“Relax, I’ll give you the finer details in a few days so for now go fulfill your godly duties.”

With his god giving him the heads up, Ben put down what he’d been working on in the shop and stepped through his new gate, bringing his clones along for the ride as he came out the other end in Thera’s old room at her family home.

When they’d visited only the day before she’d made sure to tell her mother and aunt about it, neither of them could leave something like that there without providing any sort of heads up and it was already showing its worth in letting him travel as he passed by the various staff doing their work before leaving to make his way to a proper gate to get through the network and arrive at his real destination, the magic towers.

He was going to make his way to the library eventually to do a bit of research but had a different target first which led him through some unfamiliar streets. In his time there, he’d explored only a little but had a good enough idea of the city that it didn’t take too long to find his main target, their branch of the adventurer’s guild.

Going there was the first step in what was sure to come off a slightly insane plan to help Thera so he put on a confident look and let himself inside, taking it all in as he did.

Despite it being less relevant than the Stonewall branch, what with the city being in a fairly safe location given its importance with no long stretches of woods where monsters of any sort could hide, the building was far bigger than the one he was used to dealing with, along with having a tidier interior to go with it.

It seemed it wasn’t uncommon for the people of the city to act as adventurers by taking advantage of the gate network they had, letting them go to hunt or gather out in the wilds for whatever they needed either as a way to earn some extra pocket money or else train their skills. Just looking around it was clear enough that the vast majority there were mages which made sense given the city he was in.

But that’s not what I’m here for.

He ignored the crowd taking their quests as he waited in line to get to the counter to talk to one of the staff, his card already out and at the ready.

“Well, you aren’t a familiar face,” The employee told him, giving off a friendly atmosphere. “From out of town or just looking to register? I can talk you through the process.”

“The first, but I’m not here to take a quest either,” He said, showing the mark that indicated he was rank one and enjoyed the surprised look the reveal had gotten him. “I’m here to make a request and I’m more than happy to pay well to anyone who can meet the conditions for it.”

“Very well, I’ll just need the details and then we can work on the paperwork for it. What exactly are you looking for? I suppose you won’t be seeking any guards so materials perhaps?”

He shook his head. There were plenty of things adventurers could do for requests beyond hunting but what he wanted fell fairly far outside the norm.

“Information.”

And done, all that’s left is to see how this works out.

His request had left the staff member stunned and he needed to do his best to try and make things seem a bit less significant than they actually were, with all there was left being to come back in a week and hope that nobody interfered.

If there really was some important meeting going on then he was hopeful enough that nobody in the heavens had decided to skip out to watch him instead but he was sure he’d hear soon enough from Myriad if he was wrong, but that also left one more variable that had his eyes on him.

The grey. Extradimensional beings who he knew would peer at him from the confines of their doomed world. While he personally thought he had a good relationship with Quilith, he didn’t know how he was viewed by the race as a whole. What he did know was that they weren’t just talking to him though, but many other people and gods across the world.

For a second he thought about speaking a small threat in case there were any watching him, saying that he’d cancel his research on the summoning spell if any ratted him out but decided against it in the end. He would trust that if there were any who saw what he’d been doing they wouldn’t care enough to stop it.

And if any of them do decide to tell on me and I find out I’ll just get my revenge in another way.

…Hmm, it’s a little boring without having Myriad around to comment on my vindictive thoughts, wonder how much longer he has anyway?

His god had told him it was going to be an all-day affair, so combining that with Thera being back to her regular travels and healing he couldn’t help but feel a little bored, even if he tried to suppress it. He wasn’t done after all, he had brought his clones with him for a singular purpose. To take advantage of the main thing the magic towers offered once again, their library.

He felt eyes on him when he got there along with the sudden murmurs that came with him. It seemed plenty there remembered who he was which at least made things easier for him. There was no need to re-explain the purpose of his clones and he easily went up to the second floor to get to work.

It was the second largest and he wasn’t planning on finishing it like he had for the top three, instead he directed his focus, going to read everything he could on the topics of dark magic and enchanting.

He didn’t like it, but he was planning for the potential failure of his main idea. While part of the research he was doing was in the hopes of finding some way to help Thera improve her control or else ensure she could awaken her dark magic in a way that it was sure to take in her charm, the main goal was to see if there were any ways he could improve his own skills, namely in brace creation. As things were he was more than keeping up now, but if her worries of one day awakening to an uncontrollable charm came true then he was going to be ready to help. His last visit had been basically without purpose, just absorbing as much knowledge as he could, but this time he had a goal.

With an even faster mind than the last time along with a higher level of his magic, he was going even quicker than he had before, with pages moving in a blur while he and his homunculi went from shelf to shelf, taking everything that floor had for his two magics of study and making them his own as the hours wore on.

It almost made him feel bad for the mages around him doing their own reading in whatever attempt they were making to refine themselves. At most they could flip through promising titles, hoping to find something that would make them more than they already were, but Ben was unrestrained. Given enough time, he would learn everything the library had to offer, taking it all in to be used in whatever way he saw fit.

With the last shelf finished he gave one final look around that floor, promising himself that he’d come back to finish it up in the future when he was less busy before returning to the first, and the biggest area by far.

Considering that the first floor technically included multiple multi-story buildings around it, even the two topics he wanted to read up on had the potential to take days or weeks compared to the hours he’d already spent, not that he cared.

At least for that day, he would finish as much as he could in the main location before deciding on if he’d need to go back on another.

And If I am going to come back then I really should see about making another mini-gate. Let’s see, maybe if I’m super nice and sweet I could talk Killi into letting me store it in her office or something so randoms couldn’t use it. Or worse to worse I could just buy a small place in town. Either way, it would save me the time of having to pass through Anailia whenever I want to get here… Ha, look at me, I’ve already reduced my travel time to less than an hour and I still want to make it shorter.

He couldn’t deny it would be useful though so chalked it up as something to consider later. For the time being, he was going to get what he needed and then get to work to see if he could put anything he’d learned into practice.