Heart of Dorkness

[Congratulations!]

[Through your actions you have unlocked the potential to obtain the following classes:

Acolyte of Darkness

Lesser Cultivator

Do you wish to learn more about these classes or accept them into yourself?]

Two new classes, both added to my growing list of classes I could learn, both of them sounding kinda weak.

That was the sum total of the rewards I’d gotten from two weeks of hard work, from practicing and studying until my eyes went blurry.

Well, no, there was one more reward, but it wasn’t from my studying.

[Congratulations!]

[You have unlocked the title:

Touched by the Dark One

Do you wish to equip this Title?]

When I poked at the title, all I got was a description that wasn’t all that helpful.

Touched by the Dark One

Your soul itself brushed the Dark God’s. You have felt her essence, and have shared, for a fleeting moment, her will and that of the world.

You will find Disgust and Loathing, both within yourself, and without.

I pouted at the description, but it didn’t help any. What the heck did that even mean?

Of course, I equipped it. It wouldn’t do not to experiment a little, and this was the first thing I could do with my system that Luciana hadn’t warned me against. Equipping the title did nothing obvious. Removing it did much the same.

I even had a notebook out to take notes and everything! It was very disappointing. I did leave it on. It was, in a way, a gift from Luciana

I found that most of my days post-magical awakening weren’t any different to my days before. I spent a lot more time studying magic now, but most of the books I found were very advanced, talking about techniques and spells and powers people could use. There were plenty of texts that warned people of over-emoting--apparently over-using one kind of magic in quick succession--but not one book I found taught the basics.

“You seem irate.”

I jumped in my seat and looked up from the manual I was reading. It was about the more esoteric emotions and their possible uses. Things like remorse being somewhere between loathing and sadness, and being able to fuel spells from both emotional domains, but not very well. Very interesting.

Not as interesting as finding Luciana hovering over me. “Hi!” I said. “And, uh, yeah, a bit.”

“Are you having difficulty?”

I hummed, then rubbed at my chest, the spot where she’d touched me, where our souls had mingled, if the Title was to be believed. “I think so, yeah. I was thinking that I’d find a guide on how to unlock my magic, but I haven’t found anything yet.”

The Dark Goddess nodded serenely. “It is doubtful you will. There are many ways to find out how to use magic. Most involve careful study and meditation, cultivating your emotions and their power within yourself. Usually focusing on only the one initially.”

“That sounds like it takes a while,” I said. It wasn’t a complaint, really.

“It does. Those who are destined to become warriors and fighters will start when they’re even younger than you are, and will have discovered how to use one or two domains by their mid to late teens.”

“That’s years!” I said. I kinda wanted magic now. “I thought the thing you did would make it easier.”

“It has. I can feel your disappointment now, your disgust at your own inability. It’s just a kernel, too feeble to be of any use, but it is there.”

“Really?” I asked.

“And now it’s snuffed out by hope,” she said. She made that little noise again, her almost-laugh.

“Shucks.”

The Dark Goddess hummed. “There are other ways of opening the paths you need to use magic.”

“Oh?” I asked, very interested.

“Indeed. You need only feel extreme emotion. It’s a quick path to power, but a dangerous one. You obtain one emotion’s strength, but often cut yourself off from others. For example, if I pushed you to do a task you loathed, surrounding you by what you perceive as disgusting, you might stunt your own ability to feel admiration or trust.”

“Do emotions work that way?” Just because I felt something, didn’t mean I couldn’t feel the opposite anymore. That didn’t make sense. I could be sad, then happy.

She nodded. “They do when magic is involved. Give me your coal.”

I handed her my coal pen, and shifted a bit as she leaned over my shoulder and pulled a blank sheet over. She drew a shape on it, like an eight-petaled flower, then labelled all eight of them. I recognized the eight emotions she’d mentioned before.

Joy. Trust. Fear. Surprise. Sadness. Disgust. Anger. Anticipation.

She then drew a plus in the middle, linking four emotions together. Disgust and Trust, Anticipation and Surprise. “Before you try anything drastic, you should consider forcefully unlocking multiple emotional paths, all adversarial, so that your thoughts and feelings are still unaffected. These four would keep you in relative balance.”

“Not Joy?” I asked. That was easy to feel. So was Fear.

“Ecstasy, Terror, Rage and Grief are some of the easiest emotions to use for the common man. They would also, if you push yourself, become hard for you to use. You would only feel them when you want to, or, if uncontrolled, would feel them ceaselessly.”

“Oh,” I said. That would be awful. “Won’t I have a hard time with, um, Trust and Disgust and Anticipation and Surprise then?”

“Yes,” she said. “But you want power, don’t you?”

So a sacrifice then? “Yeah, I guess I do. I still don’t know what my dream really is, but I’m sure it’ll need me to be strong.”

She made that noise again, then she pat me on the head. “I’m sure. Now, a four-path route like that is complex. To awaken it properly would take a decade or more of careful study, all without a class interfering. The power from it wouldn’t be that impressive either, though you would have utility to compliment that power.”

“Hmm,” I said. “That’s a long time.”

“To you, perhaps,” she said. “The second method, of feeling great emotion and opening your paths that way, would also be complicated. Can you have four moments of supreme emotion in one lifetime? Likely, but still difficult to orchestrate.”

“So it can’t be done?” I asked. The hard way sounded hard.

Luciana looked down and blinked at me. “I am literally a god. I did not become one by thinking to myself that things could not be done.”

“You’ll help?” I asked.

“Certainly. For a price.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

“Okay, you want to hear the price?” she asked.

“No, I’ll accept it.”

Luciana stared at me for a moment longer. “Without hearing it?”

I shrugged. “I trust you.”

For a moment, her mask cracked and she looked genuinely confused before her emotions returned to something more normal. “I see. Then... one year of servitude for every path unlocked.”

“A year!” I said. “That’s... so many chores.”

“I was thinking more than chores.”

I flopped onto the desk. “Do I still get to stay in the library?”

“Certainly, when your... chores aren’t keeping you occupied elsewhere.”

So, did I want magic now, or in a decade or so? “Yeah, alright, I’ll do it.”

She nodded, not surprised this time. “It may take some time to prepare it all.”

“Oh, well, less than a few decades, right?”

“Indeed. Now, there is one use to having your magic unlocked that you may not yet be aware of, though I’m certain what you’ve read may have referred to it in passing. Follow me.”

I jumped out of my chair, set all of my notebooks together to the side, then skipped after her. One of the librarians would probably look after things if I left them out too long. They were alright with leaving books out during lunch, but if I left a book on a table overnight, I’d always have to go looking for it again the next morning.

Luciana went up instead of down. That was neat; I’d never been to the higher floors.

I regretted it four flights of stairs later. My legs were aching and I felt like I needed a rest, but Luciana wasn’t slowing down, so I grit my teeth and caught up.

When she finally stopped, it was on a floor that only had a little alcove next to the stairs, and a single door.

It opened onto a round room, with a tall ceiling and some windows on three sides, all of them way up and far from the ground. There wasn’t anything there except for one chair, and a monster.

[Barbatius – The Soft – Lesser Servant of the Dark Goddess]

Monster of Swinging Fists

“This is Barbatius,” Luciana said.

The monster in question was short and squat, not even as tall as I was. It had wide shoulders and long arms, like some sort of ape, maybe, though its face was a bit squished, and it was covered in thick white scales that looked almost like hair.

“Barbatius here will be fighting you. It’s time that you learned how to defend yourself. And it’s a wonderful way to learn how to use your magic to lessen blows and harden your body.”

“Uh... what?”

And then Barbatius roared and leapt at me.

***