Shang returned to his Isolation Barrier after talking with the Lightning Emperor and immediately started to read the books.
Reading books was something that Shang wasn't used to doing since he got all of his knowledge from other people or from his own experience.
In fact, it felt very weird to be reading a book.
Even more, Shang wasn't interested at all in the content.
Shang was interested in Concepts and how the world worked, but these books only talked about the history of how Mages comprehended Concepts and what they had learned.
Shang was essentially learning how to learn, which wasn't the most fun activity.
Nevertheless, Shang never lost his focus, even though he wasn't interested at all.
Shang read the first couple of books in barely a couple of minutes, but then, he read a book that was not as easy to comprehend.
The book didn't seem longer than all the other ones, but as soon as Shang started to go through the pages, he realized that the stack of pages near the end never seemed to shrink.
Just to check, Shang went to the last pages and looked at the page number.
1,534,917.
Shang closed the book and checked the cover.
Basic Guide to Comprehension.
Then, Shang opened the book again and continued reading.
The book was basically a list of different ways to comprehend Concepts, how people came up with these methods, how they worked, what the disadvantages and advantages were, and what the author of the book recommended.
Luckily, Shang didn't need to spend a lot of time on the book. Yes, it was very long, and Shang read all of it, but he didn't really need to calculate things. He just needed to read.
This book took Shang nearly an hour to read, and he didn't remember a lot of it since 99% of the contents were useless to him.
However, the one percent that was actually useful was REALLY useful.
Shang didn't immediately open the next book. Instead, he reviewed his method of comprehending Concepts with the methods he had just learned.
His method had also been in the book, and by reading how a third person evaluated that method, Shang had learned more about how he actually learned.
With that knowledge, he could also consider other methods, and most important of all, one could use more than one method at a time.
Shang had barely read more than an hour, but he was sure that this single hour had probably saved him decades, if not centuries.
After several hours, Shang looked at the books and began to organize them.
First, he grabbed all the books that were related to comprehension methods he didn't find useful and leafed through them.
He wouldn't dedicate his entire mind to them since they would very likely be useless, but it was still worth it to just skim them.
Sure enough, there were a couple of things that explained a bit more of the methods, but it wasn't that useful. It was just a bit of basic knowledge.
In just an hour, Shang had consumed over a thousand books and got rid of the most uninteresting books.
After that, Shang decided to focus on more general knowledge and opened the next overview.
This guide was not about comprehension methods but about materials and substances that could help.
The guide kept referring to the other huge guide Shang had read, which prompted him to look at the author of the book.
It was the same author.
Even more, the name was actually familiar to Shang.
Lightning Manor's Myriad King.
Shang checked through all the other books and took out all of them that had been written by the Myriad King.
Seven.
And they were all insanely long and broad.
Shang spent the next five days on these books, constantly cross-referencing them.
When he was done, he created his own method for comprehension over the next four weeks.
Finally, Shang created his method and focused on reading more books.
The first couple of books were finished in just a couple of seconds.
Shang basically already knew everything that was written inside them.
Shang read the next 1,000 books in just a couple of hours, and he didn't learn a lot from them.
This prompted Shang to look at the seven books from the Myriad King again.
It was actually insane how condensed and perfectly understandable these seven books were.
All the other books talked about essentially the same thing but barely covered the surface while wasting a lot of time on unnecessary information.
If one didn't have access to the library of a literal Mage Emperor, how difficult would it be to learn all of what Shang had learned without consulting these seven books?
Naturally, to someone like Shang, all of this didn't matter as much since he essentially had access to every single book in the world.
But to a normal Mage?
If these seven books spread throughout the world, the average power of all Mages might skyrocket.
Shang was quite confident that Mages outside Empires didn't have access to these books. The Mages' comprehension of Concepts was simply far too slow.
Shang guessed that only Clouds had access to all these books and probably not even for free.
Shang could imagine a Spark working for many years just to purchase a very abridged version of one of these books, which only had 10,000 pages or so.
Meanwhile, Boltlings could probably purchase expensive versions with over 100,000 pages.
And Clouds could probably purchase the complete versions.
Shang was pretty sure that he had learned most of the things that there were to learn from this pile of books, but Shang wasn't a careless person.
So, he decided to read all the books.
Some hours later, he had read another 2,000, leaving only a thousand remaining.
Shang learned a couple of things, but not a lot.
Shang mindlessly moved the next book in front of him to read it, but he paused when he noticed something.
In comparison to all the other books, this one wasn't in pristine condition.
Tiny particles of dust and age had fallen off the book when Shang had moved it, prompting him to be more careful.
Naturally, all the other books were copies in pristine condition, but this one wasn't.
This was obviously an original and a very old one at that.
The title was rather plain.
A Watcher's Record.
Shang opened it and began to read, but he received one shock after the other very quickly.
First, the author introduced himself.
The Archivist.
Second, the start of the actual contents.
"I want to start from when I reached the Ninth Realm, which was about 6.7 million years ago."
