"So once I have Lightning Bolt down I know what it feels like and it's a lot easier to get to the next one. I want the Skill that feels like Lightning Bolt but more. Or sufficiently similar. So the thing about physical Skills is that you have direct access to your own sensorium and can find the next Skill easily, and for magical Skills it's a lot harder, but the fundamental thing is still fishing around in this—web—for a nearby Skill and using various methods to identify the correct node you're trying to attune to."

"How does anyone even know all of this?"

"Oh I mean there are many theories. This is just one of them. There's a theory that actually Skills are created by humanity's collective unconscious and the relationship between them is only purely about similar ideas in, like, how people as a whole relate to them, and there's a theory that this is all embedded in the fabric of reality suported by Yggdrasil and what you're doing isn't so much attuning your soul to anything as it is strengthening your connection to specific leaves of the World Tree and..."

"That all sounds like just different ways of saying the same thing."

"There are different details but yeah the reason no one knows which theory is true is that they all basically say the same thing about how the normal Skill acquisition process works."

"Alright. And according to your favourite theory the thing with Pierre...?"

"Both his weird spell and regular Lightning Bolt are connected to Thunderstorm but the connection from Bolt is stronger than the connection from Pierre's spell so Pierre would need to attune a lot more strongly to his spell to get Thunderstorm and instead we're trying to get him to attune to both of them in such a way as to use both of those links at the same time to find Thunderstorm."

"And that's the goal, Thunderstorm?"

"It's the natural progression in lightning magic and required for, like, Jupitel Thunder, which is a cornerstone spell in a lot of powerful elemental magic like Storm Gust and Lord of Vermillion, and he's probably gonna have a weaker Lightning Bolt than me if we both spend the same number of Skill slots total along that line but we'll both be able to get to Thunderstorm at the same point in our progression if we figure this out."

"I'm very happy I'm not a mage."

"Come on, this was fun!"

"A bit too brainy for me. I'm not great at, you know, thinking."

"Nonsense, if you weren't I wouldn't like you."

"You know you don't need to flatter me to get me to suck your cock, right?"

"Which is how you know that the flattery is genuine!"

"Touché. But we should actually sleep now."

"Really? Not even a little bit of sucking cock?"

"...fine, maybe a little bit."

The bounty boards at the Academy mostly have bounties for pest control. The fields surrounding Prontera and Izlude have a persistent problem with porings and lunatics: porings because they're all technically immortal and after being killed they eventually reconstitute themselves, and lunatics because—well, the expression "breed like lunatics" exists for a reason.

And the poring problem is particularly bad because if left alone too long the porings start merging with each other and becoming worse than just minor nuisances. While porings are by and large painfully unaggressive they are constantly seeking to eat (by which one means "absorb") more and more things, and at the low end this can mess up the ecosystem but it's not unheard of for a poring to grow so large in some uninhabited areas that it started eating people. There's nothing quite as creepy as an enormous pink bubble with a :3 face in which one can see the corpses of multiple drowned people floating peacefully. So Eden Group has permanent bounties for wild porings, where proof of kill takes the form of the crystallised gelatin porings often leave behind after being killed as they quickly evaporate.

"What's stopping people from just domesticating a poring and then killing it over and over for the bounties?"

"Takes a while for a poring to grow large enough to reliably leave jellopies behind and Eden doesn't pay that much for them; just enough that it's often worthwhile to kill any porings you happen to run into on your way to doing something else for the free money."

"And free Eden Merit," Pierre adds.

"'Eden Merit'?"

"There's a sort of ranking system in Eden. You get Merit for completing bounties and more powerful or difficult bounties give more Merit, and you get... stuff... for Merit. Not sure what."

"I'm heading over to Eden HQ after lunch today to register, I think they'll explain it all there, if you wanna come with."