An artifact that allowed the sharing of mana. Saffra hadn’t known such a thing existed. Could exist. A person shouldn’t be able to share mana. Rituals and enchantments came close, she supposed, since those allowed for collaboratively fueling some grand working, but they weren’t the same as spellcasting, even if the different disciplines used the same language of the arcane.

Lady Vivi held the codex out, and Saffra hesitantly accepted.

She nearly toppled over as it dropped into her grip.

Vivi lurched to help, but Saffra recovered, straightening out with a firmer hold on the codex.

“It’s heavy! You made it look light!”

“I didn’t—” Vivi paused. “I didn’t realize. I suppose I should’ve.”

At Lady Vivi’s level, even a mage would be ridiculously strong. The reminder caught Saffra off guard for some reason. Despite the magical might her mentor displayed so often, Saffra hadn’t internalized that Lady Vivi, despite her small frame, possessed an enormous amount of physical might, too. Though they could meet each other’s gaze without either of them craning their necks, and she was arguably slimmer than Saffra, Lady Vivi very likely could pulverize stones into dust with her bare hands. And that was without enhancement magics.

Lugging the book up—the thing had to weigh thirty pounds or more—she paused one more time to eye the cover. Something about it set her on edge. The simple, minimalist design radiated an ominous aura. The black cover, despite its glossy smoothness, didn’t seem like metal or obsidian, though she had no clue what it could be instead. She swore the book had a…a presence. Like it was alive.

Some deep, instinctual part of her told her that it was hungry.

She itched to know what an [Inspection] would say. Undoubtedly, for Lady Vivi to have taken a special interest in the item, it was the sort of relic found in the deepest alcoves of the High King’s vault.

…Or the Dragon King’s vault.

“You want me to use it?” Saffra asked.

“You should be able to. I found the process simple, and there isn’t a level requirement.”

Saffra flipped open the cover to the first page. Her brow furrowed, and it took a second to recognize the symbol glowing inside: Galdrust. Reservoir. That confirmed what Lady Vivi said about the book’s purpose, not that Saffra had doubted her.

Focusing on the rune, she opened her magical senses, wondering whether this really would be intuitive. Items were often easy to activate, but something ‘intuitive’ to Lady Vivi might be impossible for any mortal caster.

The moment she focused on the page, she felt something—or maybe she’d felt it the whole time, and only now noticed. A tug. A pulling in her gut. An offer to link, to open herself to the book and accept its bounty, or to offer her own mana in supplication. With reluctance, and even more fascination, she hesitantly accepted.

An ocean.

She stood at the bottom of an ocean. All other senses fled her as she became aware of a great, titanic pressure. Mana, enough of it to drown the world, a continent-sized mass of pure, unbridled energy. Churning all around her was the power to flatten a mountain, wither a forest, boil the sky. It pressed down on her. Into her. From all directions. She was a gnat lost in the deep currents of the abyss, leviathans swimming all around her.

The link broke, and Saffra found herself screaming, having dropped the book and backpedaled with such haste she’d tripped and fallen into the snow—and then kept pushing herself backward, scrambling on all fours. She stopped, abruptly, getting control of herself.

“What? What is it?” Lady Vivi had followed, even her stoic expression breaking into alarm. “I was certain it would be safe. What happened?”

Safe?

Saffra supposed that wasn’t…wrong?

She hadn’t been in danger. For all the pressure that ocean of mana had exerted on her, wanting to be grabbed and used, the sensation hadn’t hurt. Or even been threatening. Except in the way an ant standing underneath a suspended boulder might feel threatened.

“M-mana,” Saffra managed to stutter out. “That was—yours?”

How many years had it taken Lady Vivi to gather that much? Decades? Centuries? Saffra knew how strong of a mage Lady Vivi was, but she wasn’t that strong. That was…enough raw energy to crush the Colossus within her fist like some fragile bird. She understood that on a primal level.

Or…it felt like that. She knew she couldn’t trust her instincts, not for magic on that scale. But still. Surely even for a level 1900, that book held years or decades of mana. How could a single artifact contain it? How did the book not explode and erase the entirety of the Icevein Craters, and her insignificant existence with it?

“Are you hurt?” Lady Vivi asked, having crouched down next to her, deeply concerned.

Swallowing—and her cheeks heating up—Saffra climbed to her feet and dusted the snow off.

“I’m—I’m fine. Sorry. It caught me off guard.”

“You’re not hurt?” Vivi insisted.

“No. I wasn’t in danger, you were right about that.” A flashback to that ocean of primordial energy, and Saffra’s skin went cold. “Just…” She swallowed. “That was your mana?”

“It was.” She watched Saffra carefully. “I should have partially filled a different page. The quantity was too much, wasn’t it?”

Saffra tittered, slightly hysterical. “It was a lot.”

That was one page? She had thought she’d been looking at the entire book’s contents. The codex could hold more power than that? What in the world was that monstrous relic?

Vivi pointed her staff at the book, plucked it from the snow, and levitated it over. “I can find someone else to do this. I shouldn’t have asked you.”

“No!” Saffra blurted out. “It’s fine.” The mortification settled in. Had she actually screamed? That was so dramatic. “It just caught me by surprise. Sorry for dropping it.”

Lady Vivi studied her evenly, and Saffra could tell she hadn’t convinced her.

She insisted, “Please. I want to. I wasn’t ready, but I am now.”

And she meant it: she did want to. Not just because she needed to pay Lady Vivi back in whatever tiny ways she could, but because getting to use an extremely rare artifact to channel someone else’s mana? Lady Vivi’s mana, and that quantity of it, or even a fraction? She wanted to experience that for her own sake.

The earnestness of her voice, at least, seemed to sway Lady Vivi, though only after a long hesitation. She flipped the book open and turned to the second page. Saffra dimly perceived an immense flood of mana moving from her mentor into the page, though, with how expertly controlled it was, she couldn’t get a grasp on how much.

“There. I should have done that from the start. I didn’t realize it would overwhelm you.”

No, Lady Vivi didn’t always think things through; Saffra had picked up on that a while ago. Like a whale swimming through the deep, Lady Vivi had only a vague awareness of the vast currents each of her movements resulted in. The sheer insignificance and frailty of everything around her. Saffra wondered if she herself could keep aware of such a thing if she were in Lady Vivi’s shoes.

Saffra properly braced herself for the second time she linked to the book, this time to the weaker page. With the first experience as her standard, the enormous quantity of mana that consumed her awareness was, certainly, lesser than before, but that was like comparing the Maw of the Abyss to a regular Kraken. Lady Vivi must have dumped her entire mana pool into the page. Surely.

Saffra struggled to come to terms with the fact she probably hadn’t. That even this was only a portion, and perhaps not a majority, of the mana that the immortal carried around with her at any given moment.

As much as one half of Saffra’s instincts had always told her that Lady Vivi was harmless, there was another part of her that was terrified of this eldritch creature.

“I can feel it,” Saffra said, not letting the veritable lake of mana overwhelm her. At least it wasn’t an ocean this time. “You want me to try casting?”

“Something simple. I’ll intervene if you find it unwieldy. Start small.”

Start small. That was easier said than done, having all the power in the world at her fingertips. In some sense, being a mage meant spending one’s whole life starving—never quite having the mana desired for a magical working—and here was the largest buffet she’d ever seen. A banquet for a king.

“Does it matter what?” Saffra asked distractedly, eyes going unfocused as her imagination ran wild.

“I just want to see that you can use the mana, and how it behaves. So any spell is fine. [Scorchlance], I suppose.”

Taking a breath, she did as she’d been asked. She pulled on the endless, swirling mass of mana. No resistance met her—the energy threw itself at her. A whole river of it, blasting into her face at full speed the moment she turned the metaphorical valve.

And strangely, the experience didn’t disorient her, nor was the mana difficult to control. She’d never in her life worked with even a fraction of this power, but she seized the energy and shaped it as if it were any other spell. Like she was drawing from her own core. The glowing pattern of [Scorchlance] formed in the air with runes so dense they scalded her eyes to look at.

Fascinated, she accidentally ignored Lady Vivi’s instructions to ‘start small.’ She claimed the entire lake of energy and shoved it into [Scorchlance]. And, only as the circle’s formation completed, did she realize that she’d created a Titled-rank spell and had no idea what to do with it.

In a panic, she looked around for a target. In retrospect, she could have shot it off into the sky, but her eyes locked onto a [Star-Ice Sentinel] barely in range, the orichalcum-rank elemental asleep at the bottom of a shallow crater.

It seemed blasphemous to waste a spell of such magnitude. Why not make practical use of it? Pointing [Scorchlance] at the unsuspecting monster and aiming carefully, she incanted the spell’s name.

“[Scorchlance].”

Her previous spells seemed like bare flickers of a candle in comparison. From hundreds of paces away, a spear of fire vaporized the [Star-Ice Sentinel] before it could so much as stir to awareness. Charged with so much mana, Saffra couldn’t even properly process what happened. The spell formed, launched, and detonated on the timeline of a Titled-rank spell—meaning she could only react to the resulting explosion.

Which was certainly impressive. Her ears rang. Her teeth rattled. A fireball engulfed the crater and washed the world orange.

Only after a long minute of—with great awe—watching the flames dwindle did she jolt in realization.

“W-wait. You said start small. I think I used it all.” She shot a distraught look at her mentor.

Lady Vivi only seemed amused. “I don’t blame you for getting carried away. Did you get experience for it?”

Saffra paused.

Experience?

She had just killed an orichalcum-rank monster in a single attack.

Except no. Not really. Because she would’ve leveled. The Grand System clearly didn’t acknowledge that as her feat—as it shouldn’t. It was Vivi’s mana she had used, even if Saffra had been the one to form and incant the spell.

“I didn’t.” Because she would’ve leveled at least a few times. “It works like the phoenix feather, I guess.”

“Hm. I expected as much. I do wonder if it would work differently if it were your stored mana.”

“That’s…a good question.” Saffra had no idea, nor the foundational knowledge to guess.

Vivi mused over the possibility before giving a small shrug. “What was it like?”

“Easy.” She couldn’t believe how much so. “The mana just flowed out. A river of it. I barely had to pull. And it wasn’t hard to control, not any more than my own mana—just a thousand times stronger.”

“Interesting. Hm. Want to try again? A stronger spell, this time?”

Saffra blinked.

“There’s a much larger reservoir, if you’re interested.” Her lips quirked the smallest amount, and red eyes drifted off to the distance. To the largest, deepest of the craters, where a massive Titled-rank monster lay sleeping. “And a worthy target.”

Saffra’s brain briefly shut down at the implication.

“You want me to fight a Titled-rank monster?”

“It’s probably best someone kills it before it grows too large,” her mentor said. “And the Star-Ice inside that meteor is probably worth harvesting, if just because we have the opportunity. So yes. If you want to. I’ll be here to fix anything if it goes wrong.”

Saffra’s mouth worked soundlessly. Lady Vivi was serious. But why wouldn’t she be? With the sheer mana she had felt inside that first page of the codex, even Saffra might be able to one-shot a level eleven hundred monster.

Saffra gripped her head with both hands, since a headache had abruptly slammed into her. “Why do you keep doing this to me?” she groaned. “A silver-rank adventurer can’t kill a Titled. It’s not possible.”

“It’s entirely up to you,” Lady Vivi said, seeming to rein in her—muted, but still present—excitement. She wanted to see Saffra blow up a monster seven hundred levels her superior. “I figured you might be interested. You obviously enjoyed the previous spell.”

She totally had. Forming that first [Scorchlance] had been incredible. And making one a hundred times stronger? The idea terrified her—but also excited. Like the thrill that came from standing atop a cliff, intending to jump, looking down at the dark waters below.

Plus, having power at her fingertips, even if it wasn’t her own, reminded her of her goal. Why she worked so hard every day to climb the hierarchy. So that eventually she would have her own power—if never at this scale.

“I’ll do it,” Saffra said.

“You probably don’t need to use the entire page. So try to limit yourself.”

Saffra accepted an offered hand, and Lady Vivi [Blinked] them within range of the [Star-Core Bloom], right on the edge of its enormous crater. The monster, all those crystalline growths, and its huge orbiting blades were even more intimidating up close. The Ghulfeather had technically been stronger, and by a hundred levels. But it had seemed so much less intimidating—and had certainly been many times smaller. A reminder that a creature’s appearance hardly indicated its strength.

For example: the small, passive-looking demon standing next to her, who might not even need to lift her staff to kill an insignificant low-Titled monster. Saffra shivered at the thought.

With equal parts giddiness and horror for what she was about to do, she held the heavy tome in the crook of her elbow and aimed her staff. Once more, she linked herself to the first page of the codex and was swallowed by an ocean of mana. She tolerated the experience better the second time—which was to say, she didn’t scream and drop the book. It did take several deep breaths to come to terms with her cosmic insignificance again.

Then she began to cast.

She could get addicted to this feeling: holding the absolute power of life and death in her hands. There was no way to put it into words, really, drinking in an entire ocean of energy and cramming it into a tier-four spell. The wellspring felt endless. Like she could pull and pull and never run out, despite drawing a city’s worth of mana with every greedy gulp.

“[Scorchlance].”

A truly cataclysmic ray of energy burst forward, and a prismatic barrier flared around her and Lady Vivi to protect them from the fallout. The world burned white. When Saffra could finally see again, blinking spots out of her eyes, she was met with the aftermath of what had supposedly been a tier-four spell. But more realistically, was no less than a hundred thousand of them layered on top of each other.

The [Star-Core Bloom] was…gone.

So was the meteor. So was the crater. Well, okay, not really. But the crater had gotten noticeably deeper. It had transformed into the mouth of a volcano. Molten rock and slag had replaced the smooth, icy walls, smoke billowing to the sky in town-sized clouds. That simple spell had changed the geography of the zone in a very significant manner.

Saffra gaped. She had done that. Not really…but sort of. She had been the one to cast the spell.

She had absolutely no idea how to feel about this.

“I said don’t use the entire page,” Lady Vivi said wryly. “I guess we won’t be collecting Star-Ice.” She looked down at the utter ruination Saffra had wrought, then nodded approvingly. “Well done. That was even better than I expected.”