Published at 31st of January 2023 10:03 am

Chapter 629: Visit From the Shadows

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A couple of weeks went by, without anything in particular happening.

The only matter of any sort of importance was that the duplicates in the elemental planes were coming close to finishing the contents of the second floor, so Eiro did receive quite a bit of interesting knowledge from those realms. The only issue with that was that the information wasn’t the most reliably useful. Interesting? Sure. Were there some spells that Eiro might be able to use in the future? That was certainly the case as well. But for the most part, even on the second floor, Eiro wasn’t able to find anything that was incredibly useful to him. Though, it did make it clear to him just how much knowledge he would end up being able to gather if he reached the top of the tower. Just on the third floor, the level of information must be… incredible.

Secret tomes from families long forgotten, scriptures with events that were erased from history. Those were the sorts of things that he hoped to find on the next floor. If there were any combat or spellcasting techniques, that would be greatly appreciated as well, but Eiro wasn’t fully convinced that he would be able to find those sorts of directly applicable things until the last few floors. The most powerful spells would be hidden away until the very end.

However, for now, there was nothing of note. Instead, Eiro just spent most of his time teaching the kids at the school, training in different things when he came home to not let his skills lay stagnant while also helping James, Jess and Krog, while working on some new plans for physical modifications. His overeating skill was developing nicely, but not well enough for it to be worth it splitting off a section of his stomach just yet.

As such, most of Eiro’s focus was just on writing. And he was writing quite a lot. With each of his hands, Eiro was writing into another book, noting down the different theories and instructional books that his mental duplicates were working on after analyzing the information of the towers. Most of the things he wrote were compilations of different theories, putting them together into something slightly altered to introduce new viewpoints and angles that had been forgotten or simply not cared for enough. There were a few theories that Eiro was working on building up on his own so that he could better spread his name in the community of scholars, but those were the vast minority. That, and he would have to spend some time proving the validity of his theories to an extent, just to give him some basis on why he was even writing these.

But nonetheless, it was a good way for Eiro to prove that he wasn’t just some meathead. Some of his writing already went out to be reviewed by some other scholars, but he hadn’t heard back from them yet.

However, the thing that Eiro was working on most of all during this slow period was the ability to compress knowledge, like what the towers’ overseers used as entrance tests for the towers. Right now, he was trying to combine the meaning of two separate words into one, at least. The way he was doing that was by splitting his mouth in two, infusing the words spoken by each of those mouths with his magic, and trying to practically fuse them together. Eiro was convinced that this wasn’t the right way to do it, but it was the only idea he had right now. At the very least, it would succeed in giving him some deeper insight into what it took to do that sort of thing, so this wasn’t a waste of time by any means.

And that was when Eiro got an idea that he tried out instantly. Within his mind, he created two more duplicates, which he each gave control over one of Eiro’s mouth. He had them repeat a single word each, and as he did, started to fuse the two duplicates together. As he did, his two mouths slowly turned back into one as well, and a single sound came out of Eiro’s mouth.

“—“, the word itself was incomprehensible, being a mixture of two words that were spoken in completely different ways. Eiro wasn’t sure how exactly he made those sounds, but he managed to do it, at least. It wasn’t perfect by any means, of course, and he was still a long way off from being able to compress a whole book into a single sound, but the progress was still there.

And another fortunate thing came out of it. This combination of two words can be dizzying to some that aren’t used to hearing it. Eiro as well, he felt like he nearly collapsed when he first heard something like it.

This was the case for the person hidden in shadows of the corner of the room as well. The instant that Eiro noticed even the slightest change in the air, his body fell into the shadows that his desk was throwing onto him, and he wrapped himself around the body of the person he noticed, placing a dagger onto their neck. But it was weird; even though Eiro factually knew that he was holding someone, even though he could feel that slight resistance to the tip of his dagger, it felt as though there was nothing there. He was forgetting what he was doing, and what was here every single instant, just to remember it the next, only to forget it again. One of the mental duplicates dedicated itself to keeping track of this information, even though it seemed to practically vanish out of its hands as it was holding onto it.

“What… are… you?” Eiro asked, managing to force out words toward the person in question.

“I’m impressed, to say the least,” that person replied, but the world around Eiro was completely flipped. Not in the literal sense, however; instead, he found himself sitting on one of the couches in his office, no longer sticking out of the shadows in the corner of the room. It was as if a chunk of time was suddenly missing from his mind. The other duplicates were aware of this blackout; they were still thinking during that time, but were simply unable to access the thoughts of the original, even if it was just for a few seconds.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” the Demon replied. He didn’t know where that person’s voice came from, but it was from somewhere within this room, at least.

“…You’re the one that went looking for me, so I simply came to return the favor.”

Eiro sat there, stunned for a few moments, before letting out a loud groan, “By Lady Winter- I thought Jura and Koperia had bad manners. Are all Masters like that, Shimour?” Immediately, the demon relaxed. Of course, he didn’t directly trust this man yet, but he trusted Jura. And since Jura had most likely told the other masters he knew all about Eiro already anyway, there was no need for him to be concerned. Not to mention, it was clear that if Shimour wanted to kill Eiro, he probably would have been able to already. A Master of stealth was not an easy opponent by any means.

Before Eiro knew it, Shimour revealed himself. Apparently, he had been sitting across from Eiro all along, he simply wasn’t able to tell. This felt similar to the potion of Invisibility, which in itself was a ridiculous notion. Through his own power, Shimour was able to come close to the level of an Arcane artifact, and what he showed was most certainly not even him going all out.

Though, the Demon was a little surprised. Shimour looked different than he would have thought; mostly, the fact that he was even taller than Krog, which was not the type of body one would expect from a master of stealth. He didn’t look to be a Goliath, but instead, he probably just had some monster blood within him that brought him to this size.

“It’s nearly as if you were expecting me,” Shimour pointed out with a slight smile, and Eiro scoffed, “Obviously I was, you just came quicker than I thought.”

With a raised brow, Shimour looked back at the Demon, “Are you trying to say you knew I would come looking for you?”

“Why else do you think I used the Ministry of Information to look for you. There are much, much more subtle ways than their investigators that go around without a care in the world.”

“Hm… I see that Jura raised an interesting child after all.”

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