A New Star Chapter 3

As I stepped out of my room, I pulled on my mana as I did before, carefully observing what happened. This time, there was no pain, and I saw the darkness wrap around me, which was not particularly useful in a brightly lit hallway. I let most of the mana go, allowing enough to remain to keep the area around me just a little darker, and moved along the edges of the hallway after slipping my door shut.  

I encountered no further problems as I stole through the wing of the family residence in which my room was located. I had managed to piece together some of the layout of the house, knowing just enough to navigate from my room to the fabled room of books. I made the trip rather quickly, my steps feeling quite light as I slid through the bright halls, managing to avoid guards, servants, and family members alike, not that many would be roaming the halls at this time. My family members would be working or studying, the guards would be patrolling outside or training, and the servants stuck to the copious and twining servant passages that were layered throughout the entire premises.  

I entered the double doors of the library after only a couple minutes, carefully swinging the right door open enough that I could enter before closing it behind me. The main library in our manor was a fairly massive room, nearly a hundred feet from left to right and stretching around forty feet from the entrance to the tall windows on the outer wall. Not just that, but the room was two stories tall, with nothing but double-height bookshelves packed in from wall-to-wall, allowing it to hold enough books and scrolls that it was truly comparable to most rooms twice its size in other estates or cities.  

I slid through the shelves, fortunate in that my luck seemed to be good this day, as I found an area that looked like it had simple primers and basic language books after only a single minute of search. It was only two shelves out of the hundreds in the room, but I didn't need more than a couple of books to start. It would be a little difficult without anyone actually teaching me the letters, but once I could figure out the letters and some of the basic words, I could teach myself to read and even write. I understood much of the vocabulary already from listening to others speak, and I had a rather good understanding of languages carried over from my previous life; I just needed to understand the writing system. 

I would like to say I breezed through the language in an instant, but it took me over an hour before I had a grasp of the basic letters and symbols. I then spent another hour figuring out basic wordforms before I was really able to hit the ground running. It was not quite mid-morning at this point, and I returned the basic primers to the shelf before starting my hunt for broader subjects. I needed to have an understanding of the cultures and societies of this world, so I first started with a dry but important subject: history.  

I needed some books that were rather out of my reach and, while I likely could push one of the ladders around to climb up, I attempted first to exert my external arts. I didn't think the element of darkness would be able to directly help me here, but with all this mana freely accessible and the ease of manipulation in this environment, I thought I might be able to do pure manipulation. As I reached out with my mana, I felt something in my chest crack, and a searing pain raced through my body and limbs. I just managed to avoid falling to a knee as I thought: not again. 

Second Affinity unlocked. 

Unlocked: Gravity. 

Grade: A 

Compatibility: 150% 

The pain was not quite as severe and faded more quickly this time. I was apparently some crazy type of prodigy in this life, and I once again spent a moment pondering if I had stolen this life from someone else, someone more worthy. For a very brief moment, I felt a warmth in my chest, but it passed so quickly I assumed it was an artifact of unlocking my second power. When I had recovered, I managed to make use of my mana to slide a few books off the desired shelf. 

What I learned in the next several hours was fascinating. This continent's history was quite rich and long, not to mention this entire world's history, though there was surprisingly little of that in the library. It seemed like the continent experienced a slightly strange cycle of boom and bust, the clues to this broader pattern that I was finding making me a little concerned. Civilizations shouldn't experience this many swings up and down; one or two variances like this were understandable, but a dozen or more cycles moving between untold heights and near stone-age levels of technology and understanding was…troubling.  

More inimical to what could and would affect me was the current level of technology and magic research. Obviously, I wouldn't get a very deep understanding of that from an hour or two of paging through random books in the library, but I could still get a general feel for where things in the Settled Lands were at. It seemed that in the present age the most advanced field was that of enchantment, which I found rather interesting. This was something almost entirely absent from my former life, and the fact that it had been cultivated to such a high degree was impressive.  

It seemed as if blacksmithing, which was now wrapped up in more advanced fabrication methods, had moved along at a fairly reasonable pace of development. I judged that the current era had reached something around the very late industrial age or really, the early parts of the modern era. There were some technologies that were developing a little oddly; take communications, for instance. Despite the level of much of the rest of what the Settled Lands had figured out, because so many people had so many different powers that allowed for either instant transmission of messages or extremely rapid movement, there still really wasn't even a basic telegraph network built.  

A little strange, considering this place relied now on rail travel much more than my previous home world. Most cities across the Settled Lands were connected by rail, and many towns were included in this. That relegated the use of automobiles to more industrial work, and to connecting the smaller villages of only one or two hundred to the broader transport network. If I needed some kind of niche that required a lot of know-how and some decent starting capital, but that could provide unimaginable returns, pioneering telecommunications was definitely somewhere I could make a very high-level play.  

The thing that intrigued me the most was the field named the "forgotten art" of the current era: alchemy. It appeared that the craft had been tossed to the side, developed very little for a variety of reasons. Most people today saw it as a slightly inconvenient way to acquire healing items and, with the prevalence of people in the current age that had healing affinities, it was considered redundant. The other thing I found rather quickly in my study was that one of its key applications was in enhancing and improving the body. A mastery of alchemy went hand-in-hand with a mastery of body cultivation and, since body cultivation was generally considered a waste, there was little interest in reviving alchemy. Of course, if alchemy of this world had any of the more mythical properties that it was rumored to have, such as pure element transformation or the creation of mythical items beyond the normal realm of what was possible, i.e. the legendary philosopher's stone, then discarding it was rather foolish. 

Perhaps because it was the forgotten child, or perhaps because it had such a vast potential to interlink with body cultivation, the thing I was coincidentally most familiar with of all, alchemy called to me in a way that none of the other arts did. I would like to investigate enchanting in any time I had to, as it was also a wholly unknown art to me, but I fell immediately into a deep and abiding love for alchemy that would never abandon me, as I would never abandon it. 

The last piece I managed to figure out before I was rudely interrupted was more details about affinities and the 'rule of three.' I still didn't have a full understanding by far, but I had a lot more information to work with, as well as paths to pursue to gather greater knowledge on the subject. I had also found out more about people's body types and cultivation on this world. Let me explain: 

When someone started to really develop their affinities, usually around the ages of eight to twelve, they would get a grade, something that they would be able to tell at any time through a quick check of their 'status.' Those grades followed the letters, ranging from 'A' all the way up to 'Z.' Someone who had just awoken one affinity, even a 'strong' one, at A-grade could do little more than light a hearth or fill a sink. Conversely, the handful of old monsters out there with their 'Three Primaries' at Z-grade could individually flatten mountains or boil seas. 

Every affinity had a grade, and the Adventurers Guild gave a rank based on a person's three highest affinities. Typically, that would be a person's three highest compatibility affinities, and here is where I learned exactly what compatibility was; that being a percentage score showing just how strong in that affinity someone was. Someone with a ten percent compatibility in fire would wield the element much less effectively than someone with a seventy-five percent compatibility, just for example.  

Whatever the case may be, these three highest affinities would determine someone’s rank, which was essentially the lowest grade of the three. Three affinities at C-grade? They're a C-rank. One affinity at C-grade, one at D-grade, and one at G-grade? They're still a C-rank. The idea was the guild didn't want someone with a very high compatibility in a single affinity growing it above anything else and then finding themselves too weak to battle higher-ranked beasts. The 'rule of three' the guild stuck to meant that someone was only considered the rank of their third-strongest affinity, regardless that they might even have one affinity at the legendary Z-grade. 

Oh, and everyone's body that they were born with had the same system. They would awaken to A-grade at some point as they started to train and move through the ranks to eventually hit Z-grade, though very, very few people ever did. Body cultivation was like the town sewers; everyone in this world knew it was important, but nobody wanted to actually deal with it. Add to that the fact that body grade was never counted as part of the guild's 'rule of three,' and it was perhaps a little understandable why many people chose to ignore it. Ah, and one other important thing; rather than compatibility, which would be a little silly, how compatible someone was with their own body, bodies had tiers. From tier one and onwards, the tier generally determined how strong your body was overall and how much you could do through purely physical means, though this was, of course, complicated by a slew of affinities that affected physical power and prowess.  

The vast majority of people out there, didn't matter whether they were human, elf, dwarf, siren, merfolk, leviat (Leviathan descendants), minotaur, centaur, or so on, had tier one bodies. Rarer but not extremely rare were people with tier two bodies, while the real one in a million lottery winners were people born with tier three bodies. I had not yet awakened my body, so I could view nothing about it, but I was hoping, with the way my luck was going, that I would manage to hit that jackpot and get a tier three body. 

But all of this general information was about as far as I got before I was rather rudely interrupted. I had heard one or two people pass the room during the morning, but it didn't sound any different than what the servants walking about in the regular hallways would sound like. At around noon, the time most took lunch, there was more movement and some of it sounded a little…panicked, for lack of a better term. I would only learn the story a little later when Marianne relayed it through what she had heard and seen. 

********************************************* 

It never rained but it poured around here. As if working for the duke and duchess didn't strain my capabilities enough as it was, being the point of reporting for basically all the staff some days drove me to distraction. I, Michael Redwind, had been with the duke since before he married, before he even gained his current title. That was likely the reason why I was one of the nine captains of the household's guard, only below the duke, duchess, and lord commander in position. And the lord commander could keep her post; captain-work was already turning my hair white at forty-eight, and I couldn't imagine what being the lord commander was doing to her. Then again, she and the other two captains at the estate often looked far more relaxed than I was, but I'm sure that's just due to them being better at putting on a brave front even in the face of crisis. 

And speaking of crisis, was this different from any other day today? Of course not. The morning had started well enough; I had woken up, after all. It all seemed to slide downhill from there, as it usually did in any day ending in 'day.' I was in my office in the guard’s barracks, a separate building behind the main residence of the family at the back of the estate, focusing on completing some of the endless paperwork when trouble started brewing. I usually didn't make it past mid-morning before I was out and about due to one or more crises, though sometimes I could slip through all the way to lunch before that happened.  

Today, the midmorning trouble had been a confusion with the latest order of food which I had to go back and forth with the couriers across a dozen messages before sorting it out. If I let a problem like that fester it could turn into a huge headache, considering the massive amount of food the entire estate went through just per day. Not that we couldn't send some of the guards and servants for a resupply, but that would interrupt so much other work that I'd never see the outside of my office again. 

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