“So, where do we start?” Tybalt asked as they stepped out into the light.

  “I might as well begin with the storytelling part. The legend or myth was the thing that fascinated me when I was a kid, so I know it by heart. It’s… not a story many people could tell you. Especially not those of non-noble birth. Like I said before, I don’t know if it’s true or a myth, so don’t ask me.”

  “Uh huh, got it.” Tybalt stepped forward, dividing his attention between listening to Mariella and leading the way in their quest to find a source of water. To begin with, he just started walking, moving away from the direction of the Army’s camp. Given that he now knew they had reinforcements coming from the mining camp, it seemed all the more important to stay away from them until he could join forces with the beastfolk.

  “A long time ago, magic was everywhere, and it was in everyone. There were no classes. No hard distinctions between different kinds of people.”

  No noble, no peasants, no priests, just people, is that what she means? Or just no explicit classes?

  “How’d that work?” Tybalt asked. “What about natural talent?”

  “There are always differences between people, of course,” Mariella said. “But mana is just a kind of life force. So the major distinction was just how much life force you had access to. Sometimes people would die from overtaxing their life force using magic, but in this unstructured world, anything could be achieved with enough mana and skill. The Veil between the possible and the impossible was thin then. Almost anything was possible for anyone determined enough.”

  “Sounds interesting,” Tybalt said noncommittally.

  What does this have to do with the world we live in? The way magic works now?

  “It was chaos,” she said. “Madness and mayhem prevailed. Mankind is not naturally peaceful, and the greed and ambition of both humans and the other races knew no limits in this time. Continents rose and fell with the will of exceptionally determined and skilled individuals. Some humans grew so strong in magic that they fancied themselves gods. Governments could not maintain authority, where any random individual, given enough time and effort, might cultivate enough power to level a city.”

  That sounds chaotic, but something doesn’t quite fit. Wouldn’t the authorities just work hard to maintain their edge over any challengers? The most powerful are in charge now. That doesn’t seem very different.

  “It was unsustainable,” she continued, “and ultimately, the gods intervened. They had granted all the races of man access to magic, and it was within their power to seal it away. So they did. The gods confiscated almost all of the magical powers of all but a small share of the population, the individuals deemed most worthy and least likely to abuse that power. That’s how we got the world we live in today. People… like my ancestors… were chosen to be the remaining magic users. Those people founded noble houses, major mercantile interests, even kingdoms and empires. They brought peace, law, and order to Abadd.”

  Tybalt had to try hard to avoid rolling his eyes at the ending to the story.

  Some of this is definitely just propaganda Mariella was taught, glorifying the role of the nobles in society, Tybalt thought. There’s a decent chance she never questioned most of it. How much of the legend is true, though?

  He had never heard anything like this explanation for the class system before. It raised more questions than it answered.

  Was Lord Mudo in on this scheme? Did the gods intend to create a tiered system for society all along? Or was it just a byproduct? I know the gods actually exist, and I’ve seen that their representatives can manipulate the system to some extent, so I know that part is at least true.

  “Wait, what about classes and the system the gods put in place?” Tybalt asked. “Were you going to explain that?”

  “Oh, I didn’t get to the most important part,” Mariella said. “I just got lost in thinking about what that time must have been like. The loss of magic ended the chaos of the many races being able to freely use magic for whatever they wanted, but it also ushered in the Age of Heroes, when monsters almost overran Abadd. The world had to be saved by the families who still retained access to strong magic. And the gods had given those families a tool with which to do it. You might call it both a tool and a limiter. The average person didn’t have magic at all anymore, and the gods didn’t want the disparity between normal people and those with magic to be too great. So they limited how it manifested. Class-holders would each be limited to a certain aspect of magic, their mana only inclined to perform tasks oriented toward that aspect. Doing anything else with magic would be as difficult for them as it was for the average person. The system was there to facilitate faster growth for class-holders.

  “That brings me to the purpose of skills. Think of skills as something like a book of information that your mind and body instantly absorb. Some skills are more densely packed than others. But the key point is that almost anything you can do with a skill, your mana could replicate with sufficient practice. Skills are essentially a crutch the gods put in place to assist the magic user in getting there. Your Scrimshaw skill is something your mana is naturally inclined toward being able to do, now that you have a class. And when you used your mana to strengthen your bones and weaken mine during sparring, that might also be something that the gods will recognize as a skill, given time. Just keep practicing it, and you might have a pleasant surprise from the system some afternoon when it’s close to becoming second nature. Once it becomes a skill, you probably won’t have to think about it to use it.”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Tybalt nodded. He followed the technical explanation so far, even though Mariella was telling him while he led them through the valley and looked for a water source. His task was proving difficult, but he had avoided saying so up to this point. Mariella seemed too focused on teaching him class theory to notice, and he didn’t want to look anything less than hypercompetent with her. His talent seemed to have cemented the attraction she felt toward him, and he didn’t want to do anything to diminish her impression of him.

  “That’s…”

  Not at all how I thought skills worked, honestly, he thought.

  “It’s amazing,” he finished aloud. “Then what about the system helping me learn skills with level ups? How does that work with the system also recognizing skills if I practice them?”

  “We all get skills by level up,” Mariella said. “It just doesn’t stop you from crafting your own skills or unlocking additional skills beyond the one you pick. You might be able to see what skills the system offers you and replicate one of them that you didn’t choose, just by trial and error. And that won’t take the place of you choosing a skill.”

  The necromancy textbook definitely mentioned the idea of developing my own skills, but the way I read it, that was an advanced competency, not something I was supposed to be able to just do. How impressed was she with me earlier? Is she starting to think I can easily do things that are difficult for other people with classes?

  “So that’s why you told me to wait on choosing my level ten skill?” Tybalt asked.

  “Yes. There are some skills you might be offered that are so far away from what you already know how to do with mana, you just have to use the level up as an opportunity to learn them. I wanted you to bear that in mind, along with the fact that you can emulate and create skills, so you could make a more informed choice. Also…” She noticeably hesitated before continuing, “Related to all of this, the gods are assessing us all the time, and there is variability in the skills people with the same class are offered after the first couple of skills taken.”

  So I might have made the system think I’m aiming to be a close combat necromancer by spending hours sparring with Mariella, and now it will give me something related to fighting? Tybalt wasn’t sure if that guess was correct, and he couldn’t ask Mariella without trying to work around the fact that he had given her a completely wrong impression about his class. His head was spinning a bit at all the information he had just been given.

  She stayed silent and let him chew over the information for a few minutes.

  All right, so try looking at the skill options the system offers me and seeing which ones I could recreate using mana without system guidance. If Mariella is right that most skills we get offered are things my mana could do without a skill, maybe I could acquire all of the second tier skills without using my skill selection. If that happens, maybe I’ll get all new options with level fifteen. More powerful than whatever the level ten skillset is. And I’d still have a free selection left from level ten, unless that’s a use-it-or-lose-it sort of thing.

  It was difficult to be certain of anything while his brain was split between different tasks: processing Mariella’s rather complicated explanation of skills and classes, finding a water source, and of course, continuing to impress Mariella with his competence. The latter two tasks were complementary, but not quite the same.

  There!

  Tybalt finally saw something useful. The cliffs were generally a dark-colored stone, but there were white streaks on the cliffside near ground level ahead, along with a slightly eroded bit of rock and what might have been a streambed once. It was dry now, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t water nearby.

  Mariella noticed his reaction, and Tybalt took a moment to explain his discovery.

  “You see that?” he said, pointing.

  “The cliff?”

  “Yes, but specifically this part near the ground. Do you notice how the colors are different from the cliff back there?” He pointed at the two different sections of cliff in turn.

  She looked back and forth.

  “Um, yes. I see it. What does it mean?”

  “If you look at the furrow in the ground below, plus the white deposits on the cliff face, I think we’re looking at a place where water flowed at some point.”

  “At some point?” She furrowed her brow in an expression of concern. “So the water source has already dried up?”

  “Not necessarily. Sometimes water flows are seasonal. Think about the moisture we observed on the side of the mountain before. There’s no way that was from a river that flowed all the way up the mountain. There wasn’t any rain. So that means there’s a water source up there. And this more or less confirms that the water flows down here. It’s probably a lot of water in spring, then it decreases over the course of summer.”

  “We’re already in autumn…”

  “So it might be down to a trickle,” Tybalt said. “This might be the low point, or close to it. But if we work back along this furrow—” he pointed—“we should find the place where the flow was the strongest. It’s our best chance of locating a source right now. If that fails, I’ll come up with something else.”

  Tybalt was just trying to sound resourceful when he said he’d just make a new plan. This random remnant of a streambed was an incredible stroke of luck as far as he was concerned. But his companion looked impressed.

  “Lead the way,” Mariella said, smiling.