“I knew that, Archmund.”

  Mary was a peasant, or lowborn, or a commoner, or whatever. Just not noble. Only nobles were supposed to be able to use magic. Mary hadn’t truly used magic, but she definitely had the potential to. Which made her a criminal of the highest order.

  Unless she were to be bound to a noble family, one way or another.

  Something Archmund hadn’t known, yet somehow she had.

  “When you first came to me and asked me to try that exercise with the Gem? Struck me as something that could get me in hot water real quick.”

  She smirked. “When my auntie got me this job here, that was the first thing she told me — any noble throws you a Gem as a gesture of goodwill and says you can play with it, he’s playing a nasty trick on you. Do what he says, and he’ll have you in the palm of his hand for life. Because the more you use Gems, the harder it gets to pretend they’re just trinkets.”

  “But you listened to me.”

  “I figured if you actually had any screwed up designs on me, you wouldn’t be stupid enough to walk up to me and ask me to pour as much magic as I could into a Gem until I passed out,” she said.

  “You could’ve told me I was telling you to do something illegal,” he said. He couldn’t keep the pout out of his voice.

  “Then you would’ve stopped me,” she said.

  She was right. He would have. That was why he had brought it up.

  “You still can,” he said. He held out a pouch of raw Gems towards her. “You could take these Gems. Trade them to the Venato merchants and say they were a gift from me. Take them and go anywhere in Omnio, live a new life as someone else. No one would know you’d broken the law at all.”

  “Absolutely not,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She leaned in and flicked his nose. He winced back.

  “What would I even do with all that money, Archie? Start a store? Seems like a waste. Can’t buy a mansion like yours unless it’s from a family that’s truly fallen on hard times. I could live a pretty good life for a while, but I wouldn’t get all the food and nice clothes I get from working here.”

  “Mary, if you’re here, your life’s in danger.”

  “Unless you officially make me a servant of the Granavales for life,” she said. “And I’d be awfully worried about that sort of thing, if I didn’t know you. You’re nothing if not interesting.”

  Archmund genuinely didn’t know how to respond to any of that.

  “Think about it, Arch. Making some weird sauce that even Barst barely ever saw. Telling me to do the same ridiculous training that you do to become stronger. Going into a Dungeon and coming out alive with no combat training. You think there are any better options for my life?”

  “Uh, yes?”

  Belatedly he realized that in his past life he’d had a very bad habit of downplaying his achievements in favor of beating himself up.

  But he was from a world replete in possibility, where there was a lot of social mobility. This world was still highly stratified.

  “You think it’s easy for a peasant orphan girl to find herself a good life that isn’t filled with drudgery, Archmund? You’re a hell of a boss — you let me walk in the same path of power as you. If I wasn’t here I’d be a peddler or a scullery maid or a tavern wench or a spinstress —and all of those are… less well fed. Where else could I go?”

  Somehow, he had Mary’s undying loyalty which frankly made him uncomfortable.

  It was high time he made something of it.

  It wasn’t hard to get Mary reassigned from her other duties to be his personal maid. The other staff had raised eyebrows, but one request to his father and Mary was swiftly reassigned. He was young enough that such a request didn’t raise any questions, though he was fast approaching the age where it would — and Mary made no secret of this fact.

  “You’re awfully precocious, young master,” she said sweetly the first day of her full reassignment.

  “I know that,” Archmund said. “I fought my way through the Upper Subtier of a Dungeon at the age of nine. That’s very precocious.”

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  Mary suppressed a snort. “So… now that you have my undying loyalty… just what is it that you want from me, young master?”

  She was teasing him, just like they’d always been, yet there was a sheen of sweat upon her forehead. Perhaps her earlier bravado had been a bluff.

  He emphasized. This might have been an easier life than being part of the working class, but it certainly wasn’t one with freedom. Plus, there was always the possibility that nice men could change for the worse upon getting power and authority.

  “I know my life is in your hands, but please… be merciful.”

  Her voice was teasing, but her words rang with desperate truth.

  Archmund just couldn’t resist messing with her. Just a little. As revenge for all the teasing. No other reason.

  “Oh, you’ll find no mercy from me. You have no idea what hell you’re in for.”

  “Do your worst, young master.”

  She was defiant. He admired that about her. She’d signed up for this and resigned herself to an unknown fate, but even in the face of a potential turn to horror she stood strong.

  “Are you absolutely, completely prepared?”

  “Whatever you throw at me, I’ll take it on.”

  “You asked for it,” he smirked.

  He reached for something on his desk. She winced, anticipating something harsh.

  And he shoved a book against her chest.

  She blinked. “What?”

  “I’m teaching you how to read,” he said. “Properly.”

  Her face turned pale. She was actually scared of this. “You’re serious.”

  “Completely.”

  While Mary’s loyalty was nice to have, it wasn’t useful yet. She had domestic skills — cooking and cleaning. She also was at the very start of her journey with magic. These were not correlated. She would’ve helped with cooking and cleaning regardless of her pledge of loyalty.

  But it was obvious that the only reason Archmund had boosted above and beyond in terms of power was because of his basic knowledge of the laws of physics inherited from a past life. A half-remembered fact had allowed him to turn a trinket or flashlight into an invisible death ray.

  And the base for knowledge in depth was literacy.

  Ergo, Mary needed to learn to read.

  “I already know how to read,” Mary said blithely, her eyes shifting. Archmund frowned. Did she not like being reminded of things she wasn’t capable of? He knew the feeling.

  “If that’s the case, how come you ask me to read Ardur’s Faery Tales for you?”

  “I can do figures. Read ledgers. Do inventory, read those symbols. Anything a merchant would need,” she said. Her eyes shifted evasively. “So if you want me to start a business for you…”

  He believed her, but it frankly wasn’t enough.

  “Can you read a full sentence in plain language? Or a business contract?”

  She didn’t answer him.

  He had an ulterior motive as well.

  For one, he didn’t want to spend a second longer than necessary reading through obscure legal contracts or mercantile agreements, so he needed to delegate.

  But more importantly, he wanted to see if he could powerlevel her reading ability.

  Was she subject to the same System logic as he was, even though she didn’t have an insight into it? He hoped she was, hoped that she was governed by the same systems, that he wasn’t some “player character” surrounded by “NPCs”. He wanted to believe that everyone around him was a real person.

  Maybe interaction with Gems gave the people to tap into stat-boosting activities, even if they didn’t have direct insights into the System.

  Or maybe some people were just born different and better, and through mechanism of destiny those people ended up gaining Gemstone Tablets or Gem-Encrusted Books or some other way of peering into the System.

  Hopefully he’d prove that last one wrong.

  “One story a day,” he said. “Read one story a day to me out loud.”

  “But I — I barely know any of these words.”

  “We can start with just one story until you get it right, then. You love this book.”

  “That doesn’t mean I recognize anything that it’s saying!”

  Back in his old life, in his old country, there had been a literacy crisis. People in America just hadn’t been taught to read in a way that made sense. Instead of being taught phonics, how to “sound out” words from the noises their letters made, they were told to remember words from memory — which had been the entirely wrong approach. He was reasonably sure he hadn’t been a teacher, so he knew he wasn’t 100% up to date on the most efficient way to teach people to read, but phonics was in reach.

  “So if you know your alphabet, here’s how it goes…”

  Teaching Mary to read would be a long and somewhat tedious ordeal, but he was curious to see what she would achieve in the next hundred days. He was glad to have her loyalty, but he hoped she would be strong and confident so that one day, he could leave the tedium of managing his investment empire to her.

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