For as much as Ludere enjoyed the physical part of training and reading, he thought that working with a Senator's daughter would have been interesting. It was unfortunately not as interesting as he thought it would be.

  "So Omega has a long 'O' sound. Got it."

  "Yeah, this part is mind-numbing, but there's something about being able to speak a dead language that's just so refreshing." Was that a smile? Cire was smiling at him.

  "Are you making fun of me?"

  "I would never, Regnicus. Not in a hundred years."

  The planned tree grid outside of the male sleeping quarters was not sufficient for their purposes. For as much as she could get in a week, Cire could not parse the books quickly enough for his tastes.

  This meant that he was spending time studying with her. In many situations, they were alone, but Mila was there at least half the time. She was, frustratingly, learning Celusian faster than him.

  "I think that you'll get it one day," Mila said in broken Celusian.

  "That's about as much as I can understand. I just wish that the glyphs didn't remind me of work so much."

  "It's too bad that we can only work with what we have, though I think that you have the grammarians to answer for that. All glory to the one that picked out Celusian for mathematical notation."

  No glory was available for him and his friends. What little gains they made were in spite of the dense text available to them.

  They were deep in it. It made it sound like the entirety of Spirit Magic was controlled by knowing the language and being able to exercise it. But that couldn't be it. He didn't understand why he would need to use a whole other language just to use a Skill.

  It wasn't like there were other Skills for them to lean on. His Soul Magic had improved, giving him an increased view of how he could heal himself through it. It was, frustratingly, unless he spent years developing that on a variety of different patients. One can only clean the same wound and bandage it so many times. Soul Magic wanted variety. It was great to see things, and when everything was brand new and he knew everyone around him, it was easy to see his levels advance.

  His Soul Magic was solidly in the fifties.

  He was not able to budge it without a tremendous effort of Willpower in finding out novel things. That is to say, if there was a hospital on the island, he would have volunteered there several times over, just for the variety. If the spice of life for Soul Magic was variety, then the same thing for Will was repetitive movements through the same pathways, with ever increasing numbers as to what was actually being moved.

  At the very least, these two magics seem to have been solved by those that came before him.

  There even was an archway dedicated to the previous alumni of the academy. On it, there was a dedication in ancient Celusian to 'those that made it possible.'

  He might be standing on the shoulders of giants, but that was only because he had wasted half his life trying to climb up the side of one of them to cut it off at the neck.

  "Yes, yes. Glory be to Eumer. We are all happy that he was able to translate things from comprehensible to almost incomprehensible overnight. Truly, we would be lost without such a grammarian."

  Mila snickered. "Eumer was responsible for so many of these textbooks that I feel like I have a personal grudge against him."

  Cire nodded. "You and I, both. I feel like this crosses all of life's intricacies to let us all know that society would be both ten times worse without him, and also ten times better."

  "…But either way, we wouldn't be able to calculate it without his shorthand." Mila shook her head.

  Ludere chuckled.

  The spacing of the trees had allowed for them to put up long, thick ropes with webbing, so they could lean back while they studied. There was actually a competition going on to see who could get the highest hammock strung up between two trees, though.

  The administration had put a kibosh on that when someone hammock had been at forty feet up and begun to swing in the wind. It wouldn't do for the sons and daughters of high nobility to be killed in a hammock accident that was entirely preventable. Especially not when there were many other other things that could and would kill students at the school.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  They lost a classmate the other week. None of them knew the man in question, save Cire, and even then only in passing.

  Mila swung in her hammock. "I wonder if Eumer would have thought of someone with all three of these skills at the same time. What, do you think that it was sacrilege? How do you think they're dealt with skill gems back then? It's never clear in the text."

  "It's not clear how they do it in common, but in Celusian? They have a whole hierarchy of needs that they establish there."

  "I did not see that in the notes. Was that something you were going to teach us?" Ludere racked his brain to try and remember something she had said.

  "There's a difference between a text written by a historian, and one written by someone like these… This is meant to be a magical primer, and I think that the only relevant passage is going to be this one here about a stomach, or was that a gall bladder?"

  "The appendix?" Mila said.

  "Oh, that's absolutely right."

  It was one of those things that he didn't really understand in the language. He would learn it. He would repeat it, but it was quite another thing to be able to make a joke in another language. He found that to be a bit past his ability at this point.

  "So you're saying that you're a purist for descriptive texts about skills that are not written by this man? I don't know how many of those we were going to find. Especially the ones that are relevant to the Skill in question, which, again, is not giving you anything?"

  "Unfortunately, all I can say is that I got it to level two, but I don't know how to recreate the situation. How it got there. It's a mystery to me."

  He did not want to explain how exactly he got in it. He's been in the Demon World, and he used it once, but the whole experience had left him feeling nauseous and underappreciated. It was like he specifically hated himself afterwards, enough to block out the memory of using it. And he still hadn't come to terms with it, even now, weeks later. He was also not convinced that he could use it without killing somebody. If part of using Spirit Magic was embodying them, and they were alive, does that take their life away? Could he use their life force, like he did with Soul Magic, to heal himself?

  It was these questions that he pondered with Mila and Cire. It didn't help that they were both really helpful, and he'd started giving Mila some Skills. Mila had taken to her Skills like a dog learning to fly. Or as well-developed as his Skills were, his finesse was lacking, and hers was just there so well.

  Ludere froze, letting out a consistent, primal burp. Mila responded by belching even louder.

  Cire, for her part, rolled her eyes. It had been for hours causing a way to eat and exercise. And as much as he liked doing this, he was feeling the pain of not being able to get to the point at which his Skill would be useful. He was beginning to think that it was just going to be something he could use.

  "And you have to tell us why you got it to level two at some point in time if you ever want us to figure this out. I don't think that you're going to figure it out on your own. You need a village."

  "Maybe a village of demons." Ludere whispered.

  "What was that?" Cire leaned over.

  "Nothing, nothing."

  "Oh, wait. I think I have something."

  Mila and Ludere both sat up in their hammocks. Neither one was able to stop from swaying.

  Mila leaned over."I think that what you need to do is just tell us what it is, so we don't both blow a blood vessel."

  "Well, all right, because you insist. Okay, so, this part right here?" She showed them a page. "This is definitely about a weapon, and this is another one right here. This is about death… I don't know how these are connected, but I've never seen this combination of words before. And it's talking about the spirit of things."

  "Is Spirit some sort of death weapon?"

  "There's no way that could possibly be true. Spirit is its own thing. I feel like it gives you access to see souls. If I couldn't see your soul with my other magics, then I think this would definitely show it to me." Ludere closed his eyes. "Mila, can you do the juggling thing?"

  Even with his eyes closed he could sense her moving Will around in the air. It was like each little piece off Willpower was a distinct node that they could touch. And he could feel her. He could sense which direction she was in. He hadn't seen which way she was because he had his eyes open before, but he just pointed to the balls as they were juggled around in mid-air.

  "Can you vary the pattern of flight?"

  "Not entirely understanding of what it's going to do for you, but okay."

  Instead of juggling in front of her, they started flouting above her head, and orbiting it, and then going higher and lower. Each time it did that, he tracked it with his finger.

  "Regnicus, how the… How are you doing that? And Mila, when… When did you get the skill?"

  Oops. He hadn't meant to reveal that. It was just that she'd put it in a direction where he needed to test something out immediately. Otherwise he would have been waiting all day until they got into a secluded area. He was already pushing it, having a secluded talk with two women. Taking one of them aside to the spot would definitely attract attention.

  The fact they were from the same class did nothing to stop the sense of how he would be doing the exact wrong thing. He was honored by the Empire, and he needed to act like a gentleman. All noble houses would be trying to vie for his attention, and he definitely didn't want the Oracle to feel like she'd been slighted by him in any way, shape, or form.

  "I feel like we might need to bring you in to talk about this a little more."

  "I know you said something about being able to get the black market on Skills, but this is just… How were you able to get a skill gem to her? This is just impossible. Skill gems are highly regulated! It's harder to get a specific skill gem than is to get into the academy for most common folk."

  Mila paused her work. "See, that's why you have to stop thinking like a rich person, and start thinking like a commoner. There are always ways."