To Pryte's credit, he had managed to wait until we were back in the dining hall, comfortably seated, and a plate of the leftovers from earlier in front of him before finally voicing the words behind the incredulous look he had given me in the workshop. "Why do I seem to miss all the fun when you start to tamper with your mana channels?"

It hadn't been the question I was expecting. Then again, he was rarely the chastising type. That was more Mel's department. Pryte lived to avoid boredom, and I just happened to be a walking magnet for excitement.

"You've got a lot on your plate," I answered. He, in fact, did not, as he had quickly eaten half of it.

"About to have more. Call Laura and tell her we need her back here in three days. That's the next time the giants are in the Arena. The prince's squad itself should be there. So hopefully we can find Tomthy in a good mood," Pryte said, in between rapid bites of what remained on his plate.

"Well, that's good news at least. Hopefully, we can get both the supplies and the gate we need, which brings me to my next question. How do we get rid of the death curse? Because supplying food for six months is one thing. That only helps the people. We are looking at total animal and plant decimation if we don't do something else," I replied.

"Damn, so Glunderlin wasn't wrong when he mentioned that earlier," Rabyn said as he entered the room carrying another plate of food for Pryte, who pushed his empty one forward at the sight of the new one.

"No, he wasn't. And if you have any ideas on how to get rid of this, I'm all ears," Pryte said.

"I assume I only have the same ones Elody has, but I'm not sure how feasible they would be given the planet's lack of channelers and mana flow," Rabyn replied.

"It's almost too bad this planet has such an abundance of native life. Otherwise, we could just go with the terraforming idea. Sadly no way to do that fast enough to get the animals moved over there either," Karlinovo added. I did my best not to picture spaceships full of animals on route to Mars.

I forced myself to instead focus on the topic at hand. "So, correct me if I'm wrong on any of my assumptions here. If our mana flow covered the planet, we could remove the death curse. If we had enough powerful channelers, we could overcome it until we had the mana flow to remove it. How exactly does a death curse work?" I asked, after laying out the facts as I understood them.

"The exact details of the curse will be difficult to ascertain. Those are generally only known by those who placed it, or high-level curse breakers. And before you ask, no, we cannot possibly afford one," Rabyn said, pausing to glare at me and cut off any interruptions, before continuing. "Generally, a curse works by spreading out from a point, sometimes where the person died, sometimes at random, and begins to rapidly affect more and more of the area, until it blankets the globe. In some cases, it can cover whole universes."

"I have an idea!" Karlinovo shouted, standing up as he yelled. Rabyn's death glare turned toward Karlinovo instead. He didn't seem to notice as he stroked his beard. His mouth was half open and he looked like he was lost in his thoughts again for moment.

"Are ya going to elaborate or just stand there?" Mel asked, annoyance clear in his voice.

Karlinovo seemed to reanimate himself, and started speaking at a lightning pace. "Dave, all those different types of cables you had shown me earlier. Some of them you had said were used for networking things together. How large of a network do you have on the planet?"

"All over, we have undersea cables that connect most of the globe, why?" I asked back. What had he thought of?

"Curses prefer to target mana. This one is just particularly weak due to the level of the Orcs involved. That's why it isn't able to do anything here with the power of Cecile's greenhouses, and likely the moose as well," he started to explain. It clicked into my brain just what his idea was, a split second before he finished it. "We need to turn all of your undersea cables into a mana beacon. It should drastically weaken the curse across the globe."

"What do we need to do it, and how soon do you think we can start?" I asked, ecstatic at the idea, as the door to the hall banged open.

"Drive a spike through the center of the planet. It should improve the signal," Yorela said as she walked into the room, joining us at the table.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"She's right. I've heard of people using that in chaotic space to distract from the horrors and buy time for their own escape. We can modify the idea for use here. We will need to attach several anchoring points to the spike back into the cables, but this should work," Karlinovo replied, his beard contorting in an odd-looking smile.

"We're going to need more people to plan something like this, and it's still likely going to take months, but this may just save the planet's ecosystem," I said as I pulled out one of the phones we had been left with from my System storage. "Calling Laura, we need to get this started now."

"Hello," Laura answered after two rings. She sounded surprised. I guessed she hadn't been expecting to hear from me quite so soon.

"Good news, we have a potential plan to get rid of the curse before we would run out of supplies from the Giants, assuming, of course, we can make that agreement. We need you here as soon as the gate is in place, no later than three days. I also need you to bring someone with you who can help work out a list of experts we will need to help us construct this plan," I said, speaking quickly so as not to give her a moment to cut me off.

"Fine, I can do that. Quarilyn is already working on setting up the gate in a secure room. It should be ready tomorrow. Connie is still working on collecting materials for trading, but I assume those won't be needed until we finalize an agreement," she replied.

"Probably not, but we will need her back, as we have to fight in the Arena again in order to gain access to where we need to go. So let her know she has to be here within three days," I said.

"Fine, anything else you need?" Her voice had taken on the tone it did when she needed to get to work on something else. It usually meant she thought I was over-explaining something. It was a feeling I had gotten very used to toward the end of our marriage.

"No, thank you," I said, ending the call and letting her escape.

"That sounded like it went well enough," Pryte said the moment I had placed the phone back into my storage.

"As well as could be expected. It's going to be very interesting trying to travel with her to the Spire. But since I have you all here, and we have the curse thing as solved as we can get it at the moment, I have a different series of questions. I need someone to explain to me exactly what a core pearl and a transcendence are." I was tired of being in the dark on the topics. I knew it was mostly my fault for not asking the first time I had heard it, but it just hadn't seemed like an important topic compared to everything else that was happening at the time.

"No one has told you what those are yet? Man, maybe we should just send you to one of our academies for a while. The education system is much better there," Yorela said, snark dripping with every word.

"There hasn't been much time for a formal education, not to mention the vast majority of people get nothing like what we have in our own world," Elody replied, shaking her head at Yorela, before turning to me and continuing. "I'll start with transcendence as core pearls are a result of that."

"Okay, then what is it?" I asked. Yorela may not have been serious about the academy, but I was sorely tempted to visit one if I could one day.

"Once your core reaches S-grade, you will have the option to transcend. It's not a simple yes or no choice either. There's a reason none of us have done it here. First off, when you finally accomplish it, you're reset all the way back to an F-grade. That's the primary downside. Now, where it becomes difficult is that you need to have a deeper understanding, usually called an insight, about one of your mana orbs. Doing this allows you to ingest that orb into your core itself, turning it into a core pearl." Elody paused there and looked at me, likely waiting for any further questions.

I had several. "Wait, how does that work with me and the many orbs I have, and what exactly does a core pearl do anyway?" I was also curious how that played into awakening a mana orb, but that didn't matter at the moment, and I doubted she had any idea.

"It will almost certainly still only be one, thanks to the insight portion required. The pearl continues to function exactly as the orb did before, except now it's directly part of you. For most people, this is a huge boon as it's the first time they can easily access two orbs at once, but less so for you. There is also a significant power boost beyond that, though, as the core pearl drastically increases the mana your core is able to hold, as well as strengthens the output," she finished.

"Generally, this is the stage where people start to strongly push their mana and class growth directions in a way uniquely tailored to them. The amount of breakthroughs that happen quickly once you've formed your first pearl, I think, will stagger even you," Rabyn added.

"So you said first. I assume that means I can repeat the process? Is there a level beyond transcendence?" There had to be. It seemed like things never ended here.

"Probably, or it could just be the truly personalized path people move themselves onto at that point. It's very hard to say, and unless you want to risk talking to people who could not only kill us, they could destroy the entire planet we are standing on without breaking a sweat, you aren't going to get a better answer than that," Yorela replied. I did appreciate the directness of her answers, even if they tended to be a bit dramatic.

A System message popped into my view.

__________

Core energy is insufficient for the current load.

Core Crash will occur within one hour.

__________

Far too many people are far too comfortable telling others they just need to wait a little longer to be treated like an equal. Those people were never really on your side. They just didn't want to be seen as the bad guy. Personally, I think the trick there is just not to be one.

Why I Learned to Box by Glorinious Jole

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