No powerful Shattered, angry felines or swarms of rats attacked Silva and me on our way back to our shelter. If anything, the amount of Shattered we came across was incredibly low, as if the Shattered were purposely avoiding the area around my shelter, but somehow, I didn’t truly believe that. Sure, we had been killing them but nothing I had seen indicated actual intelligence or the ability to communicate.
Nothing had changed in the shelter and after a quick meal, I began to experiment a little. Keeping myself clean with my Darkness Magic was well and dandy but I also wanted to have clean clothes. So, I had to figure out how to magically clean my clothes or had to manually launder them. For now, I could get away with simply throwing the worn clothes away and stealing new ones but as soon as I left the city behind, and the abundance of stores, that wouldn’t work any longer.
Given that I already used Darkness Magic to clean myself, I tried to clean the shirt I had discarded the day before with it. The results were, as I maybe should have expected, suboptimal. That my magic wouldn’t directly harm my body was, maybe, to be expected, or there might be some sort of mental barrier that prevented you from accidentally burning away your body. Or something else entirely, but however the difference worked, it obviously didn’t cover my clothes. And so, while my Darkness Magic certainly managed to devour and destroy the dirt, sweat, blood and grime that had covered my old shirt, it had done the same thing to the shirt itself, requiring the use of Overflow and taking a huge chunk of Astral Power out of me in the process. It had given me a point in Darkness Magic, to my amusement, but if I wanted clean clothes, this wasn’t really the way to go. Or if it was, I needed a huge amount of training. Realistically, though, I decided to look for other ways.
Given that I was pretty low on Astral Power, I decided to get some sleep. Cuddling against my furry canine blanket, I quickly fell asleep. The past few days had been an odd mix of relaxing, exciting and utterly exhausting. It was weird, I had never realised how stressful interacting with other humans was. Maybe that was why I had taken to Road to Purgatory and Mundus as much as I had, my mind considering the natives as something other than human, something I don’t need to carefully control myself and be mindful of my mother’s teachings. And yet, even without being actively mindful, I had acted in a civilised manner most of the time, at least as far as I understood. Maybe I had spent a little too much time lost in my own head, ruminating magic and contemplating previous ideas, but that wasn’t a huge faux-pax. Granted, the repeated murder and eventual genocide likely made my mostly polite behaviour moot, but some things just couldn’t be changed.
“Yes, some things can’t be changed, love,” Sigmir’s voice agreed with me. Opening my eyes, a familiar mountainside, with endless clouds hiding the world below, appeared before me. Above, the sky was shrouded in complete darkness, with no stars in sight. The only bright spot, as it were, was the moon high above, the radiance it gave off strangely dark.
“Mhm, I’ve heard a prayer once, asking for the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change what needs to be changed and the wisdom to know the difference. And yet, some things need to be changed, even if the whole world screams that they shouldn’t be changed. That serenity should prevail,” I felt a soft smile form on my lips. Even in hindsight, I didn’t really regret my actions on Mundus, no matter how much the morals my mother had tried to teach me said that they were horrible.
“But maybe the prayer is wrong. Asking for courage is not needed. You don’t just need courage to change the world, you need power. But asking those with power to simply hand it to you, so you can change the world?” I felt a mirthless chuckle escape my throat, “No, that would never work unless your changes would enhance their power. No, power needs to be taken, to be gained with your own efforts, if necessary ripped from the hands of those in power. Or traded for, but even a trade requires something the other side wants. But serenely accepting your fate, that is not for me. Maybe I simply lack the wisdom,” I laughed, the rumbling sound shaking the mountainside.
“Maybe, or maybe you simply seek to change the world, instead of letting the world change you,” I felt Sigmir’s arms gently rest around me and felt myself relax at her words. I would change the world, for a world without Sigmir in it wasn’t a world I wanted to be in anyways. So why not be the change needed? The worst thing that could happen was that I would perish and leave the world, but wasn’t that also an acceptable alternative?
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Maybe. But I wouldn’t give up, not without being forced to.
A strange, wet rag rubbed across my cheek, causing me to frown and shudder. Why was that rag so rough and warm? When a somewhat cold thing touched my face, followed by air getting drawn across my skin, I felt myself wake up and suddenly, my entire field of vision was dominated by a mix of brown and black fur, a large, brown eye and I had a nose full of canine breath.
“Get off me,” I growled, pushing Silva away from me, only for her to bounce up and jump around our shelter, far too perky for my tastes. My entire cheek was covered in dog slobber, making me frown in distaste, especially when I remembered what she had been doing with her mouth the last few nights. It was one thing for a dog to clean its nethers with its tongue before giving you a kiss and a whole other thing for them to tear things-that-had-been-people to shreds. Just the rude awakening would have earned the perky pup a scolding, but adding that mental image? The scolding was doubled. It was far too early for this, but maybe there simply was no good time to get canine kisses, at least not for me.
Grumbling to myself, I conjured up some Darkness, dragging it across my face to get rid of the slobber and everything. I continued working, stripping off my clothes and cleaning the rest of me before I looked at the growing pile of laundry.
Darkness hadn’t worked, but maybe something else would. Conjuring up mist had almost been second nature on Mundus and I was quite comfortable working with it. It had some peculiarities but I thought I could work with them.
I didn’t even try to make anything fancy, merely conjuring up a small amount of mist, trying to make the individual particles as small as possible, while keeping the volume as contained as possible. I wanted the mist to be as close to normal water as I could make it, while still being able to control it with Ice Magic and hitting that sweet spot wasn’t particularly easy. A few drops of water rained down, taking some Astral Power with them, while I focused, poking and prodding at the cloud as I went.
Reaching out, I held the already damaged shirt into the mist, swirling the cloud around, and as much as I could through, the fabric, trying to get the dirt to stick to the mist, almost like a washing machine. A very cold washing machine, without any detergent or soap, making the whole thing rather crude.
But, looking at the shirt afterwards, I felt that it worked. The fabric was still a little smelly, cold and clammy, even after I dragged the mist away but compared to its before, state, it was a world of difference.
Grinning to myself, I began working, laundering one piece of clothing after the other, dumping the dirty mist in the same area that I used as a toilet since coming here. That part of the shelter was getting increasingly nasty and I was quite happy about the cold temperatures, or the whole thing would already be a biohazard.
When a message informed me that I had gained a point in Ice Magic, bringing it to eleven, I took a break for food and to cuddle with the incredibly excited pup. As I was comfortably sitting there, biscuit in one hand, the other buried in Silva’s fluffy fur, my canine partner suddenly shot up, her tail between her legs and her head swinging side to side. When I stood up she immediately hid behind me, piteously whining, making it obvious that she was scared. Not sure what was going on, I readied myself, the Frozen Shuttle floating above me and, in an effort to have as much power as possible, putting one of the free points I had into Intuition, bringing it to twenty and to the milestone I knew about.
Special Ability gained You gained a Special Ability: Parallel Processing For having 20 Intuition at your level you gained an ability, based on your actions. The ability Parallel Processing allows you to truly multitask, holding fully separate tasks in mind, though your body is still limited. A higher Intuition allows more parallel processes to run at the same time. Currently possible parallel processes: 2
With that, I could also draw a runic formation, keeping it armed and ready to have Astral Power channelled into it, just in case an enemy was here. Seconds turned to minutes, Silva still incredibly disturbed and scared, when suddenly, the world lurched beneath me.
The magic formation before me was shattered and my Frozen Shuttle almost dropped to the floor when my focus was suddenly needed to keep my balance. Dust started to rain down as the world shook beneath me, waves of Earth Astral Power were surging around me until finally, peace returned.
“Well, crud,” I muttered, looking around. Nothing seemed to be damaged, at least nothing in the building I was in. But for two earthquakes to happen in three days, something was seriously messed up. Somehow, the shaking, trembling earth felt like a far more immediate concern than the system and the flames it had brought. After all, the earth beneath me was the foundation of it all, even if a part of me wished that the foundation beneath me was an endless glacier.
“Well, crud,” I repeated myself, cuddling with the still-disturbed Silva. Something was going on and I had no idea what. And I hated that sensation.