After spending more than a week standing around and reading books at impressive speed, the regular visitors of the library were starting to think that something was weird, whilst the keeper himself was reminded of his first time in a library, when he had used mana reinforcement to maintain himself awake and focused, so as to not waste any second doing something as frivolous as sleeping and learn as much as possible, he had held on for almost a whole month in this manner.
It warmed his heart seeing that there were still people intent on uncovering the entirety of the magical knowledge, he had been once, but he had had no other choice than to settle down when his talent proved to be too little.
He was explaining all of this to a regular of this immense temple of knowledge, they had just pointed out that perhaps it wasn't judicious to allow someone to do this and endanger their health, but they had instead been treated to the old keeper's life story, a punishment they were currently placing only below getting kicked in the family jewels.
He was leaving no openings for them to exit the conversation, much too happy to have gotten someone to spew words to.
Meanwhile, Loimos hadn't actually been remaining within the library at all times, the place was open night and days, allowing him to step out whenever he noticed a stray dog or cat, commit horrendous acts of animal cruelty, known as killing them with his bare hands, grow stronger and rot the bodies to reinforce his understanding of his own power.
Unfortunately, he had an unseen competitor in that department, but he was ahead in the rat hunting methods, since he had learnt to mimic smells that the rodents liked, Weafewand was getting cleared of all life than weren't people, Loimos had also noticed a sudden spike in death force somewhere under the city, a clear sign that multiple people had reached the light at the end of the tunnel, but considering that they had been killed, it wouldn't be wise to just head there and inhale everything, even if he couldn't sense anyone else amidst all of those corpses.
He was going to wait a few more days before reaping that prize he hadn't earned, for now, he was trying to shape his rot into rats, it was the single organism he had decayed the most, and thus the one he should have the most ease recreating, his first attempts looked more like crude poop effigies than anything.
Instead of attempting an instant creation, he instead went to carefully crafting each part of the rat, the flesh was the easiest, he could just use his rot for it since the result wouldn't be an actual whole rat, but an undead version.
He just needed to make it denser and wrap the whole thing into the fur, which proved to be rather simple to create, the outside portion of living beings, scales, feathers and such came naturally to Loimos, so much so that when he rapidly created some rot, some bits of feathers could sometime be seen sticking out.
The most difficult part were the bones, it still took him time to manufacture those, and an entire skeletal structure was otherwise more precise than rough bone claws, the entire process of trial and error was taking place directly inside the undead, where a living's stomach would normally be, on the outside, he was still just reading a book about the long term effects of reinforcing one's body with elemental mana.
The library was rather empty at this time of day, the poor person the keeper had been talking too had left once the story had reached its end, a few people were still around of course, in Weafewand, even without an undead that never slept, it wasn't unusual for people to be roaming libraries at all hours of both the day and night.
As the skeleton finished with this book, he moved on to the next one, its title rather uninspired.
'Conditions, Rules, Vows, Pledges, Troths, Sacrifice, Waive And All That Relates'
Loimos had already encountered the terms of condition and rule in previous books, it was something that supposedly all mages could do once they reached a certain level of mastery, although it wasn't limited only to mana users, as it suggested, it was an application of a condition or rule upon oneself to get something else in return, it was a classic for third-rate mages to take up permanent variations of such things to fill in the gap.
For mages, they first needed to learn to get in touch with the condition element or such, which was actually a thing Loimos had read about leaf and pepper magic, it wasn't exactly surprising that this was how this worked.
Apparently, despite being a rather precise and odd element almost no one ever had an affinity for, it was remarkably easy to get a hold of it and then use for whatever purpose, this put into question how this thing worked for people that didn't use any energies to fight and all, but the book wouldn't go into such details.
It was all about the dozens of variations of the basic condition, sacrifice and waive were rather interesting, he would have to try them out.
"Herm? Oh, yes, they are over there" the undead heard the keeper speaking to someone, pointing them toward a young woman reading a book at a table, completely absorbed in her readings.
The undead hadn't sensed anyone entering the library, despite having no line of sight, he could see the keeper as he spoke, clearly, the person spoke back but he couldn't hear them in the least.
It was just like that malformed shadow on the building last time, and logic would dictate that it was the same person, he didn't move from his spot and simply focused on the young lady that was asked for.
Not even a second, it didn't even take a singular second for The Death Dealer to grab her by the hair and then stab her in the throat, slamming the target's face against the table before calmly walking out of the library, under the stupefied gaze of the old book keeper.
Not even bothering to properly kill her target, already knowing that she would bleed to death on her own.