Chapter 524: Spirit Technology
I seriously don’t enjoy reading people’s minds—I’d just rather not, due to the kind of things I inevitably discover when I unintentionally go poking around—so I didn’t give Eric a deep mind-scrape.
I didn’t peel back the layers of his thoughts to see what was festering underneath, but maybe it’s because I didn’t want to know if he was planning to betray us.
Sometimes ignorance was not just bliss—it was necessary.
I can’t have this fun detour end suddenly!
However, from his very subtle expression and mannerism, I perceived Eric just really wanted Heka to register as an adventurer before me, than some treacherous plot.
Hahaha! He was just delaying the inevitable, if that’s the case.
When we reached the area of the hall—a section cordoned off by a low wooden railing that had seen better decades, its surface worn smooth by countless elbows and forearms leaning against it over the years—Heka was made to provide some of her information.
The two girls attending to us were young, probably no older than nineteen or twenty, with nervous smiles and ink-stained fingers that trembled slightly as they unrolled a fresh parchment across the counter.
But then came the question that changed everything.
“State your lineage or notable relations, if any,” one of the girls read from a scripted list, her voice monotone and somewhat bored… until Heka answered.
The fact that she was the daughter of THE queen of the Amazons was particularly frightening to the girls, who soon started addressing her very respectfully.
Their postures shifted instantly; their shoulders drawing back, chins tucking in, and their previously casual tones replaced by something stiff and formal.
The girl who’d been lazily chewing on the end of her quill nearly swallowed it when the words left Heka’s mouth.
“Uhm… y-your Highness,” one of them breathed, her voice barely above a whisper, “we had no idea—”
“Please, don’t,” Heka cut her off, holding up a palm in a gesture that was simultaneously commanding and gentle. “Don’t call me that. I’m not here as anyone’s daughter. I come here as myself.”
Heka probably wanted the opposite; I could see it in the way her jaw tightened, in the slight slump of her shoulders that she was trying so hard to hide.
But since she had vowed to stop glitching into masochist mode and punishing herself out of nowhere, she soon swallowed her discomfort and let the girls fawn over her without protest.
There was a written test given to her, just a single sheet of parchment covered in neatly printed questions, with spaces left blank for her answers.
It had twenty questions on safety protocols, warrior’s instincts, some basic knowledge an adventurer should have, and identification of unique beasts and monsters.
The questions ranged from simple—”What is the first thing to do upon entering an unknown dungeon?” (Answer: Check for immediate threats and establish a retreat path)—to more complex—”Identify this creature from its described tracks and droppings” (accompanied by a rough sketch that looked like it had been probably drawn by someone who’d never actually seen the creature in question).
Of all, surprisingly, Heka passed in flying colors!
She finished the test in under ten minutes, her quill scratching across the page with confidence, like she was someone who’d drilled all that since childhood.
She probably knew even more than the girls would, since she grew up in the heart of the most unsafe place on the continent.
The monsters there are very intelligent and powerful, at baseline, I mean.
Well, Heka’s people are one of the variables that make it unsafe, even for dangerous monsters, but it’s the knowledge that matters.
And Heka had that knowledge in spades.
Due to the display of strength outside on poor Octavius, coupled with the testimony that she slapped a Mature-dragon-level wyvern down to hell, she didn’t do a strength-and-endurance test.
The examiners simply waved their hands and marked those sections as “waived” on her form, muttering something about “sufficient evidence” and “no need to risk more damage.”
What was left before she got her shiny adventurer ID—a round and flat, tech-y plate wide enough to cover the palm, displaying a holographic, three-dimensional image above that shows information and acts like a game menu—was something called a spirit trial.
You see—while it doesn’t apply to most god-touched, all demi-gods, and even myself—people rely heavily on spirits for power.
I mean, while I mostly use my spells with me as the source of power—drawing directly from my own reserves—humans and many other races try to use spirits as a risk factor.
They form contracts, pacts, bonds with these ethereal entities, borrowing their strength in exchange for something—service, tribute, sometimes just the promise of companionship.
It’s actually smart, because they don’t get to suddenly run dry and perish in the middle of a spell.
When a human runs out of their own magical stamina, they can still draw on their spirit’s power to keep going, to push through exhaustion and pain and the creeping cold of death.
Though it’s not always the case that spirits are used like this—some spirits are demanding, cruel, or simply indifferent to the fate of their mortal partners, and many adventurers have met their ends because the spirits chose not to help at a critical moment.
Magic was the energy, and spells were the medium on how to use it.
But in the world of Elyndor, Sakura told me, utilizing spirits resemble what folks on earth would call advanced technology.
It’s woven into the fabric of daily life, from the simplest household tasks to the most complex magical engineering.
They’re used to light streets, to power defensive barriers, to communicate across vast distances, and to assess the worth of potential adventurers.
And in this case, they were going to use spirit to read and determine Heka’s worth as an individual.
She definitely is a novice adventurer, until she does a lot of quests and builds up her reputation through completed contracts and successful expeditions, so her identity will still display “novice” on that holographic panel.
That’s just the starting point, the baseline that everyone begins from regardless of their background or natural abilities.
But that’s just adventurer “rank”—the measure of how many quests you’ve completed, how reliable you are, how much trust the guild has placed in you over time.
What we are going to find out is adventure “class,” which is something different:
It is the measure of your raw potential, your inherent threat level, the category that determines what kind of contracts you’re even allowed to accept in the first place.
I read a scroll where it was all listed, and these are the classes as follow;
· Grass: the starting point of people who just entered the business of adventuring, and naturally have the power level of a regular person. This is Grass Class. Nothing to be ashamed of—everyone starts somewhere, every legend was once a beginner and every hero had their first day on the job…
Except you’re still a grass after 5 years of adventuring. At that point, it’s less about potential and more about stubborn refusal to improve.
· Flower: at this class, the individual is a real threat to monsters of this class and the lower class. That is, the adventurers apply this class system to monsters as well, creating a standardized scale that makes it easier to assign contracts and calculate risk. A flower-class monster will find it difficult to defeat a flower-class human.