Chương 26: Halric and the Heaven’s Ledger

"Forty-eight… forty-nine, ugh… fifty." Ding! I came out of the squat with my thighs shaking and my back streaming sweat under the inner robe, and the gold text bloomed across my vision before I had finished straightening up. [Quest progress: Duck walk x 150 (150/150)] [+5 Strength] [+3 Stamina] [Still Mind — Level 2 (56%)] [Mana Pool: 412/430] A small pulse of revitalisation went through my legs. The shaking eased a little. Not all the way.

Enough that I could stand without putting a hand against the nearest stone lantern. That was the third round of fifty for the afternoon. A hundred and fifty in total.

Before the duck walks, I had done a hundred push-ups against the flagstones outside the inner garden, and before the push-ups I had done fifty pull-ups on the lowest bough of one of the older trees on the eastern side of the complex, and before the pull-ups I had run the length of the path from the gates to the back wall and back four times, and before the running I had spent the morning doing meditation drills with my mana flowing the whole time, holding [Still Mind] while moving, while standing and while shifting between stances Saoren had walked me through one at a time.

This had been the schedule since dawn, and it was not my idea. The System had issued the quest as soon as I had opened my eyes this morning. The objective was reach Tier 2, Level 1 before the end of the week. The reward was the S-Class skill that had been hanging at the end of the Saoren quest from the start. The failure was no skill, and a waste of the days that were left. The path to the reward had come laid out in the same notification, broken down into a daily breakdown of physical work and meditation hours.

Saoren had told me, last night, after I had finished the dumplings, that a still mind was only at its best in a strong body, and that mine was strong by the standards of sixteen-year-old mages but not strong by the standards of what I was about to attempt to become.

Then he had said that I would be applying [Still Mind] while moving from now on, because [Still Mind] was a thing that mattered most when the body was in motion, and that he wanted me to have a still mind in the conditions it would actually be used in, not in the conditions it had been taught in. The next morning the System had handed me the quest. I did not think the timing was a coincidence. I had started Tier 0 the day the System had begun keeping track of me, which was a day I could not remember.

I had reached Tier 1 at Tier 0 Level 30, the day I had broken through the first Seal in Bellos's training hall when I was twelve. I had been told, on the spot, by the System and by Bellos in different words, that the next jump would come at Level 30 again. I was at Tier 1 Level 23 right now. I had been at Level 23 since the practical exam at Sartheon, which had pushed me up from 22 in one of the rest stops in the canopy.

I dropped to a crouch on the flagstones and put my hands on my knees to breathe when a voice came from somewhere on the wall.

"That is enough for today, child. Sit. Rest. Use your mana. You have earned it." Finally!

"Thank you, Master Saoren." I lowered myself the rest of the way to the flagstones and let mana flow into my arms and shoulders for the first time since dawn, and the relief of it was almost embarrassing. Reinforcement smoothed the small tears in the muscle, eased the ache out of my lower back, took the worst of the burn out of my thighs, and within the space of a few breaths I felt closer to a person again. That was the other thing about Saoren's training plan that I had not been prepared for.

He had told me, that I would not be using mana to reinforce my body during the work. None of it. No padding for the push-ups, no reinforcement on the legs during the duck walks, no smoothing the breath during the runs. Bare flesh and bare bone for every set, every rep, every step. The System had agreed with him, too, because no reinforcement during physical training had been one of the lines. For a mage, this was, frankly, an absurd thing to be told.

Mages did train, and they trained hard, but the training was always layered with the assumption that the mana was there to carry the body past the places the body could not go on its own. A mage's base strength was slightly above an ordinary man's, perhaps, but it was not the strength of a knight or a soldier, and it had never needed to be, because reinforcement had been the answer for a thousand years.

You added the layer when the work demanded it, and the work always demanded it, and over time the layer had become so habitual that most of us did not notice we were doing it. Then Saoren had taken the layer away. The duck walks without it had been worse than anything Bellos had ever put me through. The push-ups had been worse than the duck walks.

The pull-ups had been the worst of all of them, because I had spent ten years pulling myself up onto things with a thin skin of mana running through my arms and I had not understood, until this week, just how much of the pulling the mana had been doing for me. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. He had not given me a reason for any of it.

He had simply said a mage at the top of his craft must have the body of a knight beneath him, and then he had pointed at the path where the running had started. I leaned my back against the base of one of the stone lanterns and let the reinforcement do its slow work through my limbs, and I closed my eyes for a long second and breathed. I pushed myself up off the lanterns after a few minutes, and walked across the back courtyard to the small stone well the keepers used for their drinking water.

The bucket was already raised, sitting on the low wall beside the rope. I lifted the ladle out of it and drank straight from the ladle, two long pulls, and then a third. The water was cold enough that it made my teeth ache.

"And what is that System of yours saying, child? Have you… levelled up?" Saoren had appeared on the wall beside the well.

"Not quite, Master Saoren. But I think it won't take much longer now."

"And how do you determine that you have levelled up?"

"It's not me. The System tells me."

"... Sure. How?" I set the ladle back down on the rim of the bucket and leaned a hip against the well.

"So, the System tracks me with stats. Strength, agility, stamina, mana pool, things like that. Each of them goes up on its own as I train the things they correspond to. Strength when I push my body past what it can usually do. Agility when I move at the edge of my speed. Mana pool when I push my reserves. The stats climb in small increments, and when enough of them have climbed past a certain threshold all at once, my overall level goes up by one, and the System tells me. The level is what matters.

The stats are how the level is measured." Saoren listened without moving. When I finished, he tilted his head a fraction to one side and was quiet for a beat.

"Have you ever seen a similar thing, child, in any of the books that servant of yours used to give you?" The question was a strange one to be asked, and the strangeness of it was almost the most interesting part.

He had been asking me strange questions all day, and I had been answering them without thinking too hard about why he was asking, because the chance to talk about Nana's books with a person who actually wanted to listen did not come along often, and I was not going to waste one by asking him what the question was for.

"Yes! Actually, yes. There is one I read four or five times when I was five. It's about a young man named Halric. Halric is a farmboy in one of the southern provinces, and one night a comet falls into the field behind his house, and inside the comet is a small clear stone, and the stone speaks to him. It calls itself the Heaven's Ledger. From that moment on, Halric can see a kind of writing in the air that nobody else can see. The Ledger gives him quests.

Small ones at first — defend the village from a wolf, deliver a message to the next town — and as he completes them, the Ledger rewards him with abilities. Strength to lift things he could not lift before. The ability to run for a day without tiring. Eventually he gets a sword that grows sharper with each enemy he defeats, and a cloak that turns him invisible, and a small companion spirit that flies out of his shoulder during battle."

I laughed, thrilled to finally be able to talk about this to anyone other than Nana.

"The whole book is about Halric growing through his quests. Each chapter is one. There is a great quest at the end, where he has to climb a mountain and face a king of demons, and the Ledger gives him a final blessing right before the fight. He wins. He becomes the most famous hero of his age. The book ends with him retiring to the village he came from, with the Ledger still in his pocket, waiting for the next call from the heavens."

"And you read this when you were five?"

"Well, Nana read it to me, really. I could not properly read yet at the time, but it used to be my favorite story among all others, and I heard it four times that year. And actually read it when I was eleven, before Nana was sent away." Saoren did not move.

"Fascinating."

"Right? When I was younger I used to read it and I'd think about Halric for days afterward. The Ledger, the quests, the rewards... I— I think the heavens had given me my System for the same reasons they gave Halric his. That this was how it was supposed to work. That if I followed it the way Halric followed his, I'd grow the same way he did. Isn't that great?" He murmured something.

"... Sorry, what was that?" He looked down at me from the wall.

"Nothing of consequence, child. Now. You are rested, so you will resume. Stand. We will begin the next set."

"... The next set?"

"Martial forms. With spellcasting at the same time. Both must move with [Still Mind] running, and the cast must leave the hand cleanly without breaking the form. We will start slowly, but we will not stay slow." A small, tired sound escaped me before I could catch it. I had been hoping that the Halric conversation would extend itself long enough to get me through to sunset without further duck walks. Well, that was that. I pushed myself up off the well, rolled my shoulders, and stepped into first stance.

Combat magic worked along a simple line. The lighter the matter, the easier the cast. Air and the other gas-state elements were the cheapest as a single channelled breath could shape a wind cutter, ignite a fire bolt or drop a low-density mist. Liquids were the next step up. Water cost more mana, demanded more precision, and slipped out of a hand that did not have a firm hold on the shape. Solid matter was the worst of all of them.

Earth, ice, stone, heavy on the reserves, stubborn under control, slow to release once you had committed to it. Most mages handled the heavier elements with glyphs: prepared shapes etched onto paper or metal or skin, ready to receive a feed of mana and hold the structure for you so you did not have to hold it yourself. Sadly, I did not have a single glyph on me as I had not brought any up the mountain and I doubted Saoren would have let me use them even if I had.

"What is the most complex form you know, child?"

"Erm… the Sevenfold Branch. From the Northern set. It is a series of seven strikes connected by transitional steps, and each strike opens a different angle on the opponent. It is meant to be used unarmed, but you can run it with a staff if you replace the third and the sixth strikes. I learned it from Bellos when I was thirteen. It took me about a year to be able to run the full sequence without breaking the rhythm at the fourth transition."

"Run it slowly. With your breath in the pattern I taught you. The body does the form, the mind stays where the meditation put it. The two do not interfere with each other. They do not even know about each other. Do you understand?"

"... I think so?"

"You will. Begin." I shifted my weight onto the back foot, opened my hands, and breathed in for four.

"Master Saoren."

"Yes, child?"

"Can I use [Focus] and [Still Mind] at the same time?"

"... Sure."