“Well, that was new,” Ali says sardonically, the trace of concern disappearing under his usual nonchalant expression.
I can only offer him a half-smile before I push my way to the exit. As much as I want to finish what I started, we need to leave before someone finds us hogging the Shop sphere.
It’s only pure luck and some planning that has allowed us to get this far.
***
Waves lap at my feet as I sit beside the water, small carnivorous fish and cephalopods attempting to rip through my reinforced skin. They fail, their Levels too low to breach my innate defenses. I ignore them, for they’re too low-Leveled to bother killing either.
Not when I have bigger—metaphorical—fish to fry. In my mind’s eye, deep within, I exist in a painless void that lets me tap into the only Skill I have available right now—System Edit. And using that Skill, I review my body, the data stream of my Status Screen and log files to find out what happened.
Beside me, spinning in slow circles, Ali watches the world pass by. He’s in a diamond-shaped Spirit form, invisible to most eyes and keeping track of potential dangers while I work.
Long minutes pass before I finally surface, more knowledgeable than ever of my own Skills and the System. If no wiser.
“So?”
I look around and wonder if it’s smart to discuss it here. But there’s no one watching, and once again, our best defense is anonymity. Pushing aside the never-ending paranoia that living in the System engenders, I answer my friend. “In summary—I was overloaded with Mana.”
“No shit, Gremlin-breath. What I want to know is why now?”
“That’s more interesting. I’ve always been flooded with System Mana when I access the information. The first time I got burnt was when I got the Class, but we just thought it was a case of the Class change. It’s not. It’s a… feature, not a bug of the Class.”
“Why?”
“The System itself is coded in Mana. System Mana, to be specific. So when I access it, I’m actually drawing in System Mana. The more I do, the more I drain. However, as a Heroic Class, I also churn through the Mana much faster, so it’s never been a major thing. But the Shop has a lot more that I can deal with, and…”
“You got burnt.”
“Exactly.” I fall silent for a bit, rubbing my chin. “I wonder if people do stumble onto this Class earlier. But the moment they try to access the System in any way, they burn out. I mean, I’m tougher than your usual Heroic Class in many ways. Certainly more than any Artisan Heroic. The sheer amount of Mana being sent when accessing even a small program would likely kill a Basic Classer.”
“So you think that’s why you don’t hear of the Class, because they die too fast?” Ali sends back.
“That, and the Council probably covers it up. But if a Heroic Class can barely handle poking at the basic information structures—”
“The Shop isn’t that basic.”
I ignore the mental interruption. “—of the System, even accessing low level information would probably kill a Basic Class. Heck, it’d probably damage an Advanced pretty fast, and a Master Class might only be able to handle it in very controlled doses.”
“But why would the Council set it up in such a way? It seems like a bad idea for your Junior Administrators to form from such a small pool.”
I chew on my lip a little while I think over Ali’s question before I offer the only answer that makes sense to me. “Maybe they didn’t choose to do so.” I turn over the idea in my mind further. “What if the current Council is just, I don’t know, interlopers? Or the third or fourth iteration of the programmers? And they’re stuck with whatever the idiots who first created it did. The gods know, I’ve had to clean up messy programming before.”
“You know, not everyone is as sloppy at finishing their work as you, boy-o.”
“Maybe they didn’t have a choice. The Shop, Classes, Spells, and Skills. They’re both super simple and super complicated at the same time. Anything and everything’s written in Mana. So anytime you want to edit, code anything, it’s a huge burden. It’s all part of the System after all.”
“Right, but why even bother with Classes, Skills, Levels? We know the System’s churning unaspected Mana into itself, through living things, but why make it so complicated? Why not just… I don’t know, force you meatbags into becoming giant slug things that grow, die, and consume Mana?”
“Take away free will and options?” I rub my chin. That would make sense in a sense. Though… “We consume more Mana the more we Level. And our choices to build Levels are predicated—generally—upon who we are. But there’s no reason it might not make more sense to make us just Leveling machines, or the equivalent.”
The library brings to mind images of planets warped by the System into giant, living blobs of flesh or greenery, growing without end and merging to become a living mass that just consumes Mana, and I shudder. Even the Forbidden Planets aren’t as insane as that, though monsters might run rampant and behemoths walk the land.
Yet Classes, Skills, and Leveling seem like an inefficient manner of using Mana. Unless…
“Does Mana need to be used? Not just to grow but used for… things. The System, us.” I wave at the lake, the greenery, and the marine life that continues to try to eat me. “Maybe it needs sapient life to give Mana form, otherwise it…”
I shrug. I’m not sure what it does. Grow unceasingly? Destroy life?
Knowledge, once more from the library. This time, ancillary reports from Technocrats who stay on the edge of System space, testing and learning the limits of this world.
Old recordings of worlds caught up in the Mana expansion. Worlds without the guidance of the System, or with only the barest. Mutations, change. Warped cultures, dimensional rifts. Creatures with powers that defy reasoning, ruling over worlds until they abruptly lose their powers or die to its overuse.
Skills and Classes, without form, run rampant. Monsters the size of a fingernail that destroy entire continents and titans that grow so big they are unable to move anymore.
Mana, without the constraints of the System, gives life. Gives magic, but without constraints or logic. Like a kindergarten classroom given a pile of paint and let loose. Free to make or do anything they want. With all the resulting sense and chaos.
“John?” Ali asks softly, bringing me back.
“I get it,” I say softly, wondering if I should speak the words. “I get why the System needs form. Because Mana needs structure. Without it, it’s chaos. Untamed possibility.The System rebuilds Mana into a structure, forces it to form and flow in constraints. It’s why Spells are so much more flexible, because they tap into Mana direct. But they’re also more prone to destruction, to blowing up. And are weaker…”
“Because we have to control all aspects of it at the same time, including the actual Mana flow.” Ali nods.
That’s not new spell theory. It’s spellcasting 101 really—at least for spell researchers like Aiden. People like me, who buy their spells from the Store, kind of skip the theory and just use the spells like plug-and-play rituals, no different than Skills.
But just because I use magic that way doesn’t mean I don’t understand that it can be used much more flexibly. I just never had the time or desire to learn. And, as mentioned, for the equivalent Mana cost, your spells are weaker and slower.
I’m not even surprised when the System Quest updates. This time it’s a full 1%. That puts me at 90% now. Just under the trigger point for when they went after Feh’ral.
And a part of me—a reckless, insane part that cares not for the current troubles we are in, that demands I find out—wonders what it would take to trigger that last 0.1%
***
The very next day, after running around and trying to sort out Titles and Classes and committing grand larceny in one case, we found another small Shop to complete the plan. This time around, I knew exactly where I needed to go.