The Weight of Legacy

Chapter 26 - There's Nothing Timelier Than Fresh Fruit

.Well-honed as her aim was, Malwine found herself facing the worst-case scenario.

The book was .

Approximately ten seconds later, [Remote Reading] finally landed on it.

Malwine gulped, her pulse still through the roof. She didn’t recall it ever getting this bad since whenever the widow saw a cop in town. She was young again, for fuck’s sake. so. She hadn’t even really noticed her heart could do this.

“Are you well?”

Bernie’s expression was as unreadable as always, but Malwine could have sworn a hint of worry had managed to sneak through.

“Yes, Bernie,” Malwine nodded stiffly. “I am quite well.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes, Bernie.”

It appeared this reading session would have to take place under the safety of her blankets. It took her a moment to realize she’d left several pieces of fruit behind in her plate——but Malwine was already committed to the bit. Whether Bernie left the room now or later, she had to stay down.

But she still allowed herself to mourn all that fruit.

Malwine put significant effort into not deciding to put her next points into Circulation out of spite.

Maybe she as calm as she insisted she was.

By now, Malwine had brought up an empty panel, and started taking notes. It sounded promising, that Malwine didn’t see herself intentionally veering from her balanced build yet… Right up until she remembered her trial for Katrina had thrown everything into disarray.

.

As for Perception, the section told her little. The author’s tendency to mention things then go before changing the subject was irritating her. It might have been slightly less annoying for them not to be mentioned at all.

Shaking her head, Malwine continued reading.

Malwine was well aware of the irony of her thoughts, given how she’d only ever gotten harvestables because Adelheid stole them, but buying harvestables still sounded like a waste of money.

Still, Malwine found herself wondering whether people treating harvestables as some type of gambling avenue had actually been a problem two-thousand years ago or so.

Malwine had . Sure, the author wasn’t wrong in claiming Stamina could be useful, especially if this detail about it slowing [Integrity]’s decay was accurate. However, it glossed over Endurance a bit too much for her tastes.

thinks

Perhaps Malwine should have pursued some lessons in the art of stating the obvious, as she concluded right after leaping off that train of thought. She’d been considerably excited upon seeing the book went over what attributes did, but much like every other part of it, the book was biased. There was no denying that.

Not being the book’s intended audience did little to assuage her irritation, as the text was patronizing enough to give her a severe case of secondhand annoyance.

Despite that, there might be some wisdom to be derived from it still—Malwine returned to the part about cultivation, focusing on the snippet that mattered the most to her.

Malwine put in the effort to appear from the point of view of the widow in the beach, a bittersweet callback to when she’d bottlenecked at the peak of the Early Esse. A part of her had been, guiltily, thankful that she wasn’t stuck meditating as much as she’d feared she would be, but perhaps that would have been the kind of push [Meditation] could benefit from.

Whatever had led the trial to seemingly enhance her Circulation for a moment—perhaps because none of that happened in reality—had given her a glimpse of what cultivating could truly be like. {Legacy} was strong, but her limited [Toll] didn’t allow her to make the most of it.

Early Esse, Mortal Esse, and—as she'd just learned—Core Integrationwere the three stages she knew of, and she had been stuck in the first for as long as she had lived this life. She didn’t quite understand the weight of each—all Malwine knew was she wanted to learn of them, and of what lay beyond. The book hadn’t bothered mentioning what the stage above Core Integration was called, so it would be to Malwine until further notice.

Her grandparents had both been at Core Integration—though as the book stated, Malwine figured Kristian’s would apparently be called a hollow core. And of course, the rest of her family so far had all been on the Mortal Esse.

Perhaps that was as far as people could go without Affinities—as condescending as the book was, a soft wall keeping people from progressing past Mortal Esse would make sense given what she’d seen so far. Did all stages have an entry barrier of sorts?

Did Mortal Esse have one?

For close to thirteen months, Malwine had been wondering why she had yet to progress. The bottleneck didn’t feel like something that could budge with insistence alone, as instinct told her she could cultivate for weeks on end yet achieve nothing.

As for ranking up, was this something Malwine needed to do ? No. Of course not. But she wanted to. It was a silly wish, perhaps far more influenced by her current childhood than she wished to admit, but she’d allow it to herself. Justifying her wishes, blaming them on youth, seemed like a mere crutch to avoid facing the fact that she was human, with human weaknesses. Desires did not always make sense, nor were they always opportune—they knew not of timing and logic.

.

It’d been quite the while since Malwine last felt like she’d learned anything—about herself or otherwise—while meditating. Cultivation might have been in some way tied to one’s vision of enlightenment, or as the book claimed, transcendence. It sounded like the type of thing that could spark debates, lead to essays and poems alike being written.

Malwine had learned of the topic through a different lens, where cultivation amounted to the occasional epiphany, and growing stronger happened to beat up the villain of the volume before power creep set up the next one.

Was her family isolated, or were there simply not that many powerful individuals around? The latter sounded doubtful. The beings Katrina had slain, as shown in her trial, were the highest rank Malwine had encountered, yet they didn’t appear that powerful. Was whoever cursed her on that unknown silver-grey stage, or beyond it? She knew gods likely existed, and all she could truly do was hope her enemy was closer to Katrina’s level than to a divinity, even if she wouldn’t know just what the latter would imply.

, Malwine had wondered repeatedly, and though she had long since concluded she just had no way to know, she felt she might have overestimated her mother. What she’d witnessed since had cracked her image of Beryl’s power—perhaps the kills had influenced her impression of Katrina, but Malwine was starting to think Katrina might have been the strongest member of her family.

Not OBeryl, not even Kristian, but Katrina.

She thought to the obit, forming a facsimile of it on the widow’s hand.

Malwine wasn’t thinking about Katrina’s hypothetical resurrection—again, her thoughts went to the widow. A part of her feared it might be a dangerous thing to wish for, to intentionally seek to create an unreality for herself when she knew all too well that while she’d seemingly stabilized things, her life was not one far from danger.

She thought herself patient—but she still wanted to explore, to learn. Time stood between here and oh so many things a child her age would not be taught, yet she needed to know. Everything from how to break the curse, to just what was up with the seablooded and seafarers, to whoever preceded OBeryl and Kristian on their respective ends of the tree.

To whoever the stranger with {Ore} was, and whether he awaited somewhere.

After a long exhale, Malwine loosened her grip on the widow’s image, on the beach. Though the hope had been there, she wasn’t surprised to see nothing had come of it. Her thoughts hadn’t aided her in breaking through to the Mortal Esse, nor had she finally coaxed an astral projection Skill into existence for her widow persona.

…That might have been for the best.

Still, it didn’t feel like Malwine had wasted her time—it’d been a nice change of pace from the ‘light’ scare she’d started her day with. At worst, she’d burned some time clearing her mind.

Dismissing [Meditation] entirely, Malwine figured she might as well go back to the book. As she visualized flipping yet another page, she found herself on the fourth chapter… and it was something about how many mortals different noble Houses tended to assign to each Class category, and the usual roles.

Things got worse with the fifth—it appeared to be a rant directed at the ‘unfortunate trend’ of some nobles instructing their kitchen staff to invest in Circulation. That made no sense to Malwine, either, but the author appeared to hate the mere idea with such a passion that the worsening quality of the later pages was strangely fitting.

As she imagined how she would slam the book shut if she could, Malwine recalled she had yet to review whatever it had to say about attributes. She expected some terrible takes there, and sought them—instead, she found she had yet to see them, even as she returned to the earlier section that had spoken of attributes.

Malwine visualized herself flipping the pages, looking for whenever the attributes would be discussed in full—and it never happened.

That inner peace she’d attained after her brief meditation was not as sturdy as she’d thought it was, and Malwine certainly wasn’t counting that vague Dexterity mention as an explanation of , so she huffed under her blanket.

“Malwine? Are you truly well, child?”

When her blanket was pulled from her, Malwine huffed again. “I wanted more fruits.”

Bernie simply blinked slowly. “Very well. I shall fetch some from the kitchens.”

Malwine stared wide-eyed as her guardian left the room, and it struck her that she didn’t quite recall ever going out of her way to ask for things from Bernie. She usually just went with the flow, keeping to herself as much as possible in order to focus on her own affairs.

She didn’t exactly regret her petulance anymore.

Apparently, she would be getting some extra fruits after all.