A frail old man with paper-pale skin and dark hollows beneath his eyes sat at a long wooden table, a book resting in his hands.
The text itself was nothing rare.
As a library slave, Silas had access to nearly every tome along the endless shelves.
What was unusual was his choice of seat.
He sat openly at a table reserved for high-ranking wizards, comfortably settled in a high-backed chair that an ordinary slave would have been executed for touching.
For a million years, Silas had kept his head down, reading only while crouched in shadowed corners as a slave was expected to do.
Today, he had decided to indulge himself.
His life was coming to an end.
He felt the brittle reality of his mortal body reaching its final limit.
After a million years of continuous labor, the frame was collapsing.
He glanced at the gilded title on the cover, then lifted his head.
For a long moment, he took in the view.
Shelves stretched away into the dim distance, separated by corridors smelling richly of aged parchment and drying ink.
Even after staring down these same aisles for a thousand millennia, he had never grown weary of them.
Silas lowered his gaze and turned the page.
A few lines later, his brow creased.
“The same cringe-inducing journey of another arrogant wizard.”
He glared at the text as if the author had personally insulted him.
With a dry sigh, he forced himself to keep reading.
Ridiculous or not, he was dying soon, and this was his final book.
He might as well finish it.
“I should have picked a political treatise instead,” he muttered under his breath.
“Who knew a newly published memoir could be this intolerable?”
He shook his head.
“Well, at least it passes the time.”
Silas pushed through page after page, muttering complaints whenever the protagonist’s exploits grew more absurd.
At last, he turned the final leaf and reached the back cover.
He slapped the volume onto the polished wood, swore loudly, and shoved himself out of the chair.
In this quiet wing of the grand archive, the studying wizards had been reading in silence.
The sudden profanity echoed against the vaulted ceiling, drawing sharp, offended glares.
Their disdain made sense.
Silas looked entirely out of place.
His coarse slave tunic hung loose and shapeless over an emaciated frame.
His gaunt cheeks and sunken, sleepless eyes betrayed the sheer weariness of his existence.
Set against the tall, radiant figures of the robed wizards around him, he looked wretchedly small.
Silas met their cold stares, a brief flicker of envy surfacing before it settled into quiet amusement.
“I suppose that is what a million years of servitude does to a man.”
A sudden presence materialized beside him.
A dry, wrinkled hand came down upon his frail shoulder.
Space blurred.
The entire archive appeared to twist around them, though Silas knew it was only the disorienting rush of high-tier spatial transfer; nothing could truly shake the foundations of the Heavenly Wizard World.
He did not flinch.
He had experienced the sensation plenty of times before.
When the distortion cleared, they stood near the grand entrance, right beside the reception desk where the head archivist sat.
The old wizard released Silas’s shoulder and looked down at him.
“Silas.
You are the oldest library assistant this archive has ever known.”
Silas stared back at him.
Silence stretched between them for a handful of seconds.
Then Silas’s cracked lips curved into a bitter smile.
“Assistant?” He let out a dry rasp of a laugh.
“Old man, why bother with polite titles now?
My life is already over.”
He gestured down at his wasted chest.
“Look at me.
Do I look like an assistant to you?”
The mockery faded from his expression, leaving only an ancient, quiet exhaustion.
“I am a slave.”
His voice grew firmer, weighed down by the burden of a thousand millennia.
“I do not know who fathered me.
I do not know the mother who bore me, nor where I was born, nor how I was dragged into this place.
As far back as my memory stretches, these shelves have been my entire universe.”
He turned to face the vast labyrinth of books.
“I was born into chains, and for a million years, I did nothing but dust your scrolls and wipe down your wood.”
The librarian stood quietly.
After a long pause, the old wizard let out a heavy sigh.
“You truly were an exception, Silas.” He studied the slave’s worn face.
“Every other mortal assistant lost their mind long ago.
Not a single one lasted past a thousand years.”
He paused, his weathered features softening slightly.
“Yet you survived for a million years, clinging to sanity through that bizarre mental technique you devised.”
Silas suddenly burst out laughing.
It was a sharp, raw sound that bordered on hysteria, as if he had finally caught the punchline to an agonizing cosmic joke that had dragged on for an eternity.
The laughter died as quickly as it began.
When his face settled, his eyes were bloodshot.
The sardonic smirk was gone, replaced by a deep, hollow grief.
“Who would ever choose to live like this?” Silas whispered.
“Who in their right mind wants an eternity spent cleaning floors and hauling books for masters who view them as insects?”
He looked down at his trembling, calloused hands.
“You wizards are different.
You spend centuries tempering your souls and refining your minds.
Your spirits are forged from iron.” Silas lifted his gaze, staring directly into the librarian’s eyes.
“Mortals are not built that way.
Spend a few centuries trapped in a cage, knowing you will never be anything more than property.
How is any mortal mind supposed to endure that?”
His fingers tightened into weak fists.
“Knowing tomorrow brings the same dust, the same books, for another million years.”
Silas fell quiet.
Slowly, the sorrow in his gaze receded, swallowed by the single spark that had sustained him through the endless dark: an insatiable curiosity.
He did not want to die merely as a library drudge.
If he had to be enslaved to something, he had chosen to be enslaved to knowledge.
“Hey,” Silas said, looking up at the wizard.
“Honored Wizard, you let me call you ‘old man’ in my final moments.
Can you give me one last answer?”
The librarian nodded slowly.
“Ask.”
Silas leaned forward, his gaze direct.
“Tell me the truth.
How did a mortal like me actually survive a million years without decaying into dust?”
The librarian’s expression shifted.
He stared at Silas for several long seconds before slowly shaking his head.
“You truly are mad,” the wizard murmured.
“That hunger for truth was the only reason you endured.
And it is the only reason I stayed to watch you draw your last breath.”
The old man leaned in, meeting Silas’s eyes.
“It was an ancient artifact.
The Fountain of Immortality.”
Silas’s eyes widened.
“It grants an endless lifespan but it seem it also has limit,” the librarian added quietly, “but it only functions upon mortal bodies.”
Silas stood frozen, absorbing the words.
Slowly, he looked back out across the endless sea of tomes.
The towering shelves.
The glowing runes.
The infinite sea of records that had defined his entire existence.
He closed his eyes.
“Thank you, Librarian,” Silas said softly.
“I hold no hatred for you.”
A faint, genuine smile touched the corners of his mouth.
“After all, you are a slave too.”
He opened his eyes one last time.
“You just happen to have a few more privileges.”
As the last word left his lips, Silas’s physical body began to come apart.
Fragment by fragment, his flesh and bone dissolved into specks of pale light, drifting upward toward the vaulted ceiling.
Silas did not scream.
He did not struggle against the unraveling of his form.
There was no terror in his fading vision, only an overwhelming sense of quiet relief.
After a million years in the dark, he was finally free.
* * *
“Hm?”
A strange, suffocating warmth pressed against Silas from every direction.
Wait.
Did I not just die?
He could not make sense of the sensations flooding his mind.
His last clear memory was his body dissolving into motes of light within the grand library while the librarian looked on.
His life had ended.
He had felt it end.
Yet his consciousness remained unmistakably intact.
Silas tried to move his limbs, but nothing answered properly.
He was enveloped in thick, wet darkness, squeezed into a space far too narrow for a grown man.
When he tried to stretch, he realized his body was curled tightly into a ball.
What is this?
Confusion rapidly curdled into incandescent fury.
If those wizard bastards pulled my soul into some twisted experimental vessel, I will tear them apart.
There is no way this falls under any ethical boundary.
Can those miserable bastards not let me die in peace?
Before his rage could peak, an immense, rhythmic pressure seized him from behind.
A suffocating force bore down on his lower body, squeezing him violently toward a narrow opening below.
Silas froze.
Something was terribly wrong.
He had no idea where he was, what kind of nightmare had trapped him, or why his body felt so absurdly small.
For the first time in a million years, cold panic cut through his mind.
The pressure surged again, heavy and relentless.
His fragile form was shoved forward through the tight passage.
Where am I?
Was I stuffed inside some kind of meat sack?
Desperate to break out, he opened his mouth and tried to bellow at the top of his lungs.
“Waaaaaaaaaa!”
The high-pitched wail that tore from his throat stopped his thoughts cold.
What?
His mind went utterly blank.
Did I just cry like a newborn?
Silas forced his heavy, sticky eyelids open.
Everything was a blur of bright, artificial light and distorted silhouettes.
A pair of enormous, rubber-gloved hands scooped him up, cradling him against a pale, monstrously large figure.
The person was not a giant.
He was tiny.
Unbearably, impossibly small.
Silas strained to look down at his own chest.
Two tiny, wrinkled arms lay folded tightly against his belly, his minuscule fingers curled into soft fists.
His breath caught.
What in the world is happening?
Before he could process the scene, alarms began to blare, and the room descended into frantic chaos.
Figures in pale garments and masks swarmed around a woman lying on a raised cot just a few feet away.
These foreign healers, doctors and nurses, shouted urgently over the rhythmic beeping of strange, light-emitting machines, frantically administering injections and applying equipment to stabilize her failing body.
Silas could not understand a single word of their strange tongue.
But he did not need language to understand what was taking place.
The woman on the cot was gasping for air, her chest barely rising.
The light in her eyes was fading fast.
Yet despite the chaos, despite the dying strength in her limbs, her gaze never once wandered away from the tiny bundle in the nurse’s arms.
She was looking at him.
Silas stared into those fading eyes.
A strange tightness seized his chest, sharp and unfamiliar.
He had never seen this woman before in his life.
She was a complete stranger.
And yet…
“Time of death: 17:42.”
Silas did not know the dialect, but the cold finality in the physician’s voice carried the meaning across without mistake.
She was gone.
Silas remained motionless, staring at the still face of the woman who had just brought him into the world.
Part of his mind insisted that this was nothing more than a dying delusion, a hallucination born of his disintegrating soul.
But the raw, hollow ache spreading through his tiny ribcage was far too real to deny.
Warm moisture welled up in his eyes, spilling down his cheeks against his will.
How could a man who had spent a million years as an orphan slave, without a mother or father to his name, understand the sudden, tearing grief of losing a parent?
His fragile infant stamina drained away.
Darkness crept in at the edges of his vision.
Silas fought with all his remaining willpower to keep his eyes open, but his tiny eyelids grew too heavy to lift.
The world faded to black.
Please let this be a dream.
His consciousness slipped into the dark.
Once again, fate had decided to ignore his wish entirely.
I WILL NOT PROCLAIM THAT MY BOOK IS WITHOUT FLAWS BUT I WILL CLEAR ONE THING TO ALL THE READERS THAT PLEASE READ JUST 20 CHAPTERS AS MY NOVEL IS IN FANTASY GENRE IT IS NOT GOOD TO JUDGE IT JUST BASED ON FIRST 4 OR 5 CHAPTERS.