Chapter 36: Research
The time Aerith had was short and he didn’t need to be told that twice, he made use of it as best as he could. In his former life he had tried to be resourceful since he did not have much for himself to survive.
He accessed the things he lacked and ranked them by priority. Currently two things sat at the top of his plate, the first being combat ability which almost everyone was already partaking in. After seeing the bloody battle on the first day they knew how much one needed to know how to fight, or at least defend themselves.
One thing that had been in Aerith’s mind was the events of the first day when he was taken over by the white plague, no one seemed to talk about it which suited him very nicely. He would want that story locked away somewhere. The memory flickered behind his eyelids like white haze, then screams followed. He shook it off like dust.
The second thing he lacked was what he put at the top of his list, and that being information. Information about the tower and what the floors entailed or why they needed to partake in the bloody battles. Information he felt was much more important than learning how to fight.
But this put him in a dilemma, which would he choose in the two. On the very first day he had learned of a library in the strange building they resided in. But the problem posed, the training held by the testmaster would take up the whole day, even if he finished early it would leave him weak and tired. What even made the decision much harder to him was the fact that the training room and the library was a great distance apart, and it would take minutes to move from one location to another.
The testmaster would shut the doors to the training room when he started the class leaving Aerith to believe that the decision he had to make needed to be critical.
But sure enough no one would be foolish enough to go read books when they could learn how to fight. Aerith himself would have never considered such a foolish thing in the first place but after many hours of delegating he had come to make a brutal decision.
He had instructed Emil who was currently the only one capable of combat in the group to head to the training room and learn the art of combat. He initially did not want to send a child to such a brutal place to learn how to fight, but after careful delegation he realised he would be a fool to handicap her. His body was not built for battle, yet. So he had to make the compromise.
Nasha chose to go with Emil despite Aerith ordering her to rest, he hated not having the power to watch over them and protect them. And since when did he start caring about others?
Besides both of them were not learned so they could not read, he was the only one with the ability to read and he would do his best to become a more useful member of their group. Thinking back to a time when he used to hate working with others made him smirk.
"Since when did we become a group?" He asked himself.
He was currently walking towards the library rumoured to be at the far end of the building. He walked as fast as he could, not wanting to reach there to find the door locked or worse to find that the rumoured library did not exist.
Now that he really thought about it, where did the rumour of the library come from if they all just got there? He wondered if it was leaked on purpose.
After a few minutes he finally reached what he believed to be the library door, it was massive and looked to be made of brown wood. Carved into it were the same strange symbols he saw in the endless tunnels he had first come through when he appeared in the tower. He wondered if the same architect who built the tunnel also built this too.
He grimaced at how big the architects paycheck would have been. But then again, was money a real thing in the tower?
Aerith sighed under his breath. "Here goes nothing." He pressed his palms on the door, letting them feel the engravings on them, each feeling more delicate than the and last. It gave him a moment of pause thinking how much effort had been put into them, he could almost imagine a person with face soaked in sweat carving it with their nails perhaps. "Stop have stupid thoughts idiot."
He pushed the door open and stumbled into it, surprised by how light the massive doors were. It almost seemed like he had been given the strength of a hundred men. He had almost tripped and fallen into the ground with how much energy he had put into that push.
What he first noticed was how massive the library was, the ground to the walls were all constructed with brown ebony wood that had been well polished that they practically reflected his image right back at him.
But that was only the beginning of the awe and wonder, the library was so massive it could practically fit a zoo in it. Huge beautiful brown wooden shelves were stacked to the brim with books, there was a circular rink of stairs that went high into the air as the shelves seemed to grow several stories high.
A bright light flashed in Aerith’s eyes causing him to look up to see sunlight bouncing off a holding object that floated in the air a few hundred feet away.
It hard to describe what it was exactly since it looked like it was moving on it’s own without any thing moving it.
"Is an an observatorium?" He asked, his voice almost breathless.
High in the air were several golden balls revolving like a solar system model, the only difference was that instead of nine balls that signified the planet there was several hundreds. And a huge golden tower replaced the sun. A faint hum pulsed through the air, as though the revolving spheres above were whispering a cryptic rhythm he could hear.
Aerith could not help but ask. "Is this the world here?" Seeing everything rotate around the tower filled him with dread for a reason he could not describe.
What he feared more than anything now was the unknown and the tower now stood at the middle of it all as if to show it’s unstoppable force to everyone to witness. "How peachy," he muttered, even though his palms were slick with sweat. "I never thought I’d pick up an actual book again."
He had to convince himself he had made the right choice. "After all someone that can swing a sword is expendable, but someone who knows his ball. That’s dangerously resourceful."