Rise Of House Falken (Harry Potter Fan Fiction) - Chapter 73
The academy library was only a short walk away and was quite close to the Elder’s Building. The library building from the outside was only a small single storied building and no one will be able to guess that the building holds one of Asia’s largest libraries. On the inside, the buildings show its true colours. Instead of a single floor, there were 10 different floors with each floor having a size similar to a football field. It could be said that this library was more than 10 times larger than the Hogwarts library.
This fact is not too surprising. Unlike Britain in which only a single language is used for all purposes, Magical India had more than 15 different official languages due to different tribe’s having their very own language. Books written in all these languages were present inside this library.
One thing I was thankful for in India was that despite there being so many languages, all the spells were in one language, Sanskrit. If every tribe used and taught their own version of spells in their native language, then having an academy will have no meaning. Each elder will teach in his/her language and due to this, the only people who will sign up for their classes will be their own tribe members since no one will be interested in learning a different language just to learn from the elder. If this was going to be the case, then the Elder could have conducted the class in his tribe itself.
Of the more than 15 languages here, I knew only English and Hindi. So I could read only the books in these two languages. The first two floors had only Hindi books while the English book filled a small part of the 10 floor. English was not a common used language here. I had only some average fluency in Hindi so I will have to improve my proficiency in it if I want to make good use of all these books.
The third and fourth floors had books written in Sanskrit language and I will have to learn the language sometime soon in the future to make my learning process here faster. The language was not commonly spoken in the present era but most of the old and informative books were written in the Sanskrit language and if I wanted to read and learn from them, I will have to learn language.
Much to my disappointment there was no easy way to solve this problem since there were no magical translators or spells that I could use to translate these books into English. People in India had tried very hard to make this possible over the years but they had failed miserably. I too felt that such a thing was impossible since different languages did not follow a pattern that could be used to magically translate it. Languages did not follow rules and were made by old people on a whim according to their needs.
The people here did invent a spell to make learning language easier though which I am going to make good use of. The spell will make it possible for me to completely learn a language in a month. All I had to do was memorise some books that came recommended with the spell and it will allow me to learn the language quickly. I am planning to use it to perfect my Hindi first and then learn Sanskrit. I did not plan to learn any other Indian language.
The library was huge and I already had a list of books that were recommended to me today that I had to read. I did not have time to waste since I had a deadline which I had to keep. I did not have too much time to waste.
Before going to the Healer section, I decided to visit the English section first since I wanted to see what was available in there. Also it was the language I was most comfortable with in this library.
To get to the 10th floor, the people here had invented a magical variant of lift. It was a levitating disk on a platform which would follow my command in a way similar to that of a broom and take me to my floor. I liked the idea so much that I wanted to replicate this type of lift in my black castle. I planned on completely renovating the Black castle and this lift was added to the list of changes I wanted to make.
On the 10th floor, the English section was easy to find. The section consisted of 15 large bookshelves filled to the brim with books. This was a small number when compared to the even the Hogwarts library except that the books here were priceless. On glancing through the books, I found that the collection did not have any new books but instead every one of the books was an antique and were more than a 100 years old. Some were even more than 700 years old. Even my black library did not have these book and I wondered where the academy got them from.
The books were calling for me to read them but I controlled myself and went towards the Healer section of the library. I badly wanted to start reading the books but I knew that I had no time for them currently. I could come back here after 3 days and start reading them.
The checkout system here was quite unique. First of all, all the books in the library were warded to protect from damage and making copies. At the checkout counter I had to specify the number of days I needed a book. The books had another set of runes that were then programmed in such a way that when the rental period ended, the book will be automatically returned to its original location in the library. The books will also return to the library of I take it outside the academy boundary. I was very impressed by this system.
After checking out the books for 3 days, I left the library as it was time for my next class. The mage sight tutoring with Elder Nainesh.
When I entered his room he was very excited to start teaching me. I learn the reason for it later during the class. It was due to the fact that my mage sight was different from his and he wanted to compare both and conduct experiments. The main difference was that my mage sight only showed a slight glow in my eyes when activated which his not noticeable while his and his tribes mage sight had tell tale sign when activated. His eyes started twinkling like Dumbledore’s glasses when mage sight was activated so he couldn’t discreetly use the sight like I always did.
The class was very productive. The method to toggle between different modes was controlling the amount of magic that I sent into my eyes. For the seeing through walls effect I had to rotate my the magic around my eyes. The amount of magic in the eyes and my control in rotating it perfect decided the distance I could see and what I could see.
It was difficult to do since I had not practiced controlling the amount of magic that I could send to my eyes ever in my life. For the first class I did just that. Controlling the magic. By the end of the class I had gotten a slight hang of the method and I could toggle between the modes just for a short few seconds before I lost control. I was sure I could perfect this in a weeks time.
After that productive one hour class, I went back to my room. It was time for me to start reading those books since time was tight. After conjuring a table and a chair, I started reading, beginning with the language book so that my later reading will be quicker.