Magical Engineering

Today’s book wasn’t as disused as the last two, and this one was only a couple of minutes' walk from the reference desk. Considering yesterday’s stabbing incident, I preferred being on the main level with plenty of people around. I wasn’t sure I was even willing to go into a sub-basement alone again.

It was possible that it would change once I had a core and actual abilities. For that matter, what was the distinction between magic versus a skill? I had seen them referred to in different ways throughout my reading. Were they essentially the same thing but categorized differently? Another day, another pile of questions was added to the list. I would have to start a physical one at this point, or I would forget some of the smaller ones.

Did I really need to make a physical list if I had constant access to the System interface? Ignoring my reading for the moment, I pulled up the System Menu. “Can I create a to-do list that I can look up on the interface menu somehow?” I asked the System, unsure of how to phrase it properly.

“Yes, Dave, I will add the notes tab to your main menu. Is there anything else you need?” As the System voice returned the answer, I saw a new menu titled Notes appear at the top right of the menu overlay. As I was already deep into my reading, I decided I’d finish that first before trying to populate a to-do list.

Sitting on the table in front of me was the External Core Materials book the System had assigned as my quest, as well as several other books on rudimentary core construction. I planned to thumb through them once I finished off this book. If I was going to create my own special core, I wanted to at least know the usual way most people went about it. Stumbling around blindly seemed like a great way to get myself killed, especially considering the amount of energy that a core was capable of channeling.

Apparently, it was possible to influence the affinities of your core by using the right materials. For the most part, affinities tended to come from your own personality, but by burning through items attuned in different ways, someone could override that. To make it reliable, it required higher-grade items, mana orbs, or something called extracted cores.

This was the first reference I had seen to the latter things, and the book didn’t have any description of them. A majority of the book was dedicated to a series of calculations on how to lay out materials to give the best chance to create the core you wanted. It looked incredibly similar to stoichiometry. Did that mean affinities operated similarly to elements, and it was just a matter of balancing how they formed their bonds in order to get a stable reaction?

For some reason, that realization hammered home a thought that had been nagging at me since we arrived on this planet. Why was all the information contained in textbooks and oral knowledge? Everyone had access to an integrated supercomputer that was somehow involved in all aspects of daily life, so why wasn’t there a collective source of information that came with it? Was there something like Wikipedia, and I just hadn’t come across it yet? I pulled up my Notes and added the line: Ask about a resource similar to Wikipedia or something like the Internet in general.

I moved over to the quest menu and found that I had completed my reading assignment for the day. As well as something called Books, Books, Books, Internet? So, my own curiosity was now triggering quests? That was interesting. I didn’t know what it meant, but it was exciting, nonetheless. The reward, though, really made me wonder what I had started down with this train of thought. All it said was, “Yes, curious, isn’t it?” along with a single point of experience.

I selected my other completed quest and was met with a pop-up that said, “Reward Delayed Until Level 10”. Wasn’t that when Elody said I would unlock my System storage? That meant I wasn’t able to access my physical rewards until I had that feature unlocked. I gained the usual single point of experience and returned to the quest screen to read off the new quests. There were two this time. One below the Books, Books, Books, Internet? quest: A Series of Tubes. I selected it, curious about what potential reward it had, but the description and reward sections just had a single word in each: classified. That was different. I added it to my notes to check over later.

The other was the new entry to my reading chain of quests. I had to find another Karlinovo book about orb socketing interlinks. And that was how I spent the rest of my day: reading book after book that showed up as a new quest after I completed the last one. I had two goals for the day: hit level two before dinner and see if I could get my reading comprehension back to where it had been in college. I wasn’t entirely sure if I had managed the second one, but thanks to the quest system, I knew when the first goal was approaching.