Ruger smiled, realizing he seemed to be troubled. The rooted golden key was stirring restlessly—an application he had never considered before. It could sense the subtle shifts in his emotions and use them as a warning. Of course, it was also a picky little thing; it had no interest in negative emotions like anger. Yet anger was often accompanied by trouble and vexation, while pure sorrow or anger alone was actually rare. The more he thought about it, the more interesting it became. Perhaps the tangled, inseparable mass of emotions was what made a person—a person's truest manifestation. Faced with the richest feast in the world, the golden key was so picky. It was surely connected to that river whose full form he had never seen. Ruger felt it ought to be called the River of Vexation, or the River of Confusion.
That glittering golden world... that river... was it some corner of the Spirit World?
Ruger leaned against the edge of the well, sorting through his thoughts.
More and more interesting things were appearing, and what he needed to do was grow stronger alongside them.
He gathered himself and quickly decided on the second question he would ask.
The second question was simple, yet important.
Bracing himself against the well's edge, he focused and gazed into its depths.
Guided by spirituality, the question in his heart followed that intangible, formless guidance and fell into the well. His spirituality, bearing his personal imprint, silently communicated with the well, and Ruger naturally closed his eyes.
When he had first become an accomplished wizard apprentice, during the first time in his life that he had solidified a spell in a zero-ring spell slot, he had seen a bare, enormous tree carrying an aura of holiness. It had been a white tree, branching