He felt weak, useless and drunk. Its muscles didn''t responded to him.


    <<Oh he is waking up! Increase the anaesthetic!>>


    A few seconds later and he was back into the void.


    They say that death is the brother of sleep, never before in his life, he felt those two things so close and inseparable. He passed a small death, leaving the material world for a few seconds.


    When he woke up he saw a man in police clothing near its bed.


    <<Uhm-gms>> he muttered still confused.


    The investigator looked up from the clipboard that he was reading <<You are awake! I had feared the worse, if you were killed we would have been held accountable. The council could ask our heads if you know what I mean.>>


    Pxan recovered from his confusion<<Where is Sully?>>


    <<He hasn''t yet been arrested. We dug deeper into the records and he was quite the criminal you know?>>


    <<He was a scavanger>>


    <<Yes>> he paused <<how do you know?>>


    <<He told me about its life in a sort of monologue.>>


    <<Ah, did he mentioned that Sully is an abbreviation of its real name?>>


    <<No, but he mentioned a certain Simon a university friend, don''t know if that’s a real name.>>


    <<Simon Aaryad Kresnki, we also founded about him, he is a researched high-rank cultist of the order of the Golden Serpent.>>


    <<Uhmm...>>


    <<It''s something bothering you?>>


    <<Yes, a thought. I don''t know if it''s just a fantasy...did Sully spared me?>>


    A few seconds passed


    The man shrugged <<the syringe was broken on the floor, from the little drops of liquid we managed to examin and countered the substance. If he injected more substance or if the syringe didn''t fell you would have been dead.>>


    <<So he spared me?>>


    <<We don''t know>>


    Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    Pxan following days were of a rare monotony, without Sully keeping him company and guards constantly watching anyone who came near its bed, he didn''t have anyone to talk to. He had to do only a few hours of exercises before returning to his room, it''s near-empty room, there was a desk, a mirror, a pot with a flower brought by colleagues back at the department and nothing more.No strange leather book with a questionable translation.


    He knew why that pot had arrived now and not before. For the first time, he seriously thought about what his life would look like after the hospital.


    He had run from the battlefield, he was a deserter and this didn’t put him under good light, maybe the assassination attempt actually improved his condition. Now he was a poor injured policeman hunted by crazy cultist seeking revenge.


    State books became boring very quickly. You read a few books and you have read them all in those days. Before Carlaria the press had more freedom. Now if you wanted to publish a book you needed to be a citizien, have a fully clean record, pass several tests and the manuscript needed to follow certain very precise criterias to even having a chance to be published with the mark of the council.


    There were older and more interesting books, those with the sigil of the librarians, but those were harder to find. And even if such a text ended in its lap he would need a reason to hold such a text, and more often than not the only acceptable reason was: <<I am a graduated academic with full citizenship and I want this book to study the early literature of humanity for academic purposes and nothing else.>>


    He remembered when a boy was caught reading one of those texts, it had a strange name, The Enricon? Encricion? Enchiridion? It talked about men judgments about things. The boy wasn’t sent to jail because of the mercy of the judge. What a great man. It’s family had to pay a heavy fine and were put under watch for years to come, the boy had to pass long hours of interrogatory before being sent home. It was one of its first interrogatories as a policeman actually.


    ...


    There was another sigil, that of the inquisition. All books talking about Esoteric, religion or occultism fell into this category.


    During one of its investigation, he was granted the right to study two of those texts and some passages still popped up in his mind. "The sage convince people by putting himself lower than them. So renouncing his self he is following the way" or something like it. Horrible books to forgot.


    "What should I do with all this free time?" he wondered.