“This line is too much, I think,” he said. His finger traced a single curved portion of the magic circle he’d been dissecting and reassembling with Lavinia hundreds of times. Max was working in his magical workroom, building arcane logic-circles yet again and looking at them critically when he was suddenly interrupted.

Lavinia appeared to one side. "Well, it didn't take long for you to get a reply.”

“I take it that one of your spirits at the door just told you that a note came."

"Yes. One is bringing it in." Max glanced up, and sure enough, a pair of spindly ectoplasmic legs with a small golem-like body carried in a note. He flipped it open, read it, and then put it on the floor for his spirits to read. The note had been simple. Headmaster Mong Hao Han was asking Max to wait a few more days, two days minimum. No pleasantries, just the request.

Max tapped his arm, thinking about the message. Part of him wanted to be stubborn and obstinate–just go to the central area anyway, but that would probably be a dumb thing to do. After all, the headmaster would immediately know he went. Max didn't have a way to even detect the surveillance yet, much less block it, and he wasn't sure what would happen if he just did what he wanted.

At this point, at least two headmasters had a vested interest in making sure he didn't go and get himself killed. On top of that, just like before, there was still likely a chance that Max could be murdered if he ran into somebody more powerful than he was, or a sufficiently motivated group. Like it or not, the days of him going off by himself and scamming hot-headed idiots out of their money were probably over.

"You're thinking about going anyway, aren't you?" asked Lavinia.

Max nodded, then shook his head. "No, I was thinking about it, but I've decided against it. Still, it's kind of annoying that I have all this money right now and nowhere to really use it. Well, except by destroying it, but there’s a limit to how fast that process works."

"How much do you actually have now anyway?" asked Lavinia.

Max pulled up his screen to double-check and answered, "This number should be a few hundred plus whatever I got at the end of my dungeon plus ten thousand."

Once he read off the number, Lavinia's jaw actually dropped. But Max knew that the amount was deceptively large. After all, he'd already spent thousands of mana units getting to where he was with his current mana body. There were still expensive things to buy, too. On top of all that, he couldn’t be too happy about his gains from the dungeon. While it would probably have been possible to reach a two-star mana body in the first place without being stranded in Cradle of Giants, the act of sending Max to the dungeon really had been a death sentence. If he hadn't had hundreds of years of experience to draw from and some incredibly strange pieces of fortune, he would have perished.

He didn't think back to his execution of the worker with any sort of joy, but he definitely didn't regret it.

Max looked up at the ceiling, thinking about how he could fill his days without going to the central area first. He was feeling impatient, but letting the emotion control him wouldn’t be wise. Besides, there were things to do–he could wait another couple of days. But if the headmaster dragged his feet too long, then he was going to push back. He said as much to Lavinia. She said, “Sure, you have lots to do. Speaking of which, why haven't you been working on your mana body since you've gotten back to the Quartet?"

"Well, that's one reason I need to go to the central area. I already have ways to make mana usage more efficient, but since here I have to literally burn mana just to get any in decent amounts, I want to stretch what I have even further. All my martial arts students here in the quartet need mana too, and they don't even know it yet. They're showing some improvement. The mana quality here is horrible but it is somewhat present, better than back on earth before the monsters showed up, but it still isn't good enough. Warriors on a mana path like them need to improve their bodies faster."

"Faster for what?" asked Lavinia.

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"Fast enough for them to place in the Quartet competition for one. If I have to go to another Quartet for an inter-Quartet competition, I don’t want to be stuck there alone.” Max grinned. “Maybe a little selfish of me, but I’d like my friends to win some rewards and mana units, too.”

"I'll be damned, you really are planning ahead, aren't you?"

"Trying to. So here's what I'm thinking: since I won't have a lot to do for the next couple of days, I want to spend a lot of time trying to work on this mana circle of yours and make it a little bit tamer so some of my friends can use it."

Lavinia laughed, and Max frowned. "What?"

"Oh, you just referred to them as your friends. I thought it was cute."

Max gave the ghost girl an exasperated look. "Of course they're my friends. I don't think that's weird. In fact, this morning I sent a message to Gantry asking about food, but he'd already had breakfast. Right after that Momo asked me if I wanted to get breakfast or dinner with her today."

Lavinia's light laughter turned into a full-throated howl. "

'What?” He frowned when she didn’t stop. “What!?”

"I think Momo might be interested in a little bit more than friendship there. Oh, wow. This is ridiculous."

Max blinked. "Wait. You really think so?"

By this point, Lavinia was rolling around on the ground. Slick suddenly manifested and began doing backflips across the room. Max wasn't sure if the little spirit actually understood what was going on, or was just excited by all the commotion and wanted to be involved.

Lavinia pointed and said, "For such a powerful person who has lived for so long, you can be surprisingly dense. How in the hell did you ever marry? You didn't notice the looks that Momo…hell, half of the women in the Summoner Academy have been looking at you like you're a piece of meat and they're a lion. A hungry lion. Lioness. Lionessses. Whatever.”

“A piece of meat?”

“Maybe a scary piece of meat, but a piece of meat nonetheless. How can you not tell? Maxl, I can tell, and I'm dead, and I was a virgin too."

She suddenly covered her mouth with both hands. Max got very still and only moved his eyes to follow her.

"Wait, you were a…a what?" he asked.

"I didn't say anything, don't worry about it. Mind your business.”

"No, no, no, no, no. I'm pretty sure I heard what I heard."

"Drop it, buster. Unless you don't want armor or ectoplasm again."

"Uh-huh," drawled Max. "Well, I'm fine being made fun of since it's the pot calling the kettle black over here. But I really don't think Momo contacted me for…you know."

He did give it some thought, though. Max felt a bit of confusion as he tried to remember the red-eyed woman’s expressions from the day before.

Lavinia seemed to sense what he was doing. She chuckled and shook her head again. “Well, stop wondering about it. Are you going to meet her and find out?"

Max looked at the mystic circle on the ground before sighing and pulling out his tablet to check the time. He said, "You know what, if we get enough work done on this circle stuff today and I do a few other errands I wanted to run, maybe I will meet her for dinner. Then I suppose we'll find out which one of us was right."

"So what do I get if I'm right?"

Max rubbed his chin as if deep in thought and said, "If you win, maybe I can find a nice spirit gentleman who is open to meeting a sarcastic, somewhat inexperienced bookworm, former Summoner. Maybe I can hook you guys up. What do you say? Oh, I'll even make sure that he's cool with the whole spying in the shower thing. But not on him, on me. I'll tell him you did it to me."

Lavinia narrowed her eyes and very slowly and deliberately picked up a physical piece of chalk from the floor before lobbing it at Max as hard and fast as she could, which had barely enough speed to even reach him in the first place. As the chalk bounced off, Max laughed and said, "Okay, playtime's over. Let's get back to work here on this circle. It took you a few years to create it in the first place. You’ve been thinking about it for hundreds. Now you have another month to improve it.”

“So just drop it? Just like that?”

“Yes. And besides, I know you're curious about this Momo situation too."

"Well…I have to admit…sort of guilty. How can you tell?"

Max pointed at his head. "Sometimes, well, you live in my noggin now, and you were the only person I talked to in the dungeon before we got our bone-loving warlord class spirit friend All he ever talks about is bones."

Saliron’s voice rang out from nowhere in the room. He said, "Bones are the only thing worth spending energy to discuss."

"Noted," said Max. He turned to Lavinia. "See what I mean? Anyway, by this point, you're probably one of the best friends I've ever had."

"Really?" asked the spirit.

"Really," said Max. "Meeting you was one of the luckiest breaks I've ever gotten so far in this life."

Lavinia looked down at the floor and picked up the chalk again, bringing it over to the arcane equation she'd been working on. She softly said, "Thank you."

"Don't mention it," said Max. "But for the record, I really don't think that Momo wants to meet up for a date."

“I guess you’ll find out, huh?”

“You know what? For sure. Yeah.” Max expanded his tablet from his wrist and replied to Momo’s message. He told her he might be able to make dinner.”

He still thought Lavinia was probably wrong, but the speed with which Momo replied made him start doubting himself.