Her magic interface was without a doubt one of the most valuable gifts that she had. With it she had full access to Pfortner and Sethrii's considerable databases. Pfortner had the combined knowledge from her old universe, and Sethrii had a large amount of data on this new universe. Armed with this information it was easy for her to find information relevant to innate talents and how to activate them.

Reading through the info she found some important points. Innate talents were inherited from a unique concept in this universe called Heritage. When a child was born, their Heritage was inherited from the father's side of the family, as inheriting one's Heritage from the mother's side of the family was almost unheard of. Your Heritage then acted as a pool of available innate talents that a person could get upon birth.

Innate talents could come in a variety of different themes. According to Sethrii's information, innate talents were almost infinite in variation and would likely continue to diversify. People with the same heritage could get similar innate talents, but there was always some variation, regardless if it was apparent or not. This diversification of innate talents most often took the form of different abilities. Abilities were categorized into passive and active abilities and stemmed from a person's innate talent.

Another aspect that was important for innate talents and using any associated abilities was elemental affinity. Elemental affinity dictated what elements a person could use in their magic. Every person and magical creature had an innate talent and could use magic. However, not everyone had elemental affinity with an element. You could gain elemental affinity by learning about or exposing yourself to the element in question. A good example would be that people and creatures that lived in snowy climates would often have cold elemental affinity.

Naturally, this combination of heritage, innate talents, abilities, and elemental affinity synchronized and affected each other. Each person would have to learn a balance between them to be at their peak strength.

Now, one major point in all this was how people and creatures actually used magic. Every living creature in this universe that was able to use magic drew the power to use it from within themselves. All magically capable beings had something called an inner world that contained their magic essence. Magic essence was what provided the magical energy and power to use abilities, kind of like a battery. Magic essence would not be expended in any way, but would provide a limited amount of magic energy before needing to be refilled, usually by rest, or consumable tonics.

Zoey read that increasing one's magic essence was the key to getting stronger in this universe. The more magic essence you had, the more abilities you could cast, and it let you use stronger abilities as well. Increasing your magic essence was important, and there were a number of different ways of doing this.

There was the meditation method, utilizing magical control techniques to absorb magic essence from the world around you to supplement your own magic essence and gain strength. With a balanced approach, this method was the most stable and the least prone to failure, but was also the slowest.

Another method was to kill another creature and absorb the magic essence stored within the body. This method was considered the most dangerous. If you attempted to absorb the essence of a creature that was stronger than you, you risked your own magic essence rejecting you and going out of control, possibly killing you. Most cases would leave you with a damaged magic essence, severely limiting your future magical capabilities.

Additionally with this method you had to take account of the elemental affinity of the creature. If the elemental affinity did not match your own, the risk of rejection was exponentially higher. If you managed to find a creature with the same elemental affinity as you, and the same approximate strength, absorbing its essence would give you a huge boost in power. This method was the most common on Darren, as the creatures were plentiful, and the magic they used diverse.

There were other methods of increasing your strength, but they were mostly secret techniques passed down through generations or protected by powerful organizations. Not many could get their hands on these techniques, and fewer still could actually use them as they were often tailored specifically for a unique Heritage. This would limit the technique's effectiveness for anyone that did not match the Heritage, and could even cause severe damage to a person's magic essence if the technique was badly matched. If you did manage to match the Heritage of a secret technique, the benefits were usually incredibly powerful.

Zoey did not have a secret technique, but she did have the advantage of her tattoo and her interface. A quick mental query to her interface later and Zoey was looking at a screen that displayed her information.

[HERITAGE AND ELEMENTAL AFFINITY INFO

[HERITAGE | Dark Star Runic Heritage: Tier Unknown | Gaia Human: Tier 3 ????

[ELEMENTAL AFFINITY | Cold: Harmonization 25% | Dark: Harmonization 15% | Unknown: Harmonization 1% ]

Her info had its share of mysteries as well. The Dark Star Runic Heritage was no doubt related to her Dark Star Runic Blood innate talent. The unknown tier aside, everything related to that heritage and innate skill was shrouded in mystery that even this universe couldn't penetrate. The Gaia Human heritage was attributed to her home planet Gaia and was where her Aether Engineer talent originated from.

As the sole survivor of Gaia, it appeared as if the integration process Sethrii had performed has somehow pulled the info from her DNA and merged it with the magic network of this universe, directly upgrading the heritage to Tier 3. Comparing it to other known heritages on Darren she found in the database, her Gaia Human heritage seemed to be fairly normal aside from the strange question marks trailing it in her interface. Seems like there was a secret hiding there as well.

Finally there was her elemental affinity and their harmonization levels. This was fairly straightforward except for the unknown portion... Simply more mysteries to unwind. Elemental affinity and harmonization could be improved be exposing yourself to said element or consuming the essence of a creature that was attuned to the element of choice, no surprise there.

All of this knowledge was crucial for Zoey to utilize her innate talent and abilities. now that she was prepared, it was time to begin!