55 Perks of Personal Library

As Jien was continuing to train on both the arcane and martial paths, he was also progressing steadily in his work to absorb the knowledge within the alchemy guide he was gifted. The process was slow, given that he was no longer permitted to spend full days to cast Personal Library and read books with it. That being said he still managed to progress at a decent speed, walking the tightrope of using almost all his mana and then recovering without becoming mana void. This continued to slowly allow his to accumulate a slightly larger amount of mana each time, like working a muscle to its limits and letting it heal.

At the end of the first week and a half of training after his birthday celebration Jien had finally absorbed the entire book. He looked rather haggard at this point, with dark circles under his eyes but he was smiling a genuine smile that was rare for even those close to him to see. He had succeeded in taking in the knowledge and had learned a few interesting things about his spell in the process. However, to accomplish this he had spent the greater amount of his time after his daily training and meal with his father to work on the absorption of the knowledge at hand. Ultimately this had led him to long nights of study with only a short, few hours of sleep each night.

Jien was sitting on his bed at this moment, yawning before a smile returned to his lips. He had finally succeeded and this evening he would even get a full night's rest. However that was not what was on his mind at the moment. He was recalling the knowledge imprinted from the book he was gifted, it's variety of useful information ranging from descriptions of herbs and where to find them, to recipes and instructions on how to concoct various potions and salves.

What Jien had learned along the way were mainly two things, the first is that, though it would take longer to do so he could imprint even pictures into the mindscape and the transparent orb. One wouldn't necessarily think that this was worth celebrating but Jien was ecstatic about it. After all, being able to take in pictures and record them like this could lead down many more paths. What if he collected detailed maps of cities, empires, continents and recorded them. As long as he wasn't out to sea would he ever get lost?

Perhaps he could memorize some of the books with diagrams regarding common magic beasts and plants. If he could absorb not only the text but also drawings from these books would he have issues identifying the creatures and their weaknesses. And even above that, this skill would definitely be of benefit when it came to learning from the arcane formation book gifted to him. He wouldn't be forced to memorize the formations the hard way over years, or use what end up as slightly vague descriptions of the formation characteristics to allow him to remember specifics.

Not to mention that if he was able to find guides to techniques of different martial styles that included pictures he would be able to memorize those as well. Though this would not give him the ability to use these styles without practice, the ability would allow him to work on these styles or study them without having to carry the guides in a physical form. Given how sought after such guides were it would keep him out of danger to not carry them on his person whenever possible.

The second aspect of the spell that he found perhaps even more useful than the first was that the knowledge absorbed with the use of the spell could connect to each other creating a larger recall of information. This ability in and of itself was worth it's weight in gold in so many aspects that Jien couldn't even list them all.

He had learned about this aspect of the spell the first time that he had imprinted the image of one of the many herbs in the alchemy guide. It was an image of a flower that looked much like a tulip beyond the fact that its leaves were covered in what looked like blood red thorns and the edge of the petals resembled shredded cloth. The name of the flower was known as Beggar's Drink. It was an herb with a water elemental property that would pull moisture out of the atmosphere around it. This would cause much of the land and air around it to dry out, but would also create a well of purified water hidden only a short distance beneath its roots.

Upon imprinting the image and the knowledge about where to search for the plant, as well as it's uses in salves to draw out and purify basic poisons Jien had blanked out. His mind seemed to empty and he had entered the mindscape for the second time. This time there was no shadowy figure to greet him, only a large transparent orb with text on several subjects floating on it's surface like petals floating on a calm lake. The different books worth of knowledge appeared gathered in the same place, separated by spaces in the transparent orb. The orb itself was barely even five percent filled at this stage. Jien wasn't even sure how many books he would need to imprint to fill the sphere with text, or if the sphere would even remain the same size as he continued.

However, this was not what had caught his attention. What he was staring at with his mouth slightly agape was the enlarged image of Beggar's Drink that was floating at the forefront of the orb. The image itself was as clear as it had been on the page of the book and even the labels that had been spread on the image for the various usable parts were visible. What had caught his eye though, was what appeared to be golden thread that stretched from the image. There were several lines of this golden thread stretching from the image in a variety of directions.

It was as Jien focused on these lines of gold that stretched through the center of the transparent sphere to reach other lines of text that Jien suddenly came to a conclusion, and as he did so a change occurred. his mind focused on the thought of Beggar's Drink began to recall some of the desert survival tips from a survival guide provided by Mark. Then came some lore that was hidden within the history books regarding how some of the first towns in some of the human lands were founded around the appearance of such a flower and after that a flood of alchemical recipes that included parts of the flower.

As each of the pieces of information came to mind the representative text seemed to become gold in color before gliding to the side of the picture of the plant, surrounding it with various types of knowledge directly and not so directly related. It was then that Jien saw what he thought was the true potential of the spell. Not only was it to absorb the information and retain it, it would allow him more thorough connections between the scattered information he would imprint.