Chapter 4
As Max lay on the straw bed, he felt at peace.
Max was just a normal guy a few days ago, struggling with everyday problems.
'This feels like a dream, really. I almost pissed myself there.'
He couldn't help but chuckle.
'I thought I was dead, ohh right l can't die, should get used to that probably, and honestly l was pretty scared back then and may have blurted things I shouldn't have, like that time I said rune-what from all the novels l read, l know something, and it also showed l didn't have knowledge on this world though l don't know if it's common knowledge and...'
Max continued his self-assessment, a habit he gained from having little social interaction and a tinge of high school loneliness and depression.
[+2 intelligence]
The system notification brought him out of his thoughts.
'Yo system, why did my intelligence increase?' Max asked, puzzled.
[Self-analysis]
This made Max even more puzzled.
'I thought intelligence is gained by l don't know, cultivating or reading books.'
[While yes, those are methods of gaining intelligence, there are others like self-analysis, which is a minor one and is hard to gain intelligence points from, but it gives something deeper]
'Like how?'
[Self-analysis gives wisdom, which is a branch of intelligence, because wisdom is gained from understanding oneself before understanding anything else, and it gives a better view of everything outside your biases, thus improving overall analysis]
'I understand what you mean.' Max said with a thoughtful look.
'Right, since everyone has biases, they tend to make decisions in line with them. Without self-evaluation, you really can't tell when and how they influence your thinking.'
'status'
[GUIDANCE SYSTEM]
[Name: Maxwell Blackwood]
[Race: Human]
[STR:5] (weak as hell, stop being delusional and train)
[AGI:6] (My grandma can do better, stop skipping leg day)
[INT:12] (at least you have something up there)
[DEF:4] (even a child can knock you out, get hit a bunch of times, and maybe you stand a chance against a teenager)
[ABILITIES: True Immortality (tier 1), Adaptability (tier 1), Limitless]
[True Immortality: you cannot die or age, you will regenerate from anything, albeit very slowly, depending on the level of injury, but you need a part of your body intact, even the soul, but it still needs to be whole]
[Adaptability: You adapt to any condition, but very slowly]
[Limitless: You have no limit in growth]
[Dimensional Travel: You are not bound to one world. With the help of a guide, you can travel between planes but at a cost.]
[Last Wish: You have one wish per world, but beware that once the wish is granted, the anchor to that world is lost. The wishes cannot be stacked.]
[Inventory: a spatial dimension where you can store non-living things. Its size increases with your power.]
As Max looked at the status window, he couldn't help but still be amazed; they really were something else.
'System, you know what l'll just call you Bob, it's shorter. Also, how do I increase the tier for immortality and adaptability?'
[Name change denied due to protocol preventing idiotic naming]
[As for your question, it's simple: just get beaten up, but don't die]
'So I become a masochist.' Max thought, completely ignoring the first comment.
[The small price to pay for salvation]
'Stop saying movie quotes, or I'm filing for copyright.'
'And what about dimensional travel?'
[For that, it will be available after some time since it requires a lot of energy to accumulate, so the cost is just the energy cost.]
'Either way, I'm supposed to be interrogated tomorrow by Ander, or was it Andreas, ahh, whatever, I was never good with names to begin with.' Max thought with a sigh as he covered himself with the clothing he was given, which acted like a blanket.
'I'll deal with it tomorrow.'
He closed his eyes.
It was quiet.
Then the horse on the other side of the wall shifted and snorted.
Max's eyes opened, and he just stared at the ceiling.
'...It's fine.'
The horse moved again. Slow heavy hooves on stone, one after the other, like it was doing it on purpose.
Max flinched, then calmed down.
'It's just a horse. It's behind a wall. It can't scare me.'
The horse snorted again. Loudly. Wetly. With full commitment.
Max made a sound into the blanket.
'What did I do to deserve this?'He thought, almost crying.
He lay there until his brain gave up and dragged him under into sleep out of pure exhaustion.
His last thought was that tomorrow he had to meet whatever-his-name-was.
He'd figure it out in the morning.
*****
The king's study was small by royal standards, which in this castle meant it was just small.
Two chairs by a fireplace with a crack running up its left side, a desk buried under papers and maps, a bookshelf that leaned slightly to the right and had been leaning slightly to the right long enough that it had become a feature rather than a problem. A jug of something on the small table between the chairs that wasn't wine because the king had stopped drinking wine three years ago after a particularly bad winter and had never fully explained why.
Aldren sat in the left chair with the stillness of a man who had made peace with his posture decades ago. He held a cup and looked at the fire.
The king sat in the right chair, legs stretched out, crown off, and sitting on the desk behind him, where he usually placed it. He looked older without it, or maybe just more accurately his age.
They had been sitting in silence for a few minutes, which was normal. They were old enough friends that silence had stopped needing to be filled sometime around twenty years ago.
"So," the king said finally.
"So," Aldren agreed.
The fire crackled. Outside the study window, the castle settled into its nighttime sounds: distant footsteps, a door somewhere, and wind moving through the courtyard.
"You looked at him for a long time in the throne room," the king said.
"I was looking for a signature." Aldren turned his cup slowly. "Any residual trace of the transit mechanism. Decay patterns, anchor echo, channel scarring." He paused. "There was nothing. Rowan, I have catalogued every known form of magical transit on this continent and several theoretical ones from texts most of the academic community considers fiction." He looked at the fire. "There was nothing."
The king looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man adding something to a list he didn't enjoy maintaining.
"Could he be suppressing it?" he asked.
"A person capable of suppressing a transit signature that completely would have to be operating at a level of rune-craft mastery we haven't seen in this kingdom in living memory." Aldren's mouth lifted slightly, resembling a smile. "He said rune-what when you asked him about it."
"He could be lying."
"Not like that." Aldren shook his head slightly. "That was genuine. The confusion, the recovery, and the way he answered the next question, too quickly to compensate. He knows something, but he doesn't know rune-craft, and whatever brought him here wasn't him."
The king was quiet for a moment.
"The ward," he said.
"Yes."
"Sixty years, Aldren."
"I know."
"My father had that ward set after the Duren incursion. It has held against three attempted breaches that I know of and probably more that I don't." The king's voice was steady, but there was a little crack when he mentioned his father. "And this boy just fell through it."
"Not through it," Aldren said. "That's what I keep coming back to. A breach leaves damage, distortion, or a scar in the rune structure. There's nothing. He didn't breach it." He paused. "He passed through it the way light passes through glass. As if the ward and whatever carried him here simply don't interact. Different principles entirely."
The king picked up his cup, looked into it, and set it back down.
"What does that mean practically?" he said.
"It means I don't know what he is," Aldren said. "Which I don't say often."
"No," the king agreed. "You don't."
The fire shifted, a log settling lower, throwing new shadows across the room. Aldren's coat draped over the arm of his chair, its runes drifting faintly in the firelight, the only thing in the room that seemed entirely unbothered.
"He's not a threat. Not currently. Whatever brought him here isn't something he controls. And if he's lying well enough to fool Cassandra, then he's too powerful for us to stop anyway, so we might as well find out what he is," Aldren said
There was a pause.
"He's also considerably more intelligent than he's presenting."
The king's mouth curved slightly. "I noticed."
Rowan had known Aldren for thirty-four years and knew what that particular quality of attention meant when it settled on something.
Aldren didn't deny it. "I want to watch how he learns," he said. "How a person learns tells you more about what they are than anything they say directly. Their instincts, their pattern recognition, where they struggle, where they don't." He looked at the king. "Give me two weeks."
"You just want a disciple, you old bastard."The king said, snorting slightly.
"What are you talking about? This is a matter of state affairs," Aldren said, looking serious and genuinely offended.
The king looked at him for a long moment.
They had known each other since they were seventeen, which was long enough that Rowan could read the difference between Aldren being academically curious and Aldren being concerned. This was both, in proportions Rowan didn't entirely like.
"Ha, whatever, "Rowan sighed, looking defeated.
"He's not to leave the grounds," Rowan said.
"Of course, of course."
Rowan just looked at him.
"Haa, why am I even bothered? Just make sure he doesn't cause trouble, you're already enough trouble, and I really don't want this to be a breeding ground for your kind," Rowan said with a sigh.
Adren audibly gasped
"How heartless your majesty, I who serve this kingdom with full devotion feel offended,"
Rowan's mouth twitched.
Aldren just stared at him.
"Aldren l have some paperwork here -"
"Ho ho, look at the time, it's getting a bit late, and I have to prepare for tomorrow's investigation. I cannot delay this for the glory of the kingdom, goodnight, your highness."
Before Rowan could reply, Aldren disappeared.
Rowan just looked at where Aldren had been standing and just shook his head, smiling slightly, and then started sorting out the papers on his desk.
The fire popped quietly. The only sound in the room was that of turning pages.
****
The next morning, Max woke up to grey light through the stable window, a neck with opinions about straw mattresses, and opened his door directly into a horse.
What happened next was a sequence of events that Max would later describe as a criminal ambush and that anyone watching would describe as a horse that had gotten loose, was walking past at the exact wrong moment, and didn't see him until it was too late.
The horse, startled, kicked.
Not hard. Probably not hard by horse standards. A warning kick, the kind that said watch yourself in horse language.
It connected with Max's stomach.
Max went down and instinctively reached out his hand to grab onto something. He caught a hairy rope and used it to support himself.
'Hm, why is this rope twitching? ' Max thought as he looked up.
The horse looked at him.
Out of sheer instinct, Max pushed himself down as a kick passed above him.
Max looked at the horse.
Big. Brown. Deeply unconcerned. It looked at him the way horses look at things and then walked away down the corridor like nothing had happened.
A stable boy, jogging after it, shot Max an apologetic grimace and kept moving.
Max sat in his doorway.
[...]
'Don't.' Max said.
[I wasn't going to say anything.]
'sure.'
[Come on l wasn't going to comment on how funny that was, or how your tongue came out of your mouth when that horse hit you, or the idiotic face you made afterward. I'm a good guy.]
Before he could comment, the stable boy popped his head around the corner.
"Oh, Mister, I was told to tell you to go to the kitchen. It's that way, and also sorry about the horse."He said in a hurry, pointing towards a building, and without waiting for a reply, ran off.
He stood there for another moment staring at the empty corridor, then walked in the direction of the kitchens with a slight limp and the expression of a man who had made peace with the fact that the universe had specific opinions about him.
The kitchen was warm and smelled like bread and woodsmoke.
Max appeared in the doorway and made eye contact with a broad woman who just looked at him and snorted.
She pointed at a bench without a word.
He sat, not commenting.
His aunt had been like that. His aunt had also once made him stand in a corner for twenty minutes for putting his elbows on the table, so he sat up straight on instinct and kept his hands where they could be seen.
Bread appeared. Dense, dark, functional. Then something hot in a bowl that smelled like it would keep him alive, which was the main requirement.
As he was trying to decide whether to eat or not, a small figure materialized at the counter nearby, round-faced with something on his chin, watching Max with the barely concealed fascination of a kid who had decided an interesting adult was more entertaining than whatever he was supposed to be doing.
"You're limping," the boy said.
Max looked at him. He had absolutely no memory of this child. "...Do I know you?"
The boy looked briefly offended. "I'm Pip. I saw you come through the courtyard yesterday. Everyone did." He paused. "Berta said you'd be crying by the time you got to the throne room."
"I wasn't crying," Max said with a grimace.
Pip glanced at Max. "Why were you limping?"
"Horse," he said.
Pip tilted his head slightly in confusion. "Hm, but they are all so friendly."
Max just looked at him as if he'd just heard the most ridiculous thing.
'What's so friendly about them? They are a menace who follow me even here.'
"Stop interrogating the boy, Pip," Berta shouted from the kitchen.
Pip's mouth closed as he visibly shuddered.
Max looked at his bowl and just ate. He was too hungry to comment or complain about the suspicious meat floating in the soup.
After his meal, Berta took him to the east tower and told him to climb up.
The east tower stairs got narrower going up. Max climbed past a window overlooking the courtyard and kept going until the stairs ended at a single door.
He stood in front of it and took a breath.
'Okay,' he thought. 'Interrogation. Questions. Just answer what you can and play dumb on the rest. You've been doing that naturally anyway, so it shouldn't be hard.'
He knocked.
"It's open."
Max opened the door and stopped.
The room was a lot.
Shelves on every wall, packed floor to ceiling, scroll cases, boxes with glowing runes, papers everywhere, glass containers with things inside he didn't want to look at too long. And the window — wide, overlooking the whole castle — covered edge to edge in runes drawn directly onto the glass so thick in places the light came through blue.
In the corner, something was slowly rotating. Nothing was touching it.
Max looked at it.
'Don't touch the glowing, rotating, floating ball, but will a touch hurt?' he told himself.
Aldren stood at the worktable with his back to the door. Short, grey coat covered in runes that moved faintly when he did. He was doing something with a small instrument that made a sound just below the edge of hearing.
"Close the door," he said, without turning. "And don't touch the rotating thing. It took eleven years."
Max closed the door. He found the stool at the near side of the worktable and sat down.
'Okay,' he thought, straightening slightly. 'Here we go.'
Aldren turned, looked at him once with those flat cataloguing eyes, then turned back to the table and placed a single sheet of paper in front of Max.
Twenty symbols. Four rows. Clean and exact.
Then a pen.
Max looked at the paper.
Then at Aldren.
Then, at the paper again.
'...Is this the interrogation? Am l suppose to write something?'
"The base rune alphabet," Aldren said. "Everything in rune-craft is built from these. They aren't magical on their own; they're a language. Power comes from arrangement, surface, material, intent, and energy source." He nodded at the pen. "Copy them."
'Right, the guy who is essentially a criminal is getting taught to use runes, which, if I'm not wrong, is the power system, really not suspicious. I should get ready for experimentation next.'
Max looked at the pen and the plain paper and sighed. He then picked up the pen and started writing.
He wasn't thinking about being careful. He was still mildly thrown by the complete absence of interrogation, his brain half loaded with prepared deflections that now had nowhere to go. His hand just moved, the shapes settling into place with the same ease as late nights copying kanji off a screen in his old life.
First row. Second. Third.
"You said yesterday," Aldren said, "that you didn't know what rune-craft was."
"Yeah," Max said, still writing.
"Your pen control suggests otherwise."
Max just looked at him weirdly.
'Pen control, really, I'm just writing, and I'm sure I don't have the best handwriting.'Max thought
"It's just copy and paste, or I'm l doing something wrong?"Max asked with a strained smile.
"No, nothing is wrong, go on."
Max just shook his head and continued writing.
Aldren looked at him silently.
Max finished the fourth row and then stretched.
'Man, my back hurts.'
He then pushed the paper across.
Aldren studied it. His face didn't change much, but something around his eyes shifted in a way Max couldn't read.
"Your second symbol in the third row," Aldren said. "Inner angle too shallow. It reads as a seal marker instead of a conductor. Everything else is functional." He set the paper down. "How long did that take you?"
'What do you mean, seal marker instead of a conductor? I don't even know what I wrote,' Max thought, but outwardly he just nodded.
"I don't know. A while?"
"Less than twenty minutes."
Max said nothing.
Aldren folded his hands on the table with the look of a man quietly moving something from one mental category to another.
"Where are you from?" he said.
"Far away."
"That's not an answer."
Max just looked away nervously.
Aldren was quiet. Outside the blue-tinted window, clouds moved above the castle walls.
"You bypassed the ward around this castle," Aldren said. Flat. Just a thing placed on the table between them. "It would stop any conventional magical transit. You passed through it as if it wasn't there."
"I didn't do it on purpose," Max said.
"I know," Aldren said.
He reached under the worktable and set a book in front of Max.
Foundational Rune Theory, Vol. 1. Principles of Form and Function.
"First three chapters before tomorrow," Aldren said, turning back to his worktable. "I'll know if you haven't."
Max picked up the book and stood and walked out the door.
'Right, even after school l can't escape assignments.'Max muttered under his breath as the door closed behind him.
Outside on the landing, he stood with the book under his arm.
'That went okay,' he thought.
Max looked at the book in his hands. Then he went back to his room, sat on the straw bed with his back firmly to the wall nearest the stables, opened to page one, and started reading.
The horse next door was quiet for once.
Max chose to take it as a good sign.
He kept reading.