Vivi appreciated Rafael’s interruption, not because she was interested in the quest’s payout, but because she had no idea how to deal with a starstruck, emotional old friend who wasn’t really an old friend at all.

Meeting Winston and Rafael had gone smoothly, but that was because they were social deftness personified. Mae was…not so much that. She was also clearly far more amazed by Vivi’s presence.

She supposed she’d interacted constantly with Winston, as her butler, and with Rafael, the guild’s steward. The craftsmen, she hadn’t been as close with. The luster of ‘hero of the world’ still existed in their eyes to some degree—if no doubt less than a civilian’s. At least, that seemed to be the case for Mae.

And Vivi couldn’t pick up the slack on a complicated social situation. She stumbled with normal niceties, much less unprecedented circumstances like reuniting with a guild-NPC turned real person. So yeah. She was glad Rafael had interjected. Seeing how he was more than aware of Vivi’s quirks, he’d likely done so on purpose.

Jasper slammed his book closed, tossed it aside, and rolled off the sofa, jumping to his feet in a fluid motion. “The quest does sound like fun. Level two thousand artifact with no level cap?” He whistled. “If it’s a bow, I call dibs.”

“Why would you get it?” Mae shot at him. “Just for knowing me?”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I do deserve a reward for putting up with you.”

“You! Putting up with me!” the elf sputtered. “You have that backwards!”

Rafael strode over to the quest board. As amusing as watching Jasper score repeated critical strikes on Mae was—he really understood how to get under that woman’s skin—Vivi followed Rafael, far more interested in the quest. Jasper and Mae must have agreed, because after bickering for a bit longer, they also glanced over, paused, and hurried to join them.

“To my office?” Rafael asked, eyes scanning the paper he had unpinned from the cork. They flicked to Mae. “Assuming you do, indeed, wish to rejoin Vanguard?”

Mae sounded almost offended. “I hardly avoided every other guild these past hundred years for some other reason.” She hesitated as if realizing something, and looked at Vivi with obvious concern. “Assuming I’m still welcome.”

“That goes completely without saying,” Vivi said.

A beaming smile spread across Mae’s face, which she tried to hide with some embarrassment. Vivi was struck, again, by how much weight her words held to the people who remembered her.

As a group of four, they walked to Rafael’s office. He pulled out the guild charter and flipped to, presumably, the induction form. He scribbled out several fields, then paused, pen tip hovering indecisively.

“As a craftsman solely, or an adventurer too?” he asked Mae—though also sent a significant glance at Vivi.

Mae paused. “Oh.” She glanced at Jasper, who quirked an eyebrow, then at Vivi. “Is that…an option?”

Rafael said, “Lady Vivisari did mention opening up the ranks.”

Prior to now, only the Party of Heroes had been adventuring members of Vanguard. But Vivi’s logic hadn’t changed, and who better to be the first new member of Vanguard than a former craftsman turned adventurer?

“If that’s what you want, you’re fully welcome,” Vivi said.

After confirming with Mae, who seemed a bit shocked at the development, Rafael finished filling out the form, then handed the clipboard to her. After a short hesitation, she signed it. The process repeated for Vivi, who also hesitated, though for a different reason. She’d never signed something as Vivisari. Nonsensically, she wondered whether the anti-forgery enchantment would flare up. Would her handwriting validate as the Sorceress’s?

Whatever the case was, the system recognized her signature as valid, because the quest lying on Rafael’s desk ignited in golden fire. Heat and brilliant light filled the room, and when the paper had reduced to nothingness, it left neither ashes nor scorch marks behind.

“I take it that means the quest is complete,” Rafael commented with a raised eyebrow. He flipped through pages on the guild charter. “Vanguard is, indeed, a tier-one guild now. The craftsmen quarters should be accessible, and the vault—or a portion of it?—as well.”

“My lab,” Mae gasped. “My lab is back?”

She rushed out the door before anyone could get a word in, and Jasper groaned and strode out after her. “An alchemy lab versus a level-two-thousand unbound artifact from a dead Cataclysm, and she goes for the lab. Alchemists.”

Vivi and Rafael followed. She found the craftsmen quarters through a hallway connected to the common room. Walking in, she was met with a familiar sight: a sterile laboratory filled with shining metal tools, devices, and equipment, of which Vivi would struggle to conjure a quarter of the names for.

Amusedly watching the golden-haired elf slip here and there, fawning over glassware and gasping at every drawer of alchemical reagents preserved over the century, Vivi found her thoughts drifting to the crafting situation.

In Seven Cataclysms, craftsmen helped automate processes and boost the final result. Crafting had been heavily gamified, because while complex crafting systems might appeal to some people, most regulars of an action-VRMMO wanted to tap through a screen, spend their resources, and get back to the real game. Certainly, most didn’t want to go through the rigmarole involved with a crafting system that even approached realism.

Like many aspects of this world, that gamified structure had translated into something better suited to real life. Crafting wasn’t as simple as clicking through screens and watching materials in her inventory disappear. Mastery in alchemy, or blacksmithing, or any other skill, required years or decades of apprenticeship and study.

The system had changed more fundamentally, too. Or so she surmised; this was just what she had put together using common sense, poking through the crafting screen, seeing her ranks, and cataloging what skills she had access to.

Each crafting discipline had two sub-ranks: ‘main’ and ‘collaborative,’ going from zero to ninety-nine. A real alchemist like Mae had ranks in the main discipline. Adventurers typically ranked up collaborative crafting, mostly through supplying reagents or acting as an assistant to various tasks.

Vivi was low-rank in almost all of the main crafting skills. Only enchanting had kept its maximum level of ninety-nine. The rest had been pushed down into the single digits, because Vivisari clearly hadn’t done much solo crafting throughout her years.

That said, every skill had collaborative ranks in the nineties, no doubt from the sheer amount of resources and joint-crafting she’d done with some of the best crafters in the world. She suspected a clean sweep of 90s was still utterly ludicrous, even if a collaborative rank meant she couldn’t work solo.

She still had a lot to learn about the exact details of the system. Even the obvious parts she might have intuited incorrectly. With Mae’s return, she would be able to confirm her theories soon.

Mae’s enthusiasm for her long-lost lab eventually ebbed enough for her to realize that three people were watching her joyfully scurry around. She froze, her cheeks colored, and she hurried over.

“S-so. We should probably go check the vault first. I can mess with my equipment later.”

Jasper paused, a smirk alighting on his lips, and he opened his mouth to say something. Mae’s hand shot to the potion bandolier on her hip. She gave him a look that promised in no uncertain terms a fate worse than death. His mouth reluctantly shut.

Vivi realized, after a moment, that an innuendo about ‘messing with her equipment’ had most definitely been inbound. She briefly considered setting him on fire, but instead shook her head and walked out of the lab.

Through the common room and down into the cellar, she studied the vault door. A regular tier zero guild—as Vanguard had reverted to—shouldn’t have had a vault at all. When she’d tried to access it yesterday, the door handle had refused to budge.

This time, the door swung open. Revealing the vault storing all the treasures pilfered by the strongest adventuring party in history.

A large blocky room met her, well-lit with bright silver walls. Shelves, boxes, cabinets, stands, and a dozen other containers packed the spacious interior. There was almost too much to pay attention to; the clutter overwhelmed her, her eyes flicking all around trying to identify each marvelous object on display.

A theme she identified, rather quickly, to her interest and mild disappointment, was that there were no artifacts or gear. Nor consumables. Midnight black pelts hung draped over poles; a massive golden scale leaned against a wall; jars of blue-and-green fluid shimmered on a shelf. But they were all crafting materials, and only those. The first-tier restoration quest had returned Vanguard’s vault, but not everything inside, as she’d first assumed. Merely a category of those treasures.

A door on the opposite wall told her that future quests—the future stages of Vanguard’s restoration—would likely reward them with deeper access into the vault. To the truly valuable items.

Not that what she saw now wasn’t valuable. Undoubtedly, the contents of this room rivaled the net worth of a small kingdom. There were materials here, Vivi figured, that were quite literally priceless. With no others of their kind to be found in the world. At least among mortals, only the Party of Heroes had been capable of, in quantity, harvesting dragon scales, jarring phoenix ashes, or plucking out kraken teeth.

There was one exception to the crafting materials, and it lay atop a pedestal situated ahead of the door leading deeper into the vault.

“The quest reward,” she intuited, immediately heading for it. “I recognize that book,” she muttered. “The Umbral Regent wore it on his belt. Not his main spell tome though…I never saw him cast with it.”

She [Inspected] the item as she neared.

***

The Codex of the Hollowed Sun

Legendary

Lv. 2000 (Lv. 0)

Description

Consume it all, for come what may.

***

Her stride faltered.

That was…a more dramatic description than usual, even for high-level items.

Reaching the pedestal, she hesitated before touching the book.

“[Detect Curse].”

“[Analyze].”

“[True Sight].”

“[Soul Sight].”

She went through a few more, suspicious, but found nothing. Satisfied, she lifted the tome off the pedestal. It was shockingly heavy, as if carved from a block of lead. The cover was smooth and cold, polished black stone. Inlaid into the center was a circle of dull silver, with thin, sharp lines flaring out like sun rays.

“That’s a hell of a name,” Jasper said, even his joking demeanor faltering at the legendary artifact. He eyed the book. “And ominous. Sure it’s safe?”

“I sensed nothing,” Vivi said idly, tracing the silver marks with a finger. “And it would be strange if a quest reward was cursed.” Still, it was a relic repurposed from a Cataclysm, so she’d been cautious.

She flipped open the cover. Inside were dark gray pages. All blank, she discovered after flipping to the end.

“Consume it all, for come what may?” Rafael quoted. “That’s not descriptive. What function does the item serve?”

“It absorbs energy,” Vivi said. She could feel that it was true. “It’s a mage’s accessory.” As natural, having come from the Umbral Regent, the most powerful lich the world had ever seen. The weakest of the Cataclysms, once human like the Shattered Oracle, but also the freshest-born, a mere few centuries old. The Umbral Regent had been the first Cataclysm slain by the Party of Heroes.

“Absorbs energy?” Rafael asked. “How so?”

“It’s hungry. It wants to be fed,” Vivi murmured. She could feel the pages tugging at that energy core inside her torso. On every power source around them. The Codex was starving.

“We’re sure we’re not about to birth an eighth Cataclysm, right?” Jasper joked, though it didn’t sound entirely like a joke. He was shooting nervous glances at Mae and Rafael.

Vivi opened her gates and poured mana into the first page of the Codex. It drank. More and more, oceans of mana, even her pool draining considerably. A symbol brightened on the page, Galdrust, the rune associated with the concept of reservoir/storage/container.

The Codex could store an obscene amount of mana in each page, but not more than Vivi could supply. The flow slowed to a trickle, then cut off, the book—or rather, the first page of the Codex—having glutted itself.

“Fascinating,” Vivi murmured. “There’s at least fifty more pages.” Even she couldn’t fill the whole thing. It would take weeks of constant feeding.

She pulled on the glowing symbol, and mana flowed into her, filling her core. There was a conversion loss, but only about fifty percent.

“Useful,” she said. “Very useful.”

That was putting it lightly. There were no ways to store mana for later so far as she knew. The closest would be feeding a ritual circle, but that didn’t really count. This book was a portable secondary mana pool, and a gigantic one. She would still be gated by other factors—a bigger mana pool was only one aspect of a mage’s strength—but it was outrageously convenient.

“Can the mana be shared?” she murmured to herself, barely paying attention to Rafael, Mae, and Jasper. “No, I don’t think so. Each page is locked to the mage who fed it. Or…not locked, but there would be greater loss? Enormous loss, but still functional?” It was difficult to say, since these interpretations were based on broad observations she made from the flow of mana. She would need to experiment.

After ruminating for a moment longer, she jolted back to awareness. Rafael, Jasper, and Mae were looking at her with a mixture of emotions Vivi couldn’t identify.

She cleared her throat and closed the Codex. “It’s a secondary mana pool,” she explained. “A very large one. I’ve never heard of something like it.”

“Indeed,” Rafael said slowly. “You identified nothing…concerning?”

“It’s not cursed, as I said. Aesthetically, it looks like the codex I remember the Umbral Regent wearing on his belt, but I doubt it’s the same. The quest appropriated the design, or materials, or something of that sort.”

“Interesting,” Rafael said, still reserved. He didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Not what I was expecting for a level two thousand item with the requirements lifted. A second mana pool sounds useful, even for you, my lady, but is it something to turn any mage into a Titled, as we first assumed?”

“I think I can store my mana, and another could use it. Though with significant loss. Ninety-nine parts in a hundred?”

He quietly considered the implication in those words. “I imagine,” he said, “that even greatly reduced, borrowing the power of the Sorceress would be a fearsome ability indeed.”

Vivi hummed in agreement. A fraction of a level 2100’s power was still…quite a lot higher than what most Titled could bring to bear. There was enough mana in that first page to erase a city—if used by her, at least. More like a small village, if someone like Saffra could, indeed, draw from the reservoir and channel it herself.

“More importantly,” Vivi said, “it’s a functional item for even me. I wasn’t expecting that.”

That concerned her. Because it reminded her of something Rafael had said earlier. There was no proof of an Eighth Cataclysm’s imminent arrival, but a way to store mana over time and draw on it later would be a major boon for her, should anything come that genuinely challenged her.

With that in mind…this Codex might be another piece of evidence. Why would the System be helping them if there wasn’t, somewhere on the horizon, a threat that imperiled the world?