Chương 237: BECMI Chapter 236 – Edging the Graduation Test

There were ten rooms in total. I cleared them all, which I was pretty sure was unprecedented. The next room was a library. As I entered, the whole room rotated forty-five degrees, blocking all exits as it did so. There were thousands of books lined up haphazardly along the shelves stacked floor to ceiling along the walls, many of which I recognized, and even had copies of.

In counterpoint, at the center of the area was a comfortable reading chair, a bottle of brandy, a crystal goblet, and a soft chandelier hanging there for reading, with its chain disappearing into magical darkness overhead. This was obviously a test of how fast one could go through the books. Well, that was not a test for the Cold Reader of the Zanzyran libraries!

Basic Bibliophile was also only a Cantrip, and as I only had to locate the instructions, THEN read them, it was all I needed, since the most basic spell did little more than identify what the book contained, not the actual information itself! I blitzed through the books, slapping them and looking for an inserted scroll or other item that was not part of the books, not incidentally cataloging them and weighing their value as I did so.

A history of General Zanzyr's campaign, a biography of an old Frieran baron, a cookbook for some exotic mushrooms, an advanced guide to using archon blood in alchemy… The approximate information and titles of each book flashed by in my mind's eye as my fingers brushed each tome. I slapped the books in passing along the shelves, learning what subjects they contained, if not the actual contents.

They did have value, wildly varying, and I noted them as I made my way quickly around the room, the search for one book among thousands going literally at the speed of touch… and being the thorough person that I was, after locating the message in a book talking about silkworm farming practices, I just kept going to get a better idea of the value of all the books in here, and picked out some rare ones that I wanted for my own collection as I did so.

Once I had my cataloging complete (and had to resist the urge and temptation to actually start re-ordering this damn place by subject and author!!! Holy Dewey Decimal System, this place needs you so bad…), I turned my eye to the conspicuous magical darkness up in the center of the domed room. Normally one would need levitation magic to reach the place, but I happened to have a nine-foot golem that had absolutely no problem giving me a cheerleader lift up into the darkness…

where a Detect Magic could clearly see a magical Dagger stuck into the ceiling joists. Another prize for me. Read Magic was yet another Cantrip, and needed to decode the cipher on the instructions to get out of the room. There was a Formation on the walls that was activated by removing books in a specific order and swapping some with others. It took only a couple of minutes to shift things around, and the room slowly ground back to its original position.

Then I tossed a Deeppockets spell on my new components pouch, transforming it into a temporary Bag of Holding, and proceeded to drop about two hundred pounds of the most valuable books in the place into it. Then I had my golem carry me out, across the Diamond hallway there (where I set foot down to get the Diamond Key back on my keyring), and across the hall into the next room.

There I was instantly transported into an hourglass in the middle of the room, which promptly began emptying itself into the bottom of the glass… which was also thinning the atmosphere at the same rate! Runes flickered, resolving themselves at my gaze into words: Flow with the sand of time, with time comes a wizard's experience. Uh-huh.

The benefit was gained flowing through the aperture of the hourglass, but doing it with the innate magic of the sands would cost me a precious point of Constitution I was unwilling to give up. Thankfully, Gaseous Form fell under the Elemental Spell Mastery Rules, and so Fiery, Hydrous, and Sandy forms were all possible alternatives of the spell.

I snapped my fingers, fell apart into sand, and was sucked down through the hourglass with the rest of the sand, feeling the magic swirling through me with the classic energies of time and heightened awareness of it, basically liberating mental energies to increase the speed of thought. +1 Intellect, thank you very much! I poured into the bottom of the hourglass, and when the last of the sand had fallen from above, straightened up and rebuilt myself inside the hourglass.

A moment later, I was Teleported out and back next to my golem, which had taken one step towards the hourglass to break me out of it, inspiring whoever was in charge of teleportations to hurry up a mite bit. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. A quick scan of the room's interior revealed a magical glow from one of the wooden beams supporting the magical hourglass… a glow not shared by the other beams.

Opening it up revealed a folded Cloak within, definitely an Elven Cloak of Erendyl make, whose gray-green material I swept onto my shoulders immediately. I carefully did not smile for the hidden watchers, and was on to the next room.

In this chamber, as we opened to the inner door, we were immediately Teleported to the middle of the room. A second later, a Reverse Gravity spell shimmered into effect, and my golem ride and I went tumbling up to the padded ceiling twenty feet above. Now, I wasn't going to have a few tons of golem fall on me, and instantly pushed away from my ride, who smashed through the straw padding with a crunch, while I basically tucked into a roll and bounced right back to my feet off the mounded straw, upside down.

Not a hard thing to pass if you had any flight magic, and I did, but the key to this graduation test was absolutely minimal effective spell use! There were bricks jutting out all around the dome I was now upside-down in, forming a rough way to get down and out of the room if you couldn't fly. There were also a dozen Gray Oozes shlumphing around the room if I dared to climb down. They were basically immune to heat and cold, but were not immune to lightning. Elemental Darts for d4 damage plus Kickers, go!

Little Skulls festooned with crackling voltage went cackling up-down at the slow-moving oozes, popping, blasting, and finally scattering them one by one across the stone floor above-below me. In the meantime, the golem got back to its feet a bit awkwardly, and waited stoically, waist-deep in straw, as I blasted the oozes who couldn't escape me slowly out of existence.

When we were done, I flicked up a Force Disk, bade the golem step onto it, and without further ado ran up the wall out of the reversed gravity field, inverted myself and the Disk (which the golem didn't fall out of because of Disk geo-magnetic 'cling'), and was down to the floor on the other side. Magic gleamed behind a brick I'd grabbed while coming down. I had the golem lift me back up, pulled it out, and simply pocketed the magical Scroll hidden behind the brick. On to the next chamber to the east.

This one was a trap again. When I entered the middle chamber on the golem, I found myself instantly in a sealed spell research laboratory. I scanned the area, and my eyes naturally fell on a suspended bottle floating above one of the tables, and something seemed to be inside… I made eye contact, and felt the instant hit of dimensional magic.

There was a swirl of dimensional movement I recognized as a Juxtaposition or Castling equivalent, and suddenly I found myself inside the laboratory inside the bottle, and leering at me outside was a red-skinned imp, grinning and capering and leering at me at having tricked me.

"Ha ha ha! They said you were so smart, but how easily you were trapped! No way out there is, unless you deal with me!" he began to say. He seemed to have forgotten the very large golem behind himself at the joy of being out of here. There was a crink of metal. The imp blinked and turned around, then looked up.

"Uh-oh," he murmured, and the heavy metal arm came across and splattered him across the wall. No mess, however. Imps are Outsiders, and the gore faded within a minute. As for myself, I cast a Jaunt and popped out of the shrunken laboratory. Easy as that. As for getting out of the room… I wandered over to the remains of the imp and pulled open the pouch he'd been wearing, much like the goblin in the room earlier, it being something imps did not usually wear.

A Scroll was inside, with Runes to be activated to get out of there. I looked about at the shrunken laboratory in a bottle, then the fully stocked lab around me, and reflected that I still had a Disk spell there to haul stuff around on… and, you know, there were tables here. My golem servant could carry a whole lot of stuff around in his arms if he needed to…

Going north led me to large room heaped up with large mushrooms and alien vegetation that was native to no Underdark I knew of. I scanned the area repeatedly, picking out a single instance of magic as the armored golem bulled its way forward. I plucked up the Ring fallen among a stand of purple flowers that shrank in on themselves with lightning speed when jostled, while the golem headed toward the way out.

Which had a Mirror on it, definitely magical, and not something I wanted to be looking into right now, even it did seem to have some writing across the front of it. Take the Mirror off the door and put it on the Disk, reflective side down, I instructed the obedient golem, while I closed my eyes and let it do just that, breaking some screws or clasps or whatever as it did so. The Disk trailed behind us, the Mirror balancing atop the equipment of the laboratory stacked onto a table from there.

Once the Mirror was in place, I calmly used Mage Hand to start the process of sliding the Mirror down onto the table, and stacking the equipment on top of it. I didn't want to break a magical Mirror, after all.

Out the door to the east, across the hall, and into the next room, doors opening happily and automatically for my big lumbering friend. It was full of shadows, and many, many eyes moving about in the shadowed darkness that formed the ceiling, all of them rapidly moving to focus in on me. Detect Magic said it was an illusion, so I ignored them, looking for signs of anything else.

The floor of the chamber was covered in red-hot coals, giving it a surreal and hellish air, that really would have been unnerving with the wailing eyes in the ceiling… if I wasn't immune to fear, had excellent low-light vision, and the uncomfortable heat was just a point of fact, not something actually harming me. A bridge cut across the pit from east to the west door. I actually wanted to go north, but that was fine.

There did seem to be a loose brick at the center of the bridge as my golem trod slowly and steadily across, and I hopped down long enough to dig up yet another Scroll case with faint magic within it.