“Calculating the exact time in a person’s final decade when their stats will begin to wane is a complex process involving countless dozens of factors and providing an answer that few people actually want to know. Which is why most don’t bother, and why there are only 23 of you in a lecture hall big enough for a hundred. For most people, knowing when their final decade, and their final sixth will begin is enough. That information is quite easy to acquire, since it’s a function of maximum lifespan.

“You should all be aware that every tenth level will provide you with an additional decade of life per class. Incidentally, if you didn’t know that, do feel free to leave. I’m not so desperate for students that I’ll take any old moron.

“Vitality is the only part of calculating maximum lifespan that is even remotely complicated. Class vitality of course, doesn’t have any effect on lifespan. Trained vitality though, that little fraction in brackets after your total, that does. But not all trained vitality is made equal. A mortal will receive a whopping ten years of life per point, up to a maximum of 100 years. An initiate though, will only get forty years, one year per point. Adepts only get half a year, elders a quarter, ancients an eighth and divines a meagre sixteenth. Which is why most seekers, even elders, don’t bother training their vitality higher than 200. The return on investment simply isn’t worth the ah… mess.”

From “Transcript of Bio-Alchemy 112: Aging, Lecture 1 Sp/237/84/2”

8th Maril, Spring, 375th Year, 84th Era, 2nd Age (7 days later)

Nathan set down the knife in his hand and braced against the counter as he felt himself begin to tremble. The first time it had happened he’d thought it was something to do with his motor nucleus. As it turned out, the trembling was a sort of minor panic attack.

According to Elder Haelend, it couldn’t be healed away because it was his mind’s natural defences overcompensating due to the extreme nature of what he had been through. She said that the attacks would get shorter and further apart over several seasons, before stopping entirely. It didn’t help now, but it was something at least.

Once he stopped shaking, Nathan got back to preparing his breakfast. The fruit he was chopping up had the shape and texture of a dark green carrot, but the taste was extremely sweet. It went well with the oatmeal he’d found in one of the cupboards.

It had taken a bit of trial and error to find the right thing to put in his porridge. His first selection, a bunch of dark purple grapes, had left him with an extremely spicy breakfast. He’d realised in hindsight that testing the mystery ingredients before adding them would have been a good idea.

Porridge made, Nathan walked over to the middle of the room and sat in front of the ever-burning frost-flame (he’d found out the name from Marius) and slowly ate his breakfast while watching the fire.

It was a strange thing to look at. Rather than appearing like a fire-shaped hole in the world, the frost-flame had nuance and shades and visible depth, as if it were a tangible thing. Which, as it turned out, it was. Darkness, as well as being the absence of light, was one of the twenty-one elements that made up the world.

According to a book he’d found in his small library, frost-flame was the product of a sub-element of remnant essence, called gela, burning to produce atera, which was the most common sub-element of darkness.

He’d spent a lot of time, when he wasn’t learning the last of Eternal, reading random books. What surprised him was how many things in Kelric were inexplicably identical to Earth.

Measurements for example were, as best he could tell, essentially just the metric system. And then there were the names that made everyone seem like they were from England despite living in a city called Kathresh.

On the other hand, some things were very different, like the world being the flat side of a hemisphere of rock sat inside the bottom half of a giant ball of space essence. That one had thrown him when he first read it, though it did explain why there wasn’t a horizon.

Magic obviously caused quite a lot of differences, which included currency being based on the iron standard. Apparently, iron’s anti-magic properties made it the most valuable substance in the world since it was the only thing that couldn’t be created from mana with sorcery.

Everything was so weird and novel. Despite having spent over a week in the same room (Kelric had six-day weeks it turned out) he could honestly say that he hadn’t enjoyed himself so much in years. A silver lining of his situation was that, of the few emotions that he had retained, wonder and curiosity were the ones that had kept their full strength. In fact, they seemed to have grown stronger in the absence of competition.

Regardless, Elder Haelend had given him a clean bill of health, so today he’d be going to the Kathreshi Central Library to get access to some books more geared towards general information.

Elder Ashbourne’s collection focused more on advanced magical theory. The elder had arranged for him to be assigned a librarian to fetch any books he needed. It seemed a bit excessive to Nathan, but it was apparently normal for libraries as large and old as Kathreshi Central.

The aged sorcerer had been dropping by each afternoon to teach him how to use his mana control and aura perception skills properly. Once he’d gotten the hang of it, Nathan had spent hours just moving clumps of mana around.

It was magic after all, actual real magic, and he was doing it. Who wouldn’t find that amazing? According to Elder Ashbourne, it would only take him a season or so to get up to a degree of competence that matched his skill level, a perk of level ten.

Eventually, he finished his porridge and, after washing up, settled in to do some mana control practice while he waited for Marius. He’d come a long way in very little time, from tiny clumps to small models of snakes and drifting purple flames. Mana wasn’t actually purple of course, he saw it with his soul rather than his eyes, but sorcery created purple light which coloured his perception of it. Literally.

Several minutes later, Marius arrived.

“Good morning, Master Nathan, are you ready to go?”

“Are the titles really that important?” Nathan asked as he let his mana constructs collapse and made his way over to the door. “I’d much rather just forgo it.”

Having at least one skill or ability at level ten afforded him the title of master it turned out.

“That may be so, but it would not be proper. And you need to get used to it, titles are important in seeker society. It takes an immense amount of time and effort to earn any title; acknowledging the success of others is simple courtesy.”

Nathan sighed as he stepped out the door. “You’re probably right,” he said looking at the corridor for the first time, “I have to say, I never expected to look forward to going outside quite this much.”

“Well sir,” Marius replied, stepping into the elevator and selecting the ground floor, “in my experience, when you find yourself in a situation that even the gods consider unprecedented it is best to simply take things as they come.

“And sir,” the butler said, his face taking on a more serious expression, “I am not “probably right”. I am definitely right. It is important to remember that any given person you meet has a significant chance of being able to kill you in a heartbeat. And not everyone is quite so moral or wary of veltun as they should be.”

“Surely no one would kill me for using the wrong title,” Nathan said, slightly disturbed by Marius’ sincerity.

“It’s extremely unlikely, yes. That sort of thing only happens once or twice an era. However, rudeness can make you a great many enemies and there are more methods for taking revenge than simple murder,” he said as they stepped out into the atrium. “But enough of this grim talk. Today is to be savoured, not spoiled.”

The first thing Nathan noticed when he stepped out onto the street was how clean everything was. It wasn’t just clean for a city street, it was properly, almost unreasonably clean. By pure chance, he actually knew the reason for it.

An offhand comment in a book on destruction magic had mentioned that said school of sorcery was used in enchanted street cleaners which were placed in base every lamppost. He couldn’t imagine how long it must have taken to ensure that they didn’t destroy people, or the roads themselves.

As they walked down the street, Nathan slowly looked around, noticing all the tiny differences to what he might have seen on Earth.

Some were less obviously strange, like the lampposts being made from what looked like bronze or the fact that there was almost no one on the street in an area filled with enormous towers.

Others though, were more magical. Such as the lampposts being topped by floating orbs of light, which pushed back the darkness between the massive towers. Or that everything from the pavement to the road and even the buildings seemed to be made from one continuous piece of stone. The fact that it wasn’t all the same kind of stone just made it weirder.

The lack of traffic was another odd point. They would occasionally be passed by vehicles ranging in size from large vans to articulated lorries, but never cars. There didn’t even appear to be any busses, let alone personal transportation. And what vehicles there were emitted a distinct chugging noise which made Nathan suspect that they were using something other than internal combustion engines.

The towers though, were definitely the most impressive thing that he could see, and not just for their incredible size. The stone making up the buildings reminded him of marble, in that it had lines in a different colour to the worked through it. Unlike marble however, those lines weren’t random. They wound across the buildings, converging every now and then to form images of everything from flowers to battles. It was like walking through a city sized art gallery.

After a few minutes of walking, they eventually came to a set of stairs taking up the roadside half of the pavement. The stairs brought them to a small room just below street level where elevators lined the walls.

“Isn’t sixteen elevators a bit excessive for somewhere so quiet?” Nathan asked as they stepped into one and Marius pressed the bottom of two buttons on the wall.

“It is standard policy for underground stations to have four times the number of elevators they would ever need so that the enchantments on those not in use have time to repair themselves. Only an archon of enchanting, an ancient with the skill above level 30, could create enchantments that do not degrade with use,” the butler replied.

“Could you not just use mechanical elevators?”

“I suppose it’s possible. But you see, a grandmaster grade enchanted elevator carriage needs almost no maintenance beyond the occasional inspection. A mechanical system on the other hand, would not only need fuel to supply the engine driving it, but also a constant influx of spare parts.

“In the long run, despite higher installation costs, an enchanted system is both cheaper and far safer. This elevator for example,” he bent down to read the date stamped onto the panel that held the controls, “is over three thousand years old.”

“Oh come on, that’s ridiculous,” Nathan said, moving in to look for himself. But, despite the absurdity of it, the panel read Produced Winter, 231st Year, 81st Era, 2nd Age. A quick bit of maths told him that the lift was 3144 years old.

“Bloody hell,” he muttered looking around at the pristine, silvery-white walls. If the magic hadn’t gotten there first, an elevator older than most Earth civilisations would have truly hammered home how different Kelric was.

“How old is Kathresh?” Nathan asked as they stepped out onto an underground platform and sat on a bench.

“From what I recall, the federal cities were founded in the early first age.”

“Are you saying that Kathresh is over a hundred and fifty thousand years old?”

“That sounds about right, yes,” Marius answered, as if it was completely normal information. They sat in silence for a while as Nathan processed the fact that he was in a city three quarters the age of modern homo-sapiens. Not even his extra scope helped. It just made him more aware of how incomprehensibly old Kathresh was.

It wasn’t until they had already boarded what was obviously a steam train that he said anything. “Hang on… If civilisation is that old, how come you haven’t invented the internal combustion engine yet?”

Marius frowned in thought for a while before replying. “I vaguely recognise the term… but I can’t think where from. Perhaps you can find the answer in the library.”

“Maybe,” Nathan said with a shrug.

After a few minutes and several stops, they got off at Miller Station. It turned out to be some sort of central hub, connecting various lines together. They passed through a large, circular chamber with dozens of entrances spread across three floors and boarded another train.

Nathan made a brief attempt to practice his mana control, but quickly discovered that the magical element was not carried along by the train like air was. Instead, he had to drag it along with him. At the speed the train was moving, carrying a useful amount was far beyond his meagre ability.

Eventually, they arrived at their destination. The street outside the creatively named Library Station was significantly larger than the street Ashbourne tower sat on. Parkland filled a wide space to his left. To his right stood a tower about three times the width of Elder Ashbourne’s, with an open book and the words Kathreshi Central Library formed above the door by veins in the stone.

The narrow base of Ashbourne tower had seemed a bit insane to him. This felt a bit more reasonable, even if the width had nothing to do with the requirements of engineering. Then he looked up.

“Master Nathan, we’re blocking the stairs,” Marius said after several minutes. Nathan’s chaperone took him by the arm and guided him into the expansive atrium of the library. They sat on one of the benches there for a while until his brain started working again.

“Exactly how tall is the library?” Nathan asked eventually.

“As a second ring building, it has exactly 750 floors, I believe that equates to something like three and a half kilometres.”

Nathan ran his hands over his face as he tried to think of something from Earth to compare the titanic building to. Wasn’t Everest just short of nine kilometres? That would make this man-made building over a third the height of the tallest mountain on Earth. He was surprised that he could still be surprised by anything at this point.

“Alright, let’s go,” he said, finally getting up. “Random question, what’s the tallest building in Kathresh?”

“The High Council Building, the only first ring building, is over four and a half kilometres tall.”

“Of course it is.” Only half an Everest, he was disappointed.

“Good morning, we have a reading room and librarian booked for Master Nathan Fellwood,” Marius said to the receptionist as they approached the desk at the far end of the room. The woman’s eyebrows rose slightly as she glanced at Nathan, and he felt a flicker of surprise from her aura. He was getting better at that.

“I’ll send a message up right away sir. If you’d like to take a seat, your librarian should only be a few minutes.”

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As they sat back down on one of the many benches, Nathan watched the woman use a telegram-like device. Presumably to send the message.

“Marius, what is that?” he asked after a while, gesturing to the machine.

“It’s a relay sir,” the butler answered, “It sends a simple message through a series of enchanted balls to a printer on the receiving end. They don’t work very well over more than a dozen kilometres, but they’re quite common for short distance communication.”

“So, you have buildings the size of mountains that are bigger on the inside than they should be, but you use telegrams and steam power. Mhyrra…” Marius gave him a pointed look, “Lady Mhyrra was right, technological advancement is difficult to judge.”

“I imagine that I would find your world every bit as perplexing as you find mine,” the butler said, letting his aura flow out with a brief surge of amusement as he continued, “You should know however, that a mass of earth must be at least 100,000 metres tall to qualify as a mountain.”

Nathan was rolled his eyes as Marius rose to greet a young man with the long hair and elaborate robes of a non-combatant seeker.

“Greetings High Initiate Marius, Master Nathan, I am Initiate Lucas Finch. If you would follow me, I will escort you to your reading room. Refreshments have been provided for you while you wait as I fetch your books.”

It was something Nathan had noticed on the way, but not many people had the same tight aura control as Marius and the elders. Initiate Lucas’ aura was one of the more controlled ones, but it still almost screamed boredom.

It didn’t show in his appearance though. His robes were immaculate, his black hair held neatly together by a clasp engraved with the same open book from above the library door. His tone was attentive, his shoulders straight, not even his dark red eyes betrayed a hint of disinterest. Yet the man clearly wished he could be anywhere else.

Now that he thought about it, Nathan wanted to ask about the eyes, it was another of the things he’d noticed. There was something more important that took priority though. “I don’t suppose we could just come with you. I’ve spent the last week in one room, I’ll take any opportunity I can get to stretch my legs.”

The initiate paused to think for a moment before replying. “You won’t be able to enter the storage rooms, but you can follow me through the corridors if you wish to. I will need to know which books you require immediately though.”

“Sounds good to me,” Nathan replied, “I need books on general information, the sorts of things you’d expect everyone to know as a matter of course. Possibly even children’s textbooks, if you have them. And something on why the internal combustion engine isn’t more common.”

The librarian stood with his eyes closed for a moment before nodding. “Very well. If you would follow me.”

“Marius,” Nathan said as they stepped into a lift, “it might be a bit rude in present company but are red eyes normal.”

The confusion in Initiate Lucas’ aura suggested that the question was more strange than rude, thankfully.

“Very much so,” the butler replied, “Eye colour can be roughly divided into thirds of red, green and blue. Though the darker shades of southern humans are more common for the simple reason that there are more southerners than northerners.”

“So basically, I’m the weird one,” he said, thinking about the brown colour of his own eyes.

“Precisely sir,” Marius deadpanned.

Nathan and Marius went back and forth, over the long elevator ride, about how unusual Nathan’s appearance was. Apparently, the strangest thing about him was his face, as he had neither the prominent chin and cheekbones of a southerner, nor the pointed nose and ears of a northerner. It was an insult that Nathan took great mock-offense to.

By the time the lift stopped, Initiate Lucas’ aura had transitioned from boredom to curiosity, despite nothing showing on his face. Nathan caught his eye as they stepped into a plain but well-lit hallway. “Go on, ask. You know you want to.”

The librarian froze, his eyes widening slightly, though the veritable storm of shock that passed through his aura was far more entertaining. “I… Uhh…”

“Oh, don’t worry so much. If it helps, I swear I won’t rip your spine out. I make no promises about defenestration though. I still can’t believe there’s a word for that in Kathreshi as well.”

Initiate Lucas visibly relaxed before restoring his mask of composure and asking his question.

“Are you the person that Lord Elder Ashbourne summoned from beyond the void?”

It was Nathan’s turn to be surprised. He’d expected something about his weirdness, but not that.

“I am,” he said, “though I didn’t realise it would be common knowledge.”

“The Lord Elder employed over a hundred of the strongest non-combat mages in the entire federation while he was trying to save you. It would be strange if it weren’t widely known,” the librarian replied.

“Oh really,” Nathan said, turning to Marius, “I hadn’t heard about that.”

“The Lord Elder did not wish to seem as if he were trying excessively to escape blame.”

“Well do feel free to tell the Lord Elder that while I could not blame him less for my presence in this world, I would very much blame him for keeping information from me without a good reason,” Nathan said with a pointed look.

They walked in silence for a while after that, moving through the nearly identical corridors. Occasionally, they would stop for a few minutes as Initiate Lucas slipped into a storage room.

“Where are the books?” Nathan asked after the third time the initiate returned seemingly empty handed.

The librarian’s aura flickered to confusion and back before he spoke.

“I suppose you wouldn’t know, but every librarian is provided with a storage ring.” He held up his right hand, revealing a platinum ring on his middle finger, inset with a tiny, blue gem and several diamonds.

“How does that work then?”

“Well…” he said, seeming to give it some thought, “I can’t go into much detail since I’m neither a space mage nor an enchanter, but the blue gem is made from cavrite, which is essentially a physical manifestation of space. This one contains about a metre cubed. The ring is enchanted to let you see inside that space, and move things in and out of it.”

“That sounds incredibly useful,” Nathan said, looking at the gem which couldn’t have been more than a millimetre across.

“It definitely is, but they’re not that common. Cavrite is a third-tier compound so it’s almost impossible to make using magic. I think they harvest it from fallen star fragments.”

Unfortunately, since Initiate Lucas didn’t know any more about storage rings, Nathan was barred from descending further down the wiki-like rabbit hole that was every line of questioning in Kelric. The conversation petered out for a while until after they’d moved to a different, albeit identical floor.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” the librarian said, glancing at Nathan for confirmation, “how did you know I wanted to ask a question earlier?”

“I could tell from your aura.”

“But I have level five aura control.”

“And I have level ten aura perception,” Nathan answered with a shrug. “Ten is bigger than five.”

The initiate was quiet for a moment as he processed the information. “Are you serious?”

“Yep.”

“Why in the name of sanity would you train that skill with such dedication?” Initiate Lucas exclaimed before concern shot through his aura. “Apologies, I didn’t mean to…”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Nathan interrupted, “To answer your question, I didn’t train with any dedication at all. It just kind of… happened by accident.”

The initiate stared at him blankly.

“Right, I should, um… Marius,” he said, turning to the butler, “how important is it to keep, well, anything secret.”

If the butler was surprised by the sudden question it didn’t show. “It is a matter of personal preference sir. With the political protection of an elder only the foolish or the desperate would think to take advantage of you for your talents. Unless you intend to become a criminal, it really just comes down to how much privacy you want.”

“Right, in that case…” Nathan held out a glass-like pane to Initiate Lucas, who tentatively took it from him.

“This is your status,” he said, his surprise obvious.

“Yes, it is. Now, this is quite a long story so let’s get to it,” Nathan replied, a small grin forming on his face.

As they made their way through the corridors, Nathan told his version of the story of his arrival in Kelric. As he went along, he explained his thought processes and received explanations in return. Mathematics, for example, was normally trained to level 5 over a decade of education.

Initiate Lucas suggested that, more than likely, his method only worked because it never occurred to him to just add fours and fives and sixes to the previous answers. In hindsight, even if it had gotten him level ten mathematics, it was a bit stupid to do each calculation from the start.

Ridiculous as it perhaps was to share the most harrowing experience of his life with a complete stranger, it felt good to finally get answers to the vast array of questions that he had accumulated since his summoning.

Mhyrra and Dantor had both left the day after Nathan woke up, though the latter had to be dragged away by their fellow fairy. The elders honestly seemed more uncomfortable with the situation than he was himself, and the idea of just going through everything with Marius had never occurred to him.

He might have held back more from interrogating the poor initiate if he couldn’t tell from his aura that the man was genuinely interested. Nathan hadn’t originally planned to go into every detail and through every question. But once he realised how receptive of an audience he had, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to keep the man entertained while doing a job that he clearly hated.

Eventually, after traveling to several different floors, they arrived at the reading room. Half a dozen chairs were grouped around a small fire pit such that they faced the windows and a selection of fruit juices were laid out on a table by the wall. They may have contained ice at some point but, if so, it had long since melted.

The muted crackle of frost-flame filled the room for a moment as Nathan found the control and flicked it up to maximum for a few seconds before dropping it down to a setting that would maintain the cooler temperature.

“Realms above, it’s only spring,” Initiate Lucas said as he sat in one of the chairs, manifesting several dozen books with a wave of his hand.

“I’m aware. It’s a fact I find endlessly frustrating” Nathan replied, trying the different juices. Managing, by some absurd twist of fate, to pick one made from the spicy grapes first.

“Not a fan of fire berries I see,” the librarian observed, laughing as Nathan spluttered at the unexpected kick, laughing a little himself. Initiate Lucas had loosened up quite a bit over the last hour.

“What kind of name is fire berries?” Nathan asked as he tried several more glasses, settling on a green drink clearly made from the same fruit he had put in his porridge and taking a seat.

“An informative one. The lunatics in Thorian call them frost berries.”

Nathan chuckled as he picked up a book titled Muler’s Folly “You don’t mind if I read while we talk, do you? I should be able to manage both quite easily.”

“I’d be disappointed if you couldn’t manage that much with level ten multitasking.”

“I would be as well,” Nathan replied, smirking as he worked through the first few paragraphs. “So, we’ve talked a lot about me, but what about you? I don’t mean to be a mind reading git, but you clearly don’t enjoy it here.”

The initiate sighed, staring out of the windows. “It’s… complicated,”

“Well, I’ve got plenty of time if you're willing to talk about it.”

The librarian laughed bitterly, “It boils down to the fact that my mother was inducted into a blood cult cell as a child, just before it was found and crushed.”

Nathan gave him a confused look.

“Oh, right. The blood cultists serve Lady Cassaria, the goddess of blood and sacrifice. They kill a lot of people. Their accumulated veltun is so extreme that just being part of the cult, even only in name, conveys an unreasonable level of misfortune. Unless you make sacrifices to Lady Cassaria for protection of course.”

“Ah, so your mother…”

“Has really bad luck. Yeah. Any time my parents manage to save up some money, they have to spend it on fixing a caved in roof or repairing fire damage. There is an intentionally minor council scheme to help people in their situation. They don’t do much though. It used to be more substantial but the office where it’s based had a tendency to burn down.”

He trailed off for a moment, lost in thought.

“When I somehow managed to unlock a librarian class, I got a job here because the pay is extremely good, even for low level initiates. Of course, I have the same problem as the scheme; I barely have any savings despite making enough for half a dozen people to live very comfortably. Something always crops up. Still, while I don’t enjoy the work, my class is even called The Reluctant Librarian, it gets my parents a measure of stability. So here I stay.”

“And I thought I had it rough,” Nathan said.

“I think it might be a little harsh on my life to compare our experiences, Master Nathan,” the librarian replied, a thread of bitter amusement creeping into his aura.

“You’re probably right,” Nathan laughed, “what would you do though, if you had the choice?”

“I always wanted to be a cultivator,” he said, a wistful smile forming on his face, “I never had the resources to do it properly but I’ve been training the skills in my spare time since I was about six.”

“Wait, cultivation is a thing here?”

“Yeah, it is. Does your world have cultivation?”

“What? No, well, sort of. It was in stories; you draw in the energy of the universe and cultivate to immortality. It was a kind of fictional magic,” Nathan replied, waving his hand back and forth. “How does it work in Kelric then?”

“Oh, uhh…” Initiate Lucas ran his hands through his hair and closed his eyes for a moment to think. “So, about ten percent of the human population have a control node mutation that lets them cultivate instead of becoming a sorcerer.

“But, even if you can cultivate, you have to train three skills: meditation, visualisation and fusion. You use meditation to clear your mind. Then, you use visualisation to picture the scene of your cultivation technique. If you were an earth cultivator for example, a simple technique might be an image of a mountain.”

The librarian’s aura felt even more alive and energetic than it had when raving about how unfair Nathan’s sentiment ability was, both for Nathan himself and everyone else. Nathan looked up when he paused, to see the initiate chewing his lip in thought, staring off into the distance with bright eyes.

“If you do that right,” he eventually continued, “free essence from your surroundings, earth essence in this case, will flow into your body. Once you’ve drawn in the essence, you use fusion to grasp that essence with your body and temporarily fuse with it.

“You stay like that for as long as you can, before releasing it. If you hold it for too long, or if you fail to hold the essence stable, the result can be anything from internal bleeding to death. Which is because the fusion causes an imbalance in your essence, which makes it unstable.

“In the first grade, the warrior grade, all you have to do is accumulate enough fusion sentiment to stably mix the concentrated essence from an elixir into your body. Of course, you can choose to fuse a smaller amount since each tenth of a rel takes several times the sentiment of the previous one to stabilise. If you do that though, it makes you weaker and also makes it harder to advance through the mage grade, the second grade.”

“Surely everyone would just wait until they could get the maximum amount of essence per grade then?” Nathan asked, smiling slightly as the formerly disaffected librarian launched into an excited explanation about achievement points and skill levels. With any luck, most of the people he’d meet would be like Initiate Lucas rather than arrogant young masters and inexplicable muggers.

Hang on, Nathan thought, did I just flag myself?

Status

[Status]

Name: Nathan Emmanuel Fellwood

Age: 0

Species: Human (Void-walker)

Realm: Mortal

Level: 0

Strength: 4 (4/10)

Agility: 2 (2/10)

Vitality: 10 (10/10)

Tempus: 10 (10/10)

Scope: 10 (10/10)

Stat Points: 0 (0)

Achievement Points: 2

[Class/es]

Grade 3 Available

[Skills 8]

Aura Perception 1st Lvl 10

Language 1st Lvl 10

Mathematics 1st Lvl 10

Mana Control 1st Lvl 10

Memory Technique 1st Lvl 10

Multitasking 1st Lvl 10

Reading 1st Lvl 10

Visualisation 1st Lvl 10

[Abilities 9]

Echoes of the Barren Cosmos 1st (Innate)

Enhanced Aethereoception 1st Lvl 10

Enhanced Memory 1st Lvl 10

Enhanced Time Perception 1st Lvl 10

Insomnia 1st Lvl 10

Isolation Tolerance 1st Lvl 10

Lightning Resistance 1st Lvl 10

Pain Tolerance 1st Lvl 10

Trauma Tolerance 1st Lvl 10