23 - Chapter 22 - Day 1811
Parth was left speechless by Adya’s reply. It took him almost a minute to get control of himself. “Just how many mana stones did you spend?” he asked belatedly.
“Around 300 or so.” replied Adya nonchalantly. “Why is that a lot?”
“300!” exclaimed Parth, looking at Gauri “Where did she get them? Letting a child wander about with hundreds of mana stones, what were you thinking my lady.”
Adya and Gauri shared a glance, it was enough to agree that revealing that would be a step too far, even with the soul mark in place.
“Suffice it to say, it won’t be happening again.” replied Gauri looking chastised, “That still leaves the shadowed hand as an issue we need to address. I think Adya has an idea about that.”
Parth moved his stern gaze from the mother to the daughter. As talented as Adya seemed to be, he was at a loss to explain why Gauri was deferring to Adya in almost every situation.
“Well,” said Adya, “If the other version of my tattoo, or should we call it soul mark, works. Then I propose we capture the leaders of the shadowed hand, mark them, and then have them identify the rest of the leadership, Then rinse and repeat until we have the whole leadership under our control. I am sure I can come up with uses for them. Why waste resources?”
“How would we know if they have accepted the soul mark?” asked Parth. “It does not show up in your status screen does it?”
“No, but we can use the identification feature.” replied Adya, then on a whim trying it for herself. “It seems to work for me too, just shows me the type of soul mark instead of my name. We can test it with the bandits. If it works the way I think it will, then we will not even need to keep them locked up. We can just treat them as any other employees. In fact, that would be a better idea, we don’t want rumours to spread.”
“Ok, in that case we don’t want them coming here.” replied Parth. “I will arrange for them to be taken to the interrogation room one by one. Can you sneak your ink in there without anyone noticing? We need to minimise the risk of exposure.”
“I am sure I can manage.” smirked Adya. “Let’s get started. I want to get this done today.”
Parth went off to make the arrangements, taking Dexter to assist him.
“Phillipa, go with mother and make a list of critical retainers that would benefit from being soul marked by my mother.” said Adya. “Sally, if you could get the place cleaned up please.”
Once everyone had left Adya sat down to meditate and think through the myriad implications of her series of experiments. First the successes, the formations worked, and her understanding was sufficient for the system to take notice. She was still guessing at a few of the parameters in her design, but mostly she was comfortable with her understanding so far.
The soul mark did not require power, as it was not a passive skill. She would have to find an opportunity to test the impact of someone trying mind or soul intrusion, not that it would be easy to setup. She had not heard of anyone with those skills, yet as the system mentioned it explicitly, then those skills must not only exist, but must be being utilised.
If she could move from the soul mark, to creating a passive skill that she could grant, that would give her so much flexibility. There was also the fact that soul marks could be merged and in different configurations. She would have to work out how to do that in the formation design itself, giving her even more options.
She really needed to spend time understanding the difference between a skill and spell, though she had her theories. The difference between passive and active skills was straight forward. Passive skills were running in the background, and active skills required direction to run. If her custom skills were anything to go by, and she felt they represented at least a basic understanding, then the passive skills were a set of instructions that would run based on the algorithm it was given. It would only deviate as much as the programming allowed. Case in point, her custom skills had been designed to stop running if she started to use her resource regeneration, so the effect was negligible. But the skills had not been designed to run on the tiered up energies and had subsequently required her to update the programming to function.
That led her down another darker use. Could she provide a backdoor that could use up all of someone’s resource pools and even lock up their regeneration, effectively crippling their spell and skill use? Did such a system exist already? She would have to ask Parth how they dealt with imprisoning mages. The main issue she foresaw was the requirement to get agreement before those formations took effect.
Actually, was that statement actually true? She thought through the design of her loyalty protection formation, the only one she had actually tested. Her intent had been for it to be a voluntary formation. Had her intent impacted the design? Had the system read her intent and converted it to the appropriate functionality.
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
She would need to test with the loyalty enforcement formation. That one, she had intended to force upon the bandits. If the formation was activated without consent, then that would provide further avenues of research. If it was true though, she would have to work out the mechanism by which her intent was added to the formation. When normal artificers made formations, they didn’t seem to need to imbue intent to get the formation to function. Or maybe they did and did not even realise what they were doing. So many questions, so few answers.
A part of her had the wild idea that she could push the limits of a passive skill, and create a custom skill that was in actuality a suite of applications. And with appropriate inputs, they could trigger specific actions. Even if the skills allowed no input, the number of things that Adya could think of would change the technology level of the world. That was all in the far future and she would have to work hard to make headway towards her goals.
As she was musing about the things she might be able to achieve, Dexter returned to tell her that they were ready for her to begin. As she was just leaving her room, Phillipa also returned. Gauri had agreed on a list of direct retainers, who would be soul marked by Gauri. Of course they would have to remove Adya’s soul mark on Gauri to stop the option from presenting itself to Gauri’s retainers. It was bad enough that they would get to learn about Adya’s skills.
Dynamic system interactions were considered an extremely rare event, as shown by her own retainers’ reactions when it happened. That was definitely a secret they would need to keep close to the vest. Adya decided to get her mothers retainers completed first, as they were fewer and it would go faster.
Adya, followed by Philipa and Dexter, headed for Gauri’s office. “Mother, please remove my soul mark,” said Gauri as she entered. ”We don;t want to reveal that ability just yet. I need more time to experiment. If you want, I should be able to adapt the mark to provide the equal version of our joint mark directly as that would only require changing the mark holder parameter.”
“You can do that? Only changing one parameter she says! Let me think about it.,” replied Gauri, proceeding to do just that.”Phillipa, can you and Dexter invite the people on the list I approved to meet me here.”
Dexter and Phillipa went off to collect the 5 people that Gauri had identified to be high risk enough to bring in on the secret. The list consisted of her hand maid, her secretary, the family’s head of finance, the family's head of logistics and the family's head of intelligence. They all had direct access to the family and the family’s closely guarded secrets.
“Do you want to go through them one by one, or in a group?” asked Adya.
“Let us get my hand maid and secretary done first.” replied Gauri. “Then we can do the other three. They will also be easier to convince.”
“Which version are we giving them?” asked Adya. “Decided yet?”
“My personal retainers should have the merged mark.” replied Gauri thoughtfully, “That would allow them to help me with some of your secrets. I can decide on the other three afterwards.”
As they finished speaking Phillipa returned with the two women. “Dexter is retrieving the other three on the list, my lady.” said Phillipa.
“Thanks Phillipa, please wait outside and ask them to wait for me to finish in here before letting them in .” said Gauri, then turning to the other two she continued, “please take a seat.”
“So, we need your consent to give you both formations to protect you.” started Gauri once Phillipa had left. “We are being targeted by the shadowed hand, and we are just taking precautions. The formation will give you both protection against attempted soul or mind intrusion. Adya is here because she will be the one creating the formation. Her retainers have already been through the process. I hope you both trust me enough to consent.”
Gauri’s retainers had been with her for a long time, and both understood that there was a lot that was left unsaid. Yet they did trust her, she had been a good employer over the years, and if she felt this was a necessary step, then they were minded to accept her recommendation. THe only thing they found strange, was the fact it would be miss Adya who would be creating the formation.
They both agreed and were directed to sit by the desk with their arm laying palm up.
Adya had already mentally adjusted the design, and was ready to go. She wondered if she could do both formations simultaneously, using both hands. She covertly removed a second quill, and asked them both to sit to either side.
She then asked Sai to start creating both formations simultaneously. Sai had no problem controlling both hands, more so as they were both actually forming the same motions. While Adya focussed and showed off another ridiculous talent, the other three were left speechless at the level of skill they were witnessing. The only thought running through Adya’s mind was can I do the same with my feet?
It wasn’t long till she was done, a little over 10 minutes, as doing 2 simultaneously had slowed her down marginally.
“You will both receive a system prompt, please read it.” said Gauri. “If you are happy, then please proceed to accept the mark.”
They both nodded and accepted the combined mark. Adya was happy with another point of data that furthered her understanding.
“I am now going to ask the heads of logistics, finance and intelligence to join us.” said Gauri. “I am going to ask them to do the same. If you could both stay to allow us to show you as an example.”
“And don’t worry about the ink.” said Adya. “Once we are done with them, we can wipe them that way. The formation will not need the ink to stay active.”
The two looked more and more nonplussed the more they heard. Just how had little miss Adya become so skilled in formations?
“Phillpa,” called our Gauri. “Can you ask everyone to come in now. We are ready for them.”
Upon hearing Gauri calling out, Phillipa opened the door and led in the Heads of Finance, Intelligence and logistics. Dexter followed behind.
It was a good thing that Gauri’s office was large enough to accommodate everyone, otherwise nine people in the room would have been too much.