"I don't know the word 'soul' either."

" - you. The part of you with all your - priorities and goals and things you care about."

"So like - a soul is part of your mind?  Everyone's always figured, based on things Summoned Heroes have said about what the Old Man With Tea said to them, that when you die out of Kekaro you end up in some other universe that has a use for you, like as some sort of Summoned Hero, though obviously there are all kinds of possible uses for people besides being Summoned Heroes.  The massive uncertainty and existential terror of that is the keystone underpinning our world and everyone's sanity within it, and the reason why anybody stays alive and has children, it's said.  For if we knew we were to go to better places, we would not stay here; and if we knew we were to go to worse places, we would not have children."  This is said in the tone of somebody reciting a proverb and obvious truth.

"Well, we should fix that, I guess, and get everyone an afterlife. ....in practice where I'm from people mostly don't kill themselves even though they know what the afterlives are like, so I don't think that's an enormous problem."

"You knew you were coming here?"

"No, this is weird, I thought I was going to Hell where I'm supposed to go when I die. Something must've gone wrong -- probably with my soul on the way to Hell, I have no reason to think anything's wrong with Hell. But if you don't have any afterlives around here, then we can set them up, and they'll catch almost everybody. It's just a much less stupid system, I think. 

...to be clear, I don't, yet, know how to set up afterlives. But I doubt it's harder than murdering gods."

"I mean, I think you'd mostly get cowardly people or ones without any accomplishments, who didn't want to forge boldly into the unknown when they died or had no confidence in anybody anywhere finding a good use for them."

"Or kids! People who need to be improved before there's any point in sending them on," she agrees. "- you were telling me about the world, though, go on."

The world of Kekaro has a cycle.  Every now and then a problem appears too great for the people of Kekaro, or Kekaro's gods when Kekaro still had gods, to handle alone; and the System sends them a Hero; and the more gods those Heroes killed, the more problems Kekaro on its own couldn't handle, and the more further Heroes had to be sent there by the System.

Whatever Kekaro was in its beginnings, it is not now.  There was a Summoned Hero who was offended by the practice of slaying wild magical creatures for their body parts, and of nations going to war with each other to level their noble children in battle.  Now there are dungeon cores, and dungeons; and, because that Summoned Hero didn't think things through super duper carefully in all edge cases, Dungeon Breaks, when a dungeon spawns somewhere remote and grows and grows never being culled.

It's said that the gods, once, were the sole source of affordable healing.  And then the Hero Merrin created an artifact that could create Skill Gems for a trainable Healing Skill, and also that artifact could copy itself.  Some of the gods didn't like it, some of the gods tried to do something about it, those gods failed; but, it's said, when the people of Kekaro did beg Merrin not to slay any more of their remaining gods, the Merciful Hero did relent.  She is considered one of the kindest and most successful of Heroes, and her name is remembered honorably.  But from that day, people no longer needed to plead to the gods for healing, and that tore something out of Kekaro's pantheons that all the previous casualties had not.

One Summoned Hero was really upset about the general state of sexuality on Kekaro as she found it, in the old days when it wasn't easy for men and women to transform back and forth between sexes, which apparently led to some people having not enough sex and other people having too much sex for some historical reason Almys doesn't remember.  The Sexy Hero's solution was to create an artifact that could transform men into women or vice versa, and also that artifact could create copies of itself.  Her name lives after her in the artifacts she made, the camerons.

The reason why Kekaro has undead is that a previous Summoned Hero was also disturbed by people having to suffer from the existential terror of death.  Their solution worked great for ten years after that Summoned Hero was gone, and then broke, because it turned out that the planetwide enchantment built upon and keyed to that Hero's irreplaceable Unique Skill was not literally zero maintenance.

The world of Kekaro has a cycle.  Every now and then a problem appears too great for the people of Kekaro, or Kekaro's gods when Kekaro still had gods, to handle alone; and the System sends them a Hero; who, when their work is done, often creates new problems.

"Where do the heroes go, why don't they stick around -"

"I think they just get too powerful?  Heroes can't stop getting more powerful."

" - why not?"

"- if anybody's ever asked that question before it wasn't covered in my history lessons."

"Understood. Summoned Heroes inevitably grow more powerful and shape the world to their liking and then vanish and generally leave the world more in need of Summoned Heroes because they've broken all the power structures that were not 'them, personally'."

"Is it - considered right and proper, by you - that you slay me, or punish me, if I say anything less than perfectly to your liking?"

"I don't know how I'll answer that question once I'm - powerful, and safe, and understand what's going on. But right now, seems like not hearing anything I don't want to hear will definitely get me killed. If you're not working against me, I'll keep you safe."

"People who the System sends us are always, always, the sort of people who'll be driven to fix whatever problem we have right now.  And the problem, from our perspective, inside Kekaro, is that we're then left with - a very powerful person who's the sort of person who wants to, fix things, when there's some part of Kekaro that isn't the way they like.  It's said that the Hero to slay the first chief of gods, I mean, he did kill the giant blob-monster-thing whose name I forget that even the gods couldn't slay, because that was what strong men did, where he came from, kill the most powerful monsters.  And the problem is that, the way he saw the world, the way the world had to be, the strongest man also needed the most beautiful woman."

"The last god we had was named Erastil.  All He ever did was help people farm, He didn't manipulate people, or demand worship from people or lord greater power over them, the way that lots of Summoned Heroes didn't like, which is why Erastil even lasted that long, I guess.  The dragons and the elves and, everybody who wanted there to be any gods left at all, tried so hard to hide Him, His existence was a secret.  He wasn't even helping people farm, anymore, which people didn't need anyways because a Summoned Hero had invented better farm-crops that didn't need any divine help to grow, nobody even profited when Erastil died, not even grain-merchants.  And they say that the Hero who slew Erastil was really sorry and apologetic about that to everybody, but to him, it was just, not allowed, for something bigger and more powerful than the ordinary mortal creatures of Kekaro to exist.  So that Hero tracked down Erastil and slew Erastil and then slew himself as apology, and now Kekaro has no gods at all."

"There's always just, some aspect of our world, that some particular Summoned Hero can't leave alone, because it's too important to them and their alien values."

"I'd ask if you can just not make us any 'afterlives' but I can already guess how you'll answer that.  But I - really wish you wouldn't - and if our world wasn't literally dying in flames, probably more than half the powerful people in the world would try to kill you about it."

"Do Summoned Heroes get killed sometimes by people who think we'd better off without the summoned heroes?"

"Yes.  That's the other reason we still have undead.  The System sent us a Hero who could've stopped it, probably, or at least it looked like that's what that Hero was supposed to be about, but the Hero got found out early, and somebody decided they'd rather have a continent be overrun by an undead plague for a while rather than let Kekaro get permanently twisted around even further.  I can't remember if it was recorded what that Hero wanted to do."

"And there's no record of anyone who just solved their problem and left without wrecking things?"

"No, I think that's like, two-fifths of the cases."

"And I don't think we regret the existence of camerons?  I mean there's places on Kekaro where they're not allowed but I've never heard anybody say that life is better there.  Not everything that Summoned Heroes do turns out terribly, from our perspective, just... most of it.  And it's kind of really obvious that your 'afterlife' thing is not going to be one of the good cases."

"Then I'll let you all keep dying, if everyone feels that strongly about it." She is actually thinking that clearly what she should do here is bring back the gods. "How does this world's magic system....work."

There isn't any visible look of relief on Almys's face, but if she doesn't believe in that reassurance, she's not saying it out loud.  She launches into an explanation of the world's magical system instead.

Basic Elements:  Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Light, Dark.  Dominance cycles go Earth > Fire > Air > Water > Earth; Light and Dark are mutual opposities and dominance depends on the particular spells.

Tier-2 Elements:  12, for example Earth+Fire = Metal, or 13 if you count Chaos.  Trying Light+Dark, Air+Earth, or Water+Fire all get you Chaos.  Do not mess with Chaos.

Tier-3 Elements:  The 8 possibilities for one of Earth/Air, one of Water/Fire, and one of Light/Dark, avoiding any Chaos.  Air, Fire, and Light gets you Plasma.  Earth, Water, and Dark gets you Murk.  Earth, Fire, and Light gets you Mirror.

Tier-4 Elements:  Creation and Uncreation.  Basically everyone who gets this far picks Creation because it's way more useful than Uncreation.

There's 23 major Root Classes (in the Adventuring Guild's classification, which is worldwide ever since a Hero created an extensible worldwide teleportation-portal network), but in very broad terms they could be said to boil down to "casting spells using affinity mana, making stuff using affinity materials, and hitting things with arms and armor made out of affinity materials".  Not everybody can be an Adventurer because there's only so many dungeons to go around, and competition to enter the Adventurer's Guild is very intense; people widely suspect you get to have more fun after you die if you have more Adventuring experience first and are a more desirable Hero.

But, like, the basic idea in magic is - basic affinities that people have, more complicated affinities they can acquire, and then that determines what you can do with aspected mana, or forge from aspected mats, or what kind of weapons and armor you can use?  But unless you're literally the Summoned Hero, it's not enough to have four Basic Elements and five Tier-2 affinities, you still have to party up with enough other people to cover lots of different bases in affinity-dominance contests?  Is any of this helping?

" - not really. What is magic, as you think of it, where does it come from, can only humans use it, what do you use it to do."