Tim's POV
Winter arrived the way it always did in E-Rantel, gradually, the city was covered in a thin layer of snow. Shutters stayed closed longer into the morning.
The street vendors consolidated their stalls. The adventurers' guild, normally loud with the transactional energy of people drinking and fighting, settled into a quieter register, the request board thinning as monster activity in the surrounding wilderness slowed and the roads became less hospitable to travel.
For most people, winter was a time to endure.
As for me, this was my opportunity.
I had been thinking about magical education for months, turning the problem over with the patience I'd developed for long-term planning. Magic in this world was real, systematic, and learnable, not the mysterious innate gift that fantasy stories usually made it, but a structured discipline with tiers and techniques that could be transmitted from teacher to student. The question was access. Formal magical academies existed in the Empire primarily, and were expensive and exclusive regardless of location.
Private tutors of meaningful calibre were rarer and more expensive still.
But a bored adventurer-mage in winter, with requests dried up and coin running low, was a different proposition entirely.
I composed the request carefully before bringing it to the guild counter, keeping the language simple and the terms specific. Two months of magical instruction, meeting at a designated location, three gold coins for the full engagement. I had checked the going rate for adventurer commissions and understood that three gold coins for two months of essentially indoor work during the slowest season of the year was an excellent offer. Not insultingly generous, that would raise questions, but clearly advantageous enough that a mage of modest means would find it difficult to decline.
The woman at the counter had read it twice, looked at me with the particular expression I was accustomed to, the recalibration that happened when adults realised a child was conducting serious business, and posted it without comment.
A day later, he knocked on the door of the room I had rented.
Lype was perhaps thirty, with the slightly threadbare appearance of an adventurer who had been competent enough to survive but not exceptional enough to thrive. His robes were good quality but old, and maintained very well. He had an honest face, which I appreciated.
He looked at me, a five years old, sitting at a table in a rented room with my hands folded, and his expression went through several adjustments before settling on carefully neutral.
"You posted the request?" he said.
"I did," I said. "Please sit down. I'd like to know what spells you can currently cast before we discuss the curriculum."
He sat, slowly. "You're very y-"
"Young, yes, i know" I said. "What spells do you know?"
He had two tier zero spells and one tier one. The tier zero spells were, he explained with the slight defensiveness of someone anticipating judgment, not combat oriented. One produced salt or sugar from base materials, a utility spell, the kind that paid modest but reliable dividends in civilian contexts.
The second was a danger level scan, which produced a physical magical readout of a target's combat capability.
I kept my expression neutral when he mentioned the scan. Inside, something sharpened considerably.
"Show me both," I said. "Starting with the salt."
He produced salt first, a small pile of white crystals appearing on the table from nothing, which was genuinely remarkable even knowing intellectually that magic existed. Then he turned his palm toward me, murmured something under his breath, and a piece of paper shimmered into existence between his fingers.
He looked at it.
The change in his face was immediate and unguarded. His eyes went from the casual assessment of a man confirming a routine reading to something closer to shock, the expression of someone whose instrument has returned an impossible measurement and who is now questioning the instrument.
He looked at me.
Then back at the paper.
"Why," he said carefully, "are you so strong?"
I tilted my head. "What does it say?"
He turned the paper toward me. The notation system was one I hadn't seen written before, but the number was legible.
Fifteen.
I sat with that for a moment, running the arithmetic. I was level five. The paper said danger level fifteen. One level equalled three danger levels, a clean conversion rate, simple enough to work with going forward. I filed it carefully and permanently into the part of my mind reserved for confirmed facts about this world's mechanics.
Then I looked at Lype's expression and understood that fifteen meant something significant to him, so I asked.
He told me his own danger level was twelve, with the particular carefulness of someone disclosing personal information they'd normally keep private. A tier one mage. Somewhere in the level one to seven range, if my understanding of the tier system was correct. He was looking at me, a five year old child, who had shown up to a rented room to discuss magical education, and his worldview was visibly reorganising itself around a piece of information it hadn't been built to accommodate.
"Are you still willing to teach me?" I asked.
He was quiet for a moment. Then something in his expression resolved into a decision. "Yes," he said. "I think I'm more willing than before, actually."
I appreciated that answer more than I showed.
Two months of instruction followed, conducted in the rented room each morning with the steady rhythm of a genuine academic engagement. Lype turned out to be a careful and methodical teacher, better than his modest career suggested he should be. He explained the theory of tier zero magic with real depth, the way spells were structured, the mental frameworks required to interface with the world's magical substrate, the difference between understanding a spell academically and being able to execute it under the particular kind of focused intent that actual casting required.
I absorbed the theory completely and immediately. That part was easy, I had a forty-year-old's capacity for structured learning, and the magical theory mapped onto frameworks I could build quickly.
The execution was way harder.
Not because I lacked capability, Lype's scan had confirmed I had more raw power than he did. But raw power and refined control were different things, and magical control was essentially a physical skill, like handwriting or playing an instrument, requiring the development of specific mental-physical pathways that didn't exist until they were built through repetition.
I could feel the magic, genuinely and clearly, in a way that Lype said took some students months to achieve. Shaping it into specific spell forms was the work.
By the end of the first month I had the salt-and-sugar spell. Unreliable at first, producing too much, or the wrong substance [sand, or nothing, then increasingly consistent, then reliable. By the end of the second month it was solid.
The danger level scan I also acquired, though it took longer. The output component, the magical paper construct, required a precision that the production spell didn't. But I got it.
The tier one fire spell defeated me entirely, which I had expected. Lype tried his best, explained it from every angle he could find, and I came close enough to understand precisely why I was failing, the mental architecture required was simply not something two months could build from scratch. Mages spent years developing the capacity for tier one magic. The fact that I could feel the threshold of it was, Lype told me on the last day with genuine respect in his voice, more than most non-mages ever achieved.
I paid him his three gold coins and gave him a mission complete rating, and he left with the slightly dazed quality of a man who had experienced something he'd be telling stories about for years to come.
The Church of the Water God occupied a modest but well-maintained building in the middle ward, its architecture the particular blend of functional and aspirational that characterised religious institutions operating below the top tier of wealth. I had been observing it for months, on my way to do other stuff, noting the patterns of who entered and left, the times of services, the relative accessibility of the clergy for lay visitors.
I went on a Tuesday afternoon, which I had identified as the quietest period of their week.
The interior was cool and smelled of candle wax and something herbal. A priest materialised from a side door with the prompt efficiency of someone trained to respond to visitors, a man of middle age with a kind face and the grounded patience of genuine faith rather than performed religiosity.
I explained, simply, that I was interested in learning about the Water God's teachings and had heard that the church sometimes instructed willing students in basic holy magic.
He looked at me with the same initial recalibration adults always performed, then smiled and said yes, they did, and would I like to try.
What followed was a short lesson, the theology first, the explanation of what holy magic was and where it came from, the role of faith and the divine principles the Water God represented. I listened carefully and respectfully, asking genuine questions, because I was genuinely uncertain whether I could cast holy magic at all.
My karma was not, as far as I could calculate, particularly high. I had killed a man. I had killed a great deal of vermin. I had been careful to act well where I could, but careful good behaviour was not the same as the deep spiritual alignment that holy magic supposedly required. The church would likely let me attempt the simplest tier zero light spell, and I expected to fail, and I was planning to treat the failure as useful data.
The priest guided me through the framework, the focusing of intent, the reaching toward something outside oneself, the particular quality of attention that holy magic required. He was calm and unhurried, clearly accustomed to students who needed many attempts.
I tried it.
The light came on the first attempt.
A small, pure, steady light, exactly as described, hovering above my palm without heat or flicker, exactly as it was supposed to behave. Clean and simple and completely real.
The silence that followed lasted perhaps three seconds.
Then one of the nuns nearby made a sound that was almost entirely suppressed, and the priest's careful professional composure developed a visible crack, and I looked at the light in my hand and thought, with genuine confusion:
'How did I do this?'
My karma shouldn't support this. By my own accounting I was not a good person in any spiritually significant sense, I was a pragmatic person making calculated decisions in a dangerous world. The vermin killing was neutral at best. The man in the alley was a net positive for the city but hardly a saint's work. The literacy fund was genuinely good but modest.
I didn't have an answer.
"Maybe i am just talented"
What I didn't know, was what was being recorded in whatever cosmic ledger tracked such things. I had no way to see the physician's records showing reduced illness fatalities in the lower ward. I had no way to read Panasolei's grain reports. I had no way to count the children who had not died of stomach fever this winter because the rats that carried it had been systematically eliminated from their food supply over the course of a year by a small determined figure working in pre-dawn alleys.
Tim's stats ( he can't see his true stats)
level: [5]
Vermin killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10]