Harem System In A fantasy World

Elion raised a brow and smiled.

He would have been more than content with just a bit of intel, but by the looks of things, it seemed he had stumbled upon a gold mine.

He had really come to the perfect place after all.

At this point, he doubted anyone in the entire world would have a more accurate account of the legacy world, or this entire world’s history, for that matter.

He really had to applaud their dedication to record-keeping.

As they walked, their footsteps softened against a long runner on the floor, woven in muted crimson and black.

The archive seemed to swallow noise rather than echo it.

The farther they moved from the entrance, the more the outside world receded until all that remained was the occasional minute clink of metal from Oberon’s key ring as it brushed against his belt.

Elion noticed movement near one of the far tables.

A woman in dark, revealing robes sat with a stack of open ledgers beside her, writing with a fine-nibbed pen.

"Hmmm?"

For some reason, for an instant, an incorporeal image of her formed in his mind when he looked at her, but he simply assumed it must have been his eyes acting up, since everything went back to normal less than a split second later.

She looked up when they passed, rose at once, and bowed. Her expression flickered only briefly when she recognized Celeste and Oberon.

Oberon acknowledged her with a nod. "At ease. We are only here to look for something along the west stacks."

"Yes, Elder Oberon."

She sat again immediately and resumed her work with admirable discipline.

"You let people work in here unsupervised?" Elion asked.

"Our archivists are not ’people’ in the ordinary sense," Oberon said dryly. "It’s more fitting to call her a summoned spirit now, though not in the actual sense of the word."

’Was that what I saw?’

"Spirits?" Elion asked.

The only time he had ever heard about spirits was while reading through mythological records about beings who once were.

Oberon nodded.

"Well, their kind hasn’t been around for millennia now, so I guess you wouldn’t know much about them." He allowed himself the smallest exhale through his nose.

But he didn’t say any more, much to Elion’s displeasure.

’So is she a spirit, or is she not? System... Mind briefing me? What’s a spirit to begin with?’

[A spirit is a non-physical being composed primarily of astral or spiritual energy rather than flesh and blood. Spirits possess astral bodies, allowing them to exist, move, and interact within the spiritual plane, but they normally lack true physical bodies and cannot fully interact with the material world without special means, such as possession, manifestation, or forming a temporary vessel]

’So that lady was a spirit then?’

[Well...]

[As the old man said, not in the truest sense]

[The System currently lacks enough information to make a proper judgement. However, using the limited information observed through the Host’s World Eyes for that brief moment, I suspect that she may be a vengeful soul inhabiting a physical vessel]

Elion frowned.

’Meaning?’

[A vengeful soul is the lingering soul of a deceased being that has refused to pass on, usually because of overwhelming hatred, regret, obsession, or some unresolved grievance]

[When such a soul takes possession of a physical body, it gains a vessel through which it can interact with the material world, though the body may gradually be altered or corrupted by the soul occupying it]

’And why would anyone want something like that working inside such an important place?’

[I may be repeating myself, but as I said, this is merely a suspicion]

[She could be a vengeful soul, or simply something similar]

’Haaaa... fine.’

Elion sighed in exasperation...

They reached the western aisle a short while later. This section was even denser than the first.

Large shelf markers denoted divisions by age, region, and category, with older collections enclosed behind latticed cabinet doors to keep them better protected.

Oberon moved with the confidence of a man who knew every arrangement intimately.

He paused before a set of shelves marked in old script and ran his fingers along the spines until he found what he wanted.

A set of volumes labelled...

The Secluded Legacy world

"These first," he said, withdrawing three large volumes and carrying them to a nearby table.

...

"Ohooo... wow!" Elion’s eyes widened as he flipped through another page. "These are incredibly detailed!"

He had already gone through roughly half of the pile stacked before him, while Oberon had kindly brought over the remaining volumes, including several of the more comprehensive records.

Isla and Celeste were reading alongside him, while Oberon stood nearby and watched patiently.

To put it simply, Elion had just stumbled upon the greatest advantage he could have hoped for.

If the younger generation of Vampires who were preparing to enter the Legacy World had bothered to study these records, then no doubt they would possess a similar advantage.

But then again, who was to say the Vampires were the only ones with something like this?

Even so, not everyone could read as quickly as Elion, and certainly not everyone could remember what they had read with nearly perfect clarity.

Each volume was marked with the centuries during which its records had been compiled.

A single volume generally contained information gathered across roughly five centuries, meaning five separate openings of the Legacy World.

Naturally, the amount of information recorded during each entry varied greatly.

Some expeditions had clearly returned with far more knowledge than others, which resulted in the volumes being wildly different in thickness.

One was barely thicker than Elion’s finger.

Another was so thick that he couldn’t comfortably grip the entire spine with one hand.

More importantly, every volume contained its own map, and that was where things became truly interesting.

At first glance, the maps looked so different from one another that Elion had briefly wondered whether they were even depicting the same realm.

Coastlines shifted, forests disappeared, and mountain ranges seemed to move or collapse entirely.

Rivers formed where none had existed before, while entire regions that appeared on older maps were missing from later ones.

After reading deeper into the records, however, Elion finally understood why.

Time inside the Legacy World flowed at an absurdly different rate compared to the outside world.

For every century that passed in their world... Roughly ten thousand years passed inside the Legacy World.

Elion slowly lowered the book in his hands.

’Ten thousand years...’

That meant every single opening was separated by an enormous span of time within the realm itself.

No wonder the maps were so different.

By the time the next generation entered, territories could have risen and fallen, forests could have swallowed cities.

Rivers could have carved entirely new paths.

Species could have gone extinct.

And entire civilisations could have disappeared without leaving behind anything more than ruins.

Suddenly, those wildly different maps made perfect sense.

Speaking of civilisations, Elion had been shocked to discover that the Legacy World was actually inhabited.

After all, everything he had heard up until now had made it sound like some abandoned, ruined world.

Which, to be fair, it still was.

The geography alone made that painfully obvious.

The world seemed to have no true outer borders in the conventional sense. Instead, several enormous continents floated across a vast body of water, while what Elion could only describe as the edges of the world appeared to fold inward upon themselves.

At least, that was the impression he got from the maps spread out before him.

To truly understand the absurdity of what he was looking at, he would probably have to see it with his own eyes.

But the inhabitants were even more interesting.

The older archives contained no mention of them at all.

While there was occasional mention of small tribes in some regions in the older texts, this particular group, which had managed to build functional cities in a chaotic world, was the one he was curious about.

It was only in one of the newer volumes, written as a personal account by a young Vampire who had entered during a more recent opening, that Elion found any record of people actually living there.

According to him, these inhabitants had only appeared relatively recently.

Which raised an obvious question.

’Where did they come from?’

For the moment, his claims had been dismissed as mere speculation, since no other group seemed to have encountered them.

After all, not everyone would have the time to do detailed research on the world, especially when most people would be more concerned about survival and maximising their gains.

In any case, that wasn’t something for him to worry about right now.

Oberon smiled.

"I’m glad the information we have is to your liking." That was certainly an understatement.

There were nineteen books spread out before them.

With each volume containing roughly five centuries’ worth of records, that meant Elion had access to nearly a hundred separate entries into the Legacy World.

Almost ten thousand years of accumulated records from their world’s perspective. And with the absurd difference in the flow of time...

That represented close to a million years of change within the Legacy World itself.

Elion stared at the mountain of information before him with increasingly bright eyes. Calling this a gold mine was beginning to feel like an understatement.

By the time he finished reading through all nineteen volumes, Elion was grinning like a fool.

He snapped the final book shut and leaned back slightly, taking a moment to digest everything he had just learned.

Across from him, however, Oberon looked genuinely astounded.

Only two hours had passed, and Elion had already finished all nineteen volumes.

Just like that.

At first, Oberon had briefly wondered whether Elion was merely flipping through the pages quickly to impress the two ladies beside him.

But that possibility had disappeared almost immediately.

Throughout the entire session, Elion had occasionally stopped to ask highly specific questions about particular regions and inconsistencies between different records.

Questions that only someone who had actually read and understood the material could have asked.

Which meant there was only one explanation.

His mental capabilities were simply that extraordinary.

’Unbelievable...’

Oberon thought inwardly, staring at Elion with a completely different level of interest than before.

Oberon himself could read and comprehend at a much faster pace than that, but he was a Sage Mage.

For Elion to be capable of something even remotely comparable while still looking so refreshed afterwards simply didn’t make sense.

After all, one wasn’t supposed to possess mental capabilities this refined until reaching the Archmage stage, where the mind itself would begin undergoing true tempering and transformation.

Yet Elion had just gone through nineteen dense volumes in barely two hours and didn’t even look mentally fatigued.

If anything, he looked excited.

Oberon’s eyes narrowed slightly.

’Just what kind of monster is this boy?’