“Air mana,” I said to Mnemosyne.

Mnemosyne looked at me in confusion, “What do you mean?”

I sighed, “We need to get air mana first. I don’t think either of us needs to breathe here, you are a spirit and this is my soul space. Plants need to breathe, though. They take in the carbon dioxide that animals breathe out, and breath out the oxygen we need to breathe in to live.”

Mnemosyne nods, “That makes sense. I don’t think we can have livestock in your soul space. Djinni can live physically inside of their own soul space, but they are a special case, all of their power flows through and from their personal space, and is generally chained to their wielder.”

I nodded and stepped on my pride. Of course, turning my soul space into a real storage space wasn’t particularly unique. It was useful, but I had to put aside the isekai mindset or it was going to get me killed. I was not the chosen one, destined to stop the forces of evil with just my wit, my pluck, and some kind of totally original ability that no one had ever seen before.

If I was going to stop whatever force it is that is trying to wreck my worlds, it would be dependent upon what I do, the choices I make, the growth I create, and my own efforts, not what I am… which, in the end, is just a somewhat handicapped guy stuck in the wrong place at the right time. Fear may be the mind-killer, but pride is the first and most deadly of the seven sins.

I opened the scroll again. It was silvery, filled with diagrams and Draconic ideograms. There were small circles surrounded by script and some kind of a larger circle with a formation or diagram drawn around it. Mnemosyne was able to understand some of it, but except for the draconic symbols for ‘dantian’, ‘meridians’, and ‘quintessence’, it apparently was too far outside of her experience to even help translate for me.

The draconic words simply did not go together for her, since they apparently required a context that she didn’t have. The only thing she’d been able to glean was the verb for ‘channel’, which was surprisingly useful, but until I knew more, even having all of my meridians opened with quintessence flowing through them did little more than improving my physical attributes.

Mnemosyne sighed, “I am starting to wonder if that thing is even going to be useful. I mean, it contains many more verbs, but they are used in structures and contexts that just don’t match the real world or magic in any way. It is like that computer language you were telling me about, it’s just a way to manipulate the math inside of the energy, but without any hooks to the energy itself, or a way to display it, it’s just code.”

I nodded and tried looking at it a different way. A lot of the pictograms and the way they were structured could apply in a similar way to the concepts of object-oriented programming, and when you compared it to the actual geometry of my soul space, there appeared to be some kind of physics at work. Why did the little coils of aspects rotate the way they did, why did they orbit my core in one direction, while the core itself rotated in another? Why the fixed, two-dimensional orbits in a three-dimensional space? Why was quintessence either fixed around my core or free-floating in certain streams? There had to be some reason behind it, but either I wasn’t smart enough to grasp the mathematical relationships, or there was simply something I was missing.

I finally grew frustrated enough after a few minutes to roll the scroll back up. I wasn’t a mathematical genius by any means. I was able to grasp large math questions and resolve them correctly because I was very fast at breaking them down and could do them in my ‘zone’, and was very good at redefining physical properties into simple mathematical values, but I still had to actually DO the math in my head.

Figuring out the cube of the earth’s diameter still required knowing that diameter and knowing how cube values worked… my math formulae were often different from that taught in school, which had cost me when teachers demanded I show my work, but I still had to know them. It was a party trick. I couldn’t do orbital dynamics in my head without knowing how orbital dynamics calculations worked and related to each other, which I did, but those massive math questions the real mathematicians wrestled with in quantum physics and even the biological sciences? I just didn’t understand how they related to each other.

“You know, the problem is, the only way I am going to be able to figure out some of these words is to already know what they mean before I even try to figure them out. It’s a massive recursive dilemma. It’s like, I can see that this relates to that.” I waved the scroll towards my core and orbiting essence structures, “but it’s like having a car key in my hand with the symbol of a Mercedes on the fob, and then looking at a Mercedes truck, and then trying to get the two together to teach me how to drive, without even knowing where the key is supposed to go.”

Mnemosyne looked at me with a little confusion, but nodded, “So, maybe there’s something in your evolutions that can help? I mean, your foundation is built like a skill, attached to the beginning foundation trait, maybe there’s some way to attach some other traits or something is missing, like your silver cord evolution?”

I nodded and looked at the mass of essence potential nodes that I had previously identified as potential evolutions. They were mostly attached to my traits like buds on a tree, but I ignored the ones attached to kobold evolutions. Going that route would give me greater facility with the things that only the kobold bloodline provided, like better claws and more specializations, and some of them I hated to ignore, but I didn’t want to become more optimized as a monster.

They were focal points and didn’t have any values assigned to them until I figured out what they did and created a name to label them, although when they became defined there always seemed to be a draconic adjective that could be applied.

As I looked them over, I asked Mnemosyne, “You know, we have found verbs, but they always seem to be difficult to use on their own. Languages are structured in parts, whether it’s Rhydian or computer languages. Is there a way to look for, say, adverbs or logic? If I could create a knot to define ‘and’, or ‘without’, it might allow me to push my mana way farther. In fact, in most object-oriented languages, it’s impossible to even do anything without things like and, not, is equal to, more, less, and value determinations. I am not a coder, but I could see things already that make these useful, and it might help me decode the scroll.”

Mnemosyne nodded, “I could look into that?” and then smiled, “I think those might actually be the clue to unlocking more aspects.”

I nodded and started assigning values to my evolution nodes.

Spiritual was the hardest, so I started with it. Get the toughest finished first, so the easy is a privilege. I noticed something that almost staggered me.

I had several evolutions unlocked that I had not noticed. There was one for making my soul space into a physical domain, and pretty much all of my essence work, unlocking my meridians and charging my different systems with quintessence.

I needed to confirm this. “Mnemosyne?” I asked her.

“Hmm?” she answered absently, poking and examining the draconic language glob.

“My evolutions. It seems like I can unlock them by means other than charging them with quintessence. I am confused. Am I wasting quintessence by unlocking evolutions?”

Mnemosyne shrugged, “Sort of, I guess? They are shortcuts to certain states. That’s actually how bands work. Classes feed quintessence into certain nodes, as do some of their accolades and gifts and stuff. That’s why adventurers don’t get evolutions. Evolutions of one sort lock out evolutions of another sort. Classes do the same thing. For example, if you are a priest that has your nodes opened up for divine mana, obviously it locks out the arcane nodes.”

“So, basically evolution nodes are shortcuts to the different ways your body and mind can develop, but you can do that without spending quintessence?”

She nodded again, “A lot of them are. That’s how the bands work. I think that’s how their statistic system works. Each time they level, it develops a new node onto your class and feeds energy into the evolution to enhance strength, reflexes, that sort of thing. That was how the elves' slave spell originally worked, it allowed them to take complete control of the evolution system, and they could use it to guide their pet’s development, create loyalty, and they could even graft on evolutions that were custom-made or came from other creatures.”

She continued, “Most evolutions in one area will stop development in another. If you had chosen Beefy, for example, That would have cut off some of your other bloodline potentials. But that’s completely normal. As I mentioned before, Quintessence tends to gravitate toward order and definition. When you take the time to develop your abilities in other ways, the quintessence never stabilizes, so it doesn’t shut down as many pathways.”

“So basically, I stop my own potential if I use evolutions?”

She shrugged, “yes, that’s kind of normal. I mean, a Wizard wants to expand their mana pool as quickly as possible, so they tend to develop their evolutions towards mana development. Health gains would apply to increasing their ability to contain mana instead of increasing their body mass. Sometimes even doing it the hard way hinders some development too, like if a bodybuilder builds huge muscles it can reduce their flexibility.”

Apparently, she didn’t understand my worry. “What I mean is, are all of these shortcuts cutting off development in other areas?”

Mnemosyne shook her head. “No. some of them open up development in other areas. A good rule of thumb though is that if you get a huge boost from a particular evolution, it’s taking that boost from something else. It’s like taking out a loan. You are borrowing from your potential to get power right now. You can down the road pay it back in other ways, but you never get that potential back.”

She smiled, focussing more fully on me as she realized, finally, what I was asking. “You are trying to stay balanced, and I understand. I think, perhaps, you should talk to a druid. They know a ton more about how stuff like that works than I do. But I do know that from the moment of conception, every living thing starts opening up nodes that shut off other parts. Being a human is a node, and shuts off your potential to be born as a bird, or an ant.”

Mnemosyne sighed, “That’s how and why every living thing uses and needs quintessence. Without it, you cannot create nodes of any kind. Universes that have their essence fully defined are utterly ordered, and life cannot exist in any form without being able to grow and change. Even your soul mismatch formed nodes, your unique mind? But your skills and every part of you are formed from evolution nodes, in the beginning. In your soul space, some nodes cannot be formed in any other way than by creating them and giving them quintessence.”

“Every single moment leaves an impression on the energy of the universe. Related experience tends to clump them together. When they clump together enough, we can manipulate them. Quintessence that forms into trait potential, magic, is what we call mana. If it forms from life experiences it becomes skills, and if it forms into physical form it becomes matter or attributes of some kind, but in the end, it all starts as the same energy.”

That sounded almost religious, but it also jibed with what I knew about physics. In the end, everything was potential energy.

Mnemosyne pointed at my character sheet and giggled, “Oh, by the way, you know one of those skills we kind of kept off to one side because it wasn’t really useful here? Well, you just merged it into your magical lore and enhanced it. Your quantum mechanics and energy physics knowledge just merged with magical lore and boosted it to adept good.”

“That’s what I am talking about. You related them enough that they clumped together. That’s why we can clump skills that way. If they relate enough, they sort of stick together, like gravity. There’s a reason I said that will is everything because it allows us to move around and relate essence things in different ways like it’s a sort of invisible force that only souls possess. That’s how druids work… They help you redefine your biological nodes so they work together in different ways, and can free up physical potentials that might have shut off other potentials, as long as they are not too far advanced. Will is everything, and druids have very strong wills, but some things are too strong for even their will to overcome.”

I smiled at Mnemosyne, “I need to leave, I still have a few things to do before we go and the girls are probably wondering why I have been here for an hour, but do me a favor? If I am about to open up a node that shuts down the potential to become human again or overlook one that offers it, could you warn me?”

Mnemosyne nodded, “That’s my job, now that I know what to look for. If you get overloaded again, do you want me to specifically look in that direction?”

“That’s exactly right.” I nodded to her and then smiled as I returned to the real world.

Ugh. Stinky, smelly carcass. Cassie was fighting an imaginary opponent, I think, swinging her hammer around, and Shiana was keeping watch.

I started cutting again, carefully digging out the bits that my [observe] informed me were valuable, including the rather large core and a nasty bit in the intestines, as well as shuffling the meat and several bones into my storage. It was worth doing. The special objects that adventurers could loot often contained magical effects, but the meat was just meat. Draining essence seemed to be a part of the band’s function, and I assumed that it just absorbed everything magical and replaced it with predetermined objects like a spell might, which is why I always did as much preparation as I could before I let the girls loot.

It took another hour, but with experience and my natural dexterity cleaning the carcass was incredibly fast compared to doing it back on earth. I nodded to Shiana since her wilderness lore skill allowed her to gain more from the looting, and she brushed a hand over the remains, causing them to vanish with a sparkle that, to my [observe] disappeared into her band, leaving behind several skins, a pile of even more meat, a skull, and several alchemical components. The objects HAD to have been created since the thing only had two eyes, one had been destroyed by Shiana’s arrow, I had stored the other, and somehow there were two more ‘drake eye’ components in the stack, as well as a pile of coins.

It was stupid but gave a little more insight into the way the bands work.

For comprehending a deeply flawed methodology and perversity, your logic has improved to journeyman mediocre

By unspoken concession, Shiana and I allowed Cassie to keep the coins. She was by far the most intimidating among us and knew more about precious metals. She also had higher social and trading skills than either of us and could get a better price when we needed to buy something, unless Shiana felt like waving her assets around, a tactic I was not going to ask of her.

Well, that and Cassie seemed to take a great deal of enjoyment from scooping stacks of silver, copper, and the occasional gold piece into her pouch. I could certainly understand that, especially if I could do the same thing, but few people would even talk to a kobold, let alone choose to engage in commerce with them.

I was starting to wonder if the whole ‘logic’ skill was just an illusion, an advancement bone she threw to me to have a reason to throw me a message? Or maybe it was a combination of an actual comprehension skill and Mnemosyne’s growing sense of humor? That might explain why she hadn’t suggested enhancing it.

You have successfully empathized with two other people’s personalities based on limited context, and improved your socializing skill to apprentice fair. You have also discovered a secret of the universe, that Mnemosyne has a sense of humor, and improved your logic to journeyman fair.

What kind of socializing score do most people have? I thought to her, curiously.

Among most humans, socializing skills break into the novice ranks after they become toddlers and start to learn speech. Of course, toddlers and younger have a massive bonus due to their innate appeal that allows them to use it at a much higher rank for determining initial reputation. Usually, they break into apprentice after puberty, and by adulthood, many are well into the journeyman ranks, unless they spend their teenage years private and withdrawn.

So that would make me?

Now? With your penalties from being a monster race and your unique mind, slightly more personable, on average, than an 8-year-old boy. Throwing a tantrum.

Great. That was wonderful to know. No wonder few people wanted to socialize.

We started heading toward the town. I was naturally fast, Shiana had something called ranger’s step that allowed her to move more quickly and without leaving any trail, and Cassie had gotten something called battle positioning which improved her speed. Right now we could move pretty well, far faster than the party had traveled before, which is why we had reached Boar’s Nest in four days instead of the week I had assumed.

Despite my snickered assumptions, the Boar’s Nest was not a run-down dive bar owned by a little meatball in a white suit. It was a large and well-maintained trading post town, with a ten-foot stone wall surmounted by another ten feet of sharpened log picketing, and an alert, well-maintained look to both the walls and guards.

The town was not square but was curved into a bit of an arc, with one heavy gate on the inner curve of the arc. There were four towers, also with stone bases attached to the walls, with a much taller stripped long frameworks above. The upper portions of the tower strongly resembled watchtowers around a prison, with two alert archers in each one, but the town itself felt more like a frontier town than a prison. Lots of wood and half-timber construction, and the guard took one look at our adventurer bands and demanded a silver each for entry tax, with a stern warning about starting trouble in town.

Cassie paid without complaint, but then again, loot and money weren’t that bad of an issue. We had several dozen silver and a bunch of copper coins, and at least ten gold pieces at last count. A couple of them were strangely shaped, and would probably have to be turned into local currency, but we should be good for now.

“He’s a companion,” Cassie explained to one of the two gate guards, a wiry-looking fellow with leather armor, as he asked about me.

“Does he speak or just squeak?” The shorter fellow asked. Of course, he towered above me but seemed to be shorter compared to the other guards, who tended towards the beefy side.

“I only squeak when Squoken to,” I replied matter-of-factly.

“Huh?” He eloquently responded to my statement.

“I am quite capable of speech, I have money, and I won’t get drunk and start throwing tables,” I stated, making a muscle and kissing it. The guard’s face actually started to quirk into a smile and he choked for a moment and then nodded gravely, “See that you don’t. We don’t often get tame kobolds here, and you don’t want to wreck their reputation. No one likes a kobold that throws tables.”

“My name is Guardsman Clay. The wall guards don’t come inside, officially, but lawbreaking is handled by the Breakers. Don’t piss the Breakers off, a lot of them are adventurers and will happily live up to their name if you start trouble. There is a crown outpost, Winnowrill quarter, and a League here. League is south down the main road, and you should recognize it when you see it.” he shrugged and stepped out of the way. I suppose nonhumans must be more common here than to the north, and I shrugged at Cassie, who smiled.

“This is a trade outpost,” she said, “Traders from as far south as Mentheen stop here, so we should be able to sell and buy what we need. A lot of the people that live here are either temporary or have come from someplace else, so the market and stuff are going to be larger in comparison to some other cities. Fewer residences and temples, and more stores and stuff. This place should be pretty popular with the Immortals, but I am hoping Rik isn’t here. Still, unless we want a fight, we should probably only stay a night, pick up what we need, and then head east.”

I nodded, “That sounds like the best plan. Honestly, I’d just rather avoid immortals. I’ve known too many that were just plain murder hobos. They will kill anything as long as they can get a shred of experience from it.”

Shiana chuckled, “Murder hobos. How appropriate.”

I nodded to her as we stepped through the gates and into the first real town I had entered in this world.