After Meka and Winnie left, Greta did not speak right away. She waited until their footsteps faded completely, until the background noise of the hall swallowed any chance of overheard words. Only then did she turn back to me.

  “Well?” she said, folding her arms loosely across her chest. Her tone was casual, but her eyes were sharp. “What is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  I hesitated. The words I had prepared felt flimsy now that I was faced with actually saying them out loud. I shook my head slightly, then tried again. “Actually… is there somewhere more private we could speak?” I asked. “I don’t know how to ask this properly. The more I learn, the more I realize my knowledge isn’t as useful in this age as I thought it would be.”

  Greta studied me in silence for a long moment. Her gaze flicked over my posture, my expression, the tension in my shoulders. Finally, she jerked her head toward a narrow side corridor that branched away from the main hall. “Come on.”

  We moved only a short distance, but it was enough. The air felt different there, quieter, enclosed. She leaned back against the stone wall, arms uncrossing as she settled into a stance that said she was listening, not judging, but fully alert.

  “For one thing,” I said slowly, choosing each word with care, “in my last life the Adventurer’s Guild was basically a giant scam.”

  She barked a laugh, sudden and unrestrained. “Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s not a scam.”

  That caught me off guard. I had expected denial, maybe irritation. “What do you mean?”

  Greta shrugged, unbothered. “At some point, we more or less took over dungeon operations from every government in the world as a collective. It made sense at the time. Centralized knowledge. Centralized response. These days, though, you pretty much have to be part of the Adventurer’s Guild to legally run a dungeon.”

  She tilted her head, eyes narrowing slightly as she laid it out. “Think about it. A farmer has a dungeon pop up on his land. The government declares the dungeon property of the Guild. We pay the farmer compensation for the land, roughly equivalent to what he lost in crops or usable ground.”

  “But not the wealth extracted from the dungeon itself,” she continued. “The cores, the relics, the resources. It’s like finding a mine and being told someone else owns it because they’re part of the Mining Guild. All mines belong to miners forever. Ridiculous when you actually say it out loud.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, reflexively, then stopped. The comparison landed harder than I liked. “No,” I said after a moment. “I see it. That part is absolutely a scam. I can understand the reasoning behind it, but that doesn’t make it fair.”

  Greta smirked faintly. “Things haven’t changed as much as you would believe. You’re just seeing it from a different side now. From inside the structure instead of outside it.”

  “That’s fair,” I admitted. “Another thing I noticed is that enchanting seems to be something almost anyone can do now. Not everyone has talent for it, but it’s theoretically accessible.”

  She frowned slightly, as if the point itself was obvious. “Sure it is.”

  I tried to circle the topic without landing on it directly, testing the ground before committing. “What’s the Church’s stance on enchanting these days? What do the gods say about it?”

  Greta shrugged. “I don’t know much about the gods beyond the practical side of things. But I don’t think there’s a problem with enchanting. There’s a god of it, as far as I know.”

  “A god of enchanting?” I repeated, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice.

  “Yeah,” she said. “The god of magic. One of his subdomains covers enchanting.”

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  Internally, I was screaming. That had not been the case before. In my time, the god of magic did not have that kind of hold over enchanting itself. Enchanting had been… adjacent, yes, but not owned. Had that been taken from me? Had my work, my understanding, been folded into his domain after my death?

  I did not voice those thoughts. Some questions were dangerous even when spoken softly.

  “Are there still restrictions?” I asked instead. “I assume demon summoning is still frowned upon.”

  “Of course,” Greta said flatly. “Too chaotic. Same with celestial summoning. That’s been banned for almost two hundred years now.”

  She snorted. “People thought angels and seraphs and all that other angelic nonsense were inherently good. Turns out a being of absolute justice can justify horrific acts in the name of justice. It gets ugly fast when a concept decides it knows better than people do.”

  I nodded slowly. “That ban makes a lot of sense. That’s one I would have supported.”

  “What I’m really asking,” I said carefully, lowering my voice even though we were alone, “is whether there are new forms of enchanting. New approaches. Things that weren’t strictly acceptable before. Or things that didn’t exist at all.”

  Greta sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Honestly, Azolo, I’m not the person to ask. And I don’t think you want to ask the person I’d recommend talking to about that kind of stuff.”

  I muttered the name under my breath, disgust clear even to my own ears. “Randall.”

  She said it at the same time. “Randall.”

  Greta shook her head. “Yeah. Not an option. I figured as much. That’s why I didn’t suggest it.”

  She straightened, her expression sharpening. “But there’s something else you want to ask. You’re circling it. The questions you’re asking are surface-level. Probing, not answering.”

  She held up a finger, half warning, half reassurance. “I promise I won’t say a word, as long as you’re not planning to kill everyone here. If you are, I’d have to end you. Thoroughly.”

  I laughed despite myself, the tension breaking just a little. “No. Nothing like that.”

  The words stuck in my throat after that. I hesitated, turning the real question over and over in my mind. How much could I trust Greta?

  She was an instructor. She cared about us children, genuinely, not as future assets but as people. From everything I had seen, she was a good person.

  But some questions were heavier than others and I was not yet sure how much weight she was willing to carry.

  I took a breath and finally said the thing I had been circling.

  “So… in my time,” I began, voice low, “there was a discipline of enchanting that was frowned upon. And when I say frowned upon, I mean people looked at you badly just for knowing about it.”

  I hesitated, then continued. “I don’t really know how to ask about it without sounding suspicious. I don’t want you to judge me for it, because I’m considering pursuing it, if that’s even possible now. I think there are a lot of things that could be done differently, better than they were before.”

  I glanced away briefly, then back to her. “I don’t want to break any laws. If things have gotten worse, I’ll drop it. But if things have gotten better… I’d like to know.”

  Greta watched me carefully for a moment before answering. “If you’re talking about contract enchantment,” she said slowly, “that’s still frowned upon. Depending on what you’re contracting, it can cross into outright illegal territory.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not the one I mean.”

  Understanding flickered across her face. “Runic tattoos,” she said. “That would be my guess. There aren’t many enchanting subsets that fall into that category.”

  She exhaled softly. “I won’t lie to you. I don’t think the social standard has changed much. It’s still associated mostly with criminals. It’s legal for normal people, there’s nothing inherently illegal about it, but in practice it’s used almost exclusively by people of ill repute.”

  “At least that’s something,” I said quietly.

  Greta raised a finger. “I need to be very clear with you, Azolo. If you pursue runic tattooing, people will assume you are a criminal. They will assume you are part of their system. You may fall in with the wrong crowd, or the wrong crowd will come looking for you whether you want them or not.”

  She continued without softening the warning. “There are some marks that are harmless enough, and useful enough, that they aren’t frowned upon anymore. But those are the exception. The vast majority of runic tattoos are looked down upon and considered borderline illegal, even if they technically are not.”

  Her gaze sharpened. “I cannot recommend that you do any of that while you are under my care. And I will not allow you to make modifications to yourself or anyone else while you are still a Guild trainee.”

  I nodded immediately. “That’s fair.”

  I was willing to wait. I could graduate, become a full adult in the eyes of the world, and take responsibility for my own choices without placing that burden on Greta. I did not want to put her under unnecessary stress or scrutiny because of me.

  I had time. More time than most.

  I could practice conventional enchanting, refine my understanding, and build a foundation that would hold when I eventually chose to move forward. It would have to be enough for now.