For the next few days, I work frantically to get everything in order.

The mine, my inner world, expanding the network in the wild and adding more villages. Each village in the network that accepted my invitation started adding a little more mana to the pot and increased the budget I had to work with. Though as a couple of villages started to make further inroads in the runic business, they might start hoarding their mana for their own use.

My understanding of runes fueled by the promising research lines in both the institute and Merlin’s academy grows by the day. I made the trip back to my home occasionally to work there, but there was too much that required me to be in person in the village.

I walk out of the forge with another 40 silver in my pocket. Blackwood may only have made one weapon on the previous days, but the reward was significantly bigger than before and I would soon see the money from Charlie’s agreement with the other villages. I doubted there is anyone with this much capital in the surrounding villages, possibly in the entire instance.

Even after almost three months, few jobs pay more than 20 or 25 coppers per day, and that means without spending a single copper coin most people would need one of these ‘high-end’ jobs to gather the 4 silver coins at the end of the third month. Just a few more days, as the few who didn’t have enough saved up worked frantically to scrape the last few coins.

I look in the special space where my book resides as I jog back to my hut in the village. I will get to you in just a few more minutes, let me just check the messaging system.

I touch the runic structure embedded in the inner part of the wall as I cross my door, and seeing that no other village tried to contact me, I send my awareness to my inner world. There I find a small cube of grown roots with much of the written knowledge and notes the village generated on magic and how the system works.

The exact type of knowledge that the book seems to prefer the most, though I know by heart most if not all the village’s magical knowledge, it was just a test. And if we keep expanding the MRI and The Academy, the amount of material coming out will be beyond what I could hope to read on my own.

I for the first time earnestly use the forging tools I prepared in my inner world, and light a fire which the Aster and the other rabbits seem intensely curious about, though they are smart enough to keep their distance.

In the inner world goes my book and I open a pair of portals so I can pass my hands inside. Though that is probably the wrong way to describe it. Not even an atom of my own body can enter the space. The portals just deform like a form-fitting glove against my skin. In practice, it makes little difference if I can enter it or not given what I’m working on right now.

The reason I can’t put even a hair of my own in the inner world while other living creatures can still inhabit it is a mystery, but it is possibly just another quirk of the system. Or perhaps it worked by using my body in some way and trying to put something within itself is simply impossible.

The first rune I created, the bedrock of all our communications, is very handy in proving all kinds of strange and new interactions with the system’s runes. We were hard at work studying the runes from the teleporting mobs, the ones from my trial, and ones we traded with another village that had little use for them, though they kept the source a secret.

I shake my head trying to get rid of the headache starting to form after thinking about the spatial mechanics. I already spent long enough working on space runes during the last few days. It is becoming important but I need a break now and then.

With everything in place and the silver and gold heating up, I take the leather-bound book and start carving its exterior in a carefully arranged runic design. After a good half an hour, long after the metal melts, I start pouring them in the sulks of the leather, and similar to my tests, there isn’t even a hint of smoke as the molten metal conforms to the carved out shapes in the leather of the cover.

I don’t know if this is the right course of action, for all I know I could be ruining it, but I had delayed this step too long already and I still didn’t have any more information. Though my gut tells me I am at least in the ballpark.

I don’t overfill the cover, leaving plenty of space for other materials and new runes to be worked on. I open the book and start using an expensive, but necessary bottle of engraving ink prepared just for this.

Though engraving ink is just a fancy name for ink laced with silver and gold which the improvement in magical conductivity is worth the cost.

I open the last page of the book, though I need to take a little care, for if I try to leaf from the start to the end, there seems to be an endless number of pages in between. I hope that means I don’t have to worry about ever running out of room for new information to pop up.

I ignore the pain in my heart as over a gold coin is absorbed in the pages. For now, the only source of gold is from coins and the merchant is more than happy to trade a hundred silver coins for it. At least I no longer needed to worry about silver so much with the steady supply coming from the mine.

I start on another more extensive runic design with specially designed contact points so they touch the inner parts of the formation on the cover. Dozens of pages in the back are filled out with intricate designs that don’t require a lot of mana.

Hours pass and the sun finishes its climb in the sky before starting to fall again before I’m finished with the back and the front of the book.

As I start to inscribe the first page instead of just adding a note, the first few pages start turning blank, and all the filled pages move a little closer to the middle of the book.

It’s almost as if it understands what I’m trying to do, or just by sheer coincidence, I’m doing exactly what is the proper way of going about upgrading a book. When I am finished, I close the book so the formation will come into contact with itself and send a couple of mana points into it.

Five mana points fill the small battery. If the hundred-plus grams of silver were replaced by copper, it would put the storage capacity closer to 1 mana point or at most 2 or 3 for pure silver. This little amount of gold shouldn’t have made that much of a difference on its own, so the sulks on the leather must account for the discrepancy.

The book starts shaking in my hand.

“That…is not supposed to happen,” I say, startled.

I take my hands out of the inner world, and through the perception field, I feel that it has stopped shaking. Tentatively, I take it out of the inner world and hold it in my hands.

Nothing happens, but I sense the empty batteries, so I fill it again and again until I all but send a constant stream of Mana in the book.

An ever-increasing stream of mana leaves my pool until it starts running dry, and I take mana from the battery, but a violent reaction from the book sends me tumbling around.

“So, you don’t like other people’s mana?” Looking at a smaller battery, I take the mana from the last couple of days. I rarely needed to use my own stored mana, but I kept a supply just in case. And for some reason, that is what the book wanted.

A thousand mana, 3 thousand, 8 thousand, all 17 thousand mana points I had stored are gone, and I regret not having more. Though I also felt some resistance from the book when I inputted mana from older batteries. I could feel this resistance for anything over 4 days, and a good portion of the mana a week old passes through the book and dissipates in the air. It’s as if the book was only looking for ‘pure’ mana and or mana that has my ‘signature’.

Not knowing what to do I just hold it in my grasp, eat a mana regen fruit, sit to meditate, and start sending each of the regenerating points as they tick in my mana bar.

One mana, zero mana, one mana, zero mana.

A resistance to inputting the mana starts to form even with the mana only seconds old. As I meditate, I can just barely remember that this didn’t start now, but was always there and was minutely becoming harder and harder, I just didn’t have any reason to pay attention to it before.

The memory exercises and high mental attributes were giving me unprecedented capabilities, though unlike the physical modifications they required effort to show fruition. It wasn’t just about increasing the intelligence and suddenly your IQ was higher, but with effort and training, at least recall was improving as our stats increased.

The results are very useful, sometimes in completely unexpected ways, though I still have yet to make any progress in remembering anything about the contents of the second class trial.

After a few minutes, my mana regenerates faster than I can send it in the book, so great is the resistance. Sweating and trembling at the effort, I continue using my entire willpower to push every single point I can into the book.

I take the staff from my inner world and hold it in my left hand helping me push the very last drop of mana into the book. I try for another minute just to make sure, but the resistance is no longer a steep climb carrying ever more weight. It is a gulf that I can’t cross no matter how much effort I put in. It's no longer the weight of a car but that of a cargo ship. Dozens, hundreds of times beyond my limits.

Panting, I put the staff back into the inner world and stare at the book.

Come on already, are you going to upgrade or what?

Shrugging, I move my hand to open it, but before I can do so the book starts to shine. Brighter than the sun so I close my eyes and turn my head.

I blink away the black spots in my vision, before opening the system prompt.

<> Book of knowledge – Uncommon Rank

Book provides available information throughout the system territory to the owner.

Bound to the owner, cannot be further away than 10 feet from the owner.

Information provided tends towards what the owner desires to know.

More information becomes available as the owner grows.

More important information can be obtained by upgrading the book. The rank can be increased with a massive infusion. Other bonuses may be acquired.

Abilities:

Grimoire: Store complex runic designs to remember and speed up their creation.

<>

What has changed? At the bottom is the obvious change, and I will experiment with it, but I take a look at the notes from the old prompt and compare it word for word, before grinning at the change. In the very first line. It’s no longer “commonly available information”, just “available information”. It’s an improvement already, and the direction the book will take starts becoming clearer.

Sending mana into the runes outside the book it in easily, but it doesn’t empty, so I place it on top of the ‘repository’ of knowledge I made in my hut, and I feel as something happens. A couple of mana points start going down, but it accepts the mana from the village’s batteries, and I grin, it was just during the upgrade process that there was that particular limitation. Good.

After less than a minute, I feel the mana draw slow to a trickle and then stop.

Did it…? It’s not supposed to do that. The mana flow should have continued to be about a tenth of a mana point constantly until it runs out.

As I take the book, I see a couple of runes have changed inexplicably, and it only takes me moments before I realize the change. It has a mana switch.

Shrugging at the change the upgrade brought to my design, I open it, and I’m greeted by a lot more pages filled out. The first few have the same information I was studying until this morning, then come transcriptions of all the stored notes, thousands of pages that I would go over later and finally, new information.

I learn about dozens of runes and hundreds of rules on how runes interact with each other. I learn what effects runes have on each other and the environment, and I learn about the history of the system. I learn the culture of other people and a little more about how integrations progress.

There are a lot of missing pieces to the puzzle, and just this single read-through won’t be enough but the lack of knowledge of the system is starting to wane ever so slightly. With this information our chances just got a little better, we have a real chance to beat the Council’s game. Not because it will be easy, but because we are starting to learn.

We need knowledge, and now everyone can start contributing. Notes taken on the other side of the instance can be inputted in my book, and ‘knowledge’ will be ‘generated’ based on whatever algorithm governs it.

If you know thy self and you know thy enemy and all that.

And this is a way of learning about ourselves, our enemies, and maybe even potential allies for Earth.