The bottle was the size of his thumb and stoppered with wax that looked like a kid's art project. The liquid inside caught the light like old honey—too pretty for poison, too ordinary for miracle. William rolled it in his fingers and listened to the quiet press in around him.
Common rarity. Starter area. If this were a game, healing would be the default. Of course, in real life "default" was just a nicer word for "assumption."
He worked the wax loose, stood there a second, then tipped the lip to his tongue for the tiniest touch.
A fizz kissed his taste buds—warm, amber-sweet, like root beer gone fancy. No bile, no acrid burn, none of the back-of-throat scrape his brain tagged as "bad." But it wasn't the clean mint-cool, iodine-white flavor his gut now associated with healing. The color that bloomed in his head was not sterile pale blue; it was a mellow, antique gold.
Interesting.
His Luck was still below average. If the System had a sense of humor, it would make "common" poison a thing. But the taste—his taste—said no.
"Alright," he murmured, voice a little Oklahoma. "Let's dance."
He knocked it back.
Warmth slid down his throat and spread through his chest, not like fire but like a heater cracking on in January. The System chimed in his skull.
[Potion Identified: Lesser Experience]
EXP Gained: 25
The bar that only existed when he looked for it filled to the tick. A second chime followed, lower and richer.
[Level Up]
Level: 2
Unallocated: +1 Stat Point, +1 Skill Point
For half a heartbeat he expected the bite on his forearm to close as if a developer somewhere had decided to be kind. It didn't. The throbbing stayed. The bandage stayed red. He flexed his hand; the ache answered like a grudge.
No free candy.
But something else changed. The heavy fullness he'd been carrying since the first aid manual cracked and fell away like ice off a gutter. The hunger inside him wasn't a gnaw anymore; it was a hollow, open space. Books he'd eaten: digested. Capacity: reset.
That mattered.
He pulled the status screen because he liked seeing choices written down.
Status: William Page
Age: 18
System: Unbound Bookeater
Class: None
Level: 2
EXP: 0 / 200
Strength: 9
Speed: 10
Durability: 9
Mental: 12
Social: 5
Luck: 4
Traits:
– Hunger for Knowledge
– Synesthetic Cognition
– Rational Mind
Skills:
– Survival (Basic)
– Mycology (Basic)
– Cooking (Basic)
– Knife Use (Basic)
– Herb Lore (Basic)
– Knife Combat (Basic)
– Medicine (Basic)
Unallocated Points:
– Stat Points: 1
– Skill Points: 1
He stared at the Luck number longer than he meant to. Four. It dragged his percentile schema down like a sinker. If five was median, four was below it. Shoring the weakness would be the sensible adult choice.
He breathed out, slow. "Sensible adult choice meets dying in a corridor."
Knife fights punished slow. The exercise manuals had already nudged his body forward; the Knife Combat skill wired him into better lines. If he could cut reaction time further, if he could be where the blow wasn't, then he took less damage for free.
Speed it is.
[Allocate Stat Point → Speed +1?]
Confirm.
The world didn't slow so much as align. His eyes tracked quicker. Peripheral motion punched brighter into awareness. He felt the gap between heartbeat and breath narrow into a cleaner ratio, a metronome tightening.
Speed: 11
He grinned despite himself. "Edge of superhuman, huh." His grandmother would have called it "fleet as a jackrabbit." Close enough.
He slid his gaze to the lonely skill point. Knife Combat to Intermediate would pay off now. But the lesson was already carved: books moved both stats and skills. A point now might be a worse investment than the right manual ten minutes from now.
He held it. Patience isn't sexy. It keeps you breathing.
The empty space inside—capacity—reminded him what he really wanted. He pulled An Introduction to Occult Practices from his pack. Black leather. Crooked sigil. When he'd licked it earlier he'd tasted cold licorice edged with iron; smoky violet and glacial blue had unfurled behind his eyes like frost blooming on glass.
Now he'd see what that meant when he committed.
He set his teeth to the corner and bit.
The leather didn't fight him; it yielded. The first chew was soft, not chalky—like the crust of good bread soaked in spiced syrup. Sweetness spread across his tongue with a cool undertow, the anise resolving into something cleaner, almost alpine. Colors didn't slam this time; they rose in layers—plush violet, winter-blue, a fine grain of silver like powdered mica scattered in light. It was beautiful. It was deliberate.
He swallowed, and the sensation struck deeper than taste. A resonance buzzed along his teeth, then hummed in his wrists as if a tuning fork had been pressed to bone. Meaning came with it—less a fact, more a grammar. Words for forces. Circuitry for symbols. The notion that intent had shape and edges if you carved them right.
The System's voice followed, formal as a librarian.
[Book Consumed: An Introduction to Occult Practices]
+1 Luck
Skill Gained: Magic (Basic)
Ability Unlocked: Sense Magic (Basic)
He blinked, heart beating a little too fast for comfort. Luck bumped to five—average at last, not blessed but not cursed either. A tiny weight he hadn't wanted to name lifted off his shoulders.
Magic (Basic). The word sat like a new shelf added to his mind. He didn't know spells; nothing flashy downloaded. But he understood something of the bones—how a glyph wanted to be completed, what a circle asked of its lines, why some devices would accept a touch and others would not. The grammar of it, not the poetry.
Sense Magic (Basic) was simpler. Tactile. When he laid a palm on something with a charge, he'd feel the hum—like resting a hand on a running fridge, faint and undeniable. Not sight, not range. Touch only.
He pressed his hand to the occult book's cover again even though it was gone in his stomach; habit. The hum lived in memory anyway.
"Okay." He rolled his shoulders, tested his bandage; the ache stayed true. "We do this piece by piece."
He checked the status again, because ritual keeps thoughts straight.
Status: William Page
Age: 18
System: Unbound Bookeater
Class: None
Level: 2
EXP: 0 / 200
Strength: 9
Speed: 11
Durability: 9
Mental: 12
Social: 5
Luck: 5
Traits:
– Hunger for Knowledge
– Synesthetic Cognition
– Rational Mind
Skills:
– Survival (Basic)
– Mycology (Basic)
– Cooking (Basic)
– Knife Use (Basic)
– Herb Lore (Basic)
– Knife Combat (Basic)
– Medicine (Basic)
– Magic (Basic)
Abilities:
– Sense Magic (Basic) [Touch]
Unallocated Points:
– Stat Points: 0
– Skill Points: 1
Inventory:
– Knife (Common, Durability 92%)
– Trail Mix (Mundane, 340g)
– Water Bottle (Common, Empty, Durability 100%)
– Paracord (Common, 17 ft, Durability 98%)
– Firestarter (Common, Durability 87%)
– Poncho (Common, Durability 90%)
– Goblin Key (Uncommon)
He slid the empty bottle back in its sleeve and scanned the corridor. He had room for more books now, but he wanted to be picky. Defense was good. Speed was better. Intelligence got him traps. Magic might open doors—literally.
Doors.
He turned the Goblin Key over. Bone shaft, iron teeth, wire-wrapped ring. Now that his hand knew what to feel for, a whisper rose under his skin when his fingers curled around the metal cap. Not full-on hum, just… implication. The key had been made near power or with power. It wanted a home.
William followed shelves in slow, careful arcs, letting his gaze drag over the architecture as if it were a field of brush where deer might bed down. The library wasn't random. No human mind could catalog this many books without shortcutting itself into patterns. Patterns meant repetition. Repetition meant secrets.
Two long aisles over, he paused. The dust on the floor sat wrong in a square near the base of a support column—lighter by a shade, like the place had been disturbed more recently than the rest. He crouched, fingers brushing the marble. His skin tingled faintly. Not magic. Mechanical.
He tapped along the column's wood paneling with the butt of his knife until the tone changed, hollow to his ear.
"C'mon," he murmured. "Show me the hinge."
There: a seam, hair-thin. He traced it up to an innocuous stretch of molding carved with leaves that didn't match the others. The leftmost leaf had a vein cut too deep; the craftsman's slip or a deliberate tell. He set his fingers and pressed.
A shiver ran through the paneling, and with a reluctant grind the section of wall shifted sideways, sliding into itself. Dust trickled down in lazy strands.
Behind it yawned a narrow passage, no wider than his shoulders, angling downward into black. The air was cooler there, carrying the scent of old stone and something metallic, sharp enough to raise gooseflesh along his arms.
William crouched, staring into the dark throat of the library.
A hidden way forward.