Chapter 377: Deep Lore

The professor had a controlled look on his face, and I got to watch in real time as the vast majority of my fellow students – probably the nobles with the training for it – controlled their faces and emotions.

Oh, now they’re able to properly control themselves in front of new information, and not before when the professor was lecturing.

“Ms. Highscore. You clearly have experience with war, would you mind sharing?” The professor asked me.

I was getting real annoyed being put on the spot.

I shrugged.

“Kinda. I don’t care if you don’t believe me, I’m more interested in what the expert has to say on the class.”

I sat down where I was, pointedly staring at the professor to continue his lecture. I ignored the students sitting down around me, furiously whispering with each other.

“There’s no way, right?”

“She’s gotta be lying.”

“Well, I’ve killed 15,000 people. See how easy it is to say!”

“I’ve seen her in the library. She’s got an excellent reputation for honesty, doesn’t care about our reaction, and seems annoyed by it all. [Cold Reading] says she’s telling the truth, somehow.”

“Yeah, but in what conflict? Had to have happened in the last 10 years, and I haven’t heard of anything of that size.”

“Worth investigating. If nothing else she’s unsponsored and high leveled, wonder if we can recruit her?”

“Even with her level and tag?”

“Details. It’s easy to work that out.”

Okay, that particular conversation was fascinating, and I wanted to know more. There was an easy way to let me travel mortal lands?

Sadly, the professor started lecturing again, and they shut up to pay attention.

“I’m going to touch on honor for a moment. In a war, it is important for most of you. Honor means you are following a code of conduct, and while you are following it, your opponents will follow a similar code. It tells you that you are in a typical raider’s war, and that defeat in battle will generally mean a ransom. Expensive, yes, but the alternatives are worse.”

He started pacing again, regaining some of the energy and attention he’d lost at my stunning pronouncement.

“What is worse? Simple. Your opponents believing they are at the end of their rope. Poisoning your food. Murdering your children in their cradle. Razing every stretch of land they can. Honor, as much as some sneer at it, is a social contract. It keeps the rules of war intact, and prevents small conflicts from escalating. It was mentioned earlier that war is simply a continuation of politics by other means. An honorable war suggests that non-violent resolution is still possible, is still manageable. It is half a step closer to peace. Once honor is gone, the only reason two parties will meet at a negotiating table is for one to attempt to assassinate the other.”

I felt like that last bit was a little hyperbolic, but his point was made.

If I ever found myself in a conflict where honor mattered, I was in the wrong fight.

“Speaking of escalating conflicts! Let’s discuss Immortal wars. You’ll notice they didn’t show up in the list from earlier.”

I knew Iona had quite a lot to say about the topic, although I’d come to realize she was a little biased on the topic.

“Immortal wars are the same as the other three. Raider, Ideological, and Total. Fact of the matter is, they simply have more power thrown around when they fight. A mortal mage is throwing high speed lumps of rock, an Immortal mage can throw a mountain. When two Immortals fight – not two countries, two people – the landscape is often rearranged, and they don’t care about collateral damage. When two countries fight, well. There’s a reason the end of the last major Immortal war is the start of the current era, with everything before being marked as ‘old’, and everything after being marked as ‘new’. Granted, there were a number of surviving Immortals, and civilization didn’t entirely collapse, but according to the records, this is a normal part of the cycle.”

He paused for dramatic effect. I was enthralled.

“Yes, cycle. There is a high level, somewhat predictable cycle over centuries and millennia of how the world works. Now, please keep in mind the exact details and speed will differ on a case to case basis. I am simply trying to speak of the high-level brushstrokes that occur. We will start at the end of an Immortal war. The ‘survival’ era. The world lies shattered. Cities have been razed, newly created volcanoes dot the lands, and fields burn. Monsters thrive, and expand into the missing ecological niche, their populations exploding as civilization isn’t able to beat them back well.”

“In that gap, people survive. Countries tend towards having a dominant race present in their borders, and the world ending doesn’t tend to cause mass migration of the sort needed to dramatically change what species lives where, although it does happen. Powerful fighters defend small enclaves from monsters as civilization begins to reassert itself. With the help of the System, and old knowledge, we rebuild. The powerful fighters are lauded and declared [Heroes], and they naturally turn into the first [Lords]. A crazy patchwork of civilization erupts, the small surviving villages turning into towns. We leave the ‘survival’ era, and enter into the ‘patchwork’ era.”

He paused a moment to allow those who needed to take notes to finish scribbling.

“The patchwork era is interesting. Tens of thousands of small city-states, each with their own version of a ruler, generally a warrior-lord. This era is defined by a rediscovery of knowledge, and by a thousand small scale conflicts between the various locals. Some remember that cooperation and working together is optimal, others try to conquer their neighbors. After all, civilization has largely been reset for a few generations at this point. The ethics, knowledge, and philosophy we take for granted has largely been forgotten, except for small enclaves.”

He gestured all around himself.

“The School of Sorcery and Spellcraft is an excellent example of this. The School’s highest calling is to help restore knowledge to the world after the cataclysm of a true Immortal war… when it isn’t burned down itself.”

I remembered orientation, and how the guide mentioned the Vault was supposed to store knowledge against that. It had sounded far-fetched at the time… but maybe it was the truth.

“This era is where ‘ancient magics’ thrive, where discovering the lost and powerful artifacts of the prior era help define who does well. Slowly, as time passes, the nations rebuild themselves, as the patchwork of various civilizations merge and meld together. After all, a fledgling nation of seven cities can easily add an eighth with no allies to their ranks, with minimal violence, and the vast tapestry of elvenoid civilization is stitched together once again.”

“As this process accelerates, we enter the ‘golden’ era. Lost knowledge is rediscovered, and life and civilization progresses in leaps and bounds. The old has been turned over, and there is vast room for expansion and discovery. The ancient forests are beaten back, monsters are driven back into their lair, and it is a bold, glorious time to be alive. Opportunities abound for everyone!”

Ah dang. Sounds like we weren’t in the golden era.

“The golden era moves onto the crystalline era. This is where issues arise. Nations are too large, butting up against each other. There is no room to easily expand, and the easily rediscovered lost knowledge has been found. True discovery and innovation is required. If only mortals lived on Pallos, it might be manageable. We might be able to find a way to move forward. But it is not only mortals that live on Pallos.”

He paused with that ominous pronouncement.

“Immortals live on Pallos, and they feel the effects of the crystalline era more profoundly than mortals. See, throughout the survival, patchwork, golden, and crystalline era, mortals are born and die. Most Immortals that are born don’t die. Now, all Immortal countries have ways to mitigate undying [Lords]. The rulers that don’t tend to get killed by an ambitious underling, until enough turmoil settles into a sustainable pattern. Exterreri mandates retirement. The Golden Court along with the Tympestshard Council works along family and clan patterns, although with technical differences that aren’t the topic for this class. Draakveld culture doesn’t permit them to form anything larger than a village, and even then there is no village head. The Bhutai provinces have no interest in that sort of thing. Urwa, against all odds, does manage to have Immortal, undying [Lords] in positions of power for centuries. Study their succession if you wish to see how it goes wrong. Jurcor permits all this, but require enough paperwork, and the network and web of alliances and treaties is so confusing, that half the time the devils aren’t quite sure if they’re attacking their ally or not.”

Urwa sounded overall like the least pleasant place to be.

“Speaking of going wrong, all the systems I mentioned go wrong in various ways. Immortals gather wealth and power, and soon they butt heads against rivals trying to gather similar wealth and power. Inevitably, the lesson from the start of the lecture comes into play. War is simply a continuation of politics by other means. When the powerful Immortal with thousands of levels, and tens of thousands of retainers under their banner with thousands of levels decides to take what they want by force, well. The defender fights back, and rare is the war waged by people with eternity to gather strength and make allies where nobody else is involved. If nothing else, the previously mentioned collateral damage is likely to draw in new parties.”

“Thus starts and ends the shortest era of this lecture. The Immortal war era, or the cataclysm era. When the dust settles, the survivors rule over a world of ashes, and the survival era begins once again. Now, you may have mentioned I didn’t talk about empires in all this. The rise and fall of empires is a curious thing, generally accelerating the patchwork era…”

Mormerilhawn teleported next to me as the class ended.

“Elaine.” He greeted me. I tilted my head at him.

“Mormerilhawn. Is there something I can do for you?” I asked him.

He studied me for a long moment.

“For what it’s worth, I believe you.” He said, and without further ado, turned and walked away.

That was… kinda weird. Probably the closest thing to an apology I’d get from him, for helping enable the professor.

Still, I kept him in mind. If he believed me, and my story about Remus, he could be helpful when I went to prove my ownership of the Medical Manuscripts. It was going to take more than a bit of work to convince the people I wanted to convince that I was telling the truth.

I did get a chance to meet up with Auri after the lesson though.

“Hey Auri! Off to baking class?”

“Brrrpt!”

“Oh, sorry, your Specialty Breads course.”

“Brrrpt.” Auri nodded like she was the wisest [Sage] who had ever lived, one mage hand zipping in to straighten her crooked hat.

“Save some for me, will you?”

“Brrrpt!”

I continued on to my destination – the student center. The start of the quarter had some big wargame tournament thing going on, and Iona was competing. I was showing up to give her moral support… and get some advance reading in on my next few classes.

“Hey love!” I gave her a quick kiss.

“Hey spaceosaurus!” Iona grinned at me. “You didn’t have to come, you know.”

I shrugged.

“I know. I wanted to.”

I shoved my way to a spot with a stool, overlooking the Mirage-board where the war games were held. Good practice for budding [Strategists] and the like, and they could even level playing it! It was supposed to mimic a real war, although after this morning’s lectures I had my doubts.

The game began with enthusiastic, yet inexperienced, fanfare.

“Go Iona! Pillage his villages, burn his towns, and leave no stone standing on top of each other!”

It was easy being bloodthirsty when it was just a game.

I did discreetly summon and drop one of my textbooks to the floor. I’d found I could read anything that was in my sphere of awareness.

On one hand, it looked like I was intently staring at Iona’s game, watching her beat the stuffing out of her opponent.

On the other, I had words scrolling across my vision.

[*ding!* [Bookwyrm] has leveled up! 21 -> 22. +40 Vitality, +40 Speed, +100 Mana, +100 Mana Regeneration, +300 Magic Power, +300 Magic Control from your class! +1 Mana, +1 Magic Power from your element! +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Speed, +1 Vitality, +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control for being Chimera (Elvenoid)!]

[*ding!* [Spatial Affinity] has leveled up! 21 -> 22]

[*ding!* [Reading] has leveled up! 21 -> 22]

[*ding!* [Astral Archives] has leveled up! 21 -> 22]

[*ding!* [Hunger for Knowledge] has leveled up! 21 -> 22]

“The northern continent.” The professor started. “It remains largely unsettled. The reasons for this are legion. The wild and untamed nature allow creatures to obtain a much higher level than normal, giving a challenge to those who would explore. Natural treasures grow. But mainly, there is a significant aspect to might makes right. The non-elvenoid natives of the northern continent don’t tolerate elvenoid intrusion, and even the School flying over occasionally attracts… ire. Additionally, the Wardens, for reasons unstated, enforce the ban. Even during an Immortal war, they don’t permit others to settle there. Granted, crossing the ocean is a massive endeavor, and the ocean itself is theorized to have more high level creatures, but that is a topic for a different class.”

“The name of this class is exactly what we’re talking about. Divine items. Now, every quarter, there’s some fool who thinks we’re talking about well-made items, mysteries from a forgotten era that we don’t know how to replicate, or oddities. No. This class is about items handed down to us from the very gods themselves. The Woundspear. Farwalker’s cane. The Sword of the Betrayer. The Solstice Banner. The Everflowing Chalice. Crow’s Cape, the Supple Dagger, the Lantern of Truth, and many more. They do not follow the normal rules of what can and can’t be done with the System. They are not of the System, they are of the Divine. In this class, we will go over the known divine items, as well as theorize what properties and rules the gods must follow when bestowing one of them upon their followers.”

I glanced over at Iona, my eyebrows raised. She responded with a grin, and mouthed ‘love you’ at me, then turned back to the lecture.

I see why she’d convinced me to take this class with her! It sounded neat!

“Curses suck.” The professor started. “They’re difficult and tricky to break. The easiest curses to break are ones that are supposedly buffs, skills that drain your mana regeneration to boost something else. In the proper situation, you want these buffs. The worst curses are impossible to break and spread themselves. The werewolf curse is the most prominent of these curses, and believe me, if it wasn’t for their long history, they would be wiped out to the last. Now, often curses have a limited lifetime, but that can still be enough to debilitate or kill. In order to break them, you’ll need to know how they work. We begin with classifying them into groups…”

“… and as you should all know, a Grand Feat occurs for a species when a member of the race achieves level 4096, and ascends…”

The tip of my quill snapped as I shoved it too deep into the paper. Damnit, I liked that quill!

What?!

Iona could’ve mentioned that when she was telling me about the gods!! I knew about the ascension, but the Grand Feat had been completely skipped! Hello, that detail might’ve been somewhat important!!

“Shera, the Dreamer. Wulfric, the Bloody. Baojunshe, the Tyrant. Inias, the Divine. Teruo, the Pure. Iztacoatl, the Arcane. Ragnar, the Renewer. Manadhion, the Nightmare. Learn these names. Know these names. They are the Guardians, and we believe them to be our great protectors, our shield against extinction.” The professor started the lecture with a bang.

“Now, technically, the exact purpose and role of the beings known as Guardians is much speculated on. I will attempt to stick to known facts. There have never been more than eight spotted at a single time, a number believed to be significant for various reasons you should all find obvious. People have approached and studied them, and they act normal, if exceptionally high-leveled. The announcement declaring them as Guardians only appears during calamities, and they appear to know about them as they happen, appearing from around the world. This has led to speculation that they…”

“This is the Practical Spatial Magic class! If you don’t have a Spatial element, this isn’t the class for you. You’ll want the Introduction to Spatial Magic class right across the hallway.” The professor in orange robes said. He obviously knew his stuff, and knew it well from a practical standpoint.

Our class of nine suddenly became a class of three, two in purple robes and one in blue. He clapped his hands and beamed at us.

“Excellent! Introductions!”

Everyone introduced themselves, and the names of my fellow students went in one ear and out the other. I could always retrieve them later from [Astral Archives].

“I’m going to start with the most famous Spatial skills, because frankly, that’s what everyone wants to know. Personal storage. Blink. Teleport. Portals. Intangibility. Dimension hopping. Distance manipulation. Spatial expansion. Spatial tears.”

“As a rule, Spatial magic takes twice as much, or four times as much, magic power as the mass of the object being manipulated baseline. It is my take that almost all Spatial skills are really the same two aspects, just done in different ways. Let’s start with the basic one, storage skills.”

“Storage skills of various sorts are easy, because they’re a straight double of the mass in grams. Almost. There’s a little bit of fuzziness around displacing air and the like, but at the numbers Spatial magic is dealing with, that’s a rounding error. A very, very useful rounding error, which I’ll get into in a minute. The object is removed from Pallos space, and is brought to what I’m going to call ‘personal space.’ Once there, it’ll stay there until you retrieve it.”

Obvious enough, but I dutifully took notes. This was the introductory course.

I had noticed that my [Bookwyrm’s Hoard] had required significantly more than twice as much mana as mass, but the class was new. My affinity was low-level, and my skills were at the starting line.

“Blink and teleport are generally the same thing. The only way teleport works is by specific restrictions and conditions permitting buy-offs that let the distances become manageable. Even then, it’s in the realm of the highest levels. Onto blink! It’s my take that blink is simply storing and retrieving the object being teleported. Think about it! It’s like it’s being stored, moved, then resummoned. That’s why, baseline, it costs four times as much mana and magic power as the mass of the object being moved. There is a steep non-linear scaling to the distance traveled as well, but end of the day? Storage, retrieval. Simple!”

I wanted to cry and curse. A ‘harmless’ side-effect of Operation: The Improved Elaine had been dramatically increasing my weight. I was about 60% heavier than before.

Dense jokes aside, that was screwing horribly with my numbers.

“Now, I’m going to go back to that little rounding error I was talking about before. See, you can teleport yourself into a wall if you’re not careful. Nasty when it happens, and if you’re stupid about it, you’ll probably kill yourself. However! Remember how I said you also need to move air around? Same with whatever you’re teleporting into, except wood and stone is heavy. The dramatically increased cost to the blink will alert you to an issue, and if you’re careful with how you cast your skill, it’ll fail to cast entirely instead of teleporting your head into a wall.”

I took furious notes on that.

“Portals are next, and they’re only distantly related to dimensional hopping, even though most people lump them together. Portals are great for moving other people, since teleporting others is nearly impossible. Imagine the massive cost in the first place, now imagine that cost multiplied by vitality.”

He gave a dramatic shudder. I wonder if he knew Mormerilhawn? The elf was teleporting others… although I suppose he was only able to do it to people a fraction of his level, and even then Iona was too much for him. In a free for all event. With a ton of other people.

“Portals work in one of two ways. The first is a type of distance manipulation. The [Mage] needs to twist and bend space to connect two points together. Extremely expensive, and scales terribly with distance. After all, twisting space between two points a mile away is an entirely different game than twisting space between two points ten miles away. The second are tears and rips in the fabric of reality. Still stupidly expensive, but the cost is fixed, no matter the distance. Of course, you’ll potentially invite divine disfavor, as you’re technically destroying the fabric of reality. Let’s all work hard at not getting smited.”

I’d probably get smited extra-hard with Iona right next to me. Portals sounded fun, but given the orange robed professor was calling them ‘expensive’ I didn’t think I’d be looking at them for the next, oh, century or three at minimum.

“This leads me nicely into spatial tears. Best weapon and defense in existence, and in the top 5 ways to get a god to directly smite you. Might even invite one of the big five to do it personally! If a portal might get angry rumblings, a spatial tear will get you torn a new one. I am not going to discuss how to do them in this class, for obvious reasons.”

When I dropped biomancy, I thought I was done potentially getting in trouble with the Divine Decrees. Noooooo, Spatial was another element that could screw me.

Then again, unlike with biomancy, I didn’t really have the urge to start ripping the fabric of reality apart. I liked reality.

“With that being said, occasionally there are old spatial tears lying around, being dangerous. Don’t fall into one, weird stuff can come out of them, and if you find one, do everything you can to close it. Come back to the School if you must, I’ll do it myself.”

I’d never heard of this before. I was hoping it was a niche industry-specific concern, and not a larger, global concern.

“Intangibility is occasionally in Spatial, although it tends to be in the Dark and Void domain more frequently. It’s an odd duck, and there’s no real rules on how much it’ll cost, and what you can do with it. It all depends on the skill in question.”

I doubted I’d be able to get intangibility in [Bookwyrm]. It just seemed too far removed. I suppose I had a minor form of it in [Beneath the Dragon’s Eyes]? It let me sort of turn book covers intangible, in a sense?

“Dimensional hopping is next.” I straightened up at that. [World Traveler] had been an option since my first class, and I had a powerful curiosity about it.

“Couple of ways of going about it. A teleport, a tear, a twist, manipulation, slipping away, it’s all possible. The end result is the same. Ending up in a different dimension. Some old, old records suggest that some dimensions don’t have a System, if you can believe that, and warn not to go there, else you’ll be stuck. Granted, we have no records from anyone who’s actually been to one of those worlds, so there’s no corroborating accounts… but maybe that’s because they get stranded. I’m covering this briefly for your understanding, but we’re not going into the topic in this class. Take the advanced class for it.”

“Lastly, the one you’ve all been waiting for, and the first major topic of this lecture. Spatial expansion. Bags of holding, crates of storage, and so many, many more. Expensive in every sense of the word, and if you’re the ones selling it?”

The professor chuckled.

“You’ll be able to pay for your kids, all their grandkids, and all of their kids to attend the School without blinking.”

It had taken me far too long to realize what the topic of TheApex Creature was. When I figured it out, I felt like an idiot, and immediately signed up for the class.

“The absolute pinnacle of creation doesn’t tend to bother itself with us.” The dragonling professor started her lecture. “Unless we bother them. Now, thousands of things could bother them. There’s the obvious ‘break into their home and steal their stuff’, but I think we can all agree that would bother most of us. Then there’s the arbitrary. ‘I was watching that tree grow for decades and you cut it down!’ Unfortunate.”

There were a few weak chuckles at that.

“I want to talk about one aspect in particular that explains why I am speaking so oddly in this room, and I fully expect all of you to follow. Please note that the source of this is the venerable Long Zhi, the Cerulean Scholar. He is a grand font of knowledge, a generous soul willing to share his research with us poor mortals. We will not mention him again. Names. Names are powerful things. Each time you mention one of them, it is like a tiny candle in the darkness, the smallest flicker of flame in the dark. They know. I believe they are proud of it, of a thousand small mentions lighting up the darkness of their mindscape, forming a flickering array. When you call them by their name, it is a much brighter signal, and the more powerful among them can ‘hear’ a small amount of what you say.”

She paused, letting the implications sink in.

“Again, this feeds their ego. They enjoy it. What they do not enjoy is someone constantly calling them, setting off non-stop flares to their mind. Insulting them. Belittling them. Do it often enough, and you can provoke their wrath. Hence, the roundabout nature of this class.”

NOTE TO SELF: DO NOT SAY HER NAME.

It made me wonder how calling their name worked as languages shifted. Just trying to think the logic through made my head hurt, and I decided my time and efforts were better spent on other tasks.

“Next, I want to talk about why ‘suicide by apex creature’ isn’t a viable technique…”

I grabbed a fun book for some casual reading, and plopped down into my favorite chair in the library. Classes were over, and while I did need to do some homework, and I could just read it in my sleep, I just flat-out wanted to read a book for fun. I had free time.

This was the life. Fluffy chair. Sun streaming through the window behind me, giving me beautiful natural light to work with. Books to my left. Books to my right. Books behind me.

Wait.

Books… behind me?

I looked at the window.

Sun. Light. I waved my hand through the sunbeam. Shadows.

I closed my eyes and focused on [The World Around Me].

A wall, yes.

No window.

And on the other side of the wall… a bookshelf, just like the rest of the ones in the library.