The basement of the magic tower’s library, a gathering point of forbidden spells, research, and other knowledge that had been discovered throughout the years and put in one place, to act as a reference for any investigations concerning such dark topics and that, until then, he’d never had the right to access.
It was something only the gods were allowed to grant, and he’d never had enough trust to receive it, even if that hadn’t stopped him from trying. Even in his last visit there, he’d been willing to ignore that restriction and had stretched his soul out, wanting to use it and his alien sense to access the building’s hidden depths to read everything it held, leaving everyone else none the wiser of his action, but he hadn’t gotten the chance to. No matter how he’d looked, there was nothing beneath the library. No basement full of knowledge for him to exploit, with the answer to where it really was plundered from the gods' minds, and required the consent of the current head librarian to access.
“Ben, even if you’re a third-tier, you know I can’t let anyone just casually access it. I’m not even supposed to go in without express permission from the divine.”
“I know,” he nodded. “But this relates back to me escaping hell. You heard how things went down before that, right? A group of gods decided to get rid of me.”
Killi grimaced at the statement; the very notion of any gods doing such a thing left her uncomfortable. “I’m aware, and I’m sorry to hear that happened, but the actions of a few don’t mean I can just ignore the rules we have in place.”
“I’m not asking you to. As I’m sure you can imagine, when I did escape, after I finished raising a bit of a fuss about the whole thing, I got the gods to agree to a change in my treatment. For all intents and purposes, I have the rights of both mortals and the divine, and I’m using the second to request access for myself. If you’d like confirmation on that, then I’ll happily grab you whatever deity you’d want to verify that.”
“... Then, if you would. Any god from a larger faith that isn’t connected to your church. I’m well aware that the church of Myriad is aligned with the church of Nare on most matters, as well as your connection to the church of Anailia, so I hope you understand.”
“No worries, I get you need to confirm I’m not trying to be sneaky. One second.”
Sending a part of himself up to the heavens, he took a path to a realm he’d never been to before and saw the god sitting within it twitch at his arrival, even if they kept the shock of it contained.
“What brings you here then, Ben?” Phixth asked. “A matter you couldn’t have asked Myriad to grab me for?”
“Eh, I’m just trying to make things quick. I told everyone I was taking the rights of both gods and mortals before, so now I need you to confirm with a mortal that I do in fact have such. Tell the third tier, Killi, that I have the same rights as the gods and to give me basement access.”
“Why would you… No, I suppose it doesn’t matter. As agreed, you have such freedom. One moment.”
Ben had expected the god to try to push back a little, or at the very least question him as to why he wanted such things, but Phixth was respecting the conclusion of the last meeting he’d had with the divine and that made things easy as Killi cocked her head, hearing the response the stone god gave before nodding to Ben below.
“It seems you’ve received some rather significant compensation.”
“What can I say? When you try to damn a guy and he still gets out, there’s not much room other than just doing what he wants.”
“Well, if the gods approve, then who am I to deny our library’s most voracious reader,” she said as she stood up to walk over to a cabinet off to the side, unlocking it to reveal a large spatial bag folded up within.
When she unfurled it, Ben saw the item was as wide as a door and, opening it up, she stepped through, beckoning Ben within to see what it held, leaving him to let out a low whistle.
“Dang, you guys really didn’t want the location revealed, huh?”
“The most dangerous information in the world, it’s not like we could risk anyone with nefarious intent trying to dig through the floorboards to get to it, and it needed to be kept safe as well.”
“Still, this is an impressive piece of work,” Ben said, walking over to examine the gate that had been hidden within the spatial bag, not connected to the network but instead led directly to wherever the true location of the basement sat. “Same guy who made the gate made the bag, I take it?”
“Who’s to say?” Killi shrugged. “Both are over a thousand years old by this point, so I’d suspect as much, but it’s ancient history. The important thing was making the entrance easy to hide.”
“And making the way to the basement impossible to get to without this,” Ben muttered, taking in the gate enchantment’s design and quickly understood the purpose behind it. That universe was a layered reality, and by that point, Ben had interacted with four different planes within it. The mortal realm, the divine realm far above it, the infinite hells below, and then the plane that the world’s gate network linked to, just slightly higher up, but that didn’t mean that was all. There were many empty planes that sat between the mortal and the divine, all of them admittedly growing harder to access the further one rose, with little reason to go to them when they all seemed to be empty until one reached the heavens, but it seemed that was a doorway to yet another. All of the forbidden knowledge the world had ever discovered or produced was being stored in a different layer of reality altogether, safely away from any prying eyes or nefarious thoughts, and without the background to understand the gate, none who went through it for whatever investigations they were leading would have ever realized such a thing themselves.
Clever, Ben grinned, appreciating the solution to said problem, even if it had kept him from sneakily reading anything with his soul. And also misnamed. If this is in a higher level of reality, then it shouldn’t be called the basement; it should be the top floor.
The naming sense behind it wasn’t worth concerning himself with, though. With access granted, Ben stepped through while Killi stepped out, keeping watch to ensure no one else would come in and left him with full access to all of the books there, the number fewer than he’d expected.
While the space itself was reasonably sized, big enough that even spending a few days stuck in there wouldn’t feel uncomfortable, the number of books was surprisingly scant, less than even what he would find on the library’s fifth floor.
Only four proper bookshelves, and of them, the last was only half full. It was still far more than the dozen forbidden texts he knew Anailia held and, even if few, it couldn’t help but fill him with excitement. Those books were full of mystery, holding topics the likes of which he might never have been able to read about in all of his previous studies. Horrors and discoveries both grand and foul enough that the gods of the world wanted to ensure they never got out, while also needing to be kept to give any investigators the chance to see if remnants of those texts had somehow been rediscovered, making their way out into the world to be taken advantage of by any less than moral individual who might have found them.
Ben had even seen as much himself already, having found a person before who’d gained access to some forbidden potion techniques from back when the more magical races in the world had been kidnapped and used and, as a result, had even kidnapped someone to test them out. He knew that in the wrong hands, such information could be devastating, and he knew that among the divine, many thought his own two were as wrong as things could get.
Welp, it doesn’t matter. No knowledge is bad knowledge; it all comes down to how it’s used, so let’s see what all of my nefarious predecessors were up to.
Stretching out his soul, Ben made sure there was nothing hidden around the room he couldn’t see, be it a secret compartment or a hidden enchantment that might have been hiding even more, but found nothing, and accepting that everything he was going to learn stood before him, he emptied the shelves with his magic and opened each book before flipping through their pages, consuming all of the information they held and brought a new notification to his thoughts when he finished.