Frida Goldhand ran her fingers through her latest creation, a chandelier five meters across, fit for any castle or palace she’d ever graced with her presence. Shimmering crystals chimed against one another in a song of extraordinary excess, hanging on threads of nearly invisible, whisper steel.

Each and every one of them was a skill shard, shattered from collected cores into identical diamond shapes with the deft application of Shatter Skill Core.

* Shatter Skill Core (Exceptionally Rare)

* Type: Manipulation, Utility

* Affinity: Crystal

* Range: Touch

* Cost: High Mana

* Effect: Shatters a skill core into one or more skill shards. Any skill shards that are unable to stabilize themselves will dissolve into raw mana. The user has very little control over the nature of these skill shards.

As per usual with skill shards, the results were hit or miss. Many acted much like the original skills and others became outright useless, but there were a few that had become valuable or interesting enough for her to reserve for her personal collection.

All that would already be an extravagant expense, but Frida Goldhand had insisted on using only skills of her favorite color, the same color that marked her hands and had earned her surname.

And only time mana, one of the rarest and most sought after mana affinities, was gold.

Her masterpiece contained enough time affinity skills to outfit an army.

Satisfied with her creation, she flicked her hands around her workshop. Skill cores, unshapely shards, and spools of whisper steel wire vanished into various drawers, each of which contained its own dimensional space.

She messaged her chamberlain to handle the trivialities of packing and delivery.

For the first time in ages, she had a free moment. She was determined to enjoy herself before the world at large discovered her freedom and flooded her with commissions.

Frida Goldhand teleported to her main house, just inside the front doors. She ignored the startled bowing and scraping of various servants, all her attention on the vault door that had pride of place between her foyer’s two sweeping staircases.

Instead of hiding her vault beneath the earth or in a fortified bunker, hers was the first thing any visitor would see, a statement of wealth and absolute confidence in her security.

Any who dared try to break in had the honor of being added to the collection.

The massive gears, inlaid with gold spun at the touch of Greater Gold Manipulation as she input a combination provided by her interface. The exact combination at any given time was determined by the date, time, ambient mana affinities, and so many other factors that even someone with a mind attribute as elevated as hers would need time to calculate it out, by which time the combination would’ve changed.

The door shimmered and became translucent, displaying a tantalizing amount of wealth. Frida smirked, then performed the last few adjustments that disarmed the final trap that had caught so many. The scene in front of her was replaced by a different, but equally impressive display as the vault door connected to the dimensional space pocket that held her actual collection.

The dummy vault was filled with treasure that, while priceless, weren’t quite up to her usual standards, and as difficult as it was to enter, it was impossible to leave. It was a straightforward trick, one suited to catch those with the intelligence to break inside but without the wisdom to resist their greed.

Frida shivered in delight as she passed through the intangible door. The gold passing through her body sang like a choir to her mana.

Once inside, the door vanished behind her as the dimensional connection was severed. It mattered little, she could call it again when it was needed.

Frida strode through the entryway, which contained reinforced glass cases, each containing one of her earliest treasures; a Clouded Orus egg, an artifact sword with peerless destructive power for its level that had somehow managed to soulbond with itself, a set of swamp phoenix Feathers, and a shard of the inner moon.

These couldn’t compete with the most precious items she’d collected since, but they still brought her the kind of joy a child’s drawing brought to a parent.

Ironically, the least valuable of these, the shard of the inner moon, was her favorite. Plenty of the amethyst shards had fallen to earth over the eons, though the rate was always decreasing. Physically, the shard was formed of the same, universal mana contained in notes, which made sense considering humanity had invented the process of creating notes by studying similar shards.

While it was objectively the least valuable item in the vault, Frida couldn’t deny a sense of childish glee at owning a piece of the moon.

She waltzed through her vault, examining any item that caught her eye. In the art section, she admired Hell’s Fury. The last sculpture of Ymir, the progenitor of the Jotun race, was a bust of eternal ice.

Ever the romantic, Ymir had presented the sculpture to the woman it depicted, but found her in the midst of making love with another man. In a jealous rage, he struck down the man and returned home to convert the bust into a horrible monster, but was slain himself by the same woman in retaliation, leaving behind his last and most valuable piece, half beautiful woman, half skeletal horror.

Ocean of Paradise, a painting by the famous Ogobi, depicted waving stalks of golden grain, which actually moved in the wind.

Ogobi had mastered the art of creating paintings that continually changed to reflect the landscape they depicted at any distance, all while retaining his artistic style.

It was his desire to motivate the owner of the paintings to preserve the locations he painted, each of which were meaningful to him. He had largely succeeded. Frida herself had purchased every piece of land visible in the painting.

She didn’t bother with hiring farmers to tend the fields, relying instead on permanent spell arrays and enchantments to maintain the area.

Among the more obscure weapons, she spent some time examining a spear of shining silver. It had no enchantments and contained no mana, but still thrummed with power. It was nowhere near the strength of some of her other collected weapons, but its unique nature and origin still rated it as one of the most valuable.

It was from further away than even the moon.

She kept most of the living creatures in magical status, including the Brass Scaled Ridgeback in front of her, a unique crossbreed of the copper-scaled and zinc-scaled varieties.

However, some creatures were either resistant to, or couldn’t survive that kind of magical preservation.

One such example darted around its cage, quickly enough for the movements to be confused for teleportation by someone less advanced than Frida.

The Death Elemental was largely invisible, but anything seen through it was completely drained of color.

The creature was rare for two reasons. Most elementals were composed of two different elements or mana types, like the common earth and plant elementals. Something about the unique reactions between disparate substances and mana made elemental animations far more likely.

Single affinity elementals were far from unheard of, but they were nearly always of mana types that corresponded to physical substances, such as water, metal, wood, or air. Elementals made of a single, non-corporeal mana type, such as shadow, light, force, or death, were rare enough to be worth collecting, even considering the difficulty in containing them.

When Frida came within a few feet of the elemental, it frantically scratched against the invisible magical barrier that emanated off the dragon bone bars of its cage, another piece in her collection.

She laughed at its antics.

“You never learn.” No matter how many years passed, the Death Elemental responded exactly the same. In general, elementals weren’t the brightest monsters, but most would at least try a different tactic after a few hundred attempts failed.

She guessed this one’s stupidity was because it had no physical substance, no equivalent of a biological creature’s brain. She knocked the bars, chuckling as the elemental grew increasingly frenzied. There were advantages to keeping creatures out of stasis. It might be worth reworking the containment on a few of the unaging monsters. But that was work, and this was time for relaxation. She made a note to consider it another time.

Finally, she arrived at the jewel of her collection, the skills.

All the best collectors had favorites and specialties, and these were hers.

Cleopatra of the Azure Sands owned more enchanted objects and artifacts than most nations. Rasha Skydancer collected rare and beautiful plants and beasts, which she kept in public nature preserves. Dorrin Redeye was as covetous as Rasha was generous. His collection of metals and precious stones were kept in the only privately owned vault that rivaled Frida’s for security.

As for Frida, she had skills of every affinity and description, not just the most obscure and powerful. She kept a minimum of five copies of every common and uncommon skill registered across the continent as a matter of course, but where her collection really shone was in her impressive numbers of exceptionally rare and unique skills.

As one might expect, many of these were skill variants.

Diamond Sandman was a unique variant of the uncommon Sandman skill. Instead of ordinary sand, the skill transformed the user’s body into a mass of powdered diamond.

Ice Quake was equally rare, if less obviously useful. It was a variant of Earthquake that traded earth affinity for ice.

Rejuvenate was a far less efficient version of Regenerate, but had the ability to heal physical aging as well as ordinary wounds. That had been a particularly satisfying addition, due to the number of disappointed parties who’d failed to claim it.

Eyes of Morpheus wasn’t unique, but it was exceptionally rare and highly prized by healers, counselors, and intelligence agents. The perception-type skill allowed the user to peer into a target’s dreams, and even dive into the subconscious mind, to gather information, heal, or harm.

Before Frida could dig deep into her collection of skills, she received an interface message from her chamberlain. Irritation filled her bosom. Her break had lasted less than an hour and was already being interrupted.

The content of the message didn’t lessen her anger.

One of her scouts had returned from a routine trip to some nothing city and insisted he’d only report to her. There were procedures in place for emergencies that required that kind of information security, but in her experience, people’s panic or excitement were rarely warranted.

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She’d fired the last scout that claimed he’d found something truly priceless and insisted on waking her in the middle of the night. Some con artist had sold him two skill shards cemented together with a clear resin. The man had claimed, and her scout had believed, it was actually some kind of hybrid skill core.

While Frida wouldn’t be surprised if such a trick fooled the average civilian, her Goldchains, the scouts, researchers, and magical experts she hired to find, evaluate, and gather precious items, should have keener minds and sharper eyes than that.

If, as she suspected, this was a complete waste of her time, at least she’d have the pleasure of firing an incompetent.

She reached out with her aura, breaching the dimensional barrier between the vault and her estate until she found the scout in question. With a deft use of her teleportation skill, she pulled him through space to appear before her.

Otto Goldchain collapsed as he appeared, unprepared for the stress of teleportation, but he turned the fall into a kneeling bow.

“Lady Goldhand, a thousand apologies for my interruption.”

Frida appreciated a good sycophant. Maybe she wouldn’t fire him after all, at least if this didn’t turn out to be too much of a waste of her time.

“Rise Goldchain and report.”

He obeyed, giving Frida her first good look at the man.

He looked like a deep sigh.

He had wispy and thinning hair, despite being a peak level 9 who should’ve been beyond such things. The was thin in more ways than one, with a washed out complexion and faint shadows under his eyes. If she lacked spiritual senses, she would’ve assumed he was level 2 at the highest. She examined him more deeply, heedless of the discomfort that having her aura intrude into his spirit would cause him.

The man was dangerously unbalanced, with several attributes with only a single allocated point. Vitality was one of them, which explained his sickly appearance. The overwhelming majority of his experience was allocated into the attributes that most of her mobile scouts focused on, Speed, Mind, Perception, and Endurance.

All in all, he had an excellent build for looking for things and moving fast, but little else.

If he ever managed to cross the barrier between levels 9 and 10, Frida wasn’t sure he’d survive the influx of power.

“My Lady, I have retrieved a number of skills that I believe you will find interesting.”

“You were stationed in…”

“Root Perch, my lady.”

It took her a glance through her interface to find the city. It was a distant city of Old Grove, far removed from the bulk of their territory and only remaining unconquered due to its minimal value. The city had a single stable mana node at level 2, just barely strong enough to bother with.

Her expectations for whatever Otto had found fell even further.

“Show them to me.”

Otto retrieved a skill core, which Frida lifted from his hand with the touch of her aura. Along with the item, her Goldchain sent a message with its description.

* Mana Jump (Exceptionally Rare)

* Type: Mobility

* Affinity: Force

* Range: Self

* Cost: Low Mana

* Effect: Propels the user in a desired direction.

She had access to more detail from interface functions and her own perception, but the rarity rating was helpful, especially since she had no record of such a skill. Without the description he provided, her interface would’ve rated it as unique.

Her lips parted in a smile.

“And I was pondering how to fire you for wasting my break.”

“My lady?” Otto clasped his hands in distress.

“Don’t worry, this was an acceptable interruption. A new skill, and not just a variant or shard, is a worthy find. And you said you have others?”

Wordlessly, Otto retrieved several dozen more cores. As Frida lifted them with her aura, she recognized each was a copy of the same skill.

That was…strange. Entirely new skills cropped up occasionally, usually in two distinct fashions. Very rarely, they were dropped by a single, unique monster that was never seen again. More commonly, they came from a new breed of monster that occasionally spawned from an existing mana node. The skill was initially very rare, but became less so as more and more nodes across the world began spawning the same monster.

For nearly fifty copies of the same skill to drop in a single location, without being reported somewhere else with a similar affinity mana node, was very odd, even suspicious.

“Anything else?”

Otto shook his head and opened his mouth, but Frida didn’t wait for him to speak before teleporting him away, along with a large number of notes from her own purse. Such a find was deserving of an appropriate reward. She sent a message to her chamberlain to gather a more detailed report and forward her anything important.

The human distraction dismissed, she turned her attention to the Mana Jump skills, peering into their depths to read their secrets. She had enough of them that she even absorbed one, feeling out its nature and workings as it unfolded into her spirit.

It felt very similar to Jump, but charged with mana instead of stamina, but its effect was slightly different. Instead of adding power to the body’s movements, it skipped the process and directly applied force to the body as a whole. The function was a bit cruder than Jump, but had the advantage of not requiring specific movements or a solid surface to push against.

Useful enough, not groundbreaking by any means, but a nice enough mobility option for someone without the mana for teleportation or sustained flight.

What alluded her was the skill’s origin. Normally, she could get a sense of what kind of monster a skill came from. It was an echo, like a phantom limb, or a texture in the mana. Even otherwise identical skills had different impressions, unless the monsters they dropped from were ridiculously similar.

She felt none of that from any of these cores. They felt almost…synthetic, like an interface’s version of a skill. It was possible someone had developed a method to cleanse the cores’ spiritual signature. It could also be a side effect of a unique harvesting skill.

No matter the cause, this was something worth investigating herself.

Frida bypassed the defenses on her vault and teleported back to her house. She started gathering anything she might need, packing away clothing, tools, and obscure magical objects into her dimensional space.

Normally, she would have servants take care of this, but she was far too excited to wait.

She sensed someone at her door, and waved it open before they could knock.

Her chamberlain gave her a respectful nod before entering the room. Ludwig Goldchain was a tall, dark skinned man with close-cropped white hair. He was reminiscent of an ancient tree, wrinkled and old, but standing straight and powerful. He gave the impression that he had been here long before you were born, and would still be here long after you were gone.

“Lady Goldhand, I have prepared the report from Otto.” He sent over a surprisingly comprehensive report of her agent's activities, complete with images of his other, less important finds.

“Thank you, Ludwig. I’ll be departing for Root Perch in-,” Frida glanced at the stream of items still flying through the air into the warp in space that lead to her personal dimensional storage, “Ten minutes or so. What’s their gimmick for handling monsters?”

“Standard Slayer’s Guild.”

Cities all over the world had been attempting various means to handle the escalating number of monsters in recent years all across the spectrum of complexity. On the mundane end were those who simply created fortresses around untethered mana nodes, armed with casters who could bombard any newly generated monsters. The only issue was that, while around half of monsters spawned in close proximity to the node, the rest appeared within a large radius, so you couldn’t catch every monster that way.

On the more interesting end were those who manipulated the nodes themselves. Some groups even managed to turn them into a resource instead of a threat.

The least interesting option, and the most traditional, was a Slayer’s Guild, a simple organization of warriors that patrolled the local area for monsters. It made sense that such a low level city used the simplest option, as they likely lacked the resources to do anything different.

“A boring choice, but at least they won’t get in the way. That will be all, Ludwig.”

For those who didn’t know him well, Ludwig Goldchain appeared to be a man of few words. Those more familiar with him realized he said more than most.

He didn’t need words to convey surprise and concern.

“You worry too much, dear. It's a level 2 city. The city lord can’t be more than, what, level 10?”

“Eleven, my lady.”

“Exactly. Even if they don’t fall to their knees to give me the source of this new skill, it’ll still be like stealing gold from a Graven.”

Gravens were notoriously small, weak, and adorable creatures that looked something like handspan-tall humanoids crudely shaped from clay. They only survived extinction due to their complete lack of nutritional value and ability to reform themselves from all but the most extreme damage.

Gravens had a penchant for collecting shiny objects, which they paraded around in excited glee until something with the strength of a small child came along to take it, hence the expression.

Their only defense against potential theft were their large, black eyes, like drops of ink, which elicited impressive levels of guilt in potential thieves.

“It wasn’t the city lord that worried me, my lady.”

Frida raised her eyebrows and looked over at her chamberlain. He was her most trusted companion. He could be overprotective at times, but his concerns were still worth listening to.

“Then what are you worried about?”

Ludwig looked meaningfully at her namesake, her hands, golden as dawn, then to the side, in the direction of the east wing of the estate, which she had yet to expand into after the abrupt departure of its occupant.

“You can’t be serious. Root Perch? He might as well settle down and take up farming.”

“I thought it worth mentioning.”

“It certainly is. If he’s really there, then I’d bet my moon shard he’s neck deep in this.”

She summoned a copy of Mana Jump from the spatial warp that was currently swallowing a set of rune-inscribing tools. She gazed into its faceted depths and smiled.

“I knew retirement wouldn’t last. The only thing little Hoss could never find was restraint.”

It was time to pay her twin a surprise visit.

***

Curious Seeker of the Hidden crawled through the underbrush, moving slowly and cautiously to avoid leaving a trail. They couldn’t sense any true spirits nearby, only formless energy, but they were all too aware that meant little when others were so much more powerful than they were.

Curious Seeker of the Hidden used their many inky tendrils to examine the mulch of bones that covered much of the ground, checking for irregularities or reality warping. They knew that principalities and even some powerful aspects warped the very fabric of the world around them. Even if Curious Seeker of the Hidden couldn’t sense them directly, abnormalities in the world could provide a warning.

Not that it would do the spirit much good if they found anything. If a principality was that close, they would be destroyed in short order.

They occupied themselves with cataloging the broken bits of bone, hypothesizing what sorts of creatures they came from. To their excitement, they even found a few pieces made of physical matter, instead of condensed mana. Pulling themselves away from examining every facet of those precious pieces was excruciating. It was nearly as painful as their recent injury, when a good chunk of their tendrils had been sliced off.

They couldn’t even take the pieces with them, for fear of leaving a trail to follow.

If they had lungs, they would’ve sighed. They performed their equivalent gesture, their tendrils drooping like wilted flowers.

They weren’t left disappointed for long. A flare of mana in the distance caught their attention. The sensitive tips of their tendrils rose into the air, tasting the mana’s composition.

Decay affinity mana was prevalent, which was no surprise, considering they were traversing the Decay Subdomain, but it was more…textured than the ambient decay mana around them. The difference was similar to the difference between a named spirit and formless spiritual energy.

Order.

Somewhere up ahead was a source of raw, unclaimed order, direct from the physical world. And unless their senses failed them, Curious Seeker of the Hidden was the only true spirit nearby.

They scrambled towards the beacon of power, tendrils shivering in excitement. They clutched the knotted mass of severed tendrils secured deep in their mass.

This could be exactly the stroke of luck they needed to repair themselves and reattach it, assuming they could beat the formless to it.

Curious Seeker of the Hidden slashed apart any collections of formless energy it passed. The formless would reform in time, hopefully enough time for Curious Seeker of the Hidden to finish absorbing and digesting their prize.

The source of the energy was within a hollowed out, rotten stump, that was large enough that it would take at least four of themselves stretched to their maximum to wrap all the way around it. They climbed up the side, using their tendrils to find cracks or divots to pull themselves up. Most of their tendril-holds crumbled under their weight, but that was alright, they had a hundred more tendrils seeking out more.

They reached the top of the stump in mere moments.

Each and every one of their tendrils froze as they saw the source of the order that had drawn them here.

Two humans. Real physical humans. Not shadows, not illusions, not bits of bone or even corpses. There were corpse bits too, blood, bone, scales, and teeth that might once have been some kind of snake, along with chunks of wood and stone, and a heavy blanket of unknown sludge, but those were nothing compared to the real prize.

Two living, breathing humans lay in a crumpled, unconscious heap, clutching each other like tangled flotsam in a raging sea.

And while humans were always a potent source of order, the smaller of the two radiated it like a cracked sun, drawing them in like a moth to a flame.