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Chapter 14: Read-a-holic
🕑 Added 2024-07-25 09:51:21 +0000 UTCBooks.
Everywhere I looked there were books.
The library was so large it extended up to the second floor. It felt more like a city’s worth of books than a family’s collection.
I could hear several maids cleaning on the upper floor, they were pretty quiet with their work. Were they doing it for my sake? Nah, probably not.
An impulse hit me to grab as many books as I could and see how many I could read. But with only an hour of free time before I’d be basically grounded in my room, I resisted the urge.
I shook my head, time to focus. If I wanted to find anything meaningful, I had no time to waste.
I browsed through my memories of this place of every time I visited it. Funny, I couldn’t remember spending much time here despite remembering that I read a lot of books, mainly fairy tales and such. The reason why eluded me.
Focusing back on what’s important, I tried to remember where the books about magic and Talents were. Ah, yes, right near the back of the library.
Walking there took forever, by the way. Like damn, you could build a sweet house with this amount of space. After a while, I found it.
In front of me was a collection of books stacked side by side on the shelves, each of varying thickness and height.
Some spines were blank, but the named ones stood out: “The Great Mages of Setus,” “Talent Codex: Essentials,” “Talent Appraisal Beginner’s Course,” and a bunch more.
If I wanted to know what sort of power I had, I needed to dive into these books.
“An hour huh? That’s barely any time to read one book…”
Scanning the spines, I picked the one that looked most helpful: “Talent Appraisal Beginner’s Course.”
Lifting it off the shelf almost made me drop to the floor. The book was like an elephant!
“How many pages does this thing have?!”
I looked to the side of it and counted each layer.
517 pages, huh? Wait, did I just count all of that?
Apparently, my eyes could count things super fast. Neat?
“Don’t know how handy that’ll be, but eh.”
I sat on the floor and began reading it. No time to look for a chair.
From the first page, I felt a familiar sensation. Page after page flipped swiftly under my fingers. Five hundred pages seemed like nothing all of a sudden.
In just under ten minutes, I reached the final page and closed the book with a thud. My mind buzzed with new information.
Ten minutes?! 517 pages. IN TEN MINUTES?!!?
What am I?! A freak?! A readaholic?!
“What the fu–”
I stopped myself before I finished that sentence. Almost ruined my elegant vibes there.
I slowly placed the heavy book back on the shelf. Freaking out could wait. Time to focus on the situation.
The book told me a few different things.
Talent Appraisal Scrolls. These were the scrolls Mom was talking about during our talk when she gave me honey milk.
They cost a lot, like a lot lot, but the book doesn’t tell how it is produced. It was a beginner’s course book, after all, couldn’t expect much from it.
Anyway, back to the topic: Talent Appraisal Scrolls, or Talent Scrolls for short, are pieces of paper that can read the mana of the user, thereby reading the Talents the user has. Just by dropping a pinch of blood, the scroll will inscribe symbols onto its blank page.
These symbols, named Aetherian Symbols, came from an ancient lost civilization and require deciphering by expert scholars to comprehend what they mean. This book was designed to teach those aspiring expert scholars.
I don’t know why Father has this in his collection, but I won’t question it. He probably has it for his collection.
Anyways, Aetherian Symbols. These are the symbols signifying what potential someone has inside them. A single symbol doesn’t dictate what type of Talent someone has, but a combination of symbols does.
For example, a symbol that looks like an eye without a pupil combined with a symbol shaped like a tent or an upward arrow signifies [Enhanced Sight].
So yeah, mixing and matching the symbols presented on a Talent Scroll and then interpreting it is the job of these scholars. It’s a lot more complicated than that, sure, but the book so far has been easy to comprehend, even for me who skimmed through it in under ten minutes.
Granted, it was a beginner’s course book.
The book has a small database of common Aetherian Symbols, and I memorized all of them. All I needed was a Talent Scroll.
“That’s expensive though, how do I–”
No, wait, I already have one.
Aristocrats like Father and Mother could afford the scroll easily. That’s right, I already had one when I was young!
I have a faded memory, one where I was very, very young, still being carried by Mother. I remember the face of a really old dude stabbing my tiny little thumb with a needle and dropping the blood onto a piece of paper.
The old dude then said that he’d have it appraised and took it away. I couldn’t remember ever seeing that scroll ever since then.
“I guess I’ll have to ask my parents about that.”
That could be dealt with later.
There were still about fifty minutes left for me to read all the books I could. I thought I would be lucky to even finish the first book, but I guess I had to thank my eyes.
Alright, next book: “Talent Codex: Essentials.”
It was a book listed most of the recognized Talents scholars have discovered throughout the years. Noting down its name, its effects, and the symbols that are associated with it.
Even without a Talent Scroll, I could probably guess what Talent I had just from reading about the effects of these various Talents.
Compared to the previous book, this one was skinny. Barely two hundred pages long.
“[Enhanced Endurance], [Fire Bloom], [Spatial Awareness]...” I murmured as I flipped through the pages.
Another book finished, this time it took less than five minutes. Scary, yet awesome.
From what I could gather from the book, the only Talent that could match what I was experiencing was [Enhanced Sight], as I suspected.
In the book, Enhanced Sight was given the description: “A Talent that boosts its wearer’s sight. One could see better in the night, see farther than most, and never have to wear glasses.”
The last part sounded like a joke, but that might actually be a fact.
But still… If I could absorb five hundred pages worth of information in just ten minutes perfectly, couple that with my mimicking abilities and extremely sharp sight… ain’t that a bit too much just for a simple [Enhanced Sight]?!
No, there might be still more I could learn. Besides, the book’s subtitle “Essentials” probably implied that it only listed common ones.
With only around forty minutes left, I set to work, picking up another book from the shelf.
