and she could almost swear they felt a bit different from one another. One would be fuzzy while another would be sweet. She couldn’t explain it, the same way she couldn’t explain the way the scrolls around the room glowed slightly with light when she focused on them.

When sorting through a particular architect’s scrolls, mainly organized in a single section, Aya wondered if the ceiling lights were somehow related to the scrolls’ glowing. She was busy copying the woman’s blueprints of some lord’s mansion when she noticed something oddly familiar about the layout. Still concerned about the connection of the lights, Aya looked up, hoping to find a light that linked to the scroll’s glow before her. She didn’t find one. Disappointed, she returned her attention to the blueprint. Her hand was tracing one of the final notes accompanying the designs for a magnificent ballroom when her brain finally caught up to her fingers. The ballroom was familiar to her because she had been in it once. Only, it hadn’t been decorated as a ballroom when she was in it. It had been a guild room.

Aya’s hand unconsciously tightened around the quill, straining it unnaturally until it bent. By the time she noticed, she was shaking and Henry was looking at her strangely past his bonds. Feeling trapped in a small room with a chicken tied around her arm, she got up and walked hurriedly around the desk, trying to convince herself that she wasn’t a prisoner. She threw the broken quill onto the table and untied the bird, hoping to attain some measure of freedom.

Aya braced herself for the bird’s onslaught of attacks, but they never came. Instead, he simply jumped to the ground and walked away from her, tail suspended into the air like a mocking question mark. For a moment she stood, not knowing what to do. She was finally rid of the damn bird! She wanted to run around the small room in a victory lap; instead she slumped onto the chair and rubbed the stiffness out of her right arm.

They were bonded; it was too late to get rid of him now. She sighed and tried to ignore the circling bird as best as she could. Stretching her arm out, she picked up the blueprint in front of her. It was incredibly detailed and unlike some of the other, more dated blueprints with dozens of revisions, it was current. She took out all of the architect’s other blueprints. Some were completely unrelated sketches of other buildings but most of the woman’s drawings detailed buildings in the same neighborhood as Serving Time’s guild.

The whole neighborhood housed a bunch of other guilds and Aya made careful and comprehensive copies, both for herself and the library. Her mind was abuzz with plans and what she could do with the sketches. Some of the buildings had secret passageways. Serving Time’s building didn’t but Aya could see a couple of places that would easily connect to the hidden tunnels of other nearby buildings. She was drawing all of this into her notebook, thinking of all the possibilities when the light around her suddenly intensified.

It was slow at first, growing brighter and brighter, and by the time Aya finally tore her attention away from her sketches to look at it, it was almost blinding. She shielded her eyes when she looked at the source, one of the little beads of light from the ceiling. Henry was squawking erratically in a corner and Aya was squinting through her eyes to see anything when the light suddenly increased in intensity, blinding her and warming her with a burst of heat. Instinctively, she raised her arms in protection, but by then she wasn’t in the small scroll-filled room anymore.

Aya turned around, looking at the white space around her. There was no chair she was sitting on, no table she was writing at, no dusty smell of scrolls around her and not even a noisily squawking bird in the background. She was in a completely empty and blank space until a notification popped up in front of her.

A Manic Creature has Chosen You.

Do You Wish to Accept?

Yes | No

Aya considered the screen for a moment. She didn’t know much about manic creatures. She knew, from browsing forums, that to some extent they were the source of magic in the game and that the more you had, the more powerful a magic user you were. Other than that, she knew nothing. Shrugging, she accepted, not knowing what possible drawback accepting power could have.

[Yes]

Before the notification window even finished minimizing itself, the space before Aya was filling itself with scroll upon scroll. They flew in from every corner imaginable, paper flapping through the air as they unrolled themselves. Within seconds, she was surrounded on all sides by a wall of opened scrolls. When the air finally calmed, she turned around to find herself completely encased from top to bottom with thousands upon thousands of scrolls that overlapped each other.

The light was gone and there were no notifications left to open. The usual display with her health points and other alerts were also gone. She had absolutely no idea about what she was supposed to do. Aya ran a hand through her cropped hair. The length still surprised her when she wasn’t consciously thinking about the difference between her avatar and her real body. Her eyes skimmed the scrolls around her. She would have felt claustrophobic if her mind hadn’t been busy trying to decipher the writing on the scrolls before her.

Approaching them, she lifted her hands towards the scrolls. She didn’t know what texture to expect. The scrolls looked like paper so she was half-expecting the scrolls to simply rip apart with the pressure of her hand. Instead, they were as strong as brick, not giving an inch to her hand. She formed her hands and to fists and hit them against the wall of scrolls.

Nothing.

She reasoned there must be a way out, but there wasn’t one she could see or feel. She turned her entire focus towards the writings on the scrolls instead. They reminded her of ancient hieroglyphs she’d seen in museums and history shows. Instead of rounded loops, everything seemed to have pointed and jagged edges. The ending stroke of each rune was pointed out, as if on attack. She couldn’t make anything out but the answer to her way out lay before her somewhere and she needed to find where.

It was obvious that the whole runic system was the same, probably one of the many languages that the game’s AI had come up with. The scrolls were overlapping and the writing was coming from various directions, sometimes even upside down. She couldn’t make heads or tails of the situation but she doubted her job was to interpret and read a lost language. That was obviously beyond her abilities. She eyed the runes around her, noticing the difference in strokes, the difference in rune sizes and different angles.

The runes themselves were part of a bigger image, but there was no way to see what the image was; not when they were splayed all over the place like they were. If she could separate the runes by size and then by…

As she thought about the separation of the scrolls, they started coming unglued, moving further away from her, giving her the mental space necessary to organize her thoughts. Aya nodded in excitement as she unconsciously moved toward the scrolls she had just touched. She motioned her hand to the side and the scroll moved as if commanded by it. Aya didn’t miss a beat and swirled around, looking at the rest of the scrolls before she stepped back, and bunched them up in line. She watched as they all flew together to form a long line of scroll dominoes before her.

She smiled and sorted them one by one, first by size, then by direction, then by opacity and by the time she knew it, she had a massive dashboard of hundreds of scrolls before her organized in exactly the way she wanted. The group with the smallest number of scrolls was the one with the biggest runes and she could immediately tell that they were linked. She laid them out in front of her, moving her hands in the way she wanted them to move but they often moved as soon as she thought about it, long before her hands came into motion.

Bringing all of the twenty or so scrolls with the biggest runes to the forefront, she couldn’t make sense of them at first. Some runes seemed incomplete, like they were cut in half, and others looked so alike she couldn’t tell them apart. Her brain was losing itself in the foreign script when she recognized one of the symbols. It looked like a lowercase, inverted cursive R, exactly how Rin used to write them when she was younger. However, instead of ending, or in this case, beginning with a straight line, the symbol started with a jagged edge. With only one symbol that stood out to her, she could clearly see it every time it showed up in the runes, small or big.

One of the scrolls had half of the symbol on it and she found the other half on another of the scrolls with the big runes she had already separated. Continuing to unconsciously move her hands around, she held the scrolls together so that the rune was mended and watched as the scrolls glowed slightly when the runes were lined up exactly right. Aya snapped her fingers and the two scrolls locked on to each other. It was a puzzle and she knew exactly what she had to do now.

Bringing the rest of the large runes to the forefront, she tried to find more of the R-like symbols but could not find any. She had no idea what the other symbols looked like complete, so she brought some of the smaller runes forward so she could see the whole rune before trying to puzzle one together. The next rune she found half of looked like a jagged version of the Chinese symbol for “within”.

Aya knew about a total of three Chinese symbols from the time before the death of her parents. She had once been dragged along to provide moral support for a friend. Back then, she had been known as the artist in their group of friends, but to this day she did not know why she had been chosen. The unfortunate choice of Chinese symbols had nothing to do with her ‘artistic sensibilities’. She didn’t support human branding to begin with. Who knew the experience would eventually help her in a game, or at all for that matter?

The next couple of minutes continued in much the same way. Aya would find a rune she could untangle from the rest of the large runes and build it together with the rest of the large runic lines. Eventually, she had a bunch of small locked pieces of large runes, but none of them spanned more than three scrolls. Mystified as to how everything was supposed to come together, she inspected the scrolls with the large runes until she noticed that most of them had the beginning of a large runic line in the corner of the scroll.

She fumbled for the other large rune scrolls and realized that many of the runes had little edges that were incomplete. At first it was hard to find out where one rune began and another started and it was pretty hit-or-miss, but then she noticed that the large runes were creating a bigger shape, one she already knew: a circle. Once she knew that the large runes were eventually coming together to form a circle of gibberish in runes, she was able to quickly assemble it.

After the circle was complete and locked in place, she could tell that the outer edges of the circle already had the beginnings of more runes, but in small font this time. She kept using the same techniques, relying mostly on the angle of the writing to find out where the runes fit in the circle. It was slow progress, but after some time, she could see it coming together nicely.

It was a large inner circle of runes surrounded by a circle of small runes and then medium-sized runes and so on with varying sizes. By the end, she still had no clue what any of the runes meant, but having to deal with them for so long, she was actually able to tell some of them apart, which made the work a lot faster.

It took her almost half an hour but she finished the scroll puzzle and they all started glowing brightly when she placed the last piece. They lit up at the paper edges, passing a fire through the design that burned away the outlines of the paper. Aya was left with one massive convoluted circular diagram of runes she still didn’t know what to do with.

She stood before it as the runes started moving. Each circle of runes moved at a different speed in a different direction. The large runes rotated right while the small ones rotated left and the ones in between decided on their own. The motion sped up and with it, there was suddenly wind whipping at Aya’s hair. She lifted her hand to shield her eyes and read the notification she received.

You have Acquired a Manic Creature.

Current Base Mana: 500

A path lit up before her, with little blue squares leading the way into the middle of the rune circle. The wind was still picking up speed with the runes’ movements so she hurried to the next lit square. They served almost like velcro, keeping her glued to the ground as the wind around her continued to increase in velocity. Aya took another step, even when the step looked like it was suspended in thin air before her. When her feet landed on it, it was as solid as the rest of the place and she kept climbing the lit squares all the way into the middle of the circle.

When she arrived, she saw something unexpected. She could see herself, or at least her game avatar, sitting stoically at the desk where she had been copying furiously. The avatar’s small hands still held a quill as she stared directly ahead at a bright light that hovered right before her eyes. Aya was having a hard time wrapping her mind around the image, when she was suddenly pushed through the opening, into the bright light and into her avatar’s forehead.

She was still reeling from the ride, adjusting to the fact that she was back in the small room, still sitting at the table, when she saw that the bright light before her was still there. Only this time, it wasn’t just a bright light; she could see a swirl of patterns inside it, the runic patterns she had put together. Aya squinted to see the runes continue to accelerate but was caught off-guard when they rushed at her, hitting her right between the eyes.

She couldn’t help lifting her hands to her forehead, to check if the slight coolness she had felt upon impact had left any traces, but there was nothing there.

You may now learn Magic Spells that require 500 or less Mana.

Magic Spells can be bought.

Gained through Quests.

Or Learned in Specific Circumstances.

Regeneration: 100 Mana / Minute

Aya clicked through the rest of the notifications until she realized she wasn’t going to get a explantion. She was still mulling the experience over when she realized that Henry was still in the room with her, squawking vehemently behind her. She glared at him and yelled, “Shut it!”

He suddenly croaked to a halt.

Her Mana went down by 200.

Aya stared at his silent presence in surprise until a slow smile spread across her face. She knew then she was going to enjoy her new powers.