Controlling Destiny

Ultrix walked into the central library for the second time.

This time, however, he did not need to go to the hidden archives. Instead, he walked straight to the magical beasts category.

Passing by the lift, Ultrix paused momentarily and took a deep sigh.

[Ah, blast it, I want to challenge that bookshelf again, but I guess I'll have to wait for another day.] He thought to himself with some disappointment.

Walking through the magical beasts category, Ultrix quickly scanned through all of the titles.

"How to train your magical beast", "Taking care of your tamed beast", "A guide on magical beasts and how to tame them"

[Huh, that's strange,] Ultrix thought to himself, [These all seem to be taming books. Maybe I'm in the wrong category?]

Looking to the other shelves, Ultrix realized that the magical beasts section was further subdivided into general information and more specific information like care-taking, breeding, hatching, etc, etc.

Quickly making his way towards the general information section, Ultrix immediately found what he was looking for. [Ah, that's more like it!] Ultrix thought to himself. The book was titled "An introduction to different tiers for magical beasts"

Taking a few different books from the shelf Ultrix prepared to leave the library.

Unfortunately for him, he was stopped by an artifact on the way out.

"Huh, what's this?" Ultrix cried out loud in alarm. He discovered that the artifact had completely immobilized him.

A librarian quickly walked over to him with another artifact in her hand. Assessing the situation, she turned towards Ultrix with a cold look.

"Sir, you can't walk out of here with those books. You haven't returned the ones that you took out last time yet."

Ultrix thought hard about which books he had taken. [Oh, is she talking about the books from that bookshelf?] Ultrix thought to himself. [That's too bad, I thought those belonged to me since I had to work so hard for them.]

Turning back to the librarian, Ultrix decided to play dumb for the time being. "I don't remember checking out any books," Ultrix lied through his teeth.

The librarian sighed and pushed the artifact up against Ultrix's identification token. However, weirdly enough, the artifact buzzed for a second and then turned green.

The librarian's face failed to hide her confusion in this situation.

[Wait, that can't be right,] she thought to herself. The artifact should never make mistakes. In her decades of working at the central library, she had never seen such a thing happen before.

Ultrix grinned slightly to himself as he saw the outcome. He wasn't expecting such an outcome either, but it worked in his favor.

"Does this mean I'm free to leave now?" Ultrix asked in a completely innocent voice.

Seeing that there was no reason to keep the pupil stalled any longer the librarian let out a long sigh before agreeing to free him from the artifact.

"Sorry about that," the librarian apologized politely before letting Ultrix go.

As he walked out of the library, Ultrix was quite confused as to what happened as well. [Perhaps the token did glitch?] Ultrix thought to himself. There should have been no reason as to why he would have been stopped, similarly, his clearance level should have been high enough that no big deal would have happened either way even if he took all of the books from the library.

[Ah, whatever.] Ultrix thought in annoyance. Too many weird things had been happening lately that he couldn't care less about another small incident joining the fray. [Can't dwell on the details for too long,] Ultrix thought to himself. After all, he had a lot of work to do.

Reading through the basic introductions to identifying different tiers of magical beasts, Ultrix quickly understood that a few ways could be done, but the fastest way was to test the magicule energy around the beast.

Tiers that were above silver would let out magicule energies from its body at different frequencies than those from lower and higher tiers.

The book recommended its readers to purchase a magicule energy tracker for the best results. However, Ultrix was not sure where he could get his hands on one, and he decided that they were probably going to be a lot more expensive than he could afford.

Luckily for him, the book also described in-depth on how the user could test the magicules themselves.

Unfortunately, though, the book advised that a higher affinity with neutral magicule energy would provide more accurate results.

[Welp, I guess I have to push for a better understanding of magicules then,] Ultrix thought to himself with a sigh.