Crusader King

Pushing the massive doors open, Cades quickly saw a impossibly great library inside.

There were thousands of books on shelves extending throughout the entire great, underground cellar, the shelves were made of stone and ordered right next to each other in a symmetrically repeating pattern.

As Cades took his first few steps into the library the various artifacts that were fixed onto the walls began brightly shining in a warm light to allow the visitors to read.

Right in front of him, right between the great stone shelves there laid a desk made out of stone, just like the aforementioned shelves.

It was especially lighted up with an inviting and seemingly very comfortable chair in front of it. 

The air inside of the ancient chamber was not stale, but instead very cold, indicating that this place had a circulatory system to vent itself with fresh air and with that, fresh oxygen.

Now that Cades thought about it, he realized that he had been lucky to land on a planet with oxygen, but he consequently also understood that he had probably landed on this planet because of its protruding mana, indicating that there had to be sentient life on this planet.

Cades slowly, carefully took a step forward, towards the desk and began looking into some of the books.

He could not read what was written inside of the books as he didn't know the spell of universal translation, that one was a very high ranking and difficult spell after all, but he did see that there were a multitude of different pictures and illustrations in the books.

Cades had been lucky enough to directly pick up artificing books.

They mainly illustrated things that Cades had already known for a long time but there were some things that he had never thought of and was now longing to try out, including something that seemed to be a design for a "bag of holding", a bag connecting to an interdimensional space in which one could store all kinds of objects.

Of course, this was a object that would require an extraordinary amount of mana to create, but Cades knew that the current him should be capable of doing it, if he were to be able to gather materials suitable for crafting it.

Cades also found various other artifact designs.

He had ripped out each of the pages that had those designs with them, folded them and quickly decided to take them with him and, if possible, analyse all of them.

But after he had repeated this act for some time he realized that he didn't need to run away constantly, this place was ancient and it was unchanged, no shelves were thrown over, none of the books were falling apart, nothing was destroyed at all.

This was either a sign that someone lived here and took care of the place, or, much more likely, it was a sign that this place was safe for him.

Cades decided that there was no reason to leave quickly, he had time, all of the time in the world, at least until he got hungry, then he would have to hunt for a monster to replenish his power.

Picking up as many of the ancient, unreadable books as he could he walked to the desk and began reading.

Over the next few days Cades analysed thousands of artifact designs, many of which he would've had no idea on how to create, had it not been for these very books.

He gained dozens of enlightenments related to various fields of magic.

Cades had no idea on how to utilize them in a battle, but he did now have some ideas on how to utilize them in the process of artificing, all be it only in the most basic of ways, such as the bag of holding that he now had a precise plan on how to create.

He had also found various maps of the surrounding area as well as the whole, entire planet.

These maps were ancient, and for the most part they were completely unusable in the current age, but there were countless great empires on this planet, which could allow him to go there.

Cades was certain that at least some of these great empires would've still persisted on to this very day, and even if they hadn't persisted he would at least find some cities while flying all over the planet.

Now, it was finally time to leave and pursue his goal, after all, he still wanted to find out what happened, he still wanted revenge on whoever caused the horrible disaster that took everything from him.

He took one of the books with him, the atlas which he presumed to be the most recent, and started walking out of the ancient library.

As he left the shelves behind on which he had spent almost an entire week and started pulling the massive doors onto the insides of the library, and finally, Cades walked outside of the ancient nest of knowledge, to go back to the real world, now much richer in knowledge.

However, as he left the library, the statues that had previously never moved an inch heaved up their weapons and brought them down onto cades.

He, however, didn't care about it at all.

As the weapons hit Cades, they fell apart into pieces, just as Cades had expected from the ancient porous stone.

The guardians of the library that had been protecting this very place for an eternity might have had some problems in their runic sequences after an eternity of standing here, as they did not halter Cades at all when he entered the ancient library, but they were still the most dutiful beings that one could ever see.

Cades, however, did not think about that and just started going up the spiral staircase, undisturbed by the broken statues, and out of the spiral staircase.

It was night when Cades finally left the library once now, Cades had no idea how long exactly he had spent in the library, though he estimated about a week or six days.

Now, Cades finally began flying to the first of the empires, the one that was closest to his position.