Level One God

Circa and Lyria said turning in tokens was another form of mana manipulation. What they called mana manipulation simply felt like thinking to me. Circa said it only felt so natural because of the perk from my prestige path, which allowed me to retain a fraction of Seraphel’s ability in mana manipulation. These things apparently took most people a very long time to learn, and the perk was the only explanation for how fast I had gotten the hang of it. According to them, plenty of people never learned to use their slip space or influence so much as a shred of mana. Even turning in reward tokens was beyond some people’s grasp.

I paused before turning in my first reward token. “Is this okay to do before I equip my second class?” I asked.

Circa looked like she was thinking hard. Lyria just blew out a breath, shaking her head as if the idea of getting two classes was still something she couldn’t believe.

“It may be wisest to hold off on the second class, even if you had the stone for it right now,” Circa said. “I would suggest either Heart or Shield for the defensive capabilities. They could round out your options nicely. But Soul classes tend to rely heavily on synergies with equipment. I… unfortunately can’t say how your rewards will be weighted with two classes. However, starting with only your Soul corestone would be wise for now.”

“Alright,” I said. “I think I know the answer, but would there be any reason to use a crafting corestone for my second class?” I asked.

Circa’s forehead scrunched as she seemed to give the question serious thought. Finally, she shook her head. “No. I don’t believe the potential benefits could outweigh the versatility of having two combat classes.”

“One more obligatory question, then,” I said. “What would happen if I used another Soul corestone for my second class?”

“I don’t know for certain because this isn’t a situation anyone has ever encountered,” Circa said. “But if I were to equip a base level Heart corestone, for example, it would have the abilities I first saw when I equipped my Heart Stone.

“And I was thinking about Heart for my second class.”

She nodded. “Then you’ll need to wait, anyway. Heart corestones are a little more expensive than the rest. The military pays a premium for them, so the price is typically high, especially in times of war.”

I thought about asking to know more about that. After all, I was curious. But I also felt like I’d been waiting forever to turn in my reward tokens, and I could save my questions about that for later.

“Should I reconsider joining the adventurer’s guild?” I asked. Part of me just wanted to join if I was honest with myself. It still felt like what I would’ve done if I was playing a game. I’d join the guild, climb the ranks, and spend my days fulfilling dangerous commissions and going on adventures. I was also itching to play more of that Vice game, so I imagined frequent breaks in common rooms to challenge random, grizzled adventurers in high-stakes games.

“It won’t be necessary. I can buy you a Heart stone soon. But don't get too comfortable with my assistance. I'll need to walk a fine line. Offering you too much help could stifle your progress. I can help you with these first steps, but you'll eventually need to leave the nest if you're going to reach your full potential."

I nodded. It made sense, even if I had admittedly liked the idea of having a powerful ally in my back pocket for the foreseeable future.

"Alright, well," I said, trying to shake off the gloom of the brief exchange. "I should probably get started, right?" I dumped the bag of reward tokens out in front of me.

Lyria openly gaped when she saw them. She’d seen the quantity of my tokens already, but not the type.

“Gods… is that a cursed bed token?”

I grinned. “Kind of weird, right?”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Circa said. “Even an epic bed is highly unusual. Furniture of common quality is highly affordable for anyone with a decent source of income. Rare furniture is a luxury for the very wealthy. Even a great captain within a divine house might only have one piece of epic furniture to show wealth and power. Beyond that… It’s not something I have heard of. Remember that furniture carries no rank, unlike most rewards from your tokens. You’ll be able to use a legendary bed, even at your level.”

“So I wouldn’t be able to use a legendary piece of armor right now, for example?” I asked.

“No. The more powerful the item, the more strain it puts on your mana tether.”

I thought about the golden border around my Alchemist’s Kit and helmet. Did that mean they were Gold Ranked? If so, I had a feeling I shouldn’t be able to tether to them, but here I was… Maybe it was another hidden benefit of my increased ability with mana manipulation.

Lyria was smirking in the corner.

“What’s so amusing?” I asked.

“I’m just trying to imagine a powerful bed,” she said with a shrug. “Think you’ll be able to take it into battle? Draw it like a bow and fire deadly pillows?”

“Actually, that would be amazing,” I said. “But I was hoping more for a bed with legs. Something I could ride into battle. Bonus points if it has a mouth and can bite people in half.”

Circa sighed. “I expect neither idea is particularly likely…”

“Wait,” I said, holding up a finger. “You said my other rewards will be Wood, and I’m assuming that’s because I’m Wood. What would happen if I waited to turn them in until I reached Iron?”

“The Rank is set when you earn the token,” Circa said. “Once you’re Iron, you will see the rank of an accomplishment. Some accomplishments will cease being worth your time, as they’ll only reward Wood ranked items. It’s hard to earn accomplishments above your rank, but if you do, they’ll be capped at your current rank.”

I nodded. It was worth asking. I also wondered if any accomplishments I earned would have been Iron or higher, yet. Probably not. But something like surviving poison or poisoning enemies didn’t seem strictly limited to a “Wood” difficulty. Maybe that accomplishment could have been higher rank? Or maybe non-enemy related accomplishments depended more on the difficulty. Poisoning myself wasn’t exactly that hard, after all.

I regarded my epic, legendary, and cursed bed tokens with newfound appreciation. Since they weren’t limited by rank, it made the reward from my stasis that much more powerful. These weren’t rewards I would outgrow as I leveled, I assumed.

I turned my attention to my waiting rewards and decided to start with the most unassuming of them all.

I plucked the common ingredient token from the polished floor of Circa’s personal space. “So I just…” I focused on wanting to turn in the token. It vanished from my fingertips like when I added an item to my slip space.

At the same moment, a relatively small, unimpressive bag flopped down to the center of the room. I tilted my head at it. “Huh. I was expecting something bigger.”

“Heard that before, I imagine,” Lyria muttered.

Pretending not to hear her, I scooped up the pouch and poked around inside. It was full of about twenty or so long, frosted blue straws. When I pulled one out and lifted it to the window's light, I could see it was semi-transparent and lined with throbbing, razor-thin veins of white. “Uh, cool,” I said. “Everybody is going to be jealous of my straw at dinner.”

“That’s a Siphon,” Circa said. “It will replenish your mana. They’re also used in crafting, though not particularly valuable. You might be able to sell all twenty of those for about five, maybe seven silver. I would suggest keeping them for emergencies. At your level, they’ll completely refresh your mana. Each will only work one time, though.”

I turned it over, considering its uses. “You’ve talked about manipulating mana. So I’ll also be using mana? That’s kind of confusing.”

“We all form connections with the mana flows of Eros,” Circa said. “The more attuned with those flows you become, the more your body can accumulate and store mana of its own. We use that mana to communicate with the flows in a complex weave that—”

“Yes,” Lyria said simply. “Your abilities use mana. You can suck on your fancy little straw to recover some.”

Circa’s jaw ticked, but she stayed silent.

I used the same process to turn in my Common Survival Token. There was a sound like a metallic ching, and a small chest thumped down to the center of the room instead of a little bag.

A text prompt appeared in my vision.

"Congratulations! [Survival Satchel (Common) (Wood)] has been upgraded to [Utility Chest (Rare) (Wood)]."

“You are just one lucky bastard, aren’t you?” Lyria asked.

“Wait,” I said. “You saw that?” The notification had appeared in the same way my helmet showed me tooltips. I didn’t understand how Lyria had seen it, too.

“A personal space exists in a kind of dimensional in-between,” Circa said. “Identification tools on the outside often use magic that draws power similar to what is readily available here. So, yes, we’re all able to see detailed information about levels and items in here. Without this space and the magic of items that tie back to it, I suspect we’d have a very different view of the world.”

“Huh,” I said thoughtfully. I casually slipped my helmet off. “The thing gets a little stuffy,” I said. “But why is this all here? Where did the personal spaces and all this ‘dimensional magic’ come from?”

“Scholars would love to know the answer, if you ever discover it. The oldest writings we have say it all emerged around the same time. Dimensional magic, rifts, and corestones.”

“Rifts?” I asked.

Circa hesitated. “Tears in the fabric of our world. Some number of the races populating Eros originated from rifts. Many terrible things come through them, too, but they’re not a common sight.” She waved her hand, as if she was rambling. She nodded to the loot satchel. “You should continue. You’ll need to get this finished, get your rest, and prepare for training tomorrow.”

Lyria was giving me that strange look again now that my helmet was off. I wondered if she was still trying to decide if I was actually the man in that painting. I couldn’t blame her. Even with all the evidence staring me in the face, I still had trouble believing it.

I was tempted to ask Circa more about the things she’d mentioned, but I also sensed she didn’t know much more than she’d said.

“So a rare upgrade must be a good thing,” I said, turning my attention back to the chest as I struggled with the latches.

“Yes,” Circa said. “Tokens can occasionally upgrade spontaneously on turn-in. Given how uncommon the higher tier of accomplishments are, it’s one of the main ways adventurers tend to acquire top tier rewards.”

“One of?” I asked. “What are the other ways?”

“Easy,” Lyria said, almost sarcastically. “Just pledge yourself to a divine house. Assuming you don’t mind corruption, hypocrites, and potentially wallowing at the bottom of their ranks until you die. Then climb to the top and hope Ithariel grants you some legendary table scraps for your trouble.”

“That’s… a cynical view,” Circa said carefully. “But, yes. The divine houses do have access to caches of powerful items. Some of their most powerful pledges will be rewarded from time to time with extremely rare and powerful equipment. You could also become rich enough to buy some powerful crafted items. But to earn anything in the legendary realm or beyond would mean the kind of wealth most people never see. Especially at higher ranks.”

“Is joining a divine house while supposedly being divine frowned upon?” I asked absently. I was still struggling with the stupid latches.

“It would be a great risk,” Circa said.

“What about Seraphel’s house? Is that a thing?”

“It was… the exact details have been scrubbed from the histories, but it’s believed that Ithariel’s first act when the eight disappeared was to strike the other houses directly. He brought four houses under his command and eradicated what he could of the other four. If there are others like me from your order, I haven’t spoken with them. We’ve only survived by staying separate and watching quietly from the shadows. I learned the ways of The Watch from my mother, like she did from hers, and so on.”

“Well, thank you for watching,” I said. I felt a little guilty on her behalf. It sounded like a hard life, and she’d been living it for the off chance that she would run into me. It was a huge sacrifice.

I finally managed to get the chest open. Inside, there was a magnifying glass sitting on a plush cloth pillow. “Great,” I said. “Now I can read the fine print in the newspaper when I’m retired.”

“He’s so weird,” Lyria muttered to herself.

I held up the magnifying glass and inspected it. Sure enough, I could inspect it, even without my helmet. The way text appeared in my vision was almost identical to how it looked with my helmet, too. Curious, I looked at Lyria and saw I could also inspect her level and rank. On the other hand, Circa just showed up as a question mark.

Interesting. I had been able to identify her level and rank with my helmet, but I now I couldn’t see any information about her. I also didn’t get the tooltip text explaining the human race when I inspected Lyria in here. I wondered if she had some type of shielding effect to cover herself within her own personal space. Or maybe I was simply too weak to identify her without my helmet.

[Herbalist’s Lens (Rare) (Wood)] Identify one major quality of herbs up to rare quality.

I pursed my lips appreciatively. It was cooler than anything I was expecting from a common ingredient token, at least.

I immediately pulled out my remaining corpse finger mushrooms and the pink flowers. I held up the lens and saw a new bit of information about each.

The pink flower now had a “Recovery” tag and the corpse finger had a “Destruction” tag. It was small, but hugely helpful. If I could see that about any new herbs I found, I’d know right away if it was something safe to drink or not. Baby steps. “This will make my Alchemist’s Kit a lot easier to use.”

“Alchemist’s Kit?” Circa asked.

“Yeah,” I said, producing it and holding it up so she could inspect it.

“Curious,” she said. “Of all his artifacts, I don’t know why Seraphel would leave that. It’s powerful, of course, but…”

“Maybe he hoped to guide which class he’d be given?” Lyria suggested.

Circa seemed like she wanted to disagree on principle but grudgingly nodded. “Yes. That is quite possible. An item with this kind of flexibility is perfect for a Soul class. I can see now why you were so certain in your choice.”

“The Prestige Path limited the items I could keep to Gold, too. Maybe he hadn’t hung on to many other good Gold items on his journey to godhood,” I suggested.

“Possible,” Circa said, though she sounded doubtful. She seemed to believe Seraphel was infallible and that we were all moving according to plans he had laid hundreds of years ago. Considering he was me, I was reluctant to give myself so much credit.

I was practically giddy with excitement at the thought of exploring my new class and seeing how it might evolve. The idea that I might be able to use some kind of magic felt like pure fantasy, but then again, so did the idea that I was a god in a larval state. It reminded me of when I used to find a particularly amazing video game and get tempted to call out of work and neglect life for a few days so I could play all night. But this was so much more than that.

I just needed to be careful to remember it was all real. I couldn’t let the parts of this that were fun and exciting make me forget my life was on the line.

I turned in my common armor token next. I already caught myself crossing my fingers for a rare upgrade. No such luck.

I opened the chest and found a pair of metal bracers. I lifted them up, turning them over.

[Plate Bracers (Common) (Wood)]

“No question marks when I inspect this one,” I noted. There hadn’t been any on my lens either, now that I thought about it.

“Everything but herbs and crafting ingredients will come fully identified if it’s earned from tokens like this,” Circa said.

“So they don’t have stats or special abilities?”

“Stats?” Circa asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling a little stupid as I tried to explain it. “Like a cape that will make me stronger or something.”

“Why would a cape make you stronger?” Lyria asked.

I sighed. “Special properties, then.”

“There are a great deal of factors,” Circa said. “Typically, common-level equipment falls into mundane territory. There’s no mana to tether to it, and it will survive your death. Those, for example, will help you if some creature tries to bite your wrists.”

“By the way…” I said, thinking of a question I’d held back earlier. “You mentioned some kind of ascension to ranks at level 50. Does that happen automatically?”

“No, not exactly. There are powerful artifacts that can push you to the next rank once you’ve reached level 50. These methods are favored by the nobility, because they can be purchased, even if the price is exorbitant. There are also more traditional paths to progress on your own. Each method results in a slightly different experience.”

“What do you mean?”

“Much like your class shapes itself to your nature, your path will guide your power. Every Silver is not created equally, you could say.”

“Easier the path you take,” Lyria said, “easier it is to put you in the dirt.”

Circa pursed her lips. “It’s not quite so simple. But, generally, that is correct.”

I asked a few more questions, but Circa’s answers all seemed to give the same vague idea that it was a very personalized process that varied from individual to individual.

Lyria moved to my side and took the bracer from me when she saw how much I struggled with the straps. She pushed my hand away and did them for me, meeting my eyes. “Like that. Understand?” She yanked the leather strap tight until the bracer was snug against one wrist and forearm.

“Thanks,” I said. I turned my hands over. My simple robe with the plate bracers tightened over the sleeves would look silly. That, and my awesome helmet to top it off. But I guessed I didn’t care about winning any fashion contests here. After all, the bracers would’ve been a nice touch against the razorclasps.

“Next!” I said happily, summoning the common weapon chest. Once again, no luck on an upgrade.

Inside, I found a coiled-up leather whip. “Oh,” I said, feeling a touch of disappointment and confusion.

[Leather Whip (Common) (Wood)]

“Unfortunate but interesting,” Circa said, looking at the whip.

“Interesting, how?”

“Seraphel was often depicted using a whip as his weapon of choice. Though it would be reductive to call The Elemental Chain a whip. Stories said it contained every element, and Seraphel could unleash the power of a volcano just as easily as he could freeze an entire ocean.”

I hefted the leather whip and wiggled it, watching the leather end limply flop around. “I think I’ve got a little ways to go before I’m freezing any oceans with this thing. I could probably annoy a creature, though.” I tried to give it a snap with my wrist, but it flopped dangerously close to Lyria, who flinched away and scowled.

“Look,” she said sarcastically. “You’ve just annoyed your first creature.” She looked like she was trying to sound annoyed, but there was a glimmer of amusement in her eyes.

I gave a sheepish smile and set the whip back down.

I turned in my rare ingredients token and got a fancy box full of glass vials. I counted twenty in total. They couldn’t hold as much liquid as my Alchemist’s Kit, and the tooltip simply called them [Glass Vial (Wood)]. That meant I couldn’t count on them reappearing in my inventory when I broke them. So maybe these ones weren’t for throwing. Still, the addition was one of the more exciting ones since I started opening my crates.

It meant I’d be able to keep a supply of useful potions on hand without having to tie up the contents of my kit. That would let me swap out potions in my kit on short notice. If my Elemental Projection ability worked as I imagined, the vials would be very useful.

Next, I summoned my epic ingredients chest. Once again, I had no luck on the random upgrade.

I was confused when I lifted up the simple bag. Sure, it was stitched with some fancy runes, but it looked like the kind of thing you’d use to hold a few marbles. There was a string at the top to tighten it shut. My disappointment faded when I examined it.

[Bag of Duplication (Epic) (Wood)] Duplicate any wild herb of epic quality or lower placed in this bag. The original and its duplicates are immune to this effect. Herbs obtained from trading are also immune.

“That seems pretty great, right?” I asked. I pulled out the few remaining corpse fingers and pink flowers I had, dumping them into the bag. Nothing happened until I pulled the straps closed and opened it again. To my delight, the quantity of everything inside doubled. “Wow,” I said.

Circa nodded. “Incredibly useful. There are several epic herbs that are quite difficult to obtain. Getting two for your troubles is extremely useful.”

“Well,” I said, dusting my hands and looking at the only tokens left. They were the epic, legendary, and cursed bed tokens. Circa said I’d have to wait until we reached a proper city to find a furnisher capable of redeeming those for me. “That’s that, I guess.”

“It’s quite late already,” Circa said. “Perhaps you can spar with Lyria in the morning to familiarize yourself with your new abilities before you join the guards for the cleanup. Until then, I suggest you both get some sleep. You’ll want your wits about you for tomorrow.”

I stretched. “Well, Lyria. Since you’re so insistent on keeping an eye on me, how is this going to work? Should we agree on a time when I’ll be allowed to leave my room in the morning? Am I ordered to wait in the hall until you wake up?”

“I’ll trust you to keep yourself out of trouble within your own personal space,” she said. “If I find out you’ve slipped away in the night and gotten into something, there will be hell to pay.”

“You won’t lay a hand on him,” Circa said firmly. “And you should remember to show the proper respect.”

Lyria nodded to the painting of Seraphel on the wall. “Maybe he was that guy. But right now, he’s just a low-level, Wood rank larva, if you ask me. And my captain told me to keep him out of trouble, so that’s what I’m doing.”

I stifled a yawn. “This ordinary Wood is sleepy. Thanks for letting us use your personal space, Circa. You’ll have to let me mess around in all those cool rooms you have some other time.”

She inclined her head. “Of course, My Lord.”

“Brynn,” I reminded her.

Lyria went to the door. “If you want to train in the morning, it needs to be very early,” she said. “Jarn is leaving for the infestation at first light.”

“Got it. I’ll be up bright and early,” I said. “Meet in the common room?” I asked Circa.

“Yes. I’ll look forward to tomorrow. Training you will be a true honor.”

I gave a crooked smile. “Uh, yeah. I hope you still feel that way after you see me in action.”