Kelsey had an immediate reaction to the word Magus in the name of the skill within the book. She understood the word Magus to functionally mean the same thing as mage, or wizard. But she hadn’t seen or heard that word used anywhere else before in Anoura. Everyone she had spoken to had called people who used magic various things such as Mage, Wizard, or Classer, but never Magus.
The way it was written in the book almost gave the word a special connotation, like it was somehow something more than just a regular Mage. There was something of a reverence or respect given to the word, almost as if it were a title rather than a descriptor.
She didn’t know specifically what the word Magus meant in the context of Anoura, but she knew for sure that it would have something to do with magic based on how the translation had worked thus far.
On the second night, she was sitting down and considering the best way to begin trying to unlock the skill. The book itself didn't give any information other than the Magesight skill was somehow related. That was extremely useful information, but it didn't get her much closer to the answer.
So, she decided she would begin experimenting each day on the road as she passed by travelers. She would Identify each one of them while channeling mana into her eyes, with her Magesight on and off.
She only thought to do this due to some instinct she had about the way magic worked. The rules behind the Identify skill had always confused her. The way she understood magic in this world was that everything that can be done with the assistance of skills, should be able to be done without them, as long as she had access to mana.
When she first got her Spatial magic, she had started using one of her skills in a way that wasn't intended. She had been creating weapons out of her Lesser Telekinetic Creation skill and forcing the creations to maintain their integrity so she could use them as weapons directly, rather than as simple projectiles. Using the skill in this way had caused the system to upgrade the skill and evolve it.
She didn’t discover until later that the upgraded version of the skill, Telekinetic Creation, worked in the exact way she had been trying to use the lesser version. This clued her in to the fact that the system, or whatever the interfaces and menus were, served an assistant function. If someone learned something manually, the system could create a skill for it. She was sure that was how the minor creation and manipulation general skill books Thadius told her about were going to work.
This also meant that all skills, no matter how big or small, should all use mana in some way. Every single piece of magic should use mana.
So, by that logic, she had always thought that the Identify skill, and levels themselves broke that rule to some extent. As far as she could tell, it used zero mana to activate identify.
She assumed that the Identify skill had to use some amount of mana, but the amount it used was so small that it was impossible for her to perceive. She had learned recently that even her domain used some amount of mana when it was activated, but it took a deep level of introspection to sense it.
Kelsey had always been very good at knowing exactly how much mana something was using as long as she paid close attention; and identify not consuming any mana didn’t seem to fit in with everything else she understood about magic.
This quirk of Identify didn't really bother her until she read the book and started considering it more carefully. There was always the chance that Identify functioned based on some principal or power other than mana, but if it did, she had no clue what it might be, nor where she could even find that information.
She couldn’t even begin to understand how levels worked... Outside of a videogame or something, the concept of levels made exactly zero sense to her. She simply didn’t understand how killing monsters translated to levels, and how those levels translated to power. Those two questions were the things about Anoura that confused her the most. The worst part is that no one she asked had any answers for her either.
Before she left for The Bunker, Thadius and her had a long discussion on that very topic. He told her that he had considered the question when he first arrived but finding the answer had fallen to the back burner with everything else going on. She still felt he could have found some time in the past forty years to look into it, but he had never been as curious as Kelsey was about that kind of stuff.
If the system and her skills were taken from her tomorrow, she knew that she would still be able to convert mana inside her body into external spatial mana and use it to perform certain kinds of spatial and telekinetic magic.
It would be harder, and she would be significantly less powerful, but she knew she could do it. She would never be able to do something as endlessly complex as teleportation or accessing her vault, but she could likely still do some amount of telekinetic creation.
That meant that the Identify skill must be possible without assistance from the system too, and it probably had something to do with mana. So, she channeled mana into her eyes in the hopes of figuring it out.
Two days, and many headaches later, she had her first real breakthrough. Sitting by a small fire, she was reading the book again, looking for any clues that may bring her closer to the answer, when her eyes caught on the skill's name Magus' Eye. Eye... Not eyes... It may be worth doing my testing in a single eye rather than both.
This new idea came with its own challenges. The first thing she needed to do was learn to activate Magesight in a singular eye, a task that took her another twelve hours of her trip to complete. She had been forced to fight against the skill itself. To stop mana from being directed to her other eye as the skill activated. It was quite uncomfortable the first time she succeeded, but it became much easier after she took some time to adjust.
Her next breakthrough came during the following evening. She was walking behind a young woman in her early twenties for a few hours and had been identifying her the entire time while channeling mana into her right eye with Magesight activated while paying extremely close attention to her mana usage. For several hours all she saw was [Warrior] like she was used to. But for a singular moment, faster than she could react, the identification changed to [Warrior - lvl 42] and then immediately switched back.
The change happened so quickly that she almost didn’t notice it, and by the time she had, the identification had already changed back to normal. But she knew where she started, and she knew where she had stopped after noticing the change. That gave her a range of mana per second to work with. She knew that it was somewhere between 1.5 mana per second, and 1.731 mana per second.
She felt amazing, and triumphant. It's actually possible! Hell yes.
In the beginning, she had started with whole numbers, changing from 1, to 2, to 3, and so on. Eventually she added decimals, getting more and more specific with her mana usage as she cycled between 0 and 50 mana. There had always been a chance that the skill would take more than 50 mana per second to function, but she decided to start small, and thankfully, the amount of mana needed was indeed quite small.
Alright... let's get to work. Without any more celebrating, Kelsey focused every bit of concentration and patience she had into figuring it out.
It took her another two days of frantic identification, but eventually, she solved it. In order to see someone’s level and pierce the protection, she had to have Magesight active in just one singular eye and then channel exactly 1.618 mana per second into the same eye in order to break the natural identification protections.
The moment she did, and was able to maintain it, she was rewarded with a new notification.
*ding* Class skill Magesight and General skill Identify have combined into the General skill skill Eye of the Magus - lvl 1 (Maxed)
Eye of the Magus... A surge of pride filled Kelsey as she read the notification. I was right. I was actually right! Such a specific amount of mana--
The moment she confirmed the notification however, Kelsey’s right eye, the one she had Magesight active in, began throbbing in pain. Kelsey clutched at her eye, putting pressure on it, her Pain Tolerance skill doing nothing to dull the pain. As the pain hit her, she let out a loud, involuntary groan; mostly out of surprise.
It was far from the worst thing Kelsey had experienced since arriving on Anoura, but it was still intense. It felt as though someone was branding her eyeball with a hot iron.
This pain continued for several long seconds before gradually lessening and allowing her to think clearly again.
Kelsey glanced around and saw that the people around her were staring, probably wondering what was happening to the woman clutching her eye and groaning in pain in the middle of the street.
Deciding to use that to her advantage, she picked someone out from the crowd, a young dark-skinned merchant who was leading a horse down the road the same way Kelsey was traveling. Kelsey pointed at the woman, “Hey, ma’am. Do you mind helping me? It will only take a second.”
“Of course.” the woman said, concern in her voice, as she walked up towards Kelsey, her horse following. “What do you need me to do?”
“This is going to sound weird, but just look into my right eye for me, do you see anything?” Kelsey asked.
“No, it just looks like a normal, if very blue, eye.” she said quizzically.
Kelsey then activated her Eye of the Magus skill and looked at the woman.
[Merchant - lvl 155]
Damn, level 155, good job lady...
“Oh, it changed... Is it supposed to do that?” she asked, clearly startled as she stared into Kelsey’s right eye.
“Could you tell me what it looks like, please?” Kelsey asked, a bit of nervousness entering her voice.
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“Sure, how do I say this… It looks like a blue swirl of glittering stars surrounded by a black pentagon.” she said, sounding a bit unsure if she was explaining it right.
It sounds like she’s describing a galaxy. Interesting...
“Okay, thank you, I appreciate it. Truly.” Kelsey said as she deactivated her Eye of the Magus. "That's all I needed. Thank you, again."
“You’re welcome, have a nice day.” the woman said with a small smile as she walked away towards her destination.
Kelsey continued walking slowly as she thought. I won't be able to Identify totally indiscriminately, but, if I’m quick, hopefully people won't notice the change in my eye. And, if they do, I can just say it’s some spatial sight thing that I’m using.
More importantly, why does my eye look like that when using the skill? And even more importantly than that, why 1.618 mana? That number seems so familiar to me, like I remember it being important somehow; I just don’t remember why. Whatever, those are questions for another time.
On the bright side, that’s another maxed skill, and it freed up a class skill slot too, not that I’ve been offered any since advancing...
She continued thinking, her mind wandering to what she considered to potentially be the most important question about her new skill.
Why doesn't everyone know about this?
You need to have Magesight, Identify, and channel a pretty specific amount of mana, but still, it seems like this should be something more widely known.
It was incredibly easy to learn, and that was without anyone teaching me. If I wanted to, I could help someone learn the skill within... minutes? Something doesn't add up. No skill that is this simple to learn should be anything but widespread and ubiquitous. People could find out about it accidentally if they were simply doing some testing on Identify...
It took me, what, four days to evolve the skill? There is no chance other people wouldn't have discovered how to evolve it. Maybe it has something to do with my Mageblood body? Ugh... I feel like I have new unanswered question every damn day about this world.
Kelsey considered these questions deeply for a few hours as she walked late into the night, trying to think of any possible reason that this simple skill wasn't something everyone was taught.
By the end of her deliberation, the only reasons she could think of were that Magesight was rarer that she thought, this information was purposefully hidden for some reason, or a Mageblood body was a prerequisite for learning it.
She could basically rule out Magesight being rare. If Magesight were rarer than she thought, then no one had told her. She had told Owen, Lisa, Gregory, and Thadius about Magesight, and none of them had any reaction other than acknowledging she had it. Nothing like they had with her other skills. They also seemed to recognize the skill name when she said it, which meant it probably wasn't too rare.
If the information was being purposefully hidden... well... the only thing she could do about that would be to spread it herself, which was something she wasn't quite strong enough to delve into quite yet. If there is a person or group behind the scenes keeping this information hidden it would be a death sentence to start spreading the information now. I'm going to have to hold off until I'm a bit stronger.
Kelsey decided she wasn't going to get any answers just thinking, so she decided to start testing. Kelsey spent the next few days on the road testing her new Eye of the Magus skill. It now functioned the same way Magesight had, on top of allowing her to see the levels of the people around her. She still wasn’t able to see the names of classes like she could when they were shared with her, but it was certainly a step in the right direction.
This information shouldn’t be hidden, this kind of skill should be public knowledge. It’s crazy that people walk around all day not knowing if their neighbor is secretly an incredibly strong mage. I wonder if Thadius ever figured it out. Although, I would have probably noticed if his eye turned into a galaxy at some point.
Eventually, she felt like she learned all she could about her new skill, so started focusing entirely on her travels. It had been nine days since she left Whitebranch, and according to a young man she met while camping beside the road, she was coming up to her first proper city since arriving in Anoura. Until this conversation, she hadn't even known there was going to be a city in between Whitebranch and The Trial, but she was certainly excited to check it out.
The city was apparently called Neim. According to the man she met, the city of Neim had been founded by an Immortal of the same name a few centuries prior. That Immortal was still technically the ruler of the city, but only showed their face for a few weeks every 20 years or so to ensure things were still running smoothly.
Things in the city were mostly run by a council chosen via general elections that were done whenever the Immortal was in the city. Apparently Neim, the person, had visited just a few years ago, which was fine by Kelsey. She had no desire to meet an Immortal with enough hubris to create a city with the same name as themselves and then crown themselves as ruler.
Late into morning on the following day, Kelsey and the man broke in opposite directions as Kelsey eagerly made her way towards Neim, excited to see a real city for the first time in Anoura.
It took an additional six hours to finally reach outskirts of the city, but when she did, she was in awe. It was absolutely massive. Her best estimate was that Neim held at least five times the number of people that Whitebranch did.
Neim was spread out over such a large area, she couldn’t see the entire city, even from her vantage point. What she could see however was that buildings and shops were all spaced more like a village than she would have expected for a city. The streets were extremely wide and there were frequent alleyways between buildings with enough space to push a cart through with relative comfort. There were also many spots of green scattered in regular intervals throughout the city that she assumed must be parks or gardens.
Thanks to the wall surrounding Neim only being a couple meters tall, she was easily able to see the different parts of the city from the top of the hill she was currently standing on. It was easy to see the delineation between the rich and poorer areas of the city.
In the center of the city was a second walled area with large buildings inside, probably mansions; she was too far away to tell definitively.
In general, it seemed that the city center was the wealthiest and it got progressively less wealthy as one got further and further towards the edge of the city. That wasn't to say the edges of the city were poor, not in the slightest. They weren’t like the slums of Whitebranch, they were only poor in comparison to the center. The buildings and houses near the edge still looked quite nice. They were just slightly closer together and made of less expensive materials like regular cut stone and wood, instead of brilliant white marble that she could see gleaming in the afternoon sun.
The road leading to the city from where she was, was incredibly packed and had been for over an hour. There were hundreds of farms that were directly connected to the main road, and as such there were farmers and merchants using the road to transport their goods to and from those farms.
Even before entering the city Kelsey was being bombarded by constant sounds of horses neighing and people speaking. Kelsey was ecstatic.
It's awesome to be around this many people just living their lives.
Kelsey was able to listen in on all the conversations happening around her, and even the mundane ones were fascinating. She learned that there were skills for farmers that could make crops grow faster, have higher yield, or even change the flavor to make them more desirable to customers. She also found that they don’t bother with irrigation infrastructure for farming since even someone with a Minor Water Creation class skill can water dozens of square kilometers of crops in a single day with relative ease.
Based on their conversations, it sounded like farming also wasn't weather dependent. She heard farmers talking about extremely long-term plans, and they never once mentioned the effects of seasons or weather.
Wait... are there seasons? The temperature has been exactly the same since I arrived... She shook her head as that thought crossed her mind. I can't go down another rabbit hole. There are already way too many questions.
Putting that out of her mind, she started focusing on eavesdropping again.
She learned that merchants had skills for everything from verifying a coin's legitimacy all the way to a skill that tells them the quality of a product, even if they know nothing about it. They also had skills, similar to Gregory's oath skill, that would allow them to create contracts that were magically binding in various ways.
Kelsey also overheard a middle-aged woman that appeared to be a farmer, warning her teenage child about the dangers of shopping without supervision. She explained that merchants had skills to make them seem more likable and friendly.
Mental magic...
The woman also explained that their first stop in the city was going to be to a merchant that she was friendly with, so the boy could learn the skill and begin building up a resistance in a safe environment.
The boy was 13 or 14 years old, so as he heard this, he asked a question that had been bothering Kelsey for weeks. It was also a question that she had completely forgotten to ask anyone about thanks to all of the craziness that had been happening since her first exposure to mind magic in the guild.
As his mother finished the explanation, the boy asked, "Why is it legal to mentally manipulate people? And why would they bother using the skills if everyone around them has the resistance skill anyways?"
His mom smiled softly. "So people can build up a resistance." She answered simply. "The Queen of Cardona mandates that all merchants and guild representatives learn emotional manipulation skills to ensure that the entire population has the proper resistances. There is a tragic story from a few centuries ago about a monster with a strong mental magic skill that was able to take control of an entire nations military and use it as their own. Since then, nations have taken some precautions, and this is one of them."
The boy nodded in thought, trying to wrap his head around everything. "That makes sense I guess... What about people like brother who never leave the farm?" he asked.
The mother visibly cringed at the question. "There is very little to be done about that I'm afraid. Hopefully we never have to worry about anything like that happening. Gunther will be fine, I promise." she said reassuringly.
After hearing that, Kelsey tuned out of the conversation... She didn't particularly want to pry into people's personal lives if she could help it.
The tidbit she learned about mental magic was fascinating though. It makes sense. If a monster has access to mental magic, the last thing you want is your entire nation's population falling prey to them. Better to help people build the resistances early. If everyone knows about the mental manipulation, and already has the resistances, it's functionally means that the mental magic ends up not affecting people day to day. It's only really a problem when a person from Earth walks up and gets slapped with a strong mental attack in the middle of a city...
She still didn't love the idea of merchants trying to mess with her emotions, but she had to admit it was probably better than the alternative. Especially for adventurers. She remembered stories from Earth where a group of incredibly strong heroes would have a run in with a comparatively weak mind mage and would be taken complete advantage of. This would at least solve that problem if everyone in the nation had access to the Mental Resistance skill.
Despite the seriousness of the conversation, Kelsey loved learning all about those kinds of things. They were the topics people in Whitebranch just didn’t talk about. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought that the people of Whitebranch were normal humans with no classes. The only people in the entire town that had seemed anything other than completely average had been the people in the Adventurers Guild. Even there she had never seen anyone use a skill, besides the guild representatives and the bard of course...
Whitebranch suddenly seemed so strange now that she wasn't within its walls. She hadn't thought anything was weird when she was there, but she hadn't had anything to compare it to. Now that she saw how people lived here, Whitebranch seemed... reserved.
After the conversation between the woman and her teenage child, Kelsey focused on making her way towards the city, pushing through the crowds of people on the road. From the moment she saw the city it took an additional three hours for Kelsey to arrive at the gates. Kelsey certainly enjoyed her time spent slowly making her way towards the entrance of Neim listening and learning. But now, it was nearly her turn to walk through the gates of Neim and explore a real city for the very first time.