pdf-ebookys Chapter 123 - Among the Best and Oldest
Chapter 123 - Among the Best and Oldest
An embarrassing percentage of Malwine’s successes in this life must have come from the least thought-through of her plans somehow not blowing up in her face. Granted, thanks to [Unpacifiable], she’d always put at least the minimum effort into knowing her ideas weren’t bound to bring disastrous results… not that her jump to the Mortal Esse had gone , despite it not having been dangerous.It made deciding to once again embrace her recklessness all the more troubling, not because she wasn’t willing to, but because she’d actually gone quite the while without having to deal with any messes of her own making. Despite her Skill’s silence, Malwine felt as though she were staring down a sign and seriously considering how it might look better at 0.
She never really questioned the forester’s logic when it came to his suggestions, even if she did think his perspective was beyond skewed—they weren’t that different in that regard.
But for someone who’d more than once warned her not to do anything too reckless without consulting him, to be the one encouraging her to just wing it? She hadn’t been expecting it.
Even if she’d resolved to fully take advantage of his endorsement.
Malwine had mulled over it repeatedly, yet her conclusions remained flimsy. She’d only know once she tested things, and she had admittedly been putting it off, giving herself the time to review her thoughts after a nap to look at it with fresher eyes. After several naps, maybe.
The point stood that between the comment about Forgery not being solely about Skills, and that question about Affinities, Malwine found she had reason to wonder if she was supposed to be using raw mana for it. That wasn’t something she’d done outside of her attempts to grow her Control and Acclimation—not intentionally, at least.
Veit seemed confident that the ‘nudging’ she occasionally did to get her Skills to behave in certain ways must have counted, but it was so situational that proving it went one way or the other wouldn’t be done in a single conversation. He’d confirmed freehand manipulation of mana was something people did, though—a silver lining to how utterly unrelatable she found the examples he was willing to give her.
Why he didn’t want to use something more esoteric like {Vanagloria} was beyond her, but things like {Mosaic} and {Bone} weren’t conceptual. Save for {Ore}—which was also her only unplanted Affinity—Malwine didn’t exactly have any Mana Sources with a form that was easy to determine.
For one, she understood the concept of {Legacy} beyond words, and could raise its values easily enough, but how would that be represented in reality?
A part of her still wanted to use {Foresight} purely out of spite, but in the end, she stuck to the one she knew best, even better for its status as the planted Root of her
In her initial cursory glance—which she would never call a skim in this context—she hadn’t noticed it, but now that she gave it her full attention, Malwine couldn’t help but raise her eyebrows at the feedback loop between one of her oldest Skills and its Aspect.
[Once and Forever]
As the description implied, [Once and Forever] itself held a degree of influence over the ‘reemergence’ of Affinities. One of the Skill’s components was what she could only describe as a multiplier of sorts, applying a ‘great’—literally—boost to something being referenced from the system. Curiously, she could somehow tell this part of the Skill affected things, yet only one of them was used as reference by [Mana Reclaimer]. The Aspect was benefiting from the Skill’s effect, all the while its results fed back to it, somehow informing it of just what those lost Affinities were.
Malwine couldn’t tell if this applied only to those she’d actively used [Mana Reclaimer] on, but it was… interesting. If [Once and Forever] was somehow tracking the Affinities she encountered on her ancestors, what was it doing with that information beyond what she could see? She knew for a fact that there was more to it than what looped between the Skill and its Aspect.
As for the Skill itself, the active ability to target ancestors relied on input. Once she locked in on a specific ancestor, their eligibility would be determined, and the Skill would either activate or send her the panel equivalent of a denied request. Part of what was tested for was actually visible to an extent here—the Skill seemed to explicitly seek out conditions that may affect the durability of their obits, only seeking out the obit itself as a last resort.
There were probably other abilities that made obits last longer out there.
If the ancestor she used the Skill on eligible, then their Skills and Traits would be probed to give her a list of options, much like what she’d gotten with OBeryl. It was deceptively simple, but even after looking it over repeatedly, Malwine found herself growing curious as to just how the Skill was fueled—there seemed to truly be no cost here, beyond the information it required. Its limitations were considerable, requiring knowledge of ancestors on her part or at least on that of those within 2 generations of her.
That might have been worth keeping in mind, though it explained why she’d been able to target OBeryl—Katrina had known her mother, after all.
…Yet none of that was what she to know, was it? And she could only procrastinate so much.
[Imitation Beyond Filiality] detected ancestors in a much simpler manner, relying solely on her input. Since it didn’t care for whether her targets were alive, it only seemed to confirm their existence before sending out a flurry of queries to the system. The trial was presumably made with whichever feedback it got from that, and once it was ready, the Trait seemed to just send her on her merry way to work on the trial of its own creation. Its last act was to flip one of the two switches tied to the specific ancestor she’d run a trial for—the cooldown. Only if she conquered the trial would anything else be done, as the second switch would remove that ancestor as an option of flipped.
For a Trait behind so many of her headaches, Malwine wouldn’t deny she’d been expecting more. Maybe a lengthier set of elements, or a setup as confusing as the trials themselves.o waste an opportunity, Malwine hit the edges on her own this time, all the while having the branches clear out the ‘grout’ around the elements, letting it delicately remove all that had been too close for her to dare try rougher methods on.
And there it was.
Before her stood something she intrinsically understood to be [Imitation Beyond Filiality] in truth. She got the impression that it wouldn’t get any more exposed than this, even before she noticed the rest of the panel wasn’t growing back this time.
What she could only describe as a messy flowchart practically dangled in front of her, swaying about in the nonexistent wind.
Malwine blinked repeatedly.
Nothing changed.
She reached out, laying a finger upon one of the two near-identical elements that hung from a larger piece. Endless instances of each existed, one for each ancestor she knew and for all she did not. It was more of a theoretical thing than anything genuinely , yet as she wrapped her fingers around it, a few things became immediately clear to her.
For one, this switch was ridiculously layered. She’d be better off just leaving it as it was, if she decided to do something with it—that applied to its twin as well. They were something she couldn’t replicate or change at her current level, and the matter of whether she might ever actually become able to was somewhat of a pipedream.
It also had . If [Mana Reclaimer] had relied on the type of ridiculously open-ended query this did, or if [Once and Forever] weren’t so restricted, she could have been climbing up her family tree and retrieving names without an ounce of effort, Kristian’s ignorance be damned.
But most importantly… she’d pulled it a little too hard, because it was currently sitting on her palm—still presumably functional as always, but the arrow-like paths it had connected to now hung like threads that’d been cut.
, Malwine mustered all the mental energy at her disposal to pretend that hadn’t happened, moving to examine the broken thread. Would tying a knot work? The switch certainly looked like it had a spot the thread could go through, even if context dictated it’d probably been where the arrow had pierced it.
As she tugged on the thread to try and clean up her mess, the thread slipped from the element it came from, leaving her with a switch in one hand and a limp double-sided arrow in the other.
From there, a chain reaction spread, the chaos of it mitigated only by the fact that [Imitation Beyond Filiality] had never had that many elements to begin with. It didn’t look particularly impressive as it fell apart—elements and connections slid free until all that remained was a frame, or the idea of a frame, demarcating the place where her Trait had been. Where it should be still.
It took her a moment—with how much effort she put into throwing any budding panic out the window—to realize the elements were very much still there. They were just sort of floating, idling by as she stared at the scene before her.
She’d almost forgotten about the two pieces in her hands when notifications sped past her, all elements and threads disappearing from sight and sense alike.
Malwine looked around herself, as if they would somehow just have moved elsewhere within her core, but all she achieved was making her head spin.
In search of a lifeline, she loosened her grip on the visualization, letting the panel of [Once and Forever] and its companions manifest in its full glory.
Clearly, she must have done something wrong there, because it didn’t look right.
Blinking rapidly, Malwine considered this for a moment before just exiting her core altogether, opening her real eyes.
The full weight of whatever had just happened had yet to really set in—being utterly confused probably helped—so when she called the panel up in reality, she mostly expected it to appear as it always had.
Instead, she was greeted by the sight of something new yet eerily familiar.
[Once and Forever]