It is known that the higher the quality of a saurian core one uses to awaken, the higher the quality of their realm later. Various other arcane techniques exist to improve the realm before awakening, but they must all be used before the realm solidifies.

  Few but the most opulent are willing to gamble on a candidate’s awakening, considering the staggeringly low percentage of awakened ones, see page seventy-six, where we explained that even becoming a realm knight was a one in a thousand gamble.

  — Excerpt from Introduction to Realm Cores

  Day 1, 1:40 PM

  The library was different from what I was used to. The first chamber held two dozen reading stations with clear, overly large proclamations framed in green and gold. A casual glance informed me that unauthorized reproduction of books was an imperial felony punishable by law, that damaging the library property was punishable, and another framed poster delivered a list of two dozen other conditions which would result in me owing my money or my freedom to the imperial family should I misbehave.

  Following the reading room was a vast repository of books. Based on its size and my experience, I guessed it housed between ten and twenty thousand tomes. Not too much, given library standards, but enough to keep me occupied for a year or several, and there were four more sections I could visit, two without paying anything extra.

  As my eyes roamed the shelves, I noted several things. All the spines were green with golden lettered titles, matching the building and the decrees. Each book was marked with an identical symbol of a sun’s lower half with ten rays shining down at the base of its spine. My first guess was a publisher’s brand, or an imperial crest of some sort, but I quickly changed my hypothesis.

  I picked one up at random, The Beginner’s Guide to Herbs, and noted that the glyph glowed red before dimming back to its normal golden form a wink later. It probably notified the librarian I had picked up a book, possibly even letting her know which one I took.

  A decent way to prevent theft while simultaneously offering privacy, assuming they offered privacy. I nodded absentmindedly, then focused on the book.

  The tome was leather-bound, or to be more precise, it was wrapped in fine scales, making for an interesting tactile experience. My mind skimmed through memories of various reptiles of three worlds, but I remained clueless as to which creature the publisher had skinned, not to mention why they used something other than smooth leather.

  I abandoned yet another idle train of thought for later, cracked open the book, and found pages made of fine paper with a weird glossy shin; probably treated in some way to increase durability, repel pests, or dust or something. I couldn’t be sure whether I’ve ever seen paper with such qualities before, but once again I drove the thought away.

  Instead, I forged a plan. The priority went to books on flora, fauna, and minerals. Seeing the raw resources this world had to offer was the kind of good foundation one had to create before further building their bastion of knowledge. Another thing I decided to watch out for were atlasses and books on geography. History, law, and commerce could come later, followed by the sciences.

  Based on my skills, it was obvious that this world’s inhabitants possessed access to some form of magic, their economy different from the standard I was used to, but those advanced topics could wait until I grasped the basics.

  I was about to return The Beginner’s Guide to Herbs, when I realized it fit the criteria for the books I wanted to read.

  When will my body metabolize the poison?

  I checked my status. Mindburst Poisoning remained, but thankfully, tinnitus and vertigo got the proper updates and vanished from my list of afflictions as well as from my body. The poor thing was working hard to adjust itself to the sudden spike of attributes. Unfortunately, those changes could take days or weeks.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  With a sigh, I took the book to the reading room and started acquainting myself with native herbs. The book was four hundred pages long with detailed drawings, written in a flowing, artistic handwriting which made you appreciate the effort as you read it.

  Still unused to the new body, I expected I would read the thing in under an hour, but two hours later, I still had a third of the way to go. Suddenly, I devoured the page on raptornip, my reading speed jumping up a gear or three.

  I summoned my status screen, and the poison was gone, my intellect and wisdom twenty-one each. Like it or not, I had to grin.

  Given my physique of twenty-four, I could endure two to three days without eating or sleeping, so I decided to push myself and get to know the fantastic world I have found myself in. A world whose unique features resident humans took for granted, thinking them mundane and common.

  Twenty-odd hours later, I discovered that the world was more intriguing than expected. Other than magic, it possessed dinosaur-like reptiles. In fact, the saurians constituted the entirety of the common fauna.

  The names were different. You had threehorns, longnecks, raptors, longclaws, smallarms, and a bunch of others, but you could tell they meant triceratops, diplodocus, velociraptor, and T-Rex. I had no clue what longclaws were and whether they had a counterpart I should’ve known about, but I was no dinosaur expert, so it was understandable.

  Funny how such trite trivia stuck somewhere in the hind reaches of your brain, your childhood geekiness ready to burst forth at a moment’s notice, despite it suffering through countless years and multiple lives.

  As for magic itself, it was weird. One needed to kill special dinosaurs, extract the organ which made them special, then touch it to absorb it. The notion was so weird I dropped the bestiary and grabbed the reference book to read.

  Introduction to Realm Cores was fascinating and insane at the same time. At least it explained the source of my freakish strength. If my stat screen could be trusted, I was a realm knight, a core knight, or just knight, as they were commonly called.

  It was a dead-end mage class focused on burning mana to physically enhance their bodies. A scale of power existed, ranging from one to ten, with levels called realms for a rather interesting reason, which I decided I would confirm in a later loop.

  Knights and mages both capped out at the fifth realm, to reach the sixth they had to evolve into mageknights. The chances of success were dishearteningly abysmal, even lower than becoming a mageknight outright at the first realm, or awakening as a mageknight, as the book called it.

  I was inferior. The lowest of the low. The realization was a bitter pill to swallow. Naturally, I decided the only way forward was to change my fate. On Arborea and on Everrain I grew to become the apex lifeform, and here, in this unknown world I had reincarnated in, I would become one again.

  As for how, a wealth of knowledge stood at my disposal and superhuman abilities I had grown to use with great proficiency after living through two lifetimes.

  In conclusion, the book raised more questions than it answered. I was tempted to just keep reading, following the random trail of my interests, but I grew enough self control to do things properly.

  Six days passed in a flurry of reading, and after checking my screen, I realized my class had changed. At some point, I became a scholar! My first level up condition was to read a hundred books. An easy task on one hand, on another, my progress would reset with each loop, and I would have to start over.

  Still, a class focused on learning or at least reading should be a boon in the long run. I was seriously tempted to just run it for as many levels as I could, especially if it offered skills relating to faster reading, better comprehension, and such.

  Yes, once I decided the loop over, I should focus on becoming a scholar. Finding a hundred really thin books to hasten the leveling process. But that was not a current worry. What I had to do was grab something to eat. As for sleep, I would sleep in the library, slumped in a chair or hidden amongst the shelves somewhere.

  “That was quite a collection of books,” the librarian said as soon as I left the reading room. “Have you had enough.”

  I nodded. “I need to eat something, then I’ll come back.”

  Redo was no longer red, I was free to die without consequences, and this conversation wouldn’t happen in the final loop anyway, so why not have a chat and act like a regular human being? Human interaction could be just the thing I needed to stay sane in a torrent of lost time.

  “You have checked out sixty-two books.” Her eyes locked onto mine, disdain was there, only lessened. “Did you really read them?”

  I nodded. No reason to be shy about reading books in front of a librarian. Her crime should have been much more severe than mine.

  “Why? You can find no relevant books there.”

  Why the hell not? It’s not like it’s going to stick.

  “Someone poisoned me, I had a splitting headache, and lost all my memories. Almost drowned in soup. I have no clue who I am, where I am, and books seemed like a good place to start getting to know what’s happening. I didn’t even know I was insulting you when I paid my fee with that shiny little stone. My servant told me they were my valuables when he brought them to me, so I guessed I could use them to pay.”

  She gaped at me, her slack jaw opened a crack. With the anger, disdain, and the host of other negative emotions gone, she was even kind of cute for a kid.