A Person with Morals gets Transported to Another World [LitRPG] [Satire]

I brushed myself off and collected my belongings. The remainder of the day was mine to fill. I didn’t dare to do any dangerous quests without my companions. Recollecting what Blyth had said, I chose to meet up with Eppy at the Mages Society. They would be able to explain to me the process of using magic without the System, something that I hoped my high Mind would be useful for.

I got onto the next bus, but when I tried to pay my fare the driver said, “It’s alright kid, save your pocket money.”

I opened my mouth to protest, then decided against it. At this point, what did it matter? I took my free ride and arrived at the school shortly.

By asking around for directions, I was able to make it to the Mages Society clubroom. The door was distastefully garish, covered in gems and glowing runes in no distinct pattern. On the front was a warning written in bold text reading, ‘SKILL MAGES UNWELCOME’.

I knocked but no answer came, so taking it upon myself I entered. Inside was a mess. Everything was in complete disarray, including the people.

“Just let me cast it on you! You probably won’t die.”

“Probably isn’t good enough.”

My eyes darted around seeing open tomes, spellcasting, and indoor smoking by a certain individual. “Big sis!” I called to Eppy.

The cigarette fell out of her mouth and singed a book at her feet. “Little brother, you came!” She rushed over to me while another member put out the impending inferno that the lit cigarette was about to cause.

“Eppy has a little brother?” a young man with blue hair and bluer eyes said.

“Isn’t that the boy that beat the giraffe?” someone asked.

Eppy took me by the hand and brought me further inside. “I’m glad you made it,” she said. “I was worried the Fighters Club had poached you.”

Club members gathered around me with various levels of intrigue. The blue haired boy was most interested. He put out his hand for me to shake. “Nice to meet you. One day, you might become my little brother too.”

“Not a chance, Tamworth,” said Eppy, shooting him down.

The boy clutched his heart and feigned being shot by an arrow.

“What brings you here, cutie?” an older girl with messy brown hair asked. She was among a dozen people who had me surrounded.

“I’m here to learn about magic. I’m fairly ignorant on the subject, so I hope you lot can be patient with me.” I was told to be at ease, and a chair was brought forth for me to sit on. The seat had a large circular ring of magic on it, so I was hesitant to sit down.

“You can change the seat temperature here,” said Eppy as she pointed to a small rune on the backrest that resembled a dial.

I put my butt on the lukewarm seat, and I was given an impromptu lesson by Eppy and the other students. She flipped her short red hair and began teaching by saying, “Before you learn anything, you must know about our enemies, the dastardly skill mages.”

“That’s a horrible place to start,” said one of the club members.

“Why are we letting Eppy give the lesson?” asked Tamworth.

“Quiet, you buffoons!” Small flames shot out of Eppy’s nostrils and ears. “He’s my little brother, so I get to teach him what I want.”

Even though I was the one who started it, I felt like she was taking this sibling thing too far. It was just meant to be a joke, but now a lot of students believed us to actually be related. Though, I didn’t think I was in a position to refute it anymore.

“Now, listen. These horrible creatures known as skill mages use the System to cast their spells. On the other hand, we purists, we lovers of magic, we arcane intellectuals, we…” she went on for a while, “we do not use the System whatsoever!”

That part I already knew. “You study magic yourselves, right?”

“Exactly, my dear little brother! We don’t need skills or stats or titles. We decide for ourselves who we are. And what are we?” she asked the crowd.

“Study mages!” said Tamworth while the other students replied in a jumbled mess of answers.

“We’ll have to practice that,” commented Eppy. “Anyhow, do you understand that much?”

I did understand it, I thought. But there was a small wrinkle in my understanding. “Wait, so do you not use your LP at all?” I could see that many of the members had a lot of levels and so they must have had a lot of points to use. Refusing to use them seemed so wasteful.

“That is correct. For most of us, anyway.”

My brows furrowed. “Hold on a second, does that mean you have zero levels in Soul? How can you be a mage without any Soul? Wouldn’t that mean you all have just 10 MP? How can you even cast spells with such little mana?”

The surrounding members laughed. “How adorable,” said the brown-haired girl.

“Your mind has obviously been poisoned by those skill mages,” said Eppy. “Let me enlighten you.” Someone rolled out a blackboard and handed Eppy a piece of chalk and a thin pointing stick. She drew the outline of a human on the blackboard. At the centre point of the outline, she made a circle and filled it with chalk. “This is a representation of the mana within us all.”

While Eppy wasn’t looking, another student drew a crude penis on the outline.

“You believe that spells take up a quantified portion of this because the System tells you how much MP a skill requires.”

I nodded my head. I was trying to listen to Eppy closely, but another club member was making funny faces at me from behind her. I said, “I have a skill that takes 10 MP. If I had no Soul levels, I could only cast it once.”

Eppy wagged her finger at me. “That’s because there is no skill required in using skills. No matter how good at magic you become, or how much you study the arcane, it will always cost you 10 MP. That is why I hate the System. Whether you are an apprentice or an archmage, it takes the same amount of mana to do something. You never make progress.”

I was confused. “Isn’t it progress to increase your MP through levelling Soul?”

“No!” Eppy’s hand slapped the chalkboard. She drew a line to the circle representing mana. “Levelling your Soul would simply increase this. It is not progress. It’s no different from an archer who can’t hit a target, so he buys more arrows instead of aiming better.” A club member stood behind Eppy, opening and closing their hand like a duck beak to signify Eppy was talking too much.

“I guess. So what’s the alternative? How is it possible that you don’t run out of mana immediately when casting spells if you only have 10 MP?”

“Conversion! Magic is all about becoming more efficient with the way you convert your mana into spells. An archmage is capable of blowing an entire city to bits with a single drop of mana. If someone was infinitely efficient with their mana conversion, they could cast spells ad libitum. They would never run out of mana.”

My eyes were open wide. ”Really?” That went against all logic for me. In my mind, mana was like a battery. Casting spells drained electricity and eventually the battery would run out. If mana was as Eppy said, was there no limit to what it was capable of?

Eppy raised her arm, pointed to the ceiling, and hit a pose with her hand on her hip. “Now, someone bring out the Natural Inclination for Processing Power Evaluator!”

“What the heck is that?”

Tamworth rolled out some ungodly combination of mechanical machine and magical apparatus. It made a weird pumping noise and crackled with electricity.

“This doesn’t look safe. What is it?” I asked, worried I was about to be the test subject for a weird science experiment. Or I supposed it would be a magic experiment.

“Don’t worry. This is a perfectly harmless testing machine.” She gave the thing a slap and the front fell off. “Hmm, that’s not supposed to happen. Well, whatever, we don’t need that part.”

“Are you going to explain what it is?”

“Isn’t it more fun if you don’t know?”

“No!”

“Boo. You’re no fun.” She patted the machine softer this time. “This thing will assess your talent for converting mana into magic. A number will appear denoting your talent on this screen on the back here. The higher the number, the greater your aptitude to become a study mage.”

“Wow, that’s a pretty convenient machine.” I didn’t really have high hopes for this. I wasn’t a particularly talented individual, so I assumed I would score low.

Eppy tied a glass tube from the machine to my finger. “Alright, you’re all set up.” She pulled a lever and the machine started rattling. The thing was so rickety that I felt like it was going to fall apart at any second. Blue stuff started seeping out of my finger and flowed down the tube. It thankfully wasn’t painful but there was a strange sensation. There was something like a cold numbing feeling in my finger.

“Oh my goodness!” Eppy shouted while staring at the screen on her side.

“What do you see?” I asked. If I knew my luck, she was about to say that she had never seen results this low.

“Holy guac! This is my first time seeing a number like that too. Impressive,” said Tamworth.

More gathered around the screen. Someone whistled when seeing it. “This is unprecedented, right?” another said.

Despite it all, I still refused to believe it was anything worth writing home about. My mind wouldn’t allow me to fall victim to false hope again. I got up and circled around the machine to the other side. My jaw dropped when I saw that the number that appeared on the screen was 1,000,000. I reread the screen half a dozen times to really confirm that I was seeing a million. Maybe I was missing a decimal point somewhere, but no, I wasn’t.

I rejoiced. Finally, there was something remarkable about me. My talent for mana conversion was high, meaning that if I learnt how to cast spells, they would take hardly any mana at all.

Another club member shook his head in disbelief. “It’s incredible. How can someone be so utterly and perfectly average?”

Average?

“Yeah, I’ve never seen someone exactly at one million before. He’s the shining example of an ordinary individual.”

What were these people talking about? “Isn’t this a really high number?” I asked. “Aren’t I talented?”

Eppy explained, “This machine is calibrated such that 1,000,000 is the amount of talent the average person has. No one has ever scored so perfectly unexceptional. You’re a special kid.”

I cupped my face with both hands and inhaled. “Please don’t say that. Why would you make one million the average? That makes no sense.”

“It’s so we can calculate one’s magical affinity down to the millionth degree.”

I dragged my hands down my face. “Do you really need that level of accuracy?”

“No, not really.” Eppy looked sympathetically at me. “Are you disappointed with your score?”

“Yeah. I thought for a moment that I might have an extraordinary ability. I should’ve known…” I hung my head and shuffled my feet to the exit.

“Where are you going?” Eppy held me back by the shoulder.

“I don’t have any magical talent so I’m leaving.”

Eppy puffed and then started laughing. The others joined her soon after. “Do you think the average person doesn’t have talent? Don’t be silly. Tamworth here scored around 500,000 and he’s a splendid mage.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, there are many study mages that have scored below average on this test and still gone on to do amazing things. If we don’t let the System decide our worth, why would we let a stupid machine do the same?”

That rejuvenated my spirits.

The brown-haired girl jumped into the conversation. “The question is, what kind of magic do you want to learn, little boy? I’m dying to know.”

Eppy wrapped her arm around me. “He’s my little brother so of course he’s learning fire magic!” I could smell the tar on her breath.

“I don’t think I have a need for lighting fires,” I said.

A boy with a cat-like mouth pushed his way in front of me. “You gotta learn wind magic,” he said. “You can use it to flip up girls’ skirts.”

I rejected him. “Are you Loftus’ friend by chance?” I wondered.

Tamworth cleared his throat and declared his magical specialisation to be the best. “I learned water magic and it cured the stuffy nose that my allergies gave me.”

I tilted my head. “How did it do that?”

The blue-haired boy pulled out a wooden stick with a crystal on one end. He used the wand and blue light emitted from it. He pointed the wand at his nose and used it to pull out his snot. It came out of his nose as a globule, and he floated it in the air in front of himself.

I resisted the urge to vomit. “Thank you for the demonstration, but please put that away.”

Tamworth shrugged and then used his wand to fling the snot globule into his mouth. The sound of him swallowing made me retch. I tried to think of happy thoughts to keep the contents of my stomach inside myself.

The club members rattled off more disciplines of magic.

“I’m learning divination to see if I’ll ever get a girlfriend in the future.”

“I’m learning necromancy to bring my deceased parents back to life.”

“I’m learning telepathy to read people’s minds and see if they hate me as much as I think they do.”

“Oh my goodness…” All of those were incredibly depressing. “Is there any type of magic that will help me achieve peace and kindness for the world?” I asked.

The club members looked at each other as if I had enquired an absurdity. It was as if they couldn’t fathom why I would want something like that. They did try to think of an answer for me, but they were all unable to. All barring one.

“There was,” said Eppy in response to my question. “Once upon a time, a great mage was displeased with the state of the world. There existed a specific region, between the kingdom of humans and monsters, in which countless lives were taken and much blood was shed. In this area, there was constant fighting and the great mage had had enough of it. He cast a spell that cursed the land with a permanent condition. The condition was that no creature could attack another within that zone. The fighting ended. Both humans and monsters abandoned that land, and herbivorous animals still thrive there because predators cannot prey on them.”

That was it! That was the sort of magic that I wanted to learn. With it, I might have a chance at solving disputes. Dialogue could not occur so long as people were fighting. If I stopped the fighting, people would be forced to speak instead. And through speech, understanding and peace could be attained. “Where can I find magic like that?”

“You can’t.” Eppy lit up another cigarette with a flame from her finger. “The great mage was beheaded by the King for treason. All documentation and records of his spells were destroyed.”

“Another dead end…” I sucked in air through clenched teeth and massaged my neck. Would I be executed if I tried to follow in his footsteps? “I guess there’s no school of magic that I really want to learn.”

The brown-haired girl asked, “If there’s nothing you want to learn, why don’t you just create your own magic?”

“That’s an option?”