‘Ping’ [Identify] Has leveled 40 > 41
‘Ping’ [Rest] Has leveled 25 > 30
‘Ping’ [Mana Sense] Has leveled 3 > 7
‘Ping’ [Electric Sense] Has leveled 5 > 10
‘Ping’ [Sword Expert] Has leveled 10 > 13
‘Ping’ [Martial Technique] Has leveled 41 > 2³
‘Ping’ [Dagger Apprentice] Has leveled 43 > 2³
‘Ping’ [Wood Manipulation] Has leveled 7 > 13
‘Ping’ [Electric Manipulation] Has leveled 2 > 9
‘Ping’ [Accelerated Thoughts] Has leveled 9 > 11
‘Ping’ [Parallel Minds] Has leveled 43 > 47
‘Ping’ [Fruit Production] Has leveled 42 > 1³
‘Ping’ [Plant Production] Has leveled 39 > 1³
‘Ping’ [Vegetable Prodcution] Has leveled 32 > 1³
‘Ping’ [Fatigue Resistance] Has leveled 22 > 35
‘Ping’ [Calligraphy] Has leveled 7 > 6¹
‘Ping’ [Mathematic Calculation] Has leveled 6 > 4¹
The following morning had me waking up early, once again, to head to my next set of classes.
I had high hopes that these would be just as entertaining as my magical applications course. I sincerely hoped they would be.
My first class of the day was World History. Looking through the initial pages of the textbook, it started with the early history of the continent shortly after the Collapse. There were some brief mentions of history before that, country names or the names of great leaders, heroes, and a few villains.
But largely it discussed Post-Collapse. The biggest reason for that is that there wasn’t a lot of easily accessed information on what the world had been like before. We were still uncovering ruins and the like, but a lot of the languages had to be deciphered given that the writing and languages spoken drastically changed in the past two and a half millennia.
However, that wasn’t to say that there also wasn’t a lot of information to be had on the world pre-collapse. There were tons, and a lot of it was currently being deciphered and even shared between countries. For the most part.
But that wasn’t terribly common knowledge from what I understood. Karif had seemed like he knew a lot more than he had been able to teach me in the short time I’d been with him…
I’d love to be able to pick his brain about this right about now.
I wish I had been able to talk with them one last time…
The last time I had talked with them, outside of Penny, was me getting essentially kicked out of the group, which I understand why now. Mostly. But that just made their deaths all the harder to handle.
Penny was the only one I left on good terms with. And in the end, their connection to me is what got them killed. Despite whatever Kaylith had said, I still felt responsible in a way. I didn’t make the choice for Ili’kithari to kill them.
But she had killed them to specifically hurt me. And she had done it in the most gruesome ways she could have. I could only hope that she didn’t make them suffer.
Although if she had, that felt like the kind of thing she would have gloated about to my face.
That’s another piece of ancient history though.
Ili’kithari.
The name didn’t resonate with any of the people at my… interrogation. Or if it did, they didn’t show it in their words or expressions.
She was a goddess though, which meant that she had some degree of import to her person. She had also been around for… hundreds of thousands of years? I wasn’t entirely clear on how old she was. But she was old.
Which led me to another line of thinking. This current age has lasted for around 2500 years according to Karif. This is calculated from the time of the Collapse. No one is quite sure exactly when it happened, only that it happened in a general time frame. So they eventually just designated a year and went from that point onwards.
Something else Karif had mentioned is that every nation Pre-Collapse disappeared practically overnight. And that some of those nations that disappeared had been around for nearly, or over, 5000 years.
That accounts for 7500 years of culture alone. That’s a long time, and longer than the dawn of recorded human history on Earth, which only dates back to a little over 5000 years ago if I remember correctly.
Needless to say, there is a lot of history that’s lost in the gaps there.
I’m sure it was out there as well, just waiting to be found. Although, I’m not sure archaeology is my calling. Not that I would be complaining if I did come across some huge historical discovery in the future, I’m just not sure that I’d be going out of my way to find out more.
Maybe I should though, perhaps I could find out more about Ili’kithari. Maybe find out more about the elven hearts. There was something out there about them given that Karif knew about them in the first place.
That leads me to believe that other hearts have been discovered. I was kind of curious about what had happened to them and what people were doing with them.
Lots of questions, very few answers.
Maybe this class would start answering some of them.
***
Once again as people started filing in for the start of the class, I had arrived early again. I was left sitting by myself with people giving me strange or annoyed looks. And once again I ignored them.
It wasn’t much longer before the instructor showed up for the class and the low buzz that had occupied the room started to die down.
He was a relatively short, portly, balding man and was the first person I’d seen so far to be wearing glasses. Or at least this world’s approximation for them I was assuming. I had to wonder if they were actually used for helping with his eyesight or not.
So I knew why people needed glasses, obviously, something was fucked up with their eyes causing their vision to be impaired. I just wasn’t sure what exactly was the cause for that. What needed to specifically be fixed in order for someone not to need glasses?
Given I hadn’t seen anyone with glasses before I just assumed it was a relatively easy problem to fix, but maybe it was an issue here and glasses were just expensive. In that case, though, why wouldn’t you just pay for a healer or someone who could fix your eyes?
More questions and not enough answers. Maybe I could talk with him after class and find out what they were used for.
The instructor went up to the board and began writing his name and introduced himself at the same time, “I am Instructor Palthas Allidin, you may refer to me as Instructor Allidin. I’m not going to honey-coat my words. This class is going to be hard. If you do not devote your entirety to learning this subject, you will fail. And if you fail there will be dire consequences for your continued prospects in the NSA.”
He then gave each of us a stern look over the thick, wide-rimmed glasses resting on his nose. Far-sighted then?
“Make sure you’re putting your best foot forward,” He said with finality, “With that out of the way, let’s get started. We have a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of time to do it in. We’re going to start off with Alixia shortly after the Collapse and slowly branch our way outwards to the other countries and then slowly move our way forward in time, all the while covering major political and historical events.
“At the time of the Collapse, there were no countries. No borders to observe and no inherent governmental entities to acknowledge, not even something as minor as a village leader was recorded until nearly 100 years after the Collapse. We were almost sent back into a cascading downfall that would have seen us stuck back in the Stone Age.
“Whoever instigated the Collapse assumedly didn’t account for achievements. The people of the time who didn’t die from whatever the Collapse entailed accrued achievements that catapulted their strength beyond most of what we have today. That strength can be directly tied to the God-Tyrant Ilvane. He was one of the survivors of the Collapse and in the ensuing years gained strength and power beyond what his level and tier might have suggested.
“The starting point for recorded history starts with a small town that sprouted up in what is now the modern-day capital of Alixia, Adrenitas. The name has remained unchanged in the little over 2000 years that it has existed, and is currently one of the longest living settlements to exist in the modern age.”
Once again I was completely captivated by the knowledge spilling forth from the instructor. This, this was the kind of stuff I had been looking to learn about. I rapidly wrote down everything I could that wasn’t explicitly part of the textbook. Every little bit of knowledge could be useful, my only hope was that I’d be able to hold on to it in my memory.
I didn’t have a perfect memory and I wasn’t sure that it was something my stats would help me with. Maybe I could get a skill in regards to that or something?
***
After two hours of rigorous lecturing, the instructor started winding down.
“Alixia’s relationship with other early Post-Collapse nations was tenuous at best, none trusted the other and there were constant skirmishes over natural resources. The end result of those skirmishes is what determined the boundary lines of the countries we have today. Lake Omnikiah played a large role in why Alixia was able to claim such a large landmass and hold it, despite the fact that they were outnumbered, facing off two separate opponents.
He paused for a moment, looking at each of us before continuing, “We’ll stop there for today. Coming back we’ll discuss more about the inter-relations between Alixia and what would later become the Theocracy and the Dukedom, not that they were known by such names back then. As for an assignment… read pages 30-90 in your books before we return in two days. Those are the pages we’ll be going over when we meet again. Having at least a superficial understanding of what’s going on will help you. There will be a quiz when you show up to determine if you did actually read. That is all.”
With that, he grabbed his things and he was the first person out the door.
I had wanted to talk to him about his glasses, but I guess I’d have to find another way to get in touch with him or rather another time. I wasn’t sure if he just had a prior engagement today, or if this was going to be a regular thing. I guess I’ll find out next time.
Regardless, I had to start making my way to my next class. Alchemy.
Now that I’d gotten an idea of how these classes felt and whatnot I was actually fairly excited for the alchemy course. I was never a big history buff back on Earth, as I was just never very interested. I was somewhat interested in learning about Rome and Greece. But even then I was more interested in their mythologies rather than their culture or the wars that they fought.
Well, the overall fact is that I had been mostly bored with most education subjects on Earth. All things considered, the world was exceedingly boring compared to fiction in my mind. That wasn’t to say that there hadn’t been things I’d been interested in. But those had been far and few between, and when directly compared to the idea that I could choose between learning about magical sciences versus historical literature of the 1600s?
It was kind of a no-brainer which one I would choose.
If I’m being honest, Don Quixote doesn’t have quite the same pull as learning about actual, real magic.
I could only hope that alchemy would be just as entertaining.
***
Instructor Nezebar Indilig.
They were, quite assuredly, a demon in disguise.
Or possessed. I was sure we could trump them up on one of those charges.
I felt deceived and betrayed. By whom? I was not entirely sure. But someone needed to pay.
This was not a labs class like I had initially thought it was going to be, it was instead a type of theories class. And it was being taught by one of the most boring people, with the blandest speaking tone to match.
Surely it was not difficult to make learning about alchemy fun was it? I mean, the previous instructor made learning about history at least, if not entertaining and interesting, engaging to the students.
But this?
“The recipe that had been used in this instance has mostly been lost to the ages and the disaster of the collapse, but it’s been said that the alchemists of this time commonly used this to treat the diseases of royalty and high-ranking noble folk. There have been many speculations-”
Who cares about this? A magical cure-all for the flu? Just get a healer! They can do the same thing, quicker, easier, and cheaper. Not only that, we aren’t even sure if this magical flu potion even existed! And even if it had existed we don’t even have a semblance of a clue of what it was used for!
Absolutely useless. This entire class was useless, it taught me more about potential mythologies of alchemy than anything actually useful. What was the actual purpose of this class? What was I expected to learn in here? Unless the course drastically changed directions, I highly doubted I would learn anything that would be of use in the field. Unless I suddenly got hit with a pop quiz from a bandit about speculative alchemical figures and potions of the Pre-Collapse era that we had no way or capability of comprehending.
Supposedly the alchemical understanding and technology, like everything from Pre-Collapse works, was well beyond what we have today. And while we were quickly approaching that level once again, it was still roughly a thousand years away.
Considering countries went from not knowing how to do any of this stuff other than the bare-bones understanding of what the process was, all the way to theorizing the differences in effects of potions purely based on their descriptions of the way they appeared and tasted, and then actually recreating said potion, they had actually gone quite far.
The problem was that we weren’t really learning how to do that. I wasn’t learning how to tell potions apart based on their appearances or scent, I wasn’t being taught how to identify various ingredients that were safe for consumption or, if they weren’t, how to make them so.
I wasn’t being taught anything of use as far as I was aware.
Unless you counted learning about unnamed alchemists creating potions of immortality, which have never existed as far as anyone reputable has said on the matter. That I learned directly from the book. This class felt more like it was being taught by someone who didn’t understand alchemy and thought this was how alchemy should be taught.
[Level 52⁴]
It’s not like the person was seemingly masquerading as someone important that I could tell, their level matched up with what an instructor’s roughly should be. Although I wasn’t entirely sure that there were requisites for this sort of thing, or if there were, what they were.
But at the same time, I didn’t exactly have the skills to know if someone was posing as something they weren’t. And I didn’t know enough about this subject to accurately say this wasn’t how it was supposed to be taught, for all I knew I just had misconstrued conceptions about how this was supposed to go.
All in all, this had been a very disappointing reality check. I wasn’t sure if I would ever recover.
I allowed my minds to start wandering partway through the class. After having listened to the first thirty minutes of the course I just wasn’t feeling engaged.
I still paid a semblance of attention, letting one mind handle listening and the other handle writing.
But that still left me with twenty-seven minds of thought processes to occupy. Which left me twenty-seven times as bored as I would have been normally in this kind of situation.
If this was going to be a regular occurrence, I’d need to find a way to occupy myself in the future.
I’d have to take some time to think this over.
‘Ping’ [Identify] Has leveled 40 > 41
‘Ping’ [Rest] Has leveled 25 > 30
‘Ping’ [Mana Sense] Has leveled 3 > 7
‘Ping’ [Electric Sense] Has leveled 5 > 10
‘Ping’ [Sword Expert] Has leveled 10 > 13
‘Ping’ [Martial Technique] Has leveled 41 > 2³
‘Ping’ [Dagger Apprentice] Has leveled 43 > 2³
‘Ping’ [Wood Manipulation] Has leveled 7 > 13
‘Ping’ [Electric Manipulation] Has leveled 2 > 9
‘Ping’ [Accelerated Thoughts] Has leveled 9 > 11
‘Ping’ [Parallel Minds] Has leveled 43 > 47
‘Ping’ [Fruit Production] Has leveled 42 > 1³
‘Ping’ [Plant Production] Has leveled 39 > 1³
‘Ping’ [Vegetable Prodcution] Has leveled 32 > 1³
‘Ping’ [Fatigue Resistance] Has leveled 22 > 35
‘Ping’ [Calligraphy] Has leveled 7 > 6¹
‘Ping’ [Mathematic Calculation] Has leveled 6 > 4¹
The following morning had me waking up early, once again, to head to my next set of classes.
I had high hopes that these would be just as entertaining as my magical applications course. I sincerely hoped they would be.
My first class of the day was World History. Looking through the initial pages of the textbook, it started with the early history of the continent shortly after the Collapse. There were some brief mentions of history before that, country names or the names of great leaders, heroes, and a few villains.
But largely it discussed Post-Collapse. The biggest reason for that is that there wasn’t a lot of easily accessed information on what the world had been like before. We were still uncovering ruins and the like, but a lot of the languages had to be deciphered given that the writing and languages spoken drastically changed in the past two and a half millennia.
However, that wasn’t to say that there also wasn’t a lot of information to be had on the world pre-collapse. There were tons, and a lot of it was currently being deciphered and even shared between countries. For the most part.
But that wasn’t terribly common knowledge from what I understood. Karif had seemed like he knew a lot more than he had been able to teach me in the short time I’d been with him…
I’d love to be able to pick his brain about this right about now.
I wish I had been able to talk with them one last time…
The last time I had talked with them, outside of Penny, was me getting essentially kicked out of the group, which I understand why now. Mostly. But that just made their deaths all the harder to handle.
Penny was the only one I left on good terms with. And in the end, their connection to me is what got them killed. Despite whatever Kaylith had said, I still felt responsible in a way. I didn’t make the choice for Ili’kithari to kill them.
But she had killed them to specifically hurt me. And she had done it in the most gruesome ways she could have. I could only hope that she didn’t make them suffer.
Although if she had, that felt like the kind of thing she would have gloated about to my face.
That’s another piece of ancient history though.
Ili’kithari.
The name didn’t resonate with any of the people at my… interrogation. Or if it did, they didn’t show it in their words or expressions.
She was a goddess though, which meant that she had some degree of import to her person. She had also been around for… hundreds of thousands of years? I wasn’t entirely clear on how old she was. But she was old.
Which led me to another line of thinking. This current age has lasted for around 2500 years according to Karif. This is calculated from the time of the Collapse. No one is quite sure exactly when it happened, only that it happened in a general time frame. So they eventually just designated a year and went from that point onwards.
Something else Karif had mentioned is that every nation Pre-Collapse disappeared practically overnight. And that some of those nations that disappeared had been around for nearly, or over, 5000 years.
That accounts for 7500 years of culture alone. That’s a long time, and longer than the dawn of recorded human history on Earth, which only dates back to a little over 5000 years ago if I remember correctly.
Needless to say, there is a lot of history that’s lost in the gaps there.
I’m sure it was out there as well, just waiting to be found. Although, I’m not sure archaeology is my calling. Not that I would be complaining if I did come across some huge historical discovery in the future, I’m just not sure that I’d be going out of my way to find out more.
Maybe I should though, perhaps I could find out more about Ili’kithari. Maybe find out more about the elven hearts. There was something out there about them given that Karif knew about them in the first place.
That leads me to believe that other hearts have been discovered. I was kind of curious about what had happened to them and what people were doing with them.
Lots of questions, very few answers.
Maybe this class would start answering some of them.
***
Once again as people started filing in for the start of the class, I had arrived early again. I was left sitting by myself with people giving me strange or annoyed looks. And once again I ignored them.
It wasn’t much longer before the instructor showed up for the class and the low buzz that had occupied the room started to die down.
He was a relatively short, portly, balding man and was the first person I’d seen so far to be wearing glasses. Or at least this world’s approximation for them I was assuming. I had to wonder if they were actually used for helping with his eyesight or not.
So I knew why people needed glasses, obviously, something was fucked up with their eyes causing their vision to be impaired. I just wasn’t sure what exactly was the cause for that. What needed to specifically be fixed in order for someone not to need glasses?
Given I hadn’t seen anyone with glasses before I just assumed it was a relatively easy problem to fix, but maybe it was an issue here and glasses were just expensive. In that case, though, why wouldn’t you just pay for a healer or someone who could fix your eyes?
More questions and not enough answers. Maybe I could talk with him after class and find out what they were used for.
The instructor went up to the board and began writing his name and introduced himself at the same time, “I am Instructor Palthas Allidin, you may refer to me as Instructor Allidin. I’m not going to honey-coat my words. This class is going to be hard. If you do not devote your entirety to learning this subject, you will fail. And if you fail there will be dire consequences for your continued prospects in the NSA.”
He then gave each of us a stern look over the thick, wide-rimmed glasses resting on his nose. Far-sighted then?
“Make sure you’re putting your best foot forward,” He said with finality, “With that out of the way, let’s get started. We have a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of time to do it in. We’re going to start off with Alixia shortly after the Collapse and slowly branch our way outwards to the other countries and then slowly move our way forward in time, all the while covering major political and historical events.
“At the time of the Collapse, there were no countries. No borders to observe and no inherent governmental entities to acknowledge, not even something as minor as a village leader was recorded until nearly 100 years after the Collapse. We were almost sent back into a cascading downfall that would have seen us stuck back in the Stone Age.
“Whoever instigated the Collapse assumedly didn’t account for achievements. The people of the time who didn’t die from whatever the Collapse entailed accrued achievements that catapulted their strength beyond most of what we have today. That strength can be directly tied to the God-Tyrant Ilvane. He was one of the survivors of the Collapse and in the ensuing years gained strength and power beyond what his level and tier might have suggested.
“The starting point for recorded history starts with a small town that sprouted up in what is now the modern-day capital of Alixia, Adrenitas. The name has remained unchanged in the little over 2000 years that it has existed, and is currently one of the longest living settlements to exist in the modern age.”
Once again I was completely captivated by the knowledge spilling forth from the instructor. This, this was the kind of stuff I had been looking to learn about. I rapidly wrote down everything I could that wasn’t explicitly part of the textbook. Every little bit of knowledge could be useful, my only hope was that I’d be able to hold on to it in my memory.
I didn’t have a perfect memory and I wasn’t sure that it was something my stats would help me with. Maybe I could get a skill in regards to that or something?
***
After two hours of rigorous lecturing, the instructor started winding down.
“Alixia’s relationship with other early Post-Collapse nations was tenuous at best, none trusted the other and there were constant skirmishes over natural resources. The end result of those skirmishes is what determined the boundary lines of the countries we have today. Lake Omnikiah played a large role in why Alixia was able to claim such a large landmass and hold it, despite the fact that they were outnumbered, facing off two separate opponents.
He paused for a moment, looking at each of us before continuing, “We’ll stop there for today. Coming back we’ll discuss more about the inter-relations between Alixia and what would later become the Theocracy and the Dukedom, not that they were known by such names back then. As for an assignment… read pages 30-90 in your books before we return in two days. Those are the pages we’ll be going over when we meet again. Having at least a superficial understanding of what’s going on will help you. There will be a quiz when you show up to determine if you did actually read. That is all.”
With that, he grabbed his things and he was the first person out the door.
I had wanted to talk to him about his glasses, but I guess I’d have to find another way to get in touch with him or rather another time. I wasn’t sure if he just had a prior engagement today, or if this was going to be a regular thing. I guess I’ll find out next time.
Regardless, I had to start making my way to my next class. Alchemy.
Now that I’d gotten an idea of how these classes felt and whatnot I was actually fairly excited for the alchemy course. I was never a big history buff back on Earth, as I was just never very interested. I was somewhat interested in learning about Rome and Greece. But even then I was more interested in their mythologies rather than their culture or the wars that they fought.
Well, the overall fact is that I had been mostly bored with most education subjects on Earth. All things considered, the world was exceedingly boring compared to fiction in my mind. That wasn’t to say that there hadn’t been things I’d been interested in. But those had been far and few between, and when directly compared to the idea that I could choose between learning about magical sciences versus historical literature of the 1600s?
It was kind of a no-brainer which one I would choose.
If I’m being honest, Don Quixote doesn’t have quite the same pull as learning about actual, real magic.
I could only hope that alchemy would be just as entertaining.
***
Instructor Nezebar Indilig.
They were, quite assuredly, a demon in disguise.
Or possessed. I was sure we could trump them up on one of those charges.
I felt deceived and betrayed. By whom? I was not entirely sure. But someone needed to pay.
This was not a labs class like I had initially thought it was going to be, it was instead a type of theories class. And it was being taught by one of the most boring people, with the blandest speaking tone to match.
Surely it was not difficult to make learning about alchemy fun was it? I mean, the previous instructor made learning about history at least, if not entertaining and interesting, engaging to the students.
But this?
“The recipe that had been used in this instance has mostly been lost to the ages and the disaster of the collapse, but it’s been said that the alchemists of this time commonly used this to treat the diseases of royalty and high-ranking noble folk. There have been many speculations-”
Who cares about this? A magical cure-all for the flu? Just get a healer! They can do the same thing, quicker, easier, and cheaper. Not only that, we aren’t even sure if this magical flu potion even existed! And even if it had existed we don’t even have a semblance of a clue of what it was used for!
Absolutely useless. This entire class was useless, it taught me more about potential mythologies of alchemy than anything actually useful. What was the actual purpose of this class? What was I expected to learn in here? Unless the course drastically changed directions, I highly doubted I would learn anything that would be of use in the field. Unless I suddenly got hit with a pop quiz from a bandit about speculative alchemical figures and potions of the Pre-Collapse era that we had no way or capability of comprehending.
Supposedly the alchemical understanding and technology, like everything from Pre-Collapse works, was well beyond what we have today. And while we were quickly approaching that level once again, it was still roughly a thousand years away.
Considering countries went from not knowing how to do any of this stuff other than the bare-bones understanding of what the process was, all the way to theorizing the differences in effects of potions purely based on their descriptions of the way they appeared and tasted, and then actually recreating said potion, they had actually gone quite far.
The problem was that we weren’t really learning how to do that. I wasn’t learning how to tell potions apart based on their appearances or scent, I wasn’t being taught how to identify various ingredients that were safe for consumption or, if they weren’t, how to make them so.
I wasn’t being taught anything of use as far as I was aware.
Unless you counted learning about unnamed alchemists creating potions of immortality, which have never existed as far as anyone reputable has said on the matter. That I learned directly from the book. This class felt more like it was being taught by someone who didn’t understand alchemy and thought this was how alchemy should be taught.
[Level 52⁴]
It’s not like the person was seemingly masquerading as someone important that I could tell, their level matched up with what an instructor’s roughly should be. Although I wasn’t entirely sure that there were requisites for this sort of thing, or if there were, what they were.
But at the same time, I didn’t exactly have the skills to know if someone was posing as something they weren’t. And I didn’t know enough about this subject to accurately say this wasn’t how it was supposed to be taught, for all I knew I just had misconstrued conceptions about how this was supposed to go.
All in all, this had been a very disappointing reality check. I wasn’t sure if I would ever recover.
I allowed my minds to start wandering partway through the class. After having listened to the first thirty minutes of the course I just wasn’t feeling engaged.
I still paid a semblance of attention, letting one mind handle listening and the other handle writing.
But that still left me with twenty-seven minds of thought processes to occupy. Which left me twenty-seven times as bored as I would have been normally in this kind of situation.
If this was going to be a regular occurrence, I’d need to find a way to occupy myself in the future.
I’d have to take some time to think this over.
