Charlie dozed off as he stared at the crackling bonfire. It was in that moment, just as he was about to give in to sleep, that he was suddenly jolted awake by Huey celebrating. “Yes!!! I freaking did it!”
Groggy and annoyed, Charlie groaned, then shouted, "Huey, keep it down! You're going to attract all the monsters with your voice!"
Huey, completely impermeable to Charlie’s frustration, exclaimed, “Charlie! Charlie! Look?” He presented a chunk of manacyte to Charlie. “Look, I did it.”
Staring at the reason for which he spent his eleventh night in a row in this murky forest, sleeping on the ground among cockroaches and all other bugs roaming this godforsaken place, he felt like punching the barbarian.
There’s a common stereotype about elves being in their element in the woods, but that stereotype didn’t apply to him. He was an indoor elf, one that liked sleeping on a warm bed, without the fear of being mauled in his sleep by some random monstrosity. He really felt like punching the culprit of his misery, but knowing that Huey was what he was—a barbarian—Charlie knew that the punch of a level 5 Memory Keeper wouldn’t do much to a level 24 Barbarian. Sighing to his fate, Charlie looked at what Huey was presenting to him. It was the same manacyte chunk Huey had been carrying around everywhere since his return.
It was understandable that Huey was carrying it around everywhere, considering what he could do with it, but even then, Charlie couldn’t help but think he was a little too obsessed. The manacyte would agree, as Huey had abused it so much that he managed to drain it of all its energy. Frankly, Charlie began to feel like that was going to be his fate, if it wasn’t already the case. Accepting the manacyte chunk that Huey was presenting to him, he asked, “You did what?” Despite his annoyance, he was genuinely curious about whatever Huey had come up with this time.
“Try attuning to it,” Huey said instead of simply replying to his rather simple question.
“Why?” Charlie asked, not really feeling in the mood for this little game.
“Figure it out yourself. Just do it,” Huey insisted.
Charlie felt like complaining but knew he would exhaust himself before getting to the end of it. Deciding to spare himself the trouble, he began activating [Elemental Resonance].
Elemental Resonance was an innate ability Charlie unlocked when he chose Memory Keeper as his class. It allowed him to identify the composition of a material on a microscopic level, making it a great ability for someone whose line of work involved manipulating various materials. However, considering what else it could be used for outside that line of work, Elemental Resonance was a very underwhelming ability for an innate skill.
Charlie remembered the day he chose Memory Keeper as his class and immediately gained access to this seemingly useless ability, for it was, as it didn't directly tell the user what a material was composed of; instead, it conveyed the information through "feels." If one wasn’t familiar with what these "feels" referred to, one wouldn’t be able to tell anything about the composition of what they were using the ability on. His uncle, despite trying to be considerate, explained that the ability was a heavily downgraded version of a skill known as [Identification], which allowed one to simply appraise an unanimated target and have all the desired information displayed. That skill would’ve spared him thousands of hours spent memorizing the feel of each element and material. Out of all the things he had to remember the feel of, manacyte was the one he had the easiest time with. Despite being one of the materials with the most variations, each chunk of manacyte was unique, gauged by its quality or provenance, as each had a different feel depending on which dungeon they came from. However, all those feels followed a certain pattern when it came to manacyte, which made it easy to attune with. That pattern was intensity, which, if compared to taste, meant that the higher the grade of manacyte, the more intense its flavor.
In the case of the manacyte Huey brought, it had an intense saltiness. Right now, Charlie was tasting that intense saltiness, but there was something different about it. Initially, he assumed it was because he and Huey had drained the manacyte of all its energy, but having handled the emptied chunk earlier and attuned to it, he knew it couldn’t just be that.
Having no other choice but to make a guess, Charlie asked, “Did you manage to recharge this manacyte?”
“Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!” Huey declared, beaming. "I managed to make the manacyte chunk feed off my MP!" Huey explained, a wide grin on his face. "Can you believe that?I wasn’t able to feed it much, as I don’t have all that much MP to begin with, but it has some stored now.” He shook the manacyte next to his ear as one would inspect a coconut, then said to his friend, “You can’t hear it, but right now it’s humming feebly, but it’s humming again.” Handing the chunk to Charlie, he added, "Try feeding it some of your MP to see. You have more than me.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” Charlie replied, but despite his hesitation, he tried.
As expected, nothing happened. He sighed. “It’s only something that you can do.”
Huey teased him, a large smile on his face. “So you believe in me having a special power now?”
“I have believed that for a long time now, so spare me…”
“Hehehe, that’s your fault for initially not having faith.”
At that moment, as Charlie reached out to hand the manacyte chunk back to him, Huey wrapped his hand around Charlie’s instead of simply taking the manacyte chunk back.
“What are you doing?”
“I can interfere with your rune, I can control that manacyte chunk and even feed it my own MP. Don’t you think I should be able to make it feed off yours too?”
“That’s…”
For high-ranking crafters, it's definitely possible to have manacyte turned into an MP storage, or at the very least, it can be used as the main component of an artifact capable of storing one’s MP. But that requires a unique system skill that exists solely for that purpose and can’t simply be done with raw manacyte.
To be able to do that, the manacyte has to be processed into a refined form, not just in any way but but in a way specifically tailored for that use. At his current level, Huey’s skills and abilities only allow him to process manacyte into a refined form that enhances the manifestation of magic circles. It doesn’t allow for any substantial upgrades other than that. In fact, he wouldn’t even call that an upgrade; it was more like bringing the manacyte to its true form, akin to a carpenter polishing a table or a smith polishing a sword. But unlike either of the two, Huey felt more like the quality of his work depended more on the quality of the manacyte he worked with rather than his own skill in the craft.
So, seeing Huey—a Verdenkind of the Barbarian class, which is a class that shouldn’t even be able to cast anything remotely magical—able to have manacyte—a raw no less store MP left Charlie frankly speechless. After staying in that uncomfortable position for several minutes, Charlie didn’t complain, confident that his friend would figure it out somehow, which he eventually did.
Charlie felt his MP being effectively drained at a rate that made him immediately remove his hand from the manacyte he was holding.
He looked at Huey, who was displaying an expression of disbelief, which he found strange given Huey's earlier confidence. But he realized Huey, too, had his doubts.
That expression quickly transformed into one Charlie had grown accustomed to seeing on his friend’s face over the past few weeks—an expression of utter excitement, if not outright exhilaration. Huey was always a happy-go-lucky person, finding joy in the most unusual ways, like narrating how he bisected a monster with his weapon Soul Shredder and then acquired some skills or abilities from doing it. But these past few weeks, such an expression had been constantly on his face, and Charlie had to admit that it had started to rub off on him.
“You did it, you did it!” Charlie, too, exclaimed, joining in on Huey’s celebration.
“Of course I did it,” Huey replied, a broad smile on his face. “I told you I would be able to do it. You shouldn’t have doubted me.”
Huey was wrong. In truth, having gotten used to seeing him pull off one insane stunt after another, at no point did Charlie doubt him when he said he “should” be able to pull it off. He had complete faith that Huey would.
"This is groundbreaking!" Huey exclaimed, his enthusiasm spilling over. "Do you realize what this means?"
Charlie, still processing the implications, shook his head.
Huey beamed, practically vibrating with excitement. "Battery, Charlie! What allows electricity to be stored? This is it!"
At that moment, Charlie remembered. Battery was what, by his Uncle Rudy—-Huey’s grandfather’s own words, allowed the people from the world he came from to store energy they used to power all the technological wonders that operated in their world. Battery was, according to his Uncle Rudy’s, to the people of the world—who were completely foreign to magic but had instead learned to harness the power of science. In other words, batteries were their equivalent of the system resources such as MP and SP.
Watching his friend talk about the potential of this discovery, Charlie had to admit that at first, he wasn’t entirely convinced when Huey voiced that his endeavor was to strive toward what his Uncle Rudy’s people had achieved in their own world.
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It wasn’t because he didn’t want to reach it; no, it wasn’t that.
It couldn’t be that. After all, he had, in his own way, been striving toward it—learning from the treasures of knowledge his grandfather had left behind and trying to replicate their technology. It was precisely because he understood the vast gulf between what he knew and the achievements of the world Huey’s grandfather came from—because he recognized how lacking he was and how little he knew—that he realized he and Huey, who was also eager to witness the technological wonders his Uncle Rudy had talked about, might never ride in a car, fly in a Skywing, or don a Mobile Suit.
Those were things he knew he wouldn’t realistically see within what one might call a lifetime. So when Huey told him they were on their way to bringing the technology of Uncle Rudy’s world into their own, he didn’t exactly disbelieve him; he just felt at the time that even if they tried they would only make small, insignificant steps, like the ones they had been making thus far.
But as time went on, he realized he had underestimated the power Huey had stumbled upon. Each discovery they made, almost on a daily basis, brought him closer to his dreams than ever before.
Looking at Huey, Charlie wanted to apologize, but knowing very well how their friendship worked, he knew that no apology was needed. Nonetheless, to feel better, Charlie asked, “Say, Huey, answer this question I have.”
“Hm? What question?” Huey replied, still beaming.
“I know it’s coming out of nowhere, so please don’t comment on it. Just give me your answer. Why are you doing this for, ultimately? I know that right now you’re doing this because you’re trying to figure out the limits of this power you’ve got, but what I don’t know is what you’re ultimately doing this for. What’s your ultimate goal?”
Charlie and Huey had been raised by the same person, his Uncle Rudy—Huey’s grandfather. They both grew up with a love for the world they had heard so much about. But as they grew older, they took different paths. Their classes, their levels, their ways of thinking—they were all different. Yet, in the past few weeks, it felt like they had gone back to the good old days, for the better or for the worse. Charlie wanted to know if they truly shared the same dream again.
“What am I doing this for, huh?” Huey sank into an uncharacteristic silence as he pondered the question. After a moment, he said, “Before I answer that question, I wanted to show you something.” He headed for the carriage, searching for his satchel, from which he retrieved something that Charlie instantly recognized—it was a notebook used by his Uncle Rudy as a diary.
Huey looked a little embarrassed. “This is awkward, but I think it’s the best time to confess about this.”
“Confess about what?” Charlie asked, curious.
“Confess about this.” Huey handed the book to Charlie. “Do you know what this is?”
“Yes, I think. It’s Uncle Rudy’s third diary, right?” Charlie said, reaching for the notebook that he now was certain of.
“Yes—wait, how did you know?”
“How did I know what?”
“That this is Grandpa’s third diary?! I’m sure I’ve never shown this diary to you.”
“Yeah, you never did, but I’ve seen it a lot of times.”
Huey’s eyes and expression seemed to beg the question, how.
“You were keeping this in a secret compartment beside the desk in your room, right?”
Now his eyes were begging, when.
“When you were out there dungeon delving or leveling somewhere in the wild, I was the one cleaning the house, including your room,” Charlie explained.
Huey’s expression seemed to ask one last question, but before he could voice it, Charlie pulled out a set of keys, among which was one that explained how he managed to open the closed compartment. Huey massaged his temple, clearly apprehensive. “Did you read it?”
“The third diary? Yes.”
“Through and through?”
Glancing at the book, Charlie nodded. “Why?”
Huey didn’t answer. Instead, he went into a little breakdown, laughing as if at himself. “Here I was thinking that I’d been holding a secret, but it turns out I was never holding one in the first place. Wait, since when did you know about this third book?”
“When? I don’t know, I think since you began dungeon delving alone.”
“Oh my goodness, that’s literally years ago,” Huey lamented.
“Should I not have?” Charlie asked.
After pondering it for a moment, Huey responded, “No, it’s alright. If anything, it’s for the best. You’re lifting a huge guilt off my chest,” he said as he allowed himself to sit next to Charlie.
Without asking, Charlie knew which guilt Huey was talking about. The diary was written by Huey’s grandfather and contained various anecdotes of his journey across the world. There were a total of three of them, two of which Charlie was “officially” very familiar with. The third diary, however, which contained the anecdotes of the latter years of Huey’s grandfather’s life, had been missing from the get-go when they discovered the first two after Huey’s grandfather’s departure. Huey had denied ever finding it or, at the very least, never mentioned finding it.
Huey sighed and then asked, “Since you’ve already read the whole book, then you must know what’s inside.”
Charlie looked at the book, scrolling through the two dozen or so pages filled with his Uncle Rudy’s handwriting before reaching the blank pages that made up easily 90% of the notebook. He then looked at Huey and nodded.
Being a diary—one into which his Uncle Rudy wrote anecdotes about his great adventures into the lands of men, elves, beastfolk, and even the demon and monster-filled lands—the first two diaries were a fun read, an interesting delve into what kind of man his Uncle Rudy was. But the third book was different for a very simple reason: it didn’t contain recounts of adventures. Most of its content revolved around the time he settled in Ashton, so most of the recounts included scenery Charlie was familiar with, people he knew the faces of. But most importantly, that notebook contained insights into what kind of person the one he knew as his Uncle Rudy, and Huey knew as Grandpa, truly was other than the one they thought he was.
Reading the third diary made Charlie understand that he never truly knew that old man. The only aspect of him that he knew was that of a caring, fun, and wise old uncle. He didn’t know that behind that facade, he was a man torn apart by guilt and fear. The guilt of never managing to achieve what he came to this world for, and the fear of death, or to be exact, the fear of what’s coming after.
From the first two diaries, that fear could already be felt, but in the third book, which recounted the days he was closest to what he feared, the despair felt even more present, making the whole diary, unlike the first two, a very painful read.
At no point did Charlie suspect his Uncle Rudy of feeling the emotions he wrote down in this diary, which, arguably, was his only confidant. In a way, he could say he was actually thankful to Huey for trying to keep the diary away from him, as he was sure he would have been happier not knowing about its existence.
“I see… So you know then. I guess we’re up to date now. To answer your question, what I’m doing this for, I had once a talk with Grandfather. It was a long time ago, but I remember his every word,” Huey said, clenching his fist. “He wanted me to be strong. He wanted me to be eternal, immortal.”
“So you want…”
“I want to be strong, which means that I have to keep leveling up. I want to be eternal, immortal as he wished me to become, meaning that I will strive just like he did for immortality. I know there’s no guarantee that I won’t just end up like Grandpa, failing to unlock that longevity skill, but just like he did, I will try.”
Charlie nodded. Then Huey continued, “I also want to complete the mission Grandpa came to this world for. After all, it’s what we owe Grandpa’s presence here in this world in the first place. I also want to learn more about Grandfather’s fellow Otherworlders. There was someone else other than him; there’s bound to be more. I also want to know more about Terra, the world he came from…”
Huey went on and on, listing what he wanted, how he, just like when they were children, dreamed of cars, battleships, and power armors. He now wanted to bring these into reality, how he wanted to bring this marvelous technology to this world.
“…That is what I want,” he said, seemingly concluding.
“That was an awfully long list,” Charlie teased.
“What do you want? I’m greedy; I’ve always been greedy,” Huey said.
“That I can confirm.”
Huey chuckled amusingly, then asked, “And you, Charlie, what do you want?”
“What do I want…” Charlie pondered.
Charlie knew what he wanted. If he had to voice it simply, he wanted the same things Huey just named. He wanted to make his Uncle Rudy proud. He wanted to know more about the things he mentioned and that he and Huey had dreamed about as kids. He wanted to fulfill the duty Uncle Rudy was summoned into this world for on his behalf. He wanted to become strong, eternal, immortal, but not in the way his uncle had envisioned.
In his third diary, Uncle Rudy had outlined two different paths to immortality for him and his grandson, for that was one of his many concerns. The two of them, being two different species, had different pathways to immortality. As someone born from an elf and a human, Charlie had several more paths to immortality than a Verdenkind. One of these paths, easily the easiest one and the reason his Uncle Rudy had recommended it, was to fully embrace his elfhood like most immortal elves did. This method would guarantee Charlie immortality without having to go through the dangerous process of trying to unlock the longevity skill, which could only be unlocked by putting oneself in the heart of danger.
It was a good method, one that was tailor-fitted to Charlie who was gentler and more laid back than Huey. But it required him to divest himself of something he held dear: his “humanity,” which included his memories, his friends, and his aspirations.
If embracing his elfhood meant abandoning all of those, then Charlie simply couldn’t see himself embrace it. He would choose the harder path that would nonetheless lead him to his goal of becoming just as his Uncle Rudy wanted him: strong, eternal, immortal.
Having established that with Huey, Charlie considered listing a wish that he considered dear: sparing the world the suffering his uncle went through. He wanted to create a technology similar to the one people from Uncle Rudy’s original world created to save their souls—a vessel of technological wonder to host the soul. That’s what he thought. But the more he thought about it, he realized he was lying to himself when he said he wanted this for the world. He wanted it for a very specific person he cared about, someone who, unlike Huey, wouldn’t even get the chance to unlock the longevity skill due to what she was.
Charlie wanted to name saving her soul from possibly being sent to a place like the one his Uncle Rudy went after death as one of the main things he wanted. But considering the pessimistic state of things—as he was nowhere near being able to create something capable of being a vessel for a soul—he didn’t want to see his friend come to the same pessimistic conclusion. He knew Huey, just like his grandpa, likely worried about what would become of his family after their death. So, out of consideration, he chose not to mention it.
Huey silently listened to what Charlie had to say. Then, smiling, he patted Charlie's back. “I see, so you too want to become strong, eternal, immortal, huh? This is great, but we really have a lot of work to do… you know, to make you catch up.”
Catch up to what or to who? The answer was simple: catching up to Huey. Despite the two of them choosing their respective classes at about the same time back when they were around seven, Charlie, with how little effort he had been putting into leveling up, trailed far behind Huey. Huey, with his diligence, was already a level 24 Verdenkind, whilst Charlie, even with the laboring effort put into leveling up for the past seven days, was still a level 5 Memory Keeper.
“I know, and I’m ready to put in the work to catch up,” Charlie said with determination.
“That’s the spirit!” Huey exclaimed, grinning.