Alden’s levels

On Pranab’s site

Dec 26, 2024 Feb 16, 2025 (IST)

We have some solid numbers to compare.

Spoiler severity warning🔗

There are references to information till chapter 189, which is from 15th December 2024, but if Alden is back on Earth for you, I’ve taken care to only have miniscule spoilers. If he isn’t back on earth, major spoilers ahead.

If you haven’t read the book, you might want to read it first.

Super Supportive

You can still read past this point if you don’t care too much about spoilers. I feel the biggest reason to read Super Supportive is all the little details that make up the world and the characters.

Spoilers lie ahead🔗

In 156, we learn someone got an impressive four levels that year, and in 189, we find out someone else gets two to three levels a year “like a teenager”.

Before this, we knew his real (nine) levels were epic, but we had a vague idea even his fake (four) levels were decent. When he gets back to Earth in 64, a woman says three levels and a star is impressive, though she might have cared more about the star, and in 78, someone said Alden must have hidden and trained for a year ¹ to have three levels on his skill.

156 is the first concrete number we got to compare Alden’s levelling to, but we all got distracted by different things.

If you haven’t connected the dots yet, this is what this post is about.

The meat🔗

To the world, Alden got three levels in half a year off Earth.

If more people knew his actual level of eight, mystery-moon-man is going to give people meltdowns.

In 105, we learn Alden has earned two levels in two months, which means a level a month, which means six levels in six months, which means twelve levels in a year. ²

I get tingles just thinking about it.

Even if that’s cut in half for his fake profile, that means people would see six levels in a year, though Alden’s plans from 105 suggest he’ll only increase it by a level in a few months. Even so, it’s just so exciting to think about people seeing his fake profile go up six levels a year.

What will people think when they see his actual profile?

What’s Aulia Velra going to do?

Could the knights or other wizards on Anesidora find out what’s not on his profile? What he is?

What would Gemma “the Gloom” Elber’s perspective be?

What about Morrisson I-hope-the-kid-catches-bullets Waker?

What about Torsten one-skill-is-not-enough Klein?

Even the students are going to learn of his levels. Poor Mehdi would actually lose his mind. They’ll all want to know his secrets.

AAAAaaahhhhh! There’s going to be so much juicy drama! The tingles simply don’t stop!

I can’t even imagine what the reveal of his real profile will be like. When will the cost of “lying” be too much for the system? Probably quite a bit, given that he’s basically a Knight and Artona 1 likes him, but he’ll eventually have to reveal it. In 59, he says “At least a year or two”, so probably within a year to two and a half years.

So much strangeness. So much tingling in my bones.

I want to time travel to more chapters so bad.

Edit: about that meat🔗

Ending low intensity after “a year or two” doesn’t necessarily mean the path of highest intensity, and even high intensity doesn’t mean full intensity.

There are actually possibilities where Alden’s real profile might never be revealed. At least it might not be revealed to the general public.

There are basically no possibilities where the fake profile might gradually build up to the real. Alden already has a backlog of levels, and he gets roughly twelve every year. To catch up to the backlog and overtake the yearly twelve, he has to announce over twelve levels every year, which is not a low intensity way of revealing his real power.

The only way he could gradually turn the fake profile real is if he slowed down his skill development significantly for several years. I don’t think Alden could do that. At the very least summons will make him use his power, and his free authority will also make him progress. And the whole Celena North High and University track will take about eight years, where he can’t slack off.

He also can’t hide his power forever. When he first preserved Stu-art’h, Stu noticed the strength of his authority, and the Primary also analysed it at the party. The Primary plans to analyse Alden again when he’s thirty years old. So that’s the longest he could hide his real power.

If Alden gains 12 levels a year, and 4 a year is impressive, then 3 must be the low intensity Alden wants, which is a quarter of 12. The Mother says Knights pay more attentions to this, so even if most wizards won’t notice, a Knight will notice he’s 4 times as powerful as his profile.

But even if a Knight finds out, his profile might still be hidden for a while because there are some unscrupulous summoners who might arrange an “accident” for Alden, even if he has powerful connections.

It likely won’t be hidden for too long because summoners also have authority sense and could accidentally notice his authority as well. Unless Alden is blocked off from Artonan society, it would be better to reveal his power and status. Perhaps after a brief training period with the Knights, and managing some politics behind the scenes, though the Primary and Quaternary seem to have no interest in that.

There have also been non-Artonan Knights, which means there is some place for Alden in terms of accomodations, services, processes, and relations with Artonans of all kinds.

Even at that point, resource worlds like Earth might never learn about it, because wizards don’t even discuss Knights with non-wizard Artonans — forget Avowed. Only the most politically powerful Avowed might learn a bit about Alden’s power, and it still wouldn’t mention magic or Knight-hood.

Alden might be The Secret Knight. (Not really, but it’s fun to imagine.)