The filament inside the bulbs glowed red hot. All of them brighter than when they measured him the first two times. It was at its maximum luminance.
If it wasn’t for the pure steel plate barricading the windows, the brightness would have leaked out of the room and made the hospital face twinkling like a nearby star.
Eren’s heartbeat raced with excitement as he closed his eyes.
His mind and soul thought back to that place, that corner of the world where he spent the majority of his life in.
The artificial cold from the air conditioning unit disappeared. Now, a breeze kissed his arms. Warm and natural and familiar.
The beeping of his heart monitor softened into a lull, replaced by the tweeting of birds nearby. Even the sterile scent of the hospital disappeared as the smell of autumn warmed his nose.
He opened his eyes. A grand stately arch opened up to him. It was at the end of an open-air vestibule, with pillars erected in multiple rows all over the room.
He glided through to this place. Glided, for he had no body. No feet, no arms, nothing to make him misunderstand that this was real.
A disembodied soul, that’s what he was. A man walking through the memories of a place he once called home.
He reached the end of the archway. Stopping, he took a second to let the emotions pass through him.
Beyond these gigantic double doors, grand, made out of pure oak, carvings of heaven and earth and cultivators on both sides, was a place that gave him grief, anger, love, joy... it was where he lived out his second life.
He pushed the doors open and walked into the Immortal Library of Ræzoň.
An architectural marvel. It was a place that was ancient, yet modern. Mystical, yet methodical. Foreign yet familiar.
It was a library that contained every single piece of information and knowledge in the cultivation world, enclosed in a finite space on the ground.
The creator of this place encapsulated the beauty and marvel of the universe in all its glory, right here in this library.
He kept on walking, eyes taking in the familiar sights.
Books about the History of the World were incorporated in a floating bookcase globe on the left-most quadrant of the room. Traditional shelves with dusty tomes and atlases flanked it on all sides.
Next to it was the Medicinal section. Jars and transparent bottles were displayed behind glasses on the shelves, each one containing a scroll within. More scrolls would be found on the drawers below. And beyond it, an open space with desks that was filled with flasks and needles and bones and eyes. Everything an apothecary would need.
The smell of crushed willow and essential oils wafted over him. The books felt rough as his nonexistent hands passed over them.
Everything was the same as the way he remembered it. The smell, the lights, the overwhelming sense of grandeur... it’s as if he never left.
But he did. He needed to remind himself that.
These were just his memories.
The only reason it felt real was because he’d been trained to make it real. He memorized every fiber on the red carpets he walked on, every chip on the wooden shelves, every tattered page on every book and scroll and tome around him.
Every step was second nature. His stride, just going through the motions until finally, he found himself on the Ræzoň section.
It contained only a single bookcase. A towering cylindrical spire that stretched up and beyond to the high heavens. How they captured the skies for this library, Eren did not know.
It was gigantic, its circumference as large as an arena stadium.
The lower sections contained Ascension Arts, Martial Manuals, Journals, and Training Modules meant for beginners, with the difficulty and complexity of it increasing as it went higher up the spire.
They molded it after the origin story of Ræzoň. Cultivators who wished for manuals had to climb the spire as they went up higher in cultivation. They called it poetic. Eren called it a pain. He probably broke more bones than the man in the legends trying to scale up this towering bookcase.
His eyes drew up to the top, attracted by the lonesome, few books that laid at the pinnacle of the spire.
He’d finally get to use them. Someday.
But he didn’t get ahead of himself. His eyes scanned the cylindrical wall of books and texts. These were the scrolls given to children when Ræzoň first manifested inside their bodies.
The [Art of the Volcanic Mantra] was catalogued at the bottom, along with other texts and Ascension Arts that were outdated. They were stored here simply for preservation.
Above it, hundreds, thousands of better techniques were laid bare, ready for him to consume. Excitement thrummed at his soul.
He knew every single Ascension Art in this library. But that didn’t mean he could readily use them at will.
Mortal minds couldn’t withstand consuming even a single Ascension Art, much less millions of them at the same time.
So, his Master, the creator of this Library and the Palatine of Wisdom itself, taught him a memory technique to package the information inside these books into compressed pieces of knowledge.
It was like folding a piece of paper to reduce its size.
For him to use or learn any of the information in this library, he had to first unpack them. Take them out of that box and unfold the information. Then, and only then, could he imprint them onto his mind.
In modern terms, it was the equivalent of a zip file.
So for all intents and purposes, this memory of his could be considered the same as reality.
If he wanted to learn an Ascension Art, he must take it from its place and stare at it until it was engrained onto his mind, like all cultivation scrolls. Except, the texts here don’t burn into ashes after.
This was the true power of the aspect of the mind. It allowed him to store and preserve the entire knowledge of their world.
It was stored right here, in his Mind Palace.