A moment of silence passed and I wondered if I was about to get smote—or was it smitten?—for my slip of the tongue. Oh well, I guess I’ll try again in my next life, I thought, until I remembered what Detective Gudell had told me about the possibility of being soul-killed.

  Pissing off an actual god might be exactly how that happened.

  “Er, I mean… I’m just, um, surprised. And, uh, honored?”

  Great save.

  The god-statue rumbled above me. “YOU ARE SURPRISED THAT—oh, you’ve got [Metasurvival]. Ah, sorry.”

  I nearly got whiplash at the rapid turnaround in presence and attitude, but next thing I knew, I was sitting in a library with a fairly regular-looking fellow. Maybe even a bit meek. He was wearing a sweater vest, thin wire-frame glasses, and had a comb-over.

  Except, not really.

  “This feels… familiar,” I muttered, playing with my perception. It was a lot like the time I spent in the police precinct between universes.

  “Always fun to meet a traveler,” the Guardian—librarian?—said. “Surprised I didn’t notice you sooner. Please don’t mess up the world too much, though. It’s such a pain to clean up.”

  “Sorry. Just. Hold on,” I said, raising my hand in front of me. “I’m a bit confused.”

  The god-or-whatever tilted his head, looking at me in return with confusion, then pulled up my System, taking a look at it. “Well now, this is peculiar. You’re practically a baby. What a curious child.”

  “Do you know, um, Detective Jeb Gudell?” I asked.

  “Detective Jeb—oh, the one who tagged your System. Uh, no. Different… departments, I suppose you would say.”

  “But this is between universes, isn’t it? Am I dead?”

  “Kind of, and no. This is a border, more or less. Half in, half out. I suppose you’d call me an administrator. I keep things tidy.” He spoke with his hands, gesturing as he explained. “Gets pretty boring, most of the time, to be honest.”

  I processed that, and he took my silence as permission to keep talking.

  “And no, you’re not dead. Using one of a world’s faiths to pray is a good way to reach a universe’s administrator. We’re just talking. I’ll send you back whenever. No rush though, right?”

  I nodded mutely.

  “So, what’s the deal with you? This System is… pretty weird. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said, sighing. I gave him a brief overview of what I remembered and what the detective had told me, and he nodded along.

  “Well, that’s a fun story,” he said when I caught him up. “I’ve got to admit, it’s a first for me. Never seen a soul with [Metasurvival] and no other skills. Well, no other skills aside from this,” he said, pointing to [Swordsmanship]. “Why not just ride out this life working on that?”

  I groaned. “If I have to, I will,” I said, trying to put into words what the issue was. “It’s just that... magic is so much cooler. It didn’t exist in my first life, at all. I don’t really want to wait for a third life, and the only reason I would have to is because of this country’s faith.”

  “Yeah, Five Guardians is a bit of a stickler. It’s too bad you weren’t born in—actually, you know what, I don’t want to spoil any surprises. Assuming you live that long. You did try to take on a goblin with no skills. Doesn’t really speak to a massive survival instinct... but then, you have [Metasurvival], so who knows.”

  “Certainly not me,” I griped.

  “Still, it’s pretty impressive you managed to increase your Will, with no skill, and no background with magic from your lower—uh, your former universe.”

  I ignored the faux pas, or whatever it was, about lower universes. It hardly affected me anymore. “So, is there any way you could hook a fella up with a magic skill? I assume that’s what a ‘revelation’ can do?”

  The administrator made a face. “I could give you a skill, but it would be temporary. You wouldn’t take it with you through reincarnation. It’s usually reserved for things like [Hero] candidates and the like, but I can’t offer that right now. I’m also not sure you’d want the hassle.”

  “Uh. Kay.”

  “The problem is, the Five Guardian Faith isn’t entirely wrong about your early skills being foundational. These Faiths don’t come out of nowhere. Sure, you’ll likely break the mold in a few lifetimes, but it probably would hurt your progress to give you a magic skill now, only to have you build off that this entire life and then lose it at the start of your next one.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  “Ah, well. Shoot,” I said. “Though I appreciate you looking out for me.”

  The administrator waved his hand, and a book flew off a shelf and zipped across the library into his hand. “That said, you should be capable of learning a magic skill on your own, properly, with your Will. There’s no issue with me telling you how.”

  He pushed the book across the table, and I opened the cover.

  “[Mana Manipulation]?”

  “Technically, this is a basic magic skill in this world. It’s just not really one you’ll see in the country you were born in. They’ve got a pretty rigid system for learning magic, which you’ll no doubt discover. This is more of a free-form magic spell common in a different part of the world. It’s a great jumping off point for your long-term magical journey, beyond this lifetime. Maybe don’t mention the exact name of the skill in Ivarnel, though. Or anywhere in your country, actually.”

  “This doesn’t sound problematic at all,” I muttered, but I was already scanning the first page of the book. Obviously, I’m still going to take it.

  The administrator laughed. “Well, once you’ve read through that, I’ll send you back and you can try to earn the skill on your own. That way it’ll stick with you. Should get you onto a new path, regarding the Faith.”

  “Thank you,” I said, looking back up. “Hey, what did you mean about messing up the world, earlier?”

  The administrator shrugged. “Shouldn’t actually be a problem in this life, since you’re still a baby,” he said, and I tried not to interject at that. “But in a few lifetimes, with enough power under your hat and being born into an unsuspecting universe, you can really blow the wheels off of the whole thing. It can get messy, especially if the local administrator is working towards something. Just… keep it dialed in. Not all administrators enjoy their jobs and they’ll take it out on you.”

  I blanched a bit at that, but the administrator just laughed.

  “Most are decent, though. Might be wise to get a prayer in earlier than ten years old in the future if you’re trying to go for a certain goal. Although, there are definitely some who would enjoy fucking with you, too.”

  “Like giving me a skill that would get me lynched in my country of birth?”

  The administrator’s grin became ever so slightly more mischievous. “Like I said, it can get pretty boring around here.” He stood, tucking the chair he was sitting in back under the table. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you. Feel free to check in now and then.”

  “Thanks. Will do.”

  The administrator vanished, as did the library around us, leaving me with just the chair, table, and book in front of me, alone in the white void. With nothing else to do, I started studying.

  * * *

  I cracked my eye open, finding myself back in the chapel.

  Well now, it’s up to me, I thought.

  The contents of the book had been fairly straightforward. After elucidating me on the mana flow in my body, which it referred to as a mana circuit, it went on to describe ways of manipulating this circuit to accomplish various goals.

  The two main concepts were bridging and extension.

  Bridging was the one I would mostly want to use up front. My mana circuit was like a complex, one-way highway that ran through my entire body, at the highest level. At a low level, unsurprisingly, mana was much more complicated than that. My magic circuit was actually fractal, so if I tried to zoom in on its path, I would find it infinitely stretching, infinitely deviating from the macro path with exploratory micro paths at the boundaries, evading measurement. Despite being a fractal path, mana still circulated in a regular loop. The circuit could be called the “infinite made finite,” and honestly, it wasn’t worth trying to fully grok the anatomy of it. If magic made perfect sense, would it even be magic?

  The path of the mana circuit could be altered, though. Bridging involved bypassing the usual pathway and circulating the mana through an alternate path. One obvious example would be bridging the circuit in one’s hand to create a one way valve that circulated the mana trying to escape the hand back into the hand’s closed circuit. This would concentrate the mana increasingly within the hand.

  Concentrating mana like that was part of what would happen in true spell casting. Ultimately, it would be released through the associated skill, transforming into a fireball or magic missile or whatever. That wasn’t the only use for it, but it was a common one.

  Extension, on the other hand, was a way to extend one’s fractal and infinitely stretching mana circuit from within one’s body outward, usually into an object. Sometimes, extending into another person or creature, either in a closed loop or with a way back. Using a magic sword was a good example of extension. Feeding one’s mana circuit through their hand into the sword would allow them to imbue the sword with their magical energy.

  The difference between the two was, arguably, semantic. Bridging could be thought of as a recursive form of overlapping extension. Extension could be thought of as bridging one’s own mana circuit with an external one, like the one that would be present in a true magic sword. Mana was present in everything in the world, so technically, everything had a mana circuit. In some ways, everyone was connected by the universal mana circuit, anyway, and we were all just a part of it, in the same way that our individual cells are a part of our larger body. Nonetheless, each individual cell has its own role to play.

  It was all a little philosophical. That was all well and good, but I was interested in the practical.

  Since the difference was somewhat semantic, naturally, there were ways to do things that fell within the scope of both bridging and extension. For example, bridging the flow of mana from one hand to another hand through an extension, then creating a feedback loop in the space between hands to create a concentrated orb of mana.

  That was what I was focusing on doing, while feigning continued prayer, in the front of the chapel, under the watchful eyes of the statues of the Five Guardians.

  Why I chose to do this, specifically, was because concentrated mana usually glowed. Creating an orb of mana between my hands should look a lot like a magic light spell, even with limited Will. It was an expensive way to use my mana, but I needed something visual that I could display as a skill that was straightforward and identifiable as a discrete spell as opposed to [Mana Manipulation].

  I focused my breathing to aid myself in collecting mana from within the chapel, and concentrated on extending my circuit between my hands. I felt a shift in my internal mana circuit as the magic started bypassing other parts of my body and transmitting in a loop from hand to hand, then mentally built the bridge and the valve that would cycle the mana in the invisible extended circuit held in the space between my hands.

  The mana built, collected, and coalesced. Soon it was bright enough that it was likely visible to Umbor and Mishel behind me, so I turned, and carefully lifted my hands above me. I disengaged it from my own magic circuit and it drifted upwards under its own power, lighting up the chapel before dispersing back into the atmosphere.

  “The Guardians have decided that my path will be magic,” I said to the two awe-struck men.