Death's Door

He managed to spot the thief who had stabbed him previously.

Pretending to be nonchalant, Nur exited the shack, only to be greeted by the masked thief after walking a few blocks away from the building.

"You never quit, do you?" Nur turned around facing the masked person behind him.

"Hand over all your…" the masked person didn"t get to finish nor swing the knife. Nur quickly approached the masked person, grabbed him by the hand that clutched the knife and flipped him over the shoulder, slamming him on the ground.

Luckily for Nur, the months he spent inside Shinigami"s domain were not meaningless. Desolai h.o.a.rded so many human books inside her library that he found himself entranced by them. In particular, one of his favorites was a book that gave instructions on how to use opponent"s body weight against the opponent. He chose to utilize this knowledge to quickly deal with his would be murderer.

"Don"t ever come near me again." Nur said to the dazed thief, who was lying on the ground, unable to move a muscle.

With his money pouch in his pocket, Nur proceeded to walk forward.

He eventually found a library. Apparently the place was a sanctuary for those who pursued the ways of higher thinking, or at least that"s what the clerk in the library said. The fee for access to book was not a small sum either.

"Twenty bronze coins" the clerk stated the price.

Nur reluctantly handed over the amount of coins requested. But like this, he had a permanent membership, meaning he could come to the library whenever he wanted to.

He spent the entirety of the first day inside the library, trying to find answers about where he was the name of the kingdom, and most importantly the deity who sent him here-Chronos.

Well, he found out he is inside the kingdom of Kizilalem, so that was a progress. As for Chronos, he found only mentions of her as a primary deity, but that was all he could find.

The next day, he found a place to eat that was ok with humanoids eating there. Best part? It only cost two bronze coins for a meal.

The day after that, Nur hoped would be uneventful. He was wrong.

It was a public execution. He saw from far away that a girl was taken out of wooden cage after someone who looked like a priest did some kind of a ritual with her. She was tied to a circular shaped wooden post, with her hands and legs tied to the cuffs attached to it.

"BURN THE WITCH! BURN THE WITCH!" everyone was shouting in unison, almost in a melodic tone. It was rather disturbing. Nur didn"t feel any sympathy for the girl, but he did find the act of burning young girl barbaric.

What followed were screams of pain, anguish, and then after a while the body was reduced to dust.

It was not a pretty sight, but everyone, except Nur were cheering as if something of triumph has happened.

Deeply disturbed, Nur locked himself inside of a library.

After witnessing the witch being burned, he wanted to find out more about witches, so he found himself reading a book about them. His curiosity made him stay up until the night. Everyone already left the library. The last couple of days he did sleep with books on the floor.

When he was about to doze off, a symbol on the last page caught his eye. A symbol of a five sided flower. What was odd was the fact that the same symbol was imprinted on one wall on otherwise clear surface. Out of sheer curiosity, Nur touched the symbol on the wall, the brick moved backwards.

This triggered some kind of mechanism. The floor below the wall opened to reveal a secret entrance. The library had torches that lit the hallways-apparently magical flames powered by the mana stones. So, Nur took one torch with him and proceeded to enter the underground secret room of the library.

The stairs went downwards, towards a s.p.a.ce as large as two rooms. There were some levers present, along with a table, old ink and quill, and countless books in shelves.

Nur put the torch up in a holster that apparently was present inside this structure. The secret room was likely designed so that someone could enter it with a torch and had a place to put the torch in.

Nur fooled around with the levers and found out that one closes the entrance to the underground room while the other opens it. After closing the entrance, he proceeded to look at the books on the shelves.

Sadly, each one was empty.

"Aw c"mon! Is there a secret room here because the maker of the room wanted to secretly write books but was too lazy to do so?" he threw one book down on the table in frustration.

What caught his eye was a scribbly writing on the back of the cover page.

"IF WISH TO OBTAIN WHAT THE BOOK HOLDS, GIVE A DROP OF DEMON BLOOD, AND SECRET UNFOLDS"

"Demon blood? Where the heck am I supposed to get that? But wait…" he remembered the first time he met Desolai, she called him a demon. She never jokes around, so it couldn"t have been an insult, she must have been stating a fact.

Nur used the sharp end of quill to pierce his thumb and allowed a drop of blood to touch the page of the book.

As soon as the drop of blood touched the pages, the blank pages became full of sentences.

"I see, so the books were not empty, just hidden within themselves!" Nur had eureka moment of realization. "So Desolai wasn"t kidding. I really am a demon then." He touched his forehead, looking for horns. "But apparently a hornless one." He smiled and focused on the content of the book that now became visible.

Just like that, Nur proceeded to read the books. All of them were about witches.

After getting carried away with the books for the next four days, forgetting to eat, having just a flask of water with him, Nur finally closed the third book. He got carried away, so he ended up reading very long books. But there were several more books on the shelves. Nur sighed at his situation.

Then, he heard a noise from the above, a scream and sound of crashing.

When he opened the entrance with the lever, he found out that the library"s top half has been destroyed. It looked like it was ripped off by force and flung elsewhere.

It was not a natural disaster that caused this, it was dragons.

Red Dragons, colossal in size, with wingspans that were about as big as ten people, were destroying everything in sight. People were running in panic, but most were killed by fire, eaten, or crushed under rubble.

When Nur looked at his side, he saw knights fighting off a dragon, rather unsuccessfully.

What Nur didn"t notice however was the dragon that flew from behind him. As he felt the air grow hotter, Nur turned around and saw the Dragon about to breath fire upon him.

In a flash of light, a white knight appeared between Nur and the dragon and proceeded to slash the dragon with his mighty sword, causing the dragon to lose its head, spluttering blood all over Nur who was right in front of the dragon.

The blood ended up splashing on the left side of Nur"s face, covering almost majority of his body. The blood stung his left eye, forcing him to look with his right. To his horror, the white knight was now off fighting another dragon, so when a red dragon dropped out of nowhere from the sky with mouth open to bite him, Nur couldn"t do anything.

With a single chomp, Nur"s body was cut off from his legs and he was swallowed whole by the dragon. What followed was an extremely painful trip down the Dragon"s digestive system after thorough chewing. Nur was still alive while his skin was boiled in the cauldron of digestive fluids inside the stomach, only losing his life when the acid started to get to his bones.

"Twenty bronze coins" the clerk stated the price.

"Ah?" Nur looked at the clerk with surprised expression. "The library, it is still here, not destroyed! And you are alive, not eaten!"

"Not eaten? What kind of nonsense is that? Of course I am alive and well." The clerk said indignantly. "If this is a ploy to not to pay for the library membership, then forget it."

"Oh, don"t worry, I will pay" Nur handed over the twenty coins to him.

"Are you feeling ok? I mean, your eye looks terrible."

"My eye? What do you mean?" Nur asked. Clerk just handed him the mirror.

Nur now saw why the clerk thought that eye looked terrible. His right eye was fine, it was the usual color of brown, but his left eye was completely ruby red.

"What the heck?" he thought internally, but in order to not generate any suspicion, he said "Don"t worry, my eye is fine, I was just born this way." The clerk bought the lie with a shrug.

When the night arrived, Nur went to the underground room he discovered in his previous life. There he sat upon the chair, clutching his head in confusion.

"Carriages, demi-humans, thieves, now dragons? What the h.e.l.l is wrong with this place? Practically everything wants to kill me!"

Inside her domain, Chronos was scratching her head in confusion. The crystal orb that allowed her to keep track of Desolai"s servant has stopped functioning. It was linked to his soul, so it was strange that it would appear blank. After all, her curse prevented him from dying. If he died and his soul ascended, then it would return to Desolai, his master, reuniting the two in the process. One of the reasons she placed the curse on him was to prevent that from happening.

"Mrakus, something has made the crystal orb unable to keep track of him. I need you to go there and keep an eye on him without him knowing. I want full reports on what he is doing daily. Understood?" she said as if talking to an unintelligent dog.

"Of course, your eminence." Mrakus said with a gentlemanly bow. On the inside he thought "Chronos, this way I can control what you know and what you don"t know. He he he…" his face however was unchanged, completely hiding his true feelings.