The lock turned like a sigh. The chest's lid lifted on stiff hinges and a breath of old oil drifted out, cutting the last of the burnt-meat stink.
Inside lay order—dividers, felt-lined pockets, the kind of tidy arrangement that said someone cared about what went where. Three small glass vials rested in a row, a narrow bone tube beside them. No coins. No knives. No trash.
He crouched closer, letting the low glow from the fire's embers do what it could. The first vial held amber liquid with a faint fizz against the glass. Familiar.
He thumbed the wax and touched a drop to his tongue.
Root-beer sweet, warm as a memory. No bile, no rot. The same mellow gold taste as before.
He drank it.
[Potion of Lesser Experience]
EXP +25
The bar in his head ticked forward. Not a level; close. Two hundred seventy-five of three hundred. A nudge.
He set the empty glass back and lifted the other two vials in turn—one a pale green, one clear with a slow-moving, silver thread. He did not taste them. Not here. Not after everything in this room had tried to be a teacher by killing him.
Both went into his pack.
"I need a way to name you," he muttered, thinking of alchemy, apothecary charts, anything that would turn guesses into rules. A book would fix it. A spell would, too. Either way, he'd prefer not to gamble a lung again.
The bone tube was capped with a cork and a scrap of red twine. He eased the stopper free and slid out a rolled sheet that made a sound like dry leaves.
A single spell, short as a grocery list.
The characters weren't like the occult primer's; these were clean, geometrical, held together by rhythm. As he traced a finger along the lines, something in his head acknowledged the pattern and made space for it, as if a drawer had been built into his mind and simply hadn't been opened yet.
A new section slid into his mental menu with the inevitability of a shelf falling into place:
Memorized Spells (0 / 7)
Seven. He didn't need a tooltip to do the math. Mental twelve. One slot for every point above five. Neat.
He read the scroll once, carefully. The drawer closed with a tiny click.
Memorized Spells (1 / 7): Detect Magic
He blinked. "Of course it is."
He already had touch. Range would be better. If this did what he thought it did—if it reached—then the dungeon would stop being quite so smug about its surprises.
He read it again. Another click.
Memorized Spells (2 / 7): Detect Magic, Detect Magic
Once more. The rhythm got easier; the lines went down like water.
Memorized Spells (3 / 7): Detect Magic ×3
He rolled the scroll shut, hesitated, then set his teeth to the edge and ate.
The taste was tin and basil with a cold note under it, as if he'd bitten into a leaf that had been pressed between glass for a century. Knowledge tightened around the thing he already knew; his touch at the edges of magic clarified. The hum of the chest's lock, the faint residue on the altar stones—both separated into categories that made more sense.
Sense Magic → Basic+
Still touch. Finer teeth. Close work would read clearer now—enchantment versus residue, device versus spillover.
He let the scroll settle in his stomach and tried a different experiment. He closed his eyes, ran the pattern through once more in memory, and felt the same drawer open. No parchment needed. A few seconds of attention and the slot filled.
He did it again. And again, until the list filled.
Memorized Spells (7 / 7): Detect Magic ×7
"Alright," he said softly. "Let's see."
He picked one of the seven and let it go.
The room responded like a black sheet lifting off furniture. Thin lines sketched themselves where he looked—faint tracings that clung to the chest's lockplate and key, a stale halo around the hooks where the heart had hung, a film smeared along the altar where the acid blood had eaten its course. The burned cradle read as dead metal. No fresh traps. No new enchantments. This place had been loud; now it was only messy.
He breathed out and felt the spell go with it, a match burned to the fingers.
He re-memorized one more copy to keep the slots full and closed the drawer in his head.
Time to leave.
He slung the pack, checked that the knife sat where it should, and took one last look at the ruin. The altar was a crater of cooled glass. The bone struts slumped like dead ribs. The line in his menu that had said angered stayed exactly where it was, as if a god could hold onto a grudge without blinking.
"Noted," he said, and turned to the door.
The passage took him back the way it had taken him down. Darkness made its case. He answered with hands on stone, feet careful, a slow pace that let his upgraded sense of space do its job. He did not hurry. He did not invite a fall in a place that rewarded broken ankles with teeth.
Halfway up he stopped and listened. The iron sweetness in the air had thinned to an aftertaste. No footsteps. No breath that wasn't his. He went on.
When the slit of library light finally appeared ahead like dawn through fog, some tight spring in his chest eased. He stepped into the starting room's dull glow and stood still long enough to let the bigger space recalibrate his eyes.
Books again. Rows and rows. Safe, if he didn't forget what he'd learned about that word.
He brought the numbers up because routine mattered, because it put rails under his thoughts even when the room wanted to be a maze.
Status: William Page
Age: 18
System: Unbound Bookeater
Class: None
Level: 3
EXP: 275 / 300
Strength: 11
Speed: 12
Durability: 13
Mental: 12
Social: 5
Luck: 6
Traits:
– Hunger for Knowledge
– Synesthetic Cognition
– Rational Mind
Skills:
– Survival (Basic)
– Mycology (Basic)
– Cooking (Basic)
– Knife Use (Basic)
– Herb Lore (Basic)
– Knife Combat (Basic)
– Medicine (Basic)
– Magic (Basic)
– Anatomy (Basic)
– Unarmed Combat (Intermediate)
– Wrestling (Basic)
– Situational Awareness (Basic)
– Rituals (Basic)
Abilities:
– Sense Magic (Basic+) [Touch]
– Resorb Blood (Basic) [Self]
Resistances:
– Blood (Minor)
Combat Values:
– Critical Hit Chance: +10%
Affiliations:
– God of Spilt Blood — Angered
Memorized Spells (7 / 7):
– Detect Magic ×7
Unallocated Points:
– Stat Points: 0
– Skill Points: 2
Inventory:
– Knife (Common, Durability 81%)
– Trail Mix (Mundane, 340g)
– Water Bottle (Common, Empty, Durability 100%)
– Paracord (Common, 16 ft, Durability 98%)
– Firestarter (Common, Durability 87%)
– Poncho (Common, Durability 80%)
– Goblin Key (Uncommon)
– Improvised Sling (Common, Durability 85%)
– Smooth Stones (x3, Mundane)
– Unidentified Potion (Common) ×2
He slid the numbers away and rubbed his thumb along the edge of one of the new vials through the pack's canvas. He'd need a way to tell one from the other, short of guess-and-die. Books could do it. A proper lab could too, someday. Or a different spell. He filed the problem where he kept water and sleep: soon.
Something tugged at the corner of his attention.
He closed his eyes, breathed once, and let one of the detect magics burn. The room outlined itself again in faint threads. Most of it was dead wood and glue. But here and there—barely—he saw pinpricks down an aisle, weak as stars in smoke.
Not the occult section. Not obvious. Quiet pockets of potential like seeds in bad soil.
He let the spell gutter out and smiled without showing teeth.
"Alright," he told the stacks. "Show me what you thought you could hide."
And he went hunting.