CHAPTER 146: KATHELYN’S PATHWAY

Kathelyn walked right into the clearing, heading deeper into the thick of the dense mana environment.

She loved this feeling. The clearheaded, free flowing thoughts that she felt.

It was addictive.

By the time she reached the center of the clearing, her normally expressionless face had taken on another level of blankness.

She looked devoid of emotions, already dedicating her increased focus into the next word she was trying to comprehend—Spell Fragment Memory.

Even before she’d gotten here, or taken on the compulsory military service back in her own world, she’d already had an inheritance pathway in hand.

Something that had always been with her right from when she was little.

She didn’t know her father, and even her mother had left her in an orphanage after she turned ten.

She barely remembered the woman’s face. But the one thing she always remembered was her mother emphasizing the importance of a necklace.

Kathelyn had been given this necklace right when she clocked nine. The year before her mother left her.

She’d been told it was from her father. A gift to her. Something she’d come to know was a lie later when she grew a bit older.

Her father had been from a very prestigious household, and her mother hadn’t.

While that in itself was self-explanatory, it hadn’t even been a love story. Her mother was simply someone he’d decided to have fun with during one of his travels. Their paths would never have crossed otherwise.

Kathelyn was the result of this. A child born out of wedlock.

Her mother had kept it silent, but somehow, even from the distant land her father came from, he’d still found out she was born.

But instead of going the inhumane route of sending someone to silence both of them forever, ending the stray strand of his bloodline from spreading, he had instead chosen to give them enough to live a normal life in peace and quiet, without any hassle, so long as her mother kept her mouth shut.

She had accepted, and enough wealth to last them even two lifetimes was delivered to their doorsteps.

Kathelyn had been a baby during this period, so her mother took the time, and her newfound wealth, to take care of the child to the best of her capabilities.

But after she grew... after she began to show signs of intelligence, and even coherent speech at barely past one year old...

Her mother showed her true colors after that... Her ambition for something greater.

She’d disappeared immediately, evading the subtle surveillance Kathelyn’s father still kept on her and fleeing to a totally different country.

There, she raised Kathelyn up on her own, having sold every of her previous possessions aside from the house where she fled from. She’d used that money to purchase a fallen noble house’s inheritance pathway from a black market auction, and passed it on to her daughter as if it was from her father on her ninth birthday.

Kathelyn had held on to it dearly. It was a spatial artifact necklace that held a very small space right in the pendant, where the inheritance pathway was kept.

Titled: The Cryo-Arcanum Pathway, she’d had a pathway with a clear path to Tier 4 even before she’d ever awakened.

...And immediately after she awakened, she’d put it to good use.

Kathelyn entered the single building that stood in the middle of the clearing, walking through its corridors with familiarity like this was her home. She went straight for the center, where the mana was densest.

There was a large, dark pit there, with stairs leading all the way down. But Kathelyn had never had the courage to try going into the pit.

The most she’d ever done was to stay at the edges... and that was exactly what she did. She sat down cross-legged, soaking herself in the mana and... origin that streamed out of the pit.

It took her into a state of enlightenment as she pondered the meaning of the next word she wanted to try comprehending– Spell Fragment Memory.

Her Cryo-Arcanum Pathway’s version of memory.

This was how it was for most pathways. Most concepts aside from the very basic ones were very paraphrased and tried to get to the heart of the real concept in their own way or the other.

For Kathelyn, her pathway described ’spell fragment memory’ as little containers—as little as one could envision them—that held parts of a spell for her to get access to at a short moment’s notice.

Because it wasn’t as precise as Zephyr’s path that delved into the intricacies of memory in the fullest, hers was more straightforward.

Her only issue, as pointed out in the inheritance manual, was in regards to ’miniaturization’ and the problem that came with it: getting the information stored from every of these containers...

There were various methods listed in the book to get past this hurdle. There was the direct solution to simply stop at a certain level of miniaturization when visualizing the spell fragment containers, so as to allow for every of them to be easily accessible individually.

This meant that the spell containers would be larger, using up more space in a person’s mana node while having less memory to hold spell fragments. The result of this meant that the overall power of the spell formed would be less than if it was cast manually. But in turn, the reward was a faster fetch time.

It was recommended to be used only by those who had very high mana node counts and could compensate for the reduced number per node with their total amount of mana nodes.

Kathelyn would have gone down this route, since she was a sixteen node awakened... but there was also another option, where one could continue to push the miniaturization to the very limits of their comprehension.

This was considered the more difficult, and ultimately more rewarding path. But the difficulty of fetching the stored information would remain. Routing every connection to each of the very tiny spell fragment containers during comprehension would strain her mental capacity to the maximum.

And in the end, regardless of how perfect the comprehension might turn out to be, there would still be human error.

Which meant there would be scrambled spell fragments due to clashing paths, and ’disturbance’ in the form of ’noise’ from one connection path to the other was sure to occur.

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