Chronicles of the True Wizard

As the cube filled with mana, the symbols began to glow slightly brighter and the cube continued to accept mana. Felix poured almost his entire mana pool into the cube but it kept accepting more so he started to forcefully regenerate his own mana and continued to fill it. It took him thirty four hours for the cube to finally be full which Felix estimated to be about ten times his total mana pool. This time, once it was full, something odd happened.

[E - Arcane] Skill Test Cube: Mana Control

Congra

The screen Felix expected from The System was interrupted, it appeared incomplete then disappeared completely. A heavy object suddenly fell into Felix's lap, right below the cube. Felix waited a few moments to see if The System would provide a new screen but nothing happened.

Maybe it just chose yes for me?

Felix exited his meditation and found himself starving, exhausted and soaked as, apparently it had rained at some point in the past few days. The cube was exactly as he remembered it represented in his soul space, a sleek black cube with colorful symbols he didn't have any hope of deciphering on each side. It reminded Felix of a die.

Felix looked down and saw, in his lap, a leather bound book. It was almost too thick to grip and appeared to contained at least a thousand pages. It was bound in a dark crimson leather with complicated spell forms or enchantments drawn out in white on the front. There was also a deep blue metal that covered the corners and rivetted the binding together. It was almost half a meter in height making it one of the biggest books Felix had ever seen. The book was held shut with a single leather clasp across the center of it's height.

[? - ???] ??????

??? ??? ???.

Oh lovely, how incredibly useful. On a more serious note, The System is starting to freak me out a little. It seems that the omnipotent overlord of the multiverse is glitching out or encountered a bug.

Felix visually inspected the book further but couldn't find anything resembling text. He also had no hope of figuring out the complex drawing on the front, whatever it was. Felix tentatively opened the clasp which was not a buckle like he had expected. Instead he simply pulled on the binding and it released as if it was never attached to the front of the book at all. Felix very carefully pulled the front cover open to reveal a blank page.

He examined the page with his mana senses for a few moments then was about to flip to the next page when something began to appear. At first, an inky cloud appeared like someone had spilled a bottle over the page, then it slowly moved itself to form some sort of script. At least, Felix assumed it was script as it was inside of a book, it looked more like a series of randomly placed and somewhat interconnected drawings, like a spell diagram, but not quite.

Felix just looked at it, not sure what else to do for a few minutes until the text changed again. It continued to, Felix assumed, switch languages for almost ten minutes, getting progressively faster until it simply went blank. After a few seconds, the ink cloud reappeared and slowly morphed into the shape of a book. It was a simple book with no decorations. Next to it, a drawing of the unidentifiable book Felix was currently reading appeared. The drawings moved like a cartoon and the book Felix was holding appeared to eat the other one.

I know I scanned and memorized the books in my inventory, but I feel bad having them eaten to this random book. Maybe I can go buy some books from the library or marketplace.

Felix placed the cube in his inventory then stowed the book, except nothing happened. The cube disappeared into his inventory as expected but the book simply wouldn't.

It just gets keeps getting weirder. Well I don't really want to leave this thing lying around, guess it comes with me. I probably want to hide it under my cloak at least, I don't really want people to be identifying it.

Felix spent a few minutes tying the book to his chest using his bed sheet under the cloak. With the book tied as tightly as he could, he headed down to the Vault of Secrets. The book only moved minimally when he walked, but it was still very heavy so he didn't travel at his usual pace. It did create a slight bulge under his cloak, but it was billowing enough that it wasn't overly obvious. He made sure to equip and enable his mask then headed down.

Felix headed through the forest which reminded him of a well curated park back on earth, just with denser tree-top coverage. The ground was even covered in grass with oddly not a single fallen leaf in sight. Felix rounded the building and entered through the front door heading straight to a large index book. Previously, he was simply looking for the books so he could scan them then he would put them back, he didn't need to borrow the books at all. This time, he actually read through the introduction, instead of skipping over it.

Essentially, he could borrow or buy any book he wanted from the vault. Most people were restricted from certain sections, but Felix obviously held the highest level of permission. Not that it made any difference at the moment as those sections were completely empty. To borrow or buy a book, you simply transferred the cost of buying the book to the index node. If you returned the book, the majority of the value would be refunded, contingent on the quality of the returned book. The vault could also create any number of copies of any book but the cost was high and charged to the library itself. Once they existed, the copies could be bought or borrowed. Typically the cost of copying the book was close to the cost of outright buying a copy, which made sense.

Felix chose a handful of books to produce and buy copies of starting with a number of dictionaries from a multitude of languages on earth and others that had appeared. He also bought a number of novels as examples for the structure of sentences as well as customs. The books cost anywhere from a 100 to 1000 credits each and in total, he spent 20k credits. He stowed his purchases in his inventory then headed to check on one last thing before he headed back up the tower. In the index node he flipped to the section on classes being taught and found what he was looking for. He quickly flipped through a few screens, confirming things then left The Vault of Secrets.

He headed to his room on the top floor just below the roof and pulled out the unidentifiable book. He opened it up to about the middle then placed the first dictionary from his inventory on top of it. As he placed it down however, the books didn't collide at all, the dictionary simply disappeared into the pages of the magic book.

Really glad I didn't use the books in my inventory just yet.

He continued to feed books to the book until he had run out, then waited. Nothing happened after half an hour so he simply closed it and strapped it back to his chest.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Maybe it just needs some time? What the hell do I do in the mean time? I guess I can work on designing mana channels maybe. Honestly, this book is kind of just throwing me off a little. It caused The System to bug out multiple times and The System isn't or can't translate any of the languages it contains. Honestly, I'm not sure which of those is a scarier notion. Thɪs chapter is updatᴇd by novel✶fire.net

Felix didn't have to decide as he was suddenly presented with a screen from The System.

Innate Ability

The System has identified your innate ability. Innate abilities are talents that are so unique they tend to only exist in a few people in the multiverse. Some appear in multiple people, others are completely unique to an individual. Innate abilities with no practical use or with negligible impact are typically left unidentified, this means they will not be represented on your status screen. They will however, remain a part of the individual.

Wizard

Ascendant Prodigy: Mana

You posses an unusually high capability with respect to mana as well as an usually high rate of growth. Your current capacity is unknown, the limit for your growth is unknown, the rate of your growth is unknown.

That's a lot of unknowns, and I guess it confirmed suspicions of mine, but it didn't really give me any new information. It is cool I guess. It would be even cooler if it doubled my intelligence or something like that.

Felix opened his status screen to see what had changed.