The Guild of Adventurers’ door creaked open, releasing a gust of warm, stale air thick with sour beer and rancid sweat.

  Adrian adjusted his smoked lenses by habit, the glass briefly reflecting the blurred silhouettes of mercenaries hunched over their tables. Their greasy laughter echoed against the blackened rafters, while snatches of conversation clashed like poorly sharpened blades.

  He stepped forward, the soles of his boots muffling his tread on the worn planks. Too much noise. Too many variables. His thumb brushed his tactical belt, reflexively checking the fiole compartments. Three Blues, one green, and an empty vial—emergency reserve.

  Behind the thick oak counter, scarred with knife marks, Magda slouched on her stool. Greasy hair clung to her temples, and her fingers fiddled with a toothpick she gnawed with calculated slowness. She didn’t look up when he stopped in front of her. Just a nasal grunt, half-smothered by the wood between her teeth.

  — I need access to the Pioneer’s Almanac, Adrian said, his voice steady but loud enough to cut through the din.

  Silence. Not even a glance. Then, without haste, Magda spat a splinter of wood onto the open ledger before her. The tiny projectile landed on an illegible line of script, near a dried beer stain.

  — Mage’s card, Silver rank minimum for access, she recited automatically before lifting her eyes.

  When she saw Adrian, her pupils narrowed to slits, as if she smelled something rotten.

  Adrian didn’t flinch. He knew what she saw: a man who was neither a mage nor Silver-ranked. Just some guy in a patched chitin tunic, with hands that smelled of lab work.

  — No. But I’ve got a silver coin, he replied with a clinical smile.

  He placed the coin gently on the counter, the metallic clink precise.

  -- So. The Almanac. For the afternoon.

  The coin gleamed under the flickering oil lanterns—a fresh silver circle that clashed with the surrounding grime.

  Magda stared at it, then at him, then back at the coin. Her fingers tightened around the toothpick.

  — You’re a clever one, ain’t ya?

  She leaned forward, the stench of sour mash and stale tobacco filling the space between them.

  — One silver’s the member rate. You? You’re nothing. Two. And you don’t touch the pages unless you wanna lose fingers.

  A blatant lie. Adrian could smell it.

  He didn’t blink. Just a slow nod, as if weighing his options.

  — Two. And I won’t touch anything.

  He placed the second coin beside the first.

  — Except the book, he added, his voice flat but now edged with velvet.

  Magda shook her head briefly, then slid the coins toward her as if it were nothing.

  — Room 3. Behind the curtain. Three hours, not a second more. And don’t piss off the Guard—he’s not the forgiving type.

  Adrian took the key without a word. The metal was cold, rough against his fingers.

  He turned to leave but froze when a hand clamped around his forearm. Magda, suddenly serious, her nails digging in just enough to hurt.

  — Listen close. There’s folks here who love potions. And others who love potion-makers even more.

  Her eyes flicked to a corner table where three men in gray cloaks sipped tankards, watching Adrian with predatory intensity.

  — So do what you gotta do, and don’t linger. Got it?

  Adrian followed her gaze. The three men. Worn cloaks, but clean. No visible weapons, but calloused fingers—signs of regular sword or dagger work. One had a thin, pale scar across his cheekbone, like an expert’s knife cut.

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  [WARNING: POTENTIAL HOSTILE GROUP. ESTIMATED AVERAGE GRADE: 2.5. RECOMMENDED ACTION: FLEE IF EYE CONTACT PROLONGED.]

  He didn’t pull away. Just a slight wrist twist, enough for Magda’s fingers to slip without seeming to let go.

  — Thanks for the advice, he replied with a polite smile.

  He headed for the indicated curtain, steps light, senses sharp. Behind him, the three men’s laughter rose suddenly, too loud to be natural.

  The key was heavy in his pocket. The curtain ahead hung like a shroud.

  The air was thick, as if the stone walls absorbed oxygen.

  An oil lamp, perched on a wobbly table, cast a trembling yellow light, painting shifting shadows across the Almanac’s pages. The scent of decades-old parchment mingled with the sharper tang of melted wax and accumulated dust.

  Adrian’s eyes burned after mere seconds—the lighting was too dim, the poorly trimmed wick’s smoke irritating his mucous membranes. He blinked hard, forcing his pupils to adjust.

  The book lay open to an illustrated spread. A wolf, stylized in black ink, howled at a warped moon, its fangs unnaturally elongated like blades. Around the beast, handwritten annotations in angular, almost runic script.

  Adrian ran a finger over the paper—the texture was rough, as if the ink had been mixed with fine sand.

  — “The Thicket Wolf, demon of the grey forests, feasts on the souls of the reckless…”

  He stopped cold.

  Problem.

  The text wasn’t in the common tongue.

  It was a mix of archaic dialect and alchemical symbols, the kind of gibberish priests probably used to impress illiterates.

  Worse: the descriptions were metaphorical, not technical. “Its fangs, forged in Hell’s flames…” — useless. He needed data. Not poetry.

  [ANALYSIS: LANGUAGE UNRECOGNIZED. LINGUISTIC DATABASE: 0% MATCH. PROPOSED SOLUTION: CONTEXTUAL TRANSLATION VIA SEMANTIC ASSOCIATION.]

  Adrian exhaled through his nose, lips pressed tight. Of course. IRIS couldn’t translate what had no internal logic. He’d have to read word by word, letting IRIS guess the common-tongue equivalents in real time.

  — “Its eyes burn with a cursed glow…” he muttered, frowning.

  [CORRELATION: “CURSED GLOW” → ETHERIC BIOLUMINESCENCE. HYPOTHESIS: SPECIALIZED OCULAR GLAND CONVERTING THERMAL ENERGY TO VISIBLE LIGHT.]

  — “Its howl freezes men’s blood…”

  [ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS: SOUND FREQUENCY <20Hz (INFRASONIC). PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECT: NAUSEA, VERTIGO, POSSIBLE CARDIAC ARREST WITH PROLONGED EXPOSURE.]

  Adrian nodded, despite himself. Finally, something useful. The wolf wasn’t a “demon,” but a creature with specialized organs—luminescent glands, a vocal apparatus capable of generating infrasound. An optimized predator. Nothing supernatural. Just extreme biology.

  He turned the page. A new paragraph, this time with a crude sketch: a monstrous spider in what looked like a cave, with a marginal note. The Devil’s Mark.

  — The Devil’s Mark, he repeated, fingers tracing the illustration.

  [OBSERVATION: 87% CORRELATION WITH WHISPERING FOREST DATA: LIKELY EXTERNAL VENOM GLAND.]

  A chill ran down Adrian’s spine. A venom gland. Not a “cursed mark,” but a chemical defense mechanism. The spiders of this world must also secrete venom. Danger. But also… opportunity.

  He pulled an empty vial from his belt, set it beside the book. Priority: find a way to extract that venom without getting poisoned. A giant spider would be extremely fast in this world.

  [SUGGESTION: CAPTURE NOT RECOMMENDED (FORCE RATIO: 1 VS 2.1). RISK: RAPID DEGRADATION OF VENOM COMPOUND.]

  — I need… a trap.

  The lamp sputtered. A shadow danced across the page, warping the spider’s sketch into something monstrous. Adrian didn’t blink.

  — We’re gonna need more light, he said, more to himself than to IRIS.

  And above all… more data.

  He kept scanning the parchment, each word a challenge, each symbol a puzzle to dismantle.

  Three hours. Three hours of frantic reading under the lamp’s flickering glow, eyes locked onto the trembling lines as if he could pierce them by sheer will.

  His brain was in overdrive.

  When he snapped the grimoire shut, his skull was a knot of concentrated pain. The migraine hammered behind his eyeballs, sharp and deep, like someone slowly driving a frozen metal rod between his temples.

  His peripheral vision still danced—black and white streaks flickered at the edges, afterimages of the constant mental juggling his cortex had endured without pause.

  His fingers remained frozen in a slight curl against the table’s rough wood. Stiff. Almost imperceptibly trembling—prolonged contraction from residual adrenaline and IRIS-induced hypervigilance.

  [ANALYSIS: NEUROLOGICAL OVERLOAD DETECTED (57% COGNITIVE SATURATION). RECOMMENDATION: HYDRATION + MINIMUM 90-MINUTE RECOVERY INTERVAL.]

  Adrian ignored the warning.

  This wasn’t an encyclopedia he’d just exhumed from mold-eaten, superstitious scribblings. No.

  It was a raw file.

  A taxonomic skeleton extracted line by line from bloody allegories and fake curses. Every “curse” translated into a plausible enzymatic profile; every “demonic sign” reclassified as a specialized organ or chemical exudate; every religious legend reduced to a behavioral spec sheet with approximate EDI estimates.

  He’d wrung pure biological data from the ashes of myth.

  And it would be enough for tomorrow morning.

  The Thicket Wolf wouldn’t be invulnerable when he crossed the Grey Sector to harvest its fresh glands, killed according to a plan already mapped in his mind.

  — Too early to sleep now, he muttered between shallow breaths.

  He was hungry.

  Question: If you could upload ONE book directly into your brain instantly (Matrix style), what would it be?