Chapter 36

Learned Emotions

Eliot

Finally, the item of interest rolled center stage. Eliot, who was slumping in his chair with his feet on the table in front of him, sat up and leaned forward intently. Suspended in time and space in a magical containment zone, anchored to a flat slab of concentrated vitrum on a simple cart, two different weapons floated next to each other in the air.

  On the left stretched a naginata with a jade green blade, black and gold koshirae, and amethyst purple shaft that segmented into hundreds of uniform, miniature squares, about the size of a fingertip. To it’s right, almost diminutive in comparison, gleamed an identical dagger, same in every aspect besides dimensions.

  Before the auctioneer had a chance to speak, Eliot knew they would make splendid replacements for Ellulia’s daggers— high quality in all respects, and curved, just as she liked them.

  “To finish off, we have a highly interesting pair of weapons. They leave something to be desired in practicality, however they make excellent collectables with their rampant peculiarity and somewhat infamous standing. Without further ado, these are the genuine, unfinished pair of daggers left behind by The Grand Sage of Smithing, Mary Garcia, before her mysterious disappearance,” began the auctioneer, taking a pause for dramatic effect. The crowd seated on the ground floor exploded into gasps and hushed whispers. In his own private viewing booth, Eliot’s jaw dropped.

  “Experts assume she was working on a pair of daggers that could extend their reach in the midst of combat, however no one has been able to locate any form of mundane or magical mechanisms intended for the extending and retracting. In fact, both weapons are liberally coated in a mana insulating lacquer, from blade to pommel. It’s said to hinder the wielder’s ability to use Arcane Arts because of this.

  “Unfortunately, with all of its shortcomings, the world is left to mourn the fact that they are incomplete. That said, they are one of Sage Smith Garcia’s few masterpieces. Though their design seems questionable, she chose the colors and handle pattern to resemble that of a genuine naginata from the Procudo Kingdom. They are without a doubt an excellent item to flaunt and perhaps even be used in a friendly duel.”

  Eliot was left frowning by the end of the spiel. Eventually, he sat back with a defeated sigh. Shame. If only they were both in dagger form, they would be more than perfect, he grumbled. He knew that, although it appeared as a negative, the mana insulating lacquer was obviously intended for engravings.

  Since it was so thick, the engraving wouldn’t have to be etched into the weapon itself. Also, it would actually improve the ease of activating the engraving, and allow for otherwise suicidally miniscule spacings between lines and separate engravings, since the mana would effectively be trapped in its intended pathway. There would be no chance for a leak to mess everything up in a usually catastrophic way.

  And he knew for a fact every benefit was intended because Mary Garcia was one of the few amazing smiths that not only factored in the addition of future engravings to the finished design, but also went through the painstaking process of learning how to engrave herself despite not being mana sensitive.

  She added her own engravings more often than not, and Eliot was wholeheartedly jealous of her superlative skill in the craft. He was good enough that he knew at a glance when something was an engraving, and could even think of improved designs in seconds after seeing one for the first time. It got to the point that he started regarding every engraving that wasn’t his own as the work of a foolish amatuer.

  Luckily, he was horribly mollified when he set his eyes upon Mary Garcia’s Piercer of Abyssal Night. He had seen it the first time he visited the Grand Church, where a sword said to rival the Glorious Swords was displayed at the feet of the main statue of the Goddess of Life. Laying eyes on it, he had to suppress a derisive snort. To him, it looked more like an art project than an actual weapon.

  The entire sword was wrapped in abstract golden lines that crisply resembled the sun breaking past the horizon in the early dawn. Its general shape was similar to a regular cruciform long sword, only the hilt was ovoid, with the lines looping around the circumference multiple times. With all of its characteristics, it would have effortlessly succeeded at getting him to ogle, if it weren’t for the hilariously out of place green silk straps that sprouted from the bottom of the pommel. That mixed with the golden lines and warped take on a regular sword gave it a seventh grade project esthetic.

  At first, and second glance, it was nothing more than austentatious decoration. But then, he noticed that the nearly transparent golden rays of sun spilling down the silk straps weren’t merely lines, they were emboldened runes. Immediately after, his eyes jumped back to the sun, on the tip of the blade, and he realized that it was actually the most complex and pure genius runic complex he’s ever seen. Similar to a russian nesting doll, runic complexes are runes inside of other runes that get progressively smaller as they near the center.

  However, the two things that transformed him into a die-hard fan boy, he only realized soon after. Now that his eyes were open, although he knew for a fact that the lines were actually runes, he couldn’t recognize a single one. That meant, not only was it using spells he had never seen before, but it was using spells that had entirely unknown, at least to him, spell frames and shaping runes.

  The main component of a spell is a general rune that decided the essence of a spell and what its main effect is. For it to be considered a spell, however, a general rune had to be in a spell frame that specified how that general rune took shape, hence a spell frame being made of shaping runes.

  For example, the most basic Create Flame spell was simply the general Flame Rune in a spell frame that specified where the fire would appear, the intensity, and how long it would burn. If the general Flame Rune was cast without the spell frame, it would create a fire based on the amount of mana allocated—usually wasting most of it to an effect known as Entropic Plexity—and located at the point where the rune was engraved into reality.

  Superior fire spells, like Fireball, utilize the same exact general Flame Rune. It gets all of its iconic characteristics from the spell frame that shapes the fire into a large ball and accelerates it, as well as from the general Combustion Rune and its shaping runes that shape the simple combustion into an impact based reaction.

  After recovering from that, he finally noticed arguably the most impressive feature of the engraving: the entire thing was one massive, multi-effect, engraving. Meaning that whatever spell the engraving was supposed to be was insanely high level and powerful. Unfortunately, his next instinct was to use the View Capture spell so that he could study the engraving in the future. His spell failed to cast and what looked like an entire platoon of paladins surrounded them in a flash. Luckily, Penelope was there to smooth things over, but he was still banned from viewing the sword after they learned he was an aspiring engraver.

  Pushing aside the memory, and all of the anger he felt towards the church for hiding something that should be hailed as a masterpiece for all would be engravers to learn from, he decided that he was going to buy the weapons regardless. The daggers were too perfect to pass up on, even if he had to make the extending and retracting mechanisms himself. In fact, if it wasn’t time sensitive, that would count as a positive.

  The bid quickly rose from the starting one platinum to nearly twenty in only a few seconds, and it kept rising. Purposefully waiting until the bidding slowed at fifty platinums, Eliot finally bid an entire mythril. The auctioneer was halfway through the countdown before the booth next to him put in a bid of one mythril and a platinum, the minimum raise required. Thinking they would give in soon, he matched every raise with one of his own, except he raised by two platinums instead of one.

  Irritatingly, the bid war continued until it reached two mythril and eighty three platinums. At that point, he grew fed up and, with a sigh, he increased his bid to five mythrils. He could practically hear the auction owners laughing at the two idiots that goaded each other into overpaying. Even for nobles, five mythrils was a hefty sum. Thankfully, his only compunction was the earnings the greedy top one percent would get, in truth he could drop hundreds of mythril without too much trouble.

  A few minutes later, an employee rolled the daggers into his booth, and Eliot deposited the five mythrils on the table with a heavy thunk, completely ignoring the peasant like the noble he was disguised as would, especially one that could casually drop five mythrils.

  The employee waited a few seconds for Eliot to become engrossed in studying the daggers before walking over to collect the money, freezing in his tracks, mouth agape. His eyes switched between the back of the insanely rich man and the currency on the table. With a gulp, he walked the rest of the way and picked up the coins that had an ornate crown on both sides.

  The boy’s breathing hitched as he confirmed the abnormal weight that came from coins fashioned entirely out of mythril ore. Trembling hands pointed what looked like a stereotypical wizard wand at one of the coins. He nearly fainted when it confirmed they had the unique mana signature of the First King.

  The mythrils on the table before him weren’t coins, they were crowns.

  “P-pardon me, Milord, are you aware that these are crowns?” the boy asked uncertainly.

  Eliot was perfectly aware that, for some odd reason, the boy looked scared enough that if he yelled at him, his soul would leave his body. So, he opted to ignore him, rationalizing that the boy was thoroughly convinced of his noble identity if he was that scared. Besides, the daggers were absolutely divine up close.

  With no answer, the boy couldn’t help wondering if he could pocket one without anyone noticing. With even just one, his family could stop working and live like lesser nobles for the rest of their lives. In the end, he swept all five crowns into the designated pouch and labored to carry it out of the booth as fast as his legs could carry him. Even a fairly well off peasant like him wouldn’t be able to get any value out of something so high in denomination, if anything it would only get him killed.

  As that happened, Eliot studied the dagger and naginata inch by inch. He felt that his predictions were spot on. In between each small cube were extremely thin bridges connecting the four adjacent cubes, in case an engraving didn’t fit on one and needed to take up multiple.

  He was willing to bet that Mary Garcia was the best engraver in history, now that he saw just how small the cubes were. Although he was regularly confident in his skills, he wasn’t sure if he was cut out to make quality engravings that miniature.

  His doubts faded away when his eyes traveled up to the hilt. What he hadn’t noticed were the breathtaking golden lines that adorned both hilts. Compared to the unordained portions, the decorated hilt was so intricately and breathtakingly designed that it felt like he was gazing upon an entire universe of wonders. They were indisputably the most beautiful piece of art he’s ever seen.

  His trance continued until a passing employee got his attention.

  “Pardon me, Milord, but now that the auction is over, we humbly ask you to leave the building.”

  “Ah, of course.” Eliot grabbed the pair of weapons and worked to contain the anticipation welling up inside him as he left.

  As beautiful as the design is, I wish the guard was clear. Then, I could make sure it had at least one powerful engraving without trying my skills with the cubes, he mentally sighed. Suddenly, he screeched to a halt as a realization dawned on him. Why would Mary Garcia waste prime engraving space on the guard with pure decoration if she went through the trouble of optimizing every other inch for engravings? Unless… she took that space for her own engravings!

  It took him a few minutes to recognize that the Heavenly Piercer of Abyssal Night was engraved, it was perfectly reasonable that he, and everyone else, missed the fact that the golden lines—the ones that looked exactly like those on the aforementioned sword—were actually engravings.

  At that point, he didn’t care about maintaining character. He swept his surroundings to make sure there was no one in sight and portaled to the underground crypt he called home, off-handedly dismissing his disguise on the way. He was practically skipping through the rooms and hallways, he was so excited at the prospect.

  However, as he turned the corner into the main library, he almost fell over at the sight of a disheveled monster sitting at the round table and sipping coffee.

  “Arvick? Are you ok?” he probed the beast. A low snarl left Arvick’s throat as he put down his book and looked up.

  His teeth had morphed into the razor toothed maw of some ghoul. His eyes were pure blood red, beyond bloodshot with veins on the verge of popping. His skin was pasty and pulled taunt between beastly bone protrusions on the sides of his face, shoulders, and severely jutting shoulder blades. His hands were transformed into wicked looking claws, each more than six centimeters in length; it was a wonder he could hold a book without shredding it apart.

  Before speaking, he launched into a coughing fit that ended with him hacking up some variety of black phlegm that instantly evaporated as it touched the stone floor. “Ugh… that’s much better,” he groaned in his usual baritone while cracking his jaw. “I apologize if I alarmed you. I have seen better days.”

  “What happened to you?” Eliot asked with trace amounts of morbid awe, stepping closer in concern.

  “Nothing serious. Something collapsed the church above us and rocked me awake earlier than intended. In fact, I have heard quite a commotion coming from above, has anything bad happened? Is Nel ok?”

  “Yes, Penelope is fine, just suffering from mana fatigue. Also, yes, something did happen, but it’s all resolved now. Long story short, we took down the Serpentine BrotherHood and uncovered two different coups years in the making, nothing serious,” he succinctly summarized, throwing the ‘nothing serious’ back in his face to show him how it sounded from his perspective.

  Right before his allocated time to add anything extra elapsed, he opened his mouth again, “Wait a second. You went to sleep a day before my test started, and it took me an entire month. Shouldn’t you have woken up yesterday morning?”

  “Yes, I should have,” agreed Arvick easily. “As vampires come into old age, their annual sleep rapidly increases in length. Judging by my partial ferality, I was only going to sleep for an extra few days. I hope in a year’s time I am just as fortunate.”

  Eliot winced. “Then, this is what happens when you’re woken up a few days early? And after you’ve had a day to come down? What would happen if you were woken up halfway?”

  “Most likely, I would become a full fledged beast and go on a murder spree for a few months before gradually coming back to myself,” he admitted casually.

  “Which is why vampires get such a bad reputation. Only sleeping ones would let themselves get caught by adventurers, then when they’re woken up in the middle of their sleep, they go feral,” Eliot concluded. “But… the way you said it makes it sound like eventually you’ll sleep forever.”

  “It is known as the Curse of Verve. Vampire bodies are undying in any circumstance imaginable, but the ego and soul are taxed in consequence. As a vampire begins to sleep for upwards of years, they prepare coffins in case they never wake again and need to be buried.

  “Oftentimes, it is magically prepared to protect their body from desecration, as well. Since a vampire body is undying, parts of our bodies are highly coveted and potent alchemical and magical ingredients, which is why entire orders dedicated to hunting my kind have been made,” he elucidated.

  “Then you’re…” Eliot was hesitant to say it flat out.

  “Effectively dying,” Arvick finished softly.

  “And you’re ok with that? Have you thought about how you’re going to tell Penelope?”

  “She already knows,” he said, coolly taking a sip of his coffee. “Secondly, a treatment for the Eternal Sleep was developed and given to me by my brother before I left my home.”

  A burning light of sociable intent dawned in both of their eyes as they remembered that they hardly knew each other despite being roommates for over a month now.

  “Sit. I’d say it’s about time we get to know each other beyond our mutual connections to Nel,” he offered, gesturing to the chair across his table. “I can assure you that I’ve lived through far more history than my appearance suggests—my usual one, I mean.”

  Eliot subconsciously took a step forward before stopping himself, gripping the weapons still in his hands.

  “Believe me, I want to know about you and your past more than anything right now, but I have something I need to do first,” he denied regretfully. After a moment, he raised the weapons in his hands and told the truth, “Replacement daggers for a certain someone. Her usual ones were melted in one of the battles.”

  Arvick nodded that he understood. “Another time, then.”

  Eliot reengaged his initial charge towards his room and said, “The second I have free time, I promise!”

  “I’ll hold you to that!” Arvick called after him.

  Eliot closed his door and leaned against it with a heavy sigh. He glanced at the daggers in his hand and briefly wondered, How long can I keep up this scramble between magical studies and relationships? Now I know why every great archmage was seen as aloof, social wrecks.

  He realized soon after that it was more than just that. It was martial arts and Master Camble, it was chasing Ellulia and wanting to spend every second of his time with her, it was thinking about Cel and his family, it was keeping up the deteriorating guise of a normal human being, it was learning ages of forgotten history and science, it was playing catch up with the already established power houses, it was trying to ignore the obvious plots and deceitful history and actions of every prominent figure in the Metropolis, it was swallowing his pride to play safe around nobles so that he didn’t make an enemy of the crown, and so much more.

  He felt like ever since he first stepped foot in the Metropolis, he was being pulled in every direction, and he was starting to tear. He was finally aware of this now because he naively expected to get some sort of reprieve and reward from everything after dealing with the Serpentine BrotherHood and the plotting nobles. Instead, the only thing that he got was a pat on the back for saving the king’s life and an invitation to a celebratory banquet in the castle, and he just remembered that he needed to try not to get screwed when signing his Demigod Contract, which was absolutely mandatory unless he wanted to be hunted down as a rogue Demigod.

  He physically derailed that train of thought with a shake of his head. I need to focus. The only way I can progress is one step at a time. He sat down at his desk and jumped back into studying the suspected engravings.

  Once again, he couldn’t believe how amazing Mary Garcia was. He couldn’t help drooling over how absolutely stupefying she must have been at engraving if, even now, he couldn’t parse exactly what he was looking at.

  He wondered how long she spent on creating the masterpiece before him and how it was possible to reach such unparalleled levels of skill without being mana sensitive. What backwards and unorthodox setup could she possibly be using to support her genius? How did she even get her hands on runes and spells so powerful without being a mage? Just how long did she spend internalizing and improving upon them?

  He wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if the reason the engravings didn’t look like engravings was because she was so amazing that she somehow discovered entirely new runes. He would give anything just to get five minutes of tutelage from her. How long would he have to go just to reach her level?

  Then, he became utterly enamored as he mused how godly of a mage she could have been if only she were mana sensitive. He tumbled deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole, unknowingly losing hours of his time pondering useless thought experiments.

  He simply couldn’t wrap his head around how something could be so sublime. Entertaining the millionth ludicrous thing about the artifacts before him, he subconsciously glanced up with a pious gleam in his eyes. Suddenly, he felt odd. He vaguely remembered he had a purpose for sitting down besides endlessly lauding Mary Garcia. But, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember exactly what that purpose was.

  He moved to look back down at the daggers, tapping his chin in thought. His eyes abruptly widened in terror and he threw the daggers to the side like his life depended on it, audibly cracking the wall on impact. He gasped in relief and struggled to calm down with the violently injected adrenaline in his veins.

  Sure, he would be the first to admit that he could be a tad overzealous when it came to handing out praise, but never had he gotten so lost in it that his perception of time shut off. There had to be an insanely high level compulsion spell engraved on it, that was the only explanation. Possibly even integrated with a geass code: a learning formula that tailored the compulsion to the affected ego until it eventually developed a full blown geass.

  He shuddered at the thought that he almost fell victim to a malicious charm that could see him mindlessly praising Mary Garcia until he either died or a part of his ego was amputated; that was the only method to break out of a geass discovered to date, and it left the amputee severely mentally impared.

  His fear was swiftly eaten up by his unyielding excitement as he realized he now had a spell that he could use to learn the general Charm Rune and study how to develop a geass! Charm magic was one of the very few branches of magic that was completely illegal in the Crucible Empire, not even nobles and royalty were exempt. Any knowledge of it whatsoever is harder to come by than a dragon egg. The only reason he knew some of the basics is because he could drop names like Master Camble and Karl Favesh to get what he wanted.

  Taking a few seconds to get his brain back into critical thinking mode, he earnestly frowned with shut eyes. He immediately thought up a solution, many solutions, infact. Unfortunately, none of them would work without eyesight.

  In reality, he knew that wasn’t true in the slightest, he could simply use his mana sensitivity to feel the mana, or set up a mana siphon— the usual and straight forward way of dealing with rogue magical products that were dependent on mana.

  In reality, he stubbornly crossed those off of his list because he desperately wanted to look at the engraving without coming under its effects. If he could see the engraving in action without being charmed, he could see the exact pathing of the mana, which was incredibly helpful since that would tell him how the mana would flow in a regular casting.

  Then, from that it would be straightforward to put together the non-abstracted runes of the general Charm Spell and whatever spell frame it was in. It would effectively save him hours of his time and the headache of having to reverse engineer the runes with the shape of the engraving alone.

  Within a few minutes, he had a rough, admittedly rash plan that he felt he couldn’t not test. It was obvious that the charm worked via visual avenues. But, what would happen if he didn’t see the engraving itself, and only saw the mana flowing inside of it? Basically, he wanted to test if the engraving affected beings looking at it on the spiritual plane, as well as the physical. It would also tell him if the charm relied on his own perception to beguile him, like illusions did, or if it was something more concrete, meaning even if he didn’t perceive it there, it would still charm him since it was still physically in his vision.

  Eliot smiled widely as he got into position and started meditating. He focused his ego on his five senses. This was the first time he had ever tried anything even in the same realm, so he was fully prepared to spend hours if needed. He was pleasantly surprised when he nearly effortlessly isolated his visual senses. He split it into physical and spiritual, then shut off the former.

  Delicately, he opened his eyes to see utter darkness. It was slightly jarring thanks to the fact that his law made absolute darkness perceivable. But, after a few minutes of whatever the spiritual equivalent of squinting is, he managed to just make out the ambient mana he could always kinesthetically feel around him like a shroud or, thankfully not damp, mist.

  What he saw lined up with what he felt. The mana in the air around him looked exactly like a thin grey mist restlessly whirring in place—at least, for a few seconds. After that time, his eyes instinctually focused on the fog closest to him, and it became so thick that he couldn’t see anything but the mana physically touching his eyes. When he strained to unfocus, he could physically feel his eyes unzoom like a camera and the mana returning to normal as he did so.

  The second he stopped focusing on it with all of his attention, his eyes involuntarily zoomed back in, blocking his vision with a heavy, muddled grey everywhere he looked. The constant strain to his eyes coupled with the confusion quickly caused his eyes and brain to start throbbing with pain.

  He shoved his fists into his closed eyes, rubbing hard enough to soothe his brain along with them. Meanwhile, he delved back into his senses and dampened his spiritual sight. When he opened his eyes again the fog was replaced with blissful darkness. He sighed and proceeded to shift into a deep thinking position, choosing to derail his experiment, hopefully in return for some answers.

  The question on the wall was: Why did that just happen? Approaching it purely through a mundane school of thought, it should have been exactly like seeing through a mist.

  Eliot felt like that just intuitively made sense, since the purest form of mana is aqueous and ambient mana is tainted by the air, giving it gas like properties, it made perfect sense for it to be exactly like a mist.

  When he first opened his eyes and could see ambient mana out to two kilometers, getting thicker the further out, it did behave exactly like a mist. However, if his eyes focused on the mana closest to him, it somehow grew less permeable by way of his eyesight.

  The only reasons he could think of for that to occur would be if the mana grew physically thicker or less translucent. He tackled the items in order. Regular mist or fog is visible because it’s caused by water vapor condensing into droplets around physical particles polluting the air such as salt and dust and refracting the light, whereas water vapor by itself was completely translucent. Translucence was caused when light wasn’t reflected or absorbed, and instead traveled through the object.

  The only reason it could possibly grow physically thicker would be if the mana grew denser since ambient mana, though sharing properties, was by itself in the spiritual plane, there was no air pollution for it to interact with. As for growing more translucent, he had no idea how or why it would do that. From what he knew, its properties themselves would have to be changing for it to grow more translucent.

  The only reason he could think of that either would be the case is if he were subconsciously affecting the mana with his mana manipulation. Although he ultimately decided against that explanation because he was sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that his kinesthetic mana sensitivity— his most trained spiritual perception by far— would have picked up the discrepancy.

  He briefly considered if the change was internal, him perceiving the mana differently. Obviously, he was focusing in and out, a regular physical function the eye could do via sphincter muscle, but could say with certainty that wasn’t it either. He knew that there were no physical differences in those that are mana sensitive compared to those that aren't. The only difference was that mana sensitive beings were able to pick up spiritual stimuli, able to perceive the spiritual plane.

  One of the first in depth things his Grimoire went over was the human eye. It had receptors in the back of the eyes that picked up light, transferred what it picked up to the brain, and the brain interpreted what all of that meant. For him to see mana those receptors had to be picking up something. Because of his past lack of fixation on the topic, he hadn’t considered how he picked up on mana besides just feeling it. He’d always had a vague, misguided idea that his body felt the mana itself.

  Following that train of thought, he had a realization that every hypothesis he came up with was inherently wrong because physical phenomena like translucence and fog were dependent upon and caused by light when he knew for a fact that light was a purely physical thing. It was completely wrong of him to apply physical standards to how he was perceiving it since physical perception was all based off of light.

  At the same time, he knew there had to be some, at least vague, equivalent to light. Actually thinking about it, it was stupid to think he could see the mana by taking in the mana. Since his eyes still worked by absorbing some sort of sensory information, the inane thought that he could simply see the mana there because he could sense mana would actually mean he was absorbing the mana itself for sensory information, which he knew he wasn’t.

  He came to the conclusion that there had to be something that took the place of light, interacting with the mana in some way so that when his eyes absorbed it his brain could piece together a visual qualia of what mana looked like.

  Assuming that was true, he ran into the problem that it was proven that there was nothing in the spiritual plane except for mana itself. If there was some spiritual equivalent to light, it would have to be coming from the mana itself.

  All at once, he realized that wasn’t a problem because it was well known that mana did radiate things. Things like mana signature and mana fluctuations, he knew, were byproducts of mana. He was absolutely sure that the answer laid somewhere within that realm.

  Unfortunately, the sphere of magic known as divining—or sometimes arcane divining to differentiate it from holy divining—was something Eliot not only ignored but had dead last on his list of magic sub-fields since he had thought arcane diving was only useful for picking out specific mana signatures or mana fluctuations, which he could already do to a passable extent, and other impractical to combat things. Had he known it was going to be this important in practical theoretics, he would have prioritized it along with engraving.

  He was so frustrated that he made a promise to himself that he was going to start branching out and learning a little bit of everything, even though it was going to be very slow going and the opposite of his original plan. He was finding that you could be a much more competent mage as a jack of all trades than aiming for total mastery one by one.

  Before moving on to what he was supposed to be focusing on, he had a thought. Why did ambient mana so resemble mist when something like mist was the product of an intricate reaction between light, water, air pollution, and physical geography as a whole? For that to be the case, however ‘spiritual light’ behaved was most likely in some ways similar to ‘physical light’.

  Then he had another thought. What decides the qualia of something, anyway? Qualia are the indescribable qualities of something that you perceive. The color of orange, the roughness of brick. The qualia is what the color orange looks like and how the quality of being ‘rough’ feels to our perception.

  Taking qualia into account, he thought it was very much possible that ‘spiritual light’ and ‘physical light’ were in actuality completely different from each other; his brain simply interpreted ambient mana the same as mist, attached the same qualia to it because that was what his brain was used to.

  He thought it made perfect sense because ‘spiritual’ and ‘physical’ light shared at least one inviolable similarity: it was absorbed by receptors in the back of the eye and the brain used how it interacted with other things to see those other things. It was completely straightforward that his brain would interpret it the same way when given that they were practically used and taken in the same way.

  It also followed the idea of don’t do anything you don’t have to, save as much energy as possible. Why make new qualia and interpret it differently, when you could share the qualia and interpretations of something you’ve already worked out?

  He spent the next few minutes tumbling deeper into the rabbit hole, wondering things like: if color blindness existed, do people interpret ambient mana and mana in general differently? In addition to: if someone was mana sensitive enough to be exposed to the spiritual plane before or at the same time as the physical, would there bleed over already developed qualia for something that was spiritual to something that was physical, therefore changing the way that person saw the physical world compared to everyone else.

  However, he was even less qualified to wonder about something like that than to come up with random postulates relating to arcane divining and mana sight, so it was all useless in the end.

  Thankfully, after spending some time on that, he opened his eyes and whirled with renewed vigor. In the void there was a grey streak of rapidly twisting and curving mana moving fast enough that it looked like one connected image. It formed a filled in heart in front of two ornate gates that allowed a blinding light surge forward from behind the heart, giving the impression that the heart was trapped behind the gates until moments ago, and it was finally free and riding on the flowing light.

  Keen study revealed that neither the heart nor the light were actually filled in. Picking up what he assumed was the dagger and holding it up close to his straining eyes, he could see the tiniest gaps in between the thinnest lines of mana he could possibly make out, packed close enough that it gave the illusion of filling the much thicker outline with color.

  “Damn…” he softly cursed. With a regretful sigh, he muttered, “It’s too small to make out individual runes.” The good thing was, if he could focus on the negative of the runes being too small and the mana moving too fast, he wasn’t charmed.

  He dropped his arm limply and looked up in thought. He pushed the bitterness aside in favor of wracking his brain. How was he supposed to stop the engraving? As much as engravings were outwardly unbreakable, its inner structural integrity wasn’t up to par. Simply interrupting the mana would break the engraving, leading to an explosion of epic proportions.

  Only after he gave himself a headache trying to get past the road black without buying a professional siphon, it occurred to him that the mana was grey, meaning unspecialized. He could manually siphon it with his own mana without worrying about ego reactions.

  Before doing that, however, he realized that the engraving shouldn’t have any mana left to begin with. If it was looped and there were limiters placed on the mana draw, excess mana could be run through it multiple times.

  Furthermore, if someone were a specialized engraver with quality mana that matched the specialization of their mana with the school of the engraving, optomized everything to take as little mana as possible, looped the engraving, and did everything perfectly, the engraving could remain active with only an original stipend of mana to work with. If the engraver was especially good, the engraving could continue like that for a long time.

  Mary Garcia disappeared over a decade ago. No matter how good she was, she couldn’t keep the engraving going that long with muddled, unspecialized mana as fuel. The fact that the charm was so powerful, enough so that he assumed it had a geass code, dropped it from highly improbable to definitely impossible.

  Once he allocated enough mental resources to the question, he came up with an answer, Is it possible that the engraving is two spells in one, an ambient siphon and a Charm spell? The way it’s set up, it almost looks as if the gate and heart are separate…

  With more consideration, he became sure that was the case. Splitting the spells into two different images rather than merging them as one made sense from a developmental standpoint. It would greatly simplify things by effectively turning the one incredibly complicated engraving into two relatively simpler ones on top of each other. If he had to guess, the light acting as the bridge between them was purely thematic and only there as a mana pathway rather than made up of abstracted runes.

  Jittering with enthusiasm, he fully reactivated his mana sight to see where the ambient mana was being drawn in. Being able to perceive ambient mana again, he saw a large maelstrom of cloud like mana rushing in curved trajectories towards the outline of the gates as a whole. He wanted to classify it as the general siphon rune, but he knew there could be shaping runes that designated an alternate point of entry.

  Upon confirming the point of entry, he moved to block out the ambient mana before his eyes got more bloodshot than they already were. Afterward, he opened the floodgate of his own mana, making it streak from him in concentrated, violent hot pink waves and converge where he wanted. He focused with more mental prowess than ever before to memorize the twist and turns his mana had while rushing through the engraving.

  He stopped a few minutes later when he’d memorized the flow and could formulate vivid mental images of what he thought were individual runes. Next, he overloaded the engraving with his mana, leaving no room for mana that wasn’t his own. Then, taking great care not to damage the engraving, commanded his mana to surge through the engraving fast enough that it was momentarily completely devoid of fuel. Making the siphon rune become inert and stop drawing in ambient mana.

  Eliot reactivated his physical sight with a grin, swiftly transitioning to a frown as a thought hit him. Wouldn’t the charm engraving be just as dangerous to the wielder as it is to the opponent?

  Convinced that there was no way Mary Garcia would leave such an obvious design flaw, he tentatively reactivated the rune while squinting, ready to close his eyes at a moment’s notice. When he wasn’t affected, he celebrated the discovery of another of its features and proceeded to experiment as to how this was the case. Eventually, he narrowed it down to somehow recognizing the owner of the mana that activated it.

  When everything was said and done, he put the charm rune aside to focus on the other five engravings left untouched. Merely looking them over with mana sight and trying to make out a familiar rune took more than three hours. Even then, he had only been able to recognize runes in two of them, leaving three engravings that had unknown effects.

  Thankfully, one of the two he puzzled out was the engraving responsible for extending into a naginata and shortening into a dagger. He was sure of its base use, but couldn’t for the life of him figure out why the engraving looked to be the most complex, multifaceted one out of the entire six. So, he played it safe and decided to carry on to his second identified engraving before testing it in any way.

  The second engraving was the amazingly simple and necessary cleanse rune, only embellished to a level that Eliot couldn’t recognize any of the shaping runes. Nor could he figure out how she specified what substances the cleanse rune would clean, which was the main unsolved problem with engraving such a rune. No one could figure out how to turn the large list of affected substances into anything remotely picturesque.

  Mary Garcia, along with her revolutionary techniques, opted for abstract, churning wisps of holy water with a wide berth of variegated symbols glittering in its rapids, that could be seen as eight different vague images dependent upon its directional orientation. The preeminence of it was the galled meaning of cleansing and purity it evinced in the viewer no matter which of the eight images they were exposed to.

  Incapable of being thoroughly circumspect in situations such as these, he activated the engraving with a string of mana. Everything within a fleetingly visible ovoid field of light centered around the middle of the blade—not the engraving—was subjected to its exacting pull. Pulverised stone and debris stuck to the blade mixed with dust sucked from the desk and oil extracted from Eliot’s hand in a turbulent maelstrom that fed into the blade, completely ceasing to exist the second it touched its sheen rather than collecting in a ball and being annihilated as one, like how the normal cleanse spell functioned.

  When the field disappeared, Eliot was left feeling as if his hand was harshly stripped of skin and he sat in an entirely arid piece of space. The next second, he realized with horrified confoundment that the engraving had feasted on all of the mana within the field, including the part of his Mage Armor that covered his hand. However, unlike the undesirable components seen as filth, the mana collected within the blade, gaining a scintillating hue of purple to his vision and exuded swathes of energy to his kinesthetic perception.

  His wits returning to him, he rapidly made the connection that it shouldn’t have the amount of mana and power it did, if it only took in the ambient mana in the field and part of his Mage Armor. His brain jumped at the fact that ambient mana acted like air, meaning that the spiritual pressure of ambient mana in the field became nothing in only moments.

  The stark pressure difference caused all of the ambient mana in the room and beyond to funnel towards the dagger at very high speeds. He could feel that all of the ambient mana within a five meter radius was incredibly thin, and the ambient mana in a ten meter radius was considerably less concentrated than it was only seconds before.

  If his assumptions were correct, not only could the blades strip away mage armor within the field and deprive the ambient mana levels in a significant area, it stored all of that mana to be utilized by the other engravings he hadn’t figured out yet. Taking this into account, the naginata form finally made perfect sense as well.

  Given that the weight distribution was completely off and the harmonics and materials would send a killer vibration stabbing into the weilder’s hand with every strike, it was obvious the naginata form wasn’t intended to be used like an actual naginata. If he presumed correctly, its real purposes were to store more engravings, give a sudden increase of reach, and to increase the total volume of the field that the dagger could draw mana from. It was also possible that it had unique ways to use stored mana.

  He knew without a doubt that the daggers before him weren’t made as some half-baked shape changing weapons that relied more on surprise than functionality. They were bona fide, ingenious Mage Killers.

  Eliot shot out of his chair, bursting at the seams with emotions. He jumped in place and pumped his fists in the air while failing to suppress a high pitched squeal of unbridled mirth. It was very fortunate that he’d engraved a surplus of structural engravings into the walls of his room, allowing him to properly freak out with all of his Demigodly glory.

  After calming down, he took one last reverent look at the daggers before setting them aside for his other projects. Something of that level wasn’t anything he could mess with without wasting its potential, let alone improve it. He sat back down and pulled up his chair with a sigh, opening a portal as he did. Seven different articles of exorbitantly priced noble jewelry harshly clattered against the stone.

  He first grabbed the pair of fairly large opaline pearl earrings, threw one up into the portal right as it closed, then placed the other squarely in an imaginary space he labeled as ‘finished’ on the right portion of his desk. He proceeded to create a prominent red mana stylus with a thin strand connecting to his mana pool since the mana would be used up as he went—and got to work on the ring, three bracelets, slide chain, necklace, brooch, and hairpin he’d bought prior to the auction.

  The next morning, he placed Ellulia’s folded cloak next to the finished pile along with the rest of the jewelry, and sat up to stretch. I love being a Demigod, he thought with a pleasant sigh, stretching as a transition to get his brain out of critical engraving mode instead of physical soreness.

  After an entire ten hours of sitting hunching over his desk while engraving, his brain was still pumped and ready to go, his muscles felt as fresh as if he had just finished a round of calisthenics, and he was untouched by any desire to sleep or eat whatsoever.

  Following his routine before visiting royalty, he dressed in fanciful clothing, used Cleanse, combed his hair, drank a potion of Good Breath, and sprayed his favorite perfume. While mentally checking that he had everything, he opened a portal.

  His beaming grin collapsed as he stepped through into Ellulia’s room, and his heart wailed on its plunge into the pit of his stomach. The room was destroyed. Her chest was scattered in the form of splinters scattered across the small square footage, along with shredded dresses and smashed jewelry. The only thing left untouched was her mirror beside her bed, it leaned against the wall in a bubble of normality.

  Ellulia stood in the middle of it all with puffy red eyes and smeared makeup. She bore all the disheveled, tell tale signs of someone who had just finished a heavy crying session, down to the water stains on her dress.

  Eliot rushed forward and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  She motioned for him to stop with her left and tried to cover the ludicrous mix between a sob and a scoff that escaped her lips with her right. She thoroughly wiped her eyes clear of any new tears before caustically snapping, “Of course you don’t know.”

  Finally, the full extent of her body language clicked. Past the sadness and overwhelming dread, there was fire in her eyes. She stopped him clearly out of arm’s reach and her body was slightly tilted away from him, while her feet were planted. She saw him as a threat, but she hasn’t decided between fight or flight.

  He spent precious seconds turning over every recent memory in his mind. It was useless; he couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination figure out why she felt betrayed. With no information, he couldn’t figure out what to say next. His chest squeezed tighter with every second his brain screamed at him to say something, anything, while at the same time reminding him that saying the wrong thing would make the situation worse.

  After nearly a minute of indecision, she laughed at him. She maliciously laughed at his expense. “You knew about Lobrin beforehand,” she seethed with balled fists. “You knew he would attack.”

  A dagger of guilt pierced his chest from behind. His already difficult breathing turned to suffocating as his folly dawned on him. She felt betrayed because that was exactly what he did to her.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The very same morning of the coup, he promised her that he would stop putting his life in unnecessary danger. Not only did he survive by pure chance, the near death encounter was completely avoidable. In the end, he didn’t even tell Penelope and Henry. Looking back, even he felt that was a truly moronic move. He was blinded by eagerness to test himself as a Demigod, and everything that transpired was a dire reality check.

  “You’re right, I’m sorry,” he choked with great difficulty.

  “I don’t want your empty words, you don’t have any clue what you’re apologizing for!” she growled.

  “I betrayed your trust,” he confessed airily, showing her his half raised palms as he regained control. “I promised you the very same morning of the failed coup d'etat that I wouldn’t throw my life away. I was sure that Lobrin would storm the proceedings once negotiations turned sour. I see now that the entire thing was unavoidable if I had just shared this with you beforehand. You wouldn’t have had to be at risk of exposing yourself, and I wouldn’t have almost died,” he evenly laid out the extent of his transgression.

  He used the opportunity to complete his shift with an ever so slight crouch and a small hunch to make himself appear smaller. As he spoke, he desperately held timid eye contact, hoping beyond hope that she would see his penitential supplication.

  His heart skipped a beat when he saw the righteous fury drain from her disposition, but it left him despondent as it was replaced with indurate derision.

  “You’re pitiful. Is that what you think this is about?” she spat.

  Eliot found himself in a hopeless mental sprawl once more. Learning from his mistakes, instead of failing to figure it out himself, he braced for impact.

  Ellulia’s contempt switched back to outrage as she stepped forward and threw her hands in the air in a brilliant explosion of emotions. “Are you under the impression I’m so stupid that I wouldn’t know you were lying? The fact that you don’t care about life makes up half of your gods damned character!”

  She took another step forward, her hands returning to balls at her sides while her face sunk into a bitter sneer and she looked up at him with narrowed eyes. “But maybe you’re right. After all, I was foolish enough to believe that the other half was a genius. I was going to accept that you would toy with my heart by throwing yourself into danger because I had faith that you wouldn’t want to irreparably scar me.”

  Despite being prepared, it was impossible to shield a grenade by the defensive flex of muscle alone. He was ultimately baffled as to what exactly he had done that was so wrong, and yet Eliot descended into the throws of animalistic panic and fear, nonetheless. With every step Ellulia took forward, he retreated. Her every word felt like a knife slashing at his defences. He grew smaller and drew further into himself with every strike.

  “I don’t understand,” he interjected hardly above a whisper. “We were all exhausted, but no one was injured.”

  The next thing he knew, he was shoved five centimeters into the wall and held aloft by the collar.

  “Henry’s in a spiritually induced coma! He gave himself soul damage by pushing too far with an unfinished God Slaying technique!” The unstoppable force keeping him in the air abruptly lessened, and he fell to his feet as Ellulia’s wrath rapidly fizzled into despondent anguish.

  “Do you have any idea what the smallest amount of soul damage does to a mage?” she posed in a shrill whisper. Fresh tears began pouring from her eyes, her knees started to give out, and her voice broke as she said, “Henry has so much that the supports don’t have the slightest clue how his entire being hasn’t unraveled. They say it’s almost certain he’ll never wake up again.”

  Realizing that she was starting to pull him close, she shoved herself up and away. At a safe distance, she furiously wiped her eyes and struggled to regulate her breathing.

  Eliot watched her with dispassionate anticipation. He waited for an emotional gut punch nearly until Ellulia composed herself, but it never came. The pain he expected to hit him finally made contact when he realized that he felt nothing at all in response to his actions practically killing Henry. He wanted to be torn up inside, he wanted to hate himself for what he did, he wanted to spend years in a pit of vicious self loathing. Instead, he felt nothing.

  He knew practically since he first developed the ability to remember existing that he wasn’t normal. He didn’t act or feel like a regular human. After a few experiences, he also understood that his monstrous behavior would likely wreak havoc with any and all of his relationships, especially with his family since he was closest to them.

  Naturally, he learned to act like he was normal. Before long, he realized that his acting had started turning into what felt like genuine emotional response. The kind of response that a normal human would give. He ended up spending most of his childhood perfecting his craft. It quickly reached the point that he’d mostly forgotten how to stop acting, and he buried any evidence of his real self in the process.

  Eventually, he would have periods of times where he completely forgot that most of his emotions were learned in the first place. The facade of a normal person was at its all time strongest when he first started attending the Academy of Everveil, but that was also when it started crumbling. The more he interacted with Henry, Penelope, and Ellulia, the more his real emotions started to outshine the fake ones; his mask was peeled off little by little until nothing but a thin layer remained.

  At first, he desperately fought his thrust into the light, but the more he showed of his true self, the more his friends encouraged him to show even more. He spent a small period of time in hazardous confusion until he made up his mind that he was fine with it—more than fine.

  He reached that conclusion because under his mask of a human was another mask. The mask he knew would never come off because even he was scared of the monster underneath. He would never take it off. Then, Ellulia swooped into his life, and everything changed.

  She loved him as the monster he was. Just like before, her love prodded him to show more, tempted him to take it off completely. He complied little by little until disaster struck. The very disaster he was currently in, to be precise.

  He now understood that he took the course of action that he did because he didn’t care about keeping Penelope and Henry safe. All he cared about was testing himself, and threw caution to the wind thinking that if things went horribly wrong, Ellulia would magically fix everything. He didn’t bother to have a single moment where he considered if Penelope and Henry, who were still mortals, would be in danger fighting a Demigod powerful enough to be a part of the Four Seraphim.

  Everything coming together in his thoughts led him to grasp exactly what was happening. The monster wanted out and he was losing his grip. The only benefit of this realization was that his blanched face and horrified expression helped convince Ellulia that he cared for Henry’s wellbeing, and that he wasn’t the soulless, depraved monstrosity he actually was.

  “I don’t wish for this to be protracted any further,” she spoke with formal and detached emotion, her face turned away. “Just leave.”

  Eliot’s moral crisis ground to a halt at those words. As the sickening momentum of his hectic emotions sunk in, he realized he was going to lose her. Ellulia was the one person he couldn’t lose, no matter what. She was the only one that accepted the monster. She was his life boat of sanity. If she left him, he was going to drown.

  Sheer manic hysteria filled his veins. He needed to do something to win her back. She decisively saw him as the enemy, now. He needed some way to make her see him as an ally again. More than an ally, a lover. Because that's what they were to each other. All he needed to do was remind her.

  With the loss in decision making that came as a consequence to the flight or fight response, Eliot wasn’t able to consider his next actions. He simply moved like his life depended on it—because, to him, it felt like it did.

  He lurched forward, turned her face, and kissed her. He didn’t stop when she started squirming, trying to say his name but unable to with his lips so desperately pressed against hers. Cradling her head with his right, his left slid down to the small of her back and he hooked his leg behind hers to tip her on one foot. He forced an arc in her back and pressed himself against her until he could feel the explosion of her heart pounding against her ribcage.

  For a few seconds, she stopped struggling. That coupled with her intense heartbeat had Eliot thinking, just for a moment, that his frenzied last ditch effort had worked. The next moment, he was shoved away and Ellulia’s right arm blurred in his vision. His neck almost snapped as his face skewed to his right. Pain like he’d never felt before raged through his rent tendons and pulsing skin. The monumental force behind the slap sent him stumbling to catch his footing, and the thunderous smack left his ears ringing.

  Ellulia trembled with hardly contained wrath. “Don’t you ever force yourself on me again. You…” Her furious diatribe shattered as if it hit a wall of glass. Tears streamed from her eyes and boiled against her physically red hot skin as she chocked out a horse and tortuous, “...fucking bastard.”

  With another blurred movement, Eliot pulverized her wooden door on his momentary flight. He landed in a crumpled heap of stone shards on the concentric stairway directly outside. The sensory overload of pain temporarily muzzled his hearing, but it came back just in time for the sharp cascade of rubble rolling down the stairs. Every crack of stone on stone felt like a flick directly to his temporal lobe. The bitter abuse rendered him clenching every muscle in his body while producing a gasp only capable of those with a diaphragm paralyzed by sudden agony.

  In spite of everything, the blurry image of Ellulia granted him a bubble of mental clarity. All of her anger drained into horror as she saw the effects of her lashing out. It was obvious she didn’t intend to hit him so hard. The night and day difference in their power had slipped her mind during her hot flash.

  But Eliot felt no self pity, no anger, no longing for retribution. Shame, self hatred, and self-denying heartbreak occupied the focus of his limbic system. Irreparably scar her was exactly what he’d just done. Of course she still loved him, but that only made what happened to Henry more painful. What he’d just done was paramount to infecting the wound—and now she had to deal with almost killing him.

  In the end, everything was the result of his decisions, his fault. He was impulsive, rash, inconsiderate, and he only realized it after it was too late. This had nothing to do with his inner demons or how he liked to pretend to have a fractured mental state just because he was different from other people. The entire situation stemmed from simple thoughtlessness.

  After internalizing his mistakes, he came to the conclusion that it would be best to end the situation. She needed to come to terms with things on her own, and the less she saw him suffer, the less she would feel guilty.

  He steeled himself for another wave of pain before opening a portal directly beneath him, taking the rubble along for the ride. Needless to say, the landing was painful. While squirming, he made a mental note to figure out how to move his portals so that he could have smooth transitions.

  Sucking in a breath through clenched teeth, he sat up to take in his surroundings. Blades of grass poked and scratched at the skin on his hands; sturdy, but soft and cool dirt supported his weight from underneath. Supple, deliciously pure air eased his lungs of their lassitude.

  Shining pale blue skies ate the southern horizons. North and east, he could see the fields and houses of the farming population living outside of Everveil’s walls. The walls themselves stood saluting towards the heavens and reflecting a blinding gleam across its profile of snow white stone, further north-east. Nearby to the west, a forest of titanic red wood trees swatted out the sky.

  Eliot sighed lightly. It was small enough to be mistaken for a regular breath out, however packed within it was his inane addiction to make-believe and puerile tendencies. If he wanted to make things right, he had to stop lying to himself and treating everything like it was a game.

  He tenderly stretched his hand out above him and activated the second healing ring. Glittering green packets of mana flushed his vision like a storm of confetti, popping into a tide of graceful healing that sunk deep into his bones.

  His face took up a frown when the soreness and pain still flared as he lifted himself to his feet. Plunging into a meditative state like second nature, he closely examined his physical body. A pulse of mild surprise ran through him after he saw that the healing seemed to be less effective, leaving him with a generous amount of fractures and abrasions unhealed.

  The spell stored in the ring had once regenerated a massive hole in his stomach, but a slap and a shove from Ellulia was too much to handle? Considering it for a few moments, he came to the conclusion that it probably took more to heal the body of Demigod. Although, now that the thought occurred to him, his Demigodly regeneration wasn’t working either. Shaking his head, he chalked it up to Ellulia being amazing, and made his way into the forest.

  Before anything else, he took a deep breath in through his nose. The mild spice and tinge of sweetness mixed with powerful undertones of earth and quintessential wood to produce a scent almost too much for him to process, but one he would be content to smell for the rest of his life.

  After grounding himself with the olfactory, he opened his other four senses and let the feelings of the forest wash over him. Gentle drafts waltzed with the treetops to the homey crackle of leaves brushing up against one another. Animals sang a euphonious harmony of existence, propped up by the backbone of rushing water and kept on beat by the percussive, structured tempo of the dance taking place above it all.

  His footsteps landed a decibel away from being mute; the pliable dirt welcomed his soles and allayed his joints with hardly any opposing force. The wood rubbed coarse against his wobbly fingertips as he titled his head up. Redwood trees grew far enough apart to leave a schism in the canopy, where aeriform sunlight anointed a numinous golden path blazing before him and showering his tingly skin.

  He loved the forest. Always has. Choosing to hate the forest was a conscious effort he decided on when he fabricated a new personality. That aberrant feeling of annoyance he felt was produced by him taking in everything at once without due time to process, resulting in an effortless sensory overload that would thrust him into a full on panic attack if left unaddressed.

  Although he now knew his original goal for reinventing himself was misguided, it was still made with just intentions. He wanted to condemn the part of himself he hated while covering for whatever antisocial behavior, social awkwardness, or faux pas that his natural personality had.

  Even back then he understood that it was what everyone had to do to some extent. Unless there was something special and valuable enough about you that people would conform around you, everyone has to adapt some sort of mask to be sociable.

  However, the more he acted differently, the more he lost sight of his original intentions, eventually leading to things getting out of hand.He decided to hate the forest because the harmony of it was secondary to the real reason he loved it.

  Like wavelengths silently vibrating outside of orthadox perception, the truth of the forest, the laws of the universe making it all possible, registered as wave functions streaming through his consciousness. Unless incredibly gifted in the matters of perception, most mortals were ignorant to divinity until they became Demigods. At most, they could do what Eliot did just now: take the individual elements in one at a time and conscientiously construct a feeling similar to that divinity, manifesting in a crushing feeling of profoundness, usually religious in nature.

  Eliot, though, has always been attuned to the world’s divinity, vibrating on the same frequency. And out of all the laws, there was one in particular that stuck out to him without fail. It was like a blaring siren, a rush of adrenaline, intoxication incarnate manifested as a taste and smell. A picture of absolute beauty that didn’t leave him overwhelmed, or urge him to fall to his knees in submission. It was beauty of order and ease of existence that put everything in its place, appealing to his senses personally.

  He knew its name since he first felt its euphoria that deposited him on top of the world. It was Death, the ending of all things, the conclusion of existence, the final chapter of the story, the lapse of life, the natural path of all things to destruction and non-existence.

  There was no better place than the wild nature of the forest to feel its divine touch. Where survival of the fittest is an inviolable rule. A harsh environment that only allowed you the choice of kill or be killed. With only a fickle caste system of predator or prey that could be flipped in a bare instant.

  It was why he was so drawn in by hunting. Humans have, more or less, separated themselves into a society with its own sets of rules and conditions. Hunting was the only time he could take part in the sacred ritual of death, when he could temporarily break his agreement to be above the monsters that only cared to feed and were prisoners to their carnal instincts.

  However, the understanding of what death was came along with the understanding that most humans—most sentients, in fact—were afraid of it. It was why they made society, it was what strove them to gather together and master the art of creation to make a safe haven for themselves, outside of the cruel reaches of death. He understood that he should be afraid of it as well, the fact that he wasn’t, that he relished it, meant there was something wrong with him.

  It wasn’t as simple as liking a different food, or style of dress. It was an uncompromising quality, an insult to the philosophy and culture of cherishing life. The thought of living near, interacting with, or gods forbid befriending someone so comfortable with death was horrifying. It was more than horrifying, death was the sole reason society could function. It was supposed to be the common enemy everyone united to fight against, despite the fact that everyone would inevitably be subject to its cold embrace sooner or later.

  The idea that he could be more than comfortable with death forced them to jump to the conclusion that he didn’t care about life, which was the second pillar that held everyone together. How could you when life and death were so clearly universal opposites? You can’t have one without the other, but you can’t exist in a state of both, you were either dead or alive. You were either for life, or for death.

  That was the realization that motivated him to change. He wouldn’t just cover up his deathly proclivities, either. He was going to make himself the perfect member of society by mastering social conventions, highlighting his love of learning, knowledge, and creation that everyone shared in some way. Upscaling his competence and intellect so that everyone would feel he had something to offer, but humble and aware to never brag in bad taste.

  The transformation worked too well. In no time, everyone in the village knew him as the precocious young mage that was going to reach amazing heights. Everyone saw him as a productive, laudable member of their community. Also, he was surprised to see he enjoyed it a lot more than he first thought he would. Helping people and gaining their approval felt good. The novel feeling of ‘fitting in’ twirled him dizzy.

  Unfortunately, none of it lasted. It fell from a new adventure to a rote routine. He was left longing for everything he did before, the ventures into the forest, the dissection of animals, the study of their social structures and hunting techniques. But he knew if he did that he would stop fitting in. Now that he had it, he desperately wanted not to lose it. He was afraid of what would happen if he did.

  So, he doubled down on fitting in and forging a new him. It was also at this point that he started making distinctions between himself and the mask he wore. He was completely conscious of the fact that he was just acting differently, and he knew he was himself, but he liked acting like he was two different people. It made it easier to slip into character and it added spice to what he now realized was a bland, uninteresting person. Everyone had flaws and secrets, so he added some in.

  Along with secretly hanging out at the graveyard, pretending to hate forests, and being superlatively amicable, he indulged more in knowledge and learning. He could truly lose himself in it, and it was the only facet of his personality that completely carried over. Because of that, he found himself holding his thirst for knowing more above everything else.

  The main problems arose as he grew more and more comfortable playing this new personality. It shifted from something he put all his effort into maintaining and all of his mental acuity into deciding how he should act, to feeling like it came easy and taking it for granted.

  After that completely set in, he made one rash decision after another. Just because he was easily swayed by his emotions didn’t make him empathetic, or more human. Simply agreeing with and choosing his decisions based on the whims of the other person wasn’t an actual personality. It may be good for day to day, casual interactions, but when it came to making friendships and romance, he needed friction, difference of opinion, and novelty. Additionally, pushing down everything he truly felt and how he thought things should be only made him an accomplice to everything he hated in the world and caused him to be even more prone to bouts of anger and frustration.

  Before long, his actions devolved to hedonism, doing everything he thought was fun or would make him feel good. He no longer cared about fitting in, and the self control and objectivity he thought he had was paper thin in reality.

  What happened with Ellulia was the perfect wake up call. He now realized just how idiotic he was. He managed to make friends and find an amazing lover by more or less being himself, an annoying, arrogant, and self indulgent version of himself at that.

  Furthermore, he now understood that society and the way things were isn’t perfect. And that it was impossible to change them by playing along and doing what was expected or wanted of him. All the times he was angry at someone for their unscrupulous modus operandi, or whenever he felt contempt for the nobles looking down on commoners, he should have been angry at himself for not doing anything about it.

  Finally, he understood that his differences, no matter how large they are, didn’t stop him from making relationships. People were more tolerable than he first thought, and in actuality the reason people sought to establish a bond with others was entirely for a different opinion, a perspective not their own. Anyone who did disregard him because of his differences wasn’t worth feeling the sting of rejection over. More than likely, they were also confused and dealing with their own problems.

  Really, his realizations could be boiled down to finally seeing things in shades rather than black and white. Of course, intellectually he knew that was how things were, but it was too tiring for him to feel and act like that was how things were. He would rather take on the morals that took the least effort and had the least chance to hurt him.

  As disappointing as it was, he came to this conclusion by necessity. It was either go through rapid emotional growth or lose all of his relationships, with the very real possibility that Ellulia’s love would spoil into hate for having hurt her. It officially became the option that took the least effort and had the least chance to hurt him.

  Rage boiled in his chest at the thought that he was enough of a moron to let things go so far, to make so many stupid mistakes, to hurt the people he cared about. Now that he had learned his lesson, he was going to do something about it.

  Looking back, everything happened because he was inconsiderate, so the natural first step he came to was to be more considerate. Luckily, he had a friend who was obviously having trouble with some things, and the considerate thing to do would be to go talk to her.

  A few seconds later, Eliot stepped through a portal into the main worship area of the Grand Church of Life. Hundreds of dark wooden pews in a uniform quadrilateral pattern faced the elevated podium and altar at the front of the room. Shining white quartz made up the walls, ceilings, and fancy pillars of varying designs scattered to support the main stress points. Above the altar, on the north wall was a huge fixture of the Goddess of Life, a long robed woman with flowing hair, exquisite angel wings, and a halo.

  It took some minutes of casual walking for him to reach the front row, where he successfully located Penelope praying with her head lowered and hands clasped. He sat down silently to the side, waiting for her to finish.

  Nearly ten minutes went by before Penelope sent a glance his direction.

  “Eliot?” she asked with some shock, lifting her head and unclasping her hands. “You don’t usually like coming to the church. Well, since they banned you from viewing the Heavenly Piecer, at least.”

  “I’m here for you—wait, let me rephrase that,” he spoke fast and unsteady. Penelope cocked a brow at his apparent nervousness as he gathered his words. Slower and more confident, he clarified, “What I mean is, everything that happened… and Henry ending up… it made me realize how long I’ve neglected talking to you.”

  Penelope held eye contact for a few seconds before bluntly responding, “Eliot, you’ve been gone on a mandatory test for a month, of course we haven’t talked. And you do know that what happened to Henry wasn’t your fault, right?”

  Eliot’s eyes hardened and his face turned grave. Penelope clearly felt the severity of the situation as she realized this was the most earnest she had ever seen him.

  “I knew that Lobrin was a traitor, and that he would storm the court the second the nobles lost. The entire fight could have been avoided. I have portals that can reach to the ends of the earth, I should have just gotten you and Henry to safety,” he insisted heavily.

  “Running away isn’t in your nature. Besides, Henry and I wanted to fight Lobrin as much as you did. We knew the risks. It just would have been better if you told us beforehand,” Penelope insisted back.

  “I know, I really should have told you.”

  “I don’t think you do know,” she huffed, crossing her arms. “Because it sounds like you ignored half of what I just said.”

  Their ensuing staring contest bore so much weight that the nuns and priests preparing for the day’s services felt wildly uncomfortable.

  In the end, Penelope looked away with a sigh.

  “Look, I know you’re worried and you feel bad for not doing the impossible, but Henry’s going to be just fine,” she assured him.

  “And you know because…?” Eliot demanded, taking his turn to cross his arms.

  Lowering her voice and leaning closer, she explained, “I pulled some strings to examine him personally. The damage is… really bad, but stable. As it turns out, the Crown doesn’t have any supports that can sense divinity, so the ones that examined him before me thought his soul stayed together through some miracle.

  “It’s being held together by a law. I couldn’t tell which one and I don’t have much experience with them, but it felt plenty strong to me. The hypothesis I’ve come up with is that he should have become a Demigod during the fighting, but with his soul damage the law couldn’t properly bond and his soul was flooded with divine mana that somehow ended up adhering on a superficial level, thereby keeping it together.”

  Eliot slumped against the backrest with his arms falling lifeless to his sides. Boring a hole into the Goddess of Life’s statue with his gaze, he whispered, “Is that so?” After a minute of silence, he suddenly shifted to stand up straight and reestablish eye contact, saying, “That’s good to hear, but I’m supposed to be here to ask about what’s been bothering you so much.”

  “Careful there, you almost sound like you care about me as a person,” Penelope replied snarkily, rolling her eyes.

  He knew she was probably just stalling, but that comment hurt a lot more than anything he expected her to say.

  “Is that really your opinion of me? Why the Abyss would you hang around a self-absorbed asshole that didn’t care about you?” he asked in a shrill tone.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” she clarified softly. “It’s just that, whenever it comes to serious emotions, you tend to close off. You really don’t like talking about yourself in general, so Henry and I have come to expect as much.”

  “Sorry, I’m in a weird head space right now,” he soberly apologized. “But, I’m not here to throw myself a pity party. I wanted to know why you’re so inpatient about becoming a Demigod.”

  “People usually don’t like it when you can read everything about them with a glance, you know,” she admonished sarcastically.

  “Sorry, I thought that maybe it would feel better if someone recognized your struggles and acknowledges what you’re going through,” he told her.

  “No, you’re right, it does feel better. I’m just being difficult,” she admitted wearily.

  “Talk to me, Nel.”

  After a minute of heavy silence, she took a breath and started, “I feel so useless. I was nothing but a burden when we fought Lobrin, just another person you had to protect. And when I saw Henry actually putting up a fight against Lobrin, I felt jealous and angry. I thought to myself, if he can catch up to your level, then I should be able as well. And it feels like nothing I do is enough.”

  “There’s more than just what happened with Lobrin, isn’t there?” Eliot posed it as a question, but it might as well have been a stated fact.

  “It’s just…” Frustration seeped from her words as she tried her best to keep quiet. “Ever since I was corrupted by divinity, the people around here have started treating me like I’m some prophet sent from Paradise. They look at me like I can cure blindness and walk on water, and it’s not just the common practitioners. The clergy even take it a step forward, they act like every word out of my mouth are the gods speaking through me.

  “But the worst part is: they aren’t wrong to assume that. Gaia almost always responds to my prayers, when the other holy divineers only get answered one out of twenty times. He hasn’t outright said it, but it’s obvious he’s trying to make me his champion!”

  Tales of gods granting power to mortals and using them as a relay to interact with the prime material plane, dubbing them as their Champion, are widespread and have been a part of cultural fairy tales for generations. There are even multiple iterations of the Four Seraphim’s tale where their powers are explained as blessings from the gods. The details are shrouded in mystery and myth, however everyone knows what a champion is, and what being a champion means.

  “Wouldn’t that be a good thing?” Eliot chimed.

  “Yes!” she agreed fervently. “That would be the greatest thing, if not for my incompetence. A month ago, I thought it was pretty clear that my final test was coming up soon, but all Gaia told me was, ‘take a walk through the forest’. The proceeding four times I inquired to him about it, he told me the same thing. I’ve been spending all of my time in the month you’ve been away in the forest from sunup to sun down and I haven’t the slightest clue what he wants me to do!

  “To make matters worse, after the fourth divining, Gaia’s gone silent. I don’t know what to do, I’ve been stuck at the same bottle neck for months now, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep it under control,” she heaved.

  Eliot took the time to thoroughly think it over. He thought about it from as many perspectives as he could imagine. In the end, when he considered what would be best for Penelope, he kept coming to the same objective truth.

  Steeling himself and hardening his expression, he pointedly told her, “I think you just need to suck it up.”

  Her eyes widened, her lips parted in mild shock, and she leaned back away from Eliot.

  “Wow, from how emotional you were being, I thought you would say something idiotic, like try your best,” she muttered, averting her eyes down and to the right.

  Already Eliot knew he had picked the right line of advice. If Penelope of all people was avoiding eye contact and trying to lighten the tone, especially instead of firing back with anger or snark, he knew he was hitting home. Usually, when someone is rude or sarcastic as a part of their personality it’s either to cover for their own insecurities or because they're a mean spirited person. In Penelope’s case, it’s because she personally responds to confrontation and criticism the most, so that’s how she feels natural interacting with other people.

  Taking a deep breath, Eliot forged on, “It’s completely unrealistic to compare yourself to me and Henry. He’s the crown prince of probably the most influential civilization in the world with free access to all but the highest level of Demigods for training, one of the largest collections of magical knowledge and secrets in the world, and as much as he likes to downplay himself, he’s very much a genius in his own right.

  “I am a world class, never before seen freak of nature with all mighty powerhouses seeking to take me as their discipulus through no tribulations of my own, and I spend all my time ready dusty, old tombs in dark catacombs— at least, whenever I’m not training with Master-fucking-Camble, Demigod of Equilibrium, the highest known law in existence, or abusing the fact that I learned literally a single spell from Karl Favesh to get my hands on secret or restricted knowledge that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to see in a million years. And to top it all off, I’m a masochistic slave that loves every second of what others would call life threatening, Abyssal training or mind bendingly boring and difficult to understand study.”

  Eliot was standing at this point, talking with his hands and movements as much as his mouth. “As amazing as you are, as far as you’ve come, you aren’t a genius when it comes to practical uses. You understand concepts and theories as well as some archmages, no doubt, but when it comes to actual casting and your level of mana manipulation, the truth is that you’re average.

  “No matter how nice they treat you in social interactions, the church hasn’t been providing anywhere near as much resources as Henry and I have had access to. And, I’d be willing to bet the best they’ve ever offered is something useless to you as a noble. Not to mention the doubts I have about how much your house has been supporting you. No personal tutors, no magical resources to practice with, no extra books, and you were sent to an academy where even a nobody peasant like me could attend.

  “Everything you have, everything you’ve accomplished so far has been through your own perseverance, resourcefulness, and determination—which, as far as I’m concerned, are traits way better than just being amazingly smart. Henry and I have taken short-cuts to power. I can think of ten things just off the top of my head that could possibly screw me over in the future because of it. And I’m sure Henry has some too, if his fight with Lobrin is any indication.”

  His speech was far past being a scene, everyone in the massive room was looking in his direction by the time he took another breath to continue.

  “When I look at you, what I see is a young Reltus Eldon in the making. Everyone knows his name. Nowadays, they know him as Captain of the Crucaien Royal Guard, The Demigod Slayer, The Golden Statue of the Throne Room, The Sun Blade, The Golden Swordsman, The Avatar of Helios, The Sun of the Crucible Empire. Abyss, he has more titles than I could name in three lifetimes.

  “But before all the glory, titles, royal positions, and acclaim, he was the son of a merchant turned mercenary after his family’s business failed. The first time anyone heard of his name was because he challenged a Demigod to a duel, even though he wasn’t even at the moral limit. His defeat was swift and crushing. In three seconds flat, the Demigod gave him injuries that took five months to fully heal, even with the help of a support.

  “Then, the second he was back to full health, he challenged another Demigod. He was defeated, nearly killed, in his first hundred duels, but with every try he lasted just a second longer. With every try, he refined his swordsmanship more and more into a Godslaying technique. There are even rumors that he developed a natural resistance to divinity. And he continued until he surpassed the thought to be unclimbable mountain, and defeated a Demigod. Then, another, and another until he started winning more often than not. Before long he’d refined his Godslaying technique enough that no Demigod he faced could beat him.

  “Now, with all of his titles and ascension as a Half-step Demigod, he’s a nearly infallible warrior. I guarantee you, if he hadn’t underestimated Lobrin’s backing, Reltus could have beheaded him the second he stepped foot in the grand hall.

  “That is the kind of amazing power you are meant to be. Ten out of ten times, if at the same level of power, an infallible Demigod would destroy a fast tracked genius. The only caveat is time. And if you ask me, having a proper foundation, not having the soul sapping expectations of an entire empire on your shoulders or those of a prodigy lined up to succeed the roles of multiple great powers, is a damn good deal. So, I repeat, suck it up!”

  The entire room filled with thick silence as Eliot stood tapping his foot and glaring at Penelope. The audience stood somewhere between rage that he would dare speak to her that way and shock that Penelope was simply taking it.

  “Gods, Eliot. Do you have to be so extra? Everyone’s staring, you know,” Penelope posed effervescently, a painfully wide smile stretched across her face. The second she said this, everyone eavesdropping hastily turned back to what they were doing.

  “You also say you’re not good at explaining things, yet you’re the most convincing and enthusiastic speaker I’ve heard. What might be the case there?”

  “What can I say, sometimes my genius surprises even myself,” he brazenly boasted while his eyes sheepishly darted between the previous onlookers and he reclaimed his seat.

  “You’re right,” Penelope asserted. “Everything I’ve done has been through my own personal struggle. I hate how people assume just because I may have been born into preferable circumstances that my whole life is solved without me lifting a finger. It’s… kind of my own fault that I don’t get much support from my family, but the only thing the church gave me was practical experience in healing and a restricted library that’s full of fake religious legends and techniques. Anything I did glean was painstakingly separated from fiction and upgraded past recognition for it to be viable.”

  “Give it time,” Eliot encouraged with a hand on her shoulder. After a few seconds, he got up to leave.

  “Where are you going? I thought you wanted to catch up,” Penelope froze him in his tracks.

  Eliot was purposefully acting against what he knew to be the best social choice in order to portray himself more authentically, and laid it all out, “I have a few incredibly important things to do today, so I wanted to get a start on them as soon as possible. If it makes you feel any better, you were at the top of the list.”

  “I see how it is, so I’m just a thing to you then?” she cracked sarcastically. “I was going to tell you about how I thought you were tainted the same way I am, and give you some advice that may just save your life. But, you’re right, you should go get all those things done first.”

  Eliot sat back down.

  “By the same way, do you mean tainted by divinity? Do you think that’s where my hair comes from?”

  In no time at all, Penelope’s mana flooded the space around them and formed a Sonic Barrier, blocking their words from escaping the hyaline merigold half circle.

  “I’m almost certain,” she affirmed in a grave tone. “I was researching if being tainted had any benefits besides looking cool and realized that tainted heroes and important figures are in actuality very prevalent throughout the history of the church. It used to be that you couldn’t find anyone above priesthood that didn’t have some amount of divine corruption.

  “Except, back then, the Church of Life and the Faction of Light hadn’t become widespread and powerful enough to wipe out worship of the other gods. And not every tainted mortal was tainted by the same type of divinity.

  “Apparently, there are a lot more gods that I once thought—that or the assumption that gods only have access to their specific strain of divinity like Demigods do is wrong. There are almost a hundred different types of corruption recorded in the church’s library, and that’s only what I’ve been able to find so far.

  “And in that list is a type of corruption that you fit almost perfectly. Bone white silver hair, super pale skin, more pointed than normal teeth, how lean and almost lanky you look even after training in martial arts. The only thing you’re missing is blood red eyes.

  “Most of the types of corruption are from gods in the Faction of Equilibrium, any type of divinity from the Light or Darkness factions was notably rare, and divinity like mine that comes from so high up in the hierarchy of the Light faction is incredibly so.”

  Eliot could already guess where this was going. “What about mine?” he asked after she remained silent.

  “Your type of divinity has only appeared three times in the entirety of the church’s history, and you’re the third. It comes from high in the hierarchy of the Darkness faction,” she whispered solemnly, her eyes set on the ground.

  “Does it really matter that it comes from the Faction of Darkness? Isn’t it a good thing that I have a god rooting for me?”

  “You don’t understand,” she scoffed with an exaggerated shake of the head. “Your two predecessors both went raving mad. The divinity irrevocably warped their sanity.”

  "I figure the only way you wouldn't be affected is if you're already crazy." She finally lifted her head and leveled her gaze at him. Her face was tense and her eyes filled with lethality as she asked, “Eliot, are you a psychopath?”

  At this point, he was well aware it wasn’t going to come, but that didn’t stop him from wishing it would. He wanted to break out into a cold sweat and feel his heart suddenly hammering in his chest as his veins filled with adrenaline at the thought of being discovered. He wanted it so much—wanted Penelope to see through him enough that he almost faked it, almost jumped out of his seat while laughing like a mad man and exclaimed how she had figured it out.

  In the end, no emotions, genuine or fabricated, stirred him—because he was a monster. “Of course not,” he said flatly, nearly monotone.

  Penelope let go of a heavy breath and let her seriousness crumble away. “I didn’t think so, especially not after everything we just talked about, but I felt it pertinent to ask,” she explained with a small smile of relief.

  She regained some of her severity and said, “I’m not entirely convinced it hasn’t affected you in any way, you’re pretty weird, you know? But I trust you. What I really wanted to say is, from this point forward, you should be very careful. The fact that you were born with it makes it all the more worrying. It means some evil god’s had their eyes on you since before you were even born.”

  That managed to send a minor chill up his spine. He was more relieved than anything, though, that he could have an emotional response rather than taking in the information like a passive observer. He also remembered that Master Camble had specifically said that his body wasn’t corrupted, and made a mental note to ask him about it during their next training session.

  Putting that aside for now, he felt compelled to ask, “The second one who was corrupted by dark divinity, the one before me… it was Kangan Dellam, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” she confirmed, “Suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you’ve done research of your own.”

  “Well… people talked about his white hair all the time, and he was Master Camble’s previous discipulus. It wasn’t too hard to put the pieces together,” he sighed.

  “Thank you for telling me. It was kind of driving me crazy,” he confessed while standing up. “This conversation’s been eye opening for the both of us, we should do this more often.”

  “Wait, before you go.” She sprang from her chair and collapsed the barrier. “Do you notice anything different about me?” she asked with a twirl, placing emphasis on her clothing.

  Eliot’s memory was amazing, even without intentionally committing it to memory with his self-made technique he usually remembered things no problem. But, taking a few seconds to scan her from top to bottom, he couldn’t find a single thing out of place. She was even wearing her favorite white cloak and had her hair done up in a practical braid.

  “Is there anything different about you?” he challenged, fully well aware she wouldn’t ask if there wasn’t.

  “I wear this cloak all the time,” she fussed dramatically. “Do you not see the difference?” she asked while clearly pointing out the newly sewn in designs.

  Jagged, metal-like lines of silver that looked like they belonged on a computer chip now repeated in a pattern from its hood down to its bottom hem.

  “Cool?” he tried, not seeing the point.

  “Ugh,” she groaned, “This was supposed to be a segway into how I replaced my Spiritual Infrastructure with an amazing new design that I made myself. Do you not feel how my cloak pulls the ambient mana in from the top and condenses it on the way down?”

  Now that she mentioned it, he did feel that, but that didn’t mean he had any idea what she was talking about. “Your Spiritual Infrastructure?” he queried blankly.

  Penelope just stared at him. “You’re kidding,” she stated expectantly. When Eliot’s clueless expression didn’t change, her eyes widened and she ludicrously realized, “You’re not kidding, are you? You really don’t know what Spiritual Infrastructure is!”

  All of her surprise abruptly shifted to anger as she clenched her fists and ground out, “Eliot, show me your mana. Right. Now.”

  Eliot found no reason for her to be so mad, if anything she should be lording the fact that she knew something he didn’t over his head. So, he complied. Lines of brilliant polychromatic mana strung from meridians in his left hand’s five fingers as he waved it in front of him. Its colors constantly shifted every color imaginable in chaotic, unregulated hazes, producing the illusion that it was undulating in violent waves and moving while remaining perfectly in place—similar to twirling a candy cane.

  “Are you telling me your mana is that pure with no Spiritual Infrastructure whatsoever?” she seethed.

  “Well, given that I don’t even know what that is… yeah? I thought everyone’s mana just got purer the longer they used it or something,” he confessed, taking his mana back in through a meridian in his right shoulder.

  Penelope quivered from unbridled anger and her knuckles turned white as she held her fists out in front of her, facing Eliot. “Give me permission to punch you,” she said.

  “What?!” Eliot squawked, utterly dumbfounded.

  “I’m feeling very angry and stressed right now. I think it would be beneficial if you let me vent some of that anger on you because you're a Demigod and would probably not even feel it,” she elucidated in an even tone.

  “No! I’m not gonna let you hit me just because you’re jealous,” he denied whiningly. He had no idea why she was acting so theatrically, but it was incredibly infectious for some reason. After the day he had, he wanted to act a little irrational.

  “What happened to emotional Eliot? He would let me hit him,” she argued.

  “Fine, but you’re going to have to work for it,” he relented, putting his hands up and adjusting his weight.

  Penelope’s face warped into a vicious sneer as she pulled her fist back and threw herself forward. If he wasn’t so adept at sensing maliciousness and killing intent in other people, he would be convinced she really had it out for him.

  In the second before she reached him, clinical white mana pure as clear water billowed from her body and condensed into a large fist following on top of her physical one like some summoned incorporeal spirit.

  Eliot lifted his arms and planted his feet to block it, his astonishment off the charts over the fact that she was choosing to hit him with a fist of pure, unadulterated mana. When it made contact, his blue Mage’s Armor flared to life and instantly shattered, ripped to shreds like scissors going at a piece of paper. The impact itself, however, was effortlessly stopped, hardly carrying enough force to move his arms.

  Despite this, the fist hurt. A lot. The unusual qualia of the pain—which felt like someone was crushing his forearm in a vice—quickly led him to realize why. The impact it had on his physical body was next to nothing, but with his Mage’s Armor gone it had unfettered access to strike at his spiritual body, which it was capable of doing since it was just a lump of mana in the form of a fist.

  Taking a glance inside his spiritual body, Eliot’s heart almost exploded with glee. There was a large crater shaped impression where the fist struck him in the outer shell of his spiritual body. It left what looked like was permanent damage, explaining why the pain had been so great and lingered after the fact.

  “What did you just do?” he asked in awe after she reabsorbed the mana and backed off.

  “All I did was hit you with a fist of solidified mana,” she told him with a mountain of concern. “Eliot, when you said you took shortcuts, I didn’t think they would be this glaring! If I wanted to, I could have killed you right there, your Mage’s Armor was nonexistent. Have you not been working on your mana manipulation at all?”

  “I had no idea something like that was possible. I thought all mana manipulation did was let you move mana around faster!” he confessed without a hint of shame, a broad, fanatical grin taking shape on his face. A whole new world of possibilities had just opened up for him.

  Penelope gaped at him in utter disbelief. It was a tad hyperbole to say she could have killed him there, he was a Demigod that could casually hop a distance it would take her minutes to run at full speed, after all. But if he didn’t know his life was in danger, which he obviously hadn’t, she truly could have crushed his spiritual body and killed him.

  On top of not knowing what Spiritual Infrastructure was, she simply couldn't believe a genius like Eliot would ignore two essential and foundational skills of any mage. “We were taught this! Everyone learned about the importance of mana manipulation and Spiritual Infrastructure. The Professor tested us on this,” she said helplessly.

  Back during his time in the Arcane Academy of Everveil, there reached a point where he was so far ahead of everyone in his class that he started skipping in favor of independent study on engravings. When it got out of hand, their Professor offered him a test; if he passed, he could skip as much as he wanted, and he passed with flying colors.

  In hindsight, the offered test and the final exam they had taken at the end of the year were completely practical. It tested abilities along the lines of casting time, number of spells known, mana purity, and battle awareness. In reality, aside from these abilities that he innately excelled at, the Academy only gave a cursory overview on the more indepth fields of magic such as rituals and alchemy.

  At the time, he felt vague disgust over the fact that it only covered basics, and even asked Master Camble about it. He had said that the purpose of the school wasn’t to train archmages, rather to pump out as many competent mages as possible. Now, he understood that was because the Crucible Empire was making up for the Genocide of Ignorance, but back then he skipped classes with delight.

  Penelope deflated after a few seconds to digest her emotions. “Looking back, we did only go over Spiritual Infrastructure for a small amount of time towards the end of the year, when you were skipping almost every class,” she sighed. “Do me a favor, open a portal to my room.”

  Eliot reigned in his mad scientist and said, “I’ve never been, nor do I know where it is in the Empire as a whole. I’ll need some directions.”

  Some failed tries and a few frightened servants later, they had a portal leading directly to Penelope’s room. Unfortunately, she made it a point that the reason she never had him visit before was to avoid family drama and that remained unchanged, so he couldn’t go in.

  From what he could see through the portal, it was a spectacle to behold. In the corner of her room right by a window, he could see a mythical adolescent Rapax-Aemularis plant. At first, it was a bundle of coiled leaves and vines tucked away in the crevice. When it noticed Penelope with its blindsense, it unwrapped itself into a massive, writhing mass of green with three purple balls the size of a backpack extending outward.

  The Rapax-Aemularis plant was infamous for its natural ability to duplicate an exact copy of everything it ate. The purple balls, which were its heads, had comically triangular teeth with no lips, eyes, ears, or any other features. Its elastic skin and complex muscle structure, yes muscle structure in a plant, allowed each and every one of its heads to expand and swallow an eight wheeler truck, then after an incubation period depending on how big or mana dense its food, it spat out two of whatever it ate.

  Naturally, its world breaking ability made it one of the most legendary and coveted things across the Two Continents, however it was also one of the most feared things because of its predatory and gluttonous disposition. Its heads, which would multiply to eight by the time it reached adulthood, immediately snap and bite at anything within its range. It also employed stealth tactics to camouflage itself along with the other plants.

  There were plenty of stories that spoke about humans being duplicated and the philosophical nightmares that ensued. Although no circumstance of something like that were ever confirmed, all signs pointed to an exact copy being made. It was terrifying, and inordinately lucrative when handled correctly.

  Penelope strode up to it without a worry in the world. The plant, instead of lashing out, slightly lowered its heads and let out pleasurable growls as she patted and rubbed them one at a time. She whispered apologies about not visiting often before turning towards what looked like a regular wall and waving. The wall turned into two giant leaves that peeled away to reveal a large bookcase embedded in the wall, filled to the brim with books.

  After picking out three books and feeding each Rapax-Aemularis a clearly magical potion, she stepped back into the church and ordered him to shut the portal.

  Shoving the books into his hands, she said, “Read them from bottom to top. The first is a basic guide on mana manipulation, the second is an introduction to Spiritual Infrastructure, and the last details a few designs you can pick or draw inspiration from.”

  “Now,” she huffed, already starting her walk down the aisle, “I have some incredibly important things to do today and I want to get started as soon as possible. If it makes you feel any better, I pushed them all back to have this conversation with you.”

  Eliot snorted, waiting until she traveled an awkward distance to walk back to offer, “I can portal you.”

  She stopped walking, crossing her arms as she turned back to him. “Don’t you think I’m going to backtrack. I know you can make portals away from yourself.”

  Elliot did as she demanded, rolling his eyes with a grin. As he walked down the stairs of the church, squeezing the books in the arms, he was filled with newfound determination. He was finally letting go of his problems and moving past them. He was finally getting out of his own damn way. He was going to amass knowledge and strength faster than ever. He was going to get Ellulia to forgive him. He was going to change the world.

  Currently, though, he was so engrossed in hyping himself up that he didn’t notice the teenager bolting down the street on a direct collision course with him until it was too late. As a Demigod, he might as well have been an unstoppable force. The older adolescent smashed into him and rebounded, sprawling backwards on the ground.

  Immediately, Eliot put his hand out and asked, “Are you ok? You—wait, kody?”

  He almost didn’t recognize him because of how much older he was compared to their last meeting. What first tipped him off was the boy’s orchid purple hair. From there, he recognized the emerald green eyes and style of dress to be Kody. Everything else about him, from height to facial features, changed drastically. He remembered a split second later that Demihumans grew and matured light years faster than humans did.

  “We’ve gotta stop meeting like this,” he said with a rueful smile.

  Kody, instead of getting on his feet, lifted himself to his knees and gasped, “Eliot, I’m so glad I found you!” Taking one more deep breath in, he tumbled over his words as he tried to explain, “I really didn’t want to bother Penelope with this, so I was looking for you—but I couldn’t find you anywhere, I didn’t think you would be at the church—I—”

  Eliot forcefully pulled him to his feet and said, “Deep breaths, in times of trouble it’s always better to explain everything clear and concisely.”

  Kody, standing only a head shorter than Eliot, took his time to catch his breath before trying again. “I think someone is trying to assassinate me, but I didn’t want to bring so much trouble to Penelope. I was looking for you because you’re well known for being the only one who survived an assassination attempt from beelzebub.”

  “You think someone is trying to assassinate you? Why would you say that?” Eliot cut to the chase.

  “Two people in all black ambushed me, threw fireballs at me, and chased me through the streets,” Kody said matter of factly. “And, also, they're right on my tail."