Chương 35: The First Thread of Divination.

For the first time, Lira was faced with a big hiccup when it came to creating a spell. No matter how many times she reread her father's ledger, scanning line after line with growing frustration, she could not find a proper term for divination. Divination, as a concept, simply was not among the 500 words lexicon her father had created. She leaned back slightly, exhaling through her nose as she let her gaze drift over the familiar pages once more. It meant she would have to approximate.

After some thought, she settled on something workable. Pika. Linasara. Oshkan. Mind. Book. Location. It was imperfect, she knew that much, but it should be functional. She chose Pika. again, anchoring the spell in the mind. It had worked well for her before, and repetition seemed to ease the formation of new spells. Rather than reaching for broader and more abstract concepts like time or space, she stayed within something she understood. Linasara. narrowed the scope.

By tying the spell specifically to books, she sacrificed versatility for precision, making it easier to shape and control the spell. Oshkan. was the weakest part of the structure. It would have worked well if she had the word for divination, but with mind, she wasn't sure the concept of Location alone would perform as well as she hoped. But it would have to do for now. Instead of writing a full primer, Lira made a different choice this time. She wrote only the incantation.

Then she sat down, crossing her legs, and closed her eyes.

"Pika. Selan. Tureth." The familiar calm of meditation settled over her mind, smoothing her thoughts into stillness. From there, she began to build. She reflected on books. On the way, they could be distinguished at a glance: age marked in the fading of ink, the yellowing of pages, and the wear of the spine; cover design and quality, elaborate or plain; handwriting that revealed the nature of the one who wrote it, neat and precise or rushed and careless.

She considered the difference between a personal journal and a copied manuscript. Between an author striving for objectivity and one writing an opinion piece. Then her thoughts shifted. To locations where books belonged, where they tended to gather. Libraries, desks, drawers, beside beds, within temples, carried in bags alongside personal belongings, or even buried like treasure. Some were displayed openly, others hidden away, forgotten or neglected. She imagined how she would organize them.

By genre, by author, by title. Then she shifted perspective again, considering how others might do it differently, prioritizing title over author, or structure over subject. Her thoughts deepened. She considered how the mind judged a book at a glance, by its cover, by the condition it was kept in, and by the hand that wrote it. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. And how often those judgments were right or wrong.

How meaning could be hidden beneath an unassuming surface.

"Pika. Linasara. Oshkan." Click. The spell settled into place. Lira opened her eyes slowly. A small flicker of satisfaction passed through her. She had done it without creating a primer. She knew that step had been a crutch, and that with the meditation spell she should be able to skip it. But that was beside the point. There was still the matter of testing the spell, and that was more important. Her first instinct was to search for something valuable.

Out here in this library, there had to be priceless relics or long-lost knowledge hidden beneath the chaos. But no. That would be shortsighted. What she needed was a better divination spell, and for that, she needed to improve her knowledge of the subject. Using divination to learn more about divination. It was the most logical place to start, like a smith who began by crafting his own tools, using each iteration to improve the next. She raised her hand slightly.

"Pika. Linasara. Oshkan." The effect spread outward. The feeling was strange but not unwelcome, like discovering an extra sense she had never known she possessed. It was not what she would call true divination. It felt closer to her perception spell, an extension of it rather than something entirely new. A bubble of awareness formed around her, and within it, certain objects began to stand out. Books.

All of them at first, but when she focused on the concept of divination, only those that aligned with it continued to nudge at her mind. She turned slowly, letting the sensation guide her. To her left, something pulled at her awareness. As she walked toward it, more points of interest appeared further in that direction, even beyond her line of sight or hidden behind shelves. She reached the first. A book on weather and seasons. Not what she had expected, but she did not dismiss it out of hand.

"Pika. Linasara. Cognar. Coopar. Nagla." The knowledge of the book flowed into her mind. By reflecting on the new information, she found what she was looking for. The ninth chapter. It spoke of using magic to predict weather patterns, how observation of past cycles could inform future outcomes, and how that could enhance the effect of divination. Divination spells were not completely independent from knowledge, nor were they infallible.

An ignorant diviner would always perform worse than a learned one when it came to predicting the weather. She set it aside on top of a book cart and followed the spell to the second book. This one was a military text. She did not absorb it this time. Instead, she flipped through its pages manually until she found a section discussing the use of scouts, information networks, and predictive strategies to anticipate enemy movements.

It emphasized that it was always better to build a map of current knowledge and feed it to a diviner to fill in the gaps rather than attempt to divine the situation from scratch. It also warned about counter-divination and how two diviners could interfere with each other's visions, making the field less reliable in war, but still too valuable to ignore. She placed the book on top of the others and continued. Back and forth across the library, from one end to the other, following the faint pull of her spell.

Each time she found a book, she evaluated it, mostly skimming but absorbing those she deemed more reliable, giving herself half an hour of cooldown between each absorption just in case. She built her foundation piece by piece. By the time she finished with the main floor, she had gathered sixteen books that touched on the subject. But that was only the beginning. Her gaze drifted toward the staircase. She hesitated for only a moment. Then she shrugged lightly. Why not?

Pulling her scarf over her face, she climbed upward once more, stepping into the dust-filled storage rooms, the spell continuing to guide her. To her surprise, the first room immediately revealed five books. When she looked at the pile, she recognized them, or at least the stack they belonged to. They had once been part of the lower floor before being deemed too worn to display. She had moved them here earlier, intending to experiment on them if she ever developed a spell to repair books.

They were all damaged, their covers torn, pages fragile, and ink faded to the point of being nearly unreadable. She took them downstairs and set them aside carefully on the cart, making a new pile for damaged books. She continued exploring the storage spaces, one room at a time, and her collection kept growing. Some intact, others barely holding together. From one floor to the next she went, navigating through clutter and debris.

And there, in one of the top most floor, beneath a collapsed set of drawers, partially buried under layers of dust and forgotten rubble, something caught her attention. The spell had guided her to it. Given the state of the room, she had expected another ruined book. She stepped closer, brushing aside loose debris until the object came into view. One look was enough. and she knew... she just knew that it was a Magical Primer. And more importantly, her detection spell had reacted to it. Which meant only one thing.

The primer contained at least one divination spell.