Turns out I was right; she had only made it a couple hundred feet before taking a hard turn into presumably another secret room. I didn’t do my usual theatrics and just infiltrated the minuet edges of the door with magic and pulling the chain on the other end causing it to open. I swear, I have been let down at every turn. The door slid to the side just like the last one, revealing a smaller staircase leading upward. If you're going to have hidden mechanisms and secret entrances at least use them sparingly and properly. The stairs led to a library/office, which was the most exciting thing so far until I went to read one of the books and found it was blank. I swear upon my currently small amount of shiny’s I’m going to level this place to the ground.

Like everything else so far, they were all just for show. The only mildly interesting thing so far is the looky-loo. I gathered the deceptive books because it’s a shame just to waste all this paper just for presumably some status inflation purposes. There must be a real one around here. I looked the room over and found the girl on a ledge directly above me looking at a large book. Instead of finding a latter or stairs I grabbed the ledge and pulled myself up. I got a better look at the book and found that unlike everything else it shockingly had words. My wrath slightly dimmed at this fact but not by much. It seemed to be some sort of grimoire detailing more traditional magic and one very familiar to me.

Primeval, the very first magic ever experimented with by man, and the basis for almost all magics. It was not a set of certain spells or rituals but a style of magic that is defined by taking a natural phenomenon and making it your own. Unlike many others of the pseudo modern times, most of my time built or magic from scratch using such methods. Those were the days. Now, at least in my opinion, people have twisted it into something complicated and flashy to the point that it’s not even useful in battle without someone protecting you. I watched as the girl quickly flipped over to one of my personal favorites, The force multiplier. Something that was pretty high up there in how difficult it was to figure out but stuck close to the core concept. The thing that people of all intelligent creeds use are tools, in other words, force multipliers.

The girl’s hands shook when she came to the page and quickly closed it before tucking it into a leather bag which realistically shouldn’t be able to fit it. A spirit anchor more than likely, which honestly is pretty impressive considering her apparent soul age. You can’t judge a person on their cover rather by their soul, and from what I could tell it was a bit older than her around ten to twelve-year-old appearance. She looked around wearily before skittering to the latter and walking out. She didn’t appear to notice the illusions I had placed to conceal the missing disgraces and continued down the stairs. Ha, deception, there was no way she could notice me and not notice a simple, for me, illusion. Maybe she could only sense my presence, but I’m not narrowing it down to that until some experiments.

After patting myself on the back for not ripping her into very small pieces I jumped down and continued to follow closely. While ever so slowly releasing some aura, I followed a few steps behind. But that was not the only thing happening, I was quickly forming a spatial anomaly to the left and a magic construct to the right of her. Let’s see what she detects first and if it was based on sight. Soon I came to a conclusion when my presence had even surpassed what it was when I made the jump and the other two items had far surpassed it too, her ability was based on sight, or at least her sight was the most sensitive.

My presence continued to increase until she started to show signs of unconsciously sensing me. Her hair was standing on end and her breathing had increased slightly. Soon she sped up and began to search her surroundings until she finally turned behind her and saw my ugly mug. I had revealed myself slightly from the mass of shadows just to give her a bit of a scare. She almost dropped right then and there but was able to keep herself up and went to run before unnaturally freezing in mid-step. With jerky movements she turned and bowed forcefully, I was so shocked I continued with the scare display. Well, I was not expecting that, at all. She showed all signs of flight and not freeze, and I was planning on keeping the act up while chasing her down.

Interesting, very interesting. I decided to test her endurance by seeing how long she would continue to stay there while bearing an increasing amount of my presence. There was a tense silence as she continued to bow with abnormal stillness. We continued this until I noticed signs of magic deterioration causing her to spit up some blood. I don’t want to majorly harm her, so I promptly stopped and erased my presence again. She failed to completely notice the magic construct but did briefly focus on the spatial anomaly before noticing me. But that could be chalked up to her just turning left. Still, it was more than likely that she needed to focus on magic.

When I literally disappeared from her perspective, she dropped like a rock breathing heavily and coughing up blood. Oops. It shouldn’t be too bad hopefully; it seems she was more sensitive than I first thought. Now I couldn’t just walk away to leave her for dead, so I stuck around just in case. Slowly she got her magic back under control and got up before limping back to the office/library. I continued to stick around and warded up the entrance to make sure there would be no unnoticed interruptions.