Jack slowly came to awareness. He was so warm and comfortable. So comfortable that he couldn’t imagine feeling any better. For the first time in years his body was lacking the deep aches and pains that accompanied his every waking moment. At the realization that his body did not hurt Jack’s eyes popped open and he shot upright startling the servant who was stationed in the room. Eyes wide in amazement Jack patted himself down, fascinated by just how he felt.
While Jack was checking himself over the young man in the corner set down the book he had been reading, stood up and walked over to the bed. “Sir, you’re awake! How are you feeling?”
“Hmm? What?” Jack asked not having registered what the man said, enthralled as he was by his lack of pain.
“How are you feeling sir? We did have a doctor come and examine you and while they said you seemed to be in excellent health you have been asleep now for over two days.” The man replied.
“Over two days?” Jack repeated incredulously before asking, “What day is it now then? Noctuday? Morsday?”
“It’s currently Noctuday morning.”
“Damn, no kidding.” Jack accepted before musing, “Well, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. What I did was a lot of work to my body, plus I probably overstressed myself with the preparations.”
After a moment Jack paused and asked. “By the way, it’s a bit odd, if I have been unconscious for over two days why don’t I feel thirsty? I certainly haven’t been drinking anything.”
“I afraid have no idea sir. I could ask the other’s if you would like. Perhaps the doctor who visited earlier did something.”
“No, no. Don’t worry about it. It was simply curiosity rather than anything else. I can always ask myself later.” Even as Jack waved his hand dismissing the matter, he pulled the sheets off and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Standing up quickly Jack felt a bit of dizziness. As his body swayed slightly, he reached out and held himself up using the wall.
The young man started to reach out to steady Jack but stopped as he saw that Jack had already caught himself. “Are you okay sir?” He asked.
“I’m okay. Just stood up a little too quickly I think.” Jack replied before pausing as his stomach grumbled at him loudly. “Erm, mostly fine. I feel quite famished. I don’t suppose you could point me to the kitchen. I’m not certain just where we are as I can say with full certainty that I have not been in this room before. Where is this by the way?”
The young man nodded and explained, “Certainly sir, I can take you over to the kitchen. This is the infirmary for the main house members.”
“Why is there even an infirmary in the mansion? Much less more than one, as you had to specify which one this is.” Jack wondered aloud before waving the young man off when he opened his mouth to answer. “No, no. Don’t bother answering, it doesn’t really matter anyways.”
Jack pushed himself off the wall to begin moving out of the room. As he left the wall, the butler quickly walked over, opened the door for Jack and then began to lead him down the corridor.
Jack’s stomach was grumbling the whole time that they were making their way to the kitchen. Even as it voiced its complaints Jack couldn’t help but feel amazed at the fact that he had been eating well enough these days that a mere two days without food affected him so much.
Just as he contemplated that, an expression of joy swept over his face. If he had thought about the feeling of hunger like that anytime in the last eight months it would have sent him into a terrible spiral of all the times in his life that he had felt the pangs of starvation. Now he felt that if he truly wanted he could pull up each memory in exacting detail but he was not forced too. Instead, he simply recalled that he’d had such experiences. It was amazing! So amazing in fact that Jack was forced to close his eyes as tears poured down his face. He was free! At long, long, last he was free.
Taking a deep shuddering breath, he wiped his eyes and straightened his back. He would have time to enjoy his new freedom later, for now, he needed food.
As he followed the young butler, Jack tried to recall if he had ever met the man before or even heard his name. As he did, a number of scenes passed thought his mind. The day that Jack first came to the manor this young man had been working out in the gardens alongside three others. Eight days later Jack had seen him again while on the way from the kitchen after eating lunch, the young man had briefly passed him in the hallway. More and more scenes flashed through Jack’s mind of having seen the man during his stay within the manor. During all of his memories there was never an introduction between the two of them, but at least on a couple instances he had heard someone talking to or calling the young man. If what he was recalling was correct then the man’s name was likely Gregory or something close to it. He had heard him being referred to as Greggy, Gregius, and Greg. He would have to ask him later to see just what exactly his name was.
Even as Jack felt amazement at the ease in which he recalled the memories he wanted he couldn’t help but to also feel uneasy. While he had half a year’s worth of experience by this point of dealing with the memory floods being triggered by something, it had also become ingrained in him that the experience was inherently negative and to be avoided at all costs. While he was aware intellectually that the ritual had succeeded and thus the memories were no longer tied to just his negative emotions, that didn’t stop his instinctive reaction of shuddering and clenching up as he prepared to weather another flood of horrendous memories. When nothing of the sort occurred, Jack forced himself to let out a slow breath and relax his muscles. It would take time for him to adjust to his new normal, but he would get there in the end.
The next few hours went by fairly smoothly in Jack’s opinion. He had gotten a simple lunch of a meaty stew and bread from the chef, who had apparently been informed that once Jack awoke, he would need something easy on the stomach. During lunch Jack also managed to ask the young worker his name and learned that he was called Greg Brockpal. That proved to Jack that while his memory was indeed improved and allowed him to see even more then he had possibly remembered before, he couldn’t necessarily take everything from them as definite truth. While the divination function did make it so that it should be accurate to what actually happened and what he had seen and heard, it didn’t mean that he couldn’t be fooled by an illusion or false information.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Following his repast Jack had gone back to his room to meditate and examine what if any, changes had happened to his mana passages. To his everlasting joy, the lack of pain that had been so notable during the ritual continued. Channeling mana didn’t hurt. It was a strange and almost alien feeling. So different that it was disconcerting. Because of the difference there was even a small part of Jack that actually wanted the pain to return. Not because he enjoyed it but rather because it would have been a familiar experience to help ground him while dealing with all of the other changes he was going through.
Standing from his meditation He popped his back and moaned in pleasure. As he did it brought the fact that his body also didn’t ache to his attention once more. He had grown so used to his daily aches and pains that it almost felt like he wasn’t even in his own body but the he had somehow stolen someone else’s instead.
As Jack thought that, he suddenly realized that he felt adrift. More so than he ever had before in his life. Everything that had happened to him in the past half a year all caught up to him simultaneously. Here he was sitting in a rich ponce’s manor house being waited on day and night. His aptitudes had changed so drastically that they were practically unrecognizable, what with his absorption having altered to be able to pull in and deal with any kind of mana, natural or not. His passages were now altered in some manner, so that they no longer felt the agony of being crystalized then shattered as new mana poured through them.
Add in to that the fact that he was certain that his emotions had been dulled far more than they had been before. He had struggled a great deal during his teens to come to terms with at least some of his childhood and find joy in the world around him. The months upon months of being bombarded with enhanced versions of his worst memories had taken him back to a state that was near identical to how he had been when he had first escaped his childhood home.
Now this wasn’t to say that things were terrible. In fact, Jack recognized that in many, if not most, ways he was now better off then he had ever been before. Nevertheless, with both how quickly everything had changed, alongside the fact that he had not had the spare energy to truly process things for the last half-year he felt almost as if he didn’t belong in his own skin.
Jack paused. He knew for a fact that he was still within his own body. Nothing in the ritual, neither the effects it was designed for, nor any of the patrons it had called upon would have caused such a thing. However, he still felt so different that he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. He needed to see himself in a mirror just so that he could reassure himself.
Taking a moment to steady himself Jack walked over to the mirror in corner of his room. Looking into it only made the strange feeling of being in the wrong skin worse. He saw what looked like a stranger staring back at him. With the lack of hair and light scarring from the ritual his reflection looked so far removed from how it normally did that he couldn’t fully believe that it truly was him.
Jack felt his heart beat painfully as paranoia and fear began to gnaw away at his thoughts. “Perhaps he was not really who he thought he was. Was he an impostor who had been altered and changed to think of himself as Jack? Why would someone want to do such a thing? Was it to get at the Bertrand family by creating some supposedly worthless descendent that could be used against them?” Jack’s mind jumped from conspiracy to conspiracy. Each time getting more and more outlandish as his brain attempted to create some reason as to why he felt the way he did and what meaning could lay behind it.
Jack attempted and failed repeatedly to bring his overactive imagination under control. Each attempt only sparking more worries and insane plots far beyond the boundary of plausibility. Eventually the only thing that he could think of to do was slap himself across the face as hard as he could, hoping that the shock and pain would concentrate his mind on the here and now rather then on the mad possibilities. With a loud crack, he did just that.
The stinging pain in his hand and face along with the slight taste of blood stopped all of Jack’s thoughts in their tracks. Swallowing heavily, Jack took a deep breath and spoke aloud. “Knock it off you foolish bastard. You literally just finished a ritual calling upon numerous Agier to help you repair your mind. Including the Agier who this family is related to. If you weren’t really Jack then that definitely would have come out during all of the modifications, especially as now your memories come with a level of scrying. Yeah, we can still be tricked but with that level of security it would be impossible for everything to hold up as truthful. You are still yourself and nothing is going to change that.”
With that Jack let out a short breath and decided that he needed to find something to do to keep himself fully occupied until this strange sense of disassociation passed. As he cast his mind about trying to think if there was anything that needed to be done, the memory of his meeting with the vesper Bartholomew Starsmoke popped into his head.
He needed to figure out how to get into the Adventurers Guildhouse building and plant something to let the man know that he had done it without being caught. Considering the amount of time that had passed due to the ritual, if he hadn’t extended it to a week and a half he would only have five days left to figure out and implement his plans rather then the full ten of a week. Jack let out a sigh of relief at both having something to do as well as his thinking back then.
With the thought of what he needed to do in mind Jack sigh and once more wished that he knew just what had happened to the plans that he had started before. Just as he was wondering that the memories of various theories about the building along with the memories of writing out his plans and storing them under the floorboard in his old office came back to him. He hadn’t even considered that with his augmented memory that he could simply recall everything that he had come up with before.
As each and every memory passed through his head, he became thankful for his old habit of writing everything out. As that old habit gave him one memory where everything had been organized into plans rather than the disjointed mess that the rest of the memories were.
With that thought Jack realized that going forward it likely help him a great deal to keep some kind of written record to help him stay organized. The only issue was the worry of it being found, especially as not everything he planned to do was strictly legal. At the thought of illegal activities, Jack was suddenly distracted by memory of the plans he had written up before! The plans themselves weren’t a problem but where he had hidden them certainly was.
He had stashed a whole slew of things under those floorboards, most notably were the various records of the businesses he had been investigating during his last case! If those had been found then he would have been lucky to just get arrested. At some point soon he would need to make a trip over to his old office and deal with them. With a sigh Jack patted his pocket absentmindedly to grab his notebook only to remember that he hadn’t had one on him in months. He grumbled slightly as he looked around the room for something to write with even as he wished that he could just have a magical notebook that was stored in his mind.