Fate Alchemist - A Regression Academy LitRPG

Wulf met Ms. Wenarle outside the doors of the library. She held up a lantern when he approached, then turned to the guards and said, "He's with me. Please let him in."

Both of the non-Ascendant night shift guards gave Ms. Wenarle a pleasant nod, then motioned toward the doorway, as if beckoning Wulf inside.

He trotted up the stairs, then jogged after Ms. Wenarle into the library. "What's your excuse for bringing me along?"

"It's yet another one of your punishments," she said. "You must help me clean the codex room. Have you ever seen an information codex before?"

"I haven't, ma'am."

"You're in for a treat then, dear."

They walked down the central aisle of the library. At this hour, it was completely empty, and Wulf figured it was locked to anyone except Wenarle and her helpers. A few lanterns sputtered in the wings, and a couple candles still blazed higher up, but it was largely dark. The sky outside was cloudy, and no moonlight poured in through the windows.

"This way," Ms. Wenarle said, motioning with her hand. She turned down an aisle and led him to a side door, which led into a cramped staircase. It was nondescript, and he wouldn't have noticed it if he hadn't had it pointed out to him. She descended, and Wulf followed close behind.

"What exactly is a codex?" Wulf asked.

"It's a method of information storage," Ms. Wenarle said. "Our minds can only contain so much information, but there's more in the world than we could ever know, and a codex acts like…a massive book. It is difficult to explain unless you've seen one."

Wulf hadn't seen one in his past life, and he hadn't really cared. Yet another shortcoming, it seemed.

The staircase wound around in a spiral, descending far beneath the earth, until they reached another door. Ms. Wenarle pushed it open, leading the way into a cavern. It wasn't the largest Wulf had ever seen, but with a ceiling about three storeys tall, and being long enough to fit ten carriages tip-to-tail, it was a decent-sized cavern.

The walls were rough sandstone, with an arched ceiling. Faded paintings covered the roof between the arches, but Wulf could barely see them with the light of Ms. Wenarle's lantern and the few candle sconces around the edge of the room. Moisture dripped from the walls, and it smelled like mould and mildew.

At the very center of the cavern was a…construct of some kind. Being about the height of an average man, it was a twenty-sided stone with a single rune on each of its sides. It hovered above a platform of twisting tubes, metal plates, and a circular pool of water at the center. Braided cords and ropes stretched out from the bottom platform, reaching for devices all around the room.

These smaller devices reminded Wulf more of bookshelves. Being about the size of a single cabinet, they held a number of smaller marble-sized stones on their shelves, each with rune-covered faces. They had different numbers of sides, but all hovered above their shelves, slowly turning.

Each rune—both on the main stone and the smaller stones on the shelves—pulsed faintly with magenta light, illuminating the room. It was doing something.

Ms. Wenarle pulled out a cloth from her satchel, then flicked it out. She walked over to the central stone, then wiped off its face with the cloth.

It wasn't actually stone, but glass—covered in a thick layer of dust, save for where the runes had been etched.

"Come here, dear," she said, motioning with her free hand.

Wulf jogged over behind her and peered into the little window. Inside the central glass sphere floated a white cat with a black patch of fur on its chest and emerald-green eyes. It was frozen in time, but aside from its open eyes, it didn't look distressed. Ears straight up, hair flattened, mouth closed.

He breathed, "Is that…"

"It is indeed a Messenger," Ms. Wenarle said. "There are rare occasions where an Ascendant has done a great deed worthy of a Mark, but dies in the process. The Messenger cannot bestow the Grand Mark upon the Ascendant, and it cannot return to the Field until it has done so, leaving the Messenger stranded."

Wulf closed his eyes and winced. "Poor little guys…"

"Indeed. Most volunteer to be put to use. The agony of an unfulfillable purpose will drive them insane, so they allow us to borrow their immense mental storage capabilities for our constructs. Their minds go blank, and they sleep forever, unable to agonize over their purpose. Make no mistake: all codexes require a lost Messenger to function."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"So…how does it work?"

"It stores information in the Field directly, within a certain domain. This codex has been tuned to analyze written words. Any book brought into the library it oversees…" She walked over to a cabinet with a set of runestones in it. "...whose physical boundaries we control here, will register in the codex. A [Librarian] Class is a somewhat unique class, in that we can interact with codexes and seek the information inside.

"When a book is brought into the library, so long as the author wrote it with intent, the Field can detect the words on its page—which we have tuned the codex to store. Most of the information stays within this central stone." Ms. Wenarle pointed back at the central floating sphere. "But it simply stores information. The Field doesn't care any more for the Academy's little bureaucracies than we do, so if I wish to add restrictions to the codex, or other requirements at the Academy's request, I must add in more of these little adjustment stones."

She walked over to a different shelf and plucked up a tiny stone, then blew the dust off it. "This shelf is where we control the restricted topics, and this stone governs those alchemy texts you were asking about."

"So…we just destroy the stone, and the codex releases its restrictions, allowing you to let me take it without alarming anyone?"

"Precisely."

"What if I just took the book?" Wulf asked. "Or, rather, if you just looked the other way?"

"I am not the only one with access to the library, Mr. Hrothen," she said. "Or, the library codex's status information. In Dr. Langold's office, for example, he has a sheet of enchanted parchment which connects to this codex's main status information. It would alert him to any suspicious activity, among other professors."

Wulf nodded. "And I don't really want them knowing that I'm taking restricted alchemy texts…"

"Not at all. Which is also why we must be cautious about how quickly we modify the permissions. If we adjust them too quickly, then we will trigger alarms. They are designed to be modified slowly, upon faculty request, so as long as we…"

She passed him the small marble-sized stone she'd plucked up from the shelf—which turned out was actually a glass polygon with fifteen sides and nothing in the center, when it didn't have dust all over it.

"...etch out only one rune every day. Any rune will do. They all work in tandem to create a circuit."

Wulf pulled on the lapel of his coat, gripping a button, and then used its hard edge to scratch away the bottom of one rune on the side of the glass polygon. It stopped glowing, and the rest of the runes flickered.

"There you have it," Ms. Wenarle said. "You just modified the permission enough that it will allow third and fourth years to access it."

"I'll never understand how runes work…" he muttered.

"Few ever develop a deep understanding," Wenarle told him. "Fortunately for you, I know what I'm doing. You are not the first student who I've helped get around restrictions. But that's enough for today; we don't want to set off any alarms."

Wulf passed the glass polygon back to her, and she placed it back on the shelf. "Now, you're free to go. It will take us about two weeks until you can safely take out the book you want, and on your way up, I'd appreciate it if you could help me carry some of the old crates we've been keeping in storage down here up to the main level. We opened a new library wing, and I can now put out those manuscripts about thrustwing training."

Wulf nodded, then walked to the boxes at the back of the room, which she motioned to with a flick of her fingers. There was a stack of them along the far wall, far out of the way of the codex. Wulf lifted up one with ease, leveraging his enhanced strength, and carried it back to the stairwell. Ms. Wenarle was right behind him.

"Ma'am?" Wulf asked. "Why is the Academy so stingy about who can and cannot access the library? And so worried about whether people might take out the wrong books?"

"I'm not certain," she said. "My current guess is that they simply want to make it so difficult to take out resources that don't apply to the main four Classes, because then you will focus less on your studies and more on hobbies—which doesn't benefit the Academy or the Confederacy one bit. They believe that if you're not trying to become as pure and focussed in your role as you can, then you are wasting your time."

Wulf grimaced. That was what he had believed for a long while, too. "I see," was all he could muster. "Thank you for your time, Ms. Wenarle."

"Thank you for moving these books for me, dear," she said. "Now get yourself some rest. Field knows, you look like you could use it."

~ ~ ~

For the rest of the week, Wulf went about his classes normally and performed his chores normally. In the mornings, before venturing out for his run with Irmond, he refilled his storage core with mana from the constructs Seith and Kalee had made for him, and, once he'd acquired some herbs from Chef Kennet's border grove garden (which was more like a bunch of wild herbs that happened to be growing between the poplar trunks along the border of the Academy, stimulated by the mana currents of the trees), he used them to make cleaning potions of his own.

Lemongrass, it turned out, was the main ingredient of a cleaning potion. Smelled nice, but helped you get dirt and debris off surfaces, as well as smooth them down. He filled his splatter flask with it, so the Field would recognize it as a potion that wasn't meant to be drunk. In the evenings, when he visited Ms. Wenarle at the library, he used the potion to scrub her runestone smooth and flat without leaving obvious scratches behind.

But then Seventhday rolled around. Somehow, Wulf had been dreading the encounter, even though he knew he shouldn't have been.

Still, he hauled himself out of bed and dragged himself down to the front door, where he'd planned to meet Kalee.

Attending a celebration in his own honour wasn't exactly how he'd planned to spend his weekend, but he'd agreed to meet her, and he couldn't back down now.