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When the next weekend arrived, Damion and Elicia were at one of the Argentum Adventurer Association branches. Mage Teft had arranged test subjects for him to try his artifact on. The people gathered were of all ages and professions, but they did not show just because Mage Teft asked, she posted a mission in the Association, one eligible to even non-adventurers. The mission was to be tested by a new artifact and be paid a silver coin.

Damion remembered well the low paying adventurer missions for E Ranks and F Ranks. A silver coin for just standing in place for a few minutes was enticing. The wage also brought in a fair number of ordinary people. A silver coin held even more value to ordinary people, especially when the first few found out that Damion would also pay their children the same amount if he could scan them.

Word of mouth spread quickly and before the first hour of scanning people was done, there was a line heading out of the Adventurer Association. Damion had no idea how many people were in line now, but he felt certain he had enough people to gather the data he needed. The problem he was facing now was, how to tell the people at the end of the day that were lined up that they wasted their day. There was no way he could scan everyone that showed up. Even if he could quickly make two or three more artifacts, there simply was not enough time.

"Excuse me," Damion called out to one of the Adventurer Association workers who was trying to keep everyone in line.

"Yes Mage Wells?"

"There is no way I can scan everyone that has shown up. I will scan 500 more people. Can you cut the line off at that point? I don't want people to waste their time since I can't get to them."

"I will see to it."

The Adventurer Association had been a great help to Damion for his testing. They had also shown a keen interest in his artifact. However, once they realized the artifact could not show affinities, they lost interest and simply worked to keep the crowd in order.

When Damion built his new artifact, he did so with a dedicated tablet built into the artifact. Since the tablet was built in and could not be swapped for a different one without rendering the artifact inoperable, he made it so no one could tell it could read affinities. By programing a filter into its display to either display Nashto glyphs or not, he was able to show others the filtered image, which showed a person's core, but no magic seals or affinity. Then, with the push of a button, and a password entry, he could view the unfiltered image, and no one would be the wiser.

Damion continued to scan each person in turn, followed by a quick swipe of their payment card against a terminal the Adventurer Association set up. Even with setting a cut off, he still had several hours of work left to do. Even though he was still scanning people, Damion had found quite a few interesting things about people.

He had always been told that knights, true knights, not low talent mages working as knights, had a deformed core or no affinity, which kept them from learning magic seals. What Damion found was that this was a partial truth. There were people that he scanned that had a core that was not spherical or was very small and because of that the affinity glyph could not rest in the center of their core. He was not sure what this meant, but he suspected, the glyph not being seated properly affected their ability to control mana.

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Mages were all exactly as expected. Magic seals on the surface of their core and an affinity glyph inside. What surprised Damion were the scans of normal people.

Most of the normal people he scanned could have been knights, a few even mages. Everyone had a magic core to some degree. However, as Damion kept scanning more and more normal people, he found that the older a person was, the more solid their core appeared. This led him to a theory that even if someone could practice magic, if they did not, their ability to would wane until it was impossible. This explained to him why training for mages started so young and the detection of affinities even younger. As far as Damion could determine, once the body reached maturity, if the magic core had not been used, it would start to harden and become useless.

What truly intrigued Damion, and where he felt his quest solution lay, was with the very young children that were brought to him. These children were too young to go to school and had not yet been tested by the Mage Association. When Damion reviewed their scans, he saw magic cores very similar to his own, these children had affinities on the surface of their core, not the interior.

Now what Damion had to figure out, was how the affinity moved to the inside of a person's core. His obviously had not, but every other mage he examined had. But these children, who had never been tested by the Mage Association, had cores like his.

Thinking back to when the Magic System defended itself against Dean Thorn's testing crystal, Damion could not help but wonder if there was a connection. As he continued to mindlessly scan more people, Damion sought answers from the Magic System.

'System, when I was a child and scanned by Dean Thorn's testing crystal, did you destroy it to stop it from messing up my magic core?'

{Affirmative.}

'What about when I was 18 and got tested? Why didn't you stop that test?'

{Host's magic core was fully developed at 18 and was able to resist the affinity being pushed into the magic core.}

'Is that why the system was locked until I was 18? Because my core needed to fully develop?'

{Affirmative. Casting spells prior to having a fully developed core is detrimental to core formation.'

'What about the Mana Absorption spell? I had that since I was a few minutes old?'

{The Mana Absorption passive spell was selected to assist host in growing. Key to a properly formed core is properly saturating the body and magic core with mana.}

'I thought it was random,' Damion thought to the System, clearly the thing in his head had been keeping secrets from me.

{Randomness was implied to encourage independence.}

Damion felt like the Magic System was being intentionally misleading, but he had other questions on his mind that he hoped the System would answer.

'They were not exposed to enough mana growing up. Is that why knights don't have a properly formed core?'

{Affirmative.}

'Then I need to spread the word about kids learning to pull in mana at an early age, that should solve the problem. We'll get more mages and fewer people that could only be knights.'

{Your solution is incomplete.}

'The testing crystals,' Damion realized. 'It is what the testing crystals do. They push the affinity into the core and that locks them to a single affinity or forces them to divide their mana if they have multiple affinities.'

{Affirmative.}

*Ding*

{Quest Completed}

[Quest: Discover the Flaw in Magic – Status: Complete – Reward: 1,000 Experience, 100,000 Store Credits]

*Ding*

{Hidden Quest Revealed}

[Quest: Fix the Flaw in Magic]

[Description: You have found the flaw in how mages learn spells and why they are locked to a single affinity. Develop a method to allow the mages of Nerotath to expand their power.]

[Reward: 1,000 Experience, 100,000 Store Credit]

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