Darius ignored her reaction and entered the room. He was utterly shocked once he pushed open the door and saw that instead of rows of books, there was only endless darkness with spots of light floating about like stars.
The spots of light were numerous, almost uncountable. They extended from close to Darius to as far as the eyes could see. Not only that, but when he touched them, they just bounced away like floating balls.
Darius' surprise slowly diminished as his lips couldn't help but twitch.
He finally understood the deviousness of God Krona. By presenting the information in such a way, a person needed Mind Power at the minimum to interact with these bubbles of information.
This created three factors that benefited the God of Knowledge, acting as detriments to all knowledge seekers.
For one, since Mind Power was a requirement, it meant that anyone with less than 50 Intellect would basically waste their time.
Of course, they could simply leave and store their reading hours until they acquired Mind Power, but how long would that take?
Becoming an Adept was no easy thing, even if one was born in a top-tier empire instead of a shithole like the Andrato Kingdom.
If this was the case, then it should have been advertised before, but God Krona and the various informants had kept mum.
The second factor was that once one connected to each bubble, they would have to 'download' the information to their mind based on the amount of Intellect they had.
No matter how much they had, even if they were a Grandmaster Archmage, they would not be able to swallow everything within one room given what Darius was seeing.
So Krona was truly devious. This time, one could not complain, because the speed of acquisition depended solely on your own abilities and not anything else.
The third factor was the fact that the bubbles had no labels. So if one wanted specific information, they would have to tirelessly search for it in particular, and that would likely force them to make repeated trips here.
From beginning to end, Darius simply could not believe the sheer shamelessness. God Krona was right, forget 2.8 years, even 30 would not be enough to clear one section alone.
Even if he spat out the information God Krona wanted, he still wouldn't be able to clear all five sections within his mortal lifetime unless he could reach the level of a Supreme or attain a higher lifeform.
Darius - and all fellows who sought to steal Krona's information in one go - had been caught in the trap the God of Knowledge had weaved.
Thinking that a normal human, with his flimsy life that didn't even amount to a full century, could be smarter and more devious than a being that had lived for thousands and also possessed the Divine Attribute of Knowledge… truly arrogant beyond comprehension.
Darius sighed as he passed a hand through his hair. He frowned deeply for a minute or two, wondering what he could use to speed up his task. Miranda was his first option, as she could directly connect to his mind.
So instead of downloading the knowledge to his memory banks, he would act like a conduit and feed the information to Miranda's almost endless storage, her processing power was far greater than he, so no matter how much was in the bubbles she could get it down quickly.
However, the problem was still there. His overall download speed was limited by his Mind Power.
Darius's second option was to use the Adept Bugs or even all his bugs. With the power of the Bugcloud and their numbers, they could easily Bugdownload the information in one fell swoop.
This was the best plan, but it had one fatal flaw. It was the fact that Darius was subtly aware that God Krona was watching him, wondering what he would do to bypass the limitations God Krona had put in place.
The moment he revealed the bugs, even if God Krona was kind enough not to smash him into paste at once, he would definitely use it as blackmail material to force Darius to cough up the information, then either kill Darius or shoo him away.
So that option, despite being great, was bust.
Darius had an assortment of items for sure, but none of them could be used to help. For some, they could yield some assistance but they were too valuable/controversial that Darius didn't dare remove them.
Even the Foci of the Adept, the most useful item he had for this situation which would allow him to forcibly raise his Mind Power to the Master-stage, had a terrible drawback, being that Int could no longer be raised after its usage.
Using it would be killing the chicken to claim the eggs, utterly foolish.
Darius was also tempted to Transmute something on the spot that could help, but this would result in a similar issue as with the bugs.
He could fearlessly do such things in front of ignorant people like Portia and Foldo, because they had no clue what he was doing, but God Krona would definitely see through it.
Darius eventually knuckled his forehead and gave up. He had 25,000 hours so he could come again and again. It was possible that in the future, he would acquire something that could help him.
As such, he spent the entire day acquiring what he could with Miranda's help, which, as expected, was merely a drop in the ocean, before leaving resolutely.
It was time to return to Fallon and regroup all his assets then consolidate.
He already had the entirety of the public info on the cloud, so what was in the restricted section could be slowly pried out or forcefully taken in the near future. There was no rush.
When Darius arrived in front of the inn, he saw Gunner and Xela standing there together, chatting and laughing about something.
Once he approached, they greeted him with smiles, making him even more curious about the cause of their good mood.
Xela, who already had enough Mind Power to almost be psychic, seemed to read Darius' question and spoke while tittering. "Hehe, Master Darius, you won't believe what happened today!"
