Chapter 3: An Ancient Manuscript, and the First Words from a Blue-Tinted Panel
In the darkest corner of the library's seventh floor, a pale blue magic candle flickered, throwing thin streaks of light across pages of mutant hide, dried stiff and cracked after a thousand years.
Lucian sat cross-legged on an old cushion, carefully turning each brittle, heavy page. The old smell of ash, herbal ink, and tanned hide filled his six-year-old nose.
He hadn't snuck up here hunting for some world-ending forbidden art or an unbeatable technique. His motives were a lot more modest, and a lot more practical: he wanted a few cheap household spells.
Something like a cantrip that lit a fire without matches. A little cooling charm for the brutal summer heat. A thin soundproofing membrane so he could sleep in without his parents' shouting waking him up. And if House Vance ever actually got its assets frozen by the Tax Bureau and went under, well — at least he'd have a few small, marketable skills instead of ending up begging on a street corner.
But this hide-bound book wasn't nearly as easy to read as the chronicles downstairs.
The characters in front of him didn't follow the rigid Subject-Verb-Object order of the modern Imperial tongue. They curled like vines, consonants woven into vowels in a multidimensional structure that predated the war by ten thousand years. Any given root word could flip its entire meaning depending on inflection — like a piece of dense code with a dozen nested functions.
To the local mages, trained to rely on pre-drawn magic circles, this jumble of characters would have looked like meaningless noise. But to a former finance employee who'd spent years wrestling with tangled logic tables in his last life, it was just a syntax puzzle waiting to be cracked.
"This root means 'Wind'..." Lucian murmured, his small finger tracing the rough hide. "The secondary branch modifies it to mean 'Distortion.' Reverse the order, and it becomes 'Void'..."
The moment he pieced those three abstract concepts together correctly in his mind, a thin current of static shot from his fingertip straight up to his temple.
Ting.
A clear, mechanical, oddly familiar sound rang out in the quiet.
Right before Lucian's eyes, streaks of pale blue light gathered and wove themselves into neat, translucent lines of text:
[Active deconstruction of Ancient High Elvish detected.]
[Semantic assimilation rate: 5%... 8%... 12%...]
[HIDDEN CONDITION MET: Excavator of a Forgotten Legacy.]
[Minimalist Interface initialized successfully.]
Lucian blinked twice.
No deity descended from the void. No soul contract demanding he save humanity from the coming darkness.
Just a pale blue interface panel, floating in midair. No hundred-line clutter of stats — no strength, agility, or reputation scores. Just three lean, tidy sections:
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[1. Language] [2. Attached Skills] [3. Exploration Map]
The problem was that the panel had decided to hover exactly at eye level, completely blocking the last page of hide he'd been in the middle of translating.
"What in the world is this thing?"
Lucian frowned, tapping irritably at the corner of the panel like he was knocking on a stuck pane of glass. "Move over. I'm in the middle of the important part, and you're covering the whole page."
The panel wobbled, then shrank on its own and drifted to the upper right corner of his vision, settling in like a background app.
Lucian clicked his tongue and muttered a swear under his breath, in the language of his previous life:
"Great, now it's lagging."
Ting.
[Warning: Unidentified linguistic variant detected.]
[Compatibility with world rules: 0.0001%. Logged to temporary archive.]
Lucian froze for a second, the corner of his mouth twitching. He decided to keep his mouth shut and focus instead on the newly updated line on the interface:
[Language: High Elvish (Beginner) — Comprehension: 14%]
[Skills unlocked: None]
[Next milestone: 25% comprehension to unlock first Support Skill.]
Staring at the faintly glowing text, Lucian started to understand what he'd actually stumbled onto.
For ten thousand years, this world had leaned almost entirely on pre-formed magic circles handed down by the royal family and the church. People drew a diagram, fed it mana, and activated it — like someone who only knew how to press a button on a machine without any idea what was happening underneath.
The old languages were different. They weren't incantations begging for power — they were the world's raw source code. When someone pronounced or truly understood the exact structure of the old tongue, mana particles in the environment would arrange themselves according to the command, no clunky intermediary circle required.
This system wasn't handing him unlimited power. It was a compiler — something to help him crack the world's source code.
"So I need to hit twenty-five percent to unlock a skill..." Lucian propped his chin on his hand, running the cost-benefit numbers in his head. "Fourteen percent got me through half this book. If I want to hit the next milestone, I'll need more material — or some faster way to practice."
While Lucian waved his hands through the air, testing out swipes, taps, and pinch-zooms on his invisible system panel, a figure stood quietly at the end of the seventh-floor hallway, watching.
It was Boris, the head steward — a former scout who'd followed Regulus through twenty years of border warfare.
To Boris, the rapid, precise hand movements looked disturbingly like an unfamiliar combat drill. With no weapon in sight, Lucian appeared to be rehearsing strikes against an invisible opponent.
Boris held his breath.
The young master... he hadn't let the C-grade result break him at all! He was secretly forging his own unarmed close-combat technique, alone in the dark!
Not daring to interrupt what he assumed was some sacred moment of enlightenment, the steward quietly stepped back, then hurried down the stairs as fast as his legs would carry him, rushing to report this miracle to Lady Valeria.
Up on the seventh floor, Lucian had no idea he'd just accidentally "invented" a deadly martial art in the eyes of his household. He'd only just managed to drag the system panel back down to the size he wanted.
The last pale blue line blinked gently before his eyes:
[Next goal: Reach 25% comprehension to unlock first Support Skill.]
Lucian's mouth curved into a small smirk as his eyes swept over the thousands of dust-covered, ragged books lining the seventh-floor shelves.
"Alright," he said, flipping to the next page of the hide-bound book. "Let's see how many more free skills this thing's got hiding in it."