Wow. It really worked!

Dallion had managed to enter the awakened state without focusing on an object. The room was just as he remembered it from before. The only difference was that this time there was a doorway, as well as two framed items on the wall—a buckler and a short sword. Looking closer, he could see a word beneath each.

“Attack six, Guard nine,” the boy read out loud. The moment he did, a blue rectangle appeared in the middle of the room.

YOU ARE LEVEL 3

“Thank you for the obvious,” Dallion laughed and tapped the rectangle away. “Any way I can see my stats?”

Sadly, the room didn’t respond. Given that he was presented with a single way to continue, the boy walked through the door. Initially he expected to find himself in a corridor, like last time. Instead, he entered a small library. It wasn’t much of a library, rather the same stone room, only full of wooden shelves covered in books. A blond scribe in bright red clothes was sitting at a large wooden table in the corner, writing something on a scroll of paper with a large black feather.

“Hello?” Dallion asked.

The scribe didn’t pay any notice to him.

“I said, hello!”

The scribe looked over his shoulder with bored disgust.

“Who are you?”

“Go back to your room,” the scribe replied. “There’s nothing for you to see here.”

“Okay…” I thought this was my room. “What are you doing, though?

“Are you blind? I’m working.”

“Working on what?” Dallion moved closer. Among the scrolls and pieces of paper, he spotted a map of his village. It looked slightly different from several structures he didn’t remember seeing.

Dherma, Wetie Province? Dallion wondered. He knew that was the name of the village. Strange that he couldn’t remember it until now. Wetie had to be the province belonging to the local noble. Why hadn’t he heard of him before, though?

Curious, Dallion reached out for the map only to get slapped on the hands by the scribe.

“Hey!” Dallion pulled his hand back. “What was that for? I just wanted to get a better look at the map.”

“You don’t need to know about the map,” the scribe snapped. He appeared to be the same age as Dallion, possibly slightly shorter, and definitely far more annoying. “Don’t you have things to do? Just let me work and go about your business!”

“Well, I just might!” Dallion yelled, then turned around and left the library.

See if I don’t! No one talks to me like that in my own awakening room! I’ll go now, but next time I come back, we’ll have words!

The room disappeared. Dallion was again in the dining room of his grandfather’s house, still furious at what had happened. He was just about to vent his frustration to the elder, when he suddenly noticed the old man was smiling.

“How did it go?” The elder asked.

“Well, I found a library.” Most likely that had to be a development linked to his awakened level. It stood to reason that as his level increased, so would his personal realm. Why a library, though? “There was some annoying scribe inside. Said that he was busy working and shooed me out.”

“Why did you leave?”

The question puzzled Dallion, mostly because he had no good answer to it.

“Because he asked me?” That sounded stupid. “It’ll be different next time. Next time I’ll go and tell him exactly what I think of… What’s so funny?”

“You. I didn’t expect your first experience with a limitation echo would be a scribe in a library. You must like books a lot.”

“Nah.” Dallion wanted to say that he preferred to look things up online. However, that would make little sense to anyone in this world. For all intents and purposes, a library was as good a representation as any. “Not that much.”

“It’s different for everyone. There’s one constant—the limitation echo.”

“Limitation echo… what’s that?”

“Have some more to eat.” The old man stood up. “I need to take care of something. I’ll be back in a bit.”

Usually, this was the point in horror movies that the person who uttered those words disappeared never to be seen again. Sometimes they’d leave a vague clue behind, or a bloodied piece of clothing. To Dallion’s relief, his grandfather soon came back with a bottle of alcohol. Remembering the effect the drink had on him last time the elder poured him a glass, the boy quickly pulled away from the table.

“Want some?” The old man offered, to which Dallion vehemently shook his head. “Your loss.” He took a swig from the bottle. “You’ve already noticed that people around here don’t explain much. Everyone just seems to know the basics and goes along with their life.”

The boy nodded.

“The only reason you’ve started to notice is because you’ve reached level three. The greater your awakened level, the more you’ll start to notice, the more you’ll start to question. Didn’t it seem strange that up to a week ago you had so little questions?”

Stranger than you think. The boy thought. If he tried to explain that a week ago he was to be a college freshman in a world full of technology that would appear ten times as magical as the whole awakening thing, people would think him insane.

“That’s because everyone has an echo limiter. Think of it as something that keeps you from asking questions and offering answers, and also keeping things you know hidden from you until you actually need to use that knowledge.”

“In what way?”

“What’s the name of this village?”

“Dherma,” Dallion replied instantly.

“Who’s the name of the lord whose domain we’re part of?”

The boy couldn’t reply. The name was on the tip of his tongue. He had used it dozens of times, everyone had, but for some reason he couldn’t just remember right now.

“That’s what a limiter does, it limits your knowledge. Those who are awakened get a chance to see bits and pieces, they can even trick the echo in their awakening room and glimpse some of their knowledge. However, until the echo is defeated, they’ll never get the whole picture. And just as the average person won’t talk about things, I can’t tell you much more than you already know.”

That was it, the mini-Eureka moment Dallion was hoping for. On the surface his grandfather hadn’t told him much, just a few scraps of information that he could have potentially figured out on his own. However, he had given him the key to unlocking everything.

That’s why you kept repeating that you can tell me things now.

“Who created the echo?” Dallion asked.

“Who do you think?” The old man smirked.

The village chief. Apparently, that also was something that his grandfather couldn’t share openly. “How do I get rid of it?”

“To get rid of an echo, you must defeat it like any unwanted creature in an awakened realm. You’ll have to get a bit stronger than you are now, though.” The elder took another gulp of his bottle. “To destroy all the echoes, though, you need to defeat their creator. And for that you’ll need to break your first major threshold.”