The days rolled by, filled with all the tasks I had set for myself. I visited Regan and Gorban, who were making good progress adapting their martial skills to the challenges I had set for them, and were starting to develop teams to train in the new styles and practice drills to further hone in on what they were trying to accomplish.

Between Leiren’s presence and her ability to negotiate for Golchev, we hammered out the first official trade deal and got it underway. Grain that would have fed the extraneous part of the army, having since accepted their severances and left, went north, and the first of hopefully many shipments of steel came south.

Along that trade route, the capital’s version of the Tamers Guild farm was getting as much construction done as they could before the worst of winter. The whole team, working together, made slower progress than I had on my own with my wealth of skills, but I continued to delegate it since I had too much else on my plate. Rena was waiting until spring to head to the capital, so there was no rush. I would try to get quadhorns from trade with the north at the end of winter, before they began their migration away for the spring, as they were too busy hunting for meat to trap any before the cold arrived.

The first Church reforms were sent out dealing with citizenship for children, including some minor additions to the Horuthian written language that would better facilitate recording Al’Tiolese and Velgein names. The doors were opened to all people, and all children born in the Kingdom were to be registered with identification from now on. The price of healing still needed to be addressed, but it was tied up in the safety issue, and I had not yet come up with a solution for that.

It was one of the things that itched at me as the days grew colder, knowing that there would be people who would benefit from cheaper healthcare over the winter, so I gave the Churches the option to offer healing for minor illnesses and injuries at reduced prices, based on their own diagnosis of the problem and at their own discretion.

Atlessoa’s spy network continued to grow and disrupted a few troubles which could have escalated to something much worse without her. Nodel and her advisors continued to work towards improving the Kingdom as a whole. Leiren brought to light instances of anti-Velgein sentiment and related issues in the capital that we all did our best to address and deal with.

Meanwhile, I continued to meet with Seranedra regularly, discussing the Church, magic as a whole, and various other bigger ideas about life and the world. I was able to lose hours over tea with her, but continued to maintain a minimum of professional distance, given the power imbalance and the goals I still wanted to accomplish in the Kingdom with her help.

When winter set in fully, there was still work to be done, but things also slowed dramatically. It was a time to rest and recover, to gauge what was working and what needed addressing come the spring. I personally spent more and more time in the archives, studying what I could from the collected knowledge of the generations of unified control of the Horuth Kingdom.

I was looking through some materials that had been taken from the south, a small 5-point magic light overhead, when I found an old clay tablet. I could make out the 4-point circle at the center, and it had other markings carved into it, but they were a bit weathered and hard to make out.

“Not an enchantment,” I mused aloud in the empty room. “But not just a magic circle, either.”

Setting the tablet carefully on a nearby desk, I moved the light around it trying to create shadows to better make out the weathered markings. I carefully copied what I found onto a piece of parchment, noting where clay had eroded the most, and tried to make an educated guess at what I was looking at.

I looked down at what I was fairly confident was the result, at least for the largest inscribed words around the 4-point circle: IGNIS, AER, AQVA, TERRA.

“Huh.”

Finding Latin on an ancient piece of clay in this world did not actually render me as surprised as it might have prior to learning a bit more about the history of the world. I knew that, at some point prior to the Kingdom conquering the south, magic had been learned as individual spells, not through magic circles. At some point, in the south, someone had unified elemental magic as 4-point magic, and presumably 5-point and 6-point magic followed. The advantage this gave mages was a core part of why the Kingdom invaded the south.

The parallels between 4-point magic and Earth’s pre-modern elemental theory had always been obvious, but this stone more or less proved that the magical development had come from Earth through another reincarnator. The use of Latin did not hugely narrow down a timeframe of when the other reincarnator had come from, given that even in modernity there were people who were at least passingly familiar with it, but the fact that it was not in ancient Greek meant that the development had come from well after Aristotle’s own time.

I frowned as I continued to look at it. While it answered several questions, it also raised a few more. No mage in this world had ever told me of aether or quintessence, but that surely would have been something the creator of this stone would have known about. Had aether magic been lost to history?

Was it even possible for aether magic to exist? After all, the existence of aether was a pre-modern theory, and modern science already knew that vacuum existed, and could transmit stuff like lightwaves without requiring a medium. My understanding of how light functioned was a key part of how my 5-point magic now worked.

For that matter, I had already learned that 4-point magic actually dealt in oxides, not pre-modern elemental theory. Had the creator of 4-point magic just been wrong? Close enough to make it work, but not correct at the molecular level?

Or was I creating misunderstandings on my own? After all, magic circles were just a language which described reality, but language changed. Perception was biased, while also being how we perceived reality.

Perhaps I had… changed the language of magic?

I carefully put the clay tablet away, and tucked the parchment into my inventory. It was a lot to think about, and I was unsure I would ever have any clear answers, but it was something I continued to ruminate on for a long, long time.

* * *

My time as a king offered me a lot of new life experience, and through skills like Negotiation and my continued martial and magical practice I slowly continued to grow over the winter until I hit Level 47. With the level up and my last skillfruit, I eventually pushed Enchantment and Literacy up to double-advanced while I continued to work on my project of combining 3-point and 5-point magic with a 2-point circuit.

Success finally came with my new expertise, although the true breakthrough had been when I had more or less “dual-casted” my enchantment, something I had not been able to do prior to my skill upgrade. I had been trying to set the enchantment in place by first channeling the 3-point magic aspect, and then trying to feed that through to a subsequent channeling of the 5-point magic part of the total circuit. This failed because the 5-point magic needed the 3-point magic to be active simultaneously to access the information.

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While the enchantment now worked, I could not share it as it was. Anyone who looked directly at the enchantment who knew anything about magic would start asking questions.

Enchantments were largely on the surface of metal because that was how they were engraved. Modifying the metal afterwards was risky, because it could ruin the enchantment. With 8-point magic, I was shaping the metal in a different way, and could combine pieces of gold without heat which could warp the magic circle.

My initial work had been done on a thin gold disc, about the size of a watch face. It was a tight fit, and the enchantment was relatively tiny, but given the relative simplicity of the spell that worked out just fine. It barely even needed any magic to operate, especially since 3-point magic was basically free. The small illusion display only burned about 1MP to activate, before slowly fading away.

I carefully formed a second gold disc, and placed it on top of the first, fusing the faces outside of the enchantment together while leaving the shallow engraving as a hollow. I tested the enchantment, and it still activated, to my delight.

The last thing I did was add a new minor engraving onto the visible surface of the artifact, a circle with a disc circled around it on a tilted view plane, cutting across the front of the first and disappearing around the back: a simple stylized version of the ringed gas giant in our sky, the source of magic in this world.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to attach this to a strap or chain, and it would be good to go.

* * *

“I want to show you something,” I told Seranedra with a grin as we sat down with our tea.

I pulled out the engraved golden disc which I had attached to a pair of delicate gold chains on both sides, each with a small clasp. Leaning over the small table, I asked for her hand, and strapped the accessory onto her wrist, clasping it as tight as I could without it squeezing, the small amount of excess chain dangling freely.

“Pilus, it’s lovely. Thank you,” Seranedra said with a smile.

“Oh. I mean, you’re welcome. Uh, I haven’t actually shown you what it does yet.”

“What it does?”

“It’s an enchanted artifact. Push a small amount of magic into it.”

Seranedra focused slightly, and a small display of light appeared over the top of the image of the gas giant. It looked a bit like a battery indicator on a smartphone, a bar that was mostly full with a small number indicating the total percentage.

The priestess looked at me quizzically. “68?”

Guess it’s not intuitive to the locals. Oh well, they’ll learn.

“Uh, do you know your percentages?” I asked, unsure how much math the priestess had studied. I knew the math for it existed in this world, as I had dealt with it as a merchant. “So, a percent is a representation of the amount of something by the hundred. If you took fifty of one hundred, you would have 50%, which is half. If you took two out of four, that’s also half, and also 50%. But if you took one out of four, that’s a quarter, or half of a half, which would be–”

“25%, because twenty five is a half of fifty, and a quarter of one hundred,” Seranedra finished for me, giving me a look. “I know my numbers, Pilus. I’m a trained mage.”

“Right. Of course. Yes. So 68% is just a bit over two thirds, which the bar there also represents, and you can see at a glance that it’s about one third empty.” Programming the enchantment to display the information in two ways had been a bit of a challenge, but I was able to use double-advanced Literacy to encode the enchantment ring to make it work.

“I see,” Seranedra said, frowning. “That’s… very interesting.”

I thought she’d be more excited, I thought, hiding my disappointment. I mean, it’s kind of a big deal. I picked up my tea, and took a sip, wondering what she was thinking. I was sipping my tea when she finally spoke, and I almost choked.

“So, this shows me 68%... of what, exactly?”

“Oh, I got sidetracked by the math, I didn’t–right. Um, hold on,” I said, and pulled a knife from my belt, dragging it against my arm and splitting open my flesh for a practical demonstration.

“Pilus!” Seranedra exclaimed, leaping to her feet and rushing over. One hand reached out to touch my arm while her other hand grabbed at the 6-point magic pendant she wore around her neck and she furrowed her brow as she focused on her healing magic. My wound stitched back up before my eyes, her warm spell flowing into me. “Don’t scare me like that! What were you thinking?”

“Sorry, I… I was excited. I got carried away,” I said, blushing. I had stopped being concerned about minor physical harm a long time ago. I’m totally botching this. “Could you push some magic into the artifact again? Please?”

The priestess glared at me, but her expression softened from surprised anger to that of placating patience, as though she were dealing with an unruly child. I looked at her hopefully, and she let out a slow breath, shaking her head. “Fine,” she said, lifting her wrist and activating it. “Now it says 65%.”

“Huh, I expected it would be lower. You’re quite skilled at healing.”

Seranedra stared at me in continued confusion for a while, until I saw her expression start to morph into disbelief and then wonder as she connected the dots. “Are you saying this… this is measuring my magic?”

I nodded, grinning. “I guess I should have just said that, but I figured it would be better to show you?”

The priestess sat down in shock on the couch next to me, processing. She looked down at the magic meter on her wrist, and engaged it again, over and over, and eventually the 65 changed to 64. She gasped. “It tells me how much magic I have left. The exact amount. No guesswork, no feeling. Oh my goodness, Pilus, this changes everything. The priests will know whether or not they can still heal, and how much, and…”

Seranedra continued to ramble in excitement at the revelation, and I watched her from my seat next to her. It was a bit hard to focus on her words with her sitting so close to me, and I tried to keep a flush from appearing on my face as she shifted on the couch in her excitement and brushed against me. I tried harder to listen to what she had said.

I had not set it up to display the exact amount of MP someone had, even though I could have. The closest percent was the better option. My own study of precise spell costs had been a mess, because each and every skill point earned to the skill affected how much MP a spell cost, and the specifics of the spell—particularly spells that required the application of force—could vastly change the cost.

Mages already did without specificity, working through experimentation, practice, and feeling. Once a mage has trained for a while, he or she would come to know what they could do, and how many times they could pull that off. The amount they can cast only improved over time, either with growth to the skill or growing their magic pool by leveling, so the only danger a mage faced once they knew their limits was underestimating themselves once they surpassed those.

This tool would allow them to know how much more they have left when they might otherwise tap out, without the complication of worrying about objective spell cost and comparing it to other mages. Percentages were a measure that was relative to oneself, primarily. If a spell took 2% of one’s magic, it could be cast fifty times, but it was not necessarily comparable to another mage’s 2% spell.

“I was thinking that outfitting priests with these could help with training and reduce the cost of healing,” I said when Seranedra paused for a breath. “We could also set minimum and maximum daily use expectations for healers in the Church, dropping the cost of healing correspondingly. For example, each priest is expected to provide healing only up to half of their available magic to the public as a service on workdays at the Church, or something.”

“They would have to share, and it would only help in the capital’s Church, but yes, this would be a great help,” Seranedra said, gazing wistfully at the bracelet.

“Oh, no, I figure we’ll give one to each priest.”

Seranedra’s head snapped towards me, eyes wide with surprise and excitement. “You have more?”