Chapter 10: City Library

Chapter 10: Chapter 10: City Library

After spending some time with Martha in the backyard, Rowan headed upstairs, pulled on a fresh jacket, and grabbed his satchel. If he wanted to make any sense of the soft parchment volume sitting inside his domain, he needed a reference guide or a lexicon for ancient scripts—and the regional branch of the National Library was his best bet.

He walked down the tree-lined suburban street toward the transit stop, the cool morning air filling his lungs. His body felt light and energized, every step effortless thanks to his increased attributes.

Twenty minutes later, Rowan stepped off the bus in front of the grand, stone-columned facade of the district library.

Inside, the quiet atmosphere was filled with the familiar, comforting scent of aged paper and wood polish. Passing the bustling main lobby, Rowan took the stairs up to the Special Collections and Archival Linguistics Section on the third floor—a quiet corridor lined with floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves housing historical texts, dead dialects, and forgotten runic scripts.

He pulled out a chair at a quiet corner table, set his satchel down, and began searching the catalog terminals:

Comparative Primordial Dialects & Script Mapping

A Lexicon of Lost Runes and Glyph Construction

Linguistic Roots of Pre-System Civilizations

Carrying a heavy stack of leather-bound reference books back to his table, Rowan opened the first volume. He closed his eyes briefly, reaching into his inner mind to recall every curve, line, and stroke of the flowing glyphs he had traced inside the giant tree.

With his Legendary Intelligence and elevated Wisdom (16), his photographic memory brought the book’s text into crystal-clear focus. Laying out the archival dictionaries, Rowan began meticulously cross-referencing the foreign symbols against known ancient language trees.

Rowan flipped through the thick, yellowed pages of A Lexicon of Lost Runes, his fingers flying across the screen of his digital tablet as he brought up his notes.

The glyphs from the domain weren’t from a single static language. As he cross-referenced three distinct reference volumes side-by-side, patterns began to emerge across different historical eras and isolated cultures.

The flowing, curved base strokes matched High Elvish Dialects from the First Era, but the tight, geometric accents capping the ends of each character bore the unmistakable structure of Ancient Elemental Runes. Interspersed throughout were delicate, thread-like ligatures that matched fragments of Pre-System Botanical Glyphs—a dead script previously thought to exist only in apocryphal farmstead lore.

"A linguistic hybrid," Rowan whispered to himself, tapping his stylus against the tablet glass.

It wasn’t just one language—it was an ancestral proto-tongue. Whoever had written the volume inside the Primordial Garden had synthesized elements from several lost languages to construct a precise system for recording cosmic and botanical laws.

Because of his 16 Intelligence and 16 Wisdom, his mind cataloged the overlapping structural rules effortlessly:

[ LINGUISTIC BREAKDOWN - PROTO-PRIMORDIAL SCRIPT ]

Syntax Structure: High Elvish (Flowing sentence structure and environmental descriptors)

Symbolic Core: Pre-System Botanical (Nouns and verbs tied directly to growth, soil, and vitality)

Modifier Glyphs: Ancient Elemental (Runes denoting mana flow, time manipulation, and spatial attributes)

Copying the key matching symbols directly onto his tablet, Rowan laid out a crude translation key. While he couldn’t read full paragraphs yet, he could already isolate individual recurring terms across his notes:

[ ] > The Root / Origin

[ ] > Condensed Life Essence / Primordial Water

[ ℭ- ] > Time-Dilation Soil / Accelerated Growth

A quiet thrill settled in Rowan’s chest. He didn’t need to find a single magic translation book—he had all the pieces right here. With a few more hours of cross-referencing, he would have enough of a dictionary compiled on his tablet to step back into the Primordial Garden and translate the first Chapter of the mysterious text.

***

Rowan pulled open the heavy wooden doors to the library’s Comparative Mythology and Religious Texts section. Moving down the quiet aisles, he pulled thick, leather-bound translations of the ancient world’s primary spiritual texts from the shelves:

The Holy Bible

The Holy Quran

The Tripitaka

The Guru Granth Sahib

The Bhagavad Gita

Laying them out side-by-side across his wide study table, Rowan flipped open his tablet and began cross-referencing passages. As his eyes skimmed the translated verses, a striking, undeniable pattern emerged across every single tradition—each spoke of a primordial paradise, a sacred origin point framed as an eternal garden.

In Genesis, Rowan read of Eden—a garden planted at the beginning of time where two sacred trees stood at the center: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. Four rivers flowed out of it to water the world, and its soil yielded fruit without toil.

Turning to the Quran, he found descriptions of Jannah—literally "The Garden"—described as lush, shaded sanctuaries beneath which rivers flow. Verses in Surah Al-Baqarah and Surah Ar-Rahman spoke of eternal greenery, spring waters that restore energy, and soil that never goes infertile.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna speaks of the cosmic Ashvattha tree—an eternal, divine tree whose roots extend upward into the unseen realms and whose branches spread down into the earth, symbolizing the root of all life and wisdom.

Flipping through the Tripitaka, Rowan encountered descriptions of the Pure Lands and the Jambudvipa central tree, where the soil was made of soft, radiant lapis and gold, and a single drop of water from its central spring could grant clarity, peace, and spiritual awakening.

In the Guru Granth Sahib, he highlighted line after line describing the divine realm as a blooming, timeless garden (Phulwari) cultivated by a supreme keeper where no decay, withered leaves, or winter could ever touch the earth.

Rowan leaned back in his leather chair, staring at his tablet as his 16 Wisdom connected the dots.

"It wasn’t just metaphor," he murmured under his breath, tracing his fingers across the digital notes.

Across every isolated civilization and long-lost culture, ancient humans hadn’t merely been writing poetry—they were describing the exact same spatial phenomenon. They were recording glimpses of the Primordial Garden, the very domain he now possessed. The massive tree covering the island, the marble gate, the crystal-clear spring water that restored his attributes, and the fertile, time-dilated soil—it was all there, preserved in the oldest sacred books on Earth.

His class, [Domain: The Virgin Soil], wasn’t just a garden skill. It was the inheritance of the origin garden itself.

Rowan leaned back in the heavy oak chair, the library’s quiet atmosphere humming softly around him as his 16 Wisdom synthesized the vast array of texts.

The pieces fell into place with absolute, undeniable clarity.

These ancient scriptures weren’t just spiritual allegories or mythic poetry written by dreamers. They were empirical field notes. They were the travelogues, journals, and recorded experiences of his predecessors—the ancient holders of unique domain talents who had inherited [The Virgin Soil] long before the modern System ever revealed itself to humanity.

Every culture had given its owner a different name: a prophet, a saint, an enlightened sage, or a divine cultivator. But the underlying mechanics they described were identical:

The Genesis Author had stepped through a marble threshold into an untouched sanctuary, beholding the vast canopy of the central tree and the four rivers flowing from its root.

The Vedic Sages had drunk from the subterranean spring, feeling the permanent surge of attribute growth and spiritual clarity before writing of the divine Ashvattha tree.

The Buddhist Masters had experienced the domain’s time dilation, stepping into the "Pure Land" for what felt like years of meditation, only to return to the mortal world after a few brief minutes.

Rowan tapped his stylus against the tablet screen, staring at the side-by-side linguistic comparisons.

"They weren’t just visiting the garden," Rowan whispered to himself, a thrill running down his spine. "They were managing it. And the book on the wooden table..."

His eyes narrowed as he looked at the handwritten glyphs copied on his tablet. The unknown book in the giant tree wasn’t an ancient divine artifact left behind by gods. It was a logbook. A generational diary passed down from one Domain Keeper to the next, written in a synthesized language created to preserve their discoveries across millennia.

He was not the first to hold this power—but he was its current caretaker. And with the modern System now active, he had the tools to take their ancient foundation further than any predecessor ever had.

Rowan closed his tablet, packed his satchel, and stood up from the library table with renewed purpose. It was time to go home, open the logbook, and read what the previous Keepers had left for him.