“Oh, son of a bitch!”

He’d spent what felt like two entire weeks within the archive that might have only been a few minutes in the real world, going over everything he’d seen in his first dozen volumes again and again, trying to deconstruct the dead languages based on the context clues he had and even felt like he had gotten pretty far with the project, or at least as far as he could considering what he had.

Given that, he’d decided it was time to see if any of the other books would help him pick up a few more words here and there or else help him confirm some of his less certain guesses, only to get more than he’d ever hoped for.

The first page was like any other. A galwaxian creating a new spell. In that particular case, one that merged lightning with a poison effect, but things got infinitely more useful from there. Unlike all of the rest who seemed to refine their discoveries out in the field, this one instead did it in what he wanted to describe as a lab with a notebook in hand, recording discoveries and thinking about what they were writing as they did it, giving him the sounds each character represented and a bit more context for the numbers as well.

As he was seeing it he was already comparing it against the writings in the other dozen books, sounding out the words they made to compare against what he’d heard in each memory and examining the written words that hadn’t previously come up in anything he’d heard, looking at how it related to the rest as his work felt like it had taken a major leap forward.

Even if he was still missing information, the greater pool of examples let him refine his ideas on the way the language was structured and either raise or lower some of his guesses on translations, he just needed to keep going.

Hours flew by as he studied, going back over everything he’d already taken in to look at any similarities and differences between the different languages he was seeing as well, feeling his minds pound under the strain. At that point it was no longer some unsolvable mystery, but instead a puzzle that used not only what each book contained, but the accounts of his day-to-day life as he thought back to hundreds of conversations he’d had across dozens of days, breaking down the words that both he and his conversation partners had used to determine commonality and their usage rates to compare that against what he’d expect from his native english, trying to find common rules that might transcend species, even if they were going to be soft.

Doing that helped clear up even more for him. Common words, it, of, that, to, the, and more from there would take up the majority of any normal language as long as it wasn’t akin to any of the madness his god’s people spoke and it narrowed his search down all of the more, letting him refine further until he was left with only the more specialized ones that wouldn’t come up as frequently. Those were the ones that he needed to master still, but with what he was already feeling confident with, the problem became so much more manageable.

He tried to think in the first language he’d gotten to hear, putting it to use as far as he understood it to find gaps that way, then looked at what he was still missing and compared it to the yet unknown options he had.

It wasn’t quick, none of it was. Even if only a little time had passed in the real world, under the effects of unnatural thought speed and the time distortion effects of the archive, it felt like more days were passing in his study, but it was something he let himself get absorbed in until finally he reopened the first book to see first hand how well he had done.

Just like the first time he’d opened it, he was in the body of a panicked galaxian who was in the process of facing down a herd of what looked like flying sharks, but now he understood the thoughts behind the actions. There were still words here and there he wasn’t certain of, but at the very least the spell that brought the beasts down was no longer a mystery. It seemed the being he was living through had led an exciting life, taking on the same trial Ben had been forced into and recreating a spell in a novel way.

While Ben had negative memories of suffering under a non-affinitied gravity effect, it seemed the person he was living through had sought to recreate it with the magics they had, ending with the same result from a combination of space and earth.

Brilliant. No wonder this guy was able to leave a record here, this must have taken a lot of work to pull off. ‘Course, given the situation he was in when he first started it doesn’t look like he had much of a choice but I of all people can’t argue against the idea that desperation can breed innovation. I’ll have to use this in a bit of my own work.

Despite any poor feelings he might have about Galwax, he wasn’t going to let that extend to his race, nor whatever discoveries they may have made. It was obvious they were a magic-focused people and an advanced one at that, so he closed the book with a satisfying thud, already imagining what else he might be able to learn from them, only to be faced with a unique change.

The book, which had originally had a blue cover like every other one he was seeing, had turned to red when he’d closed it.

“What? Okay, this is new. It didn’t do this any time before, did I do something wrong? No, that’s dumb, I’m applying human colour theory to an alien race. I definitely understood what was happening in there so is that it? It changed colours because something in all of this detected that I successfully understood what it contained?”

He didn’t know what it could mean, but it was a mystery that couldn’t help but leave him feeling excited. If he was right then he would see it again as he finished the next book.

And then the one after that, and the one after that, but is this it or is it something more?

He supposed marking a book to say he’d gotten all he could out of it could have just been a way to keep track of what he’d read, but he didn’t think that was it. It was too small of a thing for a mythic artifact left by a dead god, which left only one question ringing out in his head.

Just what’s going to happen if I properly understand them all?

Even if it felt as though he’d spent a couple weeks in the archive by that point, it didn’t matter. It would still be deep into the night in the real world and he’d finally cracked the code for working out the languages it contained, he could only hope that whatever would happen at the end would live up to his rising expectations.