Chương 185: 9. What's the Moral Here?

"Spare shoes," Violet says, running down a list of things to pack for our trip.

"Check!" I answer.

"Two changes of clothes."

"Check!" I actually had to argue up from one, since too much would weigh us down. Thankfully it wasn't too difficult to convince her that an extra over the bare essentials would be worth it. None of us want to end up stuck in the same outfit for days again.

"Nipper."

"Check," I giggle, giving the little guy on my shoulder an affectionate scratch.

"Spear."

"Blood and acid, Vi, I'm not going to forget your dang spear!"

"Good. Then I think we've got just about everything." With our travel bag all packed, I head out to meet Talla at the lakeshore, where our friends are gathered to see us off. So is half the dang tribe, apparently.

"Really guys?" I chuckle.

"We're just going camping." Jira laughs and claps me on the shoulder.

"Don't underestimate the wilderness, Little Baddie! Those mountains have claimed many lives."

"Speaking of which," Remi cuts in, "I've asked Ranger Talla to inspect the wards of the local convergence point while you're away, but she insisted I direct the request to you instead." I blink and throw Talla a questioning glance.

"I wasn't about to drag you along to a convergence point without asking," she explains.

"Though this should be very different from the one you came from. Degala has kept the wards on their own." Remi scratches the base of her horns and sighs.

"Our priestesses aren't the highest level, and they weren't able to make the trip this year, but we've never had a break. If you're ascending the mountain anyway, it would save us a great deal of trouble." A little detour to do some routine maintenance for the tribe seems reasonable to me. It's Talla's job, in theory, and will probably help Vi level her new class. I cock my head and put a finger to my chin.

"Hmm, I don't see an issue with it, but, [girls]?" I ask, briefly switching to our own language.

"It's a measurable way to help the village," Violet agrees.

"If Talla thinks it's safe, then I trust her."

"I wouldn't want to interfere with Lady Talla's duties," Evie adds.

"And it would ease the burden on the local priestesses."

"Dungeon raid! Dungeon raid! Dungeon raid!" Maggie chants.

"We're not raiding anything," I chide her, rolling my eyes before turning back to Remi and Talla.

"Sounds like we're all in agreement." With that, we start loading up the boat—just a simple rowboat that we'll be using to cross the lake.

"Best of luck on your journey, ladies," Fargo bids us as he helps lift our packs.

"You're sure you don't want to come with?" I offer.

"Plenty of space in the boat, and I figured you'd be all over the chance to go on an adventure."

"A well-known mountain within the bounds of my homeland is hardly an adventure," he chuckles.

"Besides, I've crossed that mountain once before, and I'm not eager to repeat it. Taaka and I will remain to await your return."

"Msshi?" I ask, turning to the serpentfolk in question. They look up from the bag they're carrying with a start, flicking their tongue.

"Me? I would not dare intrude on such a thing." I furrow my brow.

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"This journey," they explain.

"It is your Crossroad, is it not?" The word Msshi uses is a really complicated term from the People's tongue. Their language is extremely dense and involves a lot of double-meanings and metaphors. In this case, what I've mentally translated as "Crossroad" is more literally "the place where all paths meet" and also"the beginning of the path." It is, I gather, a thing of cultural significance—not unlike the Fa'aun coming-of-age upon forming their core class. [Level up!] Linguist has grown from level 9 to 10.

+1 Awareness. Linguist has reached its maximum threshold. [Upgrade] or [Fuse] the class to unlock further progression. Oh! Nice timing, but I'll have to deal with that a bit later.

"I don't know if it's all that, Msshi," I say.

"It's just a chance to clear my head and figure out what our plans for the future are."

"That sounds like the Crossroad to me," they reply.

"Besides, my kind are not meant for such terrain. I would slow you down, and be at risk if the weather grows cold." I would laugh at the idea of it getting cold if a distinct dusty white pattern hadn't appeared on the mountain peaks just yesterday. It may still be hot as heck down here, but up on the mountain is another story, especially once we clear the rainforests to reach the higher plateaus, which we very much intend to do, since you can't exactly stargaze from a rainforest.

"Alright, stay safe everybody," I say, bidding them farewell with a wave as I climb aboard the boat.

"We'll be back soon!"

"Find what you seek, Little Baddie!" Jira calls back in reply. The phrase gives me pause. Wasn't that the exact phrasing of the advancement conditions for [Unified Wanderers]? I mean, it's a different language, so not exactly, but it can't be a coincidence that I interpreted it that way. We didn't even have that class anymore by the time we met Jira. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

I purse my lips as Talla casts us off, mentally reminding myself to keep an eye on our soothsaying [Captain of Her Own Fate]. She always seems to know more than she's letting on, but not in the same way as, say, the Alchemist. Unlike the infuriatingly cryptic know-it-all, her easygoing attitude makes it easy to forget that she's probably the highest level person we currently know. As Talla and I row our way across the placid lake, I ask her about the nature of fortune-telling skills and spells.

"Divination, huh?" she muses.

"It's surprisingly common, though that's mostly because it encompasses a wider range of abilities than most people think."

"I'm mostly just interested in the ones that can tell the future," I say.

"You've got one yourself, right? You said it predicted the weather. How does that even work?" I'm actually just being polite. Talla shared her entire core class with us in an act of good faith after we took the leap of trusting her with the secrets of our own. I know exactly which skill she used to anticipate our opening to view the stars. [Read the Skies] Divine information from the firmament. As long as you can see the sky, you always know the exact time and date, and may predict upcoming astronomical phenomena.

"So do you," Talla replied.

"Or you did. Your classes have changed quite a bit since, so I'm not sure what it's turned into since." I place a finger on my chin and hum thoughtfully, trying to recall what she means.

"That would be... [Inner Compass] I think?" [Inner Compass] You always know which direction you're facing, and can faintly sense what lies down a path. That was part of our [Pathfinder] class, since fused into Evie's [Dreamwalker]. I suppose the ability to conjure a projection of our surroundings into a dream could be considered an upgrade.

"That's the one," Talla confirms.

"Divination can be roughly divided into three categories. Those are clairvoyance, psychometry, and augury. At a glance, your old skill is a type of clairvoyance—that is, the ability to gain information at a distance—but as you describe it, you would get premonitions about certain directions, right?" I nod slowly. Since I was the one who actually trained that class, I can recall it pretty vividly.

"It's hard to put into words. A given tunnel might make me feel uneasy or hopeful, but nothing more specific than that."

"That's how low-tier divination usually works," she explains.

"Even my own augury skill isn't all that specific. I know that the equinox is approaching, but anybody with eyes could tell you that. The more valuable insight is that it should coincide with clear skies at some point somewhere nearby."

"And I suppose that 'some point' and 'somewhere' are doing a lot of heavy lifting."

"Indeed," she sighs.

"Thankfully the equinox is a small enough window that it's simple enough to just camp through the whole thing, but we could still get extremely unlucky and have our only window appear during the day." Oof. I can't imagine how much that would suck. Imagine hiking all the way up a mountain, through a rainforest, then camping out for days only for your one chance to go up in smoke.

"Is that likely?" I ask.

"Not if we make sure we're above the mists gathering in the rainforest," Talla replies.

"Going entirely above the clouds would be impossible even if the mountain was tall enough, but avoiding the fog gives us the best chance."

"So augury is inconsistent?" I ask.

"The way Al put it, nothing is certain but the [World Engine] nudges the scale a bit." More precisely, he said it plays with loaded dice, but given the religious significance held by the divine mechanism, it can't hurt to phrase it more diplomatically. Talla's not the most pious person, but she still has her faith.

"It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the visions of the future allowed to us by the Goddess are only those that are most likely to come to pass," she says.

"Though I hesitate to second-guess the Alchemist. Visions of the future are notoriously difficult to change, and precise ones are rare in the extreme."

"That also lines up with what Al said," I admit.

"I'm still a little mad at him for not warning us about the disaster that happened at the tribunal, but he said that it's better to prepare for the fallout than try to prevent it." Talla purses her lips.

"I'm not sure I agree, given the gravity of the consequences, but without knowing more about how his augury works it's hard to say."

"He probably gets it straight from the source," Maggie comments.

"He called that 'Ocean of Possibilities' the boundary of all that is and all that might be. He had to dive deep to steal insights from other worlds, but I bet you could get some sick future visions just from looking at the surface." I shudder at the memory of the brief glimpse I got of that limitless cosmos of reality just before Maggie woke up to shield me from it. How anybody could see that and decide it's not enough is completely beyond me.

As Mags is the one among us who's spent the most time studying and contemplating that terrible eternity, I'll defer to her judgment.

"What about Jira?" I ask.

"She must be pretty high tier, right?" Talla cocks her head back and forth for a moment, mulling it over.

"She probably is," she agrees.

"But that doesn't necessarily mean her augury skill is more powerful. At that age, it's more likely that she's refined her use of it to a level that makes it much stronger in her hands than it would be for someone else. At its core, I don't think her skill is all that different from your [Inner Compass]." I blink.

"Really? Even the Alchemist put a lot of weight on her abilities. He didn't outright say it, but I'm pretty sure half the reason he arranged for all of us to meet on her ship was just that she was there. Her presence alone, he said, was an omen."

"It could well be," Talla muses.

"But that doesn't mean her ability to see the future is more powerful. If anything, it may mean the opposite." I furrow my brow, trying to understand.

"How does that make any sense?"

"Captain Jira summarized her class as [Captain of Her Own Fate]. That doesn't let us see the specifics of her skills, but it does tell us something valuable—her focus is not on seeing, but changing fate. Two things that are all but mutually exclusive."

"Now you're definitely losing me," I groan.

"The Paradox of the Oracle," Talla states, shifting demeanor into her familiar lecture mode.

"It is said that the more clear a vision of the future becomes, the harder it is to change it. One famous fable describes an empress who called upon two soothsayers to advise her in court. The first warned that her heiress was unprepared to succeed her, and advised that the princess should be sent away from the palace to study. The second oracle told the Empress exactly when and how her daughter would murder her."

"That's a pretty grisly fable," I say with a grimace. Though it's not too different from the myths about oracles back home.

"Let me guess, she tried to have the princess killed, only to cause the exact enmity that led to the second oracle's prophecy being fulfilled?"

"Not quite," Talla chuckles.

"She did have her heiress executed for treason—and the first seer too, for abetting the supposed coup. Assuming her fate was averted, the Empress forgot about the prophecy entirely—only for her second daughter to fulfill it instead."

"So what's the moral here?" I ask.

"Next time make sure you kill all your daughters?" She snorts.

"If there's a lesson to be learned, it's that the Empress could have saved her first daughter from the second's treachery by heeding the first oracle's warning. By desperately trying to avert the prophecy given by the second oracle, she wasted both visions and lost everything."

"I see. Did that actually happen?"

"Probably not," Talla admits.

"But the point remains. I think Jira's talent for riding the currents of fate comes from a mixture of her Skill and the decades of experience she has in reading the portents it grants her. Her ability is in navigating the future, rather than predicting it." I guess that's reasonable. I'm still left to wonder how much she sees and how often she meddles.

My greatest concern, after all, is that Al saw what was going to happen and failed to warn us not because he thought it wouldn't change anything, but because he didn't want it to. Either because it was easier to control an outcome he already expected, or more worrisome, because that was already the outcome he wanted. Jira has earned a lot more trust from me than Al has, but there's a paranoid part of me that wonders if maybe that's the point.

Either way, I'm grateful for the opportunity to put that all behind us for a little while. Though I can't say I'm looking forward to hiking up that mountain. I, uh, think I'll let Vi handle most of the walking.