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….
I sat on a stone block outside the entrance to the labyrinth, waiting patiently. A moment later, a portal opened behind me, and an identical copy of myself emerged. It walked over and handed me a book.
I took the tome and began to "read."
To an outsider, it would have looked like I was flipping through the pages at an impossible speed. But my Ex-Machina eyes were recording every word, every diagram, every rune, committing the entire grimoire to my database in seconds.
This world was truly fascinating. It had "labyrinths" dungeons, like something out of an RPG from my old life, complete with treasure chests and random loot drops. This grimoire was one such prize.
"A spell to generate smoke," I murmured, closing the book. The magic itself was trivial, but its existence raised a question.
Who was putting these things here?
I looked up at the brilliant blue sky. I knew this world had a goddess. Were these "rewards" her doing?
The question was unanswerable, and ultimately, irrelevant.
What mattered was that I now had a new, efficient method of data acquisition. "Clearing labyrinths" was officially added to my list of objectives.
Language barriers.
This was, logically, the biggest hurdle I would face traveling to different worlds.
But for an Ex-Machina, it wasn't a problem at all. My kind's true strength wasn't just in replication, but in our unparalleled ability to learn.
The language of this new world? I had already mastered it. Back in the town square, while gathering intelligence, I had recorded thousands of conversations, analyzing body language, facial expressions, and tonal shifts. With that massive data set, it took only a few minutes of processing to achieve complete fluency.
Besides, the system had a built-in auto-translator.
Any spoken word or written text I perceived was automatically filtered through the system's translation matrix.
Even if I hadn't been able to learn the language myself, the system would have handled it.
The arcane runes in the grimoire, symbols I had never seen before, were automatically overlaid with text I could understand in my visual feed.
The system itself offered no direct combat support; all my battles were my own. It functioned purely as a utility.
And while I didn't strictly need the translation function, it was a nice feature to have.
I could always turn it off. It was certainly better than the systems in some of those old isekai novels, the ones that would just dump their host in a new world and leave them to fend for themselves.
...
After committing the grimoire to memory, I tossed the physical book to a newly summoned clone. I gave it a simple command: return the book to the labyrinth.
After all, it's not like I had an inventory system or a "system space" to store things.
The contents of the book were now permanently stored in my database. I had no fear of the knowledge being lost; common spells like this were rarely recorded in only a single grimoire. And if I ever needed a physical copy, I could simply replicate one.
The book contained a complete, detailed explanation of the "Spell to Generate Smoke." It was, for all intents and purposes, a skill book. But reading it was one thing; using it was another.
All of my abilities so far had been powered by my internal energy reserves my "mana bar," so to speak. But this spell required a different kind of energy. I couldn't use it because my body lacked "mana."
In this world, mages trained their entire lives to cultivate the mana within them. It was the fuel for all magic, and the amount of mana a mage possessed was the most direct measure of their strength.
It was how demons sized up their opponents; their entire race was naturally sensitive to its presence.
But for me, with my all-purpose Dimensional Engine, different energy systems were not a problem.
[Energy conversion request detected. Initiating conversion...]
[1% of dimensional energy converted to [Mana].]
[Conversion complete.]
Of course, magical strength wasn't just about the quantity of mana. Beyond technique, experience, and talent, the most crucial factor was imagination. Magic in this world was, at its core, a function of visualization.
And for an Ex-Machina who had once downloaded and processed the entirety of Earth's internet, imagination was little more than a complex simulation.
I raised my hand.
" Endo Armament: Activate "
" Smokescreen "
Poof
A magic circle, glowing with a faint golden light, appeared at my palm. From it, a thick, billowing cloud of smoke erupted. In seconds, it had completely enveloped a one-kilometer radius around me.
I sat in the center of the smoke, observing my creation. Because the mana had been converted from my dimensional energy, it retained some of its original properties. The smoke was laced with shimmering, golden particles.
From the data recorded during the spell's successful execution, I now fully understood its mechanics.
With a wave of my hand, a gust of wind dispersed the smoke, and the forest around the labyrinth was once again bathed in sunlight. I stood up and brushed the dust from my clothes.
It really is inconvenient that this body isn't self-cleaning, I mused. I need to find a cleaning spell.
….
"Did you see that?"
"Clear as day."
A group of burly men in crude leather armor whispered to each other from behind a thicket of trees.
They were bandits. Even in an age of rampaging demons, human nature remained unchanged.
In the relatively "safe" areas between major conflicts, men like these still preyed on travelers.
"That was magic, right?" one of them hissed.
They had spotted me sitting alone outside the labyrinth entrance and thought their luck was in. Just a lone traveler.
A kid, at that. Sure, she must have some confidence to be out here by herself, but there were five of them. The odds were in their favor.
And she was pretty. Even if she was just a child, a face like that would fetch a high price on the black market.
But as they crept closer, preparing to ambush me, a shimmering golden portal had opened right next to me.
The sight had sent them scrambling back into the undergrowth, their hearts pounding. That had to be magic. Was she... a demon? The thought made them tremble.
….
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