Ralouf walked with Kestra back to the designated meet up spot. Along the way, she did some wild harvesting while he looked on with mild curiosity.
"Looking for new alchemy materials?" Ralouf asked.
"Always, but I need to eat. You and Yorgin, you aren't elementals, right?"
That got a guffaw and a, "No!" Then he gave a relaxed sigh and went on. "No, I'm a wyrm and Yorgin is a horned serpent. By the time that we Awakened reach the Immortal Realms, we're more mana than body, like most every Immortal being, and so we can shape shift as we please. Most of the Ascended races have a harder time with learning that knack, but there are those who master it."
"Does that mean you and he don't need food? Like the elementals?"
Ralouf waggled his hand side to side. "If we have sufficient mana, no, we don't need food, but it is still one of life's pleasures."
"Ah. Then what is a decent sized portion for Divine appetites?"
He waved her off. "Don't cook for us. The less we draw from this realm, the less the realm can draw upon us. You should be fine; you have the Mana Well, and it makes you blend more into the free mana."
Kestra nodded to that.
They arrived at the meeting spot before either Graemire or Ambrose, so they made a basic camp and Kestra settled in to make a stew, using some of the first meat she had looted.
While she was cooking, Kestra said to Ralouf, "Something I just don't understand is why the people here aren't leveling. I get that you guys have carried me through a lot of levels, but just being curious and trying things got me my first levels without any problem. Why is level 8 something the people here feel is the realm's average? Do higher level people leave?"
Ralouf tipped his head to the side as he considered. "That is probably part of the matter. The mana in the Low Mortal Realms is the weakest of anywhere in the Myriad Realms, and I know that thinness drives we Awakened to sniff out the Ways to cross the Realm Seas to richer realms. Awakened grow by the mana we consume, and in a realm this poor of mana, the realm actively sucks it out of us. Ascended start to have that problem more when they have more open foramina. I doubt you feel it because of your Mana Well. Also, the lower among the realms you're born, the harder it can be to open your foramina."
Kestra guessed, "Because of the lower ambient mana? It doesn't push in as much?"
"That's a way to look at it, yes," he agreed. "Near the Low Transcendental Realms, Ascended are born with as many as four foramina already open, and it's rare to have less than three born open in the Immortal Realms, though I've never heard of any Ascended born with a Body of Mana."
"And E.X.P., that's what makes levels, right? It's a particular type of mana, from what the guidebook says."
Ralouf shrugged. "That's for Ascended. An Awakened's power is from the density of their elemental core. Being able to hold more kinds of power is what makes the Ascended with Awakened Bloodlines so potent."
"So, I get E.X.P. for getting ranks in my skills. I haven't see anything about being capped on the number of skills I can get. Obviously, improving them beyond just getting them takes time and focus, but, let's take Cooking. I just showed I know what I'm doing, and I've got three ranks into it already. Sure, that's only 15 E.X.P., but that was for making one dish. The more I cook, the more E.X.P. I'm going to get for Cooking. There's Woodworking, and I'm sure there's something like Farming, or stuff. And I got a lot more E.X.P. for teaching myself a skill Technique, the Water Extraction one, when I demonstrated it. This is all on this realm, so even if people aren't fighting, what makes me different?"
Ralouf gave her a "you know what" look, and Kestra waved her hand. She said, "Besides being a transmigrator! From what the guidebook says, I can't see that making me gain mana and E.X.P. and all of that any easier than anyone born of the Myriad Realms could do in my same situation!"
That made Ralouf pause thoughtfully. "Would anyone born of the Myriad Realms ever be in a similar situation to you?" he mused. With a more considering gaze, he examined Kestra. He snorted at what he found.
"What?" she asked.
"You're the only Ascended I've looked at so closely without ties to a Village or City. Aside from that, your mana body doesn't seem that different from other humans I've met."
Kestra tipped her head to the side. "You can see people's connections to their collective Will?"
Ralouf quirked an eyebrow back. "Do all humans tie themselves to some kind of Village Stone?"
"Tie ourselves to a--? No?" she said, her words slow as she tried to puzzle out what Ralouf meant. "We do have communal souls, or that's the way the priests explained it back ... where I'm from. Physically, humans can survive on their own, but isolation drives us a little bit mad. We aren't as bad as bees or ants, but ... that's not what you're talking about. What do stones have to do with being tied to a village here in the Realms?"
Ralouf leaned back and scratched his chin. "Yorgin may be the better one to ask for details, but broadly, the Ascended races get Stones to found their villages and their cities. The Stones are something like Dungeon Cores, but instead of attracting monsters, they suppress them. The Stones do more than just that, but I'm not certain of the details. I know in the higher realms there are ways for the cities to enforce laws through using their City Stones, and the Dungeon Masters and City Lords have some kind of back door to the Reward Stands. Beyond that, I don't know." He grimaced, giving the impression that he did not like admitting his ignorance. Then his expression cleared, and he focused on Kestra. "So what is this about a collective will?"
Kestra stirred the stew, using that as a delaying tactic while she gathered her thoughts. She didn't find a good starting point, so she just dove in. "Collective Will touches on things that are priests' territory. It's an aspect of the soul. Some creatures are loners by their nature, barely tolerating another of their kind, and only that for breeding. Others, if you'll include humans as creatures, they need to be among others of their own kind. Wolves, deer, horses -- Oh, good! The universal translation is giving me words for those, so you've got something close enough to them."
Ralouf perked up. "Universal translation? No, we'll come back to that. You were saying?"
She chuckled, but continued. "So, some creatures are communal by their nature, but they still have boundaries to their communities. The wolves I know, they form family groups, parents raising children. The parents' Will rules the children. In a horse herd, the lead mare's Will rules the herd, but that lead mare also has to prevent the other mares from challenging her, or she's going to end up with no one listening to her. Those are rudimentary collective Wills. Then you get to smarter beings, sapients. Have you seen people get swept up in what the crowd around them is doing?"
Ralouf nodded.
Kestra nodded, too. "And have you heard people later saying they don't know why they went along?"
That got another nod from Ralouf.
Kestra held out her palm in 'so there you go' gesture. "That's one of the more obvious and immediate ways that a collective Will works on communal races. There's also acceptance or rejection of those outside of the Will.
"The priests say that when people live together, like in a village or a town, we reach out to the people around us through similar spiritual channels to the ones the voice of the world uses to commune with us. Just as the world voice isn't us but influences and guides us, we do the same for everyone in our communities. That influence can take root in our magic, binding us together. That's what the priests say is our collective Will."
Ralouf looked Kestra over. "Are you part of one of these collectives now?"
She frowned and poked the stew again, but didn't delay this time. "I'm not sure."
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Ralouf just waited for the rest of her words to come. She sat back and sighed before explaining. "Until my bond with the voice of my home world was severed, I couldn't have told you where it was. It was just part of me, like my lungs. I only had three days from the severing to transmigrating, and I had to scramble to put my affairs in order and gear up for the unknown. I caught moments here and there to feel the change.
"I met Graemire a few days after the transmigration, and I haven't really had time to reflect on anything yet. I've been a bit busy with survival first, and now adapting to this new world voice, the Living Scrolls.
"The first quest I got, I think Graemire called it the Child's Quest: go to a jie gate. When I did that, I was rewarded with a guidebook. The cover's nice. It says in big Druerjani glyphs, 'Don't Panic!'. One of the first sections explains that the Living Scrolls are providing a spiritual kind of anesthetic that's supposed to help transmigrators focus on finding their place in the Myriad Realms and not on the worlds they left behind.
"I don't know if that's why Graemire especially, and you and Yorgin and Vostler to a lesser extent, feel like my party. It's new and it's fragile and it's the most solid sense of belonging I have right now."
Ralouf didn't speak, but his demeanor was open, patient. Accepting what she said, and she thought that he was considering what she had shared. She found the silence between them a comfortable thing, and turned her outward attention back to monitoring her stew. When she deemed it done, she removed the pot from the fire and dished up a bowl for herself.
♦•♦•♦ Congratulations! ♦•♦•♦
You have successfully created a Low Novice grade Field Stew.
♦•♦•♦ ▲▼▲ ♦•♦•♦
♦•♦•♦ Congratulations! ♦•♦•♦
You have successfully learned the Cooking skill! View your Skill Book to keep track of your skill ranks.
♦•♦•♦ ▲▼▲ ♦•♦•♦
She ate her fill before she sent the pot off for the prisoners. She had her little Stone Sprite, nicknamed Stonespri, make a crude chamber pot and leave it just inside the bars of the prisoners' cell.
When the pot disappeared from their camp, Ralouf gave Kestra a sly look. "About this universal translation."
"Let me show you," she said, smiling. She pulled out one of her traveler's journals and her mark stick and repeated the exercise of trying to write in Druerjan glyphs only for the glyphs to morph into the common glyphs of the Myriad Realms.
"That's--! Well!" Ralouf gave up sputtering to laugh. He asked her to try different ways of forming her glyphs, and it was only by attempting to make them illustrations, thinking of them as being something not actually language while she was making them, that they got the Druerjani glyphs to remain. The process was mentally taxing, and Kestra began yawning half an hour before Graemire turned up.
The Emperor of Wood arrived just before dusk fell, pausing to coalesce his vines into his humanoid form outside of Kestra's sight. He took one obvious look at the camp and the people there, and suggested to Kestra, "How about you tell me what you've been up to, what you can of it, while I get a shelter set up?"
She relayed what she could while he turned some bushes into a comfortable little hut, and encouraged the grasses and mosses to grow into a mystically soft and relaxing bed. Ralouf took over the telling when she yawned out a groan while relaying the information they had gained from the guards.
When the hut and bed were done, Graemire paused the retelling to tell Kestra, "Go, sleep some more, little one."
She couldn't muster the energy to nay-say him.
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Graemire and Ralouf waited until they felt Kestra sleeping before they resumed speaking, keeping their voices soft.
"What have you learned?" Ralouf asked.
Graemire smothered the camp fire, his expression pensive. "Rebellion is fermenting throughout the Villages tied to Sortalheim. There is a great rejection of the current City Lord. This quest regarding unjust enslavement, it appears overdue. And the settlements are too thinly populated for how many there are. It is as if only enough people to keep a Village going are being allowed to stay while the City Lord tries to build up the population governed directly by his City Stone. And those being taken are mostly women. I found none in the Villages with forced slavery marks, but several who had sold their indenture."
Ralouf sniffed. "Whatever Ambrose discovers in Sortalheim should be interesting, then. On another matter, well, two of them. First, your little potential, she tells me that she got a guidebook from the Heavens when she finished the Child's Quest, and the guidebook warns that the Living Scrolls are forcing her into a happier state than she ought to be." He summarized what Kestra had shared about humans being part of collective Wills, and added, "She thinks of us, you mostly, I take it, as her new troop. I think the Righteous Oath may come into play with that."
Graemire came to alert. "How?"
"Eusebeia. This idea of a collective Will needs a great deal of thought, but my intuition tells me there's a connection between this communal soul binding that Kestra's described and the importance of eusebeia within the Oath. It may also be one of the hidden divides between Ascended and Awakened. My path of asha, at least for now, will keep me close enough to discover what I may."
Graemire hummed softly in thought. A part of him felt pleased that Kestra had communal feelings with him, which was an odd feeling he hadn't had since achieving Awakening within the [Perverted Swamp] Dungeon along side Ambrose and Eilith. The original Dungeon Master had withered, but she had been a harpy-garuda half breed -- half Ascended, half Awakened -- and so terribly lonely even amongst the Creatures she had bound to the dungeon. If she had had a name, he never knew it, but when she wrapped herself in the vines of his first sprite bond, he had glimpsed the sense of being part of something more. Pursuing that 'something more' had propelled him to his Awakening.
The balance that Ambrose and Eilith maintained felt similar to that 'something more', but it wasn't the same. They were all Elementals, and their plan was to find compatible Elementals of Fire and Metal, achieve Emperor Enlightenment, and then merge together to become an Harmonious Golden Emperor. Graemire had thought that might be the something more he missed.
But maybe it wasn't.
Maybe it was a merging of Ascended and Awakened.
Graemire had already found hospitable soil for a friendship in Kestra. This thought of the Sage Wyrm's, that her otherworldly perspective might illuminate more of the mysteries of the Myriad Realms and the climb to ascend beyond the Divine Realms, only made her more intriguing.
From the time he first learned of the concept of eusebeia, Graemire had thought it an assertion of dominance demanded by the Daimons of the Heavens. Most of the Awakened saw it that way, too, at least those he had discussed it with. The Ascended Celestials, however, were more split about it.
Elementals were not communal beings, and Graemire had noticed that was true of the Awakened as a whole. They learned to tolerate others of their kind as their sapience expanded and they found more benefit from joining the communities of the Ascended than in tearing them down or ignoring them, but, partly because of tamers that sought dominance over any being with an Elemental Core, they were never fully part of such communities.
And those communities had their own kind of eusebeia, lesser forms of rites and rituals, courtesies and proprieties to observe.
Ralouf gave Graemire only a slight pause to think these thoughts before he cleared his throat and asked, "Ready for the second matter?"
Graemire gave the Sage his silent attention.
"What we know as Sapient Speech is a construct of the Heavens."
The announcement was beyond obvious, so there had to be something more to it, and thus Graemire continued to wait.
Ralouf chuckled. "I know it seems quite obvious, but I mean it is a construct. Not simply something imbued within the Living Scrolls, but something enforced upon us. Did you ever bother with written language?"
"No," he readily admitted. "I Awakened in Kuruk. The only scrolls I have ever had any reason to seek out are of the consumable nature."
"Good! You can aid me in testing a theory. Make a mark in the dirt, just a random mark."
Narrowing his gaze at Ralouf, Graemire considered it before doing as Ralouf instructed. Done, he looked at it, then back to the wyrm, letting his gaze convey his question.
"Good. Now, decide that that mark means 'sun'. Just the word 'sun', not anything more than that word. Fix it in your mind. When you have it lodged in your mind that that mark means 'sun', make it again."
Graemire was intrigued. He understood the concept of a written language, and had heard of people "sounding out" new words based on what was written down. It took a few of Kestra's heartbeats before he had memorized that when he wanted to write down "sun" he would make that particular mark. Then he deliberately recreated the mark, this time thinking of it as the word "sun".
The world resisted him, but only briefly as it only took a moment to recreate the mark. Then, the mark shifted, became not one mark but four, and the series of the marks together became the Sapient Speech word "sun" within his mind.
Graemire sucked in a breath through all of his surface layers. He tried again, only this time he did not fight to make the same mark, and he chose a new word, "light". This time, the marks that he wrote while allowing the world to guide him were simply the Sapient Speech marks for "light".
After that, Graemire didn't even try to think of new marks to make. He simply focused on writing his sentences down in the dirt. Each new word he wrote, he learned, and after the first hundred, he began to tease out the meaning of the sounds each individual mark meant.
Ambrose arrived during this experiment and quickly got caught up in it. Graemire had to explain his approach because Ralouf, stone-hearted as he may have been, was too much a wyrm for the less verbose Elemental to understand what was needed.
By dawn, Ralouf declared them capable of reading at what he considered a competent level.
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While Divine Elementals were learning to read and write, Kestra dreamed herself into her tribulation realm, where she opened the book she had copied from Elamshaq's Blessing of Tribulation. She read by the light of the World Seed. Pieces of partially forgotten knowledge expanded, and the linchpin concepts she needed to create keys attuned to her realm -- and lock them to the people she wanted to be able to move in and out freely -- came together.
The World Seed ate the remnants of her failed attempts to craft the first of these keys, and then the second, but by the sixth she had got the hang of it down quite nicely, and turned out a fair number of them.
She had also figured out how to move items directly between her realms while relearning the concept of realm attuning, so she simply sent the lot of them over to Inspri's domain.
It felt good to be making, so she might have gone a bit overboard in the forging of her keys. Probably she just needed to get her Alchemy lab set up.