Chapter 5
After submitting his task, Tony immediately rushed back to his room, obviously intending to go to take a nap. After all, every inspection trip would push one’s nerves to the limit, and it really consumed your stamina. In contrast to Tony’s actions, Greem hesitated for a moment, then he turned around and walked toward the library.
It was around midday, so there weren’t very many apprentices inside the library.
It was a simple stone room with dozens of yellowed wooden bookshelves placed against the walls. On top of these shelves were all kinds of magic and spell books made from all kinds of materials and in all shapes and forms. The man who managed these books was a middle-aged, intermediate level old apprentice Adept.
For these intermediate apprentice Adepts, who had only barely reached this level with help from the experience of age, the Adept Tower would never put in any more effort to cultivate them. Also, this group of apprentice had given up their ambitions. They were not willing to take those overly risky missions, but, at the same time, they refused to return to the life of ordinary humans. Therefore, they became a unique group within the apprentice Adepts.
Although a librarian only received one Knowledge point every seven days, it was an easy job, and there wasn’t any danger at all. That’s also the reason why this task had been occupied by these senior intermediate apprentice Adepts. For someone like Greem, who had no one to depend on and was forever alone, all he could do was take on those dangerous missions.
Greem didn’t rush to the bookshelves in the deepest area, like he used to do. Instead, he was browsing through each bookshelf leisurely, occasionally picking up a book and flipping through a few pages. All the books in this library were books of magic. When they were not borrowed, only the introduction was visible to a reader, while all the other content in the book was perpetually covered with a layer of floating dark fog, making sure no one could read through it.
Greem never dared to underestimate this normal looking dark fog, because it was personally designed by the master of this tower, the frightful Adept Anderson. Without going through a treatment from a special magical formation, no apprentice could read the content of the book, not even a single character. If anyone started wishfully thinking of breaking this mechanism, they would trigger a hidden magical formation, attracting the ire of, and punishment from, the Great Adept himself.
Although the consequences could be quite dire, Greem still wanted to test to see if his Biological Assistance Chip could bring him an advantage in this situation. After all, Knowledge points were very difficult to earn, and currently Greem only had 7 points. Knowledge points alone were not enough to support his needed Spirit growth requirement.
At first, he did his best to recite the book as he went through. He was having the Biological Assistance Chip copy all the knowledge content via his eyes into its storage, sorting and storing them according to his specifications.
As time went on, Greem stopped wasting his energy on thinking or even reading. He simply turned himself into a human copying machine, his eyes continually flickering as they scanned over every single word, magical inscription, and image… they were all being copied at high speed.
In less than fifteen minutes, the ‘Glossary of All Things’ had been completely saved in the Chip’s memory!
Even Greem himself couldn’t control his shock at this extreme speed.
As the core elementary book for all apprentice Adepts, this ‘Glossary of All Things’ recorded over ten thousand different races and unique creatures that had been discovered in the Adept Mainlands. It also held records of most of the commonly found plants, animals, minerals, special magical materials… As a whole, this book had over thirty thousand entries.
During his first two years here, Greem had spent a whopping 17 months copying and memorizing the entire book, But now it took him less than fifteen minutes to save it completely.
While getting over his shock at the Chip’s amazing speed, Greem closed the book, and slowly started recalling the copied memory into his mind. Information on any species, fauna or flora, would appear in his mind as soon as he thought of it. The Chip would also project any related information and data into his mind. This would, indeed, save Greem a lot of time.
Good. This was really useful! He would never have to worry about struggling to memorize that hard to understand magical knowledge.
Being completely overwhelmed with excitement, Greem didn’t pay any attention to the growing pain in his brain. He couldn’t wait and quickly took out the second book, starting to duplicate it using the same method.
‘The Beginning of Spirit Force’, an orthodox book on Magic Theory. It mainly explained the raw source and application of the Spirit energy used by Adepts. It also contained some simple methods for exercising one’s Spirit Force.
After he finished copying the second book, Greem gently touched his head. He felt incredibly nauseous and tired at the same time.
These… these were the symptoms of Spirit energy depletion!
As an apprentice Adept, he was extremely familiar with this situation. During the period when he had just learned the Burning Hand spell, as he still couldn’t master the output of his magic energy, he had always depleted his pitiful store of Spirit energy.
In the later stages, when he got more familiar with the casting of Burning Hand, he finally gained a level of proficiency over Spirit energy usage without being taught by anybody. When one controlled magical energies, their Spirit energy was proportionate to the strength of their soul. The stronger one’s soul, the more Spirit energy they had to use. Thus, that person would be able to cast more magic spells.
Take Greem as an example! He had a Spirit of 8, and his Magical energy was ten times his Spirit. In this case, 80 points. There were some Adepts who liked to call this Magical Energy ‘Adept Energy’.
Anyway, these 80 points of Adept Energy were all Greem’s current abilities afforded him.