Prince Ora showed Serenity around the palace for the next few hours, introducing him to the different areas. It turned out that almost all of it was a single building, though Serenity suspected it hadn’t started that way.

The Palace was divided into three types of area - public, private, and staff. They started with the public areas, where events like the dance were held; there was also a large banquet hall and several smaller rooms for smaller gatherings. Many of those were set up like meeting rooms. The last public area the prince showed him to was “Court”. That room was not as large as the ballroom or banquet hall, but it was larger than any of the meeting rooms.

Court was also the only room other than the ballroom where Serenity immediately felt the influence of a spell; like the ballroom, it was old and its magic was twisted, but it was far less distorted. Serenity still found it uncomfortable, but he had no difficulty with it.

The enchantment on the Court room was also runic in nature; it made Serenity wonder about the differences in rune use, because he remembered runes almost never being used for long-lasting “permanent” spells, yet it was the third time he’d seen it on Zon. Perhaps even the fourth, if he counted the sleep spell and shield on the cells as two different things; they were different runes, after all.

“The runic layout in here is far simpler than the one in the dance hall.” Serenity walked slowly around the room, checking each rune off and putting together what it had to be, then figuring out how it fit into the overall runescript.

“Can you tell what it does?” The prince followed Serenity as he paced around the room, somehow seeming to always hover without ever quite getting in the way.

Serenity frowned as he nodded, glaring at a strange rune. “Yes, but it’ll take me a few minutes.”

Most of the enchantment was quick to figure out, but there was a modified suppression rune that took Serenity a good fifteen minutes. Once he worked through it, he knew why: it was the one that suppressed the use of Essence, and he’d never seen one like it before. The rune was surprisingly similar to the one paired with it for the suppression of Mana.

Once he finished his circuit of the room, he turned to the prince and told him the part that had been obvious even without the in-depth examination. “It’s intended to suppress and slow magic use. It won’t do much against Skills, though it might reduce their effect and increase their cost. Skills are simply too fast for the slowing effect to have much use. I think it’s intended to be used against a proper spellcaster.”

“You define a proper spellcaster as someone who can cast spells without Skills?” Prince Ora sounded puzzled by that.

Serenity shrugged, then explained. “Well, if you’re just casting Skills, all you had to do was unlock the Path. That’s like using a sword enough to get a swordsman Path; if you don’t actually practice with the sword, you’ll get paths that try to teach you to really use it, but you’ll never be as good as someone who actually trains and eventually you’ll stop getting the Paths at all. Not learning to cast even simple spells on your own is the same for a mage.”

Prince Ora seemed to think it over, then nodded. “Huh. I always thought mages just had it easier.”

Serenity smiled. That look of sudden comprehension was always nice. “Not if you want to be any good. The advantage a mage brings is flexibility; in combat, a skilled and experienced physical type can usually beat a mage, even when the mage has the starting advantage of distance. At higher Tiers, distance isn’t always to the mage’s advantage; Skills for warriors keep up with Skills for mages.The more skilled person usually wins, though sometimes that can be the more prepared person instead.”

Serenity wasn’t certain which Path Prince Ora followed; he wore a sword, but all Serenity could see of it was the fancy hilt. It might be intended for use or it might simply be a status showpiece; it was impossible to tell. A fight would tell the story if he was a combat build, but Serenity wouldn’t be surprised if Prince Ora’s Path was based more on ruling than combat. He was a prince, after all.

If Prince Ora was intending to follow a ruler’s Path, knowing that mages had to learn and practice would be valuable.

Prince Ora nodded sharply, then turned towards the exit. After taking two steps, he seemed to realize Serenity wasn’t following. “Are you done here yet? It’s time to head to the private wing. I can’t show you all of the rooms, but I can show you the ones we know are enchanted.”

“Yes, I’m done here.” Serenity turned to follow the prince.

The next room they visited was the Palace Library. Its runes were in excellent shape, barely leaking at all. It took Serenity a long time to find all of the runes and confirm his first guess, but once he did, the purpose was obvious. They were all fire suppression runes. If a fire wasn’t too large, they would put it out; if it was too large, they would try to cool it as much as possible. Serenity suspected the room had been a library for a very, very long time; the runescript seemed very appropriate.

After that, the young prince sent Serenity back to the Lowpeak house with a promise that he “and Andarit if you really want her” could come and use the Palace dungeon if they wanted to, once the magic survey was complete.

Serenity didn’t have anything better to do while he waited; he’d essentially finished going through Djen’s records and rescued all of the Earthlings who were still in Zenith. He didn’t want to move out of Zenith until Rissa arrived, since Zenith was where she would arrive on Zon.

The next few days followed the same pattern. In the morning, Serenity would examine a handful of rooms, tell the prince the ones that were easy to figure out and the highlights of any difficult room. Afternoons were time for practice, both magical and physical; he hadn’t been neglecting it, exactly, but it was good to get back on a regular schedule.

Andarit was surprisingly skilled as a physical fighter for someone who didn’t specialize in it. Serenity was both stronger and more skilled, but it was clear Andarit had been practicing since she was a child. It wasn’t quite like having a full sparring partner, but it was better than nothing, and Serenity could tell that Andarit was improving relatively rapidly.

She enjoyed their spars, and that helped immensely.

Evenings were either guarding Andarit as she went to yet another event or spent at the house, working on the theoretical end of Essence-based spells and runes. While Serenity had some practical examples, he had no idea what underlay them in terms of theory and without that there was always the risk of guessing wrong. Figuring out the theory wouldn’t prevent that, but it would help.

It was a pattern that was familiar to Serenity, cutting the day into three chunks. One piece for doing, one piece for training, and one piece for thinking. He didn’t really count sleeping; if he did, he’d add another section to his day. Exactly how he broke everything up varied with time, but breaking it up using that sort of a division was something that he’d started as Vengeance, and it seemed like a good habit to pick up again.

It took four days for the quick “first pass” of the entire Palace complex. Most of the runescripts were simple, if large, but there were three he hadn’t been able to figure out on the first pass - the ballroom, the nursery, and the meditation room.

On the fifth day, Prince Ora took Serenity to the Palace nursery and left him in the care of one of the guards, with instructions to examine the runes and let the guard know when he was done. The children were all gone, if there were any; Serenity didn’t see any sign of even recent use of the room. If he had to guess, it was probably only used for royals, and they were probably moved out at some point; certainly Prince Ora wasn’t in the nursery, even though he’d only just had his coming of age.

It took Serenity all morning to decipher the runes. They were badly damaged and leaking mana like a sieve; when Serenity examined them, he was amazed they were still carrying mana at all. Any more damage in several places would have been enough to destroy the enchantment, with results that could be anything from simple deactivation through very strange effects to a large explosion.

Actually, Serenity had to wonder if he wasn’t seeing exactly that sort of strange effect. The runes appeared to have been intended for a small greenhouse; they were set up to regulate everything from the temperature to the light and humidity levels. They were also supposed to emit mana with a tunable Affinity, and that section was where the damage was the worst. It was no longer tunable; instead, it emitted strange mana that was mostly Life-affined, but with a distinct secondary feeling of water. Because of the damage, however, the Affinity was oddly fragile and it was definitely no longer limited to plants only, which was clearly the original design of the runescript.

Deciphering it only took Serenity a couple of hours; when he told the guard he was done, the guard had him wait while they summoned Prince Ora. After an explanation, Serenity was led to the ballroom and given the same instructions, though he was told that he could return tomorrow morning if he preferred.

Serenity was far too interested in the ballroom’s runes to just leave.

They were far more complex than the ones in the greenhouse that had been turned into a nursery. Even so, once he was actually able to see the full picture, Serenity was able to figure out what it was quickly. He’d never seen it done as runes before; it was usually enchantments covering the room and equipment, often many small overlapping enchantments. One giant runescript was a completely different method.

Serenity started taking an entire series of detailed pictures of the runes. He hadn’t bothered with the previous rooms except for when he ran into new rooms, since the way the runes were put together wasn’t anything new, but this room was. The interesting part was how they’d hooked the runscripts together; instead of making one giant runescript, they’d clearly been made separately and then connected. Serenity suspected it was a generally worse method, but it let more than one person work on it at a time, and that was clearly something that had happened in the ballroom.

It was a training room, intended to be used for full-on live combat without killing anyone. It was possible it was also intended as an arena, but Serenity doubted it; there was no apparent provision for seating to watch. There were built-in protections and even a live scoring detection system and display. The protection portion was where this one was damaged, which meant that the entire room was untrustworthy as a training room; it could as easily add energy to a blow as remove it.

When Serenity had finished his examination of the room, including photographing everything so he could examine it later and see what they’d done to hook all the runescripts together, it was midafternoon. The guard led him outside the Palace and Serenity went on with his day.

The following morning, after explaining the training room, was the meditation room. Despite its apparently exposed position, it was by far the least damaged of the complex runescripts. Serenity suspected that was because of the room’s isolated location and use; if it was only used for meditation, there were few opportunities for the runes on the walls to be damaged.