Esulri does that, then wanders off elsewhere into the small house.

To read: a lot. Esulri apparently mostly collects nonfiction and a few small poetry collections. A good number of histories, political science, philosophy texts, descriptions of other empires, travelogues, comparative law, quite a few collections of news articles. Much of it's annotated by Esulri, though Cor can hide the notes so they don't clutter the screen. There's not much in the way of science or technological texts, except some things titled 'basic primers' for assorted 'grades' that seem to have not been opened in ten or more years, going by the timestamp.

Cor would really like to know more about magic but if he doesn't have any books on magic he will take travelogues and histories and news and empire descriptions and poli sci!

Histories seem to mention magic as the sort of thing that Overlords sometimes do; the best bet there's actually an analysis of warfare, though there's some general sense of what people expect on a daily basis in the news. (There was a huge war where several Overlords actually banded together, a few centuries ago, against an Overlord who had planet-destroying powers and was apparently insane enough to use them, despite general wisdom-of-warfare that that's stupid, you want intact infrastructure more than terror or quick victories.) Many powerful Overlords don't die of old age on appreciable scales, and some can (or do) empower their underlings; some of those underlings are also long lived. Constant war and conquest is pretty normal, though 'polite' Overlords keep it to trying to establish ownership claims on each other, which is usually minimally destructive to civilian populations. Most Overlords aren't very polite.

There's a somewhat recent but apparently still current empire that's gained most of its territory via the Overlord, The Demon Queen, teleporting into other Overlords' armories and treasury vaults and stealing all their stuff (as well as most of their slaves and prisoners) as an opening move, with minimal actual warfare following. This is for some reason considered more unnerving by the other Overlords than throwing very big armies at each other. The description of the Demon Queen's empire mentions she's one of the only ones who allows immigrants, and the biggest of the maybe two or three empires who allows people to leave. News of her empire's banned most places (Esulri seems to have some of these books illicitly), but at least the propaganda she puts out seems to emphasize good, stable living conditions. Esulri has really extensive annotations about considering investigating her and trying to get her to overthrow the local Overlord.

The neighbors of the empire Cor's currently in are smaller, more unstable. Still, there's a big one nearby that was aggressively expanding and had a reputation as war mongers for a while then stopped and closed their borders entirely; they're suspected to have had an change in leadership. There's another that's one of the technological innovation capitals of the region - also aggressive expansionists, but they usually start with trying peaceful annexation before war. The news mentions one empire that's suspected to be in its death throes; people are worried about some of its holdings becoming Wild Space.

Poli sci has a lot on the philosophy of governance. A lot of Esulri's annotations cross reference history books, with more than a few notes of 'has anyone actually tried this?'. There's also some about the politics of warfare - political scientists, or at least the ones Esulri reads, generally seem to think the current status quo involves going to war too often for poorly considered reasons ('if you ask 'how can I solve this with my army' of all your problems, you have already failed' one notes in the middle of tearing apart some technically victorious battles that lost wars, and wars that worked against political goals. Esulri has that highlighted but not commented on).

Wild Space?

That takes some digging since this is apparently common knowledge, but one of the basic primers (almost certainly for kids) has the answer - Wild Space is what happens when no one owns an entire region! Rather than just exploding everywhere, you get large scale random magical effects, with the local coherency of things like cause and effect decreasing over time. There's a picture of a reclaimed bit of Wild Space with trees made of bones and soil made of jelly. Sometimes monsters wander out of Wild Space.

Gosh! Are new planets generally wild-type? Also how does space travel work.

Newly discovered planets usually are, though some have an uncontacted population that owns it and keeps it stable (sometimes people who left to go colonize and dropped out of contact, but rarely also the chaos spontaneously makes people who can claim things).

Esulri doesn't seem to own any books more complicated than 'aimed at children' about space travel, but generally only the personal ships of Overlords run on magic; everything else runs on technology, using either wormholes (probably made by ancient magic; they're pretty much giant portals across huge distances) or hyperspace (slower than wormholes but doable with technology; the book describes it as 'like folded space' with a sense that's actually a horrible oversimplification) to go really far distances, like between stars. Wormholes are a lot cheaper, safer, and faster, since proper lightspeed ships are expensive and get lost in hyperspace a lot.

Whoa, spontaneously made people. Are they humans or are they weird magic people?

How physically large are non-magical spaceships. What kind of passenger capacity are they looking at. How do they find where it would be a good idea to go.

Mostly apparently weird magic people, but you're more likely to get humans even if you're less likely to get people at all in marginal Wild Space (which is close to owned areas, especially owned populated areas).

Non-magical spaceships come in a lot of different capacities but several of the ones mentioned have minimum crew in the hundreds. There's not really statistics but there seems to be a sense you could fit a city in the biggest spaceships, though ones you're sending to lightspeed instead of through wormholes usually are very small, a few dozen passengers at most. Lightspeed ships need to be carrying someone capable of interfacing with the magic system, for some reason, but sublight ships are usually run by computers.

Usually figuring out where to go happens through some combination of telescopes (which can tell you what something very far was like many years ago), small lightspeed scouting ships with minimal crew, and sometimes Overlords with far-viewing powers taking an active role in exploration.

Well, that makes obtaining a spaceship or several and hauling them to his world to be loaded up with evacuees for in-world transit seem less plausible.

Wow he's been reading for a really long time and he's hungry. "Esulri?"

"Yeah?" Esulri calls out, coming back into view.

"How should I go about getting something to eat?"

"I have food."

"Where is it and does it need preparation?"

"Kitchen. Some does, some doesn't." He gestures for Cor to follow him into another room.

Cor will follow Esuri's lead on food. "Unfortunately all my cooking skills are from another universe's magic system and also heavily rationed right now."

"Yeah. That makes sense. Don't use magic to cook, here..."

He makes simple foods - assembles a sandwich from existing cut bread and cheese and then some slightly wilted lettuce and tomatoes and condiments. Drinks are just existing bottles that were in the fridge. (He's somewhat too tired to actually cook.) His pantry seems pretty bare, overall, though.

Sandwiches are fine, and anyway there's approximately a famine going on at home. Cor does not complain.

"Find what you wanted in the books?"

"Much of it, yeah. It doesn't seem like it will make sense given the kind of deadline I'm working with to steal a spaceship to put evacuees or even scouts on, though."

"Yeah... Maybe a big station? That might be hard to move. But they get pretty huge, even if they can't go anywhere fast."

"Do they ever land? I have to be able to make marks on or around whatever I want to bring along and if they're floating in the sky at all times I can't."

"...The big ones don't usually I don't think."

"Then it seems like it might be difficult to paint one." Sigh.

"I also dunno if there's any less assholeish Overlords who can help... Though that'd be maybe high impact, from our side."