Chapter 2: Chapter 2

Four months had passed since that first miserable day.

We were led from the building, which turned out to actually be a church like I’d guessed, and into a facility for housing large groups of people and teaching them. It seemed that we were far from being the first group of people summoned to this world, though apparently, we are the first and only humans in the entire world as far as anyone in the city knows.

We had classes every day and were taught the language, geography, common sense, history and… fucking magic. At least casting a spell doesn't require a chant or anything, nor are people limited to specific elements, something I’m immensely grateful for.

It wasn’t because I want to learn every single spell in existence or something, but rather, because thinking of things as only fire, water, earth and air is just stupid.

In fact, there aren’t magic elements at all. Casting a spell is done more by understanding the physics and properties of what you want to achieve, then by enacting it with your will.

For ease of talking about magic in casual conversation, it was just simpler to describe an effect as pertaining to a specific element. So someone would just say “this is a water spell” rather than “this is a spell that connects two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom with covalent bonds” or some other complicated thing.

Casting spells of any kind was tricky as hell, though. Manipulating the energy inside your body using only your will and forming it into a structure that, when expelled, will create water, is incredibly complicated. It’s like I’m taking advanced math classes when I don’t even know remedial math, except, to make things worse, it’s just as physical as it is mental.

After having been here for a few weeks, everyone got sick. This was a result of several factors, the main one simply being the numerous viruses here that didn’t exist on Earth.

But healing magic surprisingly takes care of quite a bit. We were taken care of and healed through the diseases. Pretty quickly we were back to normal again and now had immunity to them. I was the first one to be back in full health, which was due to my nanites.

On Earth, after curing the terminal illness I had, the nanites didn’t have a ton of work to do, just general maintenance. Here though, I’ll be able to heal a little faster and make better use of the food I eat.

As for the viruses we brought with us from Earth, if anyone here had been infected by them, we didn’t notice. On top of everyone having healing magic, people were just hardier here. Your knowledge, skill, power and efficiency each have a significant effect on how well you can heal yourself or others, however.

The hardest part, though, was the fact that nearly everyone was anxious, upset and scared. Izzy, Kyle and I all had family and friends we cared about, and we hadn’t seen them in so long.

And we didn’t have a single comfort of Earth, either. The food was different. No one but us was human. Our precious internet access had been ripped away from us. For nerds, this was fatal.

There were many nights of sadness, rage, despair, ennui and every other negative emotion there is. It was too much. And when another person died because healing magic couldn’t fill in for their lack of access to their medication, it just really impressed upon us that this is not Earth. That person had had a lifelong need for a specific medication, and not even literal magic could fill in for it.

I’m so glad I was lucky enough to get those nanites… I’d have died years ago without them.

The education they were giving us was to be a six-month crash course on how to live in this new world, as well as providing all sorts of information and training related to fighting and survival.

This world is called Ashlokh. It has three continents and is currently facing a worldwide crisis. This crisis is the reason that education has such an emphasis on fighting and why they keep bringing people from other worlds. As annoying as it is to admit, this world would probably have no one left if they didn’t keep replenishing the population with frequent summoning rituals.

I wonder what percentage of the world’s population is species of people native to this world? It’s probably not very much these days.

84 years ago, a cult created a powerful curse that basically works like a zombie virus. It kills the infected person and turns them into a mindless murder machine.

They’re also drawn to large sources of mana, which means that they mainly attack human settlements. And worse, they have a tendency to gather into massive groups before attacking rather than just mindlessly charging in one by one.

Those mindless murder machines are the completely white beings we saw pictures of, and are referred to as Cursed Ones. The initial curse was powered by blood, so the Cursed Ones seek out more blood to fuel their curse. The blood of people only, not anything else. And they are powerful, violent and deadly.

That cult that initially created them has long since been eradicated, but the aftermath of their horrible bullshit continues to cause damage and death everywhere. The story is that they were taking revenge for their god, but there’s never been a single indication of that god actually existing, not just in this world, but in the countless others that people have come from as well.

As far as anyone can tell, despite all the magic and shit that exists here, it doesn’t seem like there are any gods at all. There are an endless amount of religions around, though.

With all the different beliefs out there, churches have now turned into places where people just practice whatever. There is one sort of general belief that some people share, which is: “All religions are metaphysically connected, and therefore, only one religion exists, and it is incomprehensible to us”.

Right now, the only solution anyone has to deal with the Cursed Ones is to keep throwing numbers at them. People are dying out too quickly, so the political leaders summon more from other worlds.

It was an actual summoning ritual that brought us here, and because the destination of the summoning is random every time, returning to Earth is virtually impossible. That randomness is also why there is such a huge variety of races.

Another issue with the summoning ritual is that every country continues to do it as much as they can simply because every other country is doing the same.

Everyone fears the Cursed Ones, but the politicians also fear being the ones to have the least amount of military might, despite the fact that everyone is far too busy fighting to stay alive to even consider starting a war with someone else over a land dispute or something. So they just keep dragging more and more people into their problems.

And as for us humans, we really are duds. That’s not to say we’re incapable of learning magic or are inherently weaker than any of the other races here, however.

The reason we’re considered duds is that the vast majority of other worlds have access to magic by default, apparently. On rare occasions, the summoning ritual will take people from a place that has none, and as a result, those people are regarded as failures of a summoning ritual.

It was after about a month of being in this world that many of us began to feel a faint energy that Izzy could only describe as “like being caffeinated, but not all hyperactive and jittery”.

I felt really bad for the people who were brought here without anyone they knew who could act as emotional support, but all of us pretty much banded together. With the seventh death, there are now 103 of us remaining.

Unless someone in another part of the world also summoned some humans by chance, we only had each other to rely on when it came to human stuff. It was also of massive benefit that we weren’t just a random crowd of people, but rather, a crowd of people with similar interests.

We would frequently go out into the city in groups to do odd jobs. We had all done our mandatory sign-up at the Defense Station. None of us were powerful enough to fight, or even knew how to, but we could still do support tasks until we learned.

It was truly a war that we’d been thrown into. Every four or five weeks is when the Cursed Ones would attack. They would gather into massive groups, and after creating a horde that was large and frenzied enough, they would then attack the nearest large source of mana.

This world also has monsters, to top everything off. While a fair amount of them had been picked off by Cursed Ones, they were largely ignored in favor of attacking towns and cities. Monster blood doesn’t have the same qualities as people's blood it seems. In some ways, it was actually safer to be in a small group out in the wilderness than behind walls and magic barriers.

We also found out what that wall of gems was for. After all of us had begun to feel that energy, our hands were placed upon it once again and someone from the church cast a spell through us. Now, one or two of the gems would light up for us. There were 1,000 gems on the wall. After getting up close, I saw that they were arranged into twenty rows of fifty gems each.

The reason they went out of their way to cast a spell through every single one of us was so we could get used to the sensation and do it ourselves without their help.

They also pointed out that only really large churches like this one have capacity-measuring walls of this size. Most places out there only go up to 200.

The reason for that is that most people are only in the 50 to 100 range of power capacity. People who make it beyond 200 are rare. The reason the wall goes all the way up to 1,000 is that it’s supposed to represent a person’s potential or something.

The fact that this world really does have a level system of sorts is just stupid. At least it doesn’t have skills, titles and blessings and all that.

The most interesting thing, though, is that it is actually possible to achieve immortality in this world. After capacity 50, aging will gradually slow down, and will stop altogether at 100. But that is just physically unaging. The body will still age on a magical level, meaning death by old age is still a thing.

From 100 until 200, the body’s physical age will actually begin to reverse until a person is at their prime age again. After some calculations, we figured out that a human in the upper 100s could theoretically live for 1,500 or so years. It is after capacity 200 that a person’s mana fully synchronizes with their body and they become immortal. However, it’s been found that reaching any higher than 150 requires a downright stupid amount of time and dedication.

Before the Cursed Ones ran rampant, several immortals were known to exist. It is also known that some of them have died, and no one has any idea how many might be left because long-distance communication is no longer available. The resources necessary to create and maintain those enchantments are too difficult to obtain with the way the world currently is.

The most impressive aspect of all of it, in my opinion, is that a person’s mental capacity does not decrease with age due to the presence of mana. On Earth, the human brain is only really capable of handling one lifetime’s worth of knowledge and experiences. But here, records and observations report that people of such ridiculous ages tend to do just fine mentally.

Part of our homework in addition to taking classes at the facility and helping out around the city is to practice our magic. There are three important aspects to using it.

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The first is a person’s capacity. It will rise very slowly on its own just over time, but that’s only 30 or so levels at most. There are two methods of increasing it: Meditating and stressful experiences.

“Stressful experiences” generally refers to killing monsters and Cursed Ones, but these days, it also refers to intentionally fighting other people to increase it. People need every advantage they can get in this world, so they fight each other all the time to increase each other’s capacities.

The reason for that is that your body is able to better synchronize your mana when your body and brain are both active. Meditating only gives a small boost, and most people have more important things to do with their time than that.

The second important aspect is efficiency. Spells and enchantments only require specific amounts of mana, and not all spells will improve with more being added.

The way I thought of it is your mana pool is a literal pool, and casting a spell means only using a thimble’s worth of the water from that pool. But right now, we only have huge buckets to work with, and we have to learn to shrink those buckets so that we don’t empty out the pool so quickly.

The third aspect of casting a spell, and the most important and most difficult one, is the spell itself. It’s like trying to solve a complicated math equation, except using your body and instincts are just as important as the mental aspect of it. You have to guide the energy into specific patterns within yourself before expelling it.

———

I’d been finding myself to be surprisingly motivated in this world. All my life I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety, so being in a new world is sort of like a chance to try to live differently.

I’d never cared for the idea of being able to actually use magic before, as I was never really interested in stories that had it as a main point, but I work on it all the time. I’m also one of the people who is frequently seen fighting and training.

I still struggle with my emotions here, but because everyone is always on the edge of death, so much of society’s bullshit is cut out, and it’s a genuine relief. Except for the whole threat of dying thing.

But I also wonder if I’m just desperately running away from something. Not the monsters of this world, but myself, somehow. Like I’m struggling to be a different person, but I don’t know what to do about it.

My nanites have always been able to tell that I struggle with depression and anxiety, but there’s only so much they can do on that front. They fill in for medications that a person would normally take for these things, but they can’t change the fact that I still have these issues.

———

“Feel like checking our results? It’s been a while since the last time,” Kyle asked us, pulling me out of my introspection.

“Sure,” Izzy shrugged. “Not much else to do. We can’t spend every waking minute working and fighting and practicing.”

“Yay! I’m excited to see how much I’ve leveled up.”

“I have been wondering what my capacity is at now,” I added. “I’ve been pushing myself really hard.”

Izzy frowned at me. “You have, and it’s concerning.”

I sighed. “I know. I always struggled with things on Earth. Here, well, I don’t really know. I just feel like I have a chance to feel differently, so it makes me want to work hard.”

She hugged me. “You’ll get there. But you really need to stop pushing yourself to such an extent, okay? I get that we need to work and train and stuff, but taking a break is seriously important.”

Kyle nodded. “For sure, dude. We haven’t hung out much lately, so what say we do that for the rest of the night? We’ve got a bit of free time to do that right now.”

“Yeah, okay. You’re probably right.”

“We are right. And why do you refuse to say ‘leveled up’ by the way? I just noticed that.”

“It’s because this world is real, and I don’t want to gamify it in any way. If I begin thinking of all this as an RPG, I’ll probably do something careless at some point just to get a level or a new spell or something. I’ve noticed that a few of us are like that.”

“Huh, that’s a good point, actually. You’ve been pushing yourself really hard, but there are guys like Mike who train constantly and check the Capacity Wall pretty much daily, desperate to see that next gem glowing.

“Oh! But then why do you use the word ‘mana’ instead of power or something else?”

“Because if I call it power or energy or something, humans think of something else, like electricity. If I specifically call it mana, then they know what I’m talking about. And that’s more or less what it actually is, as much as it pains me to admit it.”

“Stupid monkey brains,” Izzy said. “Nothing good about them.”

I laughed, “I can attest to that.”

After checking the Capacity Wall, Kyle’s capacity had reached 6, Izzy’s 7, and mine had gone all the way up to 10.

Kyle whistled. “Daaamn, dude, you’re 1/20th immortal now!”

“I'm pretty sure that’s not how it works,” I said flatly.

“What do both of you think of that, by the way? Immortality.” Izzy questioned.

“Honestly, I don’t really have an opinion. Someone who’s reached that level is supposed to be pretty powerful and forever in their prime, which are both good mostly.

“But the biggest caveats to stories with immortality in them are loneliness and losing your morals as time passes. And I guess the possibility of being trapped somewhere for eternity while being unable to die.

“It doesn’t seem like the morality thing is much of an issue, given what we know about people’s minds being fine after reaching capacity 200 and living for a long time. And the loneliness thing isn’t as much of an issue because there are other immortals around, or at least more that will eventually exist.

“The word ‘immortal’ is also misleading. It should just be called ‘unaging’. Someone whose unaging can still die, but it won’t be by old age.

“So ultimately, I just think living longer would be neat, but I’m not aiming for that. If it happens, though, I guess I’d be fine with it? Maybe?”

“Hmm… I guess it is a difficult thing to contemplate for people who are only in their early 20s.”

Kyle, mocking anger, said, “Speak for yourself! I’m 25. Unlike you young whippersnappers, I’m already middle-aged!”

Just then, we passed a human who had been an employee of the hotel and looked to be in his 60s. He just stared at Kyle and sighed heavily before moving on.

“Wow, Kyle, you got out old-manned! Are you going to stand for that?” I joked.

“People as young as him have no business interfering in the affairs of the elderly.”

I swear I heard another weary sigh, but I had no time to contemplate it because the alarm bells began ringing in a series of four dings. That meant that the incoming wave of Cursed Ones is going to be a big one.