The Library of Worlds

*BEEP BEEP BE-*

Cain slammed the snooze button on the alarm clock and sat up immediately, "I'm late!" he said to the empty room. But once he realized it wasn't his shabby room in the rundown motel he paused.

So it wasn't a dream after all. A variety of emotions flashed through Cain's face, as he got out of bed and dressed in his normal clothes. He didn't understand a lot of how things work, like why does he still have his clothes, or why does nothing feel any different from when he was alive. He eventually gave up thinking about it and applied his usual attitude of 'As long as nothing is wrong just roll with it'.

The hotel offered breakfast in bed but Cain just got some buttered toast from the kitchen and headed out. His main goal was to go to the library and figure out what kind of place he was going to after the higher-ups deemed his soul satisfactory. He even felt he could go now after the visit to the massage parlor, but Somer just laughed and said it was only the beginning when he asked yesterday. Cain made his way back to Somer's building to ask for directions to the library and found Somer sleeping at his desk with a small bubble coming from his nose.

Somer awoke violently with a yell but calmed down seeing Cain, "Kid, you shouldn't interrupt an old person's naptime!" he complained but he didn't seem to actually be mad. After getting directions the old man immediately fell asleep again, so Cain just left. The library was quite the distance away from the administration building, lying in the outermost circle at the north, though the reason why was quite obvious once he saw it.

"Isn't this just a castle?" Cain was awed at the sheer size of the place, the plateau was even extended in order to hold it up. A large black and white marble statue stood at the front with a large stone tablet in front stating 'The Library of Worlds'. Looking closely at the statue he felt the person depicted looked familiar, mainly because of the full face mask. Somer did say he was surprised that Twilight personally received him, he seems to be famous or something.

Cain walked forward and even the courtyard was big, it was also the first place on the plateau that had guards patrolling around. Cain could feel eyes on him but figured it was normal if the library really did have books on most worlds, having a book stolen was probably something very serious. It was also the first place he saw signs of magic, from glowing crystals to strange automata made of some sort of cerulean metal. The receptionist was seemingly human but had pointed ears, and introduced himself as an Elf named Stein. Stein was very formal and polite, and after receiving a small rectangular chunk of metal with engravings Cain had gotten from Twilight gave him directions to the section for 'Phi Raptura XVI', the world he was slated for.

Despite many people milling about it didn't feel crowded with how wide the halls were, and Cain didn't run into any trouble on his way through. The section he needed to go to was on the one-hundred and third floor, which confused Cain since the castle wasn't that tall on the outside. This was his first experience with Space magic, he had gotten into an elevator with a window to the outside. The elevator was moving up floors and yet looking out the window he wasn't moving, he thought it was broken at first until he actually arrived at the proper floor. There weren't nearly as many people on this floor, and it was much smaller than the ground floor.

Once he arrived at his destination he found that the number of books on it was quite small, perhaps roughly a few dozen he estimated. The most obvious book at the forefront of the shelves was simply labeled 'Introduction to Phi Raptura XVI' and was a fairly thin book. Reading was one of the few things Cain actually enjoyed, so he grabbed the introduction and a few other books and sat down at a nearby table.

The introduction was fairly simple, the world was named Lapis by its inhabitants, 'Phi Raptura XVI' was just a simple classification by the library. As Twilight had said, there was no advanced technology save for convenience styled things introduced by past reincarnators. Magic and monsters were fairly common and the level of strength of the humanoid races was a bit lower than most others. The book even went so far as to label it as a bog-standard world with nothing particularly interesting going on other than when reincarnators made a big huff and shook things up. The book went on to introduce each of the well-known races and give a very brief descriptor on their culture and surface relations with other races. Humans seemed to be as greedy as always, though they lacked the firepower to truly antagonize the rest of the world, preferring to sneak around in the shadows and try to manipulate things in their favor.

The next book was a more in-depth look at the various races, but Cain skipped over most of it, preferring to find out himself if he ever left the dungeon. After that was a very thick textbook about politics, which Cain immediately threw to the side after a brief glance, the jargon went way over his head and he couldn't really care less. Then after that was an introduction to the magic system which stated itself to be overly simple, but for Cain who lived on Earth it was almost as bad as the political stuff. He powered through and read fervently, even if he didn't play games or lived a dull life, magic was still something to be excited for as it meant he could have power and control for once. After reading it twice over and referencing from the index multiple times he grasped the basics. Magic was made up of keywords, modifiers, runes, and imagination. As long as someone knew the right words and had a clear image of what they wanted to cast then it should be easy, as long as their born with mana of course. Most people on Lapis had access to mana, with the ratio being; humans were the unluckiest, with only one-eighth of the population being born with mana, and usually limited to noble bloodlines. Elves were the opposite with one-eighth being born without, and the rest with. All the other races fell somewhere in between. Monsters technically had the highest ratio at one hundred percent, but that was only because monsters without mana were labeled differently.

Once done with that Cain looked at the last book he grabbed, 'Everything about Dungeons'.