Chapter 47: Upgrade

Chapter 47: Upgrade

Ressara's gaze roamed over the six people who were checking in at the bar. If not for their attention-diverting wards, she might have thought they were a somewhat larger than average but otherwise normal adventuring party. They all had armor and various sheathed weapons that looked well used, and four of them bore large and well packed backpacks with buckles designed for easy and quick release on their straps, so they could remove the encumbrance almost instantly if ambushed. Exactly the sort of thing experienced adventurers preferred for bringing their belongings with them while traveling.

The wards weren't trying to push her attention away from the people themselves, of course. That would have interfered with booking their rooms; it's difficult to book a room with an innkeeper who doesn't notice you're there, after all. It would also have risked getting them in a great deal of trouble. Such wards aren't infallible or undefeatable - case in point: Ressara herself - and if the city guard caught someone trying to go that thoroughly unnoticed they would naturally suspect criminal intent.

No, those wards were pushing attention away from the group's level of soul development and, curiously, from certain pieces of their equipment. She could tell their level was impressively high, unlike with Carlos and Amber's guards who had an additional layer of soul disguise that covered up and concealed their real souls, though not quite as high as Haftel's. It was hard to pin down numbers for it with that large a gulf separating their levels from hers, but that gulf was definitely a little wider with Haftel.

Aside from their levels, Ressara's attention was also pulled - contrary to the wards' intent because of her soul structure inverting the effect on her - to a few of their weapons, but what really intrigued her was that she was catching hints of a few more things hidden away in their packs. Had they found a hidden and warded treasure of some kind, and taken it with the ward intact? Oh, she would love to examine and document such a find!

She was on her feet and had taken several steps before she even realized she was approaching them. She hesitated for a moment, wondering why she was acting so bold, but then she remembered Carlos giving her such gentle encouragement when she'd finally gathered her nerves to actually talk with him. Yes, the cautious and circumspect approach had only gotten her caught spying, scolded, and rebuffed. The direct approach had proven better, and she could learn from that experience. Then again, these people weren't Carlos.

Ressara reached the group and stopped a few feet behind the nearest one's back, and gulped quietly. This close, she could smell how badly they needed baths. They were speckled with dirt and dust, and a few spots on their clothes were damp with sweat. One of them was giving her sidelong glances from a few paces to her right, but they hadn't otherwise reacted to her approach. "Uh, sir? Excuse me."

The heavy backpack in front of Ressara swung away as its wearer turned to face her, revealing him as a tall and muscular heavyset man with thick eyebrows and darkly tanned skin. He was covered from neck to feet in heavy chainmail, held his helm in his left hand, and scowled down at Ressara. He stared at her for a moment, and openly swept his gaze down to her feet and back up, pausing momentarily on her sizeable chest. She flushed and shrunk back a little when she noticed that, but stood her ground.

The man glared at Ressara, and spoke gruffly. "What?" Two more people in the group turned their heads to watch.

Ressara nodded back politely and gathered her courage. "You seem like capable adventurers, with well loaded packs. Did you, by any chance, find and recover some treasure recently? I'm a scholar, and I might be able to help identify and assess such things for you."

The man stared blankly for a moment, then let out a sharp breath and shook his head. "Ha. No. Stop bothering us." He turned his back to her before she could respond, his full backpack swinging back to in front of her face.

A few seconds later, the innkeeper handed one of them a key, and the whole group trudged off to the stairs. Ressara watched them go, and sighed when they were finally out of sight. At least nothing bad had happened. She shook her head and walked back to her corner table to resume waiting for Carlos and Amber.

Carlos idly stretched as he paced back and forth, impatiently waiting for the mana that kept pouring in to build up to his next level. A few days ago, stretching and pacing like that would have strained his ability to multitask and focus on keeping the absorption going, but now it was easy. He couldn't do it automatically yet, but he was getting close.

Lorvan smiled. "It will be largely self explanatory when the time comes, and there is no danger involved. I see no need to explain before you reach it."

Carlos joined Amber in glaring at him for a moment, but then laughed quietly and shook his head. He suspected Lorvan was hiding a smirk, and if it really was harmless and inevitable that they'd find out on their own in due time, he supposed he should let the guardsman get some amusement out of it.

Carlos settled down and exchanged a look with Amber. He nodded to her and nudged his spell with a bit of mana, knowing that she would sense it. She nodded back and mumbled quietly, casting her spell for Carlos to examine, and he focused most of his attention on it. He identified most of its structure easily, leaving just the one piece that determined the overall spell's effect. It had a connection to Amber, like the Compass spell he'd tried to learn this way from her before, but this one wasn't sending signals to her. There was a sense of information flowing through that connection, but in the other direction, from Amber to the spell. Information... about Amber? That connection wasn't carrying her intent or choices, he was sure of that. It could be input for calculating a parameter, possibly.

He turned his attention to the effect output part of the spell, trying to figure out what it was doing. It was using very little mana at the moment, but he had a feeling that it had to do with heat or temperature in some way. Actually, there was a distinct hint of cold about it, not heat. Or opposing heat, maybe? Then it all clicked in his mind, and he laughed. It was the opposite of his warmth spell, cooling her down if she got hot, rather than warming her up if she got cold.

Well, that made the concept laughably easy to get correct for that keyword, but he had no idea what the spoken word to trigger it was supposed to be. For every keyword he'd learned before, he'd started with knowing the exact spoken word, and had to fiddle with the concept to get the resonance just right before the mana would settle into shape properly. This time it was the opposite.

He felt the resonance of a nearly-but-not-quite correct new keyword immediately, with a strange gap for the completely absent verbalization. He considered experimenting with various syllables and using any changes in the resonance to guide his search, but that seemed unsuitable for his real goal of finalizing synergy links by learning it via his mana sensor. He imagined a connection between the spell incantation fragment he was making and the end product the fragment would produce every time he used it, and tried to link the sensed form of the end product to the resonance of the incomplete fragment to guide the formation of the missing part. He thought he felt some faint hints of sound.

After straining to decipher those faint whispers for a minute, Carlos settled down to wait. He was closer than in any of his previous attempts at this, and the advancement to level nine in... nine minutes and thirty seven seconds just might be enough. The timer ticked down to zero at last, and things changed. His mana sense became sharper. His intuition about how to interpret and use what he could sense became clearer. He stopped holding part of his attention on absorbing mana, focusing completely on the problem at hand.

For a few moments, nothing happened. Then something clicked in his mind, and the spell fragment's resonance peaked. Suddenly, he knew exactly what the correct word to speak for this was, and things changed inside his soul.

Spells or fragments learned:

"cool" keywordmildness spell

Synergy links activated:

mana sensor and spells databasemana sensor and spells linker

Active synergy links: 45 / 45

Overall mana absorption and development efficiency increased from 96% to 100%.

Alert: Synergy unification has passed 50% and will complete in 6 more levels.