A Sinner’s Chance

The three of us retreated back to the nest I'd made. I'd carved a ladder in one of the trees for Arya as she didn't trust herself climbing up nothing but the web, like I did. Steria had no problems with her new form, just as I'd advertised, and climbed a nearby tree before leaping into the nest, a splendid display of agility and mastery of her body.

We'd barely made it back before the sun disappeared beyond the horizon and Arya immediately stripped and fell into bed, tired from both the chase and the sustained use of Yatagarasu. Steria curled up next to her telling me through our Familiar's Bond, a Skill that allowed us to telepathically communicate within a certain radius of each other, that she had been tired the moment she took over the body, probably because it had not only fought, but had been active throughout the rest of the day as well.

I didn't know if Arya was just a cat person, but the moment Steria laid down she'd scooted closer and began to pet Steria like a housecat. At first I thought Steria was going to get angry, but instead I began to hear a deep purring, the two seemed to get along just fine despite the fact they couldn't particularly communicate with each other. It was a shame that only monsters and other non-sentient races could become familiars since it would make creating the Communication Jewelry much easier since I didn't need to use a special sense and could anchor to the bond rather than the Thread.

Unlike the other two I wasn't that tired, but I still laid in the bed taking the spot next to Steria and closed my eyes, a plain unassuming door appearing in my mind's eye. I was quite familiar with the door and as I imagined myself opening it and stepping through, I lost all sense of the real world, as if I had actually been transported through the door and onto the lowest floor of a massive tower, Seshat's Library. I'd gained access to this space when I'd gotten the Skill up to level five and it was where I spent most of my nights. I couldn't tell how many floors there were, but I could only go up to the fiftieth floor. Each set of ten floors increased the quality and quantity of information available about some things, while also housing new records.

The less secret and more widespread a record was, the lower the floor it appeared on. As such most of the first ten floors were filled with works of popular fiction, at least from what I could tell. There were plenty of languages that I recognized but couldn't read, but there were more that I couldn't recognize at all, or thought I did, only to find that it only looked similar, but was completely different.

As I usually did, I slowly made my way through the floors looking for any information I could find on one of many subjects, but most importantly, I wanted info on the Labyrinth Ryona, Demonweb, the Forest of Darkness, and Alcrem. These five were the most pressing issues I had at the moment, though Demonweb and the Forest of Darkness were basically one and the same as far as issues went.

The library was accessible while I was resting and even seemed to help increase how rested I felt, but that could be a placebo effect, it was hard to tell when my body recovered so quickly. On the plus side, I finally had something to do instead of wasting my time sleeping, something that I practically didn't need anyways.

There was one other annoyance about the library that I wished could be changed, and that was that every record was in its original state, as well as having any revisions next to it. For the more ancient stuff, this meant stone tablets, or even massive steles that took up an entire section, while the more more modern stuff had hundreds of copies with a single word difference. As such it wasn't uncommon for a single bookshelf to be filled with only a single record. What made this so annoying was that the library itself was huge and only had a single staircase between each floor. This meant that unless I knew where something was, I had to go through each floor one by one until I found what I was looking for, this was only compounded by the fact that there wasn't a method to sort the records either.

Despite its flaws however, the library was certainly the best place to spend any free time as I never knew what information I might find. I'd already spent plenty of time here, so I made my way up to the fifteenth floor. I'd already looked through about half the records on this floor so it didn't take too much time to finish browsing hoping for anything that might be helpful. I often wished that there was some sort of method to search for or at least get a general feel of where information I was looking for might be housed.

I'd originally thought it would, since I could look up most anything while I was outside, something I realized that made the Skill powerful. However, the Skill was supposed to come with a downside, but I'd never found out what it was as Divinity Breaker removed it before it ever became an issue. I imagined that being in this library tower was the normal way to use the Skill, and what I normally did would typically be used in a special circumstance, one that warranted whatever penalty the Skill had originally applied.

It wasn't like the Skill was omnipotent when used outside either though, as if there were multiple records that dealt with the subject, they would be compiled into one record that I would be allowed to look through. For things that I could examine with my own eyes, I almost always got the record concerning that specific thing, but the more broad a query, the higher chance of the library giving me too much information to look through.

This was especially a problem when it came to people, as while it might be uncommon to have two people share the exact same name at the same time, on the same planet, Seshat's Library wasn't exclusive to only the current time or planet. So when it returned a record a few million pages long when asked about Alcrem Eldur, I was forced to understand that the Skill wasn't as omnipotent as I'd originally thought. Still, as long as I was specific on the outside there wasn't a large problem.

My time in the library soon came to an end, about a quarter of the way through the sixteenth floor, as I temporarily lost all sense, before I could feel the silken sheets of the bed around me, and Arya's morning wood poking me. Nothing out of the ordinary, besides the fact that Arya wasn't clutching me like she couldn't let me go, but it happened occasionally so I thought nothing of it.

However, when I opened my eyes I realized that I had not slept next to Arya, but rather Steria, whose Cheetah-like form was now sporting a sizable hard-on, something that took me a few moments to process. I was absolutely sure that the Khetoran she'd taken over was female, yet it seemed that I had either been mistaken, or the Khetoran didn't follow the usual forms of sexual dimorphism, but I wasn't and had never been a biologist, and Seshat's Library had nothing on the Khetoran other than a vague description as a rarely seen monster, and records in languages that I couldn't read, which probably didn't have anything to do with the Khetoran I cared about.