Innate Talent
My reasoning for writing the post the way I did was simple.
Suppose I had just gone ahead and titled it something plain, like "Registered as an Adventurer." Would ordinary people actually click on that?
In a world where countless people died every single day, most of them couldn't be bothered to check a post like that. There was simply no perceived value in it.
That was why the title had to be written in the most clickbait, forum-flavored way possible — as if I knew nothing whatsoever about the dangers of adventuring and had only the romantic fantasy in my head.
Only then could I tug at people's sympathy and milk information out of them.
Granted, I could have worked the same angle in person, but that felt a little off. I'd never exactly been smooth talker in real life.
"Hm."
With those thoughts in mind, I extended my stay at the inn by a week to wait for the comments to roll in.
It cost me a fair bit of extra coin.
Creeeak—
With the characteristic mournful groan of an old door, I arrived at my room.
Just in case, I'd set up alarm and defensive magic around it, and fortunately there was no trace of either having been triggered.
Of course, a mage of a higher caliber than me could theoretically dispel those wards and restore them without a hint, but… there was no reason for a mage of that level to be in Barukh District 3 in the first place.
They'd better not be, anyway.
It was a little embarrassing to admit to others, but I could reasonably call myself a fairly competent mage. The kind who'd be handed an important post if I joined the imperial court.
Lost in such thoughts, I lay down on the bed and checked the comments.
An attention-grabbing title, with a body that begged with utmost politeness. Act rude up front, act sweet at the back, and people are far more likely to humor you.
"Oh."
The last comment felt like it was about to carry genuinely useful information, so I replied on the spot.
And a short while later, a very long comment arrived.
"Oh… quite the wall-of-text guy."
Granted, I had asked for it, but I couldn't help thinking how nice it would've been if he'd split that into a few separate comments.
I didn't leave a comment saying so, though. From my end, the fact that he'd bothered to write it all out at all was gratitude enough.
With that settled, this time I searched for posts by the user ExplosiveStealth. I was curious whether she'd written anything, and I wanted to know how my teacher was doing lately.
But not a single post turned up.
"Tch."
What a shame. If she'd written anything, I could at least have gleaned what she'd been up to.
It wasn't that I couldn't contact her privately. The problem was that if someone had no posts on the gallery at all, there was no way to trigger an alert to them. That was why I'd been unable to reach her all this time.
"Hm."
So musing, I kept scrolling through posts. By the time I'd read my fill, I was getting sleepy, so I decided to check just one more before turning in.
"Huh?"
Of all places, this was where I found my teacher.
And she was using a completely different tone from the one she'd used talking to me.
Come to think of it, that is how she talked on the gallery.
Apparently Sylvia kept her gallery persona and her real-life self strictly separated. A thoroughly correct attitude, if you asked me. There was no need to take the gallery too seriously — using it purely "for fun" was the healthiest approach.
In that sense, Sylvia's browsing habits were positively exemplary. I'd actually seen someone take their forum obsession so far that they ended up literally executed for it.
Soldiers, especially, had a lot of cases like that. People who enlisted out of desperation to make a living, then stupidly leaked military secrets.
To be fair, the leak itself wasn't all that serious — but the photo of that user's severed head, posted to the gallery purely as punishment for leaking anything at all, most certainly did make an appearance.
Which is exactly why the military is kind of…
So thinking, I moved to leave a comment of my own—
—and stopped.
"Damn it."
I still hadn't heard back from Sylvia.
If I replied here, Sylvia would get the alert — but so would DieILLEGAL. That was the problem.
If they found out I had a disciple of my own, who knew what kind of disadvantage I might face. Not that anything like that seemed likely… but there was no harm in being careful.
Besides, I knew better than anyone that Sylvia was nowhere near the level where she'd meet a gruesome end in some back alley.
With those thoughts, I pulled a single book from my Subspace Pouch.
Advanced Magic I
Nothing more than that was written on the cover. But I knew it was anything but simple, title notwithstanding.
For one thing, it was Advanced Magic. Difficult was a given.
"Hmm… honestly, I could have started this ages ago."
At my level, I could have moved on to the advanced material long ago, but for whatever reason, Sylvia had kept telling me to review the fundamentals instead.
Not that I had any reason to object. I hadn't felt like studying back then.
Granted, I didn't feel like studying now, either.
So thinking, I began reading Advanced Magic I.
"Oh… so that's how it works."
The content of Advanced Magic I was, in a sense, very simple. Simple yet difficult.
Where the fundamentals of magic demanded innate talent, the advanced stages demanded sheer memorization. So that was why Sylvia always said that casting high-tier magic required a monstrous brain. There was a reason she said it.
"Hm… like this?"
I constructed a spell-form spanning two full pages, then poured mana into it. Immediately, the scratch wound on my arm from the tree branch earlier healed over in moments.
So this was the spell-form called Heal, presumably. Priests were people who specialized in studying and researching nothing but this category of spell-form — which meant that, in theory, a sharp-brained mage could double as a priest.
Of course, the two disciplines had a different flavor to them.
And so I explored magic through the night.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
"Ah, I pulled an all-nighter."
Honestly speaking, I wasn't all that interested in magic.
The reason was simple: what I had was already enough to survive.
But things were different now. The Demon King had been resurrected, which meant I had to prepare as well. To do that, I needed to fully master the two books Sylvia had left me.
"…Doesn't really seem that hard, though."
Anyone else would call it a shameless flex, but from where I stood, it didn't look especially difficult. If anything, the fundamentals had been harder — the fundamentals were vague and slippery, while the advanced material just hammered one thing into your head: memorize this.
So, holed up in the corner of my room, eating and drinking at proper intervals for three whole days, I succeeded in mastering the fundamentals-and-then-some of magic.
And the moment I did, I felt my realm of mastery rise a level. At this point, I could probably claim to be a fingernail's width weaker than a Grand Mage.
With that satisfied thought, I stepped out of my room.
It had been a while — time for a shower.