Every day for the next week, Mary read from Ardur’s Fables. Every day, she stumbled over fewer words. Until she’d mastered the Voice from the Highest Hill:

  This was The Voice from the Highest Hill:

  Once upon a time, there was a little orphan boy. He lived in a small village that was surrounded by many great hills.

  The people of the village never went into these hills. They said there were bandits and beasts and demons living in these hills, and that if you went into the hills you would be lucky to escape with your life.

  The little orphan boy wasn’t treated very well by the townspeople. Some said his parents had died in sin. Others whispered they had been criminals, and so his circumstances were a punishment for the sins of his father. Still others said his parents weren’t dead at all, but had instead gone into the hills to become bandits, mooching off of the charity of the town.

  The little orphan boy tried the best he could to fit in with the town. He did errands for anyone who would accept, even if they often cheated him at the end of the day. He shined their shoes and carried their parcels for them, even if they spat and kicked him when he knelt for them. He even offered to spend time in jail for them, if they were accused of drunken carousing. Though his treatment never truly improved, there was a warmth in his heart that one day they would accept him fully.

  One day, as he was standing at the edge of the fields to keep the wolves at bay for the shepherds, holding nothing but a short wooden stick, he heard a voice from the hills.

  “Young boy,” said the voice, “Young boy, these are not people who deserve you. Follow my voice, and you shall be rewarded. Join me at the top of the Highest Hill.”

  The little orphan boy remembered what everyone told him about the dangers of the hills, so he told the village elders about the voice he had heard. But they mocked and jeered at him.

  “Oh, you are hearing voices! You have gone mad!” they said. So he thought nothing more of it, and took their abuses and ran his errands once more.

  But the next time he was at the edge of the hills, collecting stones to make bear traps, the voice spoke to him again.

  “Young boy, see how they mock and jeer. You have been chosen by my voice, and you shall be given the world you deserve.”

  Once more he ignored the voice. This time, he did not tell the village elders. But he did not heed the call. Again their abuses continued.

  Now the little orphan boy had grown into a young man, and the whispers around him grew only stronger. None of the young ladies could bear to be near him at all, and the other young men often beat him with sticks to ward him away.

  One day, after they dumped him at the edge of the hills, he heard the voice once more.

  “Come to the Highest Hill,” said the voice. “And there you shall find a place for you.”

  So the young man journeyed. He had been beaten by many sticks for a very long time, and now people were starting to refuse his offers to do errands in order to keep him from being in the same houses as their daughters. He climbed the hills, which were empty. No brigands, beasts, or demons bothered him.

  But there at the top of the Highest Hill, there was nothing. But he could see the clear blue sky stretching into infinity, and endless lands beyond his little village. His little village was trapped in a tiny circle of hills, and the rest of the world stretched out before him.

  And so, although there was nothing upon the Highest Hill, the young man walked into the endless horizon and never returned to the village.

  “Why do you like this story, Mary?” Archmund said. He had mixed feelings, personally.

  “You dream of it too,” she said. “I can tell.”

  “Dream of what?”

  “Leaving this place. Leaving Granavale County. Being more than this.”

  “Mary, I literally can’t,” Archmund said. “I’m the heir. I’d be giving up so much in doing that — and you’ve sworn your loyalty because of the whole magic thing.”

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  “I know,” Mary said with a sigh. “I know all of that. But it’s still nice to dream, isn’t it? That a voice will call you to your purpose, and you’ll be able to walk into a world full of possibility?”

  He knew the feeling. But there was just a lot that made sense to do first. Someday he would leave, and he would be free, and nobility would be wings instead of chains. Yet somehow in this life he’d stumbled into achievements that were also burdens.

  She gave his shoulder a comforting squeeze, then went off to practice reading on her own. When she left, he opened up his Gemstone Tablet and tapped on her entry in his stat sheet.

  He jabbed at the entry, trying to see if he could pull any more detail out of it, until after some convoluted sequence of button presses he finally somehow saw her stat sheet.

  Her intelligence had improved. Of that much he was sure.

  It had only been just a week, and she’d never been a slouch by any means, but it wasn’t necessarily normal for someone to go to bare minimum literacy to being able to read a 600-word story, even if they devoted that entire week to practice. Or maybe it was. He had no idea of knowing since he’d never actually studied pedagogy.

  But it was working. The System benefited her, somehow.

  And somehow he could see it.

  He wouldn’t be neglecting his own development by any means.

  He’d been passively charging his harvested Gemgear as much as he could spare, draining himself to exhaustion every night. Thanks to his increased magical reserves, he’d attained an equilibrium state of the following stats:

  Some of these numbers made much less sense than he would’ve liked. But in times like this, it was smartest to prioritize.

  He’d been constantly at risk of dying down in the Dungeon. He wouldn’t have someone to defend him every time he wanted to risk his life.

  The way to go forward was the Quartz of Barrier.

  He stood at the top of the hill beneath the apple tree, and pulled the Quartz of Barrier from his waist pouch.

  A good amount of his magic had infused the Quartz. The way his magic flowed through the Quartz felt distinctly different from how it had in the Ruby. In the Ruby, it had felt like power flowing through a circuit, electrons bumping against each other, directed into vortexes by the crystalline structure.

  In the Quartz, his power built up. He could feel six distinct pools of power where his power collected, as stable as slabs of stone. As more of his power flowed into the Quartz, the harder it was to keep going. Still he persisted — perhaps foolishly and futilely, but it was a method that had worked before with his Ruby.

  It felt like stacking rocks on top of each other to build a wall. The first bit was easy, dragging rocks from around the ground into a straight line, without needing to exert his upper body much at all. But the more that the wall got built, the more he had to use the rest of his body. Lifting the stones in order to build the wall to waist level, and then above his head to build it high enough to block a man.

  After an hour or so of channeling his magic, he checked his Gemstone Tablet. It felt like he had done a full workout. Though his muscles didn’t ache, there was a deep weariness in his soul akin to as if he had just run a marathon.

  He felt a rush of dopaminergic excitement that he immediately tamped down. Was this what his life was reduced to? Straining for an hour to watch a number go up thirty points?

  He’d been a degenerate gamer in his past life. He was certain of that. He loved watching numbers go up. Fake numbers, his stock market portfolio, all sorts of things. If there was a number, he liked to watch it go up.

  But this felt horrifically inefficient. At this current rate, it would take him another month to charge the Quartz to full, and even then he wouldn’t have access to any of its techniques.

  No, there was a much better way to learn that he’d never truly had a chance to implement in his past life:

  Project-based learning.