Mercy Stirpstredecim de Omnio was graceful. Refined, lithe, angelic.

He didn’t walk so much as glide through space. Something about his face reminded Archmund of Sister Catherine from Granavale Town’s Church, though he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was simply the rarity of pale blue eyes and blonde hair in this part of the empire, which contrasted sharply with Mercy’s all-black outfit with far too many straps and pouches.

Of course, Sister Catherine would have never looked at him with such poorly-hidden contempt and pity.

Frankly, Archmund wasn’t sure Mercy even was a boy. It was a reasonable guess, since everyone had referred to him as “milord”, but he didn’t know if the term culturally mapped to his understanding of it from English. For all he knew, military commanders were called “milord” regardless of gender.

Mercy perfunctorily sipped at a cup of tea in the Granavale Tea Room, his legs crossed elegantly. His lips puckered, almost imperceptibly, in the slightest distaste, before he set it back before him. Mary came to refill the cup, but stopped upon seeing the liquid level had barely dropped.

“What are we supposed to be talking about?” Mercy asked. “I’m not a teacher.”

“Will you be entering the Dungeon?”

“Of course. I will be leading the expedition to clear the uppermost levels.”

Archmund swallowed. “Then I would like to accompany you.”

“Oh. Great. So it’s like that,” said Mercy.

Archmund sipped his own cup of tea. It was, inexplicably, genuine tea, not some herbal tisane, brewed to perfection. Frankly, he didn’t care much for tea either way, but this was perfectly fine tea, complete with the slight hints of a caffeine buzz. Perhaps in Palace Omnio they had higher quality teas, but this hardly warranted disgust.

“I don’t know how much you learn out here,” Mercy said, “But there’s nobles, and then there’s Nobles. I don’t expect you to care or even know about the distinction in this… place.”

Another tedious class distinction. Archmund found his mind wandering — a terrible habit, since this was likely to be important, but he found himself wondering where tea even came from in this world. In his old world, “tea” was one of two words — well, cognate-groups, he supposed they could be called — for the same drink. The other was “cha” or “chai”. Many languages in that world adopted either “cha” or “tea” as the name for the drink. Which loanword was adopted depended on the various nuances of history, but generally “cha” was used by those who traded overland and “tea” was used by those who traded over sea.

Mercy looked at him with contempt, or perhaps disgust, or perhaps even boredom. “Granavale, send your maid out.”

“Why?”

“Unless she is prepared to be bound to you for life, send her out.”

Archmund nodded to Mary. She raised an eyebrow and raised her hand to her mouth in mock surprise. He rolled her eyes and gestured at her with a shooing motion. Smirking, she left.

Mercy waited until the door slammed firmly shut behind her.

“Shield,” Mercy muttered. A shimmering disc, the color of seafoam, extended from his hand.

“You know how I did this, yes?” Mercy said, as if lecturing a small, stupid child.

“A Gem,” said Archmund. “But you’re not holding any.”

“Because I’ve used this one enough to become Attuned to it. Gods above, you don’t even know the basics! Sphere.”

The disc-like shield distended like a balloon, and it transformed into a thin sphere that protected Mercy from all directions, a bubble of translucent blue-green.

Archmund raised his hand to the sphere. He touched it for only a moment before Mercy broke the enchantment. Even in that briefest moment, Archmund could feel the vast depths of Mercy Stirpstredecim de Omnio’s magic, how it was layered and complex in a way that dwarfed his own.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” Mercy said. His voice had jumped to a girlish octave. Was he actually panicked?

“Apologies,” said Archmund. “It’s just — I haven’t seen anyone do real magic ever before, so far out here in the country. Was that all one Gem?”

“Your maid isn’t eavesdropping, is she?” Mercy said. “I was serious, you know. If she isn’t a noble and hears these secrets, she’ll either have to die or serve you forever.”

“She takes these things seriously,” Archmund said.

In truth, he wondered if it was already too late. She had, after some false starts, successfully activated the Red Gem of Light. When she’d first started, she only could light it for a few minutes at most; now, she could channel enough of her magic to light it for almost an hour — not nearly as fast a growth curve as his own, but then again she spent much of the day housekeeping while he sat around and studied. That was enough to disprove that commoners innately couldn’t use magic, and that their lack of ability was simply a matter of not having the time and opportunity to do so.

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If commoners weren’t supposed to have magic, he’d already put her life in danger. If that was the case, he might as well tell her everything anyways — or, barring that, swear her to secrecy and never speak of the matter again.

“Well, they’ll teach you more at the Imperial Academy, so I’ll just tell you enough to keep you alive,” Mercy said.

So he did.

Archmund’s existing understanding of Gems and enchantments was basic but correct. Many different varieties of Gems could drop from Monsters, and though they weren’t exactly equivalent to their geological counterparts, they had been given the same names — ruby, sapphire, topaz, emerald, diamond, and so forth. These colors indicated which elemental spells could most easily be enchanted into the Gems, though exceptions always existed.

The cut of the Gem then determined which basic spell was enchanted into it. Denser or larger Gems could support more powerful and intricate spells.

Those were the basics.

“So if I want to know more, what do I study?” Archmund asked. “Advanced Gemology?”

Mercy snorted. “Advanced Gemology is a useless theoretical distraction meant to give half-wit mages and the noveau riche a sense of importance. You can’t learn the true potential of Gems without properly using them.”

For example, the Gem Mercy had used was not a “Shield” Gem or a “Protection Sphere” Gem. It was much simpler: a spell to harden the body against physical attacks. Mercy said its formal name was the Baogaddiamanta, but he preferred to call it the Diamond of Guard. Through years of vigorous training — another data point that supported Archmund’s theory nobles could use magic because they had decades of practice with it — Mercy had become unbreakable, able to fall from high cliffs or block swords with his bare hands.

“That must have been dangerous training,” Archmund noted.

“House Omnio spares no expense; I always had healers nearby for any of my stunts.”

“Anything for the elite units, huh?”

“…Yes.”

With mastery, Attunement had followed: Mercy’s understanding and technique with the Diamond of Guard was so great that he could use it without needing to touch it. So much of his magical power had flowed into it that this Diamond of Guard would always, in some way, be an echo of Mercy himself.

That was one of the few risks of using a single Gem to mastery. Habit. Lock-in. If you used one Gem exclusively, your magical flux would become Attuned to it just as the Gem became Attuned to you, and you would have great difficulty unlearning those habits to use other Gems. Nobles could afford the luxury of spending time unlearning a locked-in Attunement to learn anew. Others could not.

His earlier fears that using too much magic frivolously would risk depleting his power forever, or permanently damage his soul were unwarranted. The one risk was lock-in.

But Mercy didn’t elaborate further on that point. In fact, his discussions of Attunement were rushed, clipped, closer to bullet point lists than anything else.

It wasn’t a lot to go off of.

Had he even achieved Attunement with the Ruby of Light?

The way Mercy had phrased things unnerved him. Gems became and held echoes of their users. And they became more specialized and more powerful the more they were used.

He was reminded of a principle from his past life. There was a self-help book writer named Cal Newport, who’d written a book called “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” The central thesis of this book was that the best way to attain a life of freedom and luxury was to develop highly specialized, in-demand skills. It was better to become a potent specialist before generalizing, as opposed to starting as a generalist and meandering through skill acquisition and life.

Gems were very much like that. If you could master them to develop superhuman feats, then they could evolve and become even more powerful and flexible.

Even in a strange and unfamiliar world, he saw echoes of the past.

But perhaps it was a poor assumption that this was a world where hard work and specialization were rewarded. Perhaps this was just a game, in which case Mercy was akin to an overpowered “tutorial cheat character” meant to show him what he would one day be capable of.

(That sounded almost just as delusional as believing the power of hard work could overcome class differences from birth.)

“If I haven’t made myself clear enough by now,” Mercy said haughtily, “The Shield. The Protection Sphere. These are the Awakening of my Diamond of Guard. I could feel your magic when you touched mine — you aren’t as helpless as I’d expected you to be, but you simply aren’t near my level. Can you swing a sword?”

He could not.

“Can you shoot a bow?”

He had tried in his past life; in this body, he could not.

“Have you Awakened any Gems yet?”

He had not.

“You would be a liability,” Mercy said.

“One day,” Archmund said. “That’s all I ask. One day in the Dungeon.”

“You can have plenty of days once I’ve cleared the first levels.”

If he did that, legally, House Omnio would get the full spoils and all the easy pickings of fresh Gems from the easiest monsters. And any future excursions would be tightly supervised by the coalition of stakeholders they were building through these meetings. He had to be in this first wave. Simply for the grim sober socioeconomic reality of it all.

“I need to see what it’s really like,” Archmund said. “I need to see the dirty, messed up combat. What adventurers really have to face, how dangerous it really gets. Otherwise, how could I possibly become a Lord who sends people to their deaths in a place like that?”

And if he died, as much as he’d prefer to avoid it, that was that. Death meant much less when you knew that reincarnation was real.

Mercy looked at him. His face seemed inscrutable, almost contemptuous. But then he rolled his eyes.

“Tomorrow, at dawn, right outside the Dungeon. Don’t be late or we’ll leave without you.”

“I promise, I won’t!”

“It’s your funeral.”

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Archmund’s Journal (undated)

I should really be more afraid of death.

I’ve already gone through it once, yet I don’t remember it.

Maybe it was just that bad.