“Hey, what the actual hell?” Ben muttered to himself as he prepared to lay down for the night.

“What happened?”

“A new title. Why the hell did I get a new title?”

He didn’t really need to ask, it was obviously because word had spread around about his fight that day, but that just left him with more questions. He wasn’t going to out and say it, but Thera had been dealing with a poor reputation in town for years and never gained anything, so how was it that he’d gained one after only that?

I am literally the sweetest little thing, what the hell. I guess it’s not quite as eye-catching as some of my other ones at least.

“So what is it?” Thera wanted to know, her imagination already running wild as she laughed. “Killer craftsman? Maybe crazy craftsman? Then again, you did win one fight with your magic. Murder mage?”

“Well, you at least get points for alliteration. Brutal blacksmith. I’m not even a blacksmith! I’m a craftsman! I do all sorts of crafts and I’m good at them too! What is this disrespect?”

“Ha, most of the town probably isn’t too fussed about your skill set. You work at a smithy with my uncle who’s a smith, that’s good enough.”

“Hmph, well if anyone tries saying it to my face I might just end up with the crazy craftsman title too.”

“Oh, there there, it’s not a big deal. The title seems like it would pretty obviously give you bonuses to your crafting and maybe even your sacrilege if you’re lucky so it’s probably even a good thing.”

“That’s… true.”

He didn’t really want to complain about anything like that, the issue was just that he’d now been attacked twice for things in his status. Every new thing just made his odds worse the next time anyone got a peek.

Gee, thanks.

Never. The bonuses are always incredible.

“Well, I appreciate you dealing with that for me Ben,” She told him, leaning up to kiss him. “It was as satisfying as I expected too.”

“In that case, I guess it was worth it.”

“Good. Now, some of us have normal minds so I’m getting some sleep. Try not to be awake for too many hundreds of hours, okay?”

“Ha, we’ll see.”

With those final words, he turned off the lights and listened to the sounds of her breathing, waiting for it to slow before he reached down beside him to pick up a particular book he had waiting by his side and poured his mana into it, letting it bring his mind somewhere else as he opened his eyes to the archive.

The mythic item in his possession, he hadn’t been spending as much time in it compared to when he’d first acquired it and learned what it could do, but he’d spent enough for a few simple experiments, letting him discover a handy effect he suspected the original designer had never intended.

Normally, the time within it increased a hundred times over compared to what the rest of the world would experience. It was a massive difference, the sort that would turn hours outside into days within, but he now had an ability that stacked with it.

Unnatural thought speed. At its peak, Ben wasn’t even sure how fast it had his mind move compared to the already massive improvement it showed in its unawakened form, but it worked just as well within the archive with an additional bonus. Even though it felt like his body was within it, that was just a construct, an illusion that reflected how he saw himself, not his physical form, meaning it wasn’t bound to the limits of his flesh. In there, Ben could move as fast as he could think and was going to use that strength to finally solve one of his smaller goals. He was going to decode the texts within to finally learn what secrets the archive held.

After all, it’s a good little change of pace and I basically have all of the time in the world.

The archive was a store of knowledge, a tool that housed the memories of around three dozen of Galwax’s people in the form of books for reasons Ben could only guess had to do with recording how they studied magic back while they were alive, with pages and pages of notes at the back he couldn’t read that would fill the air around him when he got to them only after reliving days of the lives of that long-dead race.

He spent what felt like a week in the first row of books, reading through them multiple times to make sure he memorized every tiny detail from their memories. What they were thinking, even if he couldn’t understand it, what they were feeling, both emotionally and when they’d cast their spells, and what they were seeing, both in the spell effects and the world around them.

It would be a lot to take in and absorb for any normal man, but with his most recent level of unnatural mind, Ben was just shy of two and a half thousand individual minds in his head, all of them working in tandem to learn all they could. It wasn’t until he finished the first dozen that he took a break to examine how it all compared to each other.

“Okay, this is going to be a little harder than I thought. Really should have expected this too.”

He was certain that there were examples of multiple languages across the various books. It made sense, as peoples and cultures grew, languages would diverge and split. With a mythic artifact like that, He should have expected as much. The only reason he didn’t was that he’d grown too accustomed to world speak covering the whole of the planet he was on.

“And even some of the ones I’m hearing that sound like they’re probably the same might have some subtle differences depending on how many years have passed between them or regional dialects. On the plus side, it at least looks like the writing system is mostly consistent.”

While a few of them drew some diagrams and pictures in the back sections of their books, most of it was filled with notes, same as he’d done after his first little artistic spree, and the characters all of the galwaxians used were the same, even if some had different arrangements based on the particular dead language, giving him just a bit of hope that things wouldn’t be impossible, even if he didn’t have anywhere to go with it yet. Even better was the fact that he was fairly certain he’d been able to separate the characters that indicated numbers instead of letters, making at least a bit of progress.

Now I just need to figure out what sounds each character makes and figure out which numeral matches which number, but hopefully I can get even a hint for that in a later memory. For now, let’s see what I can do to start trying to figure out any translations.

Even if he had a couple different languages to work at so far, he had the visual data to go with them. All that was left was trying a brute force approach to compare everything he knew that could fit the situation while trying to deduce the rules of the sentence structure.

Easy, right?

…Yeah, this is going to take me days in here if I’m lucky. Might as well get started.