“So, we’re in a room that appears to be sunk in the middle of the ocean…why?” Amelia asked, clearly unimpressed.

“This is my viewing room.” Kali said. “We’ll be using it to look over the new plane as we work.”

There was a stirring in the water in the distance, the enormous silhouette of a giant beast turning to face them. It began to grow and grow, rapidly speeding towards the room before opening its mouth and swallowing the room whole. After a brief moment of looking at the inside of its mouth, the room had teleported a mile or so away, the beast still easily visible thanks to its sheer size.

“What was that?!” Amelia exclaimed. “And why does nobody care that it just tried to eat us?!”

“That’s just Levi.” Jerry said dismissively. “He was a pet project I was working on a few thousand years ago, and I gave him to Kali with a plane I gave her. This room should be invisible, but he can detect the trace amounts of Worship in it, so he thinks it’s a fun game to try and eat it.”

“It was shocking my first couple of times too.” Judy said, a nostalgic smile on her face. “But he can’t do anything to us in here, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

“I forgot I had the room set to his area.” Kali said apologetically. “I’ve been trying to think about what we’re going to do with him now that there’s a war brewing, it seems like such a waste to just leave him unused. I’ve considered giving him a soul like I did Anna’s dogs, but it’d be a lot of babysitting to get him to a point where he’s not a danger to everyone around him.”

As Levi approached the room again, Jerry gave him a thoughtful look. “Lia might be able to help there, actually.” He said. “She’s unusually adept at giving souls to monsters, provided they’re members of the swarm. Though, that would require you giving him back to me, at least for a time, so if you don’t want to do that, I understand.”

“Take him.” Kali said, watching impassively as Levi attempted to eat the room once again. “I’m not really qualified to work with him, and if Lia can make him useful, then it’s better than him just sitting around doing nothing like he is now.”

Jerry nodded, then waved a hand. Levi vanished, and there was a deafening roar as an unfathomable amount of water rushed to fill the space he had occupied. “I’ll cocoon him myself, I’m not sure it’ll be safe otherwise. If we can get Lia to make him…presentable, I’ll gift him back to you, the capability to make other things part of the swarm removed, of course.”

“That’s really not necessary.” Kali protested. “He’s your project.”

“And I gave him to you along with Haven. You are currently one of our most important Administrators, and you need all the defenses you can get.”

“Sure, don’t even ask Lia first.” Amelia harumphed. “Real polite.”

Jerry rolled his eyes. “It’s not like this takes more than a few seconds for her, and we both know she’d say yes. Furthermore, converting him will give her enough experience to evolve several times over, and likely unlock some incredibly potent evolutions for her. It’d make getting her on-par with you and Rose significantly faster.”

“Fine.” Amelia grumbled. “Let’s just carry on with what we were doing.”

“Give me a moment here…” Kali said, placing her hand on a globe near the center of the room. A moment later, the view shifted, becoming an aerial overview of a wide, barren expanse of dirt and rock. “This here’s the plane we’re going to be working with.” She said. “This is one of the planes that’s a blank slate, the only life being monsters. We’ll be building a “normal” ecosystem and a civilization from the ground up.”

“And there are monsters why?” Amelia asked. “How do they survive without anything to eat?”

Kali gave Amelia an inquisitive look. “Where do you think monsters come from?”

“They form out of excess Mana, obviously.” Amelia said. “But that wouldn’t explain why there are monsters here now; without consistent sustenance they should be dying out way too quickly for there to be any sort of monstrous presence on this plane aside from one or two apex predators.”

“And what happens to monsters who die?” Kali prompted.

“Depends? Usually, their bodies just decompose, but under some circumstances they vanish instead.”

“Almost correct, but you have it backwards.” Kali said. “In the absence of other factors, monster bodies will vanish, returning to Mana; Administrators are the ones who create the systems that allow monster bodies to remain, using the Mana that would otherwise be released by their deaths to instead keep the body physical.

“And, without anything else nearby, the Mana goes straight back into the atmosphere, and there’s a net neutral. Of course, if there’s another monster nearby, it gets the Mana instead, but the Mana will eventually return to the atmosphere, all the while the plane continues to generate the Mana it’s ‘missing’ from the ambient energy. In essence, the plane will never have less than a certain amount of monsters, leaving it quite a hostile place.”

“But it would also be quite a good place to train, then, wouldn’t it?” Amelia asked. “It doesn’t sound like all planes are like this, so why waste a good one when there’s something that already has a pre-existing ecosystem we can work with?”

“Yes and no. While it is true that it’s an ideal place for those who know what they’re doing, the same can’t be said for most people.” Jerry said, turning his gaze to Lilith and Judy. “How much do you two know about the nature of growing stronger as a person?”

“Outside the context of our system, not much.” Judy said.

“Likewise.” Lilith agreed. “It hasn’t been relevant.”

“Right.” Jerry replied. “It’s like this; levels, stats, and other artifacts of a system are simply representations of the base level of Mana a soul has. This base level of Mana is something that everyone has the capability to increase by absorbing Mana, which our systems represent as increasing stats. This base level of Mana is what the soul returns to when their Mana is depleted, and the base level cannot be decreased except when a soul is made conscious.”

“Made conscious as in…being born?” Judy asked.

“Being born is the most common way it happens, but anything that permanently resets the soul’s memory will do. It’s quite the vexing thing, really; it would be preferable if we could easily prevent this reset of a soul’s base Mana, but the universe simply doesn’t work that way. As Kali and Lilith can attest to, preserving a soul’s memory while putting them back in a physical form is significantly more challenging than you might expect.”

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Amelia raised an eyebrow. “I never had any issues, and Lia hasn’t either.” She said.

“I’d be willing to bet that has something to do with the eldritch.” Lilith said, the slightest hint of defensiveness creeping into her tone. “There’s no way two untrained people could get it right every time they try without even taking any precautions.”

“Have you considered the fact that Lia and I are just…better than you at this?” Amelia said smugly. “Seems like you tried and failed, but just because you can’t doesn’t mean it’s something hard for everyone.”

“She didn’t.” Kali said, stepping forward. “I did. When…look, long story short, decades ago Lilith was my dead lover, and I tried to reincarnate her the same way Lia reincarnated Rose. It was only a partial success, and her personality was preserved, but not her memories.”

“Though, with Lilith being who she is, we can’t rule out eldritch interference there, either.” Jerry pointed out. “And I believe Lilith is correct; it is overwhelmingly likely that Lia’s proficiency with reincarnations was in some way influenced by the eldritch. Whether that be choosing a soul to influence that just so happened to have the knack, or directly modifying the soul to give it the knack, it doesn’t really matter, but there are far too many precautions that have to be taken for someone to get it right without even trying to reincarnate someone, even helped as it was by me.”

“Can’t you just let her have the achievement?” Amelia complained. “It’s always eldritch this, or eldritch that, never just letting it be…hers.”

Jerry sighed. “Amelia, you’re thinking about this in the wrong way.” He said. “No matter what we may try, what the eldritch has done is intimately tied with the souls of the people they’ve touched. In my eyes, it might as well be her achievement; it is as much a part of her as anything else, and at the end of the day she is the one reincarnating those souls, not the Elder Gods. Does it matter if her way of ‘learning’ to do so is different? You wouldn’t decry her skill with magic because you were the one that taught her things, would you?”

“Of course not, but that’s different.” Amelia said. “She had to put in the effort to learn.”

“Then, assume a natural prodigy for, say, music composition. If they were never classically trained, and their first works were excellent, does that take away from their skill? It is an unrealistic scenario, yes, but so is this. In fact, you are in the same position, and you never have any complaints about assuming that the eldritch influenced your skill in crafting systems.”

Amelia was silent for a moment. “I could have complaints and just have not voiced them.” She said eventually.

Lilith chuckled. “Amelia, I’ve known you for only a couple of hours, and even I can tell that you aren’t the type to keep your complaints bottled up.”

“Fine, whatever.” Amelia said, throwing her hands up in defeat. “Let’s just get on with this boring explanation or whatever we were doing.”

“Where was I again?” Jerry asked.

“Discussing a soul’s base Mana?” Judy prompted.

“Thank you. So, to finish the tangent on reducing the base level of Mana, I believe that the Mana reduction is somehow used to help keep the universe running, but I can’t be sure and that alone wouldn’t account for everything, so it’s really something to study after this war is done. For our purposes, we’re more concerned with increasing a soul’s base Mana.

“There are three main ways that this happens. The first and least common is for the soul to live on a plane with a higher level of background Mana than the soul’s base level of Mana. Over a period of decades or centuries, the soul will very slowly begin to acclimatize and increase its level of base Mana.

“With our systems, this generally isn’t easily shown, but it’s an edge case we need to handle, so we generally like to handle it by giving the person experience from sources that normally wouldn’t, or silently increasing the stats gained upon leveling up. If people knew how to measure and utilize their base Mana, they would be able to display increased power regardless of their level increasing or their stats changing, but that’s beside the point.

“The second, more common, way of increasing base Mana is to use it. Like a muscle, as a soul empties their base Mana, it refills to an ever so slightly larger amount. In many systems, this is expressed as skill experience or something similar, but it’s important to remember that, at the end of the day, skills, experience, titles, levels, stats, everything in a system, is just expressions of a soul’s Mana. We could redistribute that any way we want and it would work just fine.”

“Are you sure?” Amelia asked. “I mean, yes, it’s all Mana, that’s obvious, but not all Mana is the same.”

Jerry frowned. “I don’t follow.” He said. “As far as I’ve been able to tell, there are no qualitative differences between different bits of Mana at the fundamental level. I’ve run a lot of experiments, and I’ve never once proved anything like that.”

Amelia shook her head. “No, the Mana’s the same, but…not. It interacts with the soul differently.”

“How so?” Jerry asked, genuine curiosity in his tone. “Again, I’ve tried a lot of things with a lot of different souls, but I couldn’t find a difference.”

“It just…it just does.” Amelia said frustratedly. “It’s really, really, really subtle, and the effect manifests differently with every soul, but it feels like the Mana is expecting to be used in a certain way. The issue with your system I kept running into was that it was too rigid. I followed the Mana, I could feel where it wanted to go, and there were times when your system forced it to go a different way.”

Understanding dawned on Jerry’s face, and he broke into a wide smile. “I…see.” He said thoughtfully. “I had chalked your circuitry’s strange patterns up to you being unfamiliar with system architecture, but you built it with the Mana in mind, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t.” Amelia said. “I didn’t build any circuitry. I just tweaked things so that Mana could ignore the places your system wanted it to go. The pattern’s different for every soul, I couldn’t just build one circuit and be done with it.”

Lilith could practically see the gears in Jerry’s head turning as he spoke. “And by doing so, you improved the efficiency of the Mana. You’ll need to teach me how to detect where Mana wants to go, because that sounds vitally important.”

“It is, but it won’t matter until we start making a system.” Amelia said. “Let’s hurry this up, we can talk about this later, at home.”

“Right. Carrying on, the last way to increase base Mana is to absorb some when something nearby dies. Unaided, this is highly difficult to do, especially in the heat of battle, and that’s one of the huge benefits of systems; it automatically does so, provided both parties are subject to the system.

“And that’s the big catch of using these planes to train; systems don’t just work for free; they need to be maintained, and every additional plane you apply the system to, the larger the maintenance cost is. It’s not a linear scale, fortunately, it’s a lot cheaper to extend an existing system to a new plane than it is to run a copy of the same system on that plane, but that running cost needs Worship.

“Usually, that Worship is generated by people who live under the system. It bites rather significantly into the Worship that they would give to the Administrator and Higher Beings, but we find the long-term gains to outweigh that maintenance cost. It’s much harder to justify for an uninhabited plane that won’t make back the Worship you’re spending, so realistically that leaves us with only the people who are able to manually absorb Mana being able to train in planes like these.

“At that point, it’s better to use these planes for other purposes. These types of planes are highly prized by Administrators because they’re complete blank slates, allowing us to tailor even the smallest aspect of the plane to our liking, so it’s just highly inefficient to use one for just training.”

Jerry waved a hand and a table with several stacks of papers appeared to the side. “That all being said, it’s time to discuss foundations. I’ve prepared a bunch of lessons and hands-on examples with system basics, similar to what we’d use to teach new Administrators. Amelia, when we come across something that seems wrong to you, please call it out and we can discuss why it’s wrong and hopefully innovate and further refine our process. If everyone would go grab the top paper of a stack, we can get started with learning to ‘read’ system abilities!”

Lilith nodded, walking over and grabbing a paper. Admittedly, she wasn’t looking forward to the beginning parts of the process, where she was learning the basics, but they had to be done. So, there was nothing to do but put her head down and get to work.