“Of course. Mostly about my brother, though.” Orion replied. They were about two kilometers from the city, and as they walked along, the silence was filled with conversation. He was accompanied only by Zaiah, who, after preparing to try to solve Orion’s mana problem, to Avir’s disappointment, decided that it was best if they did it alone and away from civilization. “He’s the one I’ve spoken to most, and I’m afraid my worldview may have affected him negatively. I told him many times that I was disappointed in humanity… our tendency to harm others and our unwillingness to selflessly help. Now that magic has arrived in our world, I’m afraid that he might place too high expectations on himself because of me and perhaps even risk his life unnecessarily.”

  ***

  “I’ve come to save you!” Robert shouted, standing in front of the hunched woman. She was wearing nothing but scraps of clothing and was surrounded by three… definitely not kind gentlemen.

  It has now been confirmed that the city they were in was merged with several other cities, thus creating quite a big metropolis. Since the System left a lot of space for new construction; and the existing buildings were only intended to serve as temporary shelters, despite the massive population, large areas of vacant land gave the impression that the place was rather deserted.

  The world was now divided into two main camps. One of them were opportunists and the people who sought to use their new abilities to snatch for themselves whatever they once secretly desired. These were the groups one would most likely encounter walking around the city.

  In the second camp, there were those who decided to utilize their newfound power to work hand in hand with others to protect their loved ones and try to bring about some semblance of order. A hastily cobbled together hierarchy was created, and rare individuals with public administration classes or social skills tried to help calm the situation. This group tried to assemble in larger groups, occupy their designated areas and then defend the citizens placed there.

  Among these larger gatherings, one could also hear here and there sweet words from politicians and former officials who promised a bright future if you followed them, something that only a few people were currently falling for.

  A large part of the population decided that they would wait out the greatest mess, hidden in their own or someone else’s abandoned apartments. However, because of the sheer number and dispersion of bandits, they were far more likely to encounter a small group of hooligans, larger gangs, or individual psychopaths than they were to encounter righteous people.

  In both camps, there were former soldiers and police officers. Some decided to become bandits, while others tried to bring order, but now they lacked the authority to do anything. Attempts to use force were met with immediate repression by greater power and the risk of escalation.

  This is where people like Robert came in. Although the provisional governments strongly discouraged this, some rebelliously decided to go deep into bandit-controlled territories to extract civilians and transport them to common, protected areas.

  Robert pulled his trusty katana from his inventory and, with a grim look, took a ready-to-attack stance. According to his brother’s view of the world, when people were given some power, most of them immediately forgot about empathy and turned into selfish beasts eager for dominance over others.

  Yet, he saw firsthand that there also were those who wanted to do good. All by themselves and against all odds. So it’s only natural that he went down that road.

  Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye the next time they meet.

  ***

  A few hours earlier he had learned a great deal about this world and the reality of life with mana and the System in general. Although the teacher did not want to give in-depth answers about mana, as she felt that she was not qualified enough, she patiently discussed all the other subjects.

  And that’s how he learned that this world is rather static. There’s no sun to form a rotating system around, and the piece of rock they were on was suspended in space, surrounded by other planets. This naturally meant that there was no day or night here, and the present dimness was unchanging.

  The source of the light was; on a cosmic scale, a small but exceptionally hot object which was actually a cloud of gas. Due to the lack of rotation, while this side of the world was quite comfortable in terms of temperature, the other side was uninhabitable for humans. The light itself, on the other hand, was reflected mainly from the largest planet in the sky called Taulos and illuminated the inhabited part.

  Since they didn’t have to keep up with planetary motion, people created cycles based on their needs. This is how the twenty-hour day cycle came into being, but most often single ten-hour cycles were used here.

  These cycles were established by society and were referred to as the ‘active cycle’ and the ‘free cycle’. And although theoretically they could be considered equivalents of day and night, due to their length it would be more appropriate to say: on this cycle you work and take care of things, and on that cycle you rest and sleep. But nothing stood in the way of functioning at ‘night’ and sleeping during the ‘day’. Since many establishments were closed during the free cycle, there were also some shops and attractions open all the time.

  Naturally, there were also people who went to bed at the end of the active cycle to get up at the beginning of the free cycle, and so on.

  Another thing worth mentioning was the local time system. People in this world apparently liked to operate around multiples of ten, so the equivalent of a minute here was 100 seconds long, and an hour was 100 minutes long; thus making a ten-hour cycle slightly shorter than one and a half Earth days. This wasn’t all that surprising, considering that one of the first things you noticed when leveling up was the decreasing amount of rest required.

  Then we had a week of ten double-cycles, or twenty ten-hour cycles, and a month of five such weeks. There were three months in the year, and interestingly enough, they represented the seasons in their own right. Although there was no planetary motion here, there was clearly something like cyclical mana flows that caused the space object, a source of light and heat, to regularly weaken and intensify its radiating. Thus, the equivalent of spring, summer, and autumn-winter took place here. These months were appropriately called Viria, Calaria, and Nixia, although the teacher mentioned that these names are not used as often. We were more likely to hear that someone was planning to move in two months’ time than the next Viria.

  For those interested in the details: Orion was curious to calculate how many seconds a year would take and how that would compare to a year on Earth, and when he did, surprisingly enough, he received a system notification about unlocked additional knowledge. According to his calculations, a year here lasted thirty million seconds, and if he wasn’t mistaken, a normal Earth year lasted thirty-one million five hundred and thirty-six thousand seconds. The System message, on the other hand; when extended, explained to him that the local second was exactly 1.0511 of his known seconds. This, being accurate, since this year lasted 30,000,000 local seconds and 31,533,000 ordinary seconds, made it fifty Earth minutes shorter than the ordinary year in his previous world.

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  Coming back to the more important issues, another thing worth mentioning was the penal system. Turns out it’s based mostly on slavery here. Orion was quite frightened to hear this, but apparently the local definition of slavery was quite different from what he knew, especially since it all depended on the circumstances.

  Starting from the fact that when someone committed an offense, the case was referred to the council, which also acted as a court and possibly hired others to investigate the details. Before the council decides on the gravity of the crime, the perpetrator is put in jail, although the name of this facility does not seem as pejorative as its Earthly equivalents. In every prison building, there’s a seating corridor and a holding room for high-risk individuals, which Orion has already experienced. The prisons here could also be just a waiting room where the suspect spends time before he learns that the case has been solved and is released as if nothing had happened.

  If, however, it is decided that the person must be punished, they are given the status of a slave, and the case goes to the person responsible for them. At this point, it should be mentioned that slaves were also people who had this status for example only for a few minutes and as a punishment, had to clean up the mess they had made. Sentences were handled by licensed slave owners, and it was their responsibility to both impose a fair punishment and monitor whether it had been served. There were five types of licenses that authorized the taking of slaves according to their assigned crime level, each with two levels.

  The local penal system was divided into ten levels of offenses, although theoretically you could say there’s an eleventh ‘level zero’ where a person was simply reprimanded and released. The division increased from level one to level ten, where the higher the value, the more serious the crime.

  At levels one through two, convicts typically just make up for the damage they’ve done, pay a small fine, or simply go through a lecture explaining why the behavior was wrong. They could also be assigned additional tasks that do not last more than a few hours, such as picking leaves or walking an animal.

  Levels two and four allowed for a sentence that could normally last up to several cycles, for example as after-hours work for the person dealing with the convict. Occasionally a slave, even after serving his sentence, decides to stay and continue working, this time for a fair wage.

  In the case of levels five and six, here things were slowly getting serious, and the slaves could be punished with labor that lasted from a week upwards. At these levels, scenarios also began where the convict had to stay in his designated place, unable to return to their apartment. Since the offense could not be drastic but would result in high damages, penal work at these levels could even take months or years, especially if the offender had no means to pay the required fees.

  For levels seven to eight, licenses were quite difficult to obtain, and to keep them, you had to take part in rigorous controls. The reason was that from these levels onwards, a slave owner could use corporal punishment, although it was carefully supervised and could not cause permanent damage to health. At these levels, the prisoner usually had to work long and hard, and the person in charge of the punishment was authorized to make life more difficult for the prisoner.

  Then we had levels nine and ten, where the punishments could have a lifelong impact on the person sentenced, and it was genuinely expected that they would be publicly humiliated and even beaten to set an example. These levels were reserved for the worst offenders, and in special cases, penalties could even be posthumous. Naturally, the people in charge of punishment at these levels were the most controlled, and the consequences of abuse of power were the most severe.

  It should be noted that slaves at all levels had the right to refuse punishment, and if no satisfactory alternative was imposed, they might request a change of punisher, thereby risking a worse punishment if the refusal was unfounded. There were many preventive measures to ensure that the punishment is not too severe for a given level or to avoid a situation where there would be some kind of cronyism in which the slave avoided punishment.

  Regarding licensed individuals, they were compensated and rewarded based on the time and effort they dedicated to the enslaved people per month, enabling the professional practice of slavery. There were also no objections to the convict earning money for the person responsible for them, but these earnings were often deducted from the reward to some extent.

  Having this new knowledge, Orion was somehow amused by the fact that in most of the other worlds in the fantasy he once quite eagerly absorbed, they were typically just limited to being alternate Earths. Add medieval times, plus magic, plus some elves and dwarves. You can take it a step further and add various furry humanoids, but remember that when you do this, they; for some reason; need to be sexually attractive. To the mixture add another moon to make it even more cool, and ta-da, the new, shiny world is ready!

  The authors somehow forgot that each community could come up with its solutions for managing the world, not to mention a limited vision of the nature of habitable planets. There were definitely some similarities between this world and Earth, but the differences were so many that even now he felt he knew only a fraction of them. Thus, because of the many differences, he even wondered about the reason for the similarities.

  What Orion didn’t know was that all the tutorial participants were experiencing worlds just like that: mostly Earth-like, with commonly known races like goblins, elves, and dwarves. The System deliberately used races that were somehow known from the stories and legends of the integrated world to make it as easy as possible for people to go through the process.

  “Alright, I think this would be a good place.” Zaiah suggested. They stopped in a small, sheltered valley, right next to a gently flowing stream.

  “So, what’s the plan?”

  “First, we need to make sure I was right about the scenario.” said Zaiah, next to whom two objects appeared in the air. The first one looked like your typical mana potion, and the second one, which floated towards Orion, was a round box with an open lid. “Take off your shirt and rub it on your chest. It will allow me to see your pathways in action more closely.”

  Orion nodded and followed instructions. The ointment he was applying had a blue, glittery color and was rather cold to the touch.

  “Okay, now drink this.”

  “Am I correct in assuming this is a mana potion?”

  “No, no. This is a soup made from my own recipe. We came here because I wanted to know what you think about it.” answered the crystal, giggling. “Yup, it’s a mana potion.”

  The corners of Orion’s mouth lifted at the joke. He shook his head and took a sip.

  The potion tasted like the juice of some fruit mixture and was accompanied by a strange sensation on the tongue, reminiscent of licking a mostly spent battery. After a while, the fluid once again began to behave as if the digestive system were merely an insignificant clue, and instead of flowing down to the stomach, it began to seep into his body. There were no pleasant sensations this time. Immediately, he felt as if he were deep beneath the sea, with water pressing on every piece of his being.

  “Blughh. Yeah, that wasn’t very nice.”

  “Well, you’ve been through this way better than I expected. We also have confirmation of my theory. Your pathways are in worse shape than an old junkie’s. I’d ask you how, but the Grand Inquisitor advised us not to be too nosy. I could argue that it’s technically impossible because I don’t have a nose, but… never mind. Anyway, I have an idea how to handle this.”

  Then a wooden tub appeared on the ground, filled to the brim with a bluish liquid.

  “You need to soak in it for a while. If you absorb at least some of this fluid into your body, it will allow me to move my personal mana within you. Oh, I think you should get completely undressed, too. Otherwise, after all, you wouldn’t want anything to do with those clothes.”

  “Uhm. You mentioned some impurities earlier. You think it’s gonna be that bad?”

  “Let’s say, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier about not having a nose.”