Chương 27: Love Advice from an Archmage

Ch 27: Love Advice from an Archmage The day after sealing the deal with Elitha, and hours before my first knowledge-exchange visit to her tower, I found myself enjoying lunch with everyone, our table full of people from every species, gathered here for healthy mix of friendship and business.

"The next version of your ssssystem..." said Kip.

"Mussst include transsslation..." Kap added.

"Becausse it would allow usss to visit the city and do businessss there," Kip finished. The brothers were sitting across from me, talking while they ate their expensive omnivorous meal. I nodded, recognizing the business opportunities translation would unlock, but perfectly aware of how difficult adding the translation spell to the system would be. Zira, sitting next to the brothers, joined the conversation.

"Can't you improve the range of the system, Eric?" she asked.

"It would be amazing if your spheres had the same range as those prototypes you gave us to hunt the Mimics." Zira was eating a pile of fruits that had probably cost her thirty credits, and she was eating them as if they cost nothing at all.

"Improving the range is doable, but I don't know if the trade-off of switching from passive mana absorption to active mana feeding is worth it for the system as a product." That was when Niko decided to join the conversation from my left. He was eating from a large pile of roasted ribs that surely wasn't cheap either.

"Can you add the status-recording feature that shows your power improving to the user in the next version, just like the sphere you and your life mate use, Eric?" At that comment, even Lili and Sahirah stopped eating to stare at the clueless alpha furball. How many times had he made the same social faux pas of calling Sahirah my life mate when even we hadn't given a name to whatever it was we had? Again, I pretended he hadn't said anything weird.

"I could do that," I said, "but each sphere would get thirty credits more expensive because of the data crystal." Sahirah, who was likely eating the most expensive meal at the table, with three kinds of raw meat covering her plate, finally decided to join the conversation from my right.

"Can't we talk about something else?" she said.

"A girl only gets to see all of you at lunch. Do we really have to talk business every single day?" I smirked. At some point during the past month, I suspected Sahirah had started to see the sales team as friends, and I could see in her eyes how much she hated it when the conversation was nothing but business during lunch. Lili also joined the conversation.

"What else would we talk about?" she said.

"Each of us is from a different world, with a different culture and a different worldview. If we talk too much, disagreements will arise faster than we can solve them." Sahirah stopped eating for a moment.

"Regardless of our backgrounds, we are peers in this school, and Principal Zorik is organizing an inter-school tournament that affects all of us. Eric and I suspect he'll find a way to include us even if we don't volunteer." Yeah, that was the unfortunate truth. Principal Dickhead had been suspiciously quiet ever since the mayor paid us for the not-so-successful Mimic extermination.

And what Sahirah and I weren't sharing with them was that we'd abused the Presence Erasure spell a bit to spy on the Grey man, and learn how he intended to get back at us for the way he felt disrespected when the mayor stepped in to pay us. Zorik was planning to convince the teachers that the most powerful students had to be chosen for the event, using the very argument that Sahirah and I would win the school a lot of credits because we were strong enough to melt a building.

And I suspected that now that he couldn't weaponize payment, he would use the fact that he was currently turning a blind eye to our cohabitation to force us to participate. The worst part was that everyone at this table could get dragged into it quite easily if Zorik decided to pressure us.

"The brothers and I will participate anyway, so this is not a problem," said Niko.

"The Driari won't be left behind either," said Lili, throwing a glance at Zira, who obviously didn't want to participate but felt pressured to nod. Sahirah and I exchanged a look, and I sighed. Why were only three of us normal people among this bunch of warriorheads? With nothing else to add to the conversation as they seemed eager to participate in the event, I rose from my seat, and a lot of people from the other tables stared at me the moment I did. Some looked at me with curious eyes. Others smelled of envy.

I offered them a smile. We weren't the table of interspecies weirdos who ate together every day anymore, were we? We were now the rich guys who didn't need to save credits on food and who had helped the school end the Mimic crisis. That was good, I thought. Because it meant that hiring them for our company would be very easy when I was ready to expand.

Elitha's tower was the same as yesterday, but with one important difference. The moment I stepped inside the room with the floating crystal near the entrance, her voice sounded from everywhere at once.

"You can study the translation spell on the fourth floor, little lamb," she said.

"But don't you dare break anything. Ah, and don't try to talk to me. I'm doing something that demands my attention right now." She wanted my help with her sensorial problem but wasn't even willing to talk to me? Still, I would not complain. I was a simple human, and she was an archmage. But there was no law saying I wasn't allowed to dislike how she treated me, right?

Cursing her in my mind, I climbed the stairs, and I only let go of my irritation when the sight of the lab with its floating runes suspended in a mana field stole my attention. And since I had permission to enter the place this time, I didn't hesitate for a single moment. The first thing I inspected was what looked like the blueprint of a simple spell. It hovered over a stone platform, rotating in the air like some kind of 3D projection made entirely out of mana.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. There was no way this was the translation spell I was supposed to study, given how simple the thing was. But why were there runes in it that I didn't recognize? I had finished Magica Principia, and the book claimed that the ten thousand runes it contained were enough to invent all kinds of new spells. Could I be missing something important by not investing time in the newly discovered runes?

Well, even if I was, I had only spent three months on Navar, and I had other priorities for now. The translation spell, for once. It was the very thing I needed most. With that in mind, I forgot about the exotic spell, moving from one stone platform to another and finding several unlabeled spells that I mostly couldn't understand in full. Still, I could tell at a glance that none of them were what I was looking for. A question began to form in my mind. Why wasn't everything labeled? Could Elitha be testing me?

I sighed and kept looking until I stumbled across a weird spell. It was a simple pile of magic circles apparently, but the runes were so tiny that I couldn't see them individually. I brought my face closer and squinted, but nothing. My eyes were not enough. It was as if I were trying to see the semiconductors in a microchip with the naked eye. And if that was the case, what I was probably missing was some sort of magnification button on the stone platform. But the more I looked for one, the more confused I became.

The thing had no moving parts whatsoever, no obvious way to interface with it. It had only some mana pathways and nothing more. It was only when I touched the stone and noticed a strange texture beneath my fingers that it clicked. I could probably inject my mana into those pathways, couldn't I? And that was exactly what I did. Yet, as the now-familiar feeling of mana leaving my body hit me, something else happened.

Every rune in the room suddenly began to lose brightness as the tiny spell I was trying to magnify grew larger and larger. I tried to stop it, but I didn't know how, so I just touched the stone again, trying to find the opposite command. Yet before I could, the thing had grown to cover half the room, while the other runes on the surrounding platforms began to dim and fade.

"Who the hell designs something that self-destructs because of one wrong command?" My eyes widened as I watched the equivalent of a website deleting every single file on the server because a user had accidentally clicked the wrong button.

"Someone who doesn't make stupid mistakes." The answer came in Elitha's voice as the magnification stopped, every other spell in the room regaining it's original brightness. I was about to complain about the stupid design choices when I suddenly froze, my gaze landing on the now-magnified stack of runes. This was definitely the translation spell. My body went rigid from head to toe. Seven giant modules, each containing around a thousand runes. I read as much as I could.

There were no exotic runes here, so it wasn't an impossible task. Within minutes, I recognized the basic structure. There was a module that connected with the mind. It seemed to extract a snippet of the target's exact mental state, almost like taking a screenshot of their mind. Then another module projected that state into the caster's mind, probably using the caster's own brain to decode the meaning behind speech.

It allowed the caster to briefly perceive the target's feelings and intentions to understand what was being said in a sentence of a language they didn't speak. Then there was a module I understood completely. A variation of the illusion spell, it allowed the caster to project a convincing illusion onto another target: a real-time translation of what was being said by one being into a format that someone from a completely different background could understand. I frowned hard at the complexity of it all.

And I nearly had a heart attack when I considered how Elitha was casting that spell for every single person inside the school at once. For the first time, I truly glimpsed the power of an archmage. Her mind had to be the equivalent of a supercomputer just to handle that spell. How did a living being of flesh and blood even reach such a level?

"Study well, little lamb," she said.

"Because for the other half of the afternoon, you're going to help solve my sensorial problem." With that, her voice vanished, leaving me alone with the complexity of the translation spell, the very thing I had wished to learn for so long. And only now did I understand why the Greys actually needed an archmage stationed in every school to cast it. Fuck.

If I wanted any hope of implementing it into my system, I would need to rely on the grandmother of all workarounds, a decent amount of luck, and more creativity than a programmer was ever supposed to have.

The water sphere still hovered in the air on the tenth floor of Elitha's tower, containing so much water that it could probably kill me if she lost control of it. As my gaze landed on the Grey woman whose gouged-out eyes were hidden behind that bandana, she gestured for me to sit. Once more, I had to crouch down and pretend the floating water didn't bother me as much as it actually did.

"So..." I said as I got myself comfortable.

"Where exactly do we begin?" I knew vey well I could only hope to give her ideas and fragments of knowledge based on what I remembered, and that she would ultimately have to solve her own problem. But what exactly would our knowledge-exchange sessions be like?

"We talk, and that's all." Just talk? That sounded too easy to be true. Well, not exactly easy, since I had no idea what kind of conversation a Grey archmage would find interesting, but it was certainly better than a one-sided interrogation.

"I still don't know exactly where to begin," I said.

"Why don't you ask me a question?" To my surprise, she rejected the idea.

"I'd rather start this conversation with you owing me something," she said.

"Are you interested in hearing something I suspect you'll find very interesting, little lamb?" I had no reason to say no, so I just nodded. Elitha Hearthstrong smiled from ear to ear.

"The reason why the girl with mismatched eyes doesn't want to push for the third stage of dual cultivation is because she knows it will conclude the first full cycle of refinement: fist body, then mana, and finally the soul." Wait a minute... Why was the archmage talking about Sahirah and me?

"Body, mana, and soul? What the hell do you even mean?" The first stage gave us mana and constitution, so I could see it being related to the body. The second stage increased basically just mana and mana control, so it made sense that it was related to mana. But what about the soul? Elitha seemed to take pleasure in my confusion and let the silence go on.

"Have you ever asked yourself why dual cultivation is taboo on our planet, little lamb?" Of course I had, but it wasn't like I could simply walk up to a Grey and ask directly, given that even the mention of dual cultivation seemed to make them uncomfortable.

"Where are you going with this?" I asked. She smiled as a few drops of water fell toward my face from the sphere. I looked up, and adrenaline shot through my veins as all that water seemed about to fall over me. This time, it didn't seem like a lapse in control. It felt more like something she had done just to annoy me. It worked.

"Have you ever asked yourself what the consequences would be if each stage of dual cultivation could only truly flourish once?"

"I–""What if, on top of only providing its real benefits once, completing the first cycle locked you to a single partner forever?" I was speechless. Was she really talking about a hypothesis here? Well, the word on the the Fire Moon book second stage certainly were suspicious: this song shall endure through every season, forever engraved in memory and soul.

If pushing to the next stage and completing a full cycle locked you to a single partner forever, then I could very easily see why the Greys might consider it taboo if people from different species did it. Well, even among the same species, it would be troubling. Much worse than an accidental pregnancy, maybe. Just imagining a scenario where two clueless young people accidentally went too far with dual cultivation made my head hurt. If that were the case, would they have to stay together forever?

That, or give up a lot of competitive advantage, and a potentially powerful source of strength that would leave them at a severe disadvantage in the future. What about Sahirah and me? Had we already gone too far? Elitha noticed something in me the moment I asked myself that question, and she spoke again.

"Don't you find this strange, little lamb?" she said.

"The girl with mismatched eyes stopped the two of you from advancing too far before there was no going back. But how does she know all of this? Don't you think that's a bit suspicious?" Not a single word left my mouth. Suspicious? Of course it was suspicious. Just like lying about her surname when she apparently had absolutely no reason to was suspicious. But Sahirah had also promised to tell me a lot of things once we had some privacy. More importantly: why was Elitha, of all people, telling me this now?

That was much more suspicious than anything Sahirah might have done.

"I don't get you," I said.

"You summoned me here to help you, and now that I'm here, you're talking about my personal life? How does that make any sense?"

"But it does." Elitha Hearthstrong laughed, and the entire water sphere shook above us.

"What I'm trying to tell you," she said, "is that the path to the power of an archmage often begins with completing the first cycle of dual cultivation." She crossed her arms, and even though she didn't have eyes, it felt as though she were staring directly into my soul.

"And if you and that girl decide to take that step," she said, "you will experience a rapid improvement in your mental faculties. Even memories that currently reside beneath your consciousness, unreachable to your current self, might resurface." With a smile that told me she knew exactly what kind of revelation she had just dropped on me, she added, "And if you remember more knowledge from your planet, even if it's only a little, you instantly become more useful to me."

It took me several minutes to comprehend the ridiculous extent of her cunning. Could it be that, several months ago, when she handed me the Fire Moon book as a reward for seeing the runes of my system, this archmage had already been planning for something like this? No. That just couldn't be. How could I accept that this level of foresight was even possible?

But then again, for someone who was even now translating languages for an entire school while playing with my life beneath a giant sphere of floating water, nothing seemed impossible.