He decided to start with the spellbook. The Master had said it was different from a scroll and he wanted to see what that actually looked like. The first thing Alan noticed was that it was written in the same symbols that he had seen on the scrolls, but this time there was no automatic translation as he tried to read it. The second thing that was different is that it seemed like each spell took up multiple pages in the book.

  It didn’t look like he was going to get much from it until he started translating. Next up was the primer on magic. This too was written in the language of symbols. To say he was disappointed was an understatement. The amount of time he would have to spend learning the symbols was daunting. Alan had learned a couple of foreign languages back in the army and he knew how much effort it took to become fluent in something. And those were with languages that shared an alphabet. However, if he could get to that stage it would be much better than simply using it for translation.

  Third up was the translation book. It was not like the bilingual dictionaries you would use in school. Those had two sections, one for translating language A into language B and another section for B to A. This book only went one way, symbols into English. He now knew that it wasn’t actually English, but decided to just call it that in his head. It would be easier that way.

  The last thing he looked at was the glyph book. This had a page for each of the hundred glyphs. There was a large drawing of it at the top of the page, an English description of the glyph, and then at the bottom a large paragraph written using the magical symbols. Alan was starting to realize just how much work this was going to be. A month no longer seemed like plenty of time, and the Master’s insistence that they focus on their studies made more sense.

  The sun was just setting, something he could tell because of a small window high up in his room. It was enough to let light in but he would be unable to see much out of it, even if he could get up there. Making a decision, he took out his whetstone. It wasn’t to sharpen his daggers, at least not yet, it was to use it as a nightlight.

  Over the many hours he had spent sharpening his blades he had invested a lot of mana into the stone. It now glowed enough to provide light to read by. He could have cast his light spell instead, but that requires some concentration to maintain. Alan was going to need all of his brain to study these books. The stone was also more likely to be overlooked by their magical overseer than a spell.

  He had lots of parchment in his ring on which he could write translations, but there wasn’t a pen for writing. Instead Alan elected to just go through the motions of translating. It would help him get used to the process again and hopefully let him start working tomorrow with a better idea of what they was dealing with. Having the symbols be one of the last things in his brain before bed would also help him start to comprehend them.

  For tonight he decided to translate some of the spell titles in the book. The first spell, he quickly learned, was fire bolt. Alan found that it was fairly simple to translate. Maybe something in his stats was making it easier to do. If he was a betting man his money would be on intelligence.

  That first title only took five minutes to get what seemed like a correct translation so he decided to try all of the spell titles. There were six in total, one for each of the glyphs they were shown earlier. There was the aforementioned fire bolt and also stone spear, light bolt, shadow bolt, conjure water, and gust.

  It was only after translating the last title that Alan realized he had a slight headache. It must have been more work than he thought while in the flow. The translation was not as simple as certain symbols being used in place of traditional English letters. That would have been childsplay to deal with. And it wasn’t symbols being used in place of words like in some eastern languages. That would have been more work, but eventually it would have been a simple matter to translate. The reality was far more complicated.

  The symbols used in this arcane language expressed magical concepts that the dictionary tried to explain in english. You then had to put those concepts together to understand the meaning. An example was light bolt. It wasn’t two symbols, one meaning light and another meaning bolt. Instead it was a series of eight symbols that expressed the concept of focused energy that shed visible light and could be directed with your mind at an object to disrupt its energy flows.

  That was not too bad to figure out using context clues since he already knew of the spell beforehand, and actually knew how to cast it. All of the other spells listed were not something he had much experience with, and for the spells conjure water and gust, he hadn’t even seen anyone else cast them. However, as he used the translation guide more, he was finding that it was getting a little easier to understand, at least a little bit, how the whole concept would come together for a name. While he thought he knew what the titles were, he wouldn’t know until he could check with the Master. Maybe tomorrow there would be an opportunity to see if he had translated them correctly.

  The headache and the thought of more translation tomorrow was enough to convince him that he should be done for now. Alan picked up his daggers from where he had left them on the bed and set about sharpening them. They had seen a lot of use fighting the kobolds today so it took a long time to hone them to his satisfaction.

  Not only his weapons had seen a lot of use. His classes had seen a lot of growth as well. So much that it took all of the time he spent sharpening to fix his aura. That even included the limited time he spent sharpening one of the kobold scimitars. While the blade was a little banged up and the hilt could use a new wrapping, the edge had already been incredibly sharp. Say what you want about those monsters, they knew how to keep their weapons keen.

  While he was working on fixing his pathways he also was inspecting them. After Tamee had let the strength pathway comment slip, Alan had also been trying to see if he could tell the difference between the pathways. So far they all seemed the same.

  He raided his ever dwindling fruit stash in his pouch as a treat before bed. Hopefully his small garden would be a success so that he could restore his snacks. He had stalled long enough, it was time to go to sleep so he could see what tomorrow would bring. With a sigh he placed the daggers into his pouch. Alan didn’t think he was going to be using them while he was in the tower, and if they were left in the magical pouch he wouldn’t have to sharpen them everyday. The whetstone went in his ring, it would be handy as a reading light and as a mana-infused item he could study. Laying down on the bed he luxuriated in the soft support. He had to admit, the idea of sleeping in a real bed for the next year was appealing. Although, the blanket wasn’t as soft as his wolf furs.

  *  *  *

  He rose early the next morning as usual. Alan chose yoga for today's morning routine since there wasn't a lot of space in the room to move around. After finishing a routine that left him limbered up, he had to spend a little more time on cultivation. After all that it still wasn’t sunrise, so he decided to explore a little.

  Opening the door to the hallway, he peeked out and saw everyone else’s were still closed. The lounge area might be a nice place to set up, but his feet were itching and so he chose to head down to see if they were still stuck in here. Sure enough there was still no door, but there was something new. Apparently Alan wasn’t the only one eager to start the day.

  Simon was down there working out, still without a shirt. He must have brought some large rocks in his storage space because he was doing a form of kettlebell swings with a boulder. He saw Alan but didn’t stop until he finished his set.

  “Good morning, I hope I didn’t wake you,” The giant rumbled out

  “Morning Simon. No, you’re good. I have been up and active for a while now. Are you an early riser too?”

  “There is much to do in a day and I never have enough time.”

  He offered Alan a rock from his ring. It wasn’t quite as large as his, but it was still around four hundred pounds. Pre-System this would have been difficult to do anything with, especially since it was an awkward shape for lifting. That would be the kind of rock they try to lift at a world’s strongest man challenge. Now Alan was using it to do a squat. He found that it was a slight challenge, but he could easily do sets of ten. In between, the two chatted.

  “So Alan, you do not look like the others with their robes and flimsy wands. What is your main class?”

  Alan had tried to identify his housemates but found that his skill was somehow being blocked. Simon’s question suggested this was true for the others as well. He wasn’t about to share all of his secrets, but his original outfit and weapons had given hints anyway.

  “The first class I picked up was rogue, how about you?”

  “My first class was mage, but then my second was fighter. It was a much more comfortable fit.”

  “Did you check out the books last night?”

  Simon set down the two rocks he was using for bicep curls before answering. “I admit that I tried, but found no success. I tried to translate some of the first spell but I couldn’t understand what it was trying to tell me. You?”

  Alan wasn’t much for bragging and he wasn’t sure how much to share with someone he was in fact competing against. “I was able to get through a little bit. I found that you had to try and think of the symbols all together to get the meaning.”

  He grunted at this and took out an even larger rock and started to do overhead presses. Alan thought he might be trying to impress him with his strength to make up for the smaller man’s success with the books. It wasn’t much longer before the sun was rising and it was time to go to breakfast. Simon stored his rocks and they headed up together. When they arrived at the dining area, the rest of the group, except for the woman who was his age, were already there. Sensing another opportunity to get names, Alan dove right in.

  “Good morning everyone, my name is Alan and this is Simon! How’s everyone doing?”

  There was a groan from the stairs and he looked back to see that the last contestant had finally made her way up. “Ughh, you’re one of those annoying morning people aren’t you?” Her hair was disheveled and there might have been some dried drool in the corner of her mouth. Even so, she was still very attractive.

  He gave her a big grin but toned the energy down a little. “Yes I am, sorry. Good morning! Mind sharing your name?”

  “The name's Harper. Has anyone seen the coffee?” She asked as she slid onto the bench at the table. They didn’t see any food yet, but after Harper had gotten the ball rolling the others introduced themselves. The older woman was Valori and the young kid was Ezra.

  It turned out that none of them had gone to sleep right away and they had all tried reading the various books. Harper and Valori hadn’t had much luck either, like Simon, but Ezra was another story.

  “I got through the titles of several of the spells, but didn’t get very far when I tried to translate the descriptions.” He finally admitted. He seemed shy, but he obviously knew his stuff. He and Alan compared notes on their translations of the titles. They matched except the spell Alan translated as ‘gust’, he translated as ‘wind’.

  “You guys are a bunch of nerds.” That was Harper who was making fun of them for having taken out their books and comparing their translations. She may have thought them silly, but someone, at least, appreciated their rabid curiosity.

  “What a studious group we have here. Maybe there is hope for you after all.” Once again the Master was just suddenly there. None of them had seen him walk in from anywhere. “If you two will put your books away we can have breakfast. You will have plenty of time later to work.”

  Ezra had jumped when the Master started talking and knocked one of his books to the floor. Bending down he picked it up and gathered the rest of his books into his ring. Alan also stored the couple he had taken out. With the table now cleared, the Master summoned in their breakfast. Unlike dinner, their plates stayed empty, but there were now platters and bowls full of food in front of them. The meal would be served family style apparently.

  For protein there was a large platter of bacon, a dish of scrambled eggs, and another of fried eggs. There were several different types of pancakes and a large bowl of porridge. There was also a platter of different fruits. Alan grabbed a couple of bananas and a handful of strawberries when no one was looking and stuffed them in his ring. He was starting to think that he might have a hoarding problem when it came to fruits.

  There was mostly silence while they ate until Alan worked up the courage to ask their host a question. “So, which of us was right? Is it gust or wind?”

  Everyone paused their eating to see how he would react. “Trying to convert magical concepts into standard can oftentimes lead to different translations. Neither of those would be incorrect, however, the accepted name for that spell is gust.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  Ezra had a scowl but Alan wasn’t going to let one correct translation go to his head. You would have thought that the Master answering rather than yelling at him would have opened the floodgates and they would have been asking questions all morning. Unfortunately, the newly inducted contestants really didn’t know enough to ask questions yet. The rest of breakfast passed quickly and then they were following their mentor upstairs. Using a staircase that wasn't there before breakfast.

  “The next three floors contain workshops. Each floor has two identical spaces for you to work in. You might wonder why there are six workshops when there are only five of you. I just couldn’t stand the thought of the lost symmetry if I tried to do an odd number. At the moment these rooms contain a couple of tables, a few chairs, and some pens and ink. Your only job between now and when I test you at the end of the month is to learn as many of the spells as you can, and to memorize those glyphs. Whoever performs the worst at the end of that time will be dismissed.”

  Alan was given the left hand workshop on the fifth floor. Valori was in the workspace next to his. Simon and Harper were below them and Ezra got one of the spaces above. He seemed happy to have the whole floor to himself. That kid was pouring out definite loner vibes.

  The next two weeks passed in a blur. Simon and Alan continued to work out together in the mornings. Some days they would lift and others Alan would get him to do yoga. The big man was willing to do that, but very resistant to tai chi for some reason. They would also occasionally spar. The two didn’t use weapons since they didn’t want to damage anything, especially themselves, but it was still nice to have someone to practice with.

  Simon was not only bigger than him, but also significantly stronger. However, when it came to speed it wasn’t even close. Alan sometimes felt like a hummingbird flitting around the larger man. He found that he was a little tougher than him too, which was a surprise. Even though Simon was punching much harder, their hits seemed to have the same effect on the other due to Alan’s higher endurance.

  Every morning and evening the whole group would eat together. It felt rather decadent after the little food he had been consuming previously, however Alan wasn’t going to turn it down. He even managed to score some watermelon slices and a cantaloupe to add to his fruit stash. He was going to need a bigger garden.

  The days were spent mostly in study. The first week they each left from breakfast and spent almost the entire time in their own workspace ignoring everyone else. It wasn’t till some of them started getting frustrated in the second week that they began to discuss their studies with each other.

  They were all making progress on translating the symbols. Alan found that learning the symbols was very easy, he assumed it was one of his stats that was helping with this. The hard part was combining them into a concept that he could relate to. It was especially tricky if there were more than three or four symbols together.

  To make it worse, the things they were trying to translate were often not ideas they already had experience with. Many of them touched on concepts of magic that didn’t make sense coming from a society of science. That's where the primer came in. It was a rather arduous process of flipping between the spellbook, the dictionary, and the primer over and over.

  Translations aside, nobody had made any progress on casting a new spell. It was Harper who had the idea to come together and share what it was like casting their own spells. Between the five of them they could cast four different spells from the book. Harper approached them with the plan after breakfast at the end of that first week and instead of going to their workspaces the group moved over to the sitting area on the dining floor.

  “So I was thinking,” Harper began. “If we could each share what it feels like to cast our own spells, it might help us figure out what we are missing.”

  Ezra was reluctant but Valori managed to convince him to stay. Alan thought that he looked at her as a kind of mother figure. She was the only one of them who he willingly talked to. They didn’t make any progress that day, but it did give Alan an idea to try later.Even without any evidence of its usefulness so far, everyone agreed to meet each day around lunch time to share any insights they had gained.

  The problem they were all having was the very first part of casting the spells. Each spell in the book began by saying they needed to ‘grab’ a certain type of mana. Alan was working mostly on fire bolt because it seemed the closest to what he was used to. So the spell said to grab a strand of fire mana, and the first time he read it he didn’t know what that meant.

  That led him to the primer which described how your energy, or mana, comes from your soul in a pure form. Each person’s aura ends up making changes to it as it moves into their pathways, but the energy in their mana pool stays mostly pure. That term, pure, hadn’t meant anything to Alan in the context so it meant another trip through the primer to understand that concept.

  It said to think of mana like light. There was an entire spectrum of different energies. Your soul, like sunlight, contains the entire spectrum. In order to grab a certain type of mana, you were supposed to create a metaphysical prism that would split the light, in this case your ‘pure’ energy, up and then you could select the type you wanted. At the moment the students’ prisms were only capable of splitting that energy up into the six types they were studying.

  The primer was not very good at explaining how to do this, or possibly they were just particularly dense students. By talking about how to cast their own spells they were trying to learn how to grasp these other types of mana.

  Alan’s idea was that maybe he should forget the other spells for now and just focus only on what he could cast. Really feel what it means to grab light mana. In listening to the others explaining what their own spells felt like he had realized that they had, at best, a surface level understanding of what was happening with their energy.

  He spent the rest of that day summoning a light bolt into his hand and then letting it dissipate. The problem the students had is that when they cast their spell they somehow split up the mana to find the correct type, but because they had learned the spell through a scroll they didn’t really know how they were doing it. The scroll inserted the knowledge of how to cast into their brain, but they didn’t really have a good way to access that information. Instead it was like they had a button they could press when they needed to cast the spell, but they had no idea of what the process was that the button began.

  What Alan needed to do was to try and study what happens when he pushes that button. There must be a way to actually access the ball of knowledge that was his spell. What made it incredibly difficult was that the process was happening in an instant, but his growing aura reading ability turned out to be very helpful.

  It took him two days of intense scrutiny until he could see what happened. Instead of a prism splitting up light it was more like finding the end of a braid or weaving. If you look at the middle of a blanket you see a pattern and not the individual threads, but if you can find the edges you can find each string that went into it.

  It was on the fourth day of that second week that Alan finally managed to replicate this himself. There in the palm of his hand was a strand of light mana. He was excited, but this was only the first step in the spell. Luckily the rest wasn’t so bad. Once he could find the strand of light mana he had to form it into a specific pattern. What made this a trippy process is you shaped it not just with your mind, but with your hands and your words. This is where the verbal and somatic components came from. Light bolt was so simple that it didn’t even require specific gestures, almost any kinetic energy would form the spell.

  Finally, as he lay on his bed twelve days since first stepping foot in the tower, Alan managed to cast light bolt on his own. It sat there in his palm and he marveled at the ball of light that he had brought into existence. He already had known how to cast light bolt, but now he had cast it without pushing the button. Instead every step of the process had been done intentionally and without any assistance from the Network.

  With great excitement Alan shared his insights with the group the next day. He could have kept it to himself, but in addition to wanting to help humanity move forward, he was also a very competitive person. That is a big part of how he ended up being a Green Beret. His type of competitiveness, however, wasn’t about winning at all costs. It’s about winning by beating his opponents, by being better than they are. And the better his competitor the more it would force him to push himself.

  The rest of that afternoon was spent with Alan explaining what he had done. Not just what he had done, but also how he had done it. If he was going to get insight into their spells they too needed to dig into how they actually did what they did. None of them really got it before dinner, but he saw Ezra head up to his workspace instead of his dorm room. Out of all of them, the goth kid was probably the next most driven besides him.

  The last day of the second week saw Alan trying to replicate the process with gathering fire mana. By dinner time he could grasp it perhaps one time out of four. During the next week, when he wasn’t trying to explain how to sense their own mana, he made great progress and by the end could cast both fire bolt and stone spear. Meal times were also more exciting for the students now that they had learned some things. The Master would not answer questions on procedure, he said each had to figure it out for themselves, but he loved to talk theory.

  “There are a hundred glyphs in our book, and each represents a different type of mana. So why is it we can only sense six?” Alan asked one day.

  “Think of mana like a beam of light,” he began. There was a collective groan around the table because he used this analogy so often. “Those six types of mana are like visible light. As your powers grow you will develop new, and more powerful, ways of analyzing the light. However, at the moment all you have are your eyes, so all you can see are those six.”

  Ezra spoke up then “How many types of mana can you see, Master?”

  “By the time you reach a diamond class you should be able to detect most of the hundred glyphs in your book. When you get to be my level you can see over a thousand.”

  The idea that there could even be a thousand different types of mana would have seemed incredible before coming here, but some of the glyphs in their book were for things like wood mana, gravity mana, and even iron mana. It seemed like there was a type of mana for almost everything.

  Another day Simon asked “how is it we can cast a spell learned from a scroll without knowing any of this stuff?

  “I have seen you and Alan spar some mornings. When you throw a punch do you think about all the different muscles you must engage and in what order? How to shift your weight and how to turn your body?”

  “In the beginning we focus on some of that, but now we just know how to do it.” Alan chimed in with.

  “The scroll gives you the final skill, if you tried to think about each step of casting your spell you would find it very difficult.” his eyes darted toward Alan when he said that. “If instead you allow the process to proceed from ‘memory’ it is easy. What you are doing with the spellbook is learning the entire process and not skipping to the end. It is the forming of the process in your brain that consumes the scroll. Since a spellbook doesn’t do that, it isn't consumed.”

  “How many spells are there?” was Valeri’s question at dinner one night.

  “That is a question without an answer. There are thousands of spells that are publicly known, and many more that have been discovered but are not shared. New spells are also being created as we speak.”

  That was a thrilling thought and it kept him up late that night. How well would you have to understand these concepts to create your own spell? Understanding the interplay of the symbolic language for a known spell was hard enough, how much harder would it be to create it yourself? Alan had explored the idea of just tweaking a spell he already knew, but so far it was far beyond his ability.

  Now it was only two days until their test. He had long ago memorized the glyphs, but was still working on the last spell. Casting fire bolt and stone spear was as easy as light bolt by now. Conjure water and gust he could cast most of the time. Shadow bolt, however, continued to elude him.

  It had reached the point where he could sense the dark mana, but trying to grab it was the hard part. He could see it there at the edge of the tapestry but try as he might he couldn’t grasp hold of it to extract it. Each mana had to be controlled differently. Light mana was something you could hold in your mental grasp and bend and shape. Fire mana had to be restrained somewhat but mostly just given a direction, eager as it was to grow and consume. Earth mana was gently pushed into form, slowly kneaded and shaped. Water was actually closest to fire mana, but it had to be restrained more and pushed less. Air mana was also pushed, but more like funneled. You couldn’t restrain it, but you could direct its flow.

  Nothing Alan did with dark mana seemed to work. He couldn’t grab it, push it, or shape it. It wasn’t until he noticed how the opposite manas had a similarity in how you controlled them that he started to make progress. He had tried to ask Ezra about it, but the moody kid was avoiding Alan for some reason.

  As a matter of fact, Harper was the only one who would still freely talk magic with him. Simon would work out with Alan, but he wouldn’t discuss magic. Valori and Ezra said as little to him as possible. Maybe they were jealous because he was moving through the primer so quickly. He didn’t think it was because he was smarter than they were, he was now convinced it was another effect of his understanding talent.

  They could all translate the symbols at this point, but it was understanding the complicated concepts being conveyed where people struggled. It would be frustrating to see yourself work just as hard as another but to get only half the result. No one wants their face rubbed in how easy someone else had it. Harper on the other hand was desperate. She was still only able to cast her original spell. Alan spent almost the entire two days before the test trying to help her to see the different threads of mana.

  “You can feel the earth mana when you cast your spear. Do you feel how you have to push and guide the mana rather than forming it directly?” It was the last day and he was trying to help her get at least one other spell.

  “Yes, but I can barely detect the other mana types and when I do I can’t make it do anything.” She was understandably frustrated and worried that she would be going home in the morning.

  Tamee had been right that none of them had aura reading. He had found that the others couldn’t sense the mana as well as he could. Well, not mana per se, that energy in their spells they could see. What they couldn’t see was how the mana was affected by their aura. Alan was able to see how the two interacted which made it much simpler to replicate it.

  The others could only watch how the mana itself changed, without being able to see the force that was changing it. The others occasionally caught a glimpse of the interplay, but it was rare. Instead they had to guess at what actions caused the changes and then try to duplicate them. It was a little like the superstitious pigeon experiment from the 1940’s. Alan tried his best to remove some of their weirdest false actions, but it was hard to explain when they couldn’t see it themselves.

  “Each mana has its own method to control it. Let’s try water. Like earth mana you have to guide it, but pushing on water doesn’t do anything. Did you ever make sand castles at the beach? You have to direct the flow by restraining it.” He held her hands and tried to demonstrate.

  She was getting better and by that night she was finally able to grasp water in addition to earth. Harper was so happy that she threw her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss. Harper and Alan were about the same age and she was only a couple inches shorter than him. She was also very striking with a vivacious personality.

  There was definitely some attraction on his end, and he had been getting similar vibes from her for a while. However, Alan wasn’t really looking to get into anything. Still, when her soft, warm lips touched his, he felt a stirring. He let the kiss linger, letting himself get lost in the sensation, but when her tongue started to prod at his mouth he knew it was time to pull back.

  “Harper, I know you’re excited about your accomplishment, and I am thrilled for you too, but this isn’t the time for this. We are in a race against other species to determine our destiny. We can’t become distracted.”

  Her mouth turned down in a pretty pout and she asked “aren’t you afraid of burning out? I saw people like you in my zone who were always pushing, always striving to be better. At some point won’t you break, won’t the stress cause you to lose it? This is just tonight and just for fun, think of it as a way to let off some steam.”

  Her hands were gently moving up and down Alan’s arms as she said this, leaving trails of electric pleasure coursing through his veins. She leaned in again for a kiss and this time pressed her whole body up against his. He could feel her heart beating in her chest and the fullness of her breasts. Alan didn’t have the same concerns that he had had with Anna. Harper wasn’t a dungeon dweller, she was fully capable of making her own decisions. If she was ok with this, then why couldn’t he be as well? To hell with it.

  Alan pressed back against her and returned the kiss while one hand made its way to the small of her back. The other got tangled in her hair as he pulled her closer. Tomorrow they would be tested, but they could at least have fun tonight. He had one last thought before she pulled her tunic over her head and he was lost to rational thought. Was he just trying to justify what he knew to be a bad decision?