“Yay! You did it!” Riala said happily after her sister had left.

“Heh. Let’s see if you’re still that happy after I force you to study for days on end.”

“Of course!” she exclaimed. “Can you teach me how to convince people to do what I want too!?”

“I don’t think there’s anything to teach there...” I said. “All I do is give them my arguments...”

“Sometimes it is a little like watching a Charmer at work though,” Berla said with a chuckle.

“Really? Huh.”

To a little girl, it apparently seemed like I had a special ability to make people do what I want. To a degree I could understand why. After all, there had been several situations that had been resolved because of my words alone. Since I was just presenting logical arguments though, or was promising people something they wanted, I wouldn’t exactly call it an ability. Then again, as I was thinking this over, I realized that it was curious how receptive people were to my words at times. With all due respect to logical arguments, I knew humans could be quite irrational, and convincing them of something that ran counter to everything they believed in could be difficult.

Berla comparing it to a Charmer was interesting, since they mostly worked with words alone as well. They were able to entice and persuade people, and while it apparently worked best if the Charmer was attractive to the potential target, there was supposedly more to it. I had wondered before how this Calling worked exactly, but I mostly shrugged it off as something that just was the way it was in this world. When we modified our aura before though, we had felt kind of like Rulers to Berla and the guards in Cerus, and I was now starting to wonder if there might be a connection to mana somehow, as the one “invisible” and “magical” force that existed here.

I didn’t notice anything special in the auras of Rulers and Charmers before, but who knows... I wonder if we could do any research in that direction... Though we’d need friendly Rulers and Charmers who trust us first.

“I guess we’ll see,” I said to Riala.

“Okay!”

Pushing that topic aside for the moment, I turned to Tomar. “How is Aelene?”

“She seemed a little better this morning, but she’s still worried about what she will do now.”

“Right. It must be difficult to feel like you can’t show yourself at the temple anymore as a Worshipper... Assuming that she actually is one.”

After we learned that Oryn was a Researcher, I couldn’t be sure about any of them anymore. This revelation at least demystified that Calling a little though, because if there was someone who didn’t quite fit in, chances were they might not actually be a Worshipper. It was too bad we couldn’t just test all priests, as that would be a serious waste of white stones.

“I actually asked her about her sign,” Tomar said. “She did see the one for Worshippers.”

“Ah, that’s good to know. And she’s a teacher, right, Lilana?”

‘Yes. She... taught a class I was in when I was younger,’ she said.

“Hmhm. I still think the Worshipper Calling has something to do with public services and helping people, and little to nothing with the gods... At least based on the jobs they generally end up doing.”

‘That doesn’t really change anything about how the temple will operate though, right?’

“Well, no, that doesn’t really change anything in the short term,” I said while repeating Lilana’s words for the others. “I’m just still trying to figure out how this world works.”

“Speaking of how things work...” Tomar said. “I learned something new.”

He raised his arm slightly, concentrated, and a moment later, mana started swirling around it. It was the same mana manipulation that Aelene had done the day before, and it was something that had eluded us so far.

“Nice! Was Aelene able to describe it after all?” I said in surprise.

“Kind of. We talked about that moment in the cell, and how she felt. I could sympathize with it... and then I got it. Though it requires a ridiculous amount of mana. I almost fell unconscious when I tried to actually shoot the mana away last night. Apparently Aelene has never even reached her pain threshold...”

“Huh.”

Tomar kept explaining what creating this effect felt like, and it sounded like it was coupled to your emotions. The first time Aelene had changed her aura, she had apparently not even noticed what she had done. Afterwards, she slowly became able to control her aura to a degree, and to move her mana around more freely, though she had a hard time putting into words how she was doing this.

“I can’t change my aura yet,” he continued, “but if I had to describe what controlling your mana directly feels like... It sounds weird, but it’s like being really scared.”

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“Hm... interesting...”

It wasn’t an unusual concept to make special abilities dependent on certain mental states or feelings in games or movies, and this sounded very much like the same thing, just a lot more vague. Usually it’s just that rage makes you more powerful, or that you need a calm mind to do something. And not that you need very specific—

“Wait a moment...”

“Heh. Yeah,” he said.

Tomar apparently already understood what I had realized, and Riala was also smiling knowingly at us, while Hati and Berla looked confused.

“What’s wrong?” Berla asked.

“It’s sadness... Kind of. Right?”

“I think so too,” Tomar said.

Berla looked back and forth between us, trying to figure out what we were talking about, so I started to explain.

“The feeling when you use water scripts, it’s like sadness. You don’t literally feel sad, but... it’s like that emotion is fueling the script from somewhere deep down below. It’s so subtle that you can’t really put your finger on it, and from the backseat you don’t feel it at all.”

This made a lot of sense, and it could explain so much. Riala had initially had issues figuring out how to use water scripts without blue stones, but given her young age, she hadn’t had many opportunities to be truly sad in her life. What if that was the reason she couldn’t quite grasp the feeling at first? Meanwhile, a child would be filled to the brim with other emotions, and feel them to a completely different degree than an adult. And then there was Lilana, who had had a pretty good life so far. She hadn’t been able to do water conversion at all yet, while Tomar and I hadn’t had any issues with it at all. Aelene had yet another set of life experiences, and she was able to do things we struggled with.

“And then there’s that fight with Grym...” I continued. “I’m certain that I didn’t use the mana wave script myself, so if it didn’t activate all on its own, maybe it was my panic at that moment, that helped me unconsciously control my mana directly...”

“I learned something new as well!” Riala said happily, as if she couldn’t wait any longer.

All eyes fell on her, as she put her arm forward, with the palm of her hand turned upwards. She activated a script, and a normal looking ball of water appeared. I didn’t understand what was new about it at first, until smoke started to rise up from it, making it look like the water was turning back into mana and rising into the air.

I realized that my focus on mana was messing with the way I looked at things when Berla commented on what we were seeing, making it obvious that this wasn’t mana rising up from the water ball.

“Is the water... hot?” she asked.

“Yup!”

If Berla could see the smoke, it evidently wasn’t mana, but steam, which, to our eyes, could look quite similar at times.

“... You can boil water...? How!?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“I tried combining script feelings the whole time, but that didn’t do anything,” she said. “But when I thought about how fluffy Hati felt, my water started to become warm!”

“Seriously...? Did you know that combining them would be possible?”

“Nope!”

Berla seemed impressed, while Tomar and I looked on with unbelieving eyes. We had just realized that emotions seemed to play a part in using scripts, when Riala had already found an application for that theory, even though she seemed to just be experimenting randomly. It was surprising to say the least. She definitely had a strong emotional reaction to Hati, presumably somewhere in the joy category, but that this would allow her to heat up the water she was creating like a flow heater was not something I would’ve ever expected. The ball of water eventually evaporated completely, and Riala spoke up again.

“Sis and I had a hot bath this morning! Without any work!” she said happily.

Riala had always hated her chores, which was part of the reason she started trying to draw scripture sigils even before she heard about our experiments. It was no surprise that she would be elated to not only be able to create water at home, but to also heat it up directly, instead of having to boil it on the stove.

Tomar and I briefly looked at each and then immediately both tried using a water script as well. A few tries later, however, it became apparent that this wouldn’t be an easy task.

“You got anything?” I asked him.

“No,” he said as he put a finger into the water inside a cup in front of him. “It has a normal temperature.”

I suspected that we either didn’t have the feeling down or that we were still lacking experience with executing multiple scripts at the same time. After all, we could execute two water scripts simultaneously by this point, but Riala was the only one of us able to control various kinds of scripts at once. For her, this was presumably not much of a struggle at all.

Does this mean she’s experiencing half a dozen different emotions when she’s creating these arrays of Calling signs though...?

“Oh well,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll get there eventually.”

“You can do it!” Riala said with a smug grin.

“Heh. You think you have us beat?” I said and stood up from the desk. “You two aren’t the only ones who figured out something new.”

Walking around the desk, to have some more space, I activated the picture script that I had shown Berla earlier. This time it was Tomar’s and Riala’s eyes that went wide, as they stared at the image appearing out of thin air.

“Are those the flakes from back then...? Without a black stone...?” Tomar asked.

“Whoa! Please show me the script!” Riala said, hopping around me.

“Er... that’s a little difficult,” I said with a chuckle. “I’ll write it down later.”

“Yay! Can you make other pictures too?” she asked.

Heh, just the question I would’ve expected from her.

As I told them a little more about my findings, I thought about how we would teach Riala. When it came to common topics like writing or math, we could simply tutor her the traditional way, but scripting would be a little different. It was less about teaching her new scripts or general knowledge, and more about how to approach problems and research. Essentially, I wanted to teach her to think like a programmer, and new scripts we would all learn together as we went along. With that thought in my mind, I didn’t respond to Tomar’s question explicitly, and instead turned to her.

“Alright, now to how I did it. Ria. Any guesses?”

Let the teaching begin.