Sera had the data within forty-eight hours.
She ran comparison tests on every scroll grade we had in stock — grey, blue, and one gold that a B-rank adventurer had left with me for enhancement and which I'd been treating with the care appropriate to something worth more than my monthly expenses. She tested pre-enhancement rates, post-enhancement rates, pass-count efficiency, mana cost per pass, degradation threshold per grade.
She put the comparison sheet on my workbench at seven in the morning with the satisfied expression of someone who had been awake since four and didn't think this was a problem.
The numbers were significant. Grey scrolls: base four-to-five use range now hitting seven to eight after two passes where five passes had been required before. Blue scrolls: the Fireball I'd noticed, plus Wind Barrier and Stone Wall both showing efficiency improvements of roughly twenty-five percent over level five. The gold scroll — a Chain Lightning, genuinely expensive — I'd run a single cautious pass on and the response had been enough to make me put it down and think carefully before continuing.
"The gold scroll," Sera said, pointing at the sheet.
"I saw it."
"The single-pass improvement at level six is equivalent to what three passes achieved at level five."
I know, I thought. That's what I'm looking at.
"The inscription density on gold-grade scrolls is significantly higher," she continued. "They have more pathways to optimize. At level five, my modeling suggested gold scrolls were the limiting factor — the skill wasn't efficient enough to reach the deeper inscription layers. At level six—"
"It's reaching them."
"It's reaching them," she confirmed. "If the pattern holds at level seven and above, gold-grade scroll enhancement becomes — I don't have a good word for what the numbers suggest."
"Try."
She looked at the sheet. "Disproportionate. The improvement curve for gold grade appears exponential rather than linear. At level five we were getting linear improvements across all grades. At level six, grey and blue are still linear but gold is doing something different." She paused. "I would like to run more tests on the gold scroll."
"It's a client's scroll."
"I would like to run tests on a gold scroll."
"I'll get us a gold scroll," I said. Durnok's contacts in the Dwarven Confederacy. Or the next time a B-rank party wants enhancement services, I negotiate a gold scroll as partial payment. "Give me two weeks."
She wrote something in her notebook. I was fairly certain it said "two weeks" with a small box next to it that she would check when it happened.
The elixir improvement was the other half of the level-six jump, and I discovered it the way I discovered most things — by accident, with the party watching.
Standard pre-run prep. Torvin drinking a health elixir, my hand on his shoulder, the enhancement channeled through as usual. Except the feedback was different — stronger, the mana flowing more efficiently into his system, the elixir's effect amplifying at a rate I could feel was above what I'd been producing at level five.
I looked at Yua. She was checking Torvin's mana signature the way she did for every elixir to verify absorption.
She looked up. "His HP absorption rate just hit one hundred and seventy."
Base health elixir is eighty, I thought. Enhanced at level five was one hundred and thirty. Level six is one hundred and seventy.
"That's a B-rank elixir performance," Yua said, carefully. "From a common-grade health elixir."
"I know."
"Junho." She said my name in the tone she used when something medical had surprised her, which almost never happened. "That's — if you can do that consistently—"
"I can do it consistently," I said. "Write it up. Both the rate and the mechanism — I want documentation before the Court Wizard gets here."
Rena had been watching from the workshop doorway. She looked at me. I looked back.
She's doing the same math as Yua, I thought. Health elixirs performing at B-rank output means our party's survival rate in fights above our official rank just went up significantly. Not just for us — for any party I do pre-run prep for. This is the kind of thing that changes the risk calculus on contracts we currently wouldn't take.
"Court Wizard comes in four days," she said.
"I know."
"Are you ready for that conversation?"
Am I ready, I thought. Theron read my stats and called my skill limited. He did it in a throne room in front of the king and twenty-two people from my world and he was wrong in the specific way that only very confident experts are wrong — he was right about everything he knew and missing the one thing he didn't ask about.
"He's going to want data," I said. "I have data. I have Sera's data, which is better than any data he's going to have walked in with. I'm ready."
"That's not what I asked."
No, I thought. It wasn't. "I'm fine, Rena."
"Okay," she said, which meant she'd noticed but was going to let me handle it, and would be nearby if I didn't, which was exactly what I needed from her and I was aware enough to know it.
Torvin asked me that evening, while I was closing up the workshop, whether I wanted company.
I looked at him. He was leaning in the doorway with the specific deliberate casualness of someone who'd been thinking about whether to ask for a while.
He knows about the Court Wizard, I thought. Kelvin told the party about the letter as a matter of party information, which is correct and also means Torvin has been aware of this for several days and has been deciding whether to say something.
"You don't have to babysit me," I said.
"I know," he said. "I was asking if you wanted to get food."
Oh, I thought.
"Yes," I said. "Let me lock up."
We got food — a place near the south gate that did grilled meat in a way Torvin had strong opinions about and which was, in fact, very good. We ate without talking much. Torvin told a story about a C-rank mission he'd done two years ago that had gone badly in a specific way that was funny at this distance and possibly hadn't been at the time. I told him about a convenience store shift back in Seoul where three separate things had gone wrong simultaneously and I'd handled them in the wrong order and the manager had been angry about it until he realized it hadn't mattered.
Neither of us said anything about the Court Wizard or the skill or Elara or Soobin or any of the things moving around us. We just ate dinner. It cost twelve copper each. Torvin paid for both and looked pleased about it.
He wanted to do something, I thought, walking back. He heard about Theron's visit and wanted to do something and what he could do was buy dinner and that's what he did.
"Thank you," I said.
"For what," he said, and he meant it, and I liked him enormously for that.