Carefully observing the wooden box within his mother's soul, he thought back to the System's words of his death.

'[The officer shooting you in the heart saved many, many lives.]'

Should he have released the full amount of unbridled mana, devastation would've befallen everyone he'd ever known. It seemed that, luckily, when the body perished, the soul took all the bare mana with it to the afterlife, effectively removing it from Earth. That still left echoes of course, such as his own, but there weren't regular explosions everywhere, considering there had to be many people on Earth in a similar situation to him. With bodies unable to expel mana, Earth had to be a treasure trove of powerful mana storages, though each with unique traits.

Still, he was very gentle in his study of her spell so as not to set it off somehow. The first thing he did was look at the contents of the box, checking what, exactly, it stored. He expected a scene similar to his own, a boiling pit of rage barely contained within six conceptual walls.

His eyebrows raised when he, instead, found something of a graveyard. The mana type in this box wasn't… active. It was a dull, grayish red, and very lethargic. Almost dead.

There were many different pockets to the box as well. While his mother didn't have the Sectioning upgrade he did, whatever her spell did served a similar function. Normally, when two points of mana of the same affinity entered a mana storage together, they would merge concepts and become identical. In his mother's spell, however, the mana was too passive to merge anything. This led to different layers forming, showing him exactly what the spell did with mana over time.

The most recent Wrath mana was his own, the single point of Wrath he'd given her. It was still infected with the Curse, which was why he was worried about giving it to his mother, but he watched in real time as the Curse was put to bed like an unruly child, tucked in tightly, given a kiss on the head, lights out. The Curse still fought back, but it was a losing battle, and would be put to sleep shortly.

The rest of her spell was organized like a section cut from a tree- showing clear, distinct, rings. Wrath mana came in one side, the spell did something, and it went out the other. The second most recent ring was only slightly duller than the typical Wrath red. The ring after that, a bit more, so on and so forth until around the halfway point, when the red was completely gone, replaced with pure gray and showing no hint of Wrath.

Dei assumed his mother had been draining the Concentration from the mana, like he did, and creating Null mana from Wrath. The middle point proved him wrong, as the gray mana did not resemble Null at all. Null was perfectly clear.

It was the second half, after the mana became fully grayed out, that he realized what her spell was doing. As he progressed down the layers, the spell quickly regained color- though now, it was pink instead. Kindness. Rather than drain the concepts of Wrath, it sort of… neutralized them, then used the spare parts to re-imbue it with Kindness.

Unlike the first half of the process, the Kindness was much more abrupt in their change. Gone were the rings, replaced with an instant wall of pink in the second half of the spell.

The Kindness was incredibly rich in concepts as well, clearly untouched by whatever other magic his mother had.

'Actually,' he thought to himself, 'Does she have any other magic, is there any way for her to use this at all?'

He quickly scanned whatever connection this spell had with an affinity, hoping to trace it back to his mother's Kindness affinity, then from there into her other Kindness spells, but instantly ran into a problem.

There was nothing holding up the spell.

No connection to Kindness, Wrath, or any other affinity. Studying the feel of the box again, he realized that this spell was unaffinitied. It was a construct of pure willpower, not a speck of mana in its creation and completely unattuned. His mother had no Kindness affinity, she'd made this on her own.

'This is what the System meant whenever it said my Pandora's Box is 'within the world of concepts,' they never used mana at all! That's why it doesn't take Kindness mana to maintain Pandora's Box, it is a construct of my willpower, same as my mother. But how? Did she create this on her own?

'No, it must be from what Perumah told me about! Affinities in this world don't need a connection to the person in order to assist them. Kindness must've seen mom trying to help dad out with his Wrath, and subconsciously guided her hand. For as long as she wanted to help him, the affinity she doesn't hold would continue to help her though… clearly with more difficulty.'

From what he could see, her spell struggled to keep up. His would level up rapidly in the other world, taking mere hours to grow and adjust, but spells in this world must've been much harder to push forward, as his mother's spell was a pale imitation to his own. It was shallow, lacking a conceptual depth that granted his the ability to expand itself supernaturally. He doubted she'd even crossed the first evolutionary threshold with it!

'If it works exactly the same as my own, I'd say hers is about level… ninety? Perhaps ninety five? She's almost there, but for how many decades she must've been cycling mana through it, that's nothing!'

In the singular year he'd had Pandora's Box in the other world, it'd grown in power by leaps and bounds, far more than the twenty years he'd held it on Earth. He could only attribute that to the nature of this world suppressing affinities.

So… His mother had a Kindness-based spell, but no way to use it, and now it was building up? That couldn't be right, it would've built up a lot faster if that was the case, and there was clearly fresh Wrath mana in here. He felt like he was missing a puzzle piece, but that was fine. He didn't have to figure it all out on his own when the user was right in front of him.

"Mom, you have a massive storage of magic in your soul but… no way to use it. How? Why?"

If she'd somehow made a spell to store it, why not make spells to use it too? It just made no sense to him.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Jack and Sophie were stunned, but his mother took on a contemplative look.

"I'd long suspected something was going on, but I don't really know how to pinpoint the exact differences since marrying your father. Could you describe it to me more?"

He did exactly that, telling his mother what he saw and comparing it to his own for reference.

She nodded. "That makes sense. I married Oscar just six months after he joined up with the Elite, and-"

"Elite?!" Dei exclaimed, matching the English word with the Undercant word, realizing they were the same by definition.

"Oh, yea, that's what Earth calls its mages. Why?"

"I… That's what they call their strongest fighters raised in a society over in the other world. Sorry, the same word took me off guard."

His mother smiled. "It's not exactly a random naming sense! Especially if they both serve the same purpose."

Dei nodded, but he felt like there was more to it than that. Nonetheless, he didn't interrupt again when his mother continued.

"Anyway, I met him shortly before he started going on missions, then we married six months after he joined. Before we married, he talked about how he was afraid of losing it, and he was getting closer every day. It's one of the reasons why we pushed to marry a bit quicker than we might've, as I was afraid he wouldn't come back. After we married though, he talked about a tangible difference in how well he could rein himself back in. He assumed it was the mental aspect of having a wife to return to, but over time I started to think I might've been directly helping when I started feeling a bit of… pressure, in my chest. Right in my heart. At first I, like Oscar, assumed it was just me missing him, but the feeling would never go away unless I physically touched him. Just spending time together wasn't enough though, we had to actually cuddle for the feeling to go away.

"There was never anything concrete, but Oscar would say that his mind would clear up after that too. It was all based on feelings so there was no way to verify without actually getting tested for magic, but I didn't want to do that unless absolutely necessary. I'm sure the military can find a way to take advantage of my magic, but I just don't care enough. I'd rather use it exclusively for Oscar."

"So… What? You think you give dad Kindness mana, and that naturally counteracts the effects of Wrath?"

"Yes, which is just one of the steps I think, especially based on what you're telling me it looks like. I take some of his Wrath mana, turn it into Kindness, and give it back. Without the ability to return the mana by cuddling with him, it just keeps building up because I'm skipping the last step. My heart has been aching since your father was locked away. I miss him… alot…" His mother said, taking on a despondent look for a few moments.

It felt wrong to break her from her thoughts, but he knew he'd be able to fix it faster if he had all the information. He was not leaving until his dad was better.

"In that case, I suppose my final question is: how do you still have Wrath mana? Does it take a long time to turn it into Kindness? If dad was locked away more than a year ago, it must be an incredibly slow process."

She looked at him like he was an idiot. "We visit him of course, I'm even able to give him hugs."

'Oh. Duh.' "In that case, how do you get the Wrath mana if it requires you to cuddle to transfer it?"

"Not with the Wrath. Only Kindness. I usually get more tense over time when we spend time together."

"Okay, so you've just been taking all the Wrath without dispensing any of the Kindness… I think I get it now, and why your spell has been such a low level for so long. Mana storage spells only go up when they store large amounts of it, which you haven't. Instead, you just keep recycling it in small quantities. I will say though, you're almost there, but there's one thing I can't figure out: why.

"I just don't get it. You've somehow made a spell, but only one for the benefit of dad. You're a normal person, and from what I know about Earth… magic should be locked for you, but you've done something to go around that, to an incredibly limited degree"

His mother nodded. "This is something I've thought about for a long time, sitting up at night and wondering what I did, and how. While it may be unrelated, I've long guessed it had something to do with our vows. I only started… cycling? Sure, cycling his anger after we were married, so I think that somehow granted me a limited ability to tap into magic in general, even if it is only for his benefit."

"Ah, but how would the vows…?" Dei trailed off, remembering his experience in making a deal with Void. What if marriage vows were a sort of contract? An intangible construct that certainly did something, but people like him, people below Godhood, were unable to truly take advantage of.

To Dei, without the System, a contract was nothing more than a promise. With the System it was… sort of still a promise, but a promise with backing. Sure, he could sense it and stuff, but it was as flimsy as his own word.

But if it actually existed, and he could actually sense it when he was creating it, how would it make sense if it did absolutely nothing? No, Contracts, vows, or whatever else he wanted to call them did do something, he just couldn't pinpoint what.

"Alright, thinking about it, I think you're right. The marriage vow to dad probably became something called a Contract, with some weird or niche benefits that I don't actually understand. So far as we can see, there is the definitive benefit of learning a mana storage spell, but your contract is also probably the source of my second inborn active affinity- Kindness. Originally, I thought me having Kindness on top of inheriting dad's Wrath was just some sort of freak mutation. Now though, I'm leaning more towards it being the result of your vow, as perhaps it allowed for Kindness to grant me an indirect blessing. Maybe you impressed Kindness so much with your efforts to help dad that when one of your sons- namely, Leven- would've been born with Wrath, it stepped in to grant him an alternate path to dad's."

"You always were the favorite…" Sophie grumbled.

"I don't have favorites!" his mother insisted, slapping Sophie on the shoulder playfully.

"He got two kinds of magic!" she insisted.

His mother rolled her eyes, saying "And how could I help that?"

"Besides," Dei cut in, "I didn't even use the magic for anything cool in life. I was just angry all the time then died."

"For like an hour," Sophie retorted, "Grow up."

"That's beside the point. Either way, mom has some magic and we don't actually know why." He sighed, "If only I could talk to Aloran right now. I'd be able to ask him about Divine Contracts and the like, which I seriously should've done before coming back to Earth."

"Who's Aloran?" Sophie asked

"A God I met."

"Run it back, pause. Now tell us the story from the beginning because I'm dying of curiosity and everyone is here."

"Not everyone… I don't mind telling you the story, but what about dad? Shouldn't we, I don't know, start the process of freeing him? If I somehow manage to get to him, I'm sure I'll be able to siphon off every scrap of Wrath mana bogging him down, but I'm also a little unsure of how to approach this. I have something of a plan when it comes to introducing myself to the U.S. government and what my new identity will be, but there is no chance I'll be having the meeting at their headquarters or whatever prison they have dad in. Is there any way I can meet with the agents independently? Like, do y'all have a way to contact them?"

His mother nodded. "Yes, and I'll do so now. Then, tell us the story."

"Don't call for her to come quite yet. Tell her you need her here two days from now, I should be ready by then."

She shrugged. "That works, let me message Loretta quickly, then let's hear everything that's happened since you've… reincarnated."

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