Kelsey spent the next nine months in isolation and solitude with Bud as her nearly constant companion. He only left her side to go out hunting for food since she created a small section in her study for him to lay down and a bowl that she filled with water whenever he needed it. She had tried to set up a water-based monster core machine that he could activate, but it turned out that he didn’t have the ability to channel mana into an object, so she made sure he had access to all the water he could want or need with her creation skill.
She would have fed him as well, but she wanted to make sure that he would maintain the ability to hunt for himself when she was gone. It may not end up being necessary due to his intelligence, but she figured it was better safe than sorry.
Kelsey started her studying with the regular books she had bought in Neim, deciding to leave the Sage’s Notes for last. She figured it would be better to get a basic understanding of magic and the system before diving straight into what she assumed was going to be a high-level mage’s intricate discoveries about the universe.
The first books she read were those about the system itself. She had always been curious about the menus, screens, and text that appeared before her eyes. Conceptually, she had always understood magic. Magic had been in every videogame, movie, and book she had loved back on Earth. The idea that magic might have really existed was something she had casually considered hundreds of times in her lifetime. An unexplained light in the sky, a missing person's case that was never solved, aliens, the pyramids, and dozens of weird coincidences that happen in everyday life. She had never seriously believed in it, but it was something familiar.
The system, however, was a mystery. She had her theories, and during her time reading these books she was able to confirm some of them and disprove others.
She found that scholars across Anoura had many theories and names for the menus and skills people processed. Most simply referred to it as ‘the system’, but some had other names for it such as ‘the gateway’, ‘the conduit’, 'the window', or 'the soul'.
Each scholar seemed to have a different theory for what the system was. There was some general consensus, of course, but there was much variation on the specifics. Some scholars believed the system to be controlled by a deity, or a large-scale magical circle that granted people skills as they progressed. The idea was that magic was what was inherent, and the system was set up by some outside force to help people make sense of it. This was the belief held by most religions in Anoura, as it turned out. This idea is what the very concept of religion was usually based on. Each church having some different theological explanation for how or why the system worked the way that it did.
The notion that it was some sort of external power that controlled the system didn't make sense to Kelsey. She wasn't exactly sure why, but that answer just felt wrong somehow. If someone were able to prove it, she wouldn't hesitate to believe it, but she didn't think anyone would be proving it any time soon.
What did make sense to Kelsey, however, was that the system was a representation of some sort of internal power. Most scholars used a term that she read as 'The Soul'. The concept of a soul was one that Kelsey was deeply uncomfortable with. She very much associated the idea of a soul with religion, and she didn't fit in well with the religious crowd. But it was still the theory that she felt was most likely, based on her gut instinct.
The theory stated that the soul, or internal power source, was infinitely powerful and able to accomplish anything given the right tools. According to the theory, the system itself was a way for the soul to protect the host from its own power. The idea was that the system locked the power of the soul behind milestones in the form of levels, and as someone gained levels, the soul’s power would be unlocked bit by bit. Some scholars believed that this was why when someone gained many levels at a time, they experience intense strain on their bodies. Their bodies are being forced to adjust to too much power from the soul at once. It had never been proven, but theoretically, if someone gained too many levels at once, they could die from the increase in power itself.
Kelsey could believe that. She remembered how intense her experience back in The Bunker had been.
These seemingly simple concepts about the system had taken Kelsey months to find and piece together, but once she did, it put the world into a whole new perspective for her. If the theories were correct, that the system was in fact just some sort of gate to the soul, then levels themselves were meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The true power was locked away by some sort of arbitrary wall that sought to stop people from harming themselves.
It meant that it should theoretically be possible to bypass the system and take power directly from the soul. Kelsey was not the first to have this idea, nor would she be the last. But as far as she could find in her books, no one had ever succeeded in bypassing the system's limitations.
That could mean one of two things. Either the theories were wrong, and the system was something entirely different. Or bypassing the system was something that was nearly impossible to do. Kelsey didn’t know which was right, and in her opinion it didn’t matter. She knew of a way to progress with the system, and for now, she was just going to focus on her path. She could worry about the soul, the system, and their true limitations after becoming an Immortal.
After finishing her research into the system and the soul, she moved on to understanding the fundamentals of magic. She wanted to understand two things. What mana was, and where it came from.
She spent months reading, consuming every bit of publicly available research on the topic, and doing hundreds of tests herself to find out answers to those questions. Unfortunately, by the end of her studying, she was no closer to a real answer than when she started. The books she read were not all mere scholarly reports. She read stories, myths, fairy tales, and religious texts. Every single shred of information she could get her hands on.
It seemed that every book on the topic was focused on the application of magic rather than the fundamentals of what mana was. In fact, as she read, she realized that it was almost as if the information on what mana was had been intentionally hidden.
She learned plenty about using magic, like how elements were created and formed from mana, but she had known most of those things from testing with her own skills. She learned about the kinds of applications that large monster core rituals had. According to one book she read, there was a city in the Kytan Empire where spatial magic was impossible to perform. The book called it a Spatial Lock and it was created in order to stop people from using teleportation or spatial domains.
The books also touched on true creation versus temporary creation. She learned that all true creation skills relied on the same fundamental principle. The stuff that made up the created objects was actually stable mana surrounded by whatever flavor of creation skill the user had. Once the object had formed, the stable mana would mix with the other kind of mana and turn into physical atoms. Apparently, temporary creation skipped that last step. Spatial manipulation was apparently unique in the way it functioned. The 'tying off' of her creations that she had done when making permanent objects was unique to Spatial magic.
Spatial magic wasn't the only unique creation discipline, however. Fire Creation was possible, and the way it created objects that someone could physically hold was even stranger than spatial. Strange enough that she didn't understand how it was possible, even after reading a book on the topic. Functionally, the user needed to freeze the flames in place before cooling them down to be holdable. How magic made colored hot air physical, she had no idea. The very idea of freezing a chemical reaction made her uncomfortable.
Other than a few edge cases, all creation magic was fundamentally the same, and anyone should be able to learn any creation skills with enough time and practice. Even turning the minor creation and manipulation general skills into true creation and manipulation skills should be possible.
From her research on the system, she had already assumed that true creation general skills should be possible, but she was glad to have found real evidence in the form of academic consensus.
Why is this kind of stuff not common knowledge? There is no chance I’m the first person that’s read all of this and discovered that this stuff should be possible. Maybe it's just really hard? Maybe everyone already knows about it, and was just waiting until I hit some sort of milestone before they told me?
Although... Owen, Lisa, and Gregory did say that true creation magic was rare. But... what if they're wrong? Owen and Gregory are well traveled ex-princes, sure, but even they wouldn't have inside knowledge on what secrets Immortal guilds and cities really hold...
Whatever, I'll just ask them when I see them next.
After finishing with all of the publicly available books, Kelsey finally moved on to the main event, the Sage’s notes of their journey to the secrets of magic and the soul.
Reading the Sage’s notes was something of a culture shock for Kelsey. When she had found that the Sage's notes were in English, she had assumed that he was simply one of the first Otherworlders from the past eighty years and had advanced quickly like herself.
She was wrong.
The Sage had actually arrived thousands of years ago, long before Kelsey, or any of the other people from Earth had. Based on his story, he was a young man from Earth who appeared in a forest similar to the one she had, and even went through some of the same events she did. He ingested some of the Mageblood, received a Mageblood body, and chose a mage class. He chose a wood mage class, his logic being that he was surrounded by wood. This class choice was how he created the paper he used to start writing his notes in the first place. He seemingly used some sort of charcoal to write with a stick of some sort.
Based on the descriptions of his surroundings, she didn’t think it was the same Mageblood forest she had arrived in. While living in the forest, he eventually gained the ability to fly and described his surroundings in the notes. There was no mention of the mountain, nor the plains to the south. She also knew that Mageblood trees were not unique to the forest northeast of Whitebranch, which meant that he could have arrived anywhere.
The man never said specifically when he was teleported from Earth, nor how it happened, but he did reference some things she was familiar with in what she would consider recent history. He talked about the president, who was in the third year of their first term when Kelsey was brought to Anoura. That meant that however long ago this man had been brought to this planet, less than three years had passed on Earth.
This gave Kelsey immense hope for her parents still being alive. If time moved differently between the two worlds, there was always a chance she would eventually find a way to teleport back to Earth and find her parents still cleaning the dishes from dinner. It was a small hope, but a hope, nonetheless.
According to his book, he went all the way from arriving in the world, to Immortality within the confines of the forest he arrived in. He found a dungeon, similar to The Trial in that it was a deep cave system that housed monsters up to, and over level 250. He used that dungeon to level all the way from mid-forties to the Immortal Tier in both of his classes. That being said, he never mentioned what his Immortal classes were, simply that he had reached Immortality. In fact, Kelsey was pretty sure that those pages had been taken from the book purposefully, as there was an awkward section missing after the section saying that he was planning on pushing for Immortality.
By the point, right before he became an Immortal, he was a wood mage as his primary class, and a fire mage as his secondary. According to him, he forced his fire mage class to learn an ash manipulation skill after getting tired of burning his own wood and having nothing to fight with. This skill was apparently the catalyst for him delving into the secrets behind magic.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Right before reaching Immortality, the story stopped, and the rest of the book focused on his discoveries of magic. What had been more like a diary, turned into a detailed series of notes and thoughts about the way the world worked.
Kelsey figured he must have reached civilization at some point in the missing chapters, as the paper quality improved and the writing on the page became ink and was much clearer.
To call his discoveries mind blowing would be a vast understatement.
He discovered that mana functioned exactly the opposite of everything she learned about energy and matter back on Earth. On Earth, she constantly read, and heard the phrase ‘energy cannot be created or destroyed’ when discussing universal laws of reality. But according to the Sage; mana could be both created and destroyed. And it could be used to both create, and destroy, regular matter and energy.
It broke every logical part of Kelsey's brain, but as she considered it more carefully, she realized that’s exactly what magic was. Even on Earth, she had always understood that ‘magic’ would be anything that broke the fundamental laws of reality. Now, she knew that it did. Magic, very literally, broke one of the most important rules in physics; the conservation of energy.
Everything else in this world followed the laws of physics that she was used to. Light, gravity, electricity; all of it behaved exactly as she expected it to. Everything except mana. It was the one fundamental difference, and she realized that it must be the single greatest difference between the two worlds.
This realization hit Kelsey like a truck. Once she came to terms with it, everything else about magic began making sense. When she regenerated mana, she was creating energy. She was generating power from nothing. Taking it from nowhere. This meant that a sufficiently powerful mage would be able to accomplish anything. Time travel, the creation of life, and even true destruction. The things that were possible with limitless energy were mindboggling. So much so that she didn't understand the true ramifications.
The new information about Mana, as well as her discoveries about the system, and by extension the soul, pointed to a few incredibly concerning conclusions. If the assumptions that mana could accomplish 'anything', and that the soul was a well of infinite mana were true, then it was no wonder that information on this topic wasn't widely available. It was no wonder that every book on mana and magic seemed to have a gaping hole where that kind of information should be. The possibilities were staggering.
Over the nine months Kelsey had spent in solitude and her time spent reading the Sage’s notes, she had rubbed up against a few concepts that she felt may be most responsible for the secrecy behind these conclusions.
The first was destruction magic, or void magic as she had always thought of it. She had considered the concept back during the first time she was selecting a class but hadn't consider its implications until she began studying mana seriously. At first, she hadn't even considered what void magic would mean. She hadn't considered what erasing matter and energy would really imply when it came to the way reality functioned. Now that she was aware, the idea of true destruction magic put her on edge.
The second concept she hadn’t wanted to try was atomic magic. She had actually seen the Atomic Mage class offered at level 1. She didn’t pick it then for the same reasons she was unwilling to try it now. She didn’t want to accidentally do irreparable damage to the planet. Atomic magic was one of those disciplines that, if taught by a master in a safe environment, would likely be incredibly powerful. Kelsey remembered a fun fact one of her college professors had shared with her concerning the amount of energy in everyday objects. He used the example that a 1-kilogram rock would have roughly eleven billion kilowatt hours of energy inside of it if you were somehow able to convert it without any losses. He compared that by explaining that an average household used less than 12,000 kilowatt hours of energy per year.
He then capped off his explanation by saying that converting one kilogram of mass directly into energy would be the same as detonating roughly five thousand nuclear bombs in one spot.
This extreme energy is what made her hesitant to try anything even resembling atomic magic. If atomic magic simply converted matter into energy at a 1:1 ratio, she could easily destroy the entirety of Anoura by converting a particularly large boulder. She doubted that was how atomic magic worked, but she wasn't willing to endanger humanity on a hunch.
Kelsey did consider for some time about the incredible amount of energy mana must possess if her memories of the professor's example were accurate. In order for her to create a 1-kilogram rock took less than fifty mana. An inconsequential amount. That meant that mana must contain an incredible amount of energy in each point. Not that she knew what a point was, specifically.
She also realized that converting mana into energy must be woefully inefficient. Converting mana into matter, easy. Converting mana into energy, hard, apparently. She could create a mountain sooner than she could move one. In seconds she could theoretically create a block of steel so large she wouldn't even be able to nudge it with her manipulation powers without breaking the thing into smaller pieces. Kelsey had no idea why this was, just that it was certainly true based on her past experiences and testing.
The third concept she was uncomfortable with testing was time magic. Based on her conceptual understanding of time, it should be possible to speed up or slow down someone’s or something’s relative experience of time. Her vault already did this inside its own space, so she knew that it was certainly possible.
She was unwilling to try it on herself for fear of sending herself thousands or millions of years into the future accidentally. She also didn’t want to try it on an animal or object. She was aware that on every surface around her were an uncountable number of microscopic bacteria and other small slices of life. She didn’t want to accelerate time for some sort of virus that would come out of that accelerated time and have mutated to wipe out humanity. She was sure time magic would be an incredible ace to have up her sleeve, but she, like atomic magic, wasn't willing to put the fate of humanity on the line without some serious safeguards.
Out of those three concepts, she was most confident in her ability to safely learn destruction magic. But not yet. She wanted to get some real-world practice with her other skills first.
Not all of her time was spent reading, however.
The Sage explained his methodology for testing the concepts behind his understanding of the fundamentals of mana, and Kelsey followed suit, confirming his tests for herself since she had the ability to create any and all materials that he used in his tests. He built various inventions, such as light bulbs, refrigerators, microwave generators, and various other technological devices that ran on raw mana rather than monster cores. He found that the amount of mana used to power these devices was completely linear. If one mana powered a lightbulb for one week, two mana would power it for two weeks.
Every test he described in the book, she followed and got identical results. Or, nearly identical. She assumed any variation would be from unclear material choices, or differences in their methodology in terms of creating the contraptions.
The other thing he did was create devices that didn’t work. Intentionally. Devices where you could channel mana into them, and the mana would simply be trapped, doing nothing for several seconds before instantly dissipating into nothingness.
He then created devices that would trap mana for a few seconds, before letting the mana bypass the trap into the machine.
This was his way of proving that mana could be destroyed. No matter how long the mana was delayed, as long as it reached a device before dissipating, it would provide the entirety of the energy it started with. Which meant that when it dissipated, it was actually just disappearing, or being destroyed rather than decaying slowly over time.
She obviously conducted these experiments as well, proving for herself that mana really did disappear into nothingness, the energy being lost forever.
After spending the time perfecting these tests and proving his theories, Kelsey moved on to the third section of the book which was about the system, and the soul.
In contrast to mana and magic, this section was very light on new information for Kelsey. Researchers had discovered most of what he did, and it was all available publicly. He came to the same conclusion, that there was some sort of inner power that was responsible for the system and mana creation. He, like the researchers, called this power the soul.
One thing he did confirm was that it was in fact possible to break the system’s limitations on a person’s power. He had seen one person try it and succeed. That person immediately exploded, taking an entire mountain range down with him. After that experience, he said that he stopped looking into the subject entirely, saying that testing was simply too dangerous. Kelsey, however, could tell that there were multiple pages missing in the sections directly before and after the section describing the man's accident, indicating that someone, potentially the Sage himself had removed information concerning bypassing of the system limitations.
She had a few theories as to why someone might want to keep whatever information he found secret, but she didn't have any that she was overly confident in. Her leading idea was that he had gone back on his word, done some more research, and decided that what he learned was too dangerous or personal to include in the book. All she knew is that whatever he found, it was important enough to exclude.
Eventually, Kelsey reached the ending sections of the book where the Sage finished his book by explaining that he was preparing for his own passing.
He described, in a diary-like section, how he had been alive for several thousand years, accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish, and had a wonderful family who had been taken away from him by the twists and turns of fate. He said that he had lived a wonderful life and had no regrets. He was going to miss his family as he passed on, but he said he knew that they would be together again one day.
Kelsey found the short passage about his eventual passing to be both motivating, and strangely cryptic. He made no comment about what twists and turns of fate befell his family, nor did he speak about them in any capacity other than the fact that they existed. Also, importantly, he never used the words dead, death, or dying. She wasn't sure what 'passing' meant in this context, and she felt that The Sage was being purposefully vague. He also never said that his family had been killed or died. Just that they had been taken away.
I suppose it makes sense. These notes aren't really meant to be personal; they're meant to be informative. The diary section at the beginning is just there to give context to who this guy was...
After the section detailing his 'passing', or whatever, he finished the book by sharing a few secrets of the world that Kelsey found extremely interesting.
The first was about classes and paths. It was simply a very cryptic sentence that simply stated, ‘All paths lead to the same place. It isn’t worth worrying about which direction to travel.’
This singular sentence, only sixteen words long, took up an entire page.
Kelsey had no idea what it meant specifically, but it definitely implied that class choice and selection wasn’t as important as people thought. She didn’t know if she agreed with that sentiment, but it was an interesting idea, nonetheless.
With everything she learned, she had a few theories about what he might be talking about, but nothing concrete enough to stake her entire path on. For now, she was going to continue following her path, doing everything in her power to make her class as strong as possible.
The second secret, however, was something Kelsey was deeply invested in. A perfected Mageblood ritual that he claimed had a 100% success rate.
The Sage described, in incredible detail, the steps and methodology he had used to discover how to do it, as well as the ritual itself. He had apparently run into the same problems Kelsey had. The Mageblood body was incredibly powerful, but he had no way of sharing that power with the people he loved. According to the Sage, it took nearly a century to perfect the ritual and he thought that it may have been impossible if he hadn’t already had a Mageblood body.
Thankfully, he confirmed a theory that Kelsey, and her friends had about the Mageblood sap. The only people that could ingest the sap directly, gain the body, and live, were people who were above a certain age, and didn't have a class. They need to be old enough that their bodies were strong enough to withstand the effects of the ritual itself. He apparently found this out by feeding some sap to a young man that had been in a coma since age 10.
The sap had worked. The man's body went through the ritual, the brain damage was healed, and he acquired the Mageblood body with no ill side effects.
Kelsey was obviously excited about the prospect of being able to give her friends and family access to the Mageblood body but wasn’t willing to get their hopes up. She was going to do some testing before mentioning it to everyone. Thankfully, the Sage had provided exactly how to test it before going through with a full ritual.
She had every intention of testing the ritual at some point soon, but there were a few things she needed to do first. Sitting right at the top of that list was Immortality.
Finishing the Sage’s notes, Kelsey finally felt ready to get back out there and take on the world. She had been in solitude for nearly a full year and while her skills had increased, and her understanding of magic was greatly improved, she hadn’t gained a single level during that time.
Kelsey hadn't spent the entire time studying, of course. No one could spend their entire day studying for months straight. She relaxed, enjoyed the river, played with Bud, and even explored more of the Mageblood forest. Unfortunately, she hadn't found anything particularly interesting. She also spent a few hours each day practicing with her skills, ensuring that her personal understanding of her limitations and abilities were as clear as possible. She knew what she could do and was ready to put those skills to the test.
It had been nine entire months since her training with Melody and she was getting desperately lonely. She was yearning for some human interaction again.
So, throwing on some traveling clothes and a cloak, she activated her teleport and set her destination to the woods surrounding Whitebranch.
I’ve accumulated enough wisdom for now, time to go back for some power. Thadius, I’m coming home.