Published at 22nd of November 2022 5:56 pm

Chapter 617: Boredom

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Eiro shut the door behind him and stepped into his room, letting out a deep breath. He took off his stuffy shirt and split up his arms, properly stretching his body out. He grabbed his chin and supported his strained jaw as he flexed the muscles around his mouth as it split up into two as well. Exhausted after using sealing arts all day, he dropped onto his bed and looked at the ceiling.

“Gondos, you there?” The Demon asked, and before long, the mana in the room gathered in one spot, supporting the Golem in creating his body in this realm. Gondos floated above Eiro and looked down at him, “That I am.”

“Do you ever think about wanting to meet other Golems?” Eiro inquired, and Gondos shook his head immediately as if he already had an answer prepared beforehand, “No, never. I have little to no interest in meeting others of my kind. But why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering if I should try and look for some Golems if you wanted to meet them. You don’t tend to spend time in the elemental plane of earth either. You only just became a Golem a few months ago,” Eiro pointed out, looking at the earth spirit with a slightly concerned expression. Of course, he wasn’t concerned because of Gondos’ lack of interest. Eiro himself had no interest in meeting other demons just for the sake of it either, and if it wasn’t for the fact that he wanted to find out if there was something to gain from properly accepting his throne, he wouldn’t consider heading to hell either. Eiro was just a little worried that Gondos wasn’t fully aware of what he was missing out on.

After seeing Noma’s concern for his sister, and the fact that Rudy and Naomi clearly wanted to be with each other, Eiro had thought a bit more about his relationships with others, and then realized that even he didn’t know what he had missed out on before meeting Ariella. He had no interest in romance before meeting her, and now, he found himself actively searching out romance novels to figure out how to make his relationship with her flourish as much as possible. Obviously he didn’t expect Gondos to fall in love, as love wasn’t really something that spirits tended to concern themselves with either, but he didn’t want Gondos to lose out on the possibility of friendships with other spirits if anything happened to Eiro. Without him around, Gondos had to either form a contract with someone else, or return to the mountain village where his ‘home’ in this realm was and live out his time there. And if he chose to do neither of those, then he had to spend his time in the elemental plane of earth.

But then again, Eiro wasn’t going to force Gondos to do anything he didn’t want to do either, so it was just up to him at this point. The spirit looked down at the Demon while floating above him, “Again, I have little to no interest in such things. One day, I will spend some time in that realm, that is quite inevitable, but until then, I wish to keep living in this world. Spirits don’t have a particularly short lifespan, so there really is no rush.”

Eiro smiled lightly and nodded his head, “Well, if that’s how it is, then alright. I won’t bother you about it anymore. Although, if I happen to get an opportunity to explore the elemental plane of earth, will you travel through it with me?”

“…In that case, there would be no reason not to,” Gondos slowly replied, slightly feeling as if Eiro had practically trapped him into a situation where he couldn’t say no to something like that. With a satisfied expression, Eiro properly laid down in his bed, “Goodnight, Gondos.”

“Goodnight, Eiro,” the spirit replied.

—

Eiro slowly let go of the book in his hand and watched it float through the water, carefully placing itself back into the shelf just to be replaced by a new one. The demon had returned to doing what he had done before starting his interactions with Anura – he continued his journey through reading the books of the tower’s first floor.

And he wasn’t alone in that, Anura himself had also continued reading the last books that he had to, just short of 200. After becoming Eiro’s servant, his ability to take in and evaluate information had increased quite a bit, so to him, he was practically flying through the books at a pace incomparable to before. For a while now, reading these books had begun to feel straining for him. Reading hundreds of thousands of books, even to someone as hungry for knowledge as Anura clearly was, would come close to driving anyone mad. Not to mention the incredible amount of time that Anura must have spent here just to get through them, alone with nobody but the quite antisocial overseer of the tower, couldn’t have contributed to a healthy relationship with books either. Rather, Anura must have spent much longer in here than Eiro was alive, even taking the former lifetime of his soul into account when he was still the Sage. Considering that, the fact that Eiro managed to get here just before Anura managed to reach the next floor was astounding. It could be considered nothing short of a miracle of fate. Either way, with Anura’s ascension to Eiro’s servant, his will to learn and hunger for knowledge had been completely invigorated. He once more felt like he did when he first found his way into the tower. With that energy, he was able to complete a book at a record pace. Not as fast as Eiro of course, but still faster than anyone else Eiro had met thus far.

Every time Eiro took the time to check up on him, Anura had completed a new book and moved on to the next. At this pace, he was going to finish this floor’s remaining content within a day. Then, he would have to spend a couple of days in a sort of meditation through his own unique magic, ‘Source of Knowledge’, to make sure that all the knowledge in his mind was at his fingertips, before taking the test to be allowed on the tower’s next floor.

Well, they would only be apart for a few weeks, and then Eiro was going to finish up everything on this floor, before inevitably overtaking Anura on the next. Eiro was able to finish five to six books a minute, and that was only if they were the average ones. Much of what could be found here was either quite short, or had a lot of illustrations, so Eiro was able to get through those much quicker, taking some time off of the total as well.

At the end of the day, the biggest issue with these books was that the content wasn’t particularly interesting. Most of the things on this floor were novels or generic scientific journals. Things like news publications could be found in one of the sections as well. It was some good information to have, but for the most part, the things that Eiro was reading was overlapping quite a bit. Especially when he was getting a bit deeper into the section that he was reading in right now, he was barely getting any new information. Maybe a few more specifics or new anecdotes. While they helped paint a proper picture of this realm for the demon, they weren’t particularly necessary things to know. And it was more than likely that this was going to continue the exact same way until Eiro reached the next floor. There, he was most certainly going to find some books about spellcasting or some of the more rare and unique researchers.

However, while reading through these books, Eiro had a thought. In this case, it was actually the original’s sleeping mind that was conscious within the mental library, taking the time to evaluate all the knowledge that was coming in from both the elemental planes he had access to. The owner of the Tower of Books, the Librarian, was the same sort of existence as the Hero, Sage, or Monster King. A special existence given power by the arcane and the system. And thinking about everything that he knew about these existences… they were all rather eccentric.

Each Hero had a peculiar quality about them that they were identified by. Surely they have been embellished to an extent, but Eiro didn’t doubt that there was some truth to it even then. The Monster Kings weren’t much different in that sense either. Since all monsters that were considered at least nobles could be seen as rather eccentric, it was obvious that the Monster King would be as well. And Eiro got the proof for that since his evolution was supported by the current Monster King himself, so there was no way that he had a boring mind. And as for the Sage… the bit of information that Eiro got about his past life was enough to tell him about his own eccentric nature, not that he had to know this to be aware that mages could generally be seen to have a unique mental state in the first place.

Now, what about the Librarian? Different to these other existences, they had a much more specific role assigned to them, not one that they were placed into out of circumstance. The Hero and Monster King didn’t ‘have’ to be each other’s nemesis, that’s just how it always turned out to be. But the Librarian was specifically the caretaker of the Tower of Books. That was their whole reason to exist. They lived for the library, and its nature being what it was, the librarian usually tended to be born from a long-lived race like the elves. Spending hundreds, if not thousands of years with your life centered around the tower would become boring rather quickly, wouldn’t it? Sure, the Librarian would generally enjoy being arounds books and reading, but there was no way for someone to do one thing for so long and not get annoyed or bored even once.

So, Eiro was thinking of a possibility. What if there was more to this tower than initially suggested? Surely, there had to be something hidden here amongst these hundreds of thousands of books. And if that was the case, then it was a secret that Eiro was going to find. Just the idea that there might be something here to make his stay a bit more exciting filled the Demon with joy.

But for now… there was nothing that hinted at anything special down here. So instead, he was just going to continue reading and see if there was anything to find later on.

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