"What level are you, and what rank is your class and [Path of the Broken Body]?"

"One hundred, both are C."

"Next time you get a class, get a B rank class. How long have you been level one hundred?"

"About a month."

"You got to level one hundred pretty fast. You should hold off on leveling for a while."

"What? Why?"

"Students three years older than you are sitting around your level for a reason. This is the prime time to prepare your body for an augmentation to your energy."

"Mana?"

"Hmm, no. Your rock is full of this stuff. The amount of a specific type of energy in your body determines the attributes you have. It's also called essence. It's tied to your life force, just like mana is."

"Mana, lifeforce, essence, spirit. What else is there."

"Nothing. That's the big four. If you want to get into it, you can include divinity. But us mortals don't have to worry about that."

"Why does mana only have a bar?"

"Health is a measure of your life force. Your tenacity to take blows or resists illness. It falls from injury and rises from replenishment. It gets weaker as the cold grasp of death stands before you as you grow older. Waiting by the tombstone that your name marks. But the more life force you have, the longer lifespan."

"So life force is intrinsically connected to bodily health. Where is it?"

"Where do you think your life force is located? Your ass? Technically! If a single part of your body doesn't have a life force, it dies. Undead are called that for a reason."

"..."

"I'll rapid-fire the next few ones. Mana is a force that needs more studying and acts more like a force of the universe. We generate our own passively, but as humans, we can't take mana from the environment. Your mana bar shows the excess mana your body produces. All things release ambient mana, like sweat, if your mana bar is full. It's associated with the mind because having more mana is directly linked to clarity and memory retention.

I told you the basics of essence earlier. It's the hardest to track and manage. Those affinity tests you took were measurement tests for that energy. The more you have and the better quality, the better mana interacts with it."

"There are qualities to it now?"

"Yeah, all things have a quality to them. Life force gets better when there are more of them and mana... we'll get to mana when we get to it.

Giles will probably go over spirit with you, and I don't have much time. I'm going to name a few flaws and some things we'll have to do to fix them."

"..."

"One, you're shit at fighting. All things considered, you are good in a fight but not good at it. I've seen some of your encounters, and you know how to disrupt tempo and determine weak spots, but that's more of your analytical mind working well in tandem with your actions."

"What needs to be done."

"We can take it in a few directions. We'll talk later. Second, your body is not good. You should take full advantage of your hardiness and bulk up. You are too skinny to be considered a good tank. A bigger hitbox would be a way to put it. Plus, more weight means you'll be dragged around less and be able to output more force with the same amount of strength."

"Sounds reasonable."

"The last one I'll touch on is something less about you and people like us. If someone can't kill you, but they can incapacitate you, you have still lost. Your defenses can cause concrete to crumble against your skin, but what happens if you're encased in it? Or grappled and choked into submission. There a technique I'll teach you."

"What should I do first?"

Master Wang pulls out a flier and hands it to me. It's for a fried chicken shop on the other side of the city.

"Go get lunch. I want five orders of combo three. Get my daughter something too."

"..."

~

After dropping off the food and getting something for myself, I sought out dean Palmer. He tells me that the winning teams can undergo specialized training if they want to. Everyone excepted except me since I don't check my phone.

"I know your personality, Ellis, but this is an opportunity for you and your beasts. I won't say good or bad since you may have one or two masters in your back pocket, but you should show up at least once a week in the mornings so we can hold team training exercises."

"I'll talk to my masters."

"Thank you. Here."

Palmer snaps his fingers, and a man in a nice suit and glasses walks over with a metal box chained shut. He looks annoyed that Palmer called him over like that. I grab the box and look at it inquisitively.

"Your books. The box will only unlock when only one person is near it or within eyesight. Don't forget to notify me if anything strange starts to happen."

"Palmer. This is stretching it. You don't have to power you once had and use the last of it to hook up some kid? I can't believe you fell this far."

"Don't talk to the representative of the human race like that. Especially when they're my student. You're not needed anymore. Leave."

The glasses guy walks away with a huff.

"What the fuck was that?"

"Pay him no mind."

"An old colleague?"

He only looks at me. His phone vibrates in his pocket. He pulls it out and flies off without saying anything, leaving me standing there. The last time I pried into dean Palmer's past, he told me that he'd have to kill me if he told me anything. I decided to read these books since I didn't know where to find master Giles.

The dorm is still open to me, so I go to my room and enter my mansion. I go to my study, right off of my bedroom, to open this box. As soon as I put it down, the chains snap off.

I open the box and look at the nine tomes inside. Only nine? The ones on top are pretty simple. [One Thousand & One Curses, by Dr. E. Deathmen.], [Floral, Fungi, & Everything Else that will Poison you.], [The Guide to Torture, Vol 1: Humans], and [The Other Elements]. The following two are strange. [History of the Prime Territories.] and [The Findings and Machinations of Darwin V. Vincere. Vol 2].

Darwin is my dad's name. Darwin Vincent Vincere. I put that book off to the side for now.

[Sun Sickness] seems to be esoteric information about the undead, while [What We Know About the "Gods"] is self-explanatory. It's oozing heresy and damnation. I see magical bindings covering the book like it's a prisoner. [Scientific Insight+] doesn't even register them as existing. After skimming through my [Lexicon], I identify them as powerful anti-divination wards. The next and last book is ominous. It's literally emitting a nauseous aura that turns the inside of the box black.

[Stalking the Doors.]

I take my time, feeding my [Lexicon] the books one at a time, making that no unintended side effects boggle my mind. [One Thousand & One Curses, by Dr. E. Deathmen.] is quite interesting. It's an encyclopedia of curses, the components needed, and how to cast them. The book itself is cursed since some curses can be triggered just by learning about them, but something I haven't seen since I started hearing voices pop up.

[Lexicon?? has blocked a mimetic hazard.]

After leaving that place, my [Lexicon] became "tainted," and a few question marks were added to the end of it. I didn't pay it any mind since nothing changed mechanically. It still worked just as well as it did before. Does the [Lexicon] do that automatically, or did my time over there add this feature?

I looked at the blocked information. I expected it to be blacked out or redacted, but no. It's right there. It's a reading curse that would temporarily cause illiteracy, but I'm still literate. The message "Lexicon?? has blocked a mimetic hazard" keep popping up rapidly. I close it. I now know that the necrosis I experienced when I helped that little girl in Goldenfield is a curse, not a disease like I was told. It's indeed hereditary, but it's not an illness. Someone in that family must've pissed someone off for them to cast a blood curse on their entire lineage. I don't have any talent for magic, but I should still be able to do the bare basics with this book. Give people bad dreams or make their gums turn grey. Simple things.

[Floral, Fungi, & Everything Else that will Poison you.] has a wide variety of different things that causes toxins and other harmful substances. It teaches how to identify, grow, harvest, and process them into even deadlier poison. I don't know when I'll need this information, but it's helpful. [Sage of the Diviners] is here since it's been reported to cause psychosis and suicides.

[The Guide to Torture, Vol 1: Humans] is an anatomy textbook with helpful guides on inflicting pain. There's a section on techniques if there isn't a healer nearby and ways to get the [Torturer] class. There are a few chapters on psychological torture that I'll squirrel away in my mind for later. The pictures are more gruesome than necessary, but it's an informative read.

[The Other Elements] touches on what it means to have an affinity that isn't elemental. [Blood], [Flesh], [Soul], [Karma], etc. It's a bit broad in the subject, but I don't know why it's banned. It has necromancy vibes even though it never outright states that this is a book for necromancers. I checked what it means to have an "undead" affinity since I got that from one of my titles.

Undead affinity will not affect spells or skills. It's a measurement of how much an undead you are. Undead cannot get it because they are already that... I pretty much died at one point, but I came back. That gave me five points of affinity. Is there a cap? How does this affect me? Is this the smell my prisoner was talking about? I don't want to think about that. The "Other Elements" also include things like [Holy] and [Life]. It also has broader topics. I mentioned before, [Karma]. One of the weirdest ones I read was [Secret], which seems ironic since I now know about it.

I'll skip the history lecture and my father's book because something tells me I'll get angry after reading them.

[Sun Sickness] is one long rant about the undead, the different types, and the origins of those types. It brings up allegories regarding sunlight directly impacting over 90% of the undead, and the connection between religion and the elements of [Holy], being a mixture of [Radiant] and [Life]. It starts getting into how undeath and curses are intrinsically connected, and a few aspects of the other books start making more sense.

I try to absorb the last two books. [What We Know About the "Gods"] and [Stalking the Doors.], but my [Lexicon] refused to.

[Lexicon?? can only absorb lesser books.]

I try to open either of the books, but they start draining mana from me when I touch them. I decided to store them away back in the box they came in. Then I put that box into the [Containor of Copious Compartments]. I'll touch on these books when I feel comfortable enough to do so. Maybe I can find a way to set up a safe room away from prying eyes. I should look into ways of upgrading the [Lexixon] as well. It's a 'man-made' skill, whatever that means.

I silently absorb [History of the Prime Territories.] and [The Findings and Machinations of Darwin V. Vincere. Vol 2]. I stand there in silence for the next minute before feeling sick. Why would dean Palmer give me these things, and how does he have the power to have them in the first place? My father's book is encrypted with a nauseating text, so I'll need to crack the cipher, but the history lecture is offputting.

It's a diary from one of the members of the First Party, somebody I've never heard of. Morden, last name withheld, is a magic caster with the specific class not disclosed. It's a diary about the hypocrisy and wickedness of the different members and the various acts of atrocity they committed. Some were spared from Morden's pen, but most were not.

The paladin known only as "The Lightborn" slayed anyone who would still hold religious beliefs originating from before the collision. They are the direct reason why the new gods had little friction in taking over the cultural gap left behind. Because he's the one who caused the void.

Saint Valentine abused his powers and would only take sexual favors from those the needed his healing. He'd spread rumors and cause those trying to report him or kill them outright. Ostracization by their peers or death. I guess that's why he has so many grandchildren running around.

The only mentions of my grandfather are the tension and fighting between Aurelius and him. They need my grandfather's skills to reinstate a country, but my grandfather is very against authority. The First Party wanted to take the lands from my grandfather to create their own paradise with themselves ruling it. Instead of fighting them or relenting to their demands, he decided to do a big "fuck you," He gave the land away to the public. If they wanted to become leaders, they would have to earn or take it.

It wouldn't be the end of the world for the First Party. With the reputation they have and the power they wield, they could grab the influence they want. But that's part of my grandfather's personality. In the diary, he's been quoted saying, "If the people desire to be ruled by incompetent buffoons, I won't stop them. If they want someone better, they'll come back to me."

They did not want someone better.