Chương 16: Chapter 15: I found your freckles!

An artifact that increased combat strength would have made sense. There were countless examples of enchanted weapons and defensive equipment. But this... people would call this cheating. He didn' t even know such a thing existed. Maybe this was why this item was an anklet and not a necklace. Unless someone specifically knew what they were looking for, nobody would think to check. Before he could talk himself out of it, he slipped the anklet beneath the hem of his robes.

The thing clicked as though it had just resized itself for its new owner. [Sidequest Completed: A Favor Left Unspoken] Reward: +335 EXP (Educational Enhancement Modifier) EXP: 1770/1500 [Congratulations! You have reached Level 5.] [You have gained 3 Attribute Points.] Three hundred and thirty-five? That was an over threefold increase from the original reward. But why would the gain fluctuate between 200% and 400%?

It meant the artifact was making a decision every time it activated, which meant variables and hidden conditions. He decided that he disliked the uncertainty. Hold on... He reread the second notification apparition. Attribute points? Is it what I think it is? [SYSTEM NOTE: Attribute Points may be allocated to permanently improve existing personal attributes.] Any attributes? [CONFIRMATION: Correct.] So this was what Levels were for. This was why the Eidralith was deemed legendary.

People had spent centuries marveling at what the Eidralith could do. They'd been looking at the wrong end of the miracle. Anyone with time and discipline could become more than the aether had first allowed. People… like him. This was the bottleneck. He pulled the apparition closer, steadying his hand so his pulses wouldn't spike faster than it already had. Attribute Allocation Available Points: 3 Aetheric Resonance (RES): 2 → 5 Fabrisse confirmed the allocation.

Sensation threaded through his hands, up his forearms, along his spine. He knew it: aether. This was the thing Professor Ake had talked about in lectures. Seasoned casters must have felt this when said they claimed they could 'feel when a spell was ready.' His fingers closed around three ordinary pebbles near the roots of the tree. There was only one thing to test. He inhaled.

"Name. Weight. Will." [Skill Cast: Stonesway (Rank II)] The pebbles rose without protest.

"Already?" He stared at them, shocked. Then he guided them farther apart. The three stones spread into a broad arc around him, each one maintaining its distance from the others as though invisible strings held them in place. He barely needed to think about keeping them there. Between his newfound aetheric power and Elemental Accretion, the stone remained perfectly steady. Eight. Nine. Ten. He had beat his personal record, and his shoulders hadn't even tensed. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.

Only then did the spell begin to unravel. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. I can now maintain them at more than twice the duration, following a wider arc. This is amazing. Fabrisse looked down at the anklet hidden beneath his robes. If the Synod discovered it, there would be questions. Many questions, possibly followed by a tribunal and almost certainly confiscation. But then everything beat expulsion.

He couldn' t care less now that help seeming only arrived after the Eidralith had bound itself to him. This is my ticket to magical competence. I'll take my chances. The dormitory hallway was dim and unusually silent as he padded through on socked feet. Maybe everyone else had fled while he slept. Maybe the Synod was under quarantine. Maybe—just maybe—he was going to get away with it. His room door stood exactly where it had been the day before. Except… The 'ROCK WITCH' sign was gone.

The scrap of parchment that had been nailed directly into the wood, complete with childish skull doodles and an anatomically impossible stick-figure casting "Gravel Curse V," had vanished. Fabrisse opened the door and asked.

"Are you in there, Greg?"

"Statutorily, yes," came the reply. His roommate, Greg Johnson, was sitting cross-legged on his bed and eating a perfectly peeled orange over a page of The Unified Sanitation Codex: Vol. II. His hair was combed, his robes were pressed, and there was not a single piece of loose parchment or unaligned sock anywhere in the room. He gave Fabrisse a briefest glance then simply resumed reading.

Greg had been assigned as Fabrisse's roommate three years ago and had somehow, across all available assessments, measured exactly neutral. He possessed no magical irregularities, no aberrant resonance spikes, and most definitely no weird affinities for insects, ghosts, or screaming rocks. His Concordance rating was 'Temperate', and his elemental alignment was listed as 'Undecided.' His main contribution to the Synod was helping faculty correct citation errors in procedural texts.

"You took the sign down?" Fabrisse asked. Greg shrugged.

"It was a fire hazard." Fabrisse lowered his voice as he walked in and took off his socks.

"Greg, Cuman cursed it. It screamed if you tried to remove it."

"I used gloves."

"Oh."

"Also, some girl just climbed the window earlier and asked to see you," he said, then resumed reading.

"What? Who? Where?"

"Look out the window." The curtain across the shared dormitory window fluttered. A muffled grunt came from outside, followed by the squeak of rubber soles skidding against the sandstone frame. Then— thump. Liene dropped into the room headfirst, somehow landing on her shoulders. Her legs still tangled in the windowsill, one boot stuck behind the curtain. She wriggled like an upturned beetle, groaning. Greg turned the page.

"She knocked first."

"I did!" Liene huffed, kicking her way free and rolling upright with the grace of a dropped quill. Her braid had leaves in it. Her jacket was on inside out.

"Hi, Fabri. Hi Greg."

"You learned his name?" She nodded like a spring-loaded bobblehead.

"Why are you here? You don't study in this department... And how did nobody see you..."

"I found your freckles!" There was a beat of silence.

"I was feeding the duck-things in the lower pond," Liene continued, as if this were a coherent segue, "and I swear I saw one of them swim away with a shadow that looked exactly like the constellation on your left cheek. You know, the one that shows up when you're stressed? So I followed it. But I lost the duck-thing, which means we're going to find it together."

[NEW SIDEQUEST AVAILABLE: "Trace the Freckle-Star"] Objective: Aetheric residue from an emotional overload has been sympathetically absorbed by a class-III migratory creature (duck-thing). Locate the affected duck-thing in the lower channel ponds. Retrieve the stone it took. Reward: 5 Mastery Points (All Affinities) [SYSTEM NOTE: The duck did not eat your feelings. But it might be nesting on them.] Fabrisse stared at the glowing prompt, then looked back at Liene.

"You were actually being serious?" And what even were Mastery Points? Fabrisse didn't know if the Eidralith had ever explained this to him. Liene grinned, triumphantly holding up what looked like an oily duck feather and a piece of quartz.

"So? You're in?"

"But I have classes…" He must admit, though, that no afternoon class was going to teach him Stonebound Synapse. Greg said, "Attendance is tracked, you know. I'd advise filing a leave of absence form under 'psycho-emotional artifact retrieval,' but I don't believe that category exists yet." Liene leaned in.

"You skip class half the time to pick rocks anyway, Fabri."

"I do not —""You once skipped a lecture because a rock 'looked sad.'"" That was Gravelkin, and it was sad. And it wasn't a lecture." It was a spellcasting practice session masquerading as a lecture. Fabrisse had no need for those. Greg said, without looking up, "I'll submit the excuse note." Even if Lorvan had specifically told him not to do so, Fabrisse felt like skipping class, especially today. He wasn't yet ready to deal with the potential staring and questioning of his classmates regarding the incident.

He sighed, already reaching for the socks he'd just taken off.

"Fine." His usual afternoon routine involved meticulous rock sorting and internal debates about sedimentary layers, not chasing empathic waterfowl. Yet, the thought of a practical skill far more valuable than any Earth Thaumaturgy spell he'd learned in a lecture hall (a grand total of 0) was far more tempting. Liene grabbed his hand and tugged.

"Good. Now hurry, before Lorvan finds out and ruins the fun." He bit the inside of his cheek as his fingers tapped the side seam of his robe—four beats, pause, two beats. He made a mental list: (1) Liene was upside down. (2) She had clearly tracked him through duck-feather divination. (3) The Eidralith had just validated her logic... somehow. He sighed. Resistance, as they say, was probably not thaumaturgically optimal.