[Please set Stats and Stat Baselines in base 10]

  “What happened, Grandpa? I felt the mana do something weird, then stopped before it… finished?” Bee said confusedly, almost shouting to try to get his attention.

  A proud smile bloomed on Talin’s face. Not many would’ve been able to sense anything from a runic array activation, let alone feel one connect to mana itself—especially not a child of his granddaughter’s age and lack of magical training.

  But because of that, he ignored her question and decided to show her what exactly it was supposed to feel like. He wanted to see that awe on her face.

  He waved both hands and traced the runes with purposeful intent of what he wanted as his baselines.

  Strength, Vitality, and Constitution were fairly simple. He’d already compared himself to several regular people, though none of them were true averages, he could recalibrate when it was all operational.

  Thankfully, though he’d lived for so long and had trained his body somewhat, the gap between him and a regular person wasn’t all that big. His strength, for example, was only around ten times the average. He could lift roughly a thousand kilograms, so he set a tenth of that as the average at 10 points.

  The same went for Constitution. His body was around 5.5 times the toughness of a normal person, which he’d discovered in the way of many… many knife cuts.

  Vitality was a bit more difficult as he always had a low-power healing spell constantly working to stop his aging. Deciding to leave it blank for now, he moved on to the harder to calculate stats.

  Agility and Dexterity were highly dependent on both age and training. The former being more for overall body coordination, the latter for fine motor movements. Both had younger people excelling in each.

  That said, his Agility was abysmal compared to his Dexterity by the sheer fact that he’d needed fine motor movements more—as a mage with one of his areas of expertise being in artifacts—than general body coordination. By his estimates, he was at least 560 times more dexterous than regular people. A bit less if he took watchmakers into account.

  Then came Agility. He looked over to his granddaughter and had an idea.

  “Hey little bug! Sorry, grandpa blanked out there for a sec—several seconds, but can you demonstrate a hop, skip, and a jump in quick succession?”

  He figured that the Agility of a carefully raised child would be much closer to the adult average than… whatever he had.

  “Um, okay? Can you tell me why grandpa?”

  Talin smiled. “Because we’re going to show the world the Bee’s knees!”

  Bee who had just been about to do a hop, stopped mid-step. “My knees?”

  “Yes!” Talin chuckled at his own joke. “Well, more like just your agility, but you get what I mean.”

  “Perhaps you should work on your humor,” the tree said matter-of-factly.

  Talin ignored the obvious bait and looked expectantly at Bee. A moment later, she finished the demonstration.

  Roughly two seconds.

  He nodded and logged it as the average at 10 points.

  Then, finally, came his preferred stats. Intelligence and Mana.

  He already had the perfect base for mana: one unit equaled one fireball. Granted, it would be a hyper-efficient fireball that could only be cast from the hands of an advanced mage of at least the fifth tier. Still, prospective mages should have that as their goal, no matter how inexperienced they are.

  Intelligence, however, was slightly harder. It was a critical stat that represented a being’s information processing power, and in turn, how fast that being can cast spells. Thankfully, he had his lovable granddaughter.

  “Quick, Bee, what’s 1023 multiplied by 237 divided by 162?”

  “Uh, uhhh, 1496.61!” his granddaughter enthusiastically replied after around five seconds of looking off into the distance with the most confused expression her face could muster.

  “Apologies again, Bee, good job. We’re almost done!”

  The last stat was something even he questioned whether he should include, as it wasn’t all that intuitive.

  Better do it now than later, I guess.

  He took off his gloves and gathered his mana on his open palms. In his mind, he traced the necessary spell form of what he considered was nothing but a souped-up fireball—a firebomb. It was simple in its complexity, where the modifications only caused a shell to form around the rest of the fire mana condensation.

  If Intelligence was processing power, Arcane Will measured raw manipulation speed.

  Maybe he wasn’t the best baseline for this particular stat because of how much experience he actually had, but it was an essential measurement nonetheless. Besides, he couldn’t teach it to his granddaughter on a whim. Children needed their time as children. Even if they were forced to be children.

  In but a moment, he finished the spell form which gave the mana direction, but without his express intent, it was slow in its transformation. This didn’t last very long.

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  Within the time it took a falling leaf to twist once in the air, his mana went into overdrive, zipped through his energy channels like they weren’t there, and completely transformed into a ball of condensed fire.

  By his estimation, he’d succeeded in completing the spell in a single millisecond.

  He was somewhat disappointed in himself, knowing he could do better, but for the sake of baselines, it was good enough. All he had to do was factor in his excellence at over ten thousand times that of the normal man, and all would be fine.

  “There!” Talin exclaimed.

  [Stats and Baselines established.]

  [Quantifying…]

  The mana around them stirred once more as the runic array went to work. Bee had closed her eyes and focused on her other senses. Even his tree friend had grown still as he too, focused on the mana.

  All the energy within several meters of them condensed and morphed into spell forms that would’ve taken lesser mages months to form and execute—taking only a few minutes… which extended to almost an hour… that did not finish even then.

  “Wait, what?!” Talin shouted in bewilderment. “It’s taking too long! This shouldn’t—”

  “It lacks… mana?” Bee’s childlike voice echoed. “It lacks it, but somehow still runs?”

  “It lacks something else too,” the tree’s sonorous voice added. “Direction? Or maybe intelligence? A guide of some sort?”

  Then it hit Talin. “Intelligence! It lacks processing power!”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant, but sure!”

  ***

  It took five hours before a change finally settled on the mana. The grandfather and granddaughter duo flew around and played with one of the treants while Talin dedicated a mind construct to a conversation with the tree.

  “The mana’s finally starting to slow,” the tree said.

  “Indeed. It should be any time now,” Talin sighed. “Still, it takes much too long for any practical use.”

  “Do you have a solution?”

  “Well…” he looked up at the massive tree. Then at the roots… then at the millions of connected sentinels to said roots.

  “I won't do it. So don’t even ask.”

  Talin let out a heavy sigh. “But where else do we find something with a ridiculous amount of mana and the processing power to back it? As far as I know, we are it. Especially you, with your—” he waved his hand over the entirety of The Forests of Aristosa.

  “Perhaps,” he sent Talin a grin. “Perhaps not. There is one that has been, shall I say, evolving.”

  Talin’s eyebrows raised at that. Who could it have been? There weren’t any others even close to their level in terms of power. And one of them was several times older than the other.

  The dragons only had Lifesbane who’d been stuck a step below them for centuries. The Leviathans had six he knew of, but none of them had the desire to reach the next stage. He doubted they could hide anyone from all other race’s scouts and divinations.

  And everyone else… well, none were anywhere even close. Not to mention that the current Empire would’ve already sent knights to kill any that had dared near. Besides, the tree did say that they were ‘evolving’. It could only be non-humanoid.

  “One of your children, perhaps?” he asked. A new tree just as massive, would be nothing but a boon. The fact that it would also have access to the root network was a bonus.

  A very desired bonus.

  “Oh, no, no! My children are much too obsessed with slow and steady growth to even think of catching up to m—”

  “Just like you, then.”

  “I—” the tree was caught speechless. “Rude. What I meant to say was, it’s the core.”

  “Which one?” Talin asked, his head tilted in confusion. “Lots of cores out there, old friend.”

  “The Core.”

  “…the core? As in the planetary core? How could you have possibly known that?”

  Then, from the side, came a root. An incredibly dense root that moved as slowly as it looked heavy. With it, he—and even his granddaughter—could see the mana dripping off it.

  “You’ve reached the center with a root? Is that why you’ve been growing so fast all this time?” Talin asked. Exasperated. “You’ve been holding out on me, friend! How did you even get past the fucking mantle?!

  “What do you mean? Of course it’s because I’m the BEST!”

  And they were chatting so well, too. Why wasn’t he surprised that the childishness would return? Talin only sighed and let his friend praise himself for a few minutes.

  There was an issue, though. How exactly would he reach the core? And even if he got there, it was still evolving and not yet at full intelligence. He was unsure if it would even know what to do.

  Just then, his thoughts were interrupted when the silent buzz of the mana they’d momentarily forgotten stopped.

  [Quantified. Showing stats for target designated as (Talin Bathory Vitram).]

  — — —

  Name: Talin Bathory Vitram (Human)

  Tier: 9th Tier (Magic)

  Strength: 100

  Vitality: -

  Constitution: 55

  Agility: 30

  Dexterity: 5600

  Intelligence: 10092

  Mana: 53856

  Arcane Will: 35142

  — — —

  “That Agility is just insulting. I’m not that old, right?” Talin mumbled under his breath. He checked his healing spell, kept alive by one of his more basic mind constructs, and found it to be operating as intended. “Should I train my body some…?”

  “Grandpa!” the little flying bug floated near him. “Was that it? Is it done? I felt the mana do some weird stuff!”

  “Indeed. I’ve never felt anything quite like it,” the tree’s voice added.

  “Yes! What you just felt, Bee, was a runic array—of my own making and recognized by whatever ancient thing is out there—connect to both mana, itself, and me. All of me. My body, my mana, even my soul. It quantified the main attributes of an average human,” he paused. “Everything that I could think of, at least.”

  “Can I try?! I want to see!”

  He thought for a moment and decided, why not? He hadn’t sensed anything dangerous. Not even anything threatening, which would’ve activated a few of his emergency spells woven into his garb and into a few mind constructs.

  So without further ado, he snapped his fingers once more with Bee as his target. It didn’t even take five minutes before her status was revealed to him.

  — — —

  Name: Beatrice Vitram Goldfinger (Human Child)

  Tier: 0th Tier

  Strength: 6.5

  Vitality: 13

  Constitution: 7

  Agility: 8

  Dexterity: 28

  Intelligence: 23

  Mana: 1029

  Arcane Will: 206

  — — —

  Talin guffawed in proud celebration.

  As expected of his granddaughter! She was a top-tier talent in magic. Only a select few would be able to compete with his little Bee.

  “Me next, yes?” The tree interjected with a vine lightly tapping him on his shoulder.

  Talin grimaced. They would surely need to wait hours once more if he did that. He wanted to ignore his friend and wait for when it would be instant—hopefully, if and when they somehow got the soon-to-be sentient core to agree to become their own processor.

  However, they did have the extra time to burn, why not help his friend out?

  So he did. Completely not expecting what the array would tell him several hours later.

  [Unable to Quantify target.]

  “So it says. Any idea why?” Talin asked.

  “…fascinating,” the tree went silent for a few seconds as Talin felt his consciousness disappear, then reappear.

  “And?”

  “I might know what it is,” a vine with several colored fruits came close. “I can’t be sure, but the answer may lie here.”

  “…in your fruits?”

  An awkward silence filled the space—Bee snatching one of the blue fruits, and her chewing, being the only audible sound.

  “In your fruits,” he repeated, not liking where it was all headed.