DEMON'S VIRTUE

Eiro filled in the blanks of multiple books that he was trying to repair, or rather rewrite, in order to remember what they offered him. The more he did so, the closer the memories seemed to come, but they were always still a bit out of reach.

The Demon figured that he would only be able to truly remember a memory after fully rewriting the book it connected to. The issue with that was that Eiro was unable to fully complete any of the books that he had laying in front of him.

He might be able to guess what happened there and fill the gaps by concluding what happened from the text around it, but for some reason Eiro thought that was a bad idea. As if that wasn't what he was supposed to do with these books.

He continued walking around the library for a while, trying to find more scraps to finally finish recovering at least a couple of memories, but to no avail. Eiro sat down and leaned against the wall with a deep sigh. Tiredness was dragging his body down, although Eiro didn't become exhausted all that quickly.

After opening his eyes again to reveal he was still in the cave after all, Eiro slowly pushed himself off the ground, wobbling around exhaustedly.

"Careful there, child. Mental fatigue is also something to be wary of." Lognir warned Eiro, who turned toward him with a slight nod. He was right. Eiro had to be careful. Well, at least his Exhaustion Resistance skill leveled up once, which was pretty nice.

But seeing how he was feeling this tired despite that skill's existence must mean that his body was close to simply shutting down at this point. He did go through quite a lot of tough things lately that were coursing through his mind constantly. It made sense for him to be exhausted like this every once in a while.

The Demon made his way to a different part of the cave together with Lognir, now that today's practices were over, and Eiro slowly approached Lugo. He fell forward and buried his face in the Stag's fur as it let out a loud bellow.

"Just let me stay like this for a while, alright? I'm tired." Eiro said as he let out a deep sigh that just warmed up Lugo's fur around the area that Eiro pressed his face into. After letting out a loud huff, Lugo still stepped away a little bit anyway, but instead of trying to get away from Eiro when he was like this, the Stag laid down on the grown and caught Eiro as he staggered forward and dropped down, ready to fall asleep any moment now.

Eiro grumbled quietly as he shifted his body around to lean against Lugo's body properly, and slowly closed his eyes as he drifted off into sleep.

As he slept, Eiro started to dream. As he normally did. Eiro was able to remember all of the dreams that he had, although most of them were just scenes of the day replaying within his mind again and again. Smaller details would be a bit different, of course. For example, he might be twice as tall as normal, or the things he was carrying with him were suddenly a different color.

Seldomly was it that everything was the exact same as reality, although Eiro would still be unable to realize he was in a dream. But now, that was different.

Everything was the exact same as how he remembered it to be. It was eerily similar, at least as he was in the moment. Maybe that realization and subtle eeriness was what made Eiro realize that he was in a dream at the moment.

Eiro stood in the middle of the cave, with everything frozen as if time had stopped. It seemed like this memory was from the middle of a short conversation he had with Lognir today. As the Demon moved his hands around, it was as if his body was shifting through the air rather than really moving, leaving behind some form of weird mist as he was at it.

Was this a Lucid Dream? Why did he experience this now of all times? Maybe it was because experiencing that Library in his mind in such a way was similar to what a Lucid Dream was like..?

But if that was the case, then Eiro should be able to do whatever he wanted here. With a wave of his hand, the Demon found that the cave around him changed. The floor was replaced by wood and the walls became bookshelves. Lognir disappeared, and Eiro was once more back in the Library.

It was the exact same one as he had been visiting all day in his mind. "So I can fix myself in my sleep, huh..?" Eiro thought to himself. He wasn't sure if he was really capable of smiling right now, but if he was, then he did. He stepped through the room as this place became more and more lifelike by the second, ceasing to be like a dream and instead being more like reality. Just like he had been experiencing all day today.

The books were in the same state as Eiro left them, and he had the exact scraps of paper left over that he was working with before.

With a smile on his face, Eiro walked through this room, realizing what this meant. Before, Eiro was unable to make time in his mind move faster, or else he might have been able to figure everything out in one day, but now that he was technically dreaming everything was different.

A dream that seemed to span thousands of years within one's mind usually took only a fraction of a second. Now that Eiro was this aware of what was going on, this effect would probably not be happening to the same extent as that, but he still should be able to work for longer than he actually slept. And hopefully, he would still recover his exhaustion due to his sleep.

Eiro kept searching the space for more scraps of paper, although he was unable to really find anything more than he had found today. Maybe they were hidden in places other than underneath the floorboards as well.

Either way, maybe what Eiro should try to do for now was the 'easy part', which was to transcribe all the books of memories that he didn't remember all too well. And that was what he did. All night, in his dreams, he kept transcribing the memories from the dirtied and 'broken' books onto new ones. Still, he was unable to complete any of them because there were simply pieces missing, but nonetheless, he made quite a bit of progress.

And when Eiro finally woke up, while he was still a little more exhausted than he usually would be when waking up, Eiro was relatively well-rested.

He stood up and stretched, hearing his bones crack from stiffening up during his sleep. It was an unpleasant noise, but a weirdly satisfying sensation. To feel his stiff body slowly loosen up like this.

"Alright then..." Eiro muttered as he looked around. The others seemed to be sleeping for now. Eiro went to sleep rather early, so he woke up early as well. Dawn was not even there yet, but he was already wide awake.

Eiro took a deep breath as he figured he should do something nice for the others. He knew what they ate, so Eiro chose that he should go out and hunt for a while, getting food for everyone.

They were dragons, so they ate quite a bit, but at the same time they chose this location in consideration of that as well. There were plenty of wild beasts around here, as well as monstrous beasts of considerable size. Judging from the bones that were scattered around the 'trash room' of this cave, they particularly liked a certain monster that was derived from Boars in some form.

It was a couple times larger than a regular boar, however, and had particularly thick skin if Eiro remembered correctly. Their tusks were a popular material for adventurers to decorate their armors or weapons with, so he had seen them quite a lot.

Not to mention that their scent was incredibly strong as well, so it was pretty easy for Eiro to find them. The only one that was awake at the moment beside him was Bavet, who didn't need much sleep in the first place, and Eiro let him know that he would return soon with something to eat, so that the slime could pass this message on to the others if they woke up while Eiro was off.

Eiro stepped out of the cave and spread out his wings, jumping from the edge of the cliff in front of him. The first thing he had to do was to actually find the boar-like monsters in question. They should be roaming around here in quite a quantity, if he remembered correctly. He saw a whole group of them together on his way here, and the town at the foot of this mountain sold many things that were made from the materials taken from that monster.

It didn't take long until Eiro was able to lay eyes on a good specimen. Fat and strong, larger than most others. It seemed to be eating the best out of the group it was 'leading'.

With a smile on his face, Eiro stopped flapping his wings and simply dropped down onto this boar, gathering and compressing air on his palm as he fell. And just as Eiro was about to hit the ground, he pushed the bullet of air through the boar's head to cleanly kill it while spreading out his wings to stop his own fall.

The large boar fell to the ground and bits of rock were slung into the air due to the wind pressure Eiro created to stop his fall like he did. And of course, Eiro quickly waved his hand around and shot those bits of rock into the foreheads of the other boars that were gathered around, immediately securing four boars that would end up making good food for some Dragons, a hungry Demon, a Slime, and an Elder Dwarf.

And so, the first thing that Eiro did was to quickly pull out a small gem that he had in his treasury to make this whole thing easier. It was the Gravity Magic stone, that he would use to make the boars' corpses a lot lighter to be able to carry them all the way.. Of course, Eiro simply used Nature Magics and roots to hold them all together as if he was using rope, before jumping into the air and pulling these mountains of meat up to the peak of the mountain.