20 The Answer!
Riwall woke up the next day to find Greg and Anna looking expectantly to him.
"Why are you two looking at me like that?" He asked.
"Why? Don't think we haven't noticed how late you come back some nights and how our masters keep calling you for private meetings! We want in on whatever is happening! Or else." Anna said while looking menacingly at him and pulling her sleeves up. He learned the worse way that she would back her words with action without a second thought.
"Yeah, what she said!" Greg, on the other hand, was not cut for intimidation. She was not even speaking to him, and he already had a scared look on his face.
"C'mon guys! You know I can't talk about it! I never pester you about your private classes. I don't see why I need to talk about mine."
{A weak argument, but it should get them out of my back.}
Surprisingly, it was Greg that insisted on this interrogation.
"That's not fair, and you know it, Mad! You are our friend, and the three of us have been living together for the last two years. We can always tell when something is bothering you."
They gave him the ridiculous nickname of 'Mad' after Edward called him a 'f~cking madman' in one of their party combat training. On that particular day, he was fighting using a halberd, and as his hands were holding a weapon twice his size, he began casting offensive spells with his eyes and his mouth without stopping shouting orders for his party now and then. As his surname is Madec, it was a fitting nickname.
"Tell me then, how do you know when I am bothered by something?" He raised an eyebrow to Greg's certainty about his state of mind.
Anna answered before Greg.
"That's easy! Look at yourself!" She said happily while pointing to him.
{Shit, I slept with my dirty clothes again.}
"That's your best, Anna? It just means I was distracted, nothing more." He came up with another weak rebuttal. He was finding this whole situation pretty funny.
Anna was getting ready and seemed ready to jump at him at any moment. Greg decided to try using words before letting the two fight each other.
"Anna just pointed at the most blatant sign, but there are many others. Your posture gets a little hunched while walking; you stop trying to teach us new things; your fighting style during training gets a lot more defensive; you stop writing books or drawing in your spare time, and you keep rubbing your chin all the time. Like you are doing this very moment."
[He is right, this kid is good! I never noticed how observant he was.]
"Ok, you got me, I am bothered by a few things. Some I can't tell you about because Master Eleanor ordered me not too."
He proceeded to share with them about the hard time he was having with the finesse of his magic, and he even showed them the mana-maze that Theodas lent him. Anna was mesmerized and began trying it herself. He then told them about the importance their masters put on their foundations and how they were still weaker than many of their age. Finally, he shared with them the question Lila asked, Greg loved these questions and sat on his bed to ponder about it.
They got satisfied with his explanation and did not annoy him after that. He went to take a bath and change into clean clothes. A few minutes later, he came back to the room to find Anna looking to the mana-maze while pouting cutely.
"What got into you, Anna? I can't complete this maze too, it's no big deal, although it is very annoying."
"I don't understand, why can't I just make my mana go directly to the center?" She was still pouting.
{It's so cute! If I didn't know that she would rip my arm off, I would be petting her right now.}
"Of course you can't go directly to the center. The pathway is meant to be followed."
"I know that, but why can't I just force my way to the center? It is stupid to take all these turns if the goal is right there!"
"Wait, you mean directly infusing your mana in the center? Without following the pathway?"
"Yes! I tried it, but it just won't work. My mana just bounces and dissipates without getting a hold."
"Here, let me try."
Riwall focused on the mana-maze and tried to manifest his mana directly inside the center, but it bounced off just as Anna described. He then tried to break through the walls of the maze and force his mana to reach the center; he felt the maze walls resisting his mana and dissipating it at a steady pace, he increased his output a little and felt the tool in his hand getting hotter.
Curious about the heat, he opened the back of the tool and found the enchantment inscribed directly in the wood. He touched it and felt nothing; it was cold.
He started channeling mana in the maze and probing the walls again, but this time he was looking directly into the enchantment. The moment his mana touched the walls and began dissipating, the inscription started emitting a faint glow. As he increased the mana output, so did the glow gets brighter and emit some heat. He felt something else as well. He could not put his finger into it, but knew that he had felt it before.
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{Can you feel it too Friday? When did I get this feeling before?}
[Yes, it's a feeling that is similar to what you felt back in the Guild when you put your mana in the Muller's Tablet.]
He and Friday both gasped at the same time.
{This! Friday, explain to me, how did you manage to intercept the System's imprint of knowledge when I raised some skill levels?}
[It's hard to put it in words. Since I merged with it back when you were born, it's like every information that goes to you is in a binary form, I can clearly see it. That's one of the reasons I was so sure the System was a piece of code.]
{Did you try to send something to it to see if you got any response?}
[I thought about communicating with it but found no way of doing so. It's not like we have an antenna that can broadcast what I want to the System.]
{Wait a minute, the simulations! The System could read my progress even while inside a simulation and increase my attributes accordingly. Did you notice anything different while I was inside them?}
[No, they ran its course and by the end, I would...]
She suddenly stopped talking, worrying Riwall for a second.
{Friday? You there? Are you ok?}
[THATS IT!]
{What? You figured it out?}
[It's so obvious! So simple! Temelth told us the answer a decade ago, and we ignored it!]
{Calm down and explain it slowly to me.}
[The System is a byproduct of another form of energy, not matter, nor aether, something much more powerful and sophisticated.]
{Are you telling me that the System is something akin to a soul? As in a soul is a byproduct of aether?}
[Exactly! The System seems to be the embodiment of rationality itself, a byproduct of something higher. Whatever it touches, it tries to make sense of it with numbers and names.]
{And what if it can't make sense of something?}
[Then it reforms itself in a way to make it possible! Lila called it malleable, remember? When you are left alone and raise a skill level, you get the knowledge directly into your brain. Not in a binary form, but in an organic one.]
[However, if I am actively interacting with you, then the information is transmitted in the form of a piece of code, which I translate and imprint in your brain.]
{That's it? The System is an embodiment of rationality? Then how can Lila say that enchantments cheat it?}
[The enchantments are most definitely not cheating the System at all, her misconception comes from the fact that the drawings they do seem to force the System to behave in opposition to its core functions.]
{I am not following.}
[Think about the System as a computer. You can make incredible things inside of it, and provided you have an excellent OS; it can be adapted to accommodate any change you make.]
{So the System is a computer, and we are some programs running on it?}
[More like it is a computer and we are AIs inside of it. As long as we know the code language that it speaks, we can make changes up to a limit.]
{Doesn't that means that we are in a simulation?}
[Don't take this analogy at face value, Temelth herself said that the System intruded this reality. So, everything we are now, precedes it, not the other way around.]
{Please tell me you can crack this language.}
[Unfortunately, it's not that simple. A good start would be reading Lila's books on enchanting. By crossreferencing shapes with the effects they cause to the System, maybe I can make a manual or something like that. I can't be sure until I try.]
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Riwall suddenly jumped to his feet and kissed Anna's cheek.
"THANK YOU! I owe you one!" It was thanks to her childish approach to the mana-maze that led him to investigate the enchantment behind the tool.
"What? What did I do?" She was as red as her hair at this moment. He found her to be even cuter.
"You, Anna, are a genius! Please never change!" He then squeezed her cheeks like he always wanted to do. Before her embarrassment turned into rage, he made his escape to see if he could find Lila on the Enchanting room.
Greg saw all of it and burst out laughing. Riwall's prediction proved to be accurate, for Greg's laughs turned into screams of pain as soon as the fox-girl reverted back to her usual behavior.
-------------------------
He knocked at the door. No one answered.
He knocked harder. There were some rustle noises, but no one answered.
He knocked even harder, and finally, he heard someone moving to answer the door.
A very sleepy Lila answered the door. She had bags under her eyes, and her hair was messy and had some spilled ink on them.
"Uh, yeah? What is it? Is it lunch already?"
Her appearance worried him very much.
"Master, it's Riwall, are you ok? Did you pull an all-nighter?"
"Riwall, what are you doing here? Today is my day off, and our class is only tomorrow."
She started closing the door on his face, but he interrupted her.
"Wait, Master, please! I found the answer to your question!"
"My question?" She was still disoriented from her interrupted sleep and could not understand what he was on about.
"The System! You asked me what it was. I think I get it! Can we talk a little bit? I still have some time before Edward's class." He was empathic enough to see that it would be better to discuss it later. But both he and Friday were too anxious to check what they discovered.
She just kept staring at him, slowly digesting what he was saying. When she got it, her eyes snapped wide open, and she pulled him inside.
"What do you mean 'you got it'? You were not supposed to figure things out for some time! It's just like Hector warned that would happen!"
"Huh? What does Master Hector have to do with anything?"
"He said, and I'm quoting: 'If you ever imply that some piece of knowledge is important, the boy will shower you with questions for hours, this is his nature. Whatever you do, never, ever, plan your lessons with his failure in mind, he will surprise you and disrupt all your plans!'." She even made an impression of Hector. She nailed it so well that Riwall was mentally clapping for her.
"Ha ha! Yeah, he did it twice actually." He felt proud of these two occasions, so he told her the stories.
"The first time it happened was when he asked me to melt an adamantium coin using my fire magic. He had planned a whole month of classes to help me get my <Fire Magic Casting> up to the task, but I did it on the first try and in just a few seconds."
She was never that much knowledgeable in combat magic, but she knew adamantium had one of the highest melting points, Theodas always complained when told to work with it in a project.
"The second time, he asked me to do a tetracast demonstration, I didn't know that he counted on me failing to teach me that there was a limit to how much differents intents and information streams a mind could handle. There was a six-month training program already planned to help me master the multitasking techniques necessary for a tetracast."
She could not believe this second story.
"A 10-year-old tetracasting? Nonsense." She said with apparent disdain in her tone. As with all the other masters, the reports they received on their students were limited to information regarded as essential to their specific classes. So she did not know about half of the impossible things the three kids pulled in the last two years.
Riwall just smiled, opened his arms, and conjured four birds, one of each element, and they started circling around him. He even added some dust to the wind element one; otherwise, it would be invisible to the naked eye; this feat only made the display more impressive.
He took a mental picture of her expression at this moment, promising himself to immortalize it in a drawing later.
"So, Master, about the System."
