Darian, left alone in the room, immediately threw himself on the hard bed; his head fell on the soft pillow while the rest of his body lay on the hard part of the bed.
Darian breathed heavily as he looked at the ceiling; the light in the room was still on, so Darian couldn't sleep at all.
'I guess I need to find a way to turn this off…' Darian slowly got up and searched around until he noticed what looked to be the light switch on the desk.
The moment he arrived there and was about to press the switch, he stopped for a moment. 'I'm alone, right?' Darian wanted to be sure that he was actually alone and that Zrelekai wouldn't randomly pop into the room.
The moment he stopped thinking, the room remained silent; no one was coming for him. "I need to see if this works…" Darian, no longer caring about the light switch, tried to turn on the monitor on the desk.
With his hand, he searched for the button behind the screen. It must be around here… Darian searched for the button, but the more he searched, the more it seemed like he wouldn't be able to find it.
'Oh wait.' Darian suddenly realized that the wires weren't attached to the monitor. "Let's try this…" Darian grabbed the few wires next to the monitor and began to attach them.
'This should go around here…' Darian grabbed the first wire and attached it; the moment he heard the click, the monitor turned on.
"It's working!" said Darian, almost shouting. Realizing his voice was too loud, he immediately closed his mouth and became silent, looking at the door, scared that someone might enter, but it didn't happen.
Darian, realizing he was safe, looked at the monitor. There was a blue screen with nothing written on it, and as time passed, the screen would glitch. "Maybe I need to attach something else?" Darian grabbed the other wires to see if attaching them would change anything, but these wires weren't related to the monitor.
'I don't think I can use these wires…' Darian left the wires where they were and kept looking at the monitor. As he waited for something to happen, he felt bored; the screen would just glitch without any sign of working.
"Tch… I guess he removed something before I arrived." Darian tried to turn off the monitor, but realizing there wasn't a button, he could only remove the wire.
'It doesn't make sense to have a monitor not working like this…' Darian looked again at the monitor and couldn't stop thinking about something. How the hell can this work? Darian finally realized something.
In any other building he had been in, there wasn't any electricity, but in this one, the lightbulb was working without any problem. But it shouldn't be possible… Darian pressed the switch, the lightbulb turned off, and the whole room became dark.
Darian, who couldn't believe his eyes, turned the switch on again, and light returned to the room. 'I don't get it… can he create electricity, too?' Darian sat down on the bed and began thinking again about what he had seen of Zrelekai.
"He created the tea and the cookies… so if, hypothetically, he is an Altered too… I guess he must be able to create everything with his power?" Darian began thinking about this until he took the book Zrelekai had left on the table.
Darian didn't know how this creature could create things. He started to see if there were any answers in this book, but the only thing he was able to find was a guide that talked about the best cookies to serve during a tea party.
"He must have understood about the cookies from there…" Darian read that the most loved cookies were extremely crunchy and had some lemon inside them; in the book, there were pictures of cookies with chocolate chips on them, too.
At the end of the page, there were the biscuits that one should never serve during a tea party: the ones that were too soft and had weird flavors.
"But it doesn't make any sense… the answer isn't there." Darian closed the book and left it on the table. The moment he got up, he went near the drawers that held a lot of books and began to inspect them.
"I wonder if he actually read all these books…" Darian took a random book in his hands; this one talked about electricity and how it worked.
Darian, reading through this book, realized that it explained in detail how electricity works. 'Okay, so… if he actually needs to understand something to create it with his power… does that mean he learned it from there?' Darian realized that all the books there talked about different topics, and even if there were similar books, they explained something different from the others.
"I can't believe he read all of them…" Darian's eyes suddenly caught a stranger book; it was very dusty, and it felt as though no one had touched it for a very long time.
Darian blew away the dust, and what he saw on the book made his heart beat faster: it talked about weapons and how to make them.
Darian started to read this book aloud. The more he read, the more he couldn't believe what he was looking at; this book explained in detail how to create a weapon, from the simplest to the most difficult.
"I—" Darian didn't even know what he could say. This book was an extremely detailed guide that talked about some stuff Darian didn't know about either.
"Wait… he took a pistol from there earlier!" Darian immediately closed the book, left it where it was, and started to search the drawers to see if he would be able to find any other weapons. "I'm sure he must have forgotten one of them here…" Darian searched through the drawers.
The first things he was able to find were tons of old wires; most of them weren't even attached to anything and had multiple holes, in fact, they were totally ruined.
"Not here…" Darian opened another drawer and found an old keyboard with several mice.
"A keyboard, too?" Darian grabbed this old keyboard. It had all the letters on it, even if Darian couldn't recognize them because the words were written in the same way Zrelekai had done.
"Hey, but there isn't even QWERTY on this keyboard…" Darian noticed that the letters were placed randomly. He wanted to test the keyboard, but he didn't have anything to try it on.
The mice were all of different types; Darian noticed that none of them even had a scroll wheel. "Strange…" Darian took one of the mice, the oldest one, and started to open it.
"It's dusty and broken… he won't even realize that I've opened it." Darian easily removed the right button and noticed that the inside of the mouse was almost empty; the only things Darian found were some wires and an extremely old battery.
"Hey, this is one of the batteries he took before…" Darian slowly removed the battery from the mouse and looked at it curiously. 'I don't get it… why do you have this many batteries?' Darian put the battery back into the mouse, and the moment he positioned it back in the drawer, he placed the right button on it; even if it wasn't attached, Darian closed the drawer carefully.
"Let's see if he has another battery or a weapon…" Darian was losing hope of finding a weapon; the only things he was able to find were old papers until he found what looked to be an old letter.
"What's written here?" Darian removed the dust from the old paper and began to read it aloud.
"My body has started to change… Ashikunz told me that with his blood I'll be able to live longer… I can't believe him. He saved me while I was about to die, yeah, but I can't understand what he needs from me and why he saved me. From what I was able to understand, he hates humans a lot, so I can't find an explanation; maybe it was because I implored him to save me?" With this, the letter stopped, and Zrelekai hadn't written anything more on this paper.
'His blood? Maybe that Krukin made him drink his blood…' Darian thought that there must definitely be other letters in this room. Forgetting about the other things, he immediately started to search for more papers until he found something.
"100g of flour, 2 pieces of lemon, some water, 3 pieces of watermelon, and a bit of fire to cook them… Damn, this is only a recipe for his stupid cookies." Darian left the recipe back in the drawer and kept searching.
"There must be something more…" whispered Darian as he searched inside the drawers. Suddenly, he found a very long letter. "Finally!" Darian, happy that he was able to find something important and long, sat down on the stool and started to read it aloud.
"Ashikunz, thank you for everything; you have actually given me a new life! Thanks to the fact that my body has started to change, I feel less pain and I'll be able to live longer. I've extracted some blood from my body and it looked completely different, it was slowly becoming black. I don't know how this really happened, but I think it is because a human's body can easily adapt to everything? Thanks to this transformation, I've been able to use my magic for longer; my soul has finally become stronger and I don't feel tired anymore. I can finally read more books and understand more things about the old world. I don't have to worry anymore about anything; Ashikunz will protect me and he will keep bringing me new books. Still, he hasn't told me yet where he can find them… I wonder if he has some sort of secret? Meh, I don't care; as long as I'm able to understand more about this old world, I'm happy with everything."
'It ends here?' Darian couldn't understand. The paper was extremely long, and Zrelekai stopped writing here? As his eyes moved down, he found something strange in the last lines.
"Eheheh… :D" The paper ended with a simple smiling face. Darian remained shocked at the sight of that, not knowing how to act.
"Yawn…" The moment he put the letter back in the drawer, he realized that he was feeling tired. Darian, realizing that his body couldn't keep up anymore, lay down on the hard bed.
'Guys…' Darian completely forgot to turn off the light and was looking up at the ceiling. In his mind, he started to think about his friends, wondering if they were doing alright like him.
'I feel like I've been lucky… but what about you?' In his mind, the faces of his friends were currently popping up. 'It feels like Zrelekai is only interested in people with knowledge like me… the others don't have that much knowledge except for Liro…' Darian's body shook in fear as he thought about what Zrelekai might have done to them.
The last image that popped up inside Darian's mind was Snowy. 'I hope that stupid guy hasn't done anything bad to you, Snowy… or I'll definitely kill him without hesitation.' With this thought in mind, Darian slowly fell asleep.