Chương 48: 13. Mysterious Powers

Marcus sat in what was normally Old Pliny's office in the orphanage, tapping his chin thoughtfully as he tried to figure out the best approach for this. He had told Pliny and Titus to leave the room and call Renatus here so Marcus could have a private conversation with him, but truthfully, he did not know what the proper way to handle something like this was. He had travelled the world and seen many things, but rarely did he have children under his care to worry about. A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts.

Before he could tell the person to come inside, the door cracked open and a child's head peeked into the room experimentally. For a moment, Marcus considered telling Renatus off for not waiting for his response before opening the door. What was even the point of knocking if you were just going to do that? However, he just silently gestured for the boy to come inside instead. Renatus immediately slipped inside, closing the door behind him.

Marcus would usually pay such minor details no heed, but knowing what he did about the boy, he noted that Renatus had managed to close the door while making only the slightest of sounds.

"Uh, I was told you asked to see me?" Renatus said.

"I did," Marcus nodded.

"Please sit down, young man."

"Ahh… it feels weird to be called that," Renatus protested. He did walk up to the chair Marcus had pointed out and sat down as instructed.

"I know you're an exalted elder from the Great Sea Academy, but how about you just call me Renatus?"

"Sure. Renatus it is, then," Marcus agreed. He studied the boy in front of him for a second. He was short for his age, with black hair and very dark eyes. Renatus was clearly somewhat nervous, which made sense for someone invited for a private talk with an authority figure, but he didn't appear to be terribly nervous. He clearly didn't realize how much Marcus knew about him.

He also seemed to have trouble sitting still – his fingers and feet were constantly twitching and shifting in place – but Marcus knew from his previous observations that this was standard for the boy.

"So, uh, what did you want to talk to me about? Did I pass?" Renatus asked, too impatient to just sit in silence like this.

"You did pretty good at the tests," Marcus told him, folding his fingers into a triangle in front of him.

"You've got courage, you have some brains, and you did well at the magic talent examination. You would be easily accepted into the Great Tree Academy, I think."

"But not good enough to be accepted by you," the boy guessed. He sounded disappointed, but also resigned. As if he already expected to fail.

"I didn't say that," Marcus told him.

"You could be better, but the other children aren't exactly amazing either. You are definitely one of my favorite candidates right now."

"Oh," he said, perking up.

"Oh! But I'm kind of…" He trailed off suddenly. Marcus raised an eyebrow at him.

"Yes?"

"N-nothing!" Renatus quickly assured him.

"I, uh, know Old Pliny probably told you some stories about me, but it's all super exaggerated, okay? That guy is always after me for some reason."

"Really? Elder Pliny actually had some uncharacteristically generous praise for you. Said you always paid attention during his lessons and even pursued academics in your own free time, without him having to hound you about it," Marcus told him.

"Ehh!?" Renatus seemed at a loss for words.

"I guess Old- I mean Elder Pliny-""He did say you were something of a troublemaker, as well," Marcus added.

"However, I won't take that too much against you. We've all done some stupid things here and there."

"Err, yeah, yeah," Renatus agreed, nodding vigorously. He started gesticulating wildly with his hands.

"It's like you say, Master Marcus. I will definitely turn a new leaf and not cause trouble, ha ha ha! Why would I risk being sent away from a great teacher like you? That would be crazy!"

"Hmm. That's good," Marcus told him.

"That said, I haven't finalized the selection just yet. Do you perhaps have any special abilities or magical traits that you haven't told anyone about? That would definitely seal the deal and ensure you were chosen. Everyone is always on the lookout for people with something special about them, after all." Renatus immediately flinched back in his seat, his eyes widening. He then seemed to realize his reaction was suspicious, and tried to recover his composure.

However, he then froze and gave Marcus a long stare, realization dawning on his face.

"Y-You know!" he accused, pointing his finger at him accusingly. Rude.

"I know," Marcus confirmed. It was fun while it lasted, but he wasn't going to play games forever.

"Wait," Renatus said, narrowing his eyes.

"What do you know?"

"That you have a divine blessing, stupid," said Marcus, controlling his urge to roll his eyes at him.

"Who do you think you're talking to?"

"Y-You even know it's a divine blessing?" Renatus asked, his shoulder slumping slightly.

"If it were anything else, you would never have been able to keep it a secret for so long," Marcus said.

"A key feature of divine blessings and other miracles is that they cannot be detected by mortal magic. Their effects can be observed, but they use no mana and do not register as magical in any way. If what you had was a chaos mutation or an inherited magical ability, you would have been caught ages ago for magic use. Not to mention that I would have been able to detect it when I examined you on the stage earlier."

"Wait. You didn't detect it when you held my hand?" Renatus asked.

"How could a mortal mage ever detect a divine blessing?" Marcus asked rhetorically.

"Of course I didn't detect anything unusual then."

"Then how…?" Instead of explaining with words, Marcus held out his hand in front of him and conjured an illusory screen in front of Renatus' face. A life-like scene of the boy skulking around in the nearby Willowhill village was projected on it. The boy on the screen expertly kept out of sight of wandering villagers and old grannies looking out of their windows to pass the time and eventually slipped into a storage shed, where he made his way towards a collection of large bags.

He placed his hand on one of them, and the bag just… disappeared. After that, Renatus on the screen fled the scene, at one point suddenly becoming completely invisible to avoid getting noticed by one of the villagers. Renatus watched the illusion with a look of resigned amazement on his face, clearly fascinated by the illusion magic that made this re-enactment possible, but also increasingly aware that there was no way to trick Marcus about what he had been doing when he had clearly seen everything.

Finally, the boy had enough of this. He waved his hand through the illusory screen a couple of times, disrupting it and causing it to fade away. He then sighed heavily. It was a loud, very dramatic sigh. Very theatrical and exaggerated. Celer would like this kid, Marcus thought to himself.

"Undone by a single bag of walnuts," Renatus said sadly.

"I knew it was a bad idea to do that while there was a powerful mage visiting the orphanage."

"But you did it anyway," Marcus pointed out.

"I used my abilities when there were other mages visiting, and they never noticed something was wrong," Renatus said defensively. Not too surprising. No matter how powerful a mage was, divine magic could not be detected. Unless the mage in question had a reason to suspect Renatus was up to something and had access to sufficiently advanced spying magic that could covertly observe him, it would be hard to catch the boy in the act.

Marcus was quiet for a second, tapping his fingers against each other thoughtfully while staring at Renatus. Renatus, for his part, shifted even more nervously under his gaze.

"You know," Marcus said.

"I don't actually mind that you kept your divine blessing secret."

"You don't?" Renatus asked, surprised.

"I don't. Mages always have their share of secrets, even from their own teachers. It is in our nature. The main reason not to keep secrets is that it limits you in how effective you can be. If you're keeping some of your abilities a secret, you will miss some opportunities you would have gotten otherwise, and you might lose people and things you care about just because you didn't want to reveal all your cards to your opponents. But, well, you're still a kid, and no one is relying on you.

I can respect your self-control in keeping something like a divine blessing a closely-kept secret instead of revealing it to everyone straight away in hopes of getting a privileged treatment. What I cannot respect, though, is the stealing." Renatus opened his mouth to defend himself but Marcus shut him up by lifting his palm at him. There was no actual magic in the move, but the boy was smart enough to recognize that Marcus was telling him to shut up and listen.

"I know what you're going to say, and it would just be insulting," Marcus said.

"If you are so cavalier about using your abilities to steal that you'd risk getting caught over a bag of walnuts, it means you've been using your divine blessing to steal constantly. This isn't a one-time thing, or a two-time thing, or even a five-time thing. Constantly." Renatus lowered his head in shame. Well, if he still had the capacity to be ashamed at the accusation, at least there was some hope for the kid yet. That was encouraging.

"Anyway, here's what I'm going to do. I will accept you as my student," Marcus said. Renatus raised his head, giving him a surprised look.

"However, I will give restitution to the Willowhill villagers for the damage you've inflicted over the years," Marcus continued. At least, he assumed this has all been going on for years at this point. He had no idea when Renatus got his divine blessing.

"You will owe me for this."

"Of course," Renatus hurriedly agreed.

"I will definitely pay it all back, it's just-""And you will apologize to the village elder for your actions," Marcus added. Renatus' face soured, clearly unhappy at the thought of having to apologize. However, to his credit, he didn't actually say anything in protest.

"I know I should make things right, but is it really a good idea to tell everyone I have a divine blessing?" he asked Marcus slowly and hesitantly.

"Oh no, we will definitely keep that part to ourselves," Marcus assured him.

"It's impossible to fully cover this up. I already told Old Pliny about this, for one thing. However, the fewer people know about your divine blessing, the better. The only thing the villagers have to know is that you've been stealing from them. Don't even mention there was magic involved, let alone divine magic." Renatus stared at him silently.

"As I said, Mages always have their share of secrets. It is in the nature of the profession," Marcus shrugged. He didn't want anyone else to know that his student had undetectable stealth magic. For one thing, such an ability was more powerful the less people knew about it. More importantly, though, if knowledge of his abilities spread, a lot of people would always be extremely wary of him, and a lot of doors that would otherwise be open to him would close.

Powerful stealth magic was automatically powerful assassination magic, and mages – even powerful mages – were very vulnerable to assassinations.

"What would happen if I just… refused to become your student?" Renatus asked, biting his lip.

"Do I even have a choice at this point?"

"You always have a choice," Marcus said.

"And in any case, I'm not interested in unwilling students. If you think dealing with me is too troublesome, you can stay here until you're ready to leave the orphanage. Keep in mind, however, that I will inform Elder Pliny of everything I know and as your caretaker, he will surely have his own thoughts about what needs to be done in regards to your… behavior." Renatus swallowed heavily.

"There, there is no need for that! I was just speaking hypothetically, Master Marcus," Renatus assured him, waving his hands in front of him.

"Of course I want to be your student!"

"That's great," Marcus told him. In truth, there was no way Renatus could be allowed to run amok in the mundane world with no oversight from anyone.

"Do me a favor and describe how your divine blessing actually works. I am going to be your teacher, and I already know about it, so I trust you have no problem with this." Renatus seemed slightly hesitant about the idea, but eventually nodded to him and began to talk. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"It's hard to explain because sometimes even I don't get it," Renatus said.

"But I have the ability to generate these invisible bubbles. If I make them swallow objects, they become weightless and invisible, and the bubbles follow me around as I move, carrying things for me."

"Aha. So that's how you carried off that big, bulky bag with seemingly no effort," Marcus mused. He had wondered about that. He had already figured that there was more to Renatus' abilities than just making things invisible, but it was interesting to hear how the blessing actually worked.

"Yeah," Renatus nodded.

"The bubbles are weird. It gets harder to create more of them than I already have, but it doesn't seem to matter if I'm carrying five bags of flour in them, or five individual leaves. They both require five bubbles to carry. Five bubbles is the maximum I can create at the moment."

"At the moment, you say. So I'm guessing the number you can create increased over time?" Marcus asked. Renatus nodded affirmatively.

"And surely you can just lump those five leaves together into a single pile and put them in the same bubble?"

"Uh, no," Renatus said, shaking his head.

"I tried that and the bubbles refused to recognize the leaf pile as one object. They have a mind of their own, and they decide on their own what is and is not an object. They don't want to swallow anything living aside from myself, either. Really, I can't even make them move the way I want to – they just follow after me like a bunch of ducklings. All I can do is order them to swallow and spit things out." Something clicked in Marcus's mind hearing this description.

"So when you turned invisible back during your walnut heist, you were putting one of these bubbles over yourself, then?" he asked Renatus.

"That's why you didn't make the whole trip while invisible. You cannot move while inside a bubble."

"Yes," Renatus confirmed.

"I also don't see very well with a bubble over me. Everything is gray and blurry, and sounds are distorted. It can be hard to figure out what is happening around me. I don't like using that trick, but it can be handy sometimes." It made sense to Marcus that Renatus' divine blessing revolved completely around the weird bubbles he commanded. Marcus had only encountered a divine blessing twice in his life before meeting Renatus, but each time it had a pretty narrow theme.

One of them gave a young warrior the ability to summon copies of any sword they touched, including magical ones, and the other could compel anyone in the vicinity to answer their questions truthfully.

"I don't suppose you know what god gave you your powers?" Marcus asked.

"No," Renatus said, shaking his head.

"I just woke up one day, about a year and a half ago, and I had this. I don't know how, but I knew in my heart instantly that this was a divine blessing." Hmm. Much like Marcus couldn't get the vision of the collapsing planet out of his mind, perhaps? There was a weight to the vision, and it demanded to be remembered and considered seriously, in a way that couldn't possibly be natural. It was entirely possible that the blessing Renatus received came with a similar revelation of its divine nature attached to it.

He nodded slightly, lost in thought for a moment. From what Marcus had read, this story was quite common among those who possessed a divine blessing. Such divine gifts were rare, but less rare than most people realized, and they occurred all over the planet with little established pattern.

Some of them were explicitly given by the gods of the Illuminated pantheon or the other two temples, but in that case it was mostly given to their own priests and faithful, usually for major achievements and a lifetime of service. However, most of the recipients of divine blessings were seemingly random people, usually children or young adults, who had done nothing special to deserve them. The blessings were provided by an anonymous source, and came with no obligations attached to them.

This was quite strange, since gods were prideful beings and liked to take credit for their deeds. The official story from the Illuminated Pantheon was that the gods occasionally blessed random mortals as an expression of their innate goodness and generosity, but Marcus had heard some heretical theories that these blessings came from an outside source. An alien force so grand and powerful that even the gods of the Illuminated Pantheon did not dare go after its mortal agents.

In any case, Marcus actually preferred things to be this way. If Renatus had been given a blessing by a specific named god, Marcus would have no choice but to hand him over to whatever temple that god was associated with. As it was, the priests had no right to butt their heads into his business, and Marcus liked it that way. He discussed some more details with Renatus and then sent him out of the office so he could consider the things he found out in private.

Afterwards, Marcus summoned the six chosen candidates in front of the orphanage, and offered to be their teacher. He didn't really think any of them would refuse, but tradition demanded that a mage formally accept his students in front of witnesses so that there was no ambiguity in these matters. In big academies, the deliberations regarding test results could take several days to resolve. In this case, the whole process only took several hours, even accounting for his interrogation of Renatus.

Much of the crowd was still here, as people were curious about who would get eventually chosen – the villagers had gone home when Marcus retreated into the orphanage to discuss the results of his tests, but came back quickly once the word came out that he was ready to announce his choice. Marcus quickly called out six names and had them step out in front of him.

He expected some disappointed comments from the rest of the candidates that didn't get chosen, maybe even an outburst or two, but mostly the crowd just erupted into mumbling and gossip. They seemed to find great significance in the fact four out of six of the chosen were girls, which made Marcus a little sour inside. Of course that was what they fixated on… just what kind of person did they think he was?

"Julia, Renatus, Livia, Claudia, Cassia, Volesus," Marcus spoke.

"The six of you possess the drive and the talent to be my students. Do you accept my guidance and authority?"

"Yes!" the six immediately shouted.

"I will do my best to turn you all into excellent mages, but you must understand - I am a very demanding teacher. You have a difficult path ahead of you if you decide to walk down this path with me," Marcus told them. He stared at them for a second, but none of them seemed hesitant or tempted to step away.

"Very well. In that case, let us not drag this out any more. Step forth, and receive my blessing." The six approached Marcus one by one, and as they did, Marcus did two things. The first was that he recited a short spell chant and placed his palm on top of the student's head, and then implanted the soul seed inside of them. The chant and the palm were not necessary and were mostly for show.

He had already created the soul seeds after speaking to Renatus and finalizing his list of chosen students, and the implantation process did not require such obvious spellwork. However, doing things this way allowed him to focus on the process, which was still new to him, without arousing much suspicion from his new students. If any of them thought there was something unusual about Marcus placing a hand on their head and chanting strange words as part of their initiation ceremony, they didn't say so out loud.

The implantation process went smoothly until it was time for Julia to receive a soul seed. As someone who had already been accepted into the Great Tree Academy, Julia already had Sacred Oak's soul seed. As such, the attempts to implant a new soul seed into her failed. Marcus had expected that – his intuition had already made him suspect he would not succeed. However, what he expected to happen was that the existing soul seed would interfere with the implantation of the second one, causing a rejection.

What happened instead was the Sacred Oak's soul fragment inside Julia outright devoured Marcus's own. It seized the soul seed Marcus sent the moment the two touched, tearing it apart and somehow feeding on its tattered remains. Although he felt no pain, it took all of Marcus's self-control not to flinch back in shock when he witnessed it through his spiritual senses. How brutal.

Although Marcus was spiritual kin to the Sacred Oak, the tree's soul fragment did not hesitate at all to attack him, and was clearly more capable in soul combat than Marcus was. Marcus was also rather sure that this defense would work on more than just a rival soul seed. It was likely that any kind of possession attempt or attack on the soul would be resisted by the implanted soul seed.

That meant that having a soul seed basically gave one a certain level of soul protection that was beyond anything a beginner mage could muster up on their own. His thoughts wandered to the various minor incidents in his youth, where he resisted attempts to charm him or attack him spiritually.

At the time, most people, including himself, simply assumed he was a strong-willed individual with a powerful soul and that his ability to resist things he shouldn't have been able to were just a product of inborn talents, but Marcus now suspected there was more to it than that. Producing a soul seed through the use of a Soul Tree Technique required one to be of at least Spirit Manifestation rank, so having one defending you was like having a tiny Spirit-rank angel on your shoulder watching out for you.

"Is there something wrong?" Julia asked, making no attempt to remove his hand from her head. He must have blanked out a bit longer than he thought.

"You have a surprisingly powerful soul," he told her, pulling his hand back. She seemed embarrassed at the compliment, muttering something that sounded like a thanks and retreating back from his reach. The second thing Marcus did was give all six of his new students an identification seal in the shape of a large circular medallion.

It was pale white, made out of the bones of white livyatans that Great Sea's whaling ships often hunted – a powerful but relatively inexpensive magical material that was hard to acquire for mages who weren't members of Great Sea Academy. Carved into the gleaming white bone was an image of a giant tree towering over mountains, shrouding the landscape under its vast canopy.

The medallions were primarily an identification tool that his students could show to anyone that questioned their allegiance, affirming their status as his students. However, they were also minor items imbued with protective enchantments – a product of Marcus's recent experimentation on the potential of soul seeds when used in magic item construction. He had personally made these in the lead-up to the choosing ceremony.

The children studied the white medallions with great interest, flipping them repeatedly in their hands and tracing the carvings with their fingers, perhaps sensing that they were not entirely mundane objects. After that, Marcus had to deal with a bunch of annoying but necessary minor issues. He had to talk to Claudia's parents, for instance, since they were travelling refugees and he had to have some way of knowing what their plans were and how to keep in contact with them.

In practice, he would have to help them out a little so Claudia wouldn't have to waste her time worrying about what would happen to her family while she was gone. He also had to talk to Pliny and Titus about Renatus. He ended up telling them that the boy's blessing enabled him to turn invisible. It was obviously not the whole truth, and Marcus could tell that both Pliny and Titus understood this, but the two men did not push him too hard for additional details.

After those matters were settled, he informed his new students that they had the rest of the day and tomorrow free to say goodbye to their families and settle their affairs, before they would all set off towards their new accommodations.

Marcus stood in front of a small stone tower, his new students fanned out behind him. The building had seen better days. The roof was partially collapsed, many of the roof tiles missing and exposing the wooden framework beneath. There were traces of an extensive garden surrounding the tower, but it had not been maintained in a long time and was utterly overgrown with weeds now. The front door was seemingly ripped off its hinges at some point and was now lying on the ground some distance away from the entrance.

This was the Amethyst Academy, or at least the remains of it. Marcus had bought it from the last two surviving members while waiting for the judging ceremony to start. Although it looked kind of bad, the overall structure of the building was solid and the primary defensive enchantment of the tower was still intact, so the situation wasn't as bad as it looked at first glance.

"This place is a ruin," Cassia said behind him.

"It's our ruin," Marcus said, turning to face his students.

"As your first task, you will help me fix it up."

"Whaat!?" Cricket protested. The others looked similarly shocked.

"This will be our home from now on," Marcus told them.

"Bringing it back to a livable state is in your best interest as much as it is in mine. I don't want to hear any complaints."

"But, but… look at the place! This could take weeks!" Cricket protested.

"Don't worry. I'll do the difficult tasks like fixing up cracks in the walls, carrying heavy objects, and replacing the roof tiles. I predict it will only take us three or four days to restore the place if you work hard."

"I, uh, are you going to teach us some cleaning and repair spells to make the work go faster?" Volesus asked. He was a pretty unremarkable boy of average height with short brown hair. The only notable feature he had was a long thin scar on his left cheek, apparently gotten while bringing a kitten too close to his face as a young orphan.

"No magic lessons will commence until the place is fixed up and ready to receive students," Marcus said, folding his hands over his chest.

"Besides, how would I teach you any spells? You aren't even rank one mages yet." Seeing how everyone except Julia was giving him blank looks for incomprehension, Marcus sighed internally and decided to give them a quick lesson in magic theory. He was serious about there being no magic lessons until the tower was restored, but this was pure theory, and it would give them some perspective of the long road in front of them.

"In order to cast even the simplest of spells, you need to use mana, the magical energies that suffuse mystical places and creatures of the world, to power them. However, you don't have any mana, so you need to get it from the world around you." He extended his arms into the air and gestured at the land around them.

"This tower has been built on one of the natural nodes of power on the planet. There is power all around us, but I bet none of you can feel it." The students shared questioning looks between each other, silently realizing that none of them felt anything special about this place. Some of them gave Julia searching looks. The Great Tree girl was keeping herself visibly more distant from the rest of the children, apparently reluctant to really interact with them.

Marcus hoped that wouldn't persist, or else he would have to intervene somehow.

"No, not even Miss Argenta can sense the ambient mana of this place. Not unless she's actively performing the Soul Tree Technique, that is," Marcus told them.

"Oh! I get it!" Claudia said.

"The foundation technique you made us perform lets us connect to the magic around us!"

"But I could barely even think while I was going through the chants and motions of that technique," Renatus pointed out.

"It took all my concentration just to keep myself immersed in it and do everything correctly. How can we cast anything while doing that?"

"You can't," Marcus said.

"You hit the nail on the head. A non-mage like you can only connect to the logos of the world around you and sense ambient mana while performing a foundational technique. But while you are doing that, you obviously cannot cast any spells. Meaning you are incapable of casting anything." It was actually possible for completely normal, untrained people to use magic through elaborate rituals and magic circles made out of exotic magical components.

However, these were extremely dangerous even for full-blown mages, since they often invoked the aid of spirits and various outer powers. Marcus didn't want them to know about this yet, lest they be tempted to try them on their own in secret.

"So what do we need to do in order to cast spells?" asked Volesus, eyes shining. He seemed really excited by the prospect of magic. Well, they probably all were.

"Be persistent, mostly," Marcus told him.

"Perform the Soul Tree Technique that I showed you daily, whenever you have some free time and your soul feels fresh enough. Again, again, and again, until the foundational technique is so instinctive, so ingrained in your soul, that you no longer need to go through the motions and speak the chants to activate it. Then practice it some more, until resonating with it is nothing but a single act of will, and you no longer need to expend any attention at all to keep it going.

At that point, you will be mystically connected to the world around you anytime you wish, and will be able to focus on performing a spell without your body and attention being taken up by the foundational technique that you practice. At that point you will truly be a rank one mage, and will be able to count yourself as one of the adepts." This process that Marcus described was, as far as he knew, identical for all adepts.

It didn't matter whether someone was training to become a mage, a warrior, an artificer, or an assassin, they were all initially tasked with integrating their foundational technique into their soul through stubborn repetition before they could actually begin to practice their magic.

Of course, the speed at which someone went through this process differed greatly depending on how talented some person was and other details, but Marcus actually expected most of them to take that first step relatively close to each other. The only exception was Julia, whose wood affinity would cause her to internalize her foundational technique much sooner than the others. As for the others, well…

their talents were all mediocre, and there was a limit as to how often one could perform a foundational technique in a day. The act of practicing a foundational technique puts considerable stress on the soul, especially if Marcus wasn't present to make things easier by manifesting his spirit like he did at the judging ceremony. Without his help, his six students, bursting with life and enthusiasm as they were, would not be able to keep practicing the Soul Tree Technique for more than half an hour at a time.

In any case, Marcus intended to push all of them to their very limit, so unless one of them had an uncommonly resilient soul, their work ethic shouldn't matter too much in this early state.

"Anyway," Marcus said, "We wasted too much time lazing around already. You six start carrying out all the broken furniture and see if there are any items inside worth salvaging. Meanwhile, I will get rid of the nest of dire centipedes currently infesting the basement."