The Eternal Assassin

The library was just as impressive on the inside as the outside, and Asher couldn't help but stare at the massive shelves of books lining the walls. Each stack ran from the ground all the way to the ceiling, and people were using everything from massive ladders to various skills to sift through the stacks. Occasionally, he would see another one of those glowing birds fly down and land in front of what he could only assume were librarians, as they would gently hand off the books to the birds and watch them fly out through one of the many open windows before going back to their tasks.

Despite the near silence throughout the large building, there were quite a number of curious skills on display. One man in almost a full suit was summoning books to a table with simple flicks of his finger, as though there was an invisible string attached from him directly to the books he wanted to peruse. A woman off to the side in stained laborer clothes walked by carrying what looked like her entire body weight in books balanced on one hand, without breaking so much as a sweat. A snickering teenage boy wove in and out of the stacks, shifting colors as he went to try and better lose the angry librarian fast-walking after him.

There were so many different things to look at, Asher didn't even notice the strange librarian until she was right in front of his face.

While he was distracted watching someone hovering near the top of the central room on some sort of tiny cloud, lounging there as they leisurely paged through a small book, a soft voice sounded in front of him.

"Welcome to the Library of Whikoga. Can I help you find anything?"

Startled, Asher looked at the speaker, blinking as he took in the woman's unique appearance. One thing was for certain.

She definitely wasn't human.

[Librarian] – 3/3 Elements

The librarian was watching him with a patient look, her smile thin but friendly, as if she'd said those exact words a thousand times that day already and was prepared to say them a thousand more. She wore a loose-fitting blue robe, and had a tiny pin that looked like a closed book attached to her upper chest signifying she was an employee.

She also had unnervingly smooth, almost glossy skin and what looked like deep, jagged cracks running across her face and exposed arms, almost as if her body was made of porcelain and someone had accidently dropped her. Seeing his wide eyes, she chuckled.

"I take it you've never seen a craston before?"

"No… I'm from a small village on the edge of the kingdom," Asher quickly added as he tried to stop staring at the cracks running across the woman's face. He had so many questions, but he didn't want to risk being rude and getting thrown out of the library now that he'd finally gotten here.

"Don't worry, my people don't tend to leave the cities very much, so it's not surprising," she reassured him, thankfully unbothered by his staring. "Now, did you need help finding anything? Renting one of the ladders is ten shards an hour. If you think you'll need more serious help, you can also borrow a librarian, but that costs a hundred shards for only thirty minutes, and you may need to wait until someone is available. None of the books may be removed from the library, but you don't have to worry about putting them back. Just leave them out on one of the tables or at the front desk and we'll take care of reshelving for you."

"Got it," Asher nodded, scratching his chin. "Wait, none of the books can leave the library? What about all those glowing birds?"

"Those within the city's fourth ring are allotted certain... special privileges," the librarian said, her smile growing slightly more strained. "Did you have any other questions?"

"Is there any sort of policy for secrecy? Say if I ask you to help me find certain books, I mean."

"All of us working here within the library won't speak a word of whatever you need help with once your thirty minutes are up, but if it's medical related, I would highly recommend you go speak with one of the healing orders instead of trying to find the answer in the library."

"Don't worry, it's not a medical thing," Asher chuckled, handing the librarian a hundred shards. I wonder how many people come to the library to try and figure out why they have a rash or for some other embarrassing issue. There's no internet here after all. "Could I borrow you for thirty minutes? Or someone else that's free?"

"I'm happy to help," she smiled, absorbing the shards. "My name is Wilna by the way. What are you looking for?"

"Ah, one sec." Turning to his tag along, Asher looked at Rosh, who had been patiently waiting for him to finish his conversation. "I'm going to be here pretty much the rest of the day. Do you mind taking care of something for me?"

"You are paying me, so of course," Rosh shrugged, pulling out a small notebook. "What do you need?"

Glancing at Wilna, Asher leaned closer to Rosh and whispered in his ear. "Sorry, I know you probably don't want to go anywhere near the dark side of town after what happened with your element and everything, but I need you to find me a lead on a more powerful concealing item. Something that will hold up at least partially against a truthseeker."

When Asher mentioned Rosh's element, the man frowned and his quill scratched. But when the word 'truthseeker' came up, he stopped writing entirely, looking at Asher like he was crazy.

"Are you insane?" Rosh hissed. "Enchanted items on their own aren't exactly easy to come by, let alone ones that powerful! You're asking about a specialized item in the second tier! That's going to be almost impossible to find!"

"Well, I'm only planning to be in the city for a couple of weeks, so you better get started," Asher said, clapping the man on the back. Rosh stared at him for another few seconds, his mouth hanging open before he threw up his arms and stomped off, cursing under his breath.

Turning back to Wilna, he found the librarian was still smiling at him, her expression unchanged in the slightest as she waited patiently for his request. Rubbing his hands together, Asher grinned.

"Alright, so I've made a list, see…"

Leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed, Asher groaned as the mother of all headaches pounded against his skull. He'd learned a lot in the last ten hours, and not just about the new world he found himself in.

Cracking open his eyes, he took a look at his latest notifications, wincing at the surge of pain the light caused him.

Identify – Lvl 12

Identify – Lvl 13

Incorporate – Lvl 2

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Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Incorporate – Lvl 7

Comprehend – Lvl 8

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Comprehend – Lvl 12

Complete Resilience – Lvl 8

Complete Resilience – Lvl 9

Eternal Regeneration – Lvl 10

I don't even want to look at another book, much less read one.

Asher had been hoping to be able to use a combination of Incorporate and Comprehend to touch a book and read the entire thing instantly, but it turned out his skills didn't quite work in that way. He could create a copy of an entire book in his mind using Incorporate, but after nearly passing out from attempting such a feat on a rather large tome titled The Big Book of Elements: Volume Six, he discovered the skill didn't come without cost.

The more information contained within the vessel he used Incorporate on, the more energy the skill seemed to sap from him in order to work. It was like getting hit with all the fatigue that came from practicing jumping around with Distortion for thirty minutes, except he experienced it all at once. The Big Book of Elements: Volume Six had taken so much out of him, it had actually caused his nose to begin bleeding, which was something Asher didn't even know could happen. And if that wasn't bad enough, that was just from absorbing the book.

Comprehend drastically increased his processing speed, but he still had to read the books that were now nestled away within his head. Sure, he could read at what felt like ten times the speed he used to be able to, but when he was sifting through books that held thousands of pages of information and a font size that he felt should be illegal, that was still a lot of reading!

I literally gave myself such a nasty headache I leveled up Eternal Regeneration and Complete Resilience, Asher thought, praying his extra level of regeneration would help get rid of the pain sooner. At least I got what I came for.

Grinning, Asher laid his head down on the table, squeezing his eyes shut as he went over the highlights of what he'd learned.

For starters, he'd made the right call asking Rosh to find a more powerful concealment item. There were literally thousands of magical elements that existed in this strange world, and while he'd even found a few scattered records of Spatial element users over the centuries, he'd confirmed the first of his suspicions.

There wasn't a single mention of Eternity as an element in the entire library.

He still wasn't sure what that meant for him exactly, but he knew one thing for certain. If word got out about his Eternity element, that crazy undead wizard would know exactly where to find the guy that stole from him, and Asher had a feeling escaping his tower wouldn't be quite so easy the second time.

Assuming he wasn't just killed instantly.

Not to mention if it can find me, it will probably be able to find Samantha and Brian… I doubt it would want to leave any loose ends.

Clenching his fists at the thought of the wizard recapturing the two siblings, Asher made his decision. Avoiding the truthseekers was important, but if he had to pick between getting discovered by them or the wizard, he'd take the truthseekers. He doubted truthseekers would involve Samantha or Brian into any conflict they had with him after all.

Once he'd answered his questions about his elements, he'd switched his focus to the mystery surrounding why classes seemed to work differently for him compared to everyone else, and he'd been surprised by what he found.

Mainly in that he all but confirmed it had to be because of his Spatial element.

He'd checked multiple reference books during his search, and every single one explained classes as an imprint of a person's desires and the way they viewed themselves on the soul, along with countless other impossible to influence variables. There were all sorts of theories as to what gave a person their class, what caused classes to change, and how a person could go about purposefully changing their class, but nowhere did he see any mention of anyone receiving a New Class Available message.

It seemed most people earned their first class within a few months to a few years of receiving their origin element, and it was considered rather rare to still be unclassed by the time you turned twenty. Asher's theory about the unique message being tied to his Spatial element had to do with another groundbreaking discovery he'd made entirely by accident while searching for records of an Eternity element.

Naturally, his interface had made no mention of this fact, but during all his research he'd discovered that every element had a passive effect granted to its wielder. While the skills a person might unlock could vary rather drastically between two people who shared the same element, passive effects were always identical. Many of them were rather straightforward, such as innate resistances for some of the more inherently dangerous elements like Fire or Poison, but other passives were far more interesting.

Knowledge, for example, granted its users the ability to comprehend and use all written and spoken languages. When Asher had stumbled upon that, he'd nearly slapped himself upside the head. The revelation didn't explain why he'd been able to understand the undead wizard immediately upon arriving in this world before he'd found the element, but at least now he knew why he was able to understand what people were saying and actually read these books. He figured the wizard must have had some sort of spell or enchanted item for that, or maybe even held the Knowledge element itself.

Seeing as there was no record of Eternity anywhere, it was up to him to figure out what on Earth the passive from that element was. But there also wasn't any record of the passive for the Spatial element either. Funnily enough, it was when Asher stumbled upon a book containing records of a debate between two scholars, both of which claimed to have Identified within days of each other the class of an ancient hero known to have the Spatial element, that he formulated his theory.

One scholar said the woman's class was dragonslayer, while the other said her class was divinesavior. According to the book, the debate ended up transforming into a hilarious wrestling match, and the winner of the debate was proclaimed to be the local cleaner who put both scholars in matching headlocks when things started getting out of hand.

While the story was entertaining, the information contained within was far more useful. Most likely, the Spatial element's passive probably had something to do with earning multiple classes and swapping them out on the fly.

If only Asher could figure out how to even equip one.

The last thing he'd looked up was shard decay, after remembering the strange look Rosh had given him when he'd asked about the topic. Thankfully, he'd managed to find a few studies performed by various scholars attempting to determine what shard decay truly was and figure out ways around it.

Evidently, when a person died in this world, for some reason that nobody seemed to be able to agree on, the number of shards that manifested above their corpse was anywhere from thirty-one to eighty-three percent of the total number they had absorbed within their body upon their death. That explained why banks were even a thing in this world, and why Latch had tried to get Asher to hand over his shards rather than just attack him outright.

But once again, that wasn't even the craziest thing. Just like with his findings around elemental passives, Asher's biggest discovery was something he wasn't even looking for.

While going through the studies on shard decay, he'd come across one conducted by a particularly wealthy noble-turned-scholar who had far more shards to throw around than the common person. It was a single, simple throw away line in the footnotes of the study that Asher had nearly missed entirely, but that one sentence changed everything.

'Subjects' rate of shard decay showed no correlation with number of times resurrected and rekilled.'

After reading that, he'd pored back through the books on elements and was blown away by what he found. Sure enough, certain elements could give people skills that were even capable of bringing people back from the dead if evolved to the third tier. There were often issues and complications, one of the most frequent being memory loss of the events directly preceding a person's demise, but the fact that it was possible at all was insane to him.

Sure, he'd seen all sorts of magic and done plenty of his own since arriving in this world… But bringing back the dead?

Immediately after this discovery, Asher's heart sank as he realized that meant Trellis could potentially be brought back to life if those mysterious, powerful backers of his thought he was truly worth spending the shards and resources to do so. Most likely his damaged memory would prevent him from pointing a finger at Asher and accusing him of murder, but he didn't like the thought of Samantha having to see that man up and walking around again after finally getting out from under his clutches.

While there was nothing he could do about it right now, Asher made a promise to himself right then and there that if those nobles did decide to bring Trellis back, he would personally kill the man as many times as it took before he realized he wasn't welcome among the living and decided to just stay dead.

Surely sooner or later he'd take the hint.