It was a quiet walk back to the house.

  Quill was deep in the mazes of Gren ruins, too narrow to allow anything wider than a man to pass through. It was more like a system of alleyways, and it was especially hard with the limp of his leg, pushing past the dull ache in his stomach.

  Shadows painted the path in the distance, and there was a faint blot of a figure right by the entrance to Yereth’s house. It was Yereth. Quill already knew what was coming next.

  “You're late.” She held a ladle, almost like a threatening weapon hanging by her side. Quill didn't know what time of the evening it was, but the look on Yereth was all that he needed to know.

  “I was studying in the library.” Quill brushed over his wounds, and Yereth’s eyes caught on to them immediately.

  “You went to the White City?”

  “Yes.”

  Quill didn't know what he expected, but it wasn’t Yereth tending to his wounds. Her mouth opened as her fingers traced the bruises on his arms, shaking her head before she was about to say something. The wounds were already healing, but not fast enough to go unnoticed.

  “Come on, I made you good food for tonight.” Yereth shouldered Quill's weight before guiding him inside the house. She seemed excited as she led him to the table.

  A strong aroma filtered through the air. On the table were bread, wine, and a large steak of red meat. It was calling to Quill, almost as if a long-lost brother he never had was shouting through the woods.

  Quill had visited the food stall from the day before. He wanted to get his hands on some skewers to fill his stomach, but he immediately turned upon checking the prices. Three coppers for a single stick. It was daylight robbery at its finest.

  But now it was staring at him on the table. Salted red meat with salt and spice on top, pooling with a thick sauce that was pleasant to the nose. Quill knew from the start that Yereth wasn't exactly filling her pockets with money, and yet here she was, offering him .

  That was Quill's first thought, but he didn't find any probable reason why Yereth would want to kill him.

  And so Quill immediately found himself on a chair with a wide grin on his face. Before he knew it, he immediately reached for the plate before Yereth pulled it away from him.

  “What were you doing in the inner city?” Yereth said. Quill cursed. He failed to realize the meat wouldn't come for free.

  Quill failed to see it. Yereth was bartering with him, the meat in exchange for vital information on his whereabouts. A cunning woman.

  “I was studying,” Quill said, following the pretense of him being Fenith before a lump then snatched his throat. He had something else to say to Yereth. “I’m studying to try and get into the academy.”

  Yereth's mouth was empty of words. “ Gilhem Magic Academy?”

  “...Yes.”

  Yereth sat in silence on the table, her still shadow looming over the candlelight. It took her a moment before she found her words. “I’m sorry Fenith, but I don't think we have the money for that.”

  Quill blinked before he then burst into laughter, his shadows cackling along the walls like a deranged man. “Don’t worry about that. Someone is willing to support me.”

  “Really?” Yereth slammed the table. “That's great, isn't it?”

  “Yes.” Quill pulled the plate to him.

  “So who is it?” She said.

  “Haref.”

  A gust of wind blew into the living room, almost snuffing out the candle flame as Yereth settled within the silence. “I know I’m not the smartest woman out there, but it's rude to make fun of your sister.”

  “I’m not.” Quill was sure that the librarian's name was really Haref, so why was Yereth so surprised when she heard his name? Quill then pieced together the puzzle, and he finally got it. Haref was the former academy chancellor.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Yereth's reaction made sense now. He was being sponsored by one of the figureheads in the city.

  “You're amazing, aren't you?” Yereth smiled and reached over the table before slapping Quill's shoulder. It was more like a light jab than anything, but she was strong for a skinny woman.

  “That’s why I’ve been going to the library.” Quill's picked up a fork before scarfing down the meat. The flavor oozed in his mouth, soft and full of spice that tickled the back of his tongue. Yereth was only staring at him with a smile.

  It was strange how normal these past two days have been. There was the problem with the City Watch guards, but somehow it all just fit perfectly in place after coming home to Yereth's cooking. This was what it might feel like to live a normal mortal life.

  It wasn't for Quill, of course. The warmth and fuzzy feeling inside his chest was good, but he had already seen so many things and done too many deeds to even think of living a life like this. Maybe back when he was still a human–before necromancy, before undeath, then maybe he could stay here.

  But not now. This scene in front of him will fade in the end, and Yereth will eventually disappear just like the others.

  After all, his parents had done the same thing.

  But Yereth was still there. As long as she was sitting on the chair across the table, he didn't really mind her company. It was better than talking to mindless skeletons, at least.

  “Don't worry.” Quill waved his fork around. “I’m not just going to leave you here either. I’ll excel in the examination so that I can be granted a scholarship.”

  It was his way of showing appreciation. Leaving Yereth in this worn house would leave a bitter taste in his mouth, especially when she had cooked for him food for the past two days.

  He had given it a thought while he was heading home from the library. He had no obligation to this woman to do anything for her, but he wasn’t so cold-hearted as to leave a dog alone after raiding a village. It was a trade, an exchange for the generosity she offered.

  It wasn't anything else.

  “You’ve really changed, Fenith.” Yereth stared at him with a faint glimmer in her eyes. “You were always distant, did you know that? Your eyes were cold, and you hardly even talked to me. What happened?”

  Quill swallowed the last piece of meat on the plate. The same feeling of guilt surfaced on his chest. “I don't know about that. Do my eyes seem so different now?”

  “Yeah.” Yereth smiled.

  “Is that so?”

  Quill finished the glass of wine before excusing himself to his room.

  It was the same as yesterday. The smell of mold in the wet corner scratched his nose, and the cold from the windowsill continued to bite at his skin. He plopped onto the dry haystack to try and get some sleep, but the crickets were more annoying than usual.

  Quill shook his head before sitting on the hay. He unslung the bag around him, and inside he fished out the only book he borrowed from the library, the ‘Language of White’. It was better to spend the night studying than trying and failing to fall asleep in the end, though he didn't really need to sleep back then.

  He skimmed past the first few pages.

  Scripting languages were fundamentally different from natural languages. They were less like tools used in conversing with other people, and more like commands instructing mana to create As such, Scripts were more similar to words and concepts rather than standalone letters.

  It was going to take a while before Quill could memorize every single Script written inside the book. An entire third of it was devoted to listing every single one of them, and so he compromised tonight by just memorizing the ones that were usually used in most summoner spells, such as the symbol for ‘form’ or ‘movement’.

  Quill sat for an hour. By the end of it, he had already brought to his memory around thirty of the most common Scripts before he was confident enough moving on to the Scripting structure. Suffice to say, his head was starting to drown.

  He wished he had a Clarity potion inside his bag right about now.

  The structure of White Scripting was similar to that of Black Scripting. It wasn't an issue understanding the abstract, but it was as if he were reading an old, forgotten form of the common language. White Scripting was filled with too many extra steps that seemed all too redundant.

  Why would he need to allocate mana to mana nodes and mana channels individually and define their properties just to create the most basic unit of command?

  Then it came to him.

  If the Scripting allowed adjusting and tweaking of how much mana to allocate to every single vessel inside his body, then it would result in a more efficient spell. That would in turn allow him to cast even more Complex Spells that his current level of Core might not be able to support otherwise.

  Sure, it was much harder to create and cast Complex Spells using White Scripting than with Black Scripting. If it were possible to take his past spells and convert them into White spells, then the Scripts alone would nearly double in size and complexity.

  But that was the silver lining. If he was right, then he could technically cast spells a level higher than his current level of Iron. To think he could cast Bronze spells now was exciting.

  Cores had different levels, and as a mage increases in level, so does their ability to cast and create much more complex spells. Iron rank mages cannot cast Bronze level spells, and Bronze rank mages cannot cast Silver level spells. To do so, they would need to first ascend to the next level.

  But that wasn't necessarily the case for Quill. He wasn't as limited by his Iron Core as he first thought. It would be as if he were able to cast his Rotten Scourge with a Gold Core instead of Emerald, and by then, he would be limited by his manapool instead of his Core.

  A smile perked on Quill’s face. It was going to be a long week of studying.