“You heard right,” Braden said. “This heart won’t interact with regular matter. You can’t carry it with you unless you have an item enchanted specifically for that purpose. You wouldn’t be able to make much use of it if you carried it that way, though.

  “If you embed it in your body and anchor it there with your own mana, not only will it stay as a part of you, it will boost your mana storage significantly. It’s a young heart, which means…it was from a young Fey, unfortunately…Regardless, the heart is young, so it’s got about as much mana as you do right now—meaning it will double your mana capacity once you integrate it.

  “I also have a suspicion that it will affect your future Class options,” he finished with a nod. Julia was saddened to hear that a Fey had died young enough that this heart exists, but like Braden said before, it’s just a copy. She tried not to let it affect her.

  “How will it affect my future Classes? I wasn’t aware that anything even could affect your Class options,” Julia said with confusion.

  “Lots of things affect your Class options, Jules. You’ve seen it already. Your Rare Class was offered due to your knowledge and circumstances. I assume what you mean is that you didn’t know items could affect Classes?” he asked, and she nodded. “Right, well that’s understandable. Most items don’t affect Classes significantly on their own.

  “However, you’ve already seen some examples of this. You probably don’t know her exact Class, but I’m sure you’ve surmised that Ravina has a swords-focused Class, yes? That would be an example of an item affecting her Class options.

  “In your specific case…I’m honestly not too sure. I’m just guessing, but I would wager that the heart, once integrated, would give you some options typically only available to spirits. Or, at least, options only available to beings on that end of the spectrum—spirits, Fey, and the like.

  “Anyway, the point is that this should help tremendously with your mana capacity. The only downside is you’ll constantly have to devote a certain amount of concentration to keep it within your body and connected to your core. I’m hoping the System will help with it after a while, though. We’ll have to see,” Braden concluded.

  Julia nodded and pushed the thing into her body. She didn’t feel it, but she did have to move the mana in her body out of the way. She had the body reinforcement technique going passively at all times—it was completely subconscious, at this point, so the mana she was circulating was actively blocking the heart from entering.

  Once it was situated in her torso, she visualized a ring starting at her core, extending out to the heart, and circling back to her core. She used this ring to begin cycling her mana. It started in her core, flowed into the heart, picked up and merged with the mana there, and flowed back into her core.

  Julia gasped as the merged mana flowed back into her core. It felt a little bit like when you dip your body in water. It’s cold and uncomfortable at first, but you quickly get used to it.

  She also became aware of external mana being pulled into her body. She usually had to meditate to pull in external mana, and it required concentration to convert into unattributed mana that wouldn’t tear her body apart.

  This heart seemed to be doing it naturally, without her input—and it was really good at it. She felt like it was at least double the rate her meditation would accomplish, and it was completely passive! Even if it didn’t also double her total mana, just the boost to her regeneration would be worth it. This was truly a game-changer.

  As if to add fuel to the fire of her already-burning excitement, the System chose that moment to interject.

  Julia closed the notification and immediately noticed a difference. The heart was now connected without requiring her constant attention. She didn’t need to consciously cycle her mana in the loop she had just contrived; the System seemed to be doing it for her. Or maybe it had made the heart a part of her body permanently? Was it just like any of her other organs now?

  Julia was unsure about the specifics, but she didn’t care even a little. She now had double her previous mana pool and a regeneration rate that was close to three times as fast as her previous! This was a huge improvement for her, and she couldn’t hide an ear-to-ear grin.

  Braden noticed and smiled as well. “I’m glad it worked out for you, Jules. Remember the warnings I gave you about Summoning, though. It’s powerful, but it should not be your first option for anything. Even that Fey Heart, as beneficial as it is for you, degrades the reality around it just a bit,” he said.

  Julia’s smile vanished. “It what? Why didn’t you tell me that before I stuck it in my body!?” she shouted in fear. What did “degrading reality” mean? Was it going to poison her!?

  “Don’t worry. It’s not doing anything harmful,” Braden chuckled. “Believe me, Julia; I would never suggest doing something that would harm you. Not without making you fully aware of it, at least. When I say it’s ‘degrading reality,’ I just mean that the Fey were from a time when the rules and laws of reality were different.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “That heart plays by a different set of rules than our current reality does, but the System was present for both its reality and our own, so it’s not an issue. It’s constantly rewriting and merging the rules between the two clashing realities to anchor the heart’s existence here.

  “In this exact, specific case, it’s fine. However, this is one of the main dangers of Summoning. When the System has to modify the existing rules of reality, strange things can happen.

  “Imagine if there were an entire region where the rules of reality were merged with rules from a previous reality where…I don’t know…where gravity didn’t work the same, or something. You’d step into that area and go floating off into the sky.

  “I call effects like these ‘anomalies.’ I’m unsure if anyone else has a specific name for them, but there are, right this very moment, areas of the world with anomalous realities. They can be just as beautiful as they are dangerous. The Great White Spout comes to mind,” he finished wistfully, as though seeing what he was describing right before his eyes.

  “What’s the Great White Spout?” Julia asked. It sounded…anticlimactic. All that talk about anomalies and clashing realities, and he ends with a “spout.”

  “It’s at the very northernmost point of this world. There is a huge geyser that’s constantly spewing an ocean’s-worth of water out into the sky. And, Jules, when I say huge, I mean monumentally enormous. The geyser’s diameter is…well, I don’t have an exact measurement, but it’s many journeys wide. It shoots water up several journeys into the air, as well.

  “What’s more, it’s freezing cold at the northernmost point of the world, so the water gets shot up as a liquid and comes down as ice, snow, and hail. It creates some amazing scenery that you have to enjoy from afar…unless you don’t mind being impaled by huge icicles or bludgeoned by hail that could be as big as your fist or larger than a house,” Braden said as he waved his arms to indicate the potential hail’s size.

  Julia was intrigued, to be sure. She’d only ever heard about snow from Braden or read about it in books. She’d seen ice that was created by magic, but never any that occurred naturally. It was always warm here, so cold weather effects were strange and mystical to her. Not to mention the scale.

  She honestly thought he must be exaggerating. A single journey was a thousand strides! And she was short, so when most people referenced a stride, it was equivalent to two of hers! How could there be a column of water thousands of strides wide shooting thousands of strides into the air constantly!? Where did all that water come from?

  “If you think that’s impressive, you should meet the people that live there—within the Spout itself,” Braden said smugly. He loved dragging things out when he knew he had her attention.

  “How could anyone possibly live in something like that? Are you saying they live in the column of water or around it?” Julia questioned skeptically.

  “Neither. They live on top of it. Maybe we’ll go check it out once you’re a full-fledged adventurer,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows at her.

  “You and Ravina are both insufferable in different ways,” Julia sighed.

  The goblin’s head hit the ground and rolled to a stop a full stride away. Julia signaled Trixy to drop the Invisibility and wiped the blood off her sword. Trixy jumped down and hovered around the goblin corpses—ready to snatch up the cores as soon as they appeared.

  Monster cores were like mana batteries, so they were valuable for many magical purposes. However, until an enchanter got to work on one, the mana stored in it would dissipate over time. This meant Trixy had to consume them pretty much immediately, lest they fail to provide her with any growth.

  Julia had decided to run the dungeon again, both to test her new mana pool as well as run through with Trixy for the first time. She was also secretly hoping for a better reward at the end. When she completed it solo last time, there had just been the shaman’s nature focus in the chest. This was decent loot, especially for a beginner, but she couldn’t use it.

  The focus, being attuned to nature, would only amplify magic aimed at manipulating nature, which Julia almost never used. She knew the theory of how to make vines move and all that, but she never found interest in it compared with her other magic. It made a decent trinket to sell, but that was it.

  The first encounter had gone the smoothest of all her runs so far. Trixy had made them invisible, so Julia just walked through the gate and stabbed the five goblins waiting in ambush. They became aggressive and swung wildly once they realized there was an enemy they couldn’t see, but it became trivial when she sunk their feet into the ground.

  Trixy had advanced to 89% evolutionary progress. Julia was mildly concerned about her evolving in a dungeon, so after she lapped up all the cores from this second encounter, Julia instructed her to not eat any others. She would give her the cores from the boss encounter, which should (hopefully) be all that’s needed.

  This second encounter then went just as smoothly as the first. She decided to let Trixy rest and handle this one on her own. This encounter was a variation on the ones she’d seen up to this point. The bonfire was present, as always. There was a pile of tattered cloth, broken crates, and various items scattered about. It seemed to be where they were storing their latest spoils.

  There were four goblins rummaging through the crates, while a fifth was patrolling around the area. Julia had used her Truesight to identify all the goblins before connecting a chain of charges. She let loose a Bolt spell that traveled down the chain and fried all five immediately. Truthfully, it was way too loud to be useful in a stealthy situation, but she was here to test her new limits, not practice running the dungeon.

  The Bolt had managed to suck about 25% of her mana away, but that was a phenomenal improvement compared to her previous baseline. She wasn’t being particularly careful with mana conservation at the moment, and it still only used a quarter of her total mana! A Bolt that took out five goblins at once from medium range only used a quarter of her mana!

  Julia picked Trixy up, wearing a smile that probably looked frightening juxtaposed with the charred goblin remains, and they headed off towards the center of the camp.