In a remote wilderness area, most definitely not a capital city, Carlos anxiously held a dimly glowing purple crystal in his hands, frowning as the glow fitfully fluttered a few times. "Are you ok, Purple?"

[Yes.] The dungeon core's mental voice gave an impression of profound weakness and fatigue. [Scroll destination wish small, but little mana. Need rest. But will recover.]

Carlos sighed. "I hope you're right. And thank you again, we really needed that wildcard." There had been something vaguely off about Enchanter Tornay's attitude when they'd bought that scroll, and Carlos had suspicions that using the scroll unaltered would have gone poorly. For one thing, he'd agreed to a discount without actually verifying the information they'd given in exchange, as far as Carlos could tell.

"So, Purple's ok then?" Amber was busily assembling a pile of twigs and clearing an area around it.

"Yeah. We need to find a good place for him to rest and gather mana for a while, but he says he'll recover."

Amber sighed. "Would be nice if I could hear him directly." She shook her head. "I know, I know, he'll need more mana to do that. I can wait. In the meantime, get started on those tents while I get the fire going."

Carlos grunted, and started digging through the various bundles in his uncomfortably large and heavy backpack. One of the bigger ones was a mess of poles and canvas that brought back old memories of camping trips back on Earth, though these didn't bother with even an attempt at instructions. Fortunately there was no magic involved to worry about, and the physical arrangement seemed simple enough. They had bought some magical camping gear, but that was for concealing the whole campsite from wildlife and repelling any that got too close, and they'd set that up absolute first thing when they got here.

"Ok, so, now that we have some breathing room, let's talk. Why do you think Darmelkon wants us so badly?"

Amber carefully arranged a few larger logs over the pile of twigs, and sighed. "I've been thinking about that, and there's only one possibility that makes any sense. Somehow, he must have figured out that you took the dungeon core rather than destroyed it. And, for whatever reason, he thinks Purple is worth platinum. Or more." She shrugged. "Maybe he's even right. Maybe he knows something about dungeon cores that I don't."

"Platinum? Is that the next step up, one platinum is worth one hundred gold?"

"Yes. And then there's mythril, then adamantium, and finally orichalcum."

"Ah. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that certain metals that are mythical on my world are real but incredibly rare and valuable here."

Amber raised an eyebrow at Carlos. "Oh? Those translated to familiar but mythical metal names to you? I wonder how well your myths match the actual metals here."

"Well, uh, let's see... In Earth myths and stories, mythril looks similar to silver but is stronger than steel and incredibly light. Adamantium is basically the strongest, hardest, most durable metal in existence. And orichalcum is some kind of alloy, I think, partly gold, and it varies but stories often describe it as being extremely magical. Like, best material in existence for making enchanted items, and stuff like that."

"Huh. Remarkably accurate."

Carlos grunted a bit as he pounded tent stakes into the ground. "You know, on the one hand I'm not surprised, because if they didn't match then my translation magic would have picked something else. On the other hand, it's suspicious that the top three most famous and well known mythical metals I know of are the ones that match so well. Either that's one hell of a coincidence, or there's an actual connection somehow."

spell activate = spark;

A small spark lit up in the middle of the thinnest pieces of kindling, which promptly caught fire.

"Well, there's obviously something connecting your world with this one. You got here, after all. We may never know more than that, though."

"Yeah." Carlos walked around the piles of poles and canvas, lifting poles into position in what he was pretty sure was the right order. "So, the other big question I've been wanting to ask. You mentioned 'soul development' when you told me about respawning. What is it?"

Amber shook her head. "I'm still getting used to just how much you don't know about incredibly basic things. Um. Just how basic a level am I going to have to start from in explaining this?"

Carlos straightened the last pole on the tent, set Purple down just inside it, and stepped back to look over his handiwork. "How should I put this? Hmm. Well, my world has a word for 'soul', or at least something close enough that my translation magic uses it. But no one has any verifiable evidence that souls actually exist. There are plenty of people who believe that the entire concept of souls is pure fiction. So, anything and everything that would prove the simple existence of souls is something that I don't know."

"Wow. Ok, that explains why 'know' and 'know' translated as the same for you." Amber took a deep breath, and settled down on a stool by the fire, setting a small pot of preserved stew to heat over it. "Ok, where to start... Souls are how people interact with mana. There are all sorts of details and complexities, but the core and foundation of everything anyone ever does with mana is that mana responds to the desires and intentions felt by a living person's soul.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"However, the natural baseline reaction of mana is very weak. So weak that it's hard to be certain that an undeveloped soul ever causes something actually significant to happen."

Carlos nodded. "So developing a soul is all about strengthening its influence on mana."

"Right. And it is done by incorporating mana into the soul. Which leads to a problem...?" Amber raised an eyebrow at Carlos as she intoned that statement like a question.

Carlos just nodded again. "Classic catch 22." He slapped his forehead. "Oh, uh sorry. That's a reference to a popular story on Earth. A more technical term for it is a bootstrap paradox. I think? Or, wait, that usually involves time travel. Um. Anyway. The point is that the ability the soul is trying to develop is exactly the same ability that it needs to do so. In order to become capable of strongly influencing mana, a soul must already be capable of it. So, what's the solution?"

"Exactly right, and you'll have to tell me about that story some time. A list of catches so well known that they're numbered sounds intriguing. Anyway, the solution is kind of an inheritance. While a woman is pregnant, she instinctively and subconsciously builds a protective shell of mana around the soul of her growing baby, and that shell is extraordinarily sensitive to the needs of the specific soul that it is protecting. A baby has to grow to near adulthood before their soul will be strong enough and directed enough to start overcoming the lingering influence of their mother, but once someone's reached that age they can start using that shell to kickstart their soul development."

Carlos frowned. "Hmm. Do I even have that, though? My mother was on Earth, where we don't have magic."

Amber cocked her head. "Huh. Good question, but if you didn't have at least some soul shell you wouldn't have been able to learn even fragments of that spell. Anyway, making good use of your initial soul shell is really critical for the foundation of all your soul development, throughout the rest of your life. It's especially important to build good soul structures."

"Soul... structures?" Carlos narrowed his eyes quizzically.

"Yes. Soul development is divided into two categories. The simple and general type of soul development is just wrapping your soul in layers of condensed mana. Each layer resonates with your soul and amplifies the strength of your influence on other mana. However, if you just did that, well, you'd be more capable in general at pretty much everything, but you wouldn't be able to do anything really special or powerful.

"To really get strong and effective abilities, you have to build specialized structures of mana within your soul, focused on achieving specific effects. For example, I've built something for sensing mana. Each spell, or fragment of a spell, that you learn also takes the form of a small structure in your soul. I've used up about a third of my shell so far, building the essentials I'll need to be a mage, and learning a few simple spells. I've been saving the rest, hoping the academy would teach me better things to build than I've found instructions for in books."

She sighed, and slumped a bit. "Shit. And now I'm probably never going to go there."

Carlos gently put a hand on her shoulder. "Hey. You gave that up for a reason, remember?"

Amber looked up at him and sighed again. "Yeah, but how are you going to help me build a good foundational soul structure? Two minutes ago you didn't even know that they exist!"

"So teach me. How are these structures designed? How do people come up with new ones? I have otherworldly knowledge you couldn't even imagine, I promise you. How can I translate my knowledge into the form we both need?"

Amber straightened up, squared her shoulders, and took a deep breath. "Might as well try, I suppose. It's mostly just conceptualizing what you want a soul structure to do, and how. Similar to learning a spell. In fact, learning spells is really just a specialized category of building very minor soul structures. The big problem is, you need a really clear understanding of the effect you want, the effects of each of your soul structures need to work together, synergizing with each other to create something greater than the sum of its parts, and it's really easy to get a small but crucial detail wrong. For example, if you build a structure to hold 'a prepared spell', as your soul gets stronger with more layers that structure will grow and become able to hold a spell of greater and greater power, but it will always stay limited to just one spell. That's a major classic mistake my books warned me about."

Carlos tapped his chin, thinking. "So, the only reason people aren't creating super powerful soul structures all the time is that they need a concept and plan that can produce all that power from individually much weaker parts?"

Amber snorted. "Typical improvised soul structures end up at copper or silver rank. Sometimes gold. An occasional genius invents something platinum rank, but above that?" She shook her head. "People theorize, and tweak plans, and pass their hard won knowledge down through generations. And most keep it in the family. I bought a book explaining a silver rank set of mage oriented soul structures, and I hoped the academy might teach something at mid to high gold, or even platinum. But mythril and above? That's the inheritances of noble houses."

Carlos blinked. "Uh, 'rank'?"

Amber slapped her forehead. "Of course you don't know those either. It's the overall quality and power of all of your soul structures as a cohesive whole. Soul structures that synergize and work well together can be positioned closer to each other, which allows fitting more soul structures into your soul, and also lets the mana in each one augment and strengthen the other. And that's on top of whatever benefit is inherent to the combination of their abilities."

"Hmm. What about making two of the same soul structure? I doubt any secret to extreme power is that simple, but I have to ask."

Amber shook her head. "Plenty of people have tried that, and it never goes well. There are three possible results: the second copy merges with the first, and its mana is expelled and wasted because it's fully redundant; or the second copy is kept separate but never used, taking up space in your soul to no benefit; or each one is used only a portion of the time, and the resulting development and improvement is split between them, crippling your rate of advancement. In all cases, it's actively detrimental. Useful and beneficial combination requires different structures with different purposes, that combine with synergy."

Carlos nodded. "I see. Makes sense. So to make a really powerful high rank set, you need to find many things that are all different, yet all still work together closely."

"Not just that. Left over empty space in your soul absorbs mana to no benefit and slightly distorts the efforts of your actual soul structures. At the highest ranks, the entire soul is filled with a diverse array of structures, all of them in a massively interconnected web of overlapping reinforcement. No improvised design could ever hope to match that."

Carlos grinned. "Who said anything about improvising? Let me tell you all about these wonderful devices on Earth called computers."