Orin felt disappointed and decided to just go home and try and cultivate. It was a nice day, and normally he would head to the woods outside the city to hunt for spirit grasses, maybe a rabbit or some birds for food and to sell, but not today.
His mind kept thinking about last night and if he would find himself in that white dome again. Of course, he also thought of the other possibility that he would never go there again, and the cultivation technique would be lost forever. He didn't know what the technique did or what it cultivated, but he noticed that he felt a great sense of greed for it when he thought about it.
Orin didn't know if this greed feeling was his or if it was forced on him like how he cultivated the technique in the first place. By the time he had arrived home he found he had no thoughts of outrage or concern about the possibility that this feeling not being his. He only felt a bit of hope that this technique would allow him to get to the sixth layer in time to join a sect.
Orin went straight to his room and sat on his bed to begin cultivating. He was worried that what happened last night and this morning, and what may happen tonight would keep him from entering a meditative state to cultivate, but to his surprise he was able to cultivate with ease. It wasn't until the sun had set that he awoke from his cultivation. Instead of the usual exhausted feeling that he had after cultivating, Orin felt refreshed and relaxed. Taking out the last of his rabbit stew from his storage bag and ate it for dinner.
As he laid in his bed waiting for himself to fall asleep, he was planning a trip to the woods to hunt for more rabbits. He was hoping to get enough for food and trade, and while he was thinking of whether he should bake, fry, or stew his catch he fell asleep. There were no dreams of the meals he planned to eat, nor did he find himself in the white dome. He found himself in a library.
The floor, the wall, the ceiling, the tables and chairs, and even the bookshelves were all a slightly glowing pristine white. The only things in the room that weren't white were the thousands on books sitting on the shelves.
After a few moments of looking around, Orin walked to the closest bookshelf and began to look at the tittles of the books. The first thing that struck him when he looked at the first book, was that he had already read it. It was the same thing with the next book, and the book after that. All of the dozens of books on this bookshelf were ones he had read before. After moving on to the next bookshelf he found it was the same, and the same with the one after that. He had read all the books here, some when he first came to the library when he turned ten, to the books he read this morning. He had even found copies of the Imperial Cultivation Technique and the spells he learned.
Of these several thousand books, some were books Orin liked a lot, like the book on the local beasts and ways to hunt them. And some of these books were so dull and boring that Orin had to force himself to finish reading instead of putting them back and forgetting they existed. But most of these books were only read by most people because they were supposed to. Things like history, customs, and manners weren't really that interesting to ten-year-olds who just want to cultivate.
Looking around this library, only a small number of the bookshelves were filled with books and the rest were empty. This made Orin think that he still had lots to learn. The moment that thought appeared in his mind; it realized why this library was only filled with books he had read; it was because he had read them. This place was like Cirko's library.
Looking through the books on the shelves, Orin found the book he was looking for, it was a book introducing famous cultivators in history. One of the people it talked about was a man named Cirko, he lived thousands of years ago. What made him famous was a precious treasure that he had created, a library that contained all the knowledge he had known. He had gathered this knowledge by creating it, buying it, or stealing it.
Cirko was known for creating many spells and cultivation techniques throughout his lifetime. But this takes a great deal of time to do, and it was far longer than Cirko had wanted to spend. So, he began to buy knowledge from smaller clans and sects, while this greatly increased the speed that Cirko acquired knowledge for his library, the larger and more powerful clans and sects refused to sell their knowledge to him. Eventually this led Cirko to begin stealing knowledge from the larger and more powerful clans and sects, before eventually stealing from everyone.
It didn't take long before Cirko was the most wanted man in the world, with a bounty on his head large enough to allow a hundred generations of a family to live in luxury. For the last several centuries of Cirko's life he began to fill his library not with books or scrolls, but with souls. He had begun to kill people with the knowledge he wanted and after capturing their souls, he would use dark forbidden alchemy and spells to refine those souls into living books. It's said that thousands of souls were placed in his library before his death.
Although this library was similar to Cirko's library, Orin knew it couldn't be it. After Cirko was surround by hundreds of powerful cultivators and killed, several wars were fought over who would get the library and after several decades of intense bloodshed, the ten most powerful clans laid claim to it and agreed to shared access between them. Everyone knows it is sealed inside a mountain and always under heavy guard, on a different continent. And while there have been many people that tried to make copies of Cirko's library, they have never come close to the original.
Orin found it exciting and frightening to have access to something like Cirko's library. Exciting because he had a place to store everything he learned and could review it when he slept. But frightening because while everyone knows of Cirko's decent into madness, no one knows why he fell into madness. Some say it is due to man's greed that he fell, while others say it was that it was due to learning too many dark secrets and he turned evil, some say the reason is the library itself, that it was forged with the souls of devils and their whispers lingered in the library slowly corrupting Cirko and turning him into a monster in their own warped image.
First came a white dome with a mysterious cultivation that he was forced to cultivate, next came a library that was very similar to one of the most famous treasures in the history of this world. Orin was finding it odd that he wasn't having a stronger reaction to all of this weirdness, and why he felt that all this and more were somehow owed to him. He also found it odd that instead of wanting to stay here and try and figure things out, he found himself staring at the stairs leading to the second floor and wanting to climb them.