20 - Chapter 19 - Day 1811

As Adya waited to hear back from her mother, she reviewed how she had spent the last two months. Most of that time had been spent on research. It reminded her of all the time locked in her lab working on her portal project.

The times she had been forced out of her room due to her mothers instructions, Adya had let Sai and Mai help with the control. Ever since she had formed her cores, she had not really had the opportunity to put her new limitations to the test. Not only had the cores made her significantly more powerful, but they had also removed the artificial limiter that had been placed on her stats by the scion protocols.

The problem was she didn’t know the extent the stats would impact her true abilities, nor could she test them out in public without giving away too much information. Finally no one would let her, a girl barely over 5, go galavanting by herself. She needed a private place to test her abilities, and she needed to be accompanied by a team who would be able to keep her secrets no matter what.

That was why the focus had been on the loyalty tattoo. If it was working as designed, then she could use the tattoo to guarantee loyalty. In her research she had designed not one, but two versions of the tattoo. The first was for the bandits or anyone else she captured in the future. It would make them incapable of betrayal or disobeying orders. That had a down side, that if the orders were badly worded, it could lead to disastrous consequences. The second version was more protection than compulsion. It would prevent the person from leaking anything considered sensitive by default. It would also protect the user from soul intrusion and mind intrusion.

The temporary versions could be overcome by removing or marring the tattoos to damage their functionality, but the permanent version, that in her tests had generated a confirmation prompt message from the system, could not be revoked without consent of the both parties.

She wanted to further test that functionality, once she was confident with the success of the temporary ones, with Sally, Phillipa and Dexter. They had already sworn their loyalty and fealty to her. She planned to openly explain what she was trying to achieve, and gain their cooperation for her testing. She hoped the message the system had provided had been accurate and that the permanent version of the tattoo could still be removed.

That left the last thing that she wanted to accomplish, security through obscurity. Many groups used tattoos as an identifying mark, and to show where they belonged. She wanted to hide the formation design behind the house heraldry, perhaps create a version for her personal use, that would look like house markings to anyone, even when they looked at it in detail, yet would hide the formation in the background. The level of control required was beyond most humans, yet with the help of Sai, it was well within Adya’s reach.

A part of her lamented the fact she had to spend so long on something so basic. Her past self would have managed to complete this project in days, but when put in context it was still an impressive achievement. She had managed to merge programming and hardware design principles with the formations, array and runes knowledge of two worlds. Yes there were gaps, but every field of study left room for improvement, so that was not anything new. At least, she now had a comprehensive toolkit to further her research.

She had not been paying much attention to events outside her research. The only thing that she was certain of was that her mother’s agents had confirmed that the money exchanger had kept to his side of the deal. So her mother had allowed Dexter to complete the weekly exchanges so far changing 800 tier 1 mana stones for 80 gold. Both Dexter and Greg had become more comfortable with the exchange, though whether that was a good thing remained to be seen.

Finally, her mother arrived in her room. “Greetings mother, thank you Sally, if I need you I will call for you.” said Adya. “What has been happening while I was busy, mother?”

They waited for Sally to leave and close the door before speaking about potentially sensitive matters.

“Well, it's good to hear that you have completed your first objective.” replied Gauri. “As for outside, we have been monitoring the shadowed hand, but have not yet taken any action. Apparently their leadership is in turmoil over the disappearance of their most skilled team.”

“As for that fop, Lord Willaby,” continued her mother. “He tried to get his father Baron Willaby to raise a furore over the insult to his person, but when his father realised the person he was complaining against was not just a 5 year old girl, but a member of house Gurg, he ended up punishing the boy instead. The idiot boy will not be able to get his family involved, but expect personal enmity with him. He will try to provoke you, to get an excuse to either challenge you to a duel, or to find a reason he can try to push for some form of sanction.”

“Understood mother,” replied Adya, “Sometimes there is no separation between victory and defeat. How have my prisoners been behaving in my absence?”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“The bandits have been extremely well behaved.” replied Gauri. “Though they have been petitioning me to try to find out when they will know what their punishment is. They are understandably worried about being separated from their family. As you wanted them to start with working on the road, I have had them spend some time training, so if the tattoo works, we can put them to work very quickly.”

“Excellent mother,” replied Adya. “That just leaves us to start the testing.”

With that they both started work on testing the tattoo. Adya was using a water soluble paint to test out the solutions, with each iteration taking around an hour to draw perfectly. After the tattoo was in place, they ran through what tests they could before calling in Sally to continue testing.

They were effectively using Sally as an outside agent, trying to get information out of Gauri. Adya would set strange rules on what was and was not allowed. Sally would then ask questions given to her by Adya, to see if Gauri was capable of answering them.

After that, they moved forward with testing the effect of the “permanent” version of the tattoo. Even though it was still drawn with water soluble ink, the system prompt still came up for Gauri.

You are being marked by a loyalty protection formation by Adya Garg. As this is a soul mark, acceptance is required to proceed.

The effects of acceptance are as follows. Those carrying the mark may identify each other. The mark may not be removed without mutual agreement by both Gauri Gurg and Adya Gurg. Gauri Gurg may not breach the confidence of Adya Gurg, willingly, under coercion, fooled by an illusion or by accident. Gauri Gurg will be protected from soul intrusion and mind intrusion by any abilities below the defined level (Rarity Rank 8 - Guru).

Accept soul mark: Yes / No

Gauri accepted the prompt and the mark was added to Gauri’s status.

Soul Mark - Adya Gurg

Those carrying the mark may identify each other. The mark may not be removed without mutual agreement by both Gauri Gurg and Adya Gurg. Gauri Gurg may not breach the confidence of Adya Gurg, willingly, under coercion, fooled by an illusion or by accident. Gauri Gurg will be protected from soul intrusion and mind intrusion by any abilities below the defined level (Rarity Rank 8 - Guru).

Request removal: Yes / No

The system could not be fooled, so they were confident now that the mark was working. Once they were satisfied with the testing, Adya had Sally call Dexter, Philipa and Parth. While they waited for their retainers, Adya removed the tattoo from Gauri to see how the system would react. Removing the physical tattoo had no effect. Gauri’s status continued to show the soul mark on her status as a permanent condition.

“If we can change this to work for the core family,” said Gauri, “then it would be a brilliant way to protect all our retainers. We have to see how the identification feature works. There are so many possibilities with this.”

Adya was just considering the same. If she could create a soul mark, could she create and grant a passive skill? Could she remotely update the skill using the system as a medium? This opened up so many possibilities that she was not ready to start discussing just yet.

“That is not as straightforward as you want mother.” replied Adya. “It would still leave a lot of routes open to abuse. Who would be considered as part of the family? What would happen in the event of conflicting orders? What would happen if someone betrays the family? With what we have currently we can have a hierarchy relationship with only small tweaks. For example I can change it so you can place a mark on Parth, he can then place one on his commanders, they can place one on their officers and so on. Still we won't know what would happen if one of the links in the chain is killed. I will need to do a lot more research, and some of it will require us to make distasteful decisions. I think this version should be limited to direct retainers only. Anyway let us try to remove the soul mark and see what happens.”

Gauri had not even started to consider the issues that Adya had raised. How had she ever expected it to be so simple? Gauri brought up the prompt and requested removal of the soul mark. As soon as she did, Adya received a notification.

Gauri Gurg is requesting the removal of her soul mark.

Remove: Yes / No

Adya responded in the affirmative and the notification disappeared. “Is it gone from your status mother?” she asked Gauri.

“Yes, it is gone.” replied Gauri, “I have never heard of anything like this before, where the system itself can be used like this.”

Adya was wondering if there was a range limit, and whether this feature could be converted into a communication tool. There was also the question of if a single person could carry multiple soul marks with the same or with different rules. The scientist part of her was excited to discover all the limitations and possibilities this offered. She had so many ideas for the things she could implement that would give her house a massive advantage.

While waiting for their retainers, Adya reviewed the message Gauri had seen, that she had read out for Adya, with her own status screen. It looked like the level of protection that was offered was the rarity average of her classes. Gauri had not questioned the protection level, but Adya still wanted to test that with her mother and Parth. She also wanted to test if both Gauri and Adya could provide marks to Parth at the same time, and the impact of any conflicting orders.

Also Adya had only been testing the loyalty protection formation with her mother, the more benign version of the two she had developed. She would also need to test the loyalty enforcement formation that was designed for the bandits. She would have to force the bandit leader to conduct the testing with her, and to show her his full system screen, if that was possible. She hadn't Gauri, as she didn’t want to have to show her system screen. She still had too many secrets, and some of those could be extremely dangerous to her family.

Still the first test was a smashing success, and was a good starting point for further exploration.