+SYS

  Name: Julia

  Age: 15

  Class: Seeker 17

  Subclass: None

  Companions: Trixy

  Attributes:

  Strength: 29

  Dexterity: 27

  Constitution: 29

  Intelligence: 33

  Wisdom: 31

  Resilience: 28

  Unassigned Attribute Points: 0

  Magic:

  Earth Magic:

  Spire

  Material Separation

  Wind Magic:

  Vacuum

  Dash

  Water Magic:

  Water Shield

  Water Whip

  Water Walking

  Icicle

  Thermal Magic:

  Spark

  Fireball

  Temperature

  EM Magic:

  Faraday’s Armor

  Lightning Bolt

  Lightning Field

  Light Magic:

  Light

  Invisibility

  Gravity Magic:

  Telekinesis

  Space Magic:

  Spatial Awareness

  Spatial Coordinates

  Summoning Magic:

  Ritual Summoning

  Monster Tamer Magic:

  Pact

  Telepathy

  Sense Share

  Arcane Magic:

  Manipulation

  Density

  State

  Elasticity

  Skills:

  Runes 6

  Enchanting 2

  Ritual Casting 5

  Meditation 7

  Mana Manipulation 7

  Mana Sense 8

  Truesight 4

  Assimilation 6

  Swordsmanship 5

  Evasion 4

  Danger Sense 3

  Tracking 2

  Mana Healing 3

  Split Focus 4

  Mana Conversion 3

  Enhanced Body

  -SYS

  Julia closed her Status, having admired her progress over the last year—even though her mind tried to insist it was far too little. She’d been busy, clearly. She’d even advanced a few levels in her Class! That had been a surprise. It turns out that because Trixy is considered part of Julia’s Status, her gains contribute just a tiny bit to Julia’s as well.

  Considering Trixy’s Evolution Progress went up to 78%, three levels for Julia was truly a tiny amount. Still, it was progress where she wouldn’t have seen any otherwise. Not that Julia wasn’t progressing, she was. It just happened that her progress was in magic and Skills rather than Class levels. Class levels required combat to advance, after all. Or, for her they did.

  Braden had been taking Julia on Bronze-rank jobs every week for the last year. Typically, these were quests that, while low-risk, exercised Julia’s resourcefulness. Every single job required something that Julia had never experienced before. Braden didn’t pick any repeats.

  Sometimes it was finding a lost pet. Other times it was tracking a specific animal that was ransacking a farmer’s crops or livestock—these were the ones Trixy especially liked, and where most of her Progress came from.

  And still, sometimes it was completely different, like tracking down a specific herb in the wild or investigating the source of a “disembodied voice” locals were hearing coming from their well (it was a kid who liked to climb down the rope and hide under the bucket to scare people).

  Julia had even picked up the Tracking skill due to all the experience she gained from following animal trails and tracks. Turns out that even looking for herbs involved animals—or, it was a good place to start. If animals ate the herb you were looking for, follow their tracks to find their feeding grounds. If animals didn’t eat what you were looking for, look for areas where the tracks weren’t.

  Julia’s free APs that she hadn’t assigned had haunted her for many months. Even as she neared her fifteenth birthday, she still hadn’t decided where to allocate them. Braden hadn’t been helpful, either.

  “It’s your decision, Jules. Think about what you want to do in the future. There’s power to be had in specializing. Some builds dump all the free APs they get into the same Attributes their APs are automatically assigned to, doubling down on the gains. Others use the points to boost other Attributes and shore up their builds’ weaknesses. Both are legitimate strategies.

  “There’s no right and wrong answer here, and I can’t tell you what to do or what you won’t regret doing in the future because it completely depends on what you want to do; who you want to become.”

  After much internal debate and bouncing pros and cons off of Braden, Julia had decided to follow the throughline of her Class, which was building her foundation. Thus, she distributed the free APs evenly throughout her Attributes not getting boosted automatically by the Class. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do in the future, so she would build a broad foundation to keep her options open. For now.

  Interestingly, despite pumping 28 APs into body Attributes (Strength and Dexterity), she didn’t hurt nearly as much as when she’d first checked her notifications after waking up in the Guild Infirmary. Braden had been confused by this until she shared her Status with him.

  Turns out the Seeker Class gave the “Enhanced Body” skill at Level 10. Typically, Classes would give Skills every five levels, with the more prominent Skills usually awarded in ten-level increments.

  Enhanced Body did exactly as advertised. It made pretty much every aspect of her physical body better. She was a little faster, a little stronger, a little…well…better in pretty much every way. This wasn’t something expressed through numbers in her Attributes. It was just a feeling.

  This was, however, the main source of her absolute agony. It made otherwise minor adjustments to her entire body—the entire thing. All those minor adjustments at once, though, made it feel like her bones were being shattered and rearranged.

  The Skill, despite being a Skill that showed up in the corresponding menu in her Status, didn’t have a Level. Julia had to ask Braden about it, she’d never heard of such a thing. Apparently, there were Skill categories that people referred to as “enhancements.”

  This was not a System designation, since they were already classified as Skills. It was just something that people started calling them.

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  They were Skills that enhanced something about oneself. They were largely qualitative improvements and, as such, didn’t have Levels associated with them. They were simply one-time improvements made to one’s body or mind or spirit or whatever else.

  The Seeker Class so far had given Julia Truesight at Level 1, Physical Assimilation at Level 5, Enhanced Body at Level 10, and Magical Assimilation at Level 15.

  The Assimilation Skills are Skills that add increased experience toward learning Skills of the relevant type. Physical Assimilation aided with skills like Swordsmanship, Evasion, and physical Skills, while Magical was for magical Skills, obviously.

  However, upon acquiring Magical Assimilation at Level 15, the two Assimilation Skills had combined and absorbed her Training Skill, which was, itself, a Skill that provided boosts to experience gained while Training.

  Braden hadn’t been able to give exact numbers, but he suspected that she now had a rather tremendous boost to experience toward Skill learning and acquisition of all types. This was in addition to the Class itself already likely giving a small boost.

  Based on the trend of Skills her Class had given her, she was both excited for and absolutely dreading the Skill she’ll get at Level 20. Very likely, it will be some kind of “Enhanced Mind” or something similar. Judging by the pain her body experienced, she expected it to be like her brain was being pulled out of her ears, nose, and eyes. That was an issue for later, though.

  The Assimilation Skill had made a tremendous difference in both her training with Ravina and her magical study—especially after her 15th birthday. Braden had kept to tradition and fed her some world-shaking truths about reality.

  The first was related to Gravity Magic. She, at this point, had very little trouble levitating all but the heaviest of objects. She still couldn’t get herself very far off the ground or for very long, but she could almost keep an apple above her head all day.

  Braden had questioned why she was only levitating objects on one axis, though. “You know the demonstration I gave you was just to make it easier to visualize, right? The apple on the sheet is just a visual aid. It’s a two-dimensional visual aid.

  “But, gravity doesn’t exist in only two dimensions, does it? Spacetime doesn’t exist in only two dimensions. When you press on that sheet—press on spacetime—to levitate an object, you’re only doing it on the up-down axis. Why can you not do it on the other two axes as well?”

  As he posed this question to her, he floated an apple out of his palm and horizontally over to her lap. She stared at it in consternation for several long minutes. Then, it clicked. She “pushed” the apple off her lap in excitement, and it rocketed across the room before splattering in a spray of apple-mush against the wall. She was too excited to even register the mess she’d made.

  The System was also excited, it seemed, as it awarded her the Telekinesis spell under her Gravity Magic category. That was just the appetizer, though.

  Once the mess was cleaned and Julia had gotten the excitement out of her system by using her Telekinesis to shift pretty much everything in the house about, Braden had sat her down again in the living room.

  He confused her by whipping a slate board on wheels out of seemingly nowhere. He must have a dimensional storage item on him somewhere. Julia resolved to figure out where it was someday, as he started to draw on the board with some kind of flaky stone.

  “Steam, water, and ice. If I told you these are all water, you would agree, right?” he began while drawing the named states of water. At Julia’s nod, he continued, “Well, why are they all water?

  “What is the commonality that unites them? No matter which way you look at them, they’re all pretty different from each other, right? So, why are they all considered water? We even have different names for all of them, so why?”

  At his urging, Julia responded with the only thing she could think of. “Well…they all…come from each other? Ice comes from freezing water. Steam comes from boiling it.”

  Braden nodded and smiled. “That’s right. To be honest, I’m not actually sure why they’re all called water colloquially. That’s not the point I’m trying to make, though. What I’m trying to say is they’re all the same thing, just in different states. This is the important thing. What the water is composed of is all the same. What matters is the stuff’s arrangement and energy.”

  Braden drew a bunch of circles in different configurations. One in a crystal-like arrangement, one with the circles loosely collected into a larger, somewhat-amorphous circle, and one with circles seemingly free-floating wherever they wanted. “Solid, liquid, and gas. These are the three most common states of matter. In the case of states of water, we have ice, liquid water, and steam or water vapor respectively.”

  He lectured about “molecules” that made up the structures he’d drawn on the board and how their energy and vibrations determined their state. Higher energy levels, which meant more motion, would shatter the rigid bonds of the solids and transition the substance to a liquid. He used the example of leaving ice out and watching it melt. It went from an ordered solid to a chaotic puddle.

  The reality of how things were structured shook Julia, but the really devastating news was that everything in the world existed in states like these. He compared the example of ice melting to melting iron in a forge and a volcano turning solid rock to molten slag. Julia felt like her view of the world was crumbling. She suddenly wondered how she’d existed for so long while being so oblivious.

  It was a strange experience. It was true, and she knew—somehow—that it was true, but it was so different from what she had thought up to this point that it was almost like her mind was refusing to believe it purely on the basis of being too different from her previous view.

  Braden had explained that there were more states out there, just less commonly. Apparently, lightning existed in a state called “plasma,” which was achieved by heating a gas so hot that it underwent another phase transition.

  “There are other, more rare states that do or can exist, but I’m honestly not super familiar with them. I barely even know a couple of them, and I certainly don’t have enough knowledge to explain how you’d be able to use supercritical fluids or whatever for magic.”

  Julia shook her head. “How is it possible to know all this and not be an expert?” she asked. “You said once that you only ‘took some classes’ to acquire this knowledge, but how is it possible to learn so much about the world from a couple classes?” Julia was overwhelmed with just the few things he’d taught her already. The overwhelming feeling left her a little dispirited, honestly.

  Braden chuckled. “Well, where I’m from, people were required to attend mandatory education from about ages five to eighteen. And that’s just the required education. People who were interested in further study could attend even more advanced education.

  “Don’t be discouraged. I’m not a genius or anything. You’re way smarter than I, Jules. The only difference between the two of us is our starting point. This is a young world. Most civilizations around this world are still in the city-state stage. This would be considered absolutely archaic by my own home’s standards.

  “The…uh, ‘place’ I come from had thousands and thousands of years of history. The civilization I came from was built on the bones of the hundreds of countries that came before it, the knowledge passed down and built upon by generation after generation.

  “These are not my own discoveries. They are discoveries made over centuries, millennia of study and research by people far greater than I.

  “But you know what, Julia? This world is so very new. I don’t know what you want to do with your life here, but if you wanted to, you could be the one to kick off the era of study and research in this part of the world. You could be the one to encourage cooperation and knowledge-sharing and work towards the mutual betterment of all sapients. This world’s story is just in its first chapters.

  “So, don’t despair at not being at the end of a story. Cherish the fact that you get to decide how it begins.”

  “What a wonderful sentiment-” is likely what Julia would’ve said had she been paying any attention. Her mind was aflame with possibilities that this knowledge of matter provided, the dip in her spirit having fled just as soon as it arrived to be replaced by a whirlwind of ideas. She was vaguely aware he had just said some things that should pique her interest, but there was too much to think about!

  She couldn’t focus on anything else beyond those ideas that came bubbling up. She kept trying to grasp them before they popped and disappeared, but there were so many of them.

  Over the next several days, it was all Julia could think about. She went through life for those few days almost without thought to what she was physically doing. She ate, slept, and brushed her hair all on instinct, constantly turning over the magic she had access to in her head. And it finally bore fruit on the fourth day after Braden’s lecture on the states of matter.

  Julia sat in the backyard around midday. She had a bowl of lukewarm water in front of her. She had been considering state changes for many days now. She knew that Ice Magic was not only a possible type of magic, but even a common one. There were many users of it even in the Striton branch of the Guild.

  Ice wasn’t as common here where it was relatively warm all the time, but there were Ice Mages that would make a living entirely off creating ice for businesses and families—to keep food storage cold.

  So, although not as common here, it was certainly present. It was also very easy to visualize and understand at a surface-level, so Ice Magic was one of the more common types, perhaps even competing with the primary four elements for number of users.

  Julia had been thinking that she could likely unlock Ice Magic by transitioning water into ice. She thought she could do this with her Fire Magic. Her Fire Magic had sharply increased in both power and efficiency once she practiced with the visualization of injecting her mana as energy to increase the vibration of molecules. If she could increase the vibrations, surely she could decrease them, too, right?

  First, she wanted to shape the water into a spike. Braden had explained that despite being so tiny as to be invisible to sight, the bonds these molecules made with each other were usually quite strong.

  Breaking a few bonds with mana would be trivial, but breaking enough of the bonds to make a noticeable difference in the material would be far more mana-intensive than one would imagine. So, Julia decided to first shape the water before freezing it rather than trying to rearrange it once frozen.

  Once it was formed into a spike and floating above the basin, separate from the rest of the water, she started on the visualization she’d been working out for days. Braden claimed that the place he came from didn’t have magic at all, which was unthinkable to Julia. She wasn’t even sure she completely believed him, despite him having no reason to lie. How could anyone figure all this out without magic!?

  However, he would also say that magic provides a huge advantage to doing basically anything. He frequently called it cheating. She was going to try and “cheat” today.

  She let her mana flow out of her along her hand towards the water spike that was floating in front of her. As it surrounded the water, she imagined the mana as a physical thing squeezing the water. As the water molecules bumped into the wall, the wall would absorb the kinetic energy.

  This was not exactly how it would happen with a physical material, she knew. The material would also have molecules that vibrate with their own energy. There would be a trade of energy between the two. Magic, however, had no such restriction. If she wanted the mana only to absorb, that’s what it would do.

  As she concentrated and infused that intent into the mana, she noticed the water spike begin to turn slightly opaque. Then, it began to freeze. It started from the tip of the spike, which Julia expected.

  There were physically fewer molecules in the tapered end, so it would freeze first. The frost slowly spread toward the end of the spike until it covered the whole thing. She’d done it! However, the notifications she got were not the ones she was expecting.

  Arcane Magic? What in the world was that? And Icicle went under the Water category? Not Ice? That wasn’t all, though. When she glanced at her Status, she noticed her “Fire Magic” had changed to “Thermal Magic.” She had to ask Braden about all of it.

  “Congratulations, Julia! You didn’t just unlock new magic. You unlocked the magic. Arcane Magic is not a type of magic so much as a threshold of understanding you’ve reached. Arcane Magic spells can be applied to nearly all types of magic. Manipulation is like what you were doing with the water. Holding it in the air, moving it around, etc.

  “State is what you did after. You used a few different types of magic to change the state of a material. Remember what I said a few days ago? Any matter can change states. They’ll require different amounts of energy, but they can all do it.

  “Unlocking Arcane Magic means that you’ve taken a step toward understanding the reality around you. You’ve recognized that everything in the world is connected through rules and laws, and magic can manipulate those rules and laws.

  “This is a huge step you’ve taken, Julia. You’re probably one of only a handful of people in the entire world that have reached this threshold, if I were to hazard a guess. And you’re almost certainly the youngest.

  “And you did that all on your own, Jules. You’re really incredible,” Braden smiled with pride.

  Julia’s cheeks heated up, but she nodded with a wide smile. She was beyond pleased with her accomplishment and her new magic. Braden then explained that the change from Fire to Thermal was just a reflection of her understanding of the magic. She didn’t see it as just a magic to manipulate fire anymore, so the System reflected that change.

  Julia was startled out of her reminiscence by Trixy jumping onto her back and perching atop her shoulders. She was likely aware that she was about to be left at home for a while again and trying to soak up as much attention as she could preemptively.

  So lost in the past was Julia that she nearly forgot that today was something to be extra excited about. After a year straight of doing Bronze jobs, Braden had finally decided she was ready for her first dungeon run.