“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need” -- Marcus Tullius Cicero

  I’d briefly gone back to birding but couldn’t really focus on it. Letting my dungeon instincts take over, I returned my focus to the second floor less than 15 minutes later. I had left my transcribe lore quest unstarted until now, but I figured it would be best not to let it lag too far behind. Besides, as a former academic, I was distinctly feeling the lack of books.

  I was generally aware that working on a library, much less a University, was premature at this point, but decided to make a smallish secret room and work on at least creating a bookshelf. To do so, I began by creating a smaller room directly off the main landing but tucked behind the stairs from the first floor. For the moment, the space I’d hollowed out was only about 2 meters by 2 meters, with a still standard (for me) 3-meter ceiling. I’d made the walls smooth and neatly squared, lined with a polished white limestone. The floor, needing to be a bit more durable, was done in polished granite tiles in shades of dark gray.

  Next, I needed some shelves, and while I could have made those out of stone as well, I opted to work in a dark, dense wood shaped directly from Brown Walnut. That had a dense, durable feel with a smooth grain, and with some careful planning on my part could be neatly dovetailed to line the walls from floor to ceiling.

  Blueprint Acquired: Polished Walnut Bookcase

  While I only had four books at the moment, available shelf space, I knew from past experience, was likely to be an issue. Those texts had clearly been transcribed by hand (or some magical equivalent, likely enough) and it didn’t seem that mechanical printing presses were in use, at least in Zaipruniel.

  I gave those four volumes pride of place on the back wall of the room and decided that I’d work to fill the side walls with texts from my own world. I suspected that the eidetic memory I’d been gifted was intended at least partially for this purpose. The question was, which books should I start with? I’d been a voracious reader for decades, but some of that reading was academic, some was avocational, and some was purely recreational. I had no way of telling which books would be most useful, which would be potentially dangerous, and which would be insulting to the actual fantasy races I was likely to encounter.

  I decided that the safest bet would be to work on some basic archaeological textbooks. I remained fairly sure that my work in that field would be the most likely reason I’d been brought to this world, after all. I could begin by recreating my doctoral thesis or some of my past research papers, but those were both fairly technical and quite specific, and as such not likely to be directly useful in a new world. Nothing Aven or Orn had said, after all, suggested any Mayan influence on this world. Having taught undergraduate level courses for over 20 years, though, meant I had an intimate knowledge of at least a half dozen distinct entry level works. The problem, though, was that some of the best works were also the longest and I didn’t want to commit too much time or effort to this until I knew how long it would take. Even Archaeology for Dummies ran almost 400 pages! With a mental sigh, I started in on Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction.

  First, I needed a blank volume, something the blueprint for a leather-bound book made simple. I had the ink, I had the book, and I knew the contents – what I lacked was hands to transcribe it with. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to determine how to make the ink appear on the page exactly where I wanted it, though I did eventually manage it. The images were even harder to manage, and I only managed a simplified black and white version – akin to a third-generation photocopy of a photocopy. Fortunately, it didn’t reflect my traditionally poor handwriting skills, with the text replicating the original typesetting quite closely. That effort was fairly directly repaid, however, as after I’d laboriously reconstructed 10 pages of the work, I’d acquired a tremendously helpful skill.

  Skill Acquired: Transcription Lvl. 1

  The skill didn’t do a whole lot, as far as I could tell, except speed up what I was already doing. The remaining 100 pages of the volume took me only about twice as long as the first ten, and ‘enabled me to complete that first-stage scholar quest. More or less the difference between rewriting something by hand and simply photocopying it page by page.

  Quest Completed: Transcribe Lore ; Reward: Crossreference Skill

  Quest Reissued: Transcribe Lore – Commit 1000 pages of non-fiction information to a durable medium; Reward: Scholar-related blueprint

  The new skill was a useful one, or would become one, from a scholar’s perspective. The deliberate application of the skill to a passage in any text in my library would identify the pages in other volumes in the library related to that passage. That would be a tremendous time saver in the absence of search engines, though obviously of limited utility at the moment.

  I considered spending another couple of hours transcribing reference works but decided that could be a slippery slope that kept me occupied for days, even if my transcription skill leveled up. That did prompt me to think about my skills, though, as I hadn’t really been paying any attention to my status, aside from registering my new blueprints and quests. That was, at least, partly intentional – I'd never been one of those people motivated entirely by increasing their numbers, either as a gamer or as a birder. I liked to complete quests and gain new options, and I liked to see new birds, but that was more about the thrill of discovery and the urge to complete things and less for bragging rights. “Numbers go up” wasn’t really my thing. I had no interest in increasing my level or expanding my mana regeneration rates, as long as I wasn’t running into trouble working on what needed to be done.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  That said, some of those numbers had been going up, and I had gained a number of skill levels – particularly in my sensory, mana, and dungeon skills. Not a lot of them, mind you, but mostly they were up to two or three. I kind of assumed these skills maxed out at 10, like my language skill, but that was just an assumption.

  Having created shelves and worked, at least a bit on transcribing some knowledge, I felt the urge to hide my tiny library. I wasn’t really sure where that urge was coming from, as in my past life shelves full of books on open display and freely lent were a fixture of every home I’d ever lived in. I can only assume my dungeon instincts felt that knowledge, and especially knowledge from another world, constituted “treasure” that needed to be protected. There was a bit of a mental disjunction there, I acknowledged, but I didn’t fight my dungeon instincts particularly. I could see some of my otherworldly knowledge being hazardous, even if it wasn’t obviously the case. I didn’t know how well scientific processes might mesh with local traditions, or whether even the basic discussion of radioactive elements involved in radiometric dating techniques was something to hide from the locals. Passing references to atomic bombs for instance, and their impact on dating, might give some enterprising soul hints I didn’t really want anyone to follow up on.

  That was clearly a problem for another day, but there was no harm in being proactive. My first use of the crossreference skill was to set up flags for references to potentially hazardous knowledge, ranging from genetic engineering through thermonuclear warfare. I was reasonably sure I’d need to add to the list of red flag terms as I went, but it was something to keep an eye on.

  That turned out to be unnecessary, as the eye to precautionary measures was clearly something the local deities were in favor of, as I received a startling new set of announcements.

  Divine Skill Acquired: Autoredaction Level 10

  Trait Awarded: First, Do No Harm (Globally)

  The instinctive knowledge of my new skill indicated that rather than having to parse what was and wasn’t allowed, some divinity (or divinities) would automatically prevent the dissemination of prohibited knowledge, at least in written form. I wouldn’t be prevented from sharing information on an individual level, but I would be alerted if I was about to cross any forbidden lines before I did so. As it turned out, the existence of radioactive decay was acceptable knowledge, but even hints towards its use in destructive items were not. That was fine with me; actually, I appreciated the helping hand as I had no interest in forcing technological growth on this world.

  In any event, I hid the entry to my library rather more carefully than I did my traps; I took the rather basic step of simply growing the stone in a 3-inch-thick layer over the doorway, with no latch or opening mechanism at all. If I decided to let anyone in, I’d have to manually remove it. I did create a number of centimeter wide vents into the stairwell to allow easier mana flow into the space, but no more.

  Collection secured for the time being, I returned to the construction of my second level. As my current building quest required a minimum of ten rooms on the level, I set that as my interim goal. I got the distinct impression that the number of rooms expected would only increase as I added levels, so I decided to expand the scale of my operations beyond the limits of the first floor. I figured pushing the volume of the level out by 1/3 or so should be plenty of space, but it couldn’t simply be even, since I was already up against the cliff edge. Instead, I opted to push mostly to the north and east, heading towards the surface ruins I’d already documented, while maintaining contact with the cliff edge on the west. Eventually, I could tell, I would need to relocate my core to the bottom level in a more or less central position, but not until I had the floor nearly completed. I wasn’t quite sure how that process would work, as I wasn’t directly mobile, but was confident my dungeon instincts (or possibly Aven) would help me figure it out.

  Given my focus on the ruins, I opted to leave the second level mostly empty until I reached them; I had the distant thought that having the level reflect those ruins might be an interesting approach. That, of course, would require me to both explore those ruins and determine what they’d been used for and who they’d been used by. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. My first level could simply reflect current conditions on the sky island, and as I went deeper, new levels could reflect the occupational history of the island – that could make it simultaneously a challenge and an educational experience!

  *Snicker. Might have to add more wyverns to the first level in honor of my draconic overlord. And possibly some goblins.*

  Excited by the notion and pleased to finally have a basic concept in place, I now needed to actually get to the ruin and do some research! To that end, I drove a long shaft in a fairly direct line towards the ruin, creating a hallway running northeast from the eastern of the three rooms on my second level. In an alternating fashion, I expanded my territory at surface level as well, once the hallway had reached the original surface limits by the stream.

  Being roughly 20 meters below the surface at that point, there was no water to be concerned about (the sky island having no real subterranean water drainage as far as I could tell). Still, I sort of mentally flagged the location in my mental 3-D model for future use in designing the level. If I wanted a water feature on this level, this would be the easiest place to bring it from. Don’t get me wrong – I could create water from other matter, but if I wanted it to not be stagnant then I either needed to figure out a way to recirculate it or I needed to bring it in from outside. Otherwise, continual creation of water was a good way to make sure I had no energy for anything else.

  I paused in the subterranean construction of my hallway about 20 meters past the current stream bed, once it became clear that the surface zone was leaving the stream area and the chances of permanent surface structures increased. Generally speaking, streams will tend to meander a bit on flat ground and most permanent residents nearby will set their buildings back a ways to reduce the chance of flooding. That said, just because the nearest visible structures were still about 50 meters away didn’t mean there weren’t more modest structures to be found between here and there. In vegetated regions like this, smaller and more temporary structures might be represented by just a low mound or even be completely invisible to surface inspection. Still, I was deep enough down that it was unlikely I’d run into anything related to a surface occupation, unless they were doing some quarrying for stone or preparing a survival bunker! I wasn’t sure what the local rates of pedogenesis (soil formation, that is) was like, but 20 meters of dirt takes a long time to accumulate outside of a major flood plain. That said, in good archaeological practice, I mostly wanted to work from the top down, moving backwards in the occupational history.