An Otherworldly Scholar [LITRPG, ISEKAI]

I needed to know the truth about Byrne, and to that end, I was going to infiltrate his study.

My heart raced, but I pushed forward. Byrne had the ability to teleport, so any speed I could exert thanks to [Minor Aerokinesis] felt slow in comparison. I moved as fast as I could, but the path beneath my feet seemed eternal. Finally, after hours of feeling the cold wind against my face, I reached Cadria's walls just before dawn.

The guards let me through the northern entrance without giving me a second glance.

Elincia's voice lingered in my mind, warning me not to scare low-level people with my skills. This time, however, I had to ignore her advice. I crossed the Northern District, jumping from rooftop to rooftop. In the streets, guardsmen saw me pass by, but none moved to stop me. They were probably used to Wind Mages from the Magicians Circle coming and going over the city.

The guards at the inner wall greeted me by name, though I had never taken that passage before. Most of my dealings were in the western quarter of the city. With tens of thousands of people living in the inner city, I wondered if the guards truly knew everybody.

The question quickly vacated my brain as I approached Cadria's center. On top of a hill rose the oldest building in the city, the Imperial Academy. A few hundred meters to the east was the Imperial Library, standing tall like a needle. Beyond the public gardens, which spanned acres and acres, was the royal palace surrounded by an artificial lake.

The royal palace was in the blind spot of the Academy, so I rarely saw it. It was hard to compete with the Academy and the Library, but the Palace had style. The number of towers and flying buttresses was adequate for a building in a fantasy world like Ebros. At a glance, the building appeared crowned with countless tiny spires, but [Foresight] revealed them to be statues of knights, mages, and soldiers. One had to have a high-tier detection skill to see them properly.

The streets were almost empty save for guard patrols and carts distributing goods to the various stores around the Library.

I stopped on the rooftop of a tavern and examined my surroundings. This is where things got tricky. Byrne was the Great Archivist of the Arcane Circle. They weren't going to let me near his personal belongings without him present—not that it was a problem given my skillset.

I shrouded myself in darkness and approached the Library from the rooftops. Below me, the wide esplanade around the Library was guarded by soldiers and mages dressed in black and yellow robes. If Firana was right, they were there to prevent mid-to-high-level members of the Library from making a scene on the streets. I detected defensive spells on the lower floors up to a hundred meters above the street level. Still, I had a huge advantage. Nobody expected an attack from above.

This was going to be one of the highest jumps I had ever attempted, so I closed my eyes and meditated for a moment. The threads of Fountain mana slowly replenished my reserves. When I opened my eyes, I was floating on my mana pool. Bright blue runes greeted me. I moved to the section that controlled my skills and edited the parameters of [Minor Aerokinesis]. The current build was made to improve control in short bursts, but this time, I needed a stronger initial burst. Luckily, I had the perfect skill to mask it. I increased the output of [Minor Aeokinesis] in exchange for a much lower mana efficiency.

Back in the material world, I summoned a [Silence Dome] that encompassed the whole roof I was standing on. [Mirage] hid my presence. [Foresight] calculated the trajectory. [Minor Aerokinesis] swirled around my feet. [Mana Mastery] created a solid platform to withstand the wind's propelling power without destroying the roof's shingles.

No wonder the System accelerated the Corruption Cycle.

There had to be hundreds of thousands of people abusing their skill set just like me.

I shot up.

Only once had I attempted a comparable jump. Elincia was in my arms. We were sneaking into the Scholar's Tower back at Farcrest. It felt like years ago.

Without thinking much about it, I adjusted the trajectory and, in a moment, I was on a parapet near the top between two wendigo-like gargoyles. Below, houses looked like matchboxes, and people were tiny insects.

I leaned against the wall, fighting the vertigo, and tried to convince myself it was a blessing that the Arcane Circle occupied the tower's summit. Several openings on the wall were designed for telescopes to peek out. I wondered if this was part of the initial design or a remodel done later.

Based on the sights of the city below me, I calculated the position of Byrne's observatory. I was on the right floor. Walking on the parapet, I circled around the tower, looking for an entrance. The bronze disk set on the rock and the hole in the wall above me told me I had arrived. I grabbed the ledge and lifted my body inside Byrne's study without making a sound.

'Why did you give a Sage the skillset of a spy?' I thought, as my [Night Vision] allowed me to see through the darkness.

The System didn't reply, but I wasn't expecting it to do so.

Byrne's desk was covered in documents. [Foresight] allowed me to go through them in a matter of seconds. Most of it was about Byrne's theory of teleportation, which wasn't all that different from orbital mechanics, but with mana influences instead of gravitational forces.

I silently thanked the fact that Ebros, Earth, and the Fountain World didn't create a three-body problem.

I found several blueprints of what seemed to be parts of a bigger machine.

"What is this?"

Byrne drew his machines in diagrams similar to electric circuits, which made them generally easier to understand. I read through the blueprints, using the runeweaving knowledge he taught me for the past months to patch it all together. The blueprints were components of a greater machine. Most of the components were some sort of safeguard to ensure the arrival at the right location. A teleportation wasn't much different from a launch between magic currents. On a large trip, a small breeze could mean kilometers of error, and regular portal users didn't have Byrne's innate teleportation magic to counter the environmental effects.

One of the blueprints was cornily called Gellar Field.

After patching together the components of the blueprint, I realized it was an arrival portal. The arrival portal was some sort of mana anchor or gravity well that attracted nearby objects subjected to teleportation. This arrival portal, in particular, seemed to be designed to catch a huge mass. It was a colossal landing spot for a huge teleportation portal.

I was not surprised. Byrne, after all, planned to transport hundreds or thousands of people at once. However, none of the calculations I had made for him seemed to fit this particular portal.

"Why are you pretending not to know I'm a Runeweaver?"

The treatment Byrne was giving me didn't make sense unless he was feeding me crumbs to keep me busy while he worked on his real plans.

I left the documents in the same position I had encountered them to the millimeter, and explored the room. The books on the shelf had nothing strange. Most seemed to be history books placed there for show. History didn't go very far back in time on this world compared to Earth. The System Avatar had made sure to wipe out every trace of the System's origin and its past, failed iterations. For that reason, written history didn't go back more than a thousand years. After obtaining the System, however, society had advanced by leaps and bounds.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I left the bookshelf and examined the room.

I needed to find proof of Byrne lying to me.

The door at the back of the observatory got me to Byrne's private chambers. Much like the cabin in the woods, the place was a mess of books, diaries, and documents. It wouldn't be hard for a Scholar with [Awareness] to locate every single one of them by memory. I read performance reviews, shipping orders, and all sorts of petition letters from the members of the Arcane Circle. One caught my attention. A Beastmaster requested a living Wendigo to test his exotic skills. To my dismay, the request was filed as pending.

"Why are you teaching me Runeweaving?"

I rummaged through the sea of papers. Old prototypes. Discarded enchanted parts. Number matrices. Fluid simulations. A lot of math.

"You son of a…" I muttered.

Despite the piles of math sitting around, my math was nowhere to be found.

Crumbs and scraps, Ilya had said.

'Make a dog busy with a bone.'

I dug deeper, searching for any hint of the work I have been doing for the past months. Most papers were dated way before I arrived in Cadria. Some dated before I even arrived in this world. I read and read, and continue reading. I devoured research journals and old scrolls. Byrne's theories about mass teleportation were already flawless half a decade ago. The coordinates were set. The math was already done. The risk of malfunction was below one in a million.

Minutes passed, and the sun was about to appear behind the Blacksmoke Mountains.

"Why are you keeping me busy?" I asked myself as my eyes darted through the pages.

Then I found the answer in the back of a wardrobe. The blueprint was so large that I had to use [Mana Mastery] to completely unroll it. It was a full teleportation device—elegant, efficient, and theoretically operational. The paper was old and yellow on the edges. Except for a couple of elements I didn't understand, I could decode most of it thanks to Byrne's lessons on runeweaving.

The teleportation circle was large enough to encompass a whole city.

I couldn't tell if it was a discarded old prototype or a current idea, but the dimensions of the teleportation circle seemed familiar. I had made that journey that very same day.

"Do you want to teleport Cadria?"

Do you want to teleport only Cadria?

I dove into the wardrobe and pulled more blueprints. All of them followed a similar mechanism, except for the size. For a moment, I thought Byrne wanted to create portals in each city of Ebros instead of only one in Cadria, but the dimensions didn't make sense. The smallest portal was only marginally smaller than Cadria and its million citizens. I found nothing the size of Farcrest and its thousands of inhabitants.

"Do you want to teleport the biggest cities on the continent?"

The blueprints made little sense to me. Teleporting became harder the more mass was transported. Stone, wood, and metal were just excess weight. Using portals to transport buildings was a foolish endeavor. There was nothing unique about the buildings of Ebros that made them worth transporting.

"Why would you want to teleport a building, let alone soil?"

The answer was obvious: living space.

Though, on Earth, Byrne had the money and connections to set up refugee camps. He didn't need old buildings … unless he was planning to take the biggest cities of the continent somewhere else. Somewhere without a proper living space to accommodate everyone.

"The Fountain world?"

In the Fountain world, there were just old ruins, water, and the belt with the Holone Grapes Janus had taken from me.

"Ah…"

The realization hit me. Byrne didn't like the people of Earth. He had even convinced Dassyra to kill anyone who spoke English. There was no way Byrne wanted to share this world with anyone. He would rather keep it hidden, for himself, in a place that Corruption couldn't touch.

The Fountain world.

I revised my train of thought in case I had taken a wrong turn, but I couldn't reach a different conclusion, no matter how much I tried to bend the facts. Byrne was trying to take Cadria and other big cities elsewhere, and that elsewhere wasn't Earth.

"If he had the layout ready for years, why not carry out the plan?"

I closed my eyes, letting [Foresight] assist my thinking, but I couldn't reach any satisfying answer. There was a missing piece, but I couldn't pinpoint what it was. I only knew I had to keep that piece away from Byrne's grasp.

The sound of footsteps brought me out of my reverie.

I left everything where I had found it, wrapped myself with [Mirage], and returned to the telescope room. An aide was leaving a tray with breakfast on top of a side table. The aide looked around and climbed down the bronze spiral staircase. He didn't seem to know Byrne was a day's travel to the north. I followed him and slipped through the gap in the door before it closed. The sun had risen, and the Arcane Circle had started to move.

Exotic skills seemed to create chaotic environments.

I dodged the novices and adepts coming and going through the corridor. Luck was on my side that day, because none of their skill sets seemed to have high-level detection skills. Maybe the high-level individuals of the Arcane Circle were all night owls.

I climbed the cramped elevator with half a dozen young, sleepy Librarians, and we went down to the first floor. I accidentally pushed a novice, but he blamed one of his classmates. They exchanged non-friendly slaps until the operator threatened to take away their elevator permit. My [Mirage] quivered for a moment. I've been using skills since the morning of the day before; my mana pool was dangerously low, and my focus was elsewhere.

'Do I have to kill Byrne?'

At least he had a plan to weather the storm, while I had nothing.

Once on the first floor, I pulled the hoodie over my head in a dark corner, dispelled [Mirage], and left the library through the main doors.

I drank a strong Red Moss Tea from a bakery and bought a dozen small carrot muffins. Sitting in the corner of the bakery, thinking about my discoveries, I came to a conclusion. Byrne might have a plan, but he had no right to enforce it over the people of Cadria.

I tried to devise a suitable course of action, but I was drained. Even if [Invigoration] allowed me to halve my sleeping time, I still had to get sleep. I rubbed my eyes and pushed towards the Academy.

My mind wandered back to Byrne's plans, but the accumulated fatigue blurred my thoughts. The Red Moss Tea was enough to keep me awake until I reached the teacher's lounge. It was deserted.

Even with a pending apocalypse scenario above our heads, there was one important thing I had to do before going to sleep.

I knocked on Talindra's door and put on my best jolly voice.

"Hey, Tali! It's me!"

The door shot open a little, and an angry middle-aged woman with short black hair streaked with gray and white appeared before me.

"Excuse me? Who are you?" I asked.

"Who am I? Who are you?" she replied.

Talindra's voice came from inside the room.

"Let him in, he's Robert."

The sassy middle-aged woman looked at me from head to toe and back up.

I drew a blank.

"You are him?" The woman sounded disappointed, but she opened the door and gave Talindra a scolding glance. "If he is him, you are certainly blinded by love, Lady Mistwood."

I had the strange urge to clarify I wasn't the father of the child, but I bit my tongue. I walked past the woman and looked at Talindra. She was in bed, looking tired. Without the Librarian's robe on, her belly was noticeably rounder.

I couldn't understand how I didn't notice it earlier.

[Foresight] was a sham skill.

"I brought muffins," I announced, approaching the bed. I couldn't even take a step before the middle-aged woman snatched the box from my hands and examined the contents.

"Did you ensure these don't contain any ingredients harmful to the baby?" the woman lashed out at me, as if I were about to offer Talindra a glass of cyanide.

"T-they are vegan… I think."

Talindra was enjoying the scene.

"This is Mildred, one of the royal midwives. She delivered Prince Adrien," she said, stretching her neck to have a peek into the muffin box. "Lady Evelisse gently assigned Mildred to me."

Mildred weaved her detection magic into the muffins; her mana was green like Wolf's.

"Are those good to eat?" Talindra asked.

"Yes," she replied, glaring at me. "But don't let them fool you. No matter how many gifts he gives you, a deadbeat is a deadbeat."

I suddenly froze.

The world was about to end, and Talindra was pregnant.