Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

A long period of silence followed Irene's statement.

A silence long enough for the server to come back with both of our coffees and a piece of cake for each of us. A silence long enough for Irene to start snacking on the sweet treat for quite some time before I finally managed to process all that she said.

"Yeah, no matter how hard I think about it, it makes absolutely no fucking sense," I spoke out while heaving a long, resigned sigh. "Any chance for you to explain it again but in a way an idiot would understand?"

No matter how much my intelligence and wisdom stats grew, for all I knew, those stats only referred to the potential performance of my brain. My wisdom allowed me to better store a greater amount of information and guaranteed easier and faster access to all of it. My intelligence attribute allowed me to process all of that information faster and more efficiently.

But neither of those two stats made me smart enough to figure out the meaning of Irene's cryptic explanation.

"Eh?" Irene moaned like a teacher who had no other choice but to deal with the intellectually challenged kid taking part in their classes.

In fact, this request of mine was enough to make her put the small fork she was eating the cake with away and hide her face in her hands as she tried to figure out a proper answer.

"It's really hard for me to do so when I don't even know what made you unlock your potential," she revealed with a heavy sigh. "Can you pinpoint an important moment that brought upon the change?" she asked, bringing her hands off her face while moving her elbows back to the table and cupping her hands together before resting her chin on top of them.

"A single moment that led to you being able to manipulate aura? Or maybe the moment that unlocked your ability to cross over to Suopari?"

Hearing the unfamiliar name, I raised my left eyebrow a bit.

This time, I had enough context to figure out this new name most likely referred to Fay's world.

"What?" Irene barked when she saw my expression. "Yes, it's the world I come from," she admitted before shrugging her shoulders, "I never had any desire to pretend otherwise."

I looked right at Irene's face for a while, only to sigh and lower my eyes back to the table as I pretended to struggle to catch a single moment in my life that would fit Irene's question.

"I guess it all started when I realized that being better, as my mom requested of me on her deathbed, wasn't all about letting others bully and abuse me," I spoke as I raised my eyes and gave Irene a cold stare.

Even now, after all the time that passed, my feelings about that moment were… quite complicated.

"But," I interjected before Irene could start explaining the situation again, "given how knowledgable you are about all the things I have little to no clue about, how come you didn't know this yet?"

This time, it was Irene's turn to give me a cold, annoyed, and outright tired stare.

"There's about seven billion humans in this world. And I'm not arrogant enough to believe I can understand the heart of each and every last one of them."

Irene rolled her eyes before resting her chin a bit deeper in her hands, to the point even her mouth hid behind them.

A moment later, though, she raised her head back up and leaned back in her seat.

"But now everything makes at least a bit of sense," she then admitted before taking a deep breath and closing her eyes.

"Being better…" she muttered, keeping some sort of thought in her mind for a moment before finally opening up her eyes again and directing them straight at my face.

"Ever since you've heard those words, you looked inwards in search of things you need to overcome. Be better than giving in to your desires. Be better than acting how you wish you did. Be better… than your own desires," Irene elaborated a bit. And for the first time, I could actually fully associate with what she spoke about.

That's how I've lived ever since my mom's passing, after all.

"Judging from what you've just told me, your life changed when you finally grew to the point of taking what your mother could potentially mean with those words into account, over just living your life as the victim of her words."n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

My eyebrows shot up on my face.

Even though I never elaborated on what exactly happened back on the day everything changed, never explained what was the thought process that led to my refusal to keep acting the way I did thus far.

And yet, Irene somehow managed to fucking nail it on her damn first try!

"How…" stunned by her ability to somehow figure it all out, my entire attention focused on just one, simple question.

'How the hell did she know?'

"It all goes back to what I've said before," Irene smiled when she saw how my face all tensed up. "You, most likely, belong to the tribe of will. The tribe of consciousness. So, while you were stuck on the very basic level of it, you couldn't wield any of your innate powers. And your life changed when you learned to account for what others think in your own perception of the world."

Irene suddenly turned silent as she directed her eyes down to the table.

"Or maybe you were already on the second level and managed to climb to the third?" she muttered under her nose, her voice indicating she was no longer perfectly sure of her judgment here.

Still, she raised her eyes and looked me right in the face again.

"Either way, the moment your life turned on its head all came because you advanced the perception of your consciousness," she explained before shrugging her shoulders.

"And those levels are?" Sensing that I was finally nearing some sort of answer that would allow me to finally start making sense of all sorts of things, I pushed for more.

"The first level is all about your own needs and desires. I need to eat, so I will look for food. I need to sleep, so I will look for a safe place to do so. It's a level that all humans have been on since birth. On the second level of consciousness, though, you start to acknowledge how all the other humans around have their own desires…"

Once again, Irene turned silent, this time, right in the middle of her explanation.

"Yeah, I believe you were on the second level. You knew others were directing their actions by following their own desires. But the very moment you learned to take account of other people's agenda."

Hearing all of those words, I couldn't help but smirk.

"Isn't it kind of obvious that everyone has their own agenda? And that you need to figure it out if you want to understand how to act around them?" I asked.

After all, how could I deal with Etaria… No, how could I ever get in cahoots with Makary if I didn't have the ability to figure out what he wanted from me?

"You see, a man's consciousness develops silently," Irene smiled. "And even though your life changed when you jumped from the second to the third level, I never meant to imply you are still on it now."