293 Reading Marathon (1/2)
Immediately after the lunch meeting, Zero and Merlin travelled back to the tower quickly, eager to continue their work. Zero quickly picked up books and activated golems while going into his meditative mood. Merlin decided to catch up on his reading as well. Zero's spare golems had written a pile of notes regarding the boy's understanding of qi and chaos energy. Both master and student worked hard trying to catch up to each other.
Merlin didn't let Zero idle and taught Zero the sequence of books he had to read. Zero glanced over some of the books and asked Merlin if they were already scanned into the reading device's library. Some of the titles looked similar.
The wizard god couldn't be sure of it. Steve did give him the option to convert all his tomes into a more convenient format but after converting a hundred or so books, the magician decided to abandon the project. He still preferred the feel of bound paper in his hands.
\”I'll leave the task of updating them into the library to you,\” Merlin said and Zero agreed.
The young doctor had another task that he wanted to do simultaneously while reading the library. He has five spare golems stationed in Merlin's tower library and another five working on the books in the forbidden library. In the mindscape, the information overload was real.
\”Pass the pen, stack those books on the third shelf. No, We need to expand the section, move!\” Mii hollered from her desk. Zero was doing everything he could as Mii's assistant while coping with the strange feeling of having new knowledge pour into his brain every second. Wii was also given her personal office to help coordinate the other Parallel Minds that were working hard at information gathering.
Thanks to Merlin's tips, Zero discovered that Wii can level up without going through the quest system that Mii was limited to. The eggplant fairy simply had to continuously perform arithmetic of increasing difficulty to increase her mental power and ability to control her duplicates. Right now, Wii was able to control up to twenty duplicates but Zero didn't want to use all twenty duplicates to gather information in the real world. He had ten doing that by possessing the spare golems, five working on Arithmetic with Wii and coordinating the information collected while the other five acted as Mii's assistants alongside Zero who was still getting the hang of it.
Zero's aim was to create ideas for the grimoire that Merlin wanted him to make. It has to be a magic that was unique only for him. A grimoire was every magician's lifeline. Once that grimoire is destroyed, the magician loses all their powerful spells. Some grimoires are tied to their owner's soul, others are tied to their owner's hearts. Most grimoires that weren't created by humans belonged to a demon who would reap the summoner's soul as offering or feed on their life energy in exchange for lending them power.
\”Ugh!\” Zero groaned as another sharp pain pierced his mind. With Wii's help, the work is definitely progressing smoother on Mii's end. Unfortunately, there was only one Zero and having so many tomes crammed into his head at the same time often caused the teen to be rendered paralysed for a while. The pain of having so much new information entering his head within such a short period of time can be hard to cope with.
\”Are you ok?\” Wii asked from the third floor.
\”What's the pain like from the scale of one to ten? One like a paper cut and ten having an arm cut off?\” Mii asked.
Zero groaned and tried to lift his head from his desk with much difficulty. \”Eight... what did you girls do?\”
Wii looked sorry and Mii felt guilty. \”Sorry, we simply synced all the newly scanned books from the reading device to your library. It's faster this way. Wii can work on processing the information at leisure and you can recall anything that needs recalling. We prioritised grimoire-making materials.\”
Zero groaned again, the headache still not leaving him. It was true. The girls really added the entire reading device's content into his head and information just couldn't stop flooding into his mind. Unable to move, Zero could only lay there in pain and wait for the overload of information to complete. Unknown to him, the amount of information input wasn't stopping. When ten books were synced, Zero's mind was made to process a hundred more.
In the forbidden library, Merlin had created a spell to help his student read faster. All spare golems were equipped with a speed reading spell similar to his famous speed-reading glasses. They now scanned things faster too and Merlin welcomed the abuse of mana in his tower. These golems were really handy and Merlin couldn't imagine what it would be like to have ten more household golems like Bib to maintain his library, lab and business.
Zero found it odd. He was beginning to see many new things despite the splitting headache. Suddenly, he knew things he never knew before. Each minute that passed made him wonder if it would ever stop. From necromancy to summoning, the subjects of his studies were making no sense. Even if Zero was able to understand the contents of whatever that had been scanned and read, he was still struggling to know how they can be applied to grimoire-making.
Wii and Mii gasped in horror as the books started piling on the floor.
\”What's going on?\” Wii asked her older sister.
The strawcherry fairy didn't have time to respond. In order to prevent an accident, she had turned to Wii with seriousness in her eyes.\”I'm going to find Lily and take over the system for a while. It looks like three floors won't be enough. Make sure that the books don't fall on Zero before I'm back!\”
Wii didn't have any time to react before her sister disappeared. From the first floor, she could hear her master groan in pain. At the same time, she could feel that something was wrong with the other cloned libraries. Perhaps it was better to stop for a while and consolidate all their materials before continuing. At this rate, there wouldn't be enough space to put all these copied books in Zero's mindscape!
\”Dispel clones! Parallel Minds, gather!\”
The ten cloned librarians stopped working and gathered at the office that Wii's original self was at in order to help with the administrative matters that were starting to pile badly from the syncing of all ten libraries.
Mii hurried over to where Lily was and demanded to create ten floors for Zero's mindscape library. At the rate that Zero was learning, they needed a lot of room. Zero wasn't even done with a third of Merlin's books. They wouldn't survive it without enough space.