ding

After what felt like an hour of waiting, but that was probably only a couple of minutes, the System once again made its presence known. And I still appeared to be conscious and intact, which I considered a good sign.

Incongruity detected: Projections indicate disruptive mana interactions arising from any time affinity spells with a mana condensation ratio of 5.36 or greater, but the lower limit for spells of specified rank is 7. Working...

Nope, never mind. It was still chugging along without actually doing anything.

And what the hell was a mana condensation ratio? Some measure of the power of spells? And all spells of rank two needed a ratio of seven?

ding

Error: Discreet spell forms impossible due to disruptive mana interactions. Assessing merged spell forms. Working...

"What's happening?" asked Dad as I impatiently tapped my foot.

"The System seems to slowly be learning that offering me the [Temporal Mage] class when I already had [Spatial Mage] was not a great idea. There's some sort of conflict between my spells, and it's taking forever to sort it out."

"I thought people just weren't normally attuned to both sides of an affinity pair, not that they reacted in weird ways."

"Me too, or I wouldn't have tried it! Nor Lord Reid, given that he wanted me to try."

Harry had been spot on when he'd complained that no-one in this world knew how magic worked. I'd just taken it as granted that people didn't normally have both sides of an affinity pair, and hadn't questioned it further. Nor had anyone else. Not even Kari. Or at least, if she had, she'd never mentioned it to me. Despite being so enthusiastic about magic, the way she thought about it was far too limited.

ding

Merged spell forms created.

[Weft Walk] and [Speed] merge to [Timeless World]

[Item Box] and [Slow] merge to [Inventory]

[Distortion] and [Stutter] merge to [Dislocation]

Mana condensation ratio above normal range for rank. Levelling penalty applied.

Error: Disruption potential remains due to existing temporal affinity spells. Removing spells.

Spells [Minor Slow] and [Minor Speed] lost.

Error: Merged spell forms result in instability in existing spatial affinity spells. Tainting existing spells with temporal affinity.

I waited for a minute, but no further messages seemed to be forthcoming.

So... that happened.

A check of my status confirmed I'd lost [Minor Speed] and [Minor Slow]. That was irritating. Most of my other spells hadn't changed at all, but the three from [Spatial Mage] had been completely replaced, thankfully keeping their old levels in the process.

[Timeless world] - Space and time complex affinity spell that allows you to tread between the threads of the fabric of reality, crossing space far faster than distance and personal time would suggest. Levelling increases travel speed. (Rank 2)

[Inventory] - Space and time complex affinity spell that provides a storage space. Levelling increases the size and time dilation of storage. (Rank 2)

[Dislocation] - Space and time complex affinity spell that permits the creation of pairs of small portals through which non-living objects can pass. Levelling increases the maximum size and duration of portals, along with the separation in space and time.

The descriptions had barely changed, but nevertheless, they sounded like amazing upgrades. [Timeless World] had 'and personal time' added, and a quick use confirmed that while it was active, I was under the auspices of a pseudo [Speed] effect. The world slowed down around me, but in a way that was proportional to my speed. If I stood still, there was no time dilation at all, but if I sprinted, the world faded to violets and greys as all movement other than my own seemed to cease.

[Inventory] had gained a temporal dilation effect of its own, presumably meaning less time would pass for anything stored in there. Hopefully, it wouldn't have adverse effects on Cluma's teleportation; we'd need to do some more testing. Detaching a hand and storing it still seemed to work, but the link faded to almost nothing, and I stopped getting any sensations back. I didn't have any immediate way of measuring the exact time dilation, but if it kept my food and monster corpses fresher for longer, it was a helpful upgrade.

On the downside, I could no longer use [Superimpose] on anything stored in there. That was understandable; given the time dilation, how were the body parts supposed to merge?

[Dislocation] now permitted the portals to be separated in time, rather than merely space. I played around with tossing stones for a bit, and while I couldn't get them to exit a portal before I'd tossed them in, I could get them to exit a few seconds after their entrance. Failing to create an exit portal to eject the stone resulted in it being spat out in a random direction when the maximum duration was up. Not useful for breaking causality, but there were some interesting tactical applications.

So, some good upgrades, some losses, and my other spells had been 'tainted', whatever that meant. There was still nothing new in the skill shop, so nothing to spend soul points on, but I hadn't been expecting to spend anything, anyway; rank two spells would have been free, thanks to [Jack of All Trades 2].

"Okay, everything seems to have sorted itself out," I said, much to Dad's relief. "Now, seeing as even farming didn't work out as stress relief, I am going to return to my bed, climb into it, and not move until next week."

"So, you plan to skip your birthday then?"

I froze as I invoked [Clock] to check the date. After all that time stuck in quarantine, I'd kinda lost track.

"For the next four days," I corrected myself. Dad merely grinned.

Of course, nothing was that simple, with my use of [Redistribute] to get back to Dawnhold immediately showing what the messages meant by tainting it with temporal affinity. My transfer was slightly faster than expected, but the mana cost had doubled. Experiments with my other spells showed similar effects. [Far Step] and [Far Reach] activated more quickly, with a reduced lag between invocation of the spell and when I reached my target. [Shelter] could be phased more quickly through my body, reducing issues like the time a snake bit me on the inside. [Superimpose] could be toggled more seamlessly, to the extent I could flick it on and off in a single punch, much like the way I changed the weight of my sword-staff.

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Everything was faster, at the expense of costing more mana. That wasn't a bad trade-off, as long as nothing broke my mana funnelling trick.

[Mana Sight] showed each of my spells now had temporal affinity mixed in. It wasn't like my efforts of creating patches of raw mana on top of each other, though; it was all carefully woven. So the two opposite types of mana didn't always react repulsively? Or did the spell form keep them from actually touching? But if it was just that, why would 'tainting' my spells solve any sort of problem? It made no sense!

I was increasingly convinced that 'magic' wasn't a problem that was solvable within a human lifespan. Just like the way Einstein wouldn't have discovered general relativity had he been born in the neolithic period, without the body of work of his predecessors to build from, we knew nothing except what the System permitted us to know, and when it came to actually understanding stuff, we were starting from scratch. Harry wasn't going to figure out any sort of defence or cure for the Law from first principles, however much help he had.

Not that I'd ever believed he could. It was just that this odd behaviour of the System was shoving it in my face.

Despite the thought I'd put into it, I still had no ideas better than 'beg the System', which itself was almost certainly going to fail. What sort of deal could I strike when all it wanted was to subsume people? Maybe Darren and Harry could work together to open a portal to a third world somewhere, and I'd let the System have that in exchange for... not eroding people? Giving them the [Unbound Soul] trait?

How had Erryn given me [Unbound Soul]? Given the error in the description, it was obviously a hack job. Was there any way I could replicate that?

[Unbound Soul] - Unchained and free, you have been appointed to the seat of judgement. (Rank 5)

I stared at the trait description. That... wasn't an error.

Bringing it up again gave the same result.

When had it changed? When had I last looked at it? I hadn't. Not since my first conversation with Erryn.

My first meeting with Erryn. She'd told me. The beginnings of that conversation were blurred in my memory, before I'd got over my shock, but I remembered how it ended with crystal clarity.

'Please grow and explore. Discover the hidden places of this world. Meet all the races and try to understand them in a way I cannot. Then if you ever come to an answer, let me know.'

But Erryn was a human toddler. Letting her know wouldn't achieve anything. My only hope would be if she'd set up something automated, but if so, she'd surely have mentioned it in the messages she left behind.

If only the Law had an administrator control panel, like the System did, there'd be a pretty good chance I'd have access to it.

My musings were interrupted by the sound of the front door.

"Welcome home, dear," I called after employing [Mana Sight] to check it was indeed Cluma.

She froze up, still standing in the entranceway. "Did you just call me dear?"

"Sorry, I'm in a funny mood."

"That's hardly an excuse; you're always in a funny mood. And don't apologise."

She resumed her movement, entering my bedroom where I was splayed out on my bed. "Tough day?" she asked.

"A... full day, certainly. I changed class to [Temporal Mage], and the System really didn't like me having both that and [Spatial Mage]."

"You got another [Artisan] level? You better not have been making more detection devices."

"No, I got it from weeding."

I peered at the cat-girl, who was staring at me suspiciously with her deep purple eyes. Eyes that could see mana better than I could. After the revelation of how Darren saw the world... The Law was a giant soul magic construct, right? I should have asked Darren, but since Cluma was right here...

"Cluma, what do I look like to you?"

She gave me a Look, so I interjected before she could answer. "Not to your normal eyesight. To mana. Darren said I was sparkly."

"You have [Mana Sight]. Can't you see yourself?"

"Yes, and as far as I can see, I don't sparkle."

"You do have a cloud of spatial and temporal affinities around you, but I wouldn't describe it as sparkly. Body affinity, too, but that stays on the inside, along with... with..." her eyes unfocused briefly, before she shut her mouth, apparently believing the sentence was over.

I suppose it was a similar problem to if someone asked me to describe the colour red. Red was, well, red. I could describe it by reference, like 'the colour of blood', but to someone who had never seen red before, a description was impossible. Mana wasn't light, and the language lacked terms to describe how things looked.

Which was an interesting factoid in itself... This world had mages prior to the System, so presumably they had their own methods of perceiving mana. Did they not have terminology for it? Or maybe there was no need for any, since spatial affinity just looked like spatial affinity. Unlike the real world, where many things other than blood were also red, mana didn't really have that problem. You could be exact.

In any case, Cluma could describe my mana by reference to my affinities, but that was the limit. I had no idea whether she and Darren saw the same things, or how what they were seeing translated to light. I knew they could both see mana in more detail than I could, so comparisons to what I saw weren't entirely accurate.

But the interesting bit there was that she could see my soul affinity. She just wasn't allowed to remember it.

"The fourth affinity I have inside me, can you see any inside yourself?"

Cluma's eyes unfocused again. "It's... not one of my affinities..." she said slowly and monotonously.

"Not as an affinity. As an effect. Is there a spell or magic of some sort of that affinity acting on you?"

"Yes..."

I sat bolt upright, the unexpected answer striking like a lightning bolt.

"Can you tell where it's coming from?"

"Everywhere..." she answered in the same monotonous voice, looking around. "But it's stronger there..." she continued, waving west.

I tried to process the direction in my head. Given our position on the east side of the continent, she hadn't narrowed it down much, but the ark was quite far north of Synklisi, and if I was forced to guess between the two, it was Synklisi she was pointing at.

"Can you help me track it down, please? I'll teleport us to Synklisi, and see what you pick up from there."

"Yes..."

She dumped her mana, so I went to teleport her, remembering just in time about my modified skills. The Law wasn't going anywhere. Safety came first.

"Actually, I need to be careful with teleportation. My [Item Box] skill changed to [Inventory], so it needs some retesting."

Cluma instantly snapped out of her nearly hypnotic state. "Wait, what? Was that what you meant about the System not liking you?"

"Yeah. Instead of giving me the proper time spells, it merged them into my space spells. [Inventory] is a mix of [Item Box] and [Slow]. It seems the same, except that time passes more slowly for anything on the inside."

"Sounds fine to me. The less time I have to spend in there, the better. It's horrible being inside your [Item Box]."

"Sorry."

"The teleportation is worth it. I just wish we could swap roles from time to time. Right, to the hospital! I want to be near some healers if anything goes wrong."

I didn't argue, so we relocated to the hospital reception before I teleported Cluma across the room.

"That... Wow. It didn't feel like I was stuck at all. One moment I was there, the next I was here."

I inspected her carefully with [Mana Sight], but saw no change, just like [Item Box]. No sign of damage or inflammation.

Further testing revealed I needed to leave her in [Inventory] for a full ten seconds before she even had time to register being in there, and even that was a blink-and-you'd-miss-it style thing. She could go a minute before it felt like old teleports using [Item Box], suggesting I had a time dilation of approximately a hundred to one.

"Well, I approve of the upgrades. And now it's even a means of hiding."

"Not a useful one, given that you need to dump your mana first. Besides, if you wanted to use it to hide, I could just eject you at another location, then teleport you back later."

"True. Anyway, Synklisi?"

With [Inventory] confirmed safe, the pair of us jumped to Synklisi.

"What were we even here for, anyway?" asked Cluma as we walked out of the Delvers' guild.

"That spell effect you had on you. We were looking for the source."

"Spell effect on me? I don't... have..."

Her speech slowed down and the lifelessness returned as she once again focused on the soul magic dragging at her.

"It's coming from there..." she droned, pointing straight at the great dungeon.