Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

While I was going through all my skills, reading what I’d gotten and testing them out, I was also reading War Sentinel Tyrannus’s letter.

Dawn,

Entirely up to you, but the rest of the War Sentinels regularly meet and discuss. Every third day for lunch at the Celestial Supper.

See you!

War Sentinel Tyrannus.

I needed Iona to decode if the letter was a polite order, a request I couldn’t refuse, or actually entirely up to me. Still, I wanted to go. A smaller group of Sentinels to help me find my feet, who’d all been in the same situation I was in now? Sign me up! Looked like the next meeting was in two days, which suited me just fine.

Speaking of meetings, Legata Valeria mentioned that she wanted to have some private discussions with me. She was in command of the Sixth Legion, the one I was attached to, and I’d be working closely with her for the foreseeable future. So many things to do!

Like figure out how to clear out the damn pile of iron coins Night had left me with.

We needed to buy a bunch of boxes or a few spatially expanded boxes, then manually scoop every single coin, put them in the boxes, then figure out how to ship them back. We’d need enchanted boxes to handle the weight, figure out how to move them to the city, find a buyer, and… it was all a mess.

Okay, there were a lot of moving parts to the problem, but none of them were insurmountable. Good boxes, ones that were spatially expanded, reinforced to hold the weight, and enchanted to be lightweight existed. They’d be useful for as long as the enchantments lasted for us generally, and I had faith that, even if I didn’t know the language, that I could maintain the enchantments.

A home always needed more storage.

While it was a huge hill of coins, a couple of good shovels combined with our stats should neatly clear the place up.

Problems always felt so much more manageable after they’d been broken down into pieces, and a solution for each part found. There was only one part of the problem I didn’t have a good solution to yet.

How was I going to prank Night back?

I almost wanted to facepalm at myself. I’d spent a ton of time ironing out the coin logistics, then picked up [Vault of Ages]. Minor downside to [Parallel Thoughts].

At the same time, bringing them all in with the skill was still a challenge, both on the ‘tons of tiny coins to pick up’ basis, and the ‘sheer amount of weight to be teleporting around’ basis. It was no panacea, but it might make some stages easier.

Taking a look at it with a silver lining - power leveling opportunity!

As soon as I was done picking out my skills, I wanted to give them a test run. Skills didn’t come with detailed instruction manuals - I had to test them out myself.

I had a brief pang of grief as I remembered Maximus and Artemis teaching me how to use Fire skills for the first time. Things to test, to experiment with. That had been - gods, that had been almost half my life ago.

I missed them. Now that I was settling in, I’d have to see if I could send Artemis and Julius some more letters. But… what would I do differently? I’d already sent a letter to every place I could think of telling them what my plans were. Was there any point in sending them more?

What if they got my letter and decided it wasn’t firm enough to come?

Yeah, that was a good reason to send out another wave.

Back to skills!

[Vault of Ages] I’d already given a test-run, and I was surprisingly impressed with it. No need to test it further right this second.

I rotated through books fairly quickly, and I didn’t have any easily on-hand to test [Manuscript Mastery] with. It’d be interesting to see how the encryption-breaking portion worked. I was sure some people in Sanguino worked hard on encrypting books - maybe I should track them down at some point to test my skills against them.

It could even be a win-win! I practiced my skills, they practiced against someone who could break their skills, it was a wonderful contest of pitting abilities against each other to level them both up, and possibly improve it. Diminishing returns meant we couldn’t just sit and stare at each other all day, but it could be worth a few levels per person.

I had a minor heart attack when I realized there had been a real chance [Bookwyrm’s Hoard] could’ve gone away while I was classing up, dropping the last thing I had from my parents - their prayer to me for good luck and safety.

I took a calming breath, centering myself.

If the skill had broken during my class up, Iona had been there. Auri was here. They knew how important it was to me. Iona would’ve caught it and protected it until I was awake again. It was still in my [Loremaster’s Library]. It was still safe.

I was going to have fun testing the limits of this skill. The Sentinels probably had ways to test various skills, although I wasn’t sure if they were equipped to test a skill so far out of the normal combat range.

Eh. There had to be somebody who could help me test skills out, for a price. Money was almost no object, it was all about finding the person… and Night would be exactly the right person to direct me.

Perfect.

[Blink] was a straightforward upgrade of an existing skill, and I already had a pretty good idea of how it worked. The major differences were that I could bring small items with me, and my dramatically improved power and control implied that I’d teleport faster, and more accurately. I stepped into a slightly clearer area, and gave Auri a warning.

“Hey Auri, careful, I’m going to try teleporting around a bit. I don’t want you to get caught in it.”

“Brrrpt!” She cleared out, and went over to the pile of iron, doing her own investigations on it.

I kept a half-eye on her. I wasn’t sure what being buried in coins would do to her, and while Auri was amazing, I wasn’t sure her flames could incinerate iron. Melt it into a slag heap on top of her, yes. Which would be worse than being buried by the loose coins in a lot of ways.

I focused on the skill, mentally picturing where I wanted to go. After three seconds, I popped out of existence, only to instantly reappear.

I was mostly where I was aiming for, and I sighed as I saw all my clothes fluttering to the ground behind me.

[*ding!* [Blink] leveled up! 42 -> 43]

Right. I had to do more to get this properly worked out.

Most magic required a strong image to work. It was why only some skills could be placed in gemstones. My [Blink] image clearly needed work.

I got dressed again, and focused on the same spot, imagining all my clothes still on me. After three seconds I [Blinked] again.

My hand shot out to snag my tunic that was fluttering to the ground next to me, grabbing it before it could hit the dirt again.

[*ding!* [Blink] leveled up! 43 -> 44]

I wanted to curse and swear, but I refrained.

I knew what the issue was.

My magic control.

I had the magic power and mana when channeling to activate the effect I wanted - teleporting a short distance. Thanks to System-shenanigans, my body always ended up in the right configuration - I wasn’t doing anything nasty like splicing my head off, or swapping my arms and legs, or just getting a mixer going to town on my guts.

Clearly, the same protection wasn’t extended to my clothing, and I was willing to bet that it wouldn’t extend to other small items I was bringing with me. My magic control wasn’t high enough to properly ‘control’ the skill, so it was going a little wild.

I bet if I had an armor or weapon skill, my teleportation would flawlessly and properly bring them along with me, since they’d be ‘me’.

Magic control was the ‘quiet’ magic stat. It wasn’t flashy like magic power. It wasn’t how many spells I could rapidly sling like mana. It wasn’t how fast my mana restored, calculating how much endurance work I could do like regeneration. It was there, quietly in the background, keeping everything working nicely.

Until it was neglected.

Then everything went haywire. Fireballs went in the wrong direction, Radiance beams unfocused and got too large, healing magic didn’t get the fine details right, and teleports didn’t keep everything together. While I was ‘under’ the limit, everything went fine, and the more I went ‘over’, the worse it was.

My tunic showing up within arm’s reach wasn’t a big deal, but it was annoying. I’d need to test more to see if this was a ‘close’ teleport miss, or a ‘far’ teleport miss.

Leveling up would fix almost all my issues. Leveling [Blink] would improve how efficient I was, which came hand-in-hand with needing less magic control. Leveling my class would improve my magic power and magic control by leaps and bounds, rapidly closing the gap. Leveling my class would also open up my [Spatial Authority] level cap, and as that went up, I’d get a weaker ‘broad’ buy-off for my skills.

The cold math on my [Blink] suggested that I should be able to do this in two seconds, not three, which also implied that something about my image was inefficient. It was like the difference between my ‘just heal them’ image, and my ‘this is exactly what’s wrong with them’ image, and ‘this is how we’re fixing them’ image.

I’d taken the classes at the School, I’d studied hard, but clearly the picture they’d taught was incomplete, or they were fundamentally missing something.

I wasn’t going to stress over it.

The one other thing I could, in theory, do, was revert my biomancy changes. I’d packed on a ton of dense weight with my changes, going from around 45kg to 80kg. [Blink] directly scaled how much mana, power, and control I needed based on how much weight I was moving around.

It was a horrible idea for uncountable reasons, but technically valid.

[Astral Archives] was up next, the skill so similar to its prior iteration that its skill name hadn’t even changed. I delved into my mental archive, finding it looking much like it always had.

Rows upon rows of neatly labeled books, filled with my memories. A desk that I could place books on, to have immediate access to everything inside. The entire place was rearrangeable, a way to easily find, store, and organize memories and knowledge.

I grabbed one of my favorite tomes, shelved right next to my mental desk. The big, fat book of all medical knowledge I knew. I grabbed it every time I wanted to perform any medicine on anyone.

I placed it on my desk, and my head was filled with every speck of knowledge I’d ever gained and put in this book. Interestingly, on my mental desk, little images shimmered to life. Anatomical diagrams. Surgery procedures. Plague response.

There might be more to it, but it looked like [Vivid Dream Reading] had given its ‘vivid visualization’ aspect to [Astral Archives].

[Lust for Lore] was entirely passive, nothing to investigate there.

Last was the big one.

[Rapid Reshelving].

Image was everything. I mentally ‘grabbed’ an arbitrary coin from the pile, and imagined it teleporting into my hand. Then I engaged the skill.

Almost predictably, nothing happened. I slowly walked towards the pile of coins, until the one I was visualizing popped into my hand, the rest of the pile shifting slightly.

[*ding!* [Rapid Reshelving] leveled up! 1 -> 2]

I grinned.

Ooooh, this could be fun!

“Hey Auri, make sure you stay away from the iron pile for a minute, going to try something.” I said.

“Brrrpt!”

A few quick experiments ensued.

I couldn’t teleport half a coin to my hand. I had no idea why - snapping a coin in half let me teleport the two halves no problem - but I couldn’t teleport half a coin, or any other object. The bark on a stick, for example, or leaves on a tree. Something about being ‘attached’ kept it attached.

‘That’s just the way it is’ was the best I could come up with. On a positive note, that meant things like my tunic kept all its little bells and whistles when being teleported around - no need to explicitly think of each piece.

I could teleport a single coin from the middle of the pile. Being crushed by the weight of tens of thousands of other coins didn’t stop me at all. Interestingly, I had to know the coin was there. I couldn’t imagine ‘a random coin that was surely there’ - I had to deliberately, explicitly pick that coin. [The World Around Me] made that a breeze.

I couldn’t teleport one object into another, which was really weird when I thought back to my Spatial class. Like, I was teleporting my coins into air all the time. What made air teleportable-into, what let my magic ‘shift’ air, but not a leaf? Why didn’t air count?

Could I displace water? A quick check with my waterskin indicated yes.

A quick spell traced into the air with burning light froze the water, and I tried to teleport a coin in again. Now it didn’t work.

I could go insane trying to work it all out. I left it to the [Scholars] and [Researchers] at the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft, and focused on simply mastering what I had.

Only worked with air and water… so far, that I knew about. The System knew why, but that’s the way it was, and there was no sense in complaining about it.

Some careful [Nova Lance] at a few coins melted and carved them a bit, and I was able to teleport them ‘together’. The prohibition on ‘can only teleport to air’ didn’t seem to also ban ‘teleport into insane configurations.’

[*ding!* [Rapid Reshelving] leveled up! 13 -> 14]

I was still working on how sending from place A to place B - neither of which was me - worked, when Iona returned on Fenrir.

A huge smile involuntarily split my face as I saw her coming, and I tilted my head in confusion when I saw she had a passenger.

Who was that?

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