The sword bit into the sentinel’s torso. The static discharged instantly, crawling across the construct’s stone surface before collapsing.

  The impact rattled my arms.

  The sentinel staggered half a step.

  Nineteen? From Static Surge?

  The maximum value was thirty.

  How did this work? Was the value randomized?

  “Ceralis,” I muttered under my breath. “Explain.”

  I frowned. “Clarify.”

  Ah.

  So it wasn’t that the skill was weak.

  It was that I only got one chance.

  With RES at 1, I was gambling every time, and losing would be common. Of course, probability again. At least, I knew that the higher my RES, the more reality bent in my favor by sheer statistical inevitability.

  I glanced at the sentinel, then at my status.

  Right.

  No second strike.

  I stayed where I was, blade lowered, breathing slow, hoping for a faster recovery.

  Nothing.

  Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. Then a minute. Still nothing.

  I frowned. “Ceralis. When does AP regenerate?”

  100 seconds?

  I did the math. Slowly.

  Five AP. One hundred seconds per point. That was five hundred seconds.

  The cooldown on Static Surge was thirty seconds. The actual cooldown was ten minutes.

  So this was the truth of it.

  Magic didn’t belong to people who merely learned spells. It belonged to those whose bodies could carry it, and not me. RES wasn’t optional.

  This was why I needed Anabeth.

  Then something came to my mind: I had two unassigned attribute points. Two points for attributes, just sitting there untouched like a fool leaving coin on the ground because he forgot pockets existed. I promptly allocated both to RES.

  The world didn’t explode. Nothing much really happened, really.

  I checked the numbers again, recalculating automatically.

  Right. I couldn’t test how rolling three values instead of one would look like.

  I let the blade tip rest against the stone floor and sighed. “Should’ve planned earlier.”

  The system, wisely, said nothing.

  With nothing else to test, I disengaged the sentinel and retraced my steps.

  Getting out proved even easier than getting in. Training grounds assumed incompetence in only one direction. I slipped through the service gate, waited for the guard’s laughter to crest again, then melted back into the side street without incident.

  Silvermane was exactly where I’d left her, tail flicking lazily, utterly unconcerned with the fact that her rider had just committed a minor civic trespass for science. I untied her, mounted carefully, and that was when I spotted Anabeth.

  She was not returning with food.

  She was not holding a basket.

  She was not even standing properly.

  Her face was practically pressed against a shopfront window, nose an inch from the glass, eyes wide with reverent fascination. Both hands were braced on either side of the frame as though the building itself might flee if she let go.

  I reined Silvermane in beside her and followed her gaze. The storefront was plain and quiet, but with a golden sextant painted above the door, and shelves inside that glittered with scroll cases, astrolabes, compasses, and charts.

  A chartmaker’s atelier.

  A cartography shop? Here?

  Right. Supposedly, this was the one thing Elderstead was actually known for. The one thing travelers, adventurers, guild hunters, merchants, and nobles actually cared about. Not honey-buttered briar loaves nor glowing pebbles. This.

  A chartmaker.

  No wonder they had guards.

  I sighed, long and resigned, and swung down from the saddle. “You went for briar loaves.”

  She didn’t look away. “Sir Henry,” she whispered, as if afraid the maps might hear her. “They have a triple-calibrated latitude wheel. I have only read about those.”

  “No bread.”

  “They have Pre-Order coastal charts.”

  “No basket.”

  “They have a star-compass with a living needle.”

  I stared at her profile. “You didn’t leave for food.”

  She finally peeled herself from the glass and smiled sheepishly. “I may have... been diverted. Truth be told, it isn’t every day one sees something so valuable.”

  Anabeth wasn’t wrong. Most people didn’t realize why maps were so prized. They thought it was about landmarks and villages. But no. Accurate mapping meant knowing where dungeon rifts opened, where monster migrations crossed roads, where ruins slept under the soil, and where untapped resources lay.

  If you had the right map, you could become rich, powerful, or dead in record time.

  The Kingdom had even tried to monopolize cartography decades ago, but it had lasted roughly three months. Turned out chartmakers were stubborn, independent, and often armed with the kind of esoteric directional magic that made arresting them extremely difficult. Also, guilds were rather powerful in this realm. I had not yet been strong enough to gain entry into one, but I wanted to. Kingdom jockeys wouldn’t be able to bully me the way they had bullied the Knighthood at the dawn of its cycle.

  Speaking of maps… I still kept the aetheric stone that gave me the cartography task in my pannier. I reached for it, and immediately, the task information flashed in front of my eyes again.

  I could do this. The task wasn’t to redraw the entire continent, just my immediate surroundings. Still, a chartmaker in their own atelier could teach me a thing or two. How to orient maps with local aetheric anomalies and what kind of landmarks mattered inside a town. This Cartography skill would be crucial to rebuilding the Knighthood, as I might actually be able to map out where Mostenstein was once I’d gathered enough information.

  I squinted through the atelier’s window, and moving among the scrolls and compasses was a man. Slightly stooped, spectacles perched on the tip of his nose, ink stains running down his sleeves like a badge of honor.

  That had to be the chartmaker. No one else would treat maps like sacred instruments, no one else would handle astrolabes and sextants with that careful reverence.

  Surely I could secure his assistance with a modest application of ‘persuasion’.