Julian and Helena spent the rest of the day in the room with the ho-ho doing little more than relaxing. In truth, Julian was very deliberately avoiding the book Chronos had written for him because he was afraid of what he might uncover inside it. No matter how he looked at it, there was no harmless reason for a being like that to go so far unless the matter was truly important. Yes, it was possible the titan had been honestly trying to help him, but Julian did not have anywhere near enough information to assume that safely, especially when myths about the titan were all he had to work with.
Julian was not foolish enough to miss the fact that the Greek gods had been the victors in that conflict, which meant it was entirely possible they had slandered the titan unfairly. The problem with that line of thought was that the gods' own actions did not exactly make them look benevolent either. Zeus was a serial rapist, Athena was arrogant and cruel, Ares stood behind a huge amount of the world's suffering, and Poseidon was as cold and uncaring as the sea itself. The only decent one among them was Hades, who usually just minded his own business and did his duty unless the others interfered with him.
Even the story of how he ended up in a one-sided love with Persephone had not truly been of his own making, despite everything that followed from it. Unfortunately, that was all Julian really had to rely on in this matter, myths. Needless to say, he was completely justified in being cautious about that book. Still, he was not just sitting around doing nothing. By this point he had managed to save nearly seven thousand points, and there had been a certain book in the shop that had been drawing his attention for quite some time.
More specifically, {Creating the atronach forge}, a detailed work explaining how to build a magical device capable of forging sentient magical constructs so long as the user possessed the proper knowledge. The system shop had priced the book at 6270 points, which came from the way the system judged the value of books. From what Julian had observed, books seemed to be priced according to three factors, rarity or how difficult they were to acquire, utility or how useful the knowledge inside them was, and power or whether the book itself possessed value beyond simply containing information.
This particular book came from an entirely different world, which already made it significantly more expensive than most books from this one. On top of that, the knowledge inside it was extremely useful since it served as a manual for creating a versatile magical device, which pushed the cost even higher. Thankfully, the book held no power of its own, which actually reduced the price somewhat. After balancing all of that, the system arrived at its final number according to its own grading methods. One thing Julian had found rather amusing was that while most books from this world were valued more highly by the system than by ordinary shops, there were a few exceptions.
One such example was Lockhart's books about "his" adventures throughout the magical world. In stores, each of the man's seven books sold for five galleons, which in terms of system value should have translated to hundreds of points apiece. In reality, because the books were not only extremely common but also actively harmful to learn from, they were cheaper than nearly every other book in existence apart from nursery rhymes, costing only three points each. Julian could not help laughing at that, since even the system apparently agreed that the man was completely full of shit.
In any case, Julian bought the book he had been eyeing and immediately pulled it out of Greed where it had appeared. Helena looked at the old brown leather-bound volume with its frayed pages in open curiosity. But when Julian opened it, she was left completely dumbfounded because the language written inside was unlike anything she had ever seen before. The obviously handwritten characters looked oddly sharp and seemed to be built around some sort of symbolic structure. Julian, on the other hand, instinctively recognized what he was looking at and was surprised to realize that it was essentially that world's version of demonic script, daedric runes.
'No wonder it cost so much. I could probably use this book to create a primer covering a pretty large portion of the daedric rune system. That would make two entire magical writing systems that only I know in this world,' he thought, pleasantly surprised. "What language is that?" Helena asked curiously. "I am not actually sure where it comes from, but it looked interesting so I picked it up from a spot that had clearly been forgotten," Julian said, which was not technically a lie since he genuinely had no idea where the language had originally come from, and the book had definitely been pulled from some abandoned place judging by its condition.