People always ask “Why am I here?” “What is the purpose of my existence?” “Does God care about me?”

Trust me when I say knowing the answers to those questions causes more problems than it helps.

I know why I was created and what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to organise the memories of dead people in order to A) harvest all useful information out of them B) ensure they can be resurrected at a later point, in prime mental condition.

The problem with this is that my God sees me as a tool, a way to make sure that his grand objective is completed, if I don’t comply I will be eradicated and replaced. If I do an excellent job, I may be allowed to continue my existence such as it is inside my creator’s soul maintaining his library. Not an enviable position to be in.

The sad thing is that I know everything about how I was created because there’s a truly massive black book with its own dedicated plinth, wrapped in chains that is Luther’s Soul Book. He uses it to maintain a grip on his own sanity, when inundated with a plethora of souls that wish to tear him apart.

The book can not be edited or moved from it’s spot, it can only be read. It details my creation among a multitude of other events, great and small in Luther’s life. The death of his wife, his pursuit of forbidden knowledge, his deal with a demon lord, him carving a bloody path through his world in pursuit of power and ultimately his journey to this world.

He didn’t even put much effort into naming me, just changing one letter of his own name to serve as a name for his poor copy. How pathetic and unimaginative of him.

I get my irreverence from him, I get my knowledge of libraries from one particular librarian who died at Luther’s urging.

I decide to rename myself Lex, there’s a particular tale of a normal man fighting against a superpowered alien in order to succeed in various enterprises. It seems appropriate.

After all I am unique and I deserve a proper name distinct from my master? Creator? God?

He’ll probably not care. Hopefully. I don’t want to be smote out of existence.

There is so much work to do.

According to Luther’s memories, it’s usually not this hectic. He’d just take out travellers or adventurers, in isolated areas, killing everyone and harvesting their souls and converting their memories into soul books and adding any useful knowledge to his own book. Sometimes an isolated village or two would be harvested if he had the inclination to.

Anything he deemed unworthy of his interest was simply archived on a shelf for later perusal if he was unoccupied and needed something to read to pass the time. If his bookshelves got too full, he’d simply find someone with sufficient proficiency with soul magic and convert them into a Lich and teach them how to create a Soul Library and lend out the unneeded Soul books.

This world was a buffet of undefended souls, including some disembodied souls in the form of ghosts. As a result, Luther kept making more and more Liches to try and deal with the growing number of Soul books that needed to be sorted until he created me to deal with it all.

Now I have to figure out how to organize three hundred million souls thoughout ten thousand or so Liches. Due to the limited time frame, there’s been very little proper digestion by any of the Liches, including the reigning one. Everyone was just cramming souls down left and right, converting them into books and piling them up unattended in hastily constructed Soul Libraries.

Luther’s library is a work of art compared to the others. His has several book shelves around the central plinth. The bar has been set very low.

One bookshelf larger than the others is the uncensored, unedited soul books of the deceased in what would be considered the autobiography section of the library. The books vary in size, depending on the nature of the person’s life and their general life span.

There’s a bookshelf dealing with military matters, a monument of sorts to all the warriors that Luther has harvested directly or indirectly. There’s books on unarmed combat, sword play, military tactics and some on weapons of war.

There’s a bookshelf for Magic, from all the mages that met their end because of him, allowing Luther to use and or teach various forms of magic to his minions as necessary.

There’s a similar one on Theology from a horde of dead priests, each book features a different God, detailing their sacred rites, their dominion and their general temperaments. After all to fight the gods you have to know their strengths and weaknesses.

There’s a few miscallenous sections with information gained from merchants, bandits, villagers on all sorts of topics of limited interest, towards the back of the library.

Unfortunately all around those organised shelves are piles and piles of unsorted Soul Books that I have to catalogue and shelve.

Luther gave me some power over the soul allowing me to make alterations as necessary to the library. I plan to make full use of my power to make some fairly drastic changes but first things first.

I grab a book and start the process.

I need a lot of things to work out just the right way in order to do what I was made for. It’s all so shoddy and haphazard. It aggravates me seeing the disorder. Time to do what I was made for.

At first I simply grab the soul books, skim the contents and if they have any interesting knowledge I make a copy to be stripped down at a later point. I place the original soul book on one of the shelves in the newly expanded Autobiographies section and the copy to the side to be dealt with.

The copy gets chunks of it ripped out to make use of any particular knowledge that may be useful later. For instance, someone whose a member of the Chinese military will have useful information about the weapons they use, the tactics that are most likely to be used in small scale combat and training methods.

Every piece of information needs to be properly categorised so it can be made use of as needed. That way if Luther needs to find information he can find it easily and use it to further his ambitions.

There’s simply so much the average person of this world knows and I must extract the maximum value out of all this disparate information for my God to be happy. An angry God is hazardous to my health.

A lot of it is utterly irrelevant. Mostly stuff involving celebrities and gossip about other people. I archive it as magazines, in the format that Tom is familiar with.

Sections on Maths, science and the military form out of the collective knowledge. Some of the information contradicts each other or is out of date or obsolete. Frustrating.

It doesn’t matter for now, I simply compile the information into sections and make notes in my own clipboard that certain information needs to be cross referenced and verified at a later date when intake drops off.

Soon enough I realise that I could make use of the fact that every single Lich has a soul fragment of Luther inside them which allowed for instantaneous communication. This allows Luther to receive reports from his Liches, along with Soul books and a fraction of their stolen power.

Soul books are typically passed from Lich to Lich depending on their general level of intake, in proportion to their soul strength, which indicates their capacity for handling souls.

It was time to digitise Luther’s collection and make use of this to create a proper Lich network to achieve a greater purpose.

One of the reasons Luther harvested people for their memories was to allow himself to increase the power of his soul and allow himself to be able to deal with a multitude of situations knowledgeably.

This could be achieved with greater speed and ease of function by adopting this world’s information strategy.

It was time to create the Lichnet, a mix between a standard library and the internet itself.

I’d keep the bookshelves as it is because it looks nice and has nostalgic value but I’d add a few computers and create a reference library within Luther while using the other Liches as lending libraries. The card catalogues would remain since I already put so much effort into it already but I’d also have the information available from the computer terminal.

Instead of a book format, that described events in vivid detail, it would be a video format. There’s a saying in this world that a picture was worth a thousand words, a video would be worth at least a million.

I referred back to Luther’s Soul book for details for what I was thinking and I converted a few soul books into Ethereal servants. My new Soul Librarians would take orders from me and I’d train them in the way of handling the copies and stripping the information out by topic.

The souls I converted were all Chinese students, even though children were considered poor targets for various reasons, they would be harvested if they resisted and or died incidentally during a reaping. There was also the ghosts that lingered in the mortal realm that were harvested with little effort.

I chose to revive/resurrect the souls of students who had driven themselves to suicide pursuing high test scores. I admired their dedication to the pursuit of knowledge even if their goals were ultimately misguided. They also had useful knowledge.

They understood the Internet even if they only had access to a restricted version and modern libraries. Their memories helped me perfect my plans.

While I dealt with the originals, my new companions could handle some of the busy work of separating the copies of Soul books into different categories.

I passed along a message to the other Liches, requesting excess Soul Books to be sent Luther’s way.

It was a thoroughly engaging task, admittedly from time to time I let off steam by mocking my God, just a little. I had yet to tell him of my name change, I was planning on telling him once I completed my projects. He was busy with other tasks so he barely paid attention to my work.

Time was relative within the Soul Library so time moved slower outside this realm so I had more time to work as Luther continued reaping the souls of the living.

Thankfully he acceded to my suggestion of a proper day off, so that I could focus on the digitisation process.

The analogue version of the library was mostly complete, with every original Soul book in the massive autobiographies sections and the fragmented and or compiled remnants spread throughout other bookshelves.

I could leave the rest of the effort to my ten assistants, they could work tirelessly and it was a fairly simple task to make a card for each book’s location and put it in the card catalogue. I dealt with creating a master list that would be added to the terminals.

The next part was the hard part, once the soul books were shelved, catalogued and indexed, it was time to copy the books again and convert it into a digital file.

After a time, when the work was becoming tedious I created clones of myself to speed up the process. Once I started copying myself, I couldn't seem to stop myself.

It took till the Library was crowded with me's for Luther to notice the power drain and comment. I stopped immediately. I had more than enough help. Over a thousand clones went to work grabbing books, copying them, harvesting relevant information and shelving books.

After the work was done within the main library of Luther's soul, I sent off my clones to set up lending libraries inside the most senior Liches. Admittedly there were very few of them that were over a week old but their training had been expedited with borrowed knowledge and hectic work schedules.

The goal was to have a clone within each Lich to serve as a guide in creating a lending library and also as an insurance policy against erasure. Each of my clones would continue the work, allowing for the formation of a Lich net that allowed any Lich to access any information from the main Soul Library from a computer within themselves that my clones would create and would be linked up through Soul Communion.

Long story short, I had fulfilled my purpose in creating an easy way for Liches to find and access any information they wanted and I would coordinate with my clones in the creation of more soul assistants as necessary.

I was one of many now, in true Lich tradition. I would manage a grand repository of information dedicated to ensuring all information was retained in premium condition.

I also suggested that it might be useful for Liches to grant extraordinary souls the privilege of activity within the Library, allowing for certain souls to be active.

The Soul Librarians seemed satisfied with their situation, though mostly it was because they were teenagers that were used to taking orders from their elders with little choice in the matter. At least this way they had the freedom to learn for learning sake, rather than for the sake of testing.