ANASTASIA (1)

Leonel and Aina spent the next month in secluded discussion. Unfortunately, this wasn't a euphemism for something more spicy. Fortunately, there was much more to gain out of it than just the satisfaction of carnal desire. Well, maybe there was a little carnal desire. …

"I think we have this pinned down properly now," Leonel said, feeling satisfied with the blueprint they had drawn out. In reality, although Leonel's father had left him behind several lessons on blueprints, how to read them, and how to construct them, this was the first time that he had ever truly bothered to do such a thing. But this just went to show how important he found it all. This wasn't just another Craft; this was for Anastasia. Anastasia had been by his side for a long while. She almost never complained, and she did everything he asked without question. The one time she had shown even the slightest inkling of dissent was when he had sent her off to the Celestial Embers, but that was something that he had no choice but to take full responsibility for. Anastasia might have lived longer than any of them combined, but she was still a child at heart. Her appearance might not be a coincidence, but maybe she looked like a little girl because that was what she truly was. He should have never put her in such a situation, and when he had sworn to pull her out from her darkness, he had meant it with every fiber of his being. In truth, Leonel and Aina had had the solution they needed within a day, but then they spent the rest of the month refining it and perfecting it all. It was only now that they were semi-satisfied with how things were, and even then, their minds were still churning with more thoughts. To the two of them, Anastasia might as well have been their first child, and her place in their hearts was no less profound. The problem Anastasia faced was easy enough to diagnose after you had been made aware of it, but the solution was far more difficult. Anastasia was a World Spirit, and though World Spirits were living beings, they would be more so classified with a semi-sentience as opposed to a true one. World Spirits were far more intelligent than their other humanoid counterparts, but their "personalities" were muted by the laws that bound them. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that they didn't have personalities at all. In fact, they didn't even speak. World Spirits, in a lot of ways, were extensions of Regulators. They existed only to uphold the laws of a world and help it to prosper. What made the situation odd was that World Spirits did have the capacity to be more human-like… they just weren't. The Minerva had picked up on this, and they wondered what would happen if they could take a World Spirit and break it free of the shackles of the world's laws and make it follow their own laws? There were already some examples of this, like Leonel's mother. But the trouble was twofold. First, a World Spirit was too intelligent to be "tricked." You couldn't just feed World Spirits candy and lure them into a van to be taken away. Whatever you could think of, the World Spirit could as well. On top of that, they could normally observe everything in their world perfectly, so they had already seen all the faces that humanoids had to offer and had a perfect understanding of them. This meant that if you wanted to become the champion of a World Spirit, they had to choose you of their own volition, and that would defeat much of the purpose. And second, even when a World Spirit chose you and gave you special authority over their world, it wasn't unilateral authority and was still highly limited. The World Spirit would never let you do what Anastasia could do, for example. Warping time, accelerating the growth rate of plants and ore deposits, etc.… that was because all of these abilities, abilities that every World Spirit had, couldn't be done without harming the foundation of a world. If you wanted to use such a world for a few thousand generations, billions upon billions of years even, it would be fine. But a World Spirit was only interested in having their worlds survive for the longest period of time possible, and time periods of time couldn't be described in terms any less than the trillions. As a result, if you wanted to do any such thing with a World Spirit, you would have to take drastic measures to change the laws of the world itself. Although Leonel had harsh words for the Minerva, there was no denying that what they had done was truly impressive. In order to circumvent the limitations of the world, they first had to form a vessel capable of holding a world in the first place. It had already been described just how rare treasures like the Segmented Cube that could hold so many living beings were in the first place. One could imagine that a vessel that could go a step further and encapsulate an entire world was even more shocking. It could be said that the Minerva hadn't created a vessel for storing people… they had created a vessel for storing entire worlds! Not only did they manage to do this, but step one of accomplishing this meant separating their worlds from their Regulators. This was something that even [Final Destruction] hadn't been able to do. Leonel's worlds weren't even "technically" in his body. Rather, he had just formed a connection with them through his Destruction World and could return to their coordinates whenever he wanted by traveling through the Second Dimension—or, once again, his Destruction World. Just these two things alone were highly impressive, but to the Minerva, this was just the start of their ambition. Next came changing the laws.Têxt belongs to .