"Rena...?"
There was silence. Then, the faint sound of life reappeared around him. Knights walking around, civilians on their daily routines.
It was an ordinary scene once more.
"..."
He turned his attention back to the information he had just received. When he initially began to receive it, he had expected to be overloaded. Instead it sat cleanly in his mind. It was a small surprise, given that a warrior typically had no knowledge of anything related to knowledge transfer.
He appreciated it. And he was absolutely sure it would co in handy in the future after he broke free from the system.
For now, however, he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it yet.
The system was the system.
It did not care what knowledge his mind held. It cared about skill points, recognized class entries, and unlocked abilities. If the dark magic wasn’t reflected in his panel, the knowledge was theoretical at best, useful for personal understanding but inaccessible through actual casting while the system still governed him.
Then he noticed the notification that had been sitting pending.
[Congratulations! You are the first player to et and speak with a Hero of Masteria! A ga-wide announcent will be made. Would you like to reveal your na?]
"Yes."
It wasn’t even a question. Fa was sothing he could not have too much of.
He could imagine the reaction spreading across the player base right now. He didn’t dwell on it. Thinking of the dark magic knowledge he now had access to, he opened his skill nu just in case.
He had expected no difference.
"What...?" He gasped. He couldn’t help himself. The skill nu had bloated up. Under First Rank, there were nearly double the entries. Various dark magic skills had appeared.
Just as he thought it would be entirely useless, given that he was out of skill points, he saw that the entries were actually lit up.
He read one of them.
[Dark Drop: 20/20]
[Generates a wave of dark energy, saturated with crystals. After a mont, it will crash down.]
AoE Damage...
That would have been incredibly useful for farming enemies.
Lumi wasn’t sure why the skills had points allocated, but he wasn’t complaining. He began to scroll through the list carefully, overviewing what exactly he had. Then he found it among his core skills, sitting apart from everything else with the quiet weight of sothing important.
[Truth]
[Proof of holding the knowledge and mastery of the true form of the magic wielded by Alton, Hero of Light.]
[Any skill points allocated to a Light skill will automatically level the corresponding Dark skill.]
His eyes went wide as he read it. "What...?" He had never, ever heard of the system doing sothing like this. Sure, there were core skills that could slightly modify the behavior of the system, but it was just that. Slightly.
And those took concentrated ti and effort over a recognized skill from a suitable source. What was this...?
He focused on the effect. If the dark skills were automatically levelled, it was in effect doubling his available skill points. If he thought of it as a ga, it was ’blatantly OP’.
But why and how?
His mind trailed back to what Rena said about Alton. The brightest light is found in the darkest dark. The darkest dark is found in the brightest light.
Rena had said it and Alton had believed it deeply enough to build it into the foundational philosophy of his entire magical existence. Light and dark were not opposites to choose between. They were the sa truth approached from two directions simultaneously. You could not master one without the other.
Taken to an extre, the skill represented that very philosophy, existing to enforce that principle at a chanical level, ensuring that every point invested in light would build dark in equal asure.
Every point he had ever put into light magic. Every point he would put in going forward. All of it had been and would be constructing both paths at once, without dividing his resources between them.
He looked around the port.
Rena was still gone. It seed she wouldn’t be reappearing. He had an enormous number of questions and no one present to receive them. He filed them away for rath and headed to the training grounds first.
He found an empty section and stood in it. It was a dirt field, with just a few charred and broken dummies around.
He closed his eyes, ntally accessing his mind. There sat the books on dark magic. He ntally opened one and began reading.
Strictly speaking, he didn’t need to understand a spell to cast it through the system. The system handled execution. But understanding it himself was separate from that, and he considered it non-negotiable. The difference between knowing how to use a tool and understanding how it worked was not a gap he was willing to leave open.
When the day ca that he cast away the system, he would need the knowledge to cast the spells himself.
He read through the chanics of Dark Drop. The principles driving dark energy were entirely unfamiliar and strange to him. After all, he had only ever known light. To learn the opposite was like learning a new language.
Or so he thought it would be.
From a logical perspective, the principles seed entirely new. Only the most fundantal aspects of magic were the sa. Despite it being logically different, it felt familiar, and he was making progress extrely quickly.
Dark energy condensed under a gravitational direction, giving it mass and force. He studied how the targeting functioned and where the precision limitations ca from. He ran through the theory until he was satisfied.
Only then did he cast it. "Dark Drop."
Dark crystals materialized in the air above the specified area. The air surrounding them beca dark and heavy, carrying with them a terrifying weight. Then, they suddenly ca down with a force light magic would never carry.
Boom!
Despite only being a first rank spell hitting dirt, it made a loud, reverberating sound as the spell made impact. The various crystals struck and sent cracks spreading through the surface, leaving clear craters where each one hit.
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