With little else to do while she waited, Sophie gently poked at each item on the table with her mana. She was especially careful not to form a connection to them in any way since she wasn’t sure if that was safe yet. Instead, she merely determined how corrupted each one seemed.

“Can I move them?” she asked, after she had satisfied her curiosity and had a general idea of the levels of corruption in each – at least compared to one another.

“Sure, knock yourself out. As long as you’re wearing the gloves, they’re relatively safe to handle,” Linden replied.

Sophie didn’t like the sound of the word relatively, so she gingerly moved each piece with the very tips of her fingers. She thought she probably shouldn’t move them at all until Sterling showed up, but she sort of couldn’t help herself. She began to organize them by their level of corruption, lining them all up in row. The locket felt like it had significantly more corruption than anything else on the table. Strangely enough, the item that felt the least corrupted was a small dagger. Glancing down at the assortment offered no real insights to Sophie.

“So where did you find all of these things anyway?” she asked. She had been dying to know, but she hated to ask in front of Calli. She was sure the other woman would just pressure her to go on quests, and Sophie really wasn’t the questing sort of person.

“I take it you’ve never been on a quest before,” Linden began.

Sophie shook her head. “Nope, I haven’t even been out of Caulis since I became a priestess.” That seemed safe enough to tell him. It was at least the truth.

“Well, there are many different types of quests, but a lot of them deal with corrupted areas in some way or another.” Linden gesture to the items on the table. “These items specifically – well, I got these out of a dungeon.” He said it with no small amount of pride, although most of the effect was lost on Sophie.

“A dungeon?” It sounded like something out of a video game, but what didn’t in this strange fantasy world?

Linden nodded. “Yep, that’s what we call places that have a higher level of corruption. Corruption can happen anywhere of course, but there are certain places in the world that have higher levels of it naturally. There are also the Corrupted Lands to the west – but that’s a bit of a different story. Besides, only the highest level teams go there.”

Sophie’s head spun with the new information. Up until this point, she hadn’t considered the idea that corruption could be so… widespread in the world. “So what’s the point of going into the dungeons then? Can’t they just be sealed off or purified?”

“Sure,” Linden replied. “You’ve got the right idea. Smaller ones typically can be purified and then sealed off, which is what my team went out to do. But some of the larger areas can only be contained. We’re still not quite sure what causes corruption in the first place… Of course plenty of people have been studying it for years and have a lot of different theories, but some places in the world seem to generate tons of it naturally. We can’t purify those places entirely, but we can’t just leave them alone, either, since corruption spreads. Not only that, but when corruption settles in deep enough, it can even spawn creatures and cause issues with nearby cities or settlements.”

Sophie took in all of this information with no small amount of concern. The world outside of her shrine seemed somehow darker and more scary than she realized. Now she really had no interest in going on quests.

“So where do all these items come in then?”

“I found them in the dungeon we were clearing!” Linden explained. “Time seems to work a bit differently in the dungeons, you see. So some of these items are ancient artifacts, like this looks to be Dwarven-made –” He gestured at the axe. “But the locket probably came off another adventure. It’s hard to say. I’m no expert in these things. We’d have to get a Crafter or a specialist in Dwarven weapons to take a look at them to really know their worth. But you typically find things like this in the course of clearing out a dungeon.”

“And it’s just okay for you to… take these things?” Sophie asked, skeptical. And why would they just be lying about the place?

Linden began to reply, but then the door swung open, drawing both of their attention away from the items on the table.

Calli barreled through the door, practically pulling the unspecialized mage Sophie had met previously behind her. He was wearing similar robes as before, with his long blond hair pulled back, but this time he looked extremely annoyed. “I simply do not have the time for this Calliandra,” he complained, but it was completely ineffective against Calli’s determination.

“It will literally only take a minute. Just tell her what to do.”

Calli shoved him in the general direction of the items on the table, and he barely gave Sophie a second glance once he saw the assortment laid out there.

“Quite a find,” he murmured, bending down to peer closer at the locket in particular. Sophie felt the oddest urge as if she should pull him away from the thing. It felt…

Well, it felt wrong.

“Sterling! How’s it going?” Linden asked, clapping him on the shoulder and breaking his concentration on the items.

“Fine, fine. You know how it is. Nothing too exciting happening in Caulis – or, no, perhaps that’s untrue.” Sterling’s eyes turned to Sophie finally. “I suppose we did have a priestess join us after all.”

Sophie’s face heated at the remark. She lifted a hand in hesitant greeting. “Hello again.”

Sterling nodded in recognition, but immediately turned back to Linden. “So these are all from your latest run?”

“Yep,” Linden said proudly, detailing his expedition. Sophie resisted the urge to roll her eyes. So much for being too busy to help her learn purification.

Calli made her way over to Sophie and nudged her. “Any luck?”

Sophie shook her head. “Not really, I can sort of tell that they each have different levels of corruption, but that’s about it. I’m not sure what to do with them.”

“Well, that’s better than me,” Calli confided.

“You can’t tell at all?”

Calli shook her head. “Not really. But mana sensing isn’t my specialty. There’s not much need for it as a clerk.”

Sophie supposed that made sense. She was about to ask Calli more about her job as a clerk, when Sterling finally turned back to them both. He gestured at Sophie’s gloved hands and made a disparaging noise. “Well, those won’t do you any good at all.”

Sophie held up her hands in confusion. “What? Why not?”

Sterling chuckled and shook his head. “I suppose the spirit hasn’t been teaching you much. Priestesses need to interact directly with the corrupted mana to do any good. You’ll have to push your own mana into the object and burn the corruption out of it. The gloves will only make it more difficult, especially at a low level.”

Sophie pulled off gloves, handing them back to Calli. “Push my mana into it?” It sounded like what she was doing with the mana lamps or the Magewood. “But these items already feel full of mana.” And besides that, they seemed quite resistant to Sophie’s mana.

“It’s not the same as channeling.” He sighed. “I do wish I could show you, but unfortunately I don’t have the ability to purify mana. It’s a priestess-only sort of thing. Or a priest I suppose. You would need to target the corrupted mana with intent to purify it, and it should burn away the corruption.”

Sophie frowned down at the items on the table. She made her way back to the small dagger that seemed less corrupt than the others. “And it’s okay to touch it?”

Sterling nodded. “For you it is. Just don’t pull on the mana, of course.”

Right. That seemed obvious. “What would happen if I did?”

Sterling looked thoughtful at the question. “Hmm, perhaps not much at first. Humans can tolerate quite a bit of corruption before they start to go mad. But it’s best not to risk it. A higher level priestess could burn the corruption out of herself, of course, but you’ll have a long way to go before you’re able to do that sort of thing.”

Well that was slightly more comforting. Sophie had been thinking of the corruption as an all-or-nothing sort of thing – like if she became corrupted, even a little bit, then something awful would happen. But it sounded like it wasn’t quite so simplistic as that. Still –

“I’ll be careful,” she promised, echoing what she had told Elowen.

She began by reaching her mana out to the dagger, but she immediately ran into resistance when she encountered the corrupted mana. Even though it was far less corrupted than some of the other items on the table, her own mana shied away from it – or perhaps the corrupted mana repelled her own.

She tried pushing a bit harder at it, feeling like her mana reserves were draining with effort, even as she felt like she was making no progress at all.

“Hold up there,” Sterling interrupted her. “You’re quite uncontrolled – has the spirit really been teaching you nothing?”

Sophie felt annoyed at the unspecialized’s constant jabs at Elowen, but she tried to repress her irritation. “Uncontrolled?” she asked instead.

“Mana control is of the utmost importance, especially when you have so little of it as a new class. Ideally as a priestess, you would be working on meditation and focus to improve your control. You’re simply pushing most of your mana into the environment, as it is. Just completely wasting it.”

She… was?

Sophie vaguely recalled Elowen mentioning something along those lines, but they never got around to anything like meditation. She frowned. She would have to ask further when she got back to the shrine.

Sterling shook his head. “I suppose I don’t know much about the specifics of priestess training, but I could at least show you the basics of mana control.”

Calli gave Sophie an encouraging nod, which somehow felt completely un-encouraging given the source. “Um, sure,” Sophie agreed. “If you truly don’t mind. I suppose I do need some practice…”

“Well not now. I really do have to go.” He shot Calli an annoyed look. “I have a meeting across town, but someone intercepted me.”

“Whoops,” Calli said, sounding completely unapologetic. “How about tomorrow then?”

Sophie glanced at Calli. “Tomorrow?” she asked. It wasn’t as if she had plans, but –

“Tomorrow is fine,” Sterling replied, as if he knew better than to argue with Calli. “Meet me at The Cracked Coin. Let’s say noon. We’ll go over some of the basics.”

“The Cracked Coin…?” Sophie asked, the name sounding vaguely familiar to her for some reason, and then she remembered – the little tavern she had gone to once before. In the beginning. “Oh! I know where that is!”

But meeting in a tavern to practice mana control? She wasn’t so sure about that.

“Great,” he said, turning to go. “You’ll be fine practicing as you are today, although I doubt you’ll get anywhere.”

Sophie felt even more annoyed at the parting comment as Sterling said his goodbyes to Linden. Couldn’t he have at least given her something to work with? She desperately wanted to keep trying just to prove him wrong.

“I’m going to head out, too,” Linden said after Sterling left. “I’m supposed to meet up with Ryland –”

“That’s fine,” Calli cut in. “You’re welcome to stay back here for as long as you’d like, Sophie. I’ve got to get back to the front, too, but I’ll be sure to peek in if I don’t hear from you for a while. Just don’t go nearly passing out on us again, okay?”

Sophie nodded. “Okay,” she agreed, and with that Calli and Linden left her to her own devices to try to figure out anything with the corrupted items.