today i have an important announcement, so i am putting it at the top. i started a patreon account!

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3786951

I'm not expecting to make much money off of this but what it means is that i will have a chapter out every calendar week, until someone sponsors a chapter, and i will be putting more effort in to every chapter. until now i have had an average of 1000 words per chapter, from now on the minimum will be 1250. tell me your thoughts in the comments.

Chapter 66

It has been a full week since I landed on the alfalm continent, with little to no noteworthy events. This left me with a lot of time to think, about the world, about magic, about myself. One of the things that struck me as odd is how weak everything that has attacked me has been, I haven’t really faced a threat on my life in several years. I am by no means a strong person on this world when you take everything into account, I am just not weak. When you look at my age group, yeah, I’m one of the strongest. But look at cultivators, all of the ones that accomplish anything are immortal, they can live for thousands of years, hell there are some cultivators on this planet that predate it. I met one of them, briefly, had I been in his presence for much longer I would have suffocated to death. Anyway, thinking about that made me think about qi, or chi, or whatever you want to call it. It is very similar to mana, but the way it functions is different. While mana is used primarily for external manipulation with relatively weak ability to reinforce the body, qi is the opposite. Once upon a time I tried to cultivate qi, and failed miserably. After 2 months of secluded meditation I hadn’t even reached the first stage. The average person would reach that stage in half the time with casual meditation, half that time with secluded meditation. Although I did profit from that with my skill to meditate, definitely comes in help now.

I pause from my thoughts for a minute to recollect myself, there are so many rabbit holes to explore with qi, and I don’t want to get distracted.

Mana is commonly referred to as the energy of the world by many mages, while qi is called the energy of the self. The reason being is that mana is abundant in the world; it is extremely hard to find an area that naturally has no mana in it, although not impossible. With qi it is created in the body, and is impossible to find in nature. Even when a cultivator dies the qi doesn’t stay for very long, it entirely fades away in at most a week. Of course there is a third energy source that I am still learning how to control, energy of the soul, which is found in the soul and the mind. My guess is that qi is actually formed from mana that the cultivator takes in and processes through the soul, now there have been several people who have tried to turn mana directly into qi, all of them have failed. And there have been many people in the position to test my theory, look at any soul mage, but either they aren’t talking or they didn’t care enough to figure it out. If I am correct then that means that I might be able to turn mana into soul energy, which will open up many opportunities for me.

The first step is to find a cultivator I can observe meditating. Finding a cultivator shouldn’t be too hard; it is a rather popular way to gain power. The hard part will be convincing one to let me watch them meditate, for most it is a very private occasion, me asking them to watch would be like asking to watch them fuck their spouse.

And that was just one of the rabbit holes my thoughts wandered into during those seven days, the most significant one. I constantly find myself wishing I could go into secluded meditation just to sort out all the ideas I have. But unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of time, I need to get back home quickly, I have a war to prepare for.

At the end of the seventh day I finally make it to new gate, and I am dead tired. I haven’t slept in the entire week I have been here. I quickly make my way to a middle class inn that caters to tourists, I book a room for a night and as soon as I hit the bed I was asleep, and I stayed that way for nine hours. It was a nice, dreamless sleep, there were no titans trying to kill everyone, nor any succubi trying to seduce me.

When I woke up it was mid morning. I gathered my things and silently left the establishment. I decide to head up to elandrels mansion to do some scouting, apparently he has guided tours go through every hour. I decide to wait around for the next one along with a couple other people, and I manage to hear some interesting gossip about the local lord, a lot of what I hear is that he isn’t a terrible lord, but neither is he a good one. Of the crowd waiting for a tour only one person dislikes him, most people want him to continue being the lord, not that I care. Of course the entire time no one tries to talk to me or even look at me, like I am invisible, because I am, at least to them, they are incapable of perceiving me. It is straining to do this kind of thing to so many people so I can’t keep it up indefinitely, six hours at most. It is still more than enough time for a scouting mission.

When the tour guide comes and unlocks the gate I slip away, making sure no one sees me. I run into the currently unoccupied servant’s kitchen and mentally map out the locations of everyone within my range of perception. I then proceed to map out the mansion by walking around it, making sure to stay away from everyone. After around half an hour I manage to find the room where they organize the guards in the mansion, there is only one person inside at the moment and it doesn’t take too much effort to put them into a trance where they are completely unaware of their surroundings. I slip in and after a quick look at the guard’s recent memories I find what I’m looking for, a complete map of the grounds and a schedule for all guards for the next week.

I then leave the room, making sure the guard remembers nothing, and leave the building. Now is time to prepare for tonight.

I decide to walk around the city while I plan. And I come across something interesting, The Library. Not just any Library, but the first library. It is also a dungeon, the lord being the founder of The Library. It is special in many ways, for one it is never in the same place for very long, occasionally teleporting to other places in the world, anywhere in this world, heaven, or hell. It is the dream of every scholar to write a book deemed worthy of entering its shelves. And unlike many libraries it does not loan out books, in fact the books are incapable of leaving the premises, right before they do they teleport back to the shelves. Even more envied than writing a book that is accepted by the library is being a librarian, it isn’t a very well payed job, if you ignore the bribes, but it does come with many benefits. So long as you don’t try to damage anything in the library you will never be fired, but you can quit any time you want, and it is usually easy to get hired again after you quit. You also can’t be harmed while inside the library, and even when you’re outside the library no one would dare harm you, for fear of the wrath of many powerful mages.

The hiring procedure is rather simple, first you have to want to be a librarian, not as easy as it sounds, and most people want the benefits of being a librarian, not the job itself. Next you have to be accepted by the lord of the dungeon that is the library, which is actually the easy part. If you manage to do those two things then congratulations, you are a librarian.

I walk inside and notice someone I know sitting at the front desk.

“Hello jack” oracle

end chapter 66