Percy was, admittedly, a little bummed out that he hadn’t found a door leading out of the pyramid yet. He’d already mostly explored its outer walls while descending through the corridors, and it didn’t seem there was an exit at its base either. It appeared that his only chance would be to find one near the very tip of the structure, and even that wasn’t a certainty.

Suffice to say, his odds weren’t looking good. Worse still, he doubted he would make it there without running into trouble, which greatly dampened his mood. After all, it was hard to get excited about the treasure trove of information inside this hall if he didn’t have a way to bring it back to Remior.

At the same time, he couldn’t find it in him to leave the room without at least skimming over its contents. Considering that this place stretched for over a hundred metres in two of its three dimensions, and that every inch of it was covered in writing, he understood that he couldn’t possibly read everything carefully. Certainly not in the limited time that he had.

It had barely been an hour since he found himself in this world, and his eyelids were already drooping, as he felt more tired than he had in weeks. Evidently, the curse plaguing these people was already steadily encroaching into his mind, winning the battle against his spectral trait.

‘I’ll have to be smart about it… Let’s pick out the most important titbits of information, memorize them quickly, and get the hell out of here while I still can…’

A cursory scan of the room revealed that the hieroglyphs on the floor and ceiling shone a little brighter than the ones on the walls – save for a single patch at the other end of the room. It was a column a few metres wide, glowing more intensely than its neighbours. Shrugging, Percy walked toward it, thinking it was worth checking out. That said, he did try to read some of the information above and below him on the way.

‘…marinate the besumian eel in fharine oil for two days and nights… grill until its flesh begins to redden before adding the spices… serve with dried kongal berries…’

What the hell was this?!

At first, the text had stirred Percy’s heart, as he thought he’d stumbled upon some obscure alchemical secret right from the get-go. On further inspection, this looked more like a cooking recipe, however.

A few metres down the hall, he found a second recipe, and then a third. And a fourth. Warm and cold meals… Main and side dishes… Sweet, spicy and sour… Baked, grilled, fried and steamed… Fish, meat, soups, salads, pies, kebabs… and even things he didn’t have any words for in his own vocabulary to translate to, as they didn’t resemble anything they had on Remior. Evidently, this room was nothing more than a vast accumulation of cooking recipes!

‘Seriously? Are these people just a bunch of foodies?!’

Shaking his head, he pressed on toward the glowing patch on the wall, figuring he might have misunderstood something. Needless to say, he’d be quite disappointed if this entire room turned out to be entirely dedicated to the native cuisine.

Soon, he arrived at his destination, reading the hieroglyphs.

‘Culinary Arts – a vast accumulation of recipes from all over Amenthes, grouped together based on the regions they originate from. Note: Only the oldest, most popular and most unique dishes have been preserved.’

Percy frowned.

This read suspiciously like a book cover. Was this room some kind of magical library then?

Stepping to the next, dimmer column to his right, he read the text there too, soon confirming his guess.

‘Pottery – the art of crafting decorations or utensils out of clay. Listing various techniques, materials and information on famous artists and pieces of work from across Amenthes.’

‘Amenthes, huh? Both topics mentioned that. Is that the name of the world these people have originated from?’

Shrugging, Percy placed his hand on the wall, brushing over the engraved hieroglyphs in search of a way to change the topic. Luckily, things were rather straightforward.

The moment his host’s long, slender fingers as much as touched the writing, the whole column lit up, as a deep rumble permeated the room. Scanning the hall, he watched the symbols along the ceiling and floor merge, twist and split chaotically for a few seconds, before settling into a new orientation.

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‘Fascinating… though I still think a regular book is more convenient than this nonsense...’

Just craning his head to look up or down at the text was quite exhausting. Having to constantly walk around the hall wasn’t great either. He had no idea why these people had chosen to do things like this, instead of installing a regular library. Was it just to make everything flashier? Or did they think they could better preserve the information like this? Then again, he still had no idea where he even was. If this was somebody’s dream, maybe they didn’t even have any control over how things manifested.

Well, whatever the case was, Percy now had a much easier way to navigate the contents of the strange library. Walking along the perimeter of the room, he scanned the various topics one by one, looking for something worth his time.

‘Sculpting… Painting… Music… Dancing… Fishing… Hunting… Masonry… Smithing… Tailoring… Geography… Traditions and customs… Architecture… Calligraphy… Languages…’

Percy ignored most of these categories, realizing a lot of it was junk – at least to him. Not that he wasn’t interested in these people’s culture, but he simply didn’t have the time to immerse himself in every mundane detail.

‘Come on… Don’t you have anything on magic?!’

It wasn’t until about halfway around the hall that he finally stumbled upon something potentially useful.

‘Runecrafting – A collection of the most potent enchantments for various everyday tasks. Note: The runes are grouped first by their complexity, and then by the relevant mana types.’

Not wasting a moment, he triggered the change, waiting a few moments for the text around him to shift. This time, the hieroglyphs on the floor and ceiling varied more than before, however. Besides the regular text, there were also more intricate symbols sprinkled throughout the room – runes most likely, surrounded by information and instructions about their effects and construction.

Over the next few minutes, Percy gleefully strolled around the room, randomly skimming through the information as he tried to gauge the locals’ level. Eventually, his shoulders slouched a little. He had no idea how good these enchantments were exactly, compared to the ones on Remior – but it was clear that they weren’t even remotely close to the Vault’s magiscript. That was only to be expected, obviously, though it wasn’t automatically bad.

A key advantage here was accessibility.

In the Vault, every single rune cost a lot of credits. On Remior, Percy couldn’t easily get his hands on teaching material either, as it was mostly hoarded by House Etna. Meanwhile, he was free to study whatever he wanted inside this hall.

Sure, the enchantments wouldn’t be that potent compared to the ones he was used to, so he doubted he would be able to truly upgrade his strongest spells in any significant way with them. Still, it didn’t mean he couldn’t find some useful runes to make his everyday life a little easier.

‘This… It’s decent stuff… If only I had the time to study it properly…’

The problem was, he would have to learn another runecrafting language. On top of that, these runes wouldn’t even be compatible with his own, so he would be hard-pressed to combine them into useable enchantments. It was the same issue that had forced him to ignore runecrafting on Felmara too. Unlike alchemic principles, which were much more transferrable from one world to another, runecrafting was a relatively esoteric field.

Furthermore, Percy already had fairly consistent access to the best runecrafting language he could have hoped for. If he wanted to make any significant gains in the field outside the artificial world, his best bet would be to look for a suitable Decree – assuming there even was one.

‘Oh well… The people of Amenthes have produced at least one god, so they should have discovered alchemy too. I just need to find it.’

Returning to the glowing column, Percy continued to circle the hall, browsing over the remaining topics. Not all of them were mundane – some did discuss spells and other magical knowledge – but he didn’t see anything else that piqued his interest.

It wasn’t until he was almost back to the original column – the one on Culinary Arts – that he finally found what he was looking for.

‘Seriously?! All the way here?!’

Percy couldn’t help but roll his eyes at his bad luck. If only he’d traversed the room in the opposite direction, he would have stumbled upon this in the first few seconds. Then again, he would have probably wanted to search the whole place regardless, in case he found anything else of value, so the end result would have been the same.

Shrugging, he placed his palm on the wall again, causing the symbols to light up. Curiously, the topic literally translated to “Potion-making” in his host’s mind – they clearly didn’t have a separate word for “Alchemy”. He didn’t know if they simply used a different name for the field, or if they’d hidden the more sensitive information elsewhere, but he sure hoped it was the former.

Diving into the text, it didn’t take him long to wrap his mind around the topic.

The gist of it was that they had indeed developed a cultivation resource on par with elixirs – which made sense, for a lesser spring. Most impressively, Amenthes was – or had been – blessed with not just one, but two sources of stable beast mana! The first were the scales of some kind of aquatic creatures, while the second was extracted from the horns of some land-dwelling beasts.

That definitely got Percy’s hopes up. If they’d found some way to combine the two ingredients to create even more potent elixirs, it would open new doors for him.

Sadly, he quickly realized they’d done nothing of the sort. Their alchemists – or potion-makers as they called them – had merely found lots of standard ingredients around their planet, discovering all the basic alchemic principles he was familiar with – extraction, deattunement, pacification and redirection.

They called their cultivation resource “amber potions”, and they didn’t really differentiate them from other potions they brewed. For the most part, this wasn’t particularly useful to him, as he doubted he’d find any physical ingredients in this world, nor did he have any means of bringing them back home, as things stood.

Though one thing did catch his eye. It was something he hadn’t seen anywhere else.

‘The compression principle? Now, that’s a new one…’