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Chapter 75

The noble pushed Erika forward. Her hands were tied up to a rope he was holding, and she took several steps forward before catching herself on a table.

“Where are they? Where are all the books?” He snarled.

“Not finding what you’re looking for?” Erika spoke back, smiling with a bloody lip and a bruise on her cheek.

He lifted the storage ring that had been on her finger. “The books in your ring are all useless crap. Where did you hide the valuables?”

“I already said, I couldn’t find them.” She shot back. “There is nothing of value there.”

“Is that so? And did all of the other books in the library disappear without you being aware of why either?” He demanded.

This time, she looked around the room which was now empty, and frowned slightly. “I don’t know how this happened either.”

“I’ve discovered how Replication works at the macro level.” I heard a voice in my head, interrupting the scene in front of me.

“Oh? How is that?”

Even though I was no longer single-celled, I still had all the skills I had gained along the way. The problem was that I didn’t exactly know how to take advantage of many of those skills. Replication, for example, wasn’t the same as Mimic or Mitosis. It was a knowledge skill, so I wasn’t sure how it would be useful at all.

“Any book stored within our Luminal Space can be processed through Replication. In short, we convert the text into knowledge, or absorb it.”

“How quickly are we able to do this?” I asked.

“The replication process appears to coincide with its biological component.”

“Oh? How so?”

“Whenever a cell divides through Mitosis, the information that programs the cell, the DNA, must go through DNA Replication. Every base pair of DNA is replicated with high efficacy into a copy, which ends up becoming the DNA of the other cell.”

“You know… you’re talking to yourself here…”

“Ah! Right… well, we clock the speed of genome replication as about fifty nucleotides a second in a eukaryote. I’d say information Replication functions at the same speed. Fifty characters per second.”

“So, a book runs about what, 500,000 characters?”

“They widely vary, but I would suggest that as a mean. So, about three hours a book.”

“So slow? Does that even make sense?”

“You forget one thing. If a human genome was being replicated at that speed, it’d take nearly 800 hours, or thirty-three days to complete. Our cells divide faster than that. In other words, there can be multiple replication forks working at the same time.”

“In other words…”

“In other words, we can initiate Replication on as many books as we want. The longest books may take ten hours, but you could have most of them complete within four or five.”

“Start with that!” I grumbled.

“Heh, sorry. There is one setback though. You have to dedicate your attention to this process. You can’t do anything else while absorbing the books.

“That won’t work for me. Can I task you with analyzing the books? We need this information, but I’m not in a situation where I can concentrate on that. There is this mysterious fog as well as this hostile noble. Erika also seems to be a bit too clever for her good.”

“That’s fine.” My other self responded. “Thankfully, it’s night right now and they are resting despite Tyler’s protests. He was moving everyone to exhaustion. Even the other knight put his foot down.

“Is Mara okay?”

“She is resting now. Tyler most ignores her. He’s completely focused on saving Erika. It’s been quite boring watching a grown man lament over his sister.”

 

 

 

“Mmm,” I responded. “As long as he’s not a threat to Mara.”

“Otherwise, we’ll kill him.”

“Agreed.”

We ended our conversation there and I went back to watching Erika. Tyler probably would have been furious if he had seen his sister being handled in such a manner. If she was in any real danger, I might have stepped in, but after their initial fight, he hadn’t tried to hurt her. After looking through her ring and finding himself disappointed, he was convinced she was still hiding something. This inevitably led him to bring her back to the library.

However, when the pair returned to the library, they were both in for a surprise. That was because after I dealt with his friend, I returned to the library and collected the remainder of the books. After he pointed out that the books must be hiding something, I showed interest in them too. Besides, with my massive Luminal Storage, it wasn’t a challenge to store them.

Even if they weren’t special, I could slowly read through the books and gain more insight into this world. I had spent so much time hidden in my pond and I knew very little about this complex new world. These books all seemed to be older and might not have any practical knowledge of getting by in the modern age, but they could still prove useful.

“I said, I don’t know where the books are!” Erika cried out. “Maybe the library hides them or something.”

My conversation with myself had only taken moments, and the noble was still threatening Erika, looking for answers that she didn’t have. Perhaps, had she been breaking down or crying, I might have stepped in, but she seemed to be as bold as she had been with the mercenaries we had encountered before.

“Nonsense! You’re hiding something from me. If you don’t tell me, we’ll kill that friend of yours.”

Her eyes flashed with concern for a moment, but then they hardened. “You already sent your goon to kill him, didn’t you? Bring him to me alive if I’m wrong.”

The noble opened his mouth, but then he frowned. “It is taking him a bit long. A mortal shouldn’t cause a paragon this much trouble, even him.”

There was a moment of hopefulness in Erika’s eyes. I was a bit surprised that she seemed to care about me a bit. In general, Paragons seemed to see mortals as less than dirt, but I could see in the way she trembled when she realized I might be dead that she cared a bit.

As for the noble, it didn’t seem that he was able to determine his friend was dead. I had killed him in the manner I did exactly because even if he had some kind of means of determining his death like the noble suggested the others had, it would just come up as being killed by some mysterious fog. Surely, the magic wouldn’t be able to tell if someone pushed someone else into danger, otherwise the noble wouldn’t have sent that woman through. It stood to reason that if he had some kind of death talisman that revealed when and who killed him, the girl had something similar.

Erika was about to say something snarky to the noble, but then they both heard a crackling sound. The noble’s expression hardened, and he grabbed her and pulled her with him up the stairway and out the doorway. The pair of them emerged into the hallway where they had heard the noise. When he saw the fog at the end of the hallway, he cocked his head.

“Clouds?”

Erika let out a cry. “Ether!”

“Ether? How can there be ether?  This is a sealed space!”

Just as he said that a light slashed across the hallway in front of them. I was able to get a better look at it this time too, and I realized that although it appeared like lightning, it was a crack in space that admitted a blue light. That crack was leaking out of the dark fog. It closed back up much slower than the ones I had seen outside.

“A spatial storm!” Erika took a step back. “This subspace is compromised.”

“Wait… this doesn’t make sense… how can there be a spatial storm.” He shook his head. “This entire castle should be destroyed.”

“The astral gate! It must have a protective effect.” Erika looked like she was deep in thought.”

“Didn’t you say you’ve been here days?” The noble demanded.

“It probably has a cyclic pattern, once every week or something, until the astral gate pushes it back.”

“That must be where your mortal friend went, as well as that dolt. The idiot probably ran right into that fog.” The noble looked downcast. “We’ll be next.”

“Not necessarily!” The farther we get from the center astral gate, the stronger the storm. If we remain close to the astral gate, the spatial storm will be at its weakest.”

“We’re not the first ones to think that.” The noble responded. “The corpses in the courtyard, those were all people who hoped to shelter the storm. Spatial storms are no joke. Even a lord like my father could die in one if he wasn’t careful.”

“Do we have any other choice?” She asked, looking at the fog.

It had been at the end of the hallway before, but in that short time, it now covered half of the hallway. It was progressing quickly indoors.

“I suppose not…” He looked crestfallen.

“My discipline is formations,” Erika spoke after a moment. “We should have a good thirty minutes before it arrived. If I put up some defensive formations, we might be able to hold out until your father re-opens the doorway.”

He took a breath, his original demeanor returning. “Then, we’ll do it. You better not betray me, or I won’t hesitate to kill you.”

“Isn’t it your side that needs to come through?” She huffed. “I can keep us alive, but if your father doesn’t come fast enough, we may die anyway.”

“Hmph… just do your part.”

The two left the hallway and headed back to the courtyard. It seemed like they had forged an uneasy alliance. Things were going to get messier before they got better.