Judine walked throughout the jailhouse. It was a terrible sight to see what criminals, specifically what people with minor crimes had to go through. One wrong move would place you in the worst place in Forsivo, or so it seemed to her.

  She knew she was looking at it from a privileged view, but she had no choice but to keep looking through her rose-tinted glasses. The way some criminals she recognized looked at her with not deep contempt, but a hope in their eyes.

  It made Judine sick to her stomach. She knew they were all human at the core, but she typically shut off her own emotion, blocked it away for trial. But she now knew that the problem isn’t just corrupt judges allowing criminals to go free; there was a deeper one at the core of the justice system.

  One that Judine would have to spend the next few years slowly cleaning up, removing brutality away from the pointless crimes, and looking at the full case. Judine noticed one thing throughout her currently two years of working as the head judge.

  And that was the way every single person had a story, every single crime had different context, and the same punishment was wrong. And that was only proven with her visit to the courthouse. She bowed to the warden before she was sent back to work on another case.

  55 - Annotations

  Judine had wandered away from Clara, but that was probably for the best in this massive library. She found some books of court records, some in other languages but she stuck to Elvish and Common, and grabbed one or two in a language she didn’t use to train her [Translate] skill.

  These court records went deep into history, and the judge was most curious how the past judges handled some of the other things, but there were even some from pre-integration. That was rare for history books to cover.

  She had seen there were plenty of annotations, getting more closely related to Common as the court cases got more recent. Judine took a note in her personal journal of how these were probably used by Kishtan to learn Common.

  The annotations were detailed too, clearly made with expertise in either the crime or the justice of said crime. Harder to tell the difference between those two when the annotations target the crime more so than the punishment most times.

  Some annotations dug into the punishment, or defended the punishment when it seemed far too harsh for the crime with added context. One was a crime by a Minie Positure; Manslaughter of a Family of 3. Apparently the court case was actually a week long, with witnesses including the legendary Lanostiv Forsivo and Archibald Pestiaera.

  And the reason it took so long was because Minie was an infamous SSR++ rank person, and nobody other than the other first adventurers were capable of punishment. But that made Judine pause in the reading.

  She reread that line, ‘the other first adventurers’. That implied she was one, but she wasn’t mentioned in most common stories of the five adventurers. In fact; she was more well known among justices and adventurers as the Sower of Death.

  While Lanostiv and Archibald were far more famed, in fact the divinity of Magic had named themselves after Archibald with how legendary the mage was, it was still far too odd to specify those two as witnesses when there should’ve been three others that made a famous mark in history.

  While Petra had a reasonable one, founding the library of Alexandria, Judine was curious now. She had left the court case books where they were; and followed the annotations actually. She found a mention in one annotation of a book titled ‘Foul Play by Firnie Nurnista’. This book led to another.

  The chain left Judine with more small puzzle pieces, but they were physically broken. She hadn’t had this kind of research to be done since she’d first studied the Sower of Death’s major case 9 years ago for the King’s first prince.

  But most people didn’t have history spanning before she was alive. Even then the statute of limitations prevented most tidbits from being placed in the court of law, and was better to go ignored.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  One can’t base a guilty or not guilty verdict off things done 30+ years ago anyways, but here she was following the annotations like a conspiracy theorist trying to prove the current king had made a false move to get the throne.

  The annotations led her from book to book; some in Elvish, some in Gnomish, one in Primordial, but they were all primary sources. This library missed a large amount of sources outside of the annotations. Secondary sources were still a requirement.

  So she dug herself deeper. The mosaic on the ceiling had already turned by the time she finished collecting a small amount. Judine was probably digging herself a rabbit hole, but she was fine with that.

  Not when it meant upending stories from over 100,000 years ago, before the kingdom of Forsivo was even founded by Lanostiv. The books slowly aligned, making a timeline. They weren’t dated, but they were dated by Kishtan’s reading habits.

  He had clearly read some books in phases, massive phases that spanned for years upon years; but still phases. And the genre was sort of sorted from that with few outliers from that pattern. Judine read more and more, and found herself looking at Clara from across the second floor opening; seeing her passed out on her desk was a nice view from the research the two had done.

  One was digging into linguistics and languages, while Judine was relying on a system skill to help her research the history of this nation. When Pallad barged into the library, she jumped and her eyes fell upon the paladin carrying a bard on his back.

  She hopped down from the second floor, and upon landing she quickly walked up towards Pallad, who was calling out for Clara. She had found him not taking too long in that miniature game of Marco Polo where only one member was calling out.

  “Why is Bariton passed out?” Judine was first to ask, without trying to waste time. The condition Bariton was in… Terrible was the only way to describe it. Pallad set him down on the plush carpet that lined the entire library.

  Judine placed her hand upon Bariton’s head and frowned lightly as Pallad answered her question. “Well at the temple we met the god of death-”

  “A god? Was their name ‘Unfortunate Ends’ by chance?” Judine interrupted as she cast a cryomancy spell upon a cloth she had at the ready to cool it down quickly, placing it atop Bariton’s head.

  The bard’s groan didn’t make her feel much better. She actively ignored the system warning about exhaustion or whatever. “Yes, it was- Would you happen to recognize it?” Pallad seemed confused in this scenario, looking around the library.

  Of course the library looked odd to someone who hadn’t figured out the system for finding books of specific titles. Her books were strewn about seemingly randomly, but by reading a singular annotation at the start of all of them; you could find out what Kishtan had read previously, and it’d always be nearby.

  She tried something else she hadn’t had much practice in, healing magic without the system’s help. She worked hard to find the small virus, ignoring the system message once more as she looked around.

  The idea behind germ theory was also interesting, but she couldn’t get side tracked. Not now; when Bariton’s life was in Judine’s hands. Judine thought of that as she looked at Bariton’s fate, but more specifically the fate of the fever.

  She relaxed when she found out the fate was well. Bariton just needed a good rest. “I think it’s because he drained too much life force. When facing gods, we need to stay well defended against all kinds of forces.”

  Judine began speaking, finally being unable to ignore the notifications.

  [Exhaustion Level -> 3.89]

  “Oh dear.” She muttered under her breath in seeing the number steadily rise. Pallad rushed to her aide when she muttered that; but she waved him off. “I’ll also be fine after a sleep or two. Mind helping me find some books?”

  “Of course not!” Pallad answered, looking around at the bookshelves some entire sections cleared out by Clara or herself and Judine couldn’t be bothered to recall which. Judine looked down at the more vile notification.

  The number was still increasing, and she felt herself get dragged down further and further. She hadn’t felt this weak since Level 75. The night sky looked so beautiful above her as well.

  [Exhaustion Level -> 4.52]

  The system kept trying to lull her into sleep with the incessant reminders of its existence. And Pallad looked at her more worriedly, his blue eyes framed by the rotation of his eyebrows. Interesting, that reminded her of the book ‘Fated to Fall’ by Funipe Finursta.

  She felt the ground come up to meet her as suddenly she fell over, simply muttering out a light ‘I’m quite tired’ before blacking out into the nothingness that is sleep. Maybe she was wrong on her theory of Demigods not needing sleep.