But before that, let’s go over the weird as fuck shit I found while plumbing through his brain.

I pull out my infinite notebook; the flutter of uncountable pages as beautiful as always. Before starting a new web of pages filled with the weird new info I got from a real dude vision quest.

At the top there is the obvious stuff, like what is Perception, and how do spirits work if they aren’t essentially emotional waste products, especially with them apparently being gods, effective ones. All this is very important stuff, that is sadly going to have to be sidelined. Because I can’t exactly wait forever researching non-critical things while people’s lives are in danger.

I just need to get the essentials done, like making sure this new guy isn’t going to fuck me over by getting a read on his tribe, which might show up in The Book of Runes. For all I know, they could be from the same general time but hundreds of miles apart. Though that does make me think of something.

How did he know a bunch of stuff about me, however inaccurate, before even meeting me? Without any scrying, from what I could tell with my vision quest into his mind, He did mention that his people were known as essentially spirit wranglers, so he might have special techniques or a map of Great Spirit territories. Or, frankly, the more reasonable answer, considering what I know of his negotiation skills specializing in spirits, would be that he tapped into the web of Great Spirit gossip.

Speaking of, I should probably talk to my neighbors once I’m done with this mission. Obviously, I can’t exactly set up a tea party while gearing up for a rescue mission, but now that I know they’re people, well, I need some fucking company. I'll take what I can get, even if they are a set of wholly alien intelligences. It's not like that ever stopped me from heading out of the human sector before I ended up in an entirely different dimension.

But getting back on task, other things on the list of weird shit I learned while trawling through the Patient Bridge's brain.

That is Belief, which he strangely emphasized in his own thoughts. Giving the word much more weight than it should. My guess is that his religious practices are what allow him to expect his way into magic. Similar to my gestures and magic built off magic. Which makes sense if spirits are actually around affecting stuff but it pretty much sinks the prospect of me convincing him that I’m a human. It would be like trying to tell a New-Methodist god isn’t real while he knows that worshipping god gave him magic powers. Damn near impossible.

But the final and most applicable thing is the weird stuff that he did with that pinkish reddish spirit. Because the Patient Bridge essentially gave up some of his emotion, in some sort of strange astral currency.

Which makes some sort of sense considering that emotions and the size of them are what power magical effects. The more angry of a person you are the more juice you have for anger spells, so if you gave some of that juice up, and if it’s literally the specific thing that makes up the spirit's body, it makes sense that the spirit would get stronger.

This means that, taking all this in, there is another option other than busting in and maybe murdering the mystery spirits minions. I could negotiate, essentially offer to buy the people in exchange for giving up some Mystery.

It would most likely cripple me in some strange direction. Make me unable to understand puzzles or some such, considering how, without the concept within you, some of the framework of your mind starts to break. The things that your mind needs to understand certain things ripped away leaving you a shell.

When my Language was taken away, I was entirely unable to read anything. I was luckily still able to listen to others, but if I weren't, I would’ve been screwed. Unable to ever take any notes. I would have had to try to convey complicated experimental notes in pictograghs!

Hells, I could’ve been unable to understand my own thoughts, trapped in the confusing, broken sludge of my own mind. No, I cannot bargain by giving up emotions, who knows what bits and pieces of humanity I could lose? And frankly, the only solution I know is unacceptable. I refuse to devour Mystery for there is nothing beyond this, and I won’t cut short someone's life as if I were a judge, jury, and executioner.

Before this, I was a failed clothing entrepreneur. I can’t deal life and death with my own hands when I couldn’t even deal out fashionable clothing designs. Nor do I frankly want to. Death is the end, a rattling bomb of unforeseen consequences all made because you decided to end someone’s path. Every death sends out irreversible ripples, disturbing the water in such a way that it too creates ripples, ruining the surface's mirror.

I've seen what death can do to a family, what one person being taken away, even by themselves, does. Death is a horrifying question with no answer, except for one thing: there is nothing beyond it.

I shake my head. I can't afford to get into my own little internal debate over the nature of death. I've got to move on from here, so with a smooth, practiced motion, I unwind the cloth and fly down, below, or up. Gravity sure is confusing when you don't really need it.

—

I sit in a chair, peering over a pile of papers on my good, solid, steel desk, placed to the side of the factory floor. I shuffle through them, looking at my reports of output, input, efficiency, and other such matters pertinent to monitoring the health of the factory.

"Not that the papers show anything but steady upward growth," I say with a smile, overlooking my glorious progress.

I look over the glorious pumping and pounding of metal. Iron, and steel dust, raining down, cleanly seperated, and then melted, and pressed with runes, before switly cooling. And not one line but three, each making a different enchantment, making the small, tiny pieces that turn my work into something glorius and larger than life.

Alongside a series of lines where dozens of little gears are forged, cooled, and placed on a thin sheet of metal. Electricity and magic automating the creation of electricity and magic in a sort of ouroboros cycle, items creating the items that created them, magnificent!

Although funnily enough, it took so many engines to build the damn line that, frankly, it wasn’t worth the second series of steam engine lines until I needed to make dozens for the recharging central enchantment.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Either way, the factory plugs along steadily nowadays, making a truly monumental number of enchanted plates, gears, and components daily. It still isn’t reliable crapping out for the stupidest reasons it could possibly find, but I’ve gotten good enough at babysitting the darned thing that I imagine that I could do it night, and day through both sleep and death.

But sadly I have a task other than gushing at my beautiful, beautiful factory, for I’ve got some reading to do. I quickly set up the passive Language effect of speeding up my reading and blast through the entire history, digesting nothing in my search for Duraha. Essentially pretending that my mind is a search engine.

And quickly enough, I reach the first mention of the word.

—

The First Shaman, THOSE FUCKING BITCHES!

ARGH, I have had it up to here with the Duraha; they’re essentially screwing everything up in a bid to grab just a bit more power. Or well, a lot more, but that's not the point! I thought it was fine when that former priest created a power bloc out of the dissaffected fragmented tribes—just useless political manuevering worth nothing in a war. But now that we’ve released humanity from the grip of spirits, they want to let them back in!

It makes sense, though, that darned priest's practical entire arsenal of rituals required licking the boots of the spirits, and now that I’ve paid attention to it, damn near all the groups he gathered are of similar minds. People who will have their power bases massively destroyed if they cut contact with the spirits like I wish.

And now, despite none of them having any real power or approval from their people, they can just trample over everything due to the sheer concentration of politically powerful people in one place. To get rid of one of them is to invite the assassins blade from everywhere, and each is a separate swamp of sticky procedures and bullshit.

Making it damn near impossible to do anything despite the massive following, and oodles of magical power I have gained from painfully tearing us from the rule of spirits. Sadly enough, I’ll have to slowly leverage that DAMN PRIEST out of power by slowly pushing away his allies. And once that's done, it'll be over. At that point, there’s only one swamp I have to wade through to kill him.

—

Damn the first shaman is surprisingly bloodthirsty for the man who collected mementos of all the people he saved. Or maybe not; I have no idea when the fuck this is, but humanity has one birthplace, earth; it isn’t possible for it to be an alien planet, and the place looks a lot like Africa. Either way, all the clues point to this being ancient Earth, a time when people, well, frankly, gave less of a shite about murder.

But either way, it seems like the shaman's main tools, magic-wise, are essentially spirit-related stuff. My face suddenly contorts into a rictus of disgust, struck by a sudden thought. He better not have cast some sort of charm spell or something; I personally doubt it due to the fact that I really want to murder anyone who reduces my automy. But I should keep watch for it.

No need to be cocky at this juncture once I've gotten this far. I quickly skim past all of it again searching for another entry entirely about the Duraha.

—

Shaman of Peace, collective pain in my ass.

It’s been decades, and we are still fighting in the shallows with the Duraha tribe. Because the First Shaman, while he did have an admirable eye for the future, an innovative mind, and was one of the best combat magicians to exist, was goddamn terrible at politics.

He tried, but now I’ve got to clean up the mess he started with the Duraha tribe. We can’t exactly leave them alone now, considering they have one of the better chances of overthrowing our tribe's dominance. Any lapse of attention might lead to a crucial victory that might knock us off our pedestal.

Like the one I discovered today, for underneath the entire council's nose our recruitment efforts have all been overthrown. Any neutral tribe decidedly unwilling to speak to us with anything other than threats, and frankly, I have learned from my predecessors pain, threats get you nowhere in the long run.

While our tribe boasts the most versatile, variable, growing magic thanks to the work of the First Shaman, the Duraha tribe similarly boasts of the widest selection of magic of all the tribes in the habitable lands. It might not be good, with the vast majority more prone to destroying your brain than being actually effective but it's wide I'll give them that.

The first shaman never managed to pry free the First Bridge from his supporters, all his efforts leading to the dissenting eventually being subsumed into the Duraha for protection. And since they essentially took in the legacies of a dozen different tribes along with the willing shamans, they were able to form a legacy so ridiculous that it makes all others seethe in envy.

With that, they have the perfect tools for trading anytime, anywhere. We might be the only provider of true enchantments, but what does that matter when they can teach you a spell specifically made to cure burns, while your mother lays on her deathbed suffering from a wildfire? With such a wide array of techniques, they can afford to quickly and easily tailor their offers.

They have decisively claimed the advantage, influence-wise, for the next generation. Our grip is only holding strong on the core group and their subsidiary tribes. Our tribe already providing all they could want, for a limited time, thanks to the missing storage runes.

For now, I’m thinking of a sneakier solution, for if the problem is their extensive legacy, then how powerful are they if it’s gone?

–

Oh wow, scratch that earlier statement his tribe apparently has the monopoly on the vast majority of magic. A legacy is essentially the final product of a shamans efforts, their last gasp attempt to make their successors lives just a bit easier. Over the years each would undoubtably gain several fantastic techniques and with a dozen legacies that they themselves have curated and perfected, their magical techniques must be monstrous!

Why the hell is he asking me? Apparently, he could blast me to fucking pieces. This makes absolutely no sense, he from the vision, at least very definitely needs my help, yet the information shows that he should single-handedly destroy all problems in front of him. The history here directly contradicts the facts shown by his magic, and well he’s trying to get me to do something, he has every reason to alter the information shown.

Should I even do anything? This all just feels like a trap. But what if there’s people? Hooo, with a deep slow breath out I stop. And then I resume drawing my breathe back in through my preserved white teeth contrasting nicely with my dark skin. Slowly gaining calm due to my effort, and remembering a crucial detail. I got body language knowledge for days! And he might’ve been infuriating but he was genuinely afraid for his people.

And I’m not exactly going to abandon a bunch of people to the same hell that I’ve been forced into.

So let’s finish reading up on them before I make any more hasty decisions.

—

The GREATEST SHAMAN, A new idea.

Hmm, I’ve been handed the most intriguing offer by the newest bridge. An out after all my "mistakes" well, jokes on them, I haven’t made a single mistake yet, no matter what that Patient Bridge says.

I’m the most competent shaman to manage to grab this position in a century. My predecessors focused on all the wrong things while also desperately scrambling to be at the top. For what? Why do we need widespread approval? We’re the strongest around, what are they going to do if they get pissy invade?

And get vaporized by the defenses the first shaman picked up. Or crushed to death by our glory awakened again after so long.

But their offer of allowing me to evacuate my people through their territory as refugees in exchange for the bangle does make me think of something.

The astral forest is quite empty, and space is relative when using the bangle, according to all reports. So if I truly need to duck and run, I can always take the bangle. It’s not like I can give it to them; the recharging part of the enchantments is essential to our rule over my vassals and our people alike.

The first shaman solved the main problem of enchantments twice! First by making the first true artifacts with his absorbing solution, and second by imprisoning the great spirit of langauge in the bangle so that he might use the infinite energy to mantain our rule by holding out the recharge of enchantments.

For how are you going to screw us over with swords, with a dozen useless runes carved into it?

Regardless I might be able to extract concessions from this new Patient Bridge fellow if I can pretend to give it away. For whatever reason he wants the damned thing despite it's use mostly being a tool of control.

Pfff and I doubt that the idiot could see that!

The greatest shaman out.

—

Frowning I set the book down, before spinning away from the desk—not with a swivel chair, those are a fucking pain to make. I just literally spin while still atached to my chair, twirling in the astral expanse my movements not stopped by much of anything, leaving me in a semi-perpetual elegant spin.

I tap the side of my head while groaning due to one fairly simple reason. There's a fairly high chance that the Patient Bridge is going to screw me over, he might have been one of the more reasonable Bridge's among his tribe from my fairly small data sample. But nonetheless, the histories say that the Duraha tribe are a bunch of backstabbing politicking snakes, whose main skill is screwing over others. However, both of the two perspectives I can see on the Duraha tribe, and on the Patient Bridge himself are from two deeply biased sources.

One of them being the apparent political enemies of his tribe, and the other being the very same person the text accuses of being a snake. In the end I'm still going through with this, both due to the prize, and the fact that I'm pretty damn sure that there are people to rescue. And who would I be if, when I was granted great power that I ignored the plight of the weak?

All this means now is that before I do this, I'm going to need a bigger arsenal, so let me gather it all together.

For whatever else may come, I refuse to let pain continue unheeded.