Learning To Live As A Cultivator 11 Chapter Eleven - I Go And Visit The Library

His bullies did not appear the following day, when they said they would. He spent the day carving, but his crude talisman's were more often than not shaped into silhouettes of animals or emblems before the scrolling symbol was cut into the wood. In between creations, he would pause to glance into the woods in the direction he was expecting them to come from. He even walked towards that place, but he collapsed failing to realise how exhausted he was, he a.s.sumed from the stress of nervous antic.i.p.ation.

He waited for another day, relying on his fruit and tuber supplies for sustenance, watering the rapidly growing plants and tying charms to trees and his belt. But the boys did not appear.

He relaxed his guard on the third day, taking a quick bath in the lake, was.h.i.+ng his outer robes, fis.h.i.+ng and foraging before returning home to practice cultivating, less he forget how. Still no one came to steal his treasured pills. As they seemed to have forgotten about him, he decided to forget about them as well. He decided that he would visit the library and perhaps trade the pills for fresh herbs.

The library was higher up on the mountain than his small hut and it took well over an hour for him to walk through the numerous trees to the place it was located. For whatever reason, the architects of the library had built the tower on a hidden plateau attached on the mountains side no more than half mile across and quarter long. The drop was several stories deep, the tips of softwood trees peaked a little over the cliff face and apart from the sky and the tower itself were all that could be seen from the path. Clearly students could not descend safely this drop, so a bridge was built from the forested mountain path to the midsection of the library.

Inside, the library had levels reaching skyward and levels descending, but the only level a student like Leon could reach was this middle one and one above. The middle level contained basic, general knowledge books. Fortunately, there consisted the books Leon was looking for; history, geography and culture. The most basic of pill and potion recipes were on the next floor, in a room accessible to the students of the alchemy school. The library was open to all students, but only a few books, such as the most basic cultivation books and the books on the entry level were available for all students to read.

On arrival, Leon had been greeted by an older student, whose robes indicated they were from the inner school of the Scholars department. He didn't recognise Leon and didn't seem to care enough to know him, simply recited the library's rules and let him pa.s.s. Leon strolled around the library to get him bearings. There had been no floor plan in the diary's, Leon could only a.s.sume that Leo did not visit here often enough to bother making one. That boy had seemed rather obsessed with herbs, pills and potions once he had been enrolled into the alchemy section of the school to exclusion of almost everything else.

Leon found a place he could jot notes and was flabbergasted when he found that all he could write with was ink and brush. Leon was from an era that wrote in biro and used an alphabet. Though he could read this world's words (he a.s.sumed thanks to Leo), they were something like Chinese or j.a.panese kanji and he had never practiced this type of calligraphy in his two lives! However, he was blessed with steady hands, thanks to years of carving, so he very, very slowly drew upon parchment, the lay of the library before grabbing a very thick book on general history and reading it... also very slowly.

This world was known as Xulaphrey and it was made up of two land ma.s.ses and two large oceans which separated them. The land ma.s.ses were simply named West Xulaphrey and East Xulaphrey, which naturally had Leon wondering how they had concluded which was in the east and which was in the west? He shrugged, dismissing the question in his mind. The Academy was located in the Sky-Reaching Mountains in the northeast of East Xulaphrey.

Xulaphrey was considered a middle realm world. Leon did not understand what this meant, but jotted it down, carefully, as it seemed important, before he became completely immersed in reading the history of the world. It was a pretty b.l.o.o.d.y history.

The strong ruled and suppressed the weak, the weak were mere cannon fodder in battles, mercilessly killed simply as they were in the way when supreme powers fought. Leon shuddered. He truly understood now why his bullies ran roughshod over him. With no backing and no real talents, he had no one that would support him or protect him when things got difficult. He had only himself to rely on and by all accounts, he was weak. The school gave a chance that could not be found in this world in general, a chance for those without to become strong and survive the cruelties of the world. If Leo had not managed to secure a place here, then he, Leon, would have one fate; to be crushed along with the rest of the weak commoners.