Tarthocas: Chronicles of the Transmigrating Scribe Chapter 5: Chapter 4

Read chapter 5 of Tarthocas: Chronicles of the Transmigrating Scribe by Bigmachine on NovelPedia.

When Ling Xuan came back to his senses he was surrounded by bookshelves. They were neatly arranged on the walls around him. He was standing at the centre of the cave-like room. The floor was wooden in texture and the dim light emanated from the bulbs. 'Is this some kind of library? Did I transmigrate again?’ Ling Xuan wondered. He looked at himself only to notice that he was still wearing the robes from before. He looked through his memories. There was nothing in them that could explain this. As he looked around he noticed a computer on a table not far away from him. Ling Xuan walked towards it. When he got close to the table he saw that there was a book laid open on it. Unlike the books on the shelves this one was plain and ordinary. Ling Xuan read what was on the open pages. To his surprise, it talked about his current situation. About how a chosen person would be able to access a mysterious library in their dreams. Ling Xuan checked the cover of the book. It read “Guidelines to the Library”. He skimmed through the contents. According to the book, the library was an ancient artefact that chooses its owner. The books in the library represent the memories of the user. Each book details everything that had happened within the perception sphere of the user. The information would be more detailed than what the user himself had perceived at the time of the incident. There were two ways to use the books. One was to directly read them. This would be a tiring endeavour as the books are filled with every detail that had happened. The other more direct way was to drip your blood onto the books. This would upload the information in the book into the brain of the user. This however could only be used a limited number of times as the total imaginary blood available was very low, only allowing upto 10 uses per day. Then there was the computer. It was the kind that you could get in the late 90s. Its beige plastic casing, once vibrant, now bore the marks of age – yellowed and scuffed. A bulky CRT monitor perched atop the tower, its screen flickering occasionally. Inside, colourful cables and circuitry adorned the motherboard, while a Pentium II processor whispered tales of its former power. A clunky keyboard with worn-out letters and a mouse with a discoloured rubber ball completed the scene, surrounded by scattered floppy disks and faded CD-ROMs. Ling Xuan sat in front of the table, moved some stuff out of the way and switched on the computer. It slowly booted up. On the screen there was nothing but a search bar. Ling Xuan typed in “martial arts” and pressed enter. A green progress bar appeared slowly and it filled in the space.. When the bar became full the computer showed 2 options. [View native world’s Martial Arts] [ View current world’s Martial Arts] “ Hmm, by the native world does it mean my original world? If it is indeed the case then can I use it’s martial arts? No that’s wrong, my world's martial arts are not very powerful and who knows whether they will do any good in a World like this” With this reasoning Carto chose the second option. After clicking the second option, the green progress bar appeared again and started filling up. After 2 minutes as according to Carto’s inner clock, a new page opened up. On the page were all the martial techniques he had seen and even some he didn’t know about! “Hmm the reason for me not knowing some of them should be due to 2 reasons, one is that this computer records everything so it may have recorded them while his attention was somewhere else and the other reason is that these techniques are the techniques that the original Ling Xuan once saw and the computer pulled the information about them from his memories”. Concluded Ling Xuan. While he was checking the techniques Carto suddenly noticed a small question mark icon. “What is this?” Carto thought and then clicked it and as he predicted another page opened with the green progress bar opening up. “These progress bars will soon make me want to