Nameless King

Wain passed through the gate at the other end of the tunnel, and to his surprise, he saw a blue sky and hundreds of clouds all around him.

"What...?" Wain muttered puzzledly.

He was surprised. It seemed to him as if he were floating among the azure sky. It was something impossible to see without the ability to fly. The scene mesmerized Wain.

Wain looked around and realized that he was standing on a cloud. It was an unusual feeling, but during the battle with Forgotten, he had been standing on clouds too.

"I need to figure out which way to go," Wain muttered and concentrated.

He felt the energy fluctuate and looked up. To his surprise, he saw another layer of clouds in the distance. It was as if there was another sky above the sky.

"I have to go up again, all right, but how do I get there?" Wain pondered and looked again at the clouds around him.

There were no bridges between the clouds, and the clouds were not static. They were slowly drifting across the sky like an azure sea. Wain also noticed that there were objects on the clouds.

When he looked closely, he realized that they were bookcases. Moreover, when he turned around, he found that there was also one bookcase on his cloud, completely filled with books.

"Hmm, I can wait for the clouds to float close together, but it might take forever to get up that way. Moreover, given my previous experience getting into the Purgatory zone, these books are here for a reason." Mumbled Wain and picked up a random book.

He read it pretty quickly. It took him about ten minutes. Although his reading speed was incredible, the books in the cabinets were pretty thick. An average person would have needed a full twenty-four hours to read it.

However, Wain did not get any useful information. The book he read was an ordinary tale. The next five books were the same. They were fantasy stories about knights, dragons, feats, and magic.

"When the apocalypse happened in my world, at first I thought that people began to become magicians. However, that was not the case. Souls and Soul Essence are like magic, but that's not the right definition.

If a dragon can breathe fire, it's not magic but its natural abilities. With Soul Essence, the situation is exactly the same. Moreover, the powers of people who have magical abilities work the same way." Wain muttered as he closed the book.

In a few hours, Wain had read every book on this cloud. His head was splitting from the sheer amount of information, but he was getting nowhere. Wain lay down on the cloud and looked up at the vast blue sky that surrounded him.

"Damn, what's going on here anyway? Did I really come here to read fucking stories?!" Wain said furiously.

He stood up and kicked the bookcase with all his might the next moment. The bookcase was regular wood, so Wain's blow shattered it into splinters.

The top half of the bookcase fell down, but Wain found another book at the bottom of the bookcase. It was gray and shabby, but it was the only clue Wain had. Moreover, it was much thinner than the previous ones. This book had no more than twenty pages.

Wain opened it and read it in less than three minutes. However, he did not understand anything, for it was not some story. It was a manual.

"It's strange, the book talks about controlling some mechanisms, yet there's nothing around. Damn, I need to reread it all." Mumbled Wain.

His passive Mastery of Reading skill not only greatly increased his reading speed but also improved his perception of information. However, even this was not enough to understand such a complex manual the first time.

Wain read the book a few times before shrugging his shoulders and tossing it beyond the cloud. Then he bent down and thrust his hand into the center of the cloud. Wain took his hand out, and the next moment there was a stone, round amulet in his palm.

The book talked about how to interact with this amulet and get it. To do this, Wain had to pour Soul Essence into different points on the cloud in a certain order. Also, the amount of Soul Essence and the time between activating the dots had to be observed.

However, Wain decided that now that he knew his target, he could decide everything by brute force. Wain wasn't against cunning plans and solving complex puzzles, but only if it made sense.

In this situation, he broke through the barrier around the amulet with one blow and pulled it out. Given his strength, it was quite easy to do.

"Even though this amulet looks pretty simple, it isn't," Wain muttered, looking at the drawing on the amulet in the form of many lines and dots.

He had read the manual carefully and knew what he had to do with this amulet, but besides the old book, Wain had another way to find out some information about the amulet.

[Amulet (????)

You can use this amulet to activate a certain mechanism. It requires using some Soul Essence and activating the anchor points in the right sequence].

'What?!' Wain was surprised. He hadn't expected that there would be so little information about this amulet and that some of it would be encrypted.

Wain shook his head and muttered, "I shouldn't be surprised, though. I'm in the Purgatory zone now, and anything can happen here."

Wain had no other option to move to the next cloud, so he concentrated and poured some Soul Essence into the amulet. It looked like a white dot, gradually moving along the lines on the amulet. Wain knew what to do, but it wasn't as easy as he initially thought.

It took Wain about two hours and over three hundred attempts to successfully activate the amulet. When it did, the amulet glowed brightly.

Wain sighed in relief, and the next moment not far from his cloud, space began to distort.