33 – Asset

They ended up walking all the way to the shore, where the sea stretched out before them.

“[Privacy Screen],” Elric said, casting an adept-tier spell that encased them within a dome. No one outside of the dome would be able to hear what they were saying.

After he was done, he sat and gestured for her to sit beside him, which she did.

“Have you learned about what happened to the first Earth?” he asked.

Arielle nodded. She’d first learned of it in the schoolyard, and then in The Vacu Paradox, and also in her politics and history remedials. “The Primordials were fighting and destroyed the Earth.”

“Yes,” he nodded. “And then?”

“We got a second Earth, and they almost destroyed that, but the Great Balancer stepped in. He maintains balance and peace between all the essences, so it doesn’t get destroyed again.”

“Good,” he said. He interlaced his fingers and said, “The Great Balancer, as a being, exists to balance out all the Primordials in their realm and make sure that whatever infighting they have doesn’t affect our realm. He left the Sentinel, a man/god who found our second Earth, in charge of overseeing our realm and ensuring that what happened to the first Earth doesn’t happen to this one. That’s where the system comes from.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand. What does this have to do with the system?”

“Core refinement and magical ability are directly linked to mortality. The more refined your cores are, and the better you are at magic, the longer you live. Some of the legendary mages are on the gates of immortality as we speak, and the High Ascendant is essentially immortal. Power is a blessing. Earth must maintain a powerful populace to combat invaders emerging from dimensional rifts. But power can also be a curse. What do you suppose will happen if we have too many powerful immortals running around?”

She considered it, but there were a lot of directions she could take the scenario, so she just shrugged.

He picked up some sand, letting it drain through his fingers. “The Primordials. There are only five of them, yet an argument between them was able to destroy Earth. What do you think would happen if ten, twenty, or fifty immortal humans with world-ending powers decided to wage war against each other? What about a hundred of them? Two hundred? Three hundred? You see where I’m going with this.”

She nodded reluctantly, the pieces forming in her head.

“They can be stopped,” she said. “If there are powerful bad guys, then they can be stopped by powerful good guys.”

“Thinking of these people as bad or good is too simplistic. After all, though we’re not sure what the Primordials argued about, there’s no evidence to show any of them were ‘bad‘ or ‘good’. They simply disagreed, and the world ended as a result. Civilizations wiped out. Billions killed. Humanity was almost completely erased through no fault of their own.”

Arielle tried to imagine it. She tried to imagine everyone she knew and cared about gone. Her mother, her sister, her brother. Elric. The friends she’d made at the academy. All gone.

It hurt to think about it, so she shook the thought away.

“We got another chance with this second Earth,” Elric said. “And as our population has grown, it was decided that we cannot let the same thing happen again. The Great Balancer is too occupied with handling the Primordials to save us for a second time. The Sentinel was left in charge, but he likely would have trouble handling a hundred humans whose powers have managed to approach and transcend a limit. The system is supposed to ensure that doesn’t happen. The quota, too. Magic is meant to serve humanity, not destroy it. It is a privilege, not a right, and only those who are deemed worthy are allowed this privilege.”

“Deemed worthy?” Arielle’s face scrunched up. “How can you measure worth when nothing about the system is fair? Regular charms are prohibitively expensive, so only the wealthy nobles can afford them, and people like Lyra cannot. Nobles also have tutors that they hire to train their children, and regular commoners don’t.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Elric said. “I’m not saying the system is fair, and we should definitely work to change it. But it’s what we have for now. Additionally, as I said, essences may not be entirely infinite. They’re mined, collected, and spread into the atmosphere. Some can be reused, some cannot. If we were to run out prematurely, Earth would be doomed. Our strict power hierarchy prevents this from happening.” He stared at her. “You might think it’s unfair, Arielle, and you’re not wrong, but it is the world we live in. There will always be a hierarchy, and anything that threatens that will be investigated. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong. Even if you have your powers through no fault of your own. There are too many invested in our current system to let it be broken by one girl.”

Arielle eyed her feet even as a sense of injustice surged. “How do I break it?”

“By becoming as powerful as the High Ascendant, while having none of the limitations. It’s very possible for you, Arielle. With enough training, you could easily approach and maybe even surpass that level of power. If they were to discover your full potential, Arielle, a lot of people would be excited, no doubt. Some will celebrate you and treat you as a god. But just as many will try to bring you down, especially those associated with the current High Ascendant. You don’t have the experience to avoid the pitfalls yet, and you could just easily end up being trapped and used as a tool for the system. Even the ones who worship you might not care much about your actual well-being. You might be used as a conqueror, sent to realm after realm to destroy Earth’s enemies, whether you want to or not. I don’t want that kind of life for you, at least not until you know enough to choose it for yourself.”

“They can force me into it?” Arielle asked quietly.

“At this stage, yes. The current High Ascendant has been given the power, by the Sentinel, to suppress any cores he wants. They might give you a choice: work with them as their tool or have your core suppressed. At your level of power, core suppression will be an unbearable existence.”

“I see.” She certainly didn’t want to be a tool, nor did she want to have her cores suppressed. She simply wanted to live as she was already living, learning, and studying magic. Also earning a suitable amount of coins.

“I know it’s hard to swallow,” Elric continued. “And I’m sorry about it all. It’s an extremely imperfect system with a lot of loopholes. For example, you might ask, what about those who could be powerful but simply don’t log enough spells for the system to register? Couldn’t they eventually ascend to a level of unspeakable power? And the answer is probably not. As I mentioned before, it’s extremely difficult for one to do that, to earn enough power without the help of the system. Not even someone like Gio could achieve such in his lifetime. You’re the only one I know who could do that, which is what makes you so dangerous and makes it imperative that you hide your abilities better. While your abilities will prove you to be a great asset in our fight against instability, it could also be a hazard. To the council and the High Ascendant, you would either become a tool or a threat, and I would rather not risk finding out which one they choose. Either way, you will no longer have a normal life.”

Normal. There was that word again.

Had she ever been normal?

A thought occurred to her.

“Out of curiosity,” she asked. “What would happen if, after some time has passed, my power became the same as the High Ascendants? Would I be killed then? Or have my cores been suppressed?”

“I‘m not sure, but I don’t think so.” He eyed her. “If a human attained that much power, there would likely be no way for the High Ascendant to suppress it. However, there can only be one High Ascendant. I suppose there will have to be a battle for it.”

“The human would battle the High Ascendant to become the new High Ascendant?”

“Yes.”

Arielle thought about it. “What if they didn’t want to be the new High Ascendant? What if they simply had the power but wanted to use it for fun projects?”

Elric smiled. “In that case, they need to do a better job of blending in.”

Arielle nodded. She didn’t know precisely what the High Ascendant did, but she knew it had to do with a lot of politics and stuff that bored her. No, thank you to that.

“Now,” he said. “About bloodline traits. Think of these as patented spells passed down a bloodline. The spells may not necessarily be very complex, but what they are is powerful and recognizable. Those who inherit the bloodline trait can use it with ease, from the onset of core control, and while there might be different ways to achieve the same spell effect, the spell bears certain signatures that distinguish it from similar spells, including name, activation, and mode of action. You can also witness the signature in the spell form.”

“Signature…” Arielle trailed off, thinking about what she’d seen on the desk runners. “Like an S made up solely of Vacu? Would that be a signature?”

“I suppose. Anyway, with these bloodline traits, the families maintain charge over it. They are not in any spell books, and they’re made exactingly so that they’re harder to copy. Copying it is forbidden.”

“Why?”

“Well, for certain spells, copying can be dangerous, because your cores might not be adequate for stabilization. But honestly, it’s mostly just a prestige thing. You copying the spell is an insult to their prestige, and it suggests that the spells aren’t difficult enough.”

“But it wasn’t.” She could copy both the magnetic spell and the Antigones Light Web spell with ease.

A smile tickled the corner of his lips. “Yes, but you’re not supposed to let them know that. Maybe when you’re an Archmage, you can get away with it, but as an apprentice, that type of skill will piss off nobles. In any case, you should steer clear of copying any spell that has a special signature and that you’ve never seen in a spell book before. At least don’t repeat it in public.”

“Okay.” She drew up her knees, picking sand off the edges of her robes, “I still don’t see why you had to get in trouble for it. You’re an Archmage, one of the most powerful ‘assets‘ on Earth. Don’t you get some leeway?”

“I do,” he said. “If you were not my cousin, that would have been much worse. And I’ve managed to settle things with Strauss in my own way.”

“How?”

“That’s not important,” he said. “Let’s just say that once he realized that you were my cousin, he was much more willing to let it go. Maybe if I were Gio Li, I would be able to flout the rules with more abandon. He doesn’t have just power going for him; he has his family’s influence as well. No mortal would be able to stop him, which is how he gets away with things. But my family is complex, as you know, and I’d rather keep them out of matters about you. While I am powerful, some people can restrain me, Gio being one of them.” He sighed. “An Echo’s sigil is a restricted item. Giving it to you should have had me called before the council if I were merely a master or an adept. However, as I’m an Archmage, I will likely only get a demerit, if that, which is essentially a slap on the wrist to me.”

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“What about the Northern Pillage Mountains? You told me when I was younger that if you got another demerit, you would end up there.”

“You remember that?”

She nodded. She remembered most things about their conversation that day. It was a defining moment of her childhood.

“Those mountains are often where we see our worst dimensional rifts,” he explained. “So it’s a lot of fighting, but nothing I cannot handle.”

Ari wasn’t too sure about that. Her father had gone to deal with a dimensional rift at the Southern Border, and she hadn’t seen or heard from him in years.

“You could have just said I have a copying bloodline trait.”

He shook his head. “I was tempted to do that, and while that would have gotten rid of one problem, it would have introduced a whole host of other problems. The fact that you have a bloodline trait would require too much investigation into your bloodline, especially since neither my mother nor anyone in her immediate family had one. Bloodline traits don’t just appear out of thin air. They are passed down, so there had to be an origin, and for a bloodline trait that unique, the council would definitely be interested in finding that origin. They would look into your background too much and might find things we don’t want them finding.”

“The Council?”

“The Celestial Council, a smaller part of the Celestial Assembly. They deal with magical dissidence, and they’re led by the High Ascendant. We do not want to have you go there and get investigated, which is why I worked to get things cleared up as easily as possible.”

“But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Not technically, but there are clauses he could have pushed that might eventually have landed you there after a drawn-out legal battle with the lower courts. For example, the union issue. It might have been a lower court case if it were just a case of unlicensed distribution of charms, but the involvement of an apprentice mage, especially the cousin of an archmage, might graduate it to an assembly issue.”

“Oh.” She sifted some of the sand around her feet. “I’m sorry I got you in trouble.”

“It’s alright. It’s my fault anyway. I didn’t do enough to warn you about the pitfalls of being here.” He leaned in and said, “I’m sorry if I seemed upset or frustrated. It was mostly directed at myself. It’s just…I’m not really trained to deal with young ones, and I never expected to adopt a cousin.”

“It’s okay. Neither did I.”

He smirked. “Asking you for subterfuge, I know, is an impossible task. Even if they think that your powers are charm-based now, it will be impossible for them to believe that for long. You simply cannot hide how talented you are. However, unless you do something impossible, they should have no right to investigate you or think that you’re anything more than a genius student, who will likely become a Master by the end of her second year.”

Her eyes widened. “Is that okay? Can I do that? I thought you said Master by third year.”

“It’s never been done before,” he said. “But I think your skills are too much to hope for total normalcy. You will be a grade above the rest, proving you’re an asset, but you cannot do anything too unusual to assign yourself as a threat. Also, I do not want the [Hidden Abilities] marker on you. It gets their attention.”

“Okay…so I can keep doing what I’m doing?”

He smiled gently. “Yes, apart from copying the bloodline traits and adjusting spells in real time, you can keep being the young genius that you are.” He thought about it. “Instead of duels, you should spend time crafting spells that mimic your natural abilities so that in the future, if you ever slip up and you’re being investigated, you can point to that as the cause.”

She nodded. That was clever. She simply had to have spells on hand that broke other spells in that very distinct way of hers. Also, maybe a copying spell in case she ever got in trouble again.

“I will send over a list of dos and don’ts,” Elric continued. “And if you’re ever unsure about something, ask me, alright?”

“Okay.” She pursed her lips and then admitted. “Elric, I have been doing something you will not approve of.”

“What is it?”

‘”Healing manalings.”