“What’s it like stealing a soul?” Faynel asked curiously while they walked through the town.

Mason’s heart skipped a beat and he looked around, but nobody seemed to be paying them any mind. This section of the town was busy and ugly, which reminded Mason of pretty much every other part of New Marra he had seen so far.

When he threw on mana sight, there were plenty of wonders to revel in. Every wall was alive with mana and symbols decorated the space above each doorway to indicate the purpose and the affinity of the building. Without mana sight though, it merely looked as if someone had splashed tar on every surface in sight.

“That’s- I don’t know, It’s complicated, I guess? I’d say it burns but it’s nothing like that way mana used to burn me before I had a tolerance. When the soul is processing it’s like my body and mind forget what each sense is like, I get pretty twitchy, magic starts doing stuff I don’t understand, and from my experience, the souls tend to be really fucking angry when I go to talk to them,” Mason explained, feeling like he was vastly oversimplifying the whole thing. He also wasn’t sure why he was explaining this to her at all.

“Even Mowry was angry? He always seemed so stoic when I met him,” she pondered. “He also kind of creeped me out. He was intense, but people tended to overlook it, or at least nobody ever admitted to me they felt something was off.”

“Well, I guess Mowry wasn’t angry. He defended me against Geralt since I met them at about the same time, and apparently built the whole structure of my soul or something,” Mason squinted as he tried to make sense of it for himself, “You know, you ask a lot of questions nobody else does. Talking to you is very confusing.”

“That’s just because you don’t know anything at all. It’s a wonder you’re still alive.”

“Okay, seriously,” Mason grumped, “Do Marrans just like to insult people? I’ve been called an idiot and a child more times in the past few weeks dealing with your people than in a year back on Earth.”

A smile grew on her face, and she beamed at him as if she took great pleasure in hurting him further, “Can you blame us for making fun of you when you don’t understand things we teach to children? You don’t actually seem dumb, though. You learn fast and can speak well. But you really don’t know the simplest things. Like, look, follow me,” she pointed to a building with a rune above it that Mason couldn’t recognize.

A cheery man with dirt on his hands, face, and apron greeted them enthusiastically as they entered the building, “Ahh, I thought I heard Torysen’s band had returned. It is so lovely to see you, Faynel. And your companion, ah… I’m sorry, I do not know your name.”

“This is Senmay,” Faynel said in her deceptively charming voice. “He’s been living under a rock more or less literally since before the Trials, and my mother decided to take him in and help him catch up to the more general intelligence. I’m showing him around the city.”

“Ah,” the shopkeeper replied uncertainly, “Well your mother is a wise woman, so if she is vouching for him, I won’t ask anything more. What can I do for you?”

“Would you show me the five common herbs that go into any of the standard health potions? I’m trying to prove to Senmay that he’s an idiot.”

Mason glared at her. She seemed to be going a little far with her explanations, but most of the people they interacted with went along with anything she said, though Mason couldn’t tell if they were acting reverent or scared.

The shopkeeper laid out five herbs: three different leaves, a root, and the stalk of something. Faynel pointed, “Can you identify any of these?”

Of course, he couldn’t, other than knowing that they were related to brewing health potions. “No, Faynel.” He couldn’t keep the resentment from his voice.

She moved past him and, with the help of the herbalist, began explaining the basics of the plants and how to make a potion from them. Even alone, supposedly, they were good for vitality, so she bought him a mixed bag and told him to chew them throughout the day to slightly improve his health.

From there they moved to an enchanter’s shop, where squares of leather were on display in wooden boxes all around the room. Each of them had a physical carving which paled in comparison to what Mason could see with his mana sight.

The squares of leather each had a different complex embellishment, but Faynel was determined to make Mason truly understand what he was seeing. The embellishments were more three dimensional than the shallow carvings, but were also less shifty and expressive than the runes Mason used to cast spells through.

“Miss Faynel, I don’t think you need to pressure him to understand each of the enchantments in a single day. I’ve been studying enchanting since I was a boy, and the mysteries reveal themselves to me slowly each day,” the thin man said nervously as he watched Faynel hold Mason’s face in front of one of the patches of leather.

“Don’t worry, sir. This is an approved and tested training protocol. Back on Marra he came from a backwater town without even a single enchanter or runemaster. One of my duties is to make sure he feels exceptionally familiar with both, and what better way than to closely inspect your fine wares?”

“You can say that but is forcing me this close to the enchantment really supposed to help? Shouldn’t I be trying to activate it for myself or something?” Mason grumbled as he pushed back against her hand.

Faynel had him pressed so close that his face was actually in the middle of the projected embellishment, and he had to activate Focus to see through it and to the carving. For some reason with the way she was touching him, he couldn’t turn off mana sight, and somehow she simultaneously pushed the embellishment out much further from the leather than it would normally rest on an object.

“I’m teaching you to use your senses, Senmay,” she said simply through gritted teeth, not releasing her grip or the flow of her mana at all.

“You don’t even know how my senses work! Let me shine a bright light into your eyes and we’ll see how much that helps you!” Fed up, Mason flailed and wrenched himself out of Faynel’s grip. He looked around at the room but when he did so, his Focus on the carvings and embellishments changed.

For a split second, he could understand how one could be derived from the other, and he could even begin to picture a rune that they could become with enough study and comprehension. The image only lasted for a half-second, but it was long enough to leave Mason stunned. He turned to Faynel with wide eyes and she just nodded stoically.

“Do you get it now?” she asked.

“Can I see the enchantment for raw Force?” Mason asked the enchanter, ignoring Faynel while the gears in his mind began turning.

The small man hesitated, looking at Faynel, then nodded and rushed out of the room. He came back with a pair of leather gloves, each with a carving and an embellishment. The two seemed like halves of the same whole, and when Mason took them in his hands and held them a few inches apart, the image they created looked oddly familiar.

Drawn in, he pulled on the gloves and began to move his hands in the air, and the images of the carvings paired with the shifting of the embellishments looked eerily similar to the Force rune he had in his mind.

“For a country bumpkin, you pick up runecraft quickly,” Faynel commented with a smile in her eyes that she seemed to hold back from her face.

“I’ve got a high intelligence stat,” Mason said, his voice dry and distracted. He pulled off the gloves and handed them back to the confused enchanter, then turned back to Faynel, “So do you have some vague and passive aggressive lines to feed me while I mess with this stuff for the next few weeks, or can I get you to explain how all of this actually works?”

“I’d be glad to!” She said, beckoning toward the door.

Mason wasn’t clear on whether she meant she was going to share an explanation with him, or feed him more vague lines.

She led him beyond the city gates on the north side of the town, and he followed quietly as she greeted guards and scouts passing in and out. It was a relief to see a spread of trees and shrubs before him, as well as some more basic wooden structures. The city had its unique charms, he supposed, but in general it was fairly ugly. He couldn’t get used to the uneven tar-like defensive material that coated the buildings, and mana-sight was still too draining to use regularly.

“We keep a lot of forward outposts to make sure that any direct raiding from the Corrosi or the goblins can be handled outside of the city,” Faynel explained as she passed between two short wooden structures and onto a thoroughly flattened dirt field. “Of course, some sneak past and through, but for the most part any forces that we’re unprepared for tend to be smaller groups just looking for a fight. It ended up being safer to just give them something to attack outside the gates, so we could keep them closed during the melee.”

“Couldn’t you just use archers and magic to fend the attackers off from the walls?” Mason asked.

“Yeah, we could,” was Faynel’s only explanation though her tone implied that he was dumb for even asking.

As they passed into the open field, Faynel motioned for Mason to stand on one end, and she walked about ten steps away and turned to look at him. “So Torysen wanted you to rest and familiarize yourself with the town today, and now you can say that you’ve seen the apothecary, the council chambers, and the enchanter. But I can tell you’re like me, and you’ve got better things to do than go sight-seeing, right?”

The sun was high above them, and the midday heat seemed to have driven most of the Darkest Night into shelter. Faynel might have been a tad sweaty, but other than that the heat barely seemed to faze her, and her hood protected her from the direct sunlight. She wanted to test him without anyone around- it was the only explanation of why she would have brought him somewhere so exposed during the day when the rest of her people were hidden away.

Mason considered the hungry look on her face, and found himself grinning. Her mind seemed to just run along its own tracks, and she didn’t really seem to have much fear of anything, if her disregard of Torysen’s wishes was anything to measure by. “Right. I’d rather learn more about these runes.”

“Check your stats. I think you’ll find you’ve already gained a good amount from today’s exercises.”

She was right, though he couldn’t entirely understand what had happened. His Mana Manipulation had gone up by one, as well as his Mana Tolerance and Focus. On top of that, Mana Sight and Glamour had levelled twice, but the most interesting improvement was that his Runecraft had levelled twice without him really working directly on his runes.

He had also picked up the Herbalism skill, but he didn’t see himself using that a whole lot any time soon.

“I don’t think I’ve ever gained so many improvements without fighting. What did you do to me?”

Faynel shrugged and continued to stay in place a few feet away from him, “People think that the skills level from use, but that’s bullshit. A skill improves as you do, and a large part of that is understanding what you’re doing. So I taught you about how your glamour works to move mana around your body, I made you Focus on the runes and enchantments until you learned something about them.

“I’m supposed to get you ready to join the band, but it seems like nobody has bothered to give you even the basics. Have you gotten any skill to twenty-five yet?” she asked.

“Mana Tolerance is at twenty-four, but that’s my highest skill yet. It levelled pretty quickly while I was torturing myself early on,” Mason explained calmly, still reading over his updated stats.

“Mana Tolerance, huh?” She looked thoughtful for a second. “I don’t know what the bonus for achieving level twenty-five in that will be. Mana Tolerance kind of comes built into us Marrans so we don’t get a skill for it. Bet you anything I can push your level over the edge though, if you’ll trust me for a second.” There it was again- a mischievous gleam in her eye that Mason was convinced made her look more dangerous than his Demon glamour ever did.

“If you kill me, I’ll make sure the humans come back to haunt you,” he joked, though his tone was nervous.

“Don’t be so melodramatic.” She stepped forward in a lazy motion, but somehow closed the gap between them in no time. Grabbing his hand with her right, she began to channel mana into the tips of the fingers on her left hand. Then she grabbed onto his arm, hard.

He felt the mana burning hot against his skin, and instinctively he pulled on the connection with his staff and triggered Mana Vampirism. She pulled her hand back and slapped him hard, and the shock reminded him to control himself. He turned off the vampirism and instead focused on the pain, trying not to bite his lip or scream or do anything that might make him look weak in front of her.

The mana seemed to take his lack of response as a challenge though, and it spread from the surface of her fingers in a rippling pattern through his arm. He hadn’t realized that mana could still have this effect on him, especially since it wasn’t pumping through his body, it was just pressing into his skin, but the pain was hardly different than the feeling of his skin against a hot stove.

He triggered Focus to keep his control, and instead of focusing on the pain itself, he locked eyes with Faynel. Her eyes glimmered with a ferocity that didn’t seem to suit such a simple exercise, and for a moment he was worried that she had more malicious intent toward him than he had previously suspected. But as he looked deeper he realized that was paranoia talking. This ferocity was simply what lay buried inside of her.

And he didn’t want to back down from it. If he couldn’t activate mana vampirism, he had other ways to fight back. He pulled from the core of his own mana and sent it into his arm, trying to make the tendrils of it reach up to the places she was grabbing and wall off her mana, or reinforce his flesh. Her eyes narrowed as she felt him move against her, but she didn’t hit him. Instead, she seemed to tighten her grip, and Mason willed his mana against hers with an even greater determination.

But his mana seemed to be expended rapidly as it defended against hers, even while she seemed to have more to send his way. He felt his pool empty in no time, but noticed that while it was emptying the pain seemed almost insignificant. That must be what she was trying to teach him.

“I’m out!” he shouted finally, wrenching his arm back.

She grinned at him with a satisfied expression and stepped back before nodding and letting her face fall inscrutable again. “You did well. Now look at your stats again.”

Mason’s eyes went wide when he did. That short exchange, possibly only a minute or two, had brought his Mana Tolerance up to level twenty-seven. It was undoubtedly his greatest skill at that point. There was also a notification right after the level up indicator.

Mana Tolerance has passed level 25, and you’ve become proficient. You’ve gained one Focus Point in Willpower and Endurance to commemorate the growth of your skill.

A wise man recoils from poison and learns to treat its infections and shun its sources. Strength is learning to use the poison as a weapon. You will no longer suffer Mana Sickness under most normal circumstances.

“The Trials suck, honestly. Pretty much everything here is supposed to kill you, and everything else just hasn’t figured out how to yet. But they aren’t without their rewards. Any skill you can get past level twenty-five grants some sort of bonus, and I don’t need to tell you how useful those Focus Points can be. How else do you think I got my agility so high?”