The forest thickened the farther north I walked, the canopy knitting tighter overhead until the light turned the color of old parchment. Two days of walking — though "walking" was generous, since I could have crossed the distance in a heartbeat if I hadn't wanted to actually see this world rather than blur past it — brought me to a hillside choked with ivy and fallen stone.
The ruins weren't much to look at, from the outside. Broken pillars. A collapsed archway, half-swallowed by roots. But the moment I stepped past the tree line surrounding it, I felt something — a faint pressure against my senses, like walking into a room where everyone had just stopped talking.
I appraised the site.
[ Location: The Sunken Archive of Eldoria ]
[ Status: Sealed ]
[ Notes: An ancient repository, warded against intruders. The seal responds only to significant magical presence. ]
Well. That answered why nobody who went in ever came back to brag about it. It wasn't monsters keeping people out — it was the door itself.
I approached the archway and rested my palm against the cracked stone. I didn't even need to push; the moment my mana brushed against the seal, the wards recognized exactly how absurdly overqualified I was and simply gave up. Ancient runes lit up along the stone in a slow cascade of blue light, and the archway groaned open, spilling cool, stale air into the forest.
Inside, the ruins opened into a sunken chamber far larger than the hillside above suggested — a hall of cracked marble floors and toppled statues, all leading toward a raised dais at the center. Faint motes of light drifted through the air like lazy fireflies, and the wisdom carved into every wall told me this had once been a place of learning, not treasure-hoarding.
I explored slowly, partly out of genuine curiosity and partly because barreling straight to the reward would've felt like cheating myself out of the one interesting mystery I'd stumbled across in this entire world so far. Old shelves, long since rotted to dust, still held the faint magical imprint of the scrolls they'd once carried. Faded murals on the walls depicted robed figures channeling light into a single glowing stone.
At the center of the dais sat that same stone — a crystal, fist-sized, pulsing gently with a soft blue-white glow, resting in a cradle of carved stone hands.
I appraised it.
[ Name: Crystal of Eldoria ]
[ An ancient repository crystal, containing centuries of accumulated knowledge from a long-vanished order of scholar-mages. Attunes to a single bearer upon contact. ]
Interesting. Not treasure in the way Garret's villagers probably imagined, but arguably better. I reached out and closed my hand around it.
The moment my fingers touched the crystal, a rush of information poured into my mind — not painful, the way the 'Ways to Train to Godhood' download had been, but gentle, almost like being handed a very long, very detailed book all at once. Centuries of this world's magical theory, geography, history, the names of kingdoms and their old wars, the basics of mana circulation as the people of this world understood it — all of it settled into my thoughts like it had always belonged there.
When it finished, the crystal dimmed slightly, its glow steadying into something calmer, more personal. It had chosen me, apparently, for whatever that was worth.
I appraised it once more, just to be sure.
[ Name: Crystal of Eldoria (Attuned: Lukas Gigonos) ]
[ May be consulted at will for stored knowledge of this world. ]
A walking encyclopedia, essentially. Not bad for two days of walking and thirty seconds of not-quite-effort.
I pocketed the crystal — or rather, tucked it into the same pocket of space where the Beautiful Katana lived — and made my way back out of the Archive, the ancient seal quietly resetting itself behind me as if it had never been opened at all.
Standing back out in the sunlight, I let the new knowledge settle. This world had kingdoms. It had wars, old and new. It had monsters that weren't just campfire stories, and — according to one particularly faded mural I hadn't mentioned yet, one showing a hooded figure standing over a field of the dead — it apparently had things that weren't quite monsters and weren't quite men either.
Something about that mural had unsettled me in a way nothing had in a very, very long time. I didn't know why yet. But I had a feeling I'd find out eventually.
For now, though, there was a whole continent I hadn't seen yet. I picked a direction, and I walked.