Why do these idiot poors never seem to realize that the reason I’m a king in the new world of magic, and they’re just as poor as they were when the internet still worked is because they just don’t work hard enough? My work ethic is so great that I’m cycling essence while they do my laundry, make my food, take care of their children, and die. If they just worked like I did, they could level up just like me!

Quote from a play set during the fall of an Oblivion King, written in 148 Modern-Era

-

Mystical Supplies—or as I thought of it, Yanette’s place—was a small store in a shopping plaza that wasn’t too far away from Susan’s Café. Her store sat between an ice cream parlor, currently boarded up for the off season, and a clothing store that specialized in outdoor wear. As I pushed the door open, I waved to the owner.

Yanette was a short woman with medium brown skin, black hair, and the glowing purple eyes of someone who’d awakened their essence. I knew she was on the far end of her forties, but she honestly looked young enough to pass for mid-thirties.

“Hey, Aiden. How are y…?” Yanette said, trailing off as she saw Laurel enter behind me. Her eyebrows waggled. “Who’s your friend?”

“He’s acting as my tour guide,” Laurel said stiffly. “I need an imprint disk for Willow Switch.”

I just sighed and started pursuing the shop. Yanette’s stock was pretty limited, especially in the autumn, but she still had several goods stocked behind the counter: pneuma restoration spray, anima recharging pills, primal repellent, low-grade storage gems, enchanted backpacks, and even various free and paid software modules to help a user awaken their essence or learn specific spells. I’d used those before, donating a few extra credits to Yanette to thank her for keeping copies of them on her local network.

While I looked, I kept an ear open for Yanette and Laurel’s conversation.

“We don’t stock pre-made disks, since there’s not much demand out here, so I’ll have to overwrite some blank ones,” Yanette was saying. “And yeah, while things are a bit more expensive, I’m the only one in town certified to make them…”

“That’s fine with me,” Laurel agreed, letting out a sigh. “I should have considered it.”

“Do you have wood element anima?”

“What?” Laurel asked. “Do you not have basic anima samples?”

“Course I do,” Yanette said flippantly. “But drawing ambient essence and running it through the converter will take a few days to create your disk.”

Laurel opened her mouth, but Yanette just kept talking.

“I’ve aspected my anima to the arcane element and have the spells to do the binding part and trace the basics of Willow Switch, but I’ll still need to run my anima through a converter, since I don’t have Willow Switch in my ousia. Even if I put everything in, it’s still gonna take hours. If you can pour wood element anima in, though, it’ll speed the process up a lot.”

“Fine. C’mon, Zaza, let’s get this done,” Laurel said, sounding annoyed. A moment later, her Serest appeared on her shoulder. “I also want a storage gem. Actually, let’s make that three, in case I mess up the spell. How much is it going to cost?”

“Prolly around a thousand credits or so? Two hundred and change per gem, and then a bit over three hundred for the disk. Here, let’s check.”

Yanette pulled out her augpad, a larger model meant for a business, and tapped a few times as she loaded the payment processor—an open source model that was secure, but a bit laggy.

“Actually, give me five pneuma restoration sprays and ten anima recharging pills too,” Laurel said, but I started tuning them out as well.

The mention of a thousand credits had me thinking about money, so I pulled up my bank details on my augpad to start doing some math.

Since I was sixteen, I’d been saving up for a trip that would let me find a second primal, register as a member of the Tamer Consortium, and start challenging some of the Councillors. There had been expenses: food, helping my mom, fixing the radiance absorbance roof shells when they’d cracked. Even still, I had a tiny bit over thirteen hundred credits in liquid funds.

If Vince found his legendary egg the moment that he landed on the island, I should still get two days of pay to paddle out and back. That was another fourteen hundred credits immediately, plus the three hundred and fifty for today, putting me at three thousand total credits.

The registration and yearly fees for the Tamer’s Consortium had a sliding scale of payment based on net worth, history with the consortium, donations, sponsors, and more, but last time I’d checked it for myself, the fee had been just shy of a hundred credits. Call it a hundred and fifty for a buffer.

I’d slowly been buying and assembling all my camping gear for years now. It had been incredibly expensive, but if I wasn’t planning to take a bus from place to place, it was worth it. My trip to find Scales had shown me a few things that I needed to replace, which I figured would cost another two or three hundred credits.

Speaking of transport… biking out to Tourmaline City would mean getting some extra trail food cubes, but it could be fun, and it wasn’t like I was in a rush. If I got four of the bulk ration packs—the kind meant to last someone a month—that would run me six hundred credits, but also leave me set on food for a while.

What about costs in the city? I wasn’t so proud that I was unwilling to stay at the free Oceanseed National Hostels, but I did want to donate to the people who worked there. If I donated twenty-five credits a day, how many days would I need to be there?

Hmm.

Getting an appointment to battle the Councillor could take anywhere from minutes to weeks, depending on how many other up-and-coming tamers were trying to battle them. Better say two weeks, to be safe. Three hundred and fifty, then, bringing my total expenses to fourteen hundred credits.

I blinked as I realized that, for the first time, I had enough to make the trip.

The only reason this was even possible was that Laurel was planning a primal hunt on the island, which gave me a shot to also find another strong primal willing to join me. Not having to spend weeks heading up the coast to a place that had primals who would pair well with Scales was a massive savings.

Of course, it wasn’t technically needed. I could walk to the beach, find the nearest Aquarb who had a desire to battle, and bond it. But I wanted to make sure my team was viable. Showing up with two defensive water element primals, one of which would need to spend massive amounts of time reinforcing its base ousia before it was up to Scales’ standard wasn’t a great way to start my career as a tamer.

I looked up at Yanette.

“How much would a move disk for Aqua Fin cost?” I asked.

Once Scales absorbed enough essence to hit level seventeen, his natural essence patterns should unlock Aqua Fin anyway. But having a more powerful attack than Pneuma Bite, which was also a water element move, on an island that had some earth primals, would be useful.

“Don’t, your Sharmond will learn that anyway,” Laurel said. “Get Frosted Bite instead. It will still have the elemental advantage over earth types, and I’m pretty sure Sharmonds are compatible with the spell, even if they don’t learn it naturally.”

“I’ll check!” Yanette said, then tapped away before nodding. “She’s right, they are.”

I didn’t know every spell in the world, but Frosted Bite sounded like an ice element move. It wouldn’t match Scales’ water element, but neither did his current Pneuma Bite, and it would pack more of a punch against earth, air, and wood element primals, helping cover a weakness.

I gave a respectful nod to Laurel, wondering why she was doing this. Was it because Willow Switch would be more effective against Scales, and she wanted to make it a fair playing field? I wasn’t sure.

“Let’s do it. I need one storage gem and a Frosted Bite disk!”

“Only one?” Laurel asked, raising an eyebrow. I shrugged.

“I figure I’ll just cast the spell normally. No sense wasting money.”

“I could always just fix the circuits for you,” Yanette said. “That way, you don’t have to worry about it.”

“Yeah, but you won’t be on the island, and I haven’t learned the spells to repair them. But I have learned the bonding spell. Easier for me to do it.”

Yanette nodded, then pushed two anima taps over. One of them was connected to an elemental conversion machine, which I assumed was the one for me. The one without, she pushed to Laurel and her Serest—Zaza, hadn’t she called it? Zaza slipped down Laurel’s arm and started pouring wood element anima into the tap, while I put my hand on mine and poured in my personal null element anima. As we slowly poured magic in, I glanced at Laurel.

“How’d you meet Vince? It’s got to be quite a story.”

“Not really. I’m from Howlite Village, and I wanted to be a tamer. So I started looking for a Procella, the strongest primal near where I grew up. It took me a while to find one with the same drive to improve that I had, but I eventually found Ella, grabbed a Litooth who was curious enough to give taming a shot, and headed to Calcite City.”

She smiled a little, and instead of sardonic, it actually looked fond.

“I did terribly against the Councillor there, but Vince happened to catch the live stream and headed over to meet me. I was kind of dejected, and the Litooth decided he didn’t actually like battling. Vince showed up and told me that his own Serest had just formed a kid. Zaza wanted someone to bond with and grow, but she was only level five at the time. He told me if I could beat Alyssa with Zaza and Ella, then I could become his apprentice, and Zaza could travel with me as long as she wanted.”

Laurel shrugged like it was no big deal.

“I agreed, spent a week training, then beat Councillor Alyssa. Vince submitted the paperwork to become my official sponsor in the Tamer Consortium, as well as his apprentice.”

“You already beat your first Councillor? That’s impressive! Can I see the seal?” I said, leaning forward.

Each of the sixteen Councillors modulated the power of themself and their primals based on the tamer’s relative strength and number of seals they’d already collected, but even still…

Laurel flicked her augpad and sent over her Tamer ID. I scrolled past her photo, name, ranking, and current team to look at the seals. Sure enough, at the bottom, there was a bright pink stamp with the logo and signature of Councillor Alyssa Ramos.

“That’s awesome!” I said, grinning. “What was she like?”

We spent a while making small talk, the taming-focused conversation seemingly putting Laurel more at ease than before. After about half an hour, Laurel’s disk was done, so Yanette and Laurel both started channeling anima into mine. When we finally finished, Yanette clapped and pushed the imprint disks over to us.

The disks were made of essence, which gave them a strange, hard, almost crystalline, feel, and they were surprisingly hefty. Each one was only the circumference of a tangerine, but as thin as a sheet of paper. Mine was an icy blue color, while Laurel’s was a rich green.

I picked mine up and placed it on top of Scales, who began cycling the essence into himself, layering it to the empty spell slot inside of him. It filled the fourth, currently empty space in his essence, and I felt Scales start to flow his anima through the move.

“Hold on,” I told him. “Wait until we get home.”

Scales flopped onto his back and pouted like I’d broken his heart. I sighed and scratched his belly.

“We didn’t pay yet,” Laurel pointed out, not reaching for her disk, even as she watched the display.

“You’re good for it, or at least Aiden is,” Yanette said dismissively. “He’s a good kid. He wouldn’t have let you order if you couldn’t pay.”

I sent her the payment for my disk and the simple storage gem, and she clacked her tongue happily, pulling out the blank storage gem I’d ordered and tossing it to me.

“See?”

“You all are strange,” Laurel said, shaking her head and sending her payment.

Yanette piled up her purchases, which Laurel put in her backpack before handing Zaza the spell imprint disk and exiting the shop.

“City folk,” Yannette said, laughing.

“I should probably guide her back to the hotel,” I said, smiling at the owner’s joke. “It is what I’m getting paid for, after all. Thanks, Yanette!”

She waved, and I headed outside, Scales trotting on my heels.