After a very uncomfortable afternoon, we got back to the laboratory. I was a little anxious since I had never been so thoroughly examined before.

  Locan inspected the results for several minutes, scratching his head more than once.

  “Let’s get the basics out of the way first. Your health is perfect, nothing is out of the ordinary. Your magical affinity remains good, the same way your mana pool is still below average.”

  “Don’t you mean “ridiculously low”?” I quipped with a little more bitterness than intended.

  “Well, it improved 2% from the last measurement. Anyway... There is no significative change in your magical capacity or your mana absorption. That means, whatever you are doing with the monsters have nothing to do with magic nor left any visible changes in your body.”

  A few seconds of awkward silence followed.

  “So ... what happened to me?”

  “Based on this, nothing happened to you. But I saw you with the hellhounds, that was not a stroke of luck. I am missing something...”

  More awkward silence.

  “There is no way you can make magic without using mana?” asked Uther.

  “You need some form of energy. It is usually mana, but undead use green flame and mechanical abominations can supplement mana with electricity. The only thing that can make an equivalent of magic without a source of energy are ...” He opened his eyes with a glimmer of realization as something finally clicked in his mind.

  Locan jolted from the chair.

  “How can I be so stupid? I need to find something. Wait here.” And he darted from the room before we could ask any questions.

  There was not much else that we could do, so me and Uther sat and waited.

  Itsy jumped on my lap. She was heavy and her legs were prickly, but I had no courage to put her on the floor because she looked so comfortable. How a metal spider could be cute was beyond any logic, but Itsy definitively was.

  We had to wait a little over one hour until Locan returned with a strange bronze gadget. It had several lenses, crystals, dials, and switches. The machine looked old and neglected, with patches of heavy dust where the quick scrub that Locan gave it failed to clean.

  He put the device on the workbench and started to fiddle it, changing some parts and tweaking others to make the strange contraption work. It took another hour. I thought about asking him what he was doing but interrupting him and risking a technical monologue as he went on a tangent would not make things any faster.

  “That should do it” announced Locan while stretching his sore back. “Gift, stay there” he instructed for me to get in front of the device’s lenses.

  I put Itsy on the floor, to which she expressed her displeasure with some clicking sounds before walking away. Then I went to the position indicated by the professor with my legs still a little numb.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  He put his eyes in a pair of oculars, flicked a switch, turned some dials, and finally pressed a button.

  He jolted his head from the device screaming a curse.

  “Professor!” Me and Uther said in unison.

  “I am fine” he replied massaging his eyes with a hand and making a sign for us to not move with the other. I noticed that the light coming out of the ocular was strong enough to illuminate the opposite wall.

  Locan turned some dials to dim the light and hesitantly placed his head in the ocular again. He looked for several seconds in ominous silence.

  “Remember that I said that there are a few methods that you can use to see the Rule? The other method is through artifacts. Artifacts interact directly with the Rule. So, if an artifact is powerful enough, you can use this device to see a few words of it.”

  He moved some lenses in the contraption and flickered a switch. An image was projected on the wall.

  It was the silhouette of my body. The shape was contoured with alien letters of yellow light, blocks of text moving, overlapping, submerging and resurfacing inside my figure like the infinite was in my core. A content so vast that it would take several books to transcribe.

  “Gift, I don’t know how, but you are an artifact.”

  ***

  I moved my arm, the image moved as if mirrored, the symbols accompanying it like glowing tattoos. I kept staring at the projection on the wall, a little conscious because my silhouette appeared to be naked.

  Since I was expecting some kind of explanation for my ability to talk to monsters, I was not particularly shocked. To my blissfully ignorant self, having innate magic or been an artefact were at the same level of weirdness.

  “This is something rare?” asked Uther, just as lost as I was.

  “Not rare. As far as I know, this never happened before. Living things cannot be artefacts, at least based on all our knowledge about how they work.” He turned to me. “You should be dead, of at the bare minimum have your conscience obliterated. It is like you are at the bottom of the ocean, walking without a care in the world, ignoring the water resistance, crushing pressure and lack of air.

  “It is difficult to explain what artefacts are but think about them as annexes of the Rule. Each one is unique and not bound by restrictions that the rest of reality must abide, even magic. A spell that can control monsters, used by a very powerful mage, could control maybe one hundred, an artifact like the Seal of the Forgotten Gods can command all monsters in existence.”

  I stepped out of the gadgets field of vision and the silhouette disappeared.

  “Uther, what do you intend to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are my master, any ability I have is by consequence yours.” I said matter of fact.

  Due to a mix of denial and ignorance, I had still not felt the impact of what I was, but the concept that I could have the full power of the Seal of the Forgotten Gods was something simpler that I could grasp.

  And that was just too much power for a lowly slave to have.

  If the power was indeed the same, the implications would be enormous. It could drastically change the politics of the entire continent. To leave it unattended was unthinkable.

  Uther was not just a noble, but a prince; he had duties to his people and country. I was sure he would be more qualified to make decisions in this regard and I was prepared to accept any use he wanted of me.

  “I will need to think about this before doing anything.” Uther replied pensively as he digested all that new information.

  “There is one other thing that is making me worry.” Locan continued. “Artefacts cannot be destroyed by usual means. I don’t know how this would translate to a living creature.”

  “You took samples of my blood today and it hurt, so I don’t think I am invulnerable or something.”

  “Maybe your bones will retain the power after you die or your children will inherit it.”

  Using my bones to control monsters gave me chills, the mere idea was creepy. As for children... I could not have them, so that at least was something that I would not need to worry about.

  “Anyway, it’s getting late, and we have a lot to think about. There was a librarian here in the Academy that was very knowledgeable about artifacts. I will probe her without revealing what we discover here.”

  We said goodbye and returned to the castle in contemplative silence.