Dungeon Master (Karma System)

Mira discovered that dying made adults even more annoying.

Garrick had been protective before the Sanctuary proved it could restore her. Afterward, he became protective in different directions. He no longer checked whether every meal contained the exact mixture prescribed by distant healers. Instead, he checked the nearest hospital portal, counted the steps between buildings, and asked whether an activity might cause her to die earlier than necessary.

Mira considered that last phrase especially irritating.

The wasting curse had begun spreading again. Thin gray lines showed beneath her wrists and along the side of her throat. She tired more quickly than she had in the days immediately following her resurrection, but the decline was slow. She attended the Masquerade, visited the Skyyard, studied in the library, and slept without wondering whether failing to wake would end everything.

She was safe, but now she did not know what to do with her life.

Anna found her in the Hall of Achievements studying the display from the first Grand Masquerade. Garrick’s replica of the Thornwood Reliquary appeared beside an image of the original target. The hall showed both from several angles, including the incorrect row of thorns Mira had hidden by turning the copy toward the wall.

Mira had filled three sheets of paper with notes, and from the look of it, she was just getting started.

"Are you planning to steal it again?" Anna teased while approaching the girl.

Mira looked over her shoulder. "Brakka is planning to steal something. He has not decided what."

"That sounds like Brakka."

"I am comparing the hall’s record to the contract image." Mira pointed to the original sketch. "The image deliberately removed one thorn. This scratch near the hinge was also missing, but the color variation was accurate. Whoever made the contract wanted a replica to be possible without making it easy."

Anna sat beside her. "And you want to know how to tell which details matter."

Mira nodded. "That is appraisal."

"I thought appraisers told merchants how much something cost."

"That is just a small part of what they do."

They left the hall and crossed the square toward the market. Anna did not bring Mira to an office or suggest she help with dungeon work. She took her to three ordinary stalls.

At the first stall, a goblin jeweler placed six blue stones on a cloth. Five were polished glass. One was a low-grade mana crystal. Mira found the genuine crystal because it felt colder than the others.

At the second stall, a dwarf presented her with two nearly identical belt buckles. One was iron with a silver coating. The other contained enough actual silver to be worth several times the price. Mira chose correctly after examining the wear around the pin.

At the third stall, Anna showed her a sealed bottle labeled as a healing tonic.

Mira held it to the light, smelled the wax around the stopper, and set it down without opening it.

"The seal was replaced." she said.

"Why do you think that?"

"The wax on the neck is red. The wax beneath the string is brown."

Anna smiled. "The bottle contains colored water."

The goblin vendor reclaimed it. "Training stock. Not for sale."

"You sell fake medicine for training?" Mira asked.

"I sell real medicine. I keep fake medicine so my apprentices learn the difference before a customer needs them to."

On the way back to the square, Anna explained the available paths. Appraisal could support merchants, crafters, archivists, adventurers, inspectors, and enchanters. Material identification was a basic skill rather than a class commitment. Mira could begin learning it without deciding what profession she wanted for the rest of her life.

"What did you think I should choose?" Mira asked.

"Something you find useful." Anna said. She was still undecided on what class she should take let alone recommending one to Mira.

Mira considered the jewelry, the buckles, and the altered seal. "What about enchantments?"

Anna led her to the public training hall.

The enchanting room contained no dramatic spells. Students sat at benches and examined ordinary objects while class trainers asked questions. One man held a boot and tried to determine whether its minor speed enchantment strengthened the wearer or merely reduced the boot’s weight. A woman compared three metal rings that carried similar amounts of mana but released it in different ways.

The trainer gave Mira a wooden disk marked with a simple preservation rune.

"Tell me what you see," he said.

"A circle with four lines."

"Good. Do not pretend to see more than you do."

He showed her how to move a trace of mana across the surface without activating the enchantment. Mira failed the first six attempts. On the seventh, a faint tingling passed through her fingertip when it crossed one of the carved lines.

The sensation disappeared immediately.

Mira smiled at the disk.

"Again." The trainer said.

Garrick arrived before the lesson ended.

He stood in the doorway with sawdust on his sleeves. Since moving into the Sanctuary, he had found steady carpentry work repairing stalls and building furnishings for new homes. His attention passed from Mira to the runes, then to the trainer.

"Is this dangerous?" He asked.

Mira closed her eyes and fought the urge to let out a deep sigh.

The trainer answered without offense. "Not at this level. The disk stores less mana than a child’s warming charm."

"Can the charm explode?"

"Anything can explode if mistreated with sufficient creativity."

That did not help. Anna stepped into the corridor with Garrick while Mira continued practicing.

"She is not becoming an adventurer." He said quietly.

"She is learning to identify materials and basic enchantments."

"That is what she is doing today, but what about tomorrow, or the next day."

Garrick watched through the open door. Mira touched the wooden disk again, frowned, adjusted the angle of her hand, and tried once more.

"Before the curse, she wanted to learn my trade." He said. "She followed me around the workshop until I gave her a hammer small enough to hold. After she became sick, I stopped letting her near the tools. A splinter became an infection. Dust made her cough."

"You kept her alive long enough to reach this place."

Anna understood what he meant. The Sanctuary made permanent death unlikely, but Garrick’s habits had been shaped by years in which every fever and fall might take his granddaughter away. He could not discard that fear because a dungeon menu said protection was active.

"You do not have to stop." Anna said. "But you have to make room for something else."

Mira crossed the carved line correctly. A pale blue outline appeared around the preservation rune.

The trainer nodded. "There. Remember how that felt."

Garrick released a breath.

When the lesson ended, Mira showed him the wooden disk. "I am taking the introductory material-identification course."

"For how long?"

"Six weeks."

"How often?"

"Three lessons each week."

"What happens if the curse worsens during a lesson?"

"The same thing that happens anywhere else in the dungeon. I get help. If help fails, I wake up in the hospital and complain about it."

Garrick looked at Anna. Anna did not rescue either of them from the conversation.

"Three lessons." He said at last. "You rest between them."

"I will rest when I am tired."

"Mira."

"That is what resting is for."

They compromised when Garrick agreed not to wait outside every lesson and Mira agreed to carry a hospital contact charm in her pocket even though the dungeon menu already provided the same function.

Mira’s first assignment contained no magic at all.

The trainer gave her a list of twenty common materials and told her to collect small legal samples. She needed to identify each by sight, texture, weight, and smell before using a basic appraisal exercise to confirm the answer. The list included six woods, four metals, three stones, two types of glass, leather, bone, clay, and two fibers.

Garrick read the list on the walk home.

"Blackwood is a poor choice for a beginner." he said. "The grain changes depending on where it grows."

Mira waited for him to continue. Her grandfather may be annoying when it came to her health, but she was absolutely certain about 2 things. Her grandfather loved her and he knew wood.

"And pine should not be listed as one material. Mountain pine is nothing like lowland pine."

She continued waiting.

Garrick noticed her expression. "What?"

"You have complained about two items and offered to help with none."

He folded the sheet. "My workshop has twelve kinds of wood. We will begin there."

"I thought dust was dangerous."

"The collection shelves are not dusty."

"They were yesterday."

"They will not be tomorrow."

That was as close as Garrick came to admitting that he wanted her beside a workbench again.

That evening, Max and Anna invited them to dinner.

Garrick brought a small wooden box he had made for Anna’s earrings. Mira brought the practice disk because she wanted to prove she could find the rune again.

Garrick also brought a narrow wooden case. After dinner, he placed it in front of Mira. Twenty-four divided spaces lined the inside. The first six held polished pieces of wood, each large enough to examine without creating splinters. Small blank labels rested beneath them.

"Samples should not be carried loose." He said. "You will confuse the dust and damage the edges."

Mira ran one finger across the lid. He had carved a simple thorn pattern into it, copying the part of the reliquary she had identified at the Masquerade.

"Thank you." She said.

Garrick looked away. "You still need to learn the difference between mountain and lowland pine."

She demonstrated after dessert. The blue outline appeared on her third attempt.

"I am going to learn appraisal." She announced.

"Material identification first." Garrick corrected.

"That is the beginning of appraisal."

Max examined the disk. "Useful at the Masquerade."

"Useful everywhere." Mira said. "People keep showing me things and expecting me to believe what they say about them."

"That is also most of the Masquerade."

Anna leaned against Max’s shoulder while Mira described three errors in the latest contract images. Max rested one hand over hers and listened. They disagreed about whether the missing scratch on the reliquary had been an important clue or an irrelevant imperfection. Garrick joined the argument because he had built the replica and considered both of them wrong.

For one evening, nobody discussed how long the curse would take to spread or what would happen when it did.

When Mira and Garrick left, the gray lines remained visible beneath her skin.

For the first time, Mira had chosen something because she wanted to become good at it, not because someone claimed it might keep her alive.