For a moment, the entire scene felt lonely. It was hard to describe the way she was feeling. From beginning to end, this entire thing could be said to be blamed on her profession, but in the end it was what she chose to do. From there, like falling down the stairs, she continued to tumble as if gravity had a disturbing sense of humor. Worst being not having anyone else to blame but herself.
To this point, she was starting to get used to the way death felt up close. It was one thing to brush up against it while the two were moving in different directions. The world is wide, however it happened and it would happen constantly. Usually people just politely moved around it, so they had no idea how close to death they had been. Laboratories were those types of places. It was no secret how dangerous they were.
And yet somehow she felt extremely alone at that moment. She didn’t pursue the psychology of it all. Magic visualizations were wonders because one didn’t have the understanding to get what they were experiencing. When the calmness started to subside, she just couldn’t get away from a profound sense of loneliness that was being built upon by the emotions reeling off the walls. By the time she came back to herself, she realized she was more alone than she had anticipated.
The stage was still stable, but there were a number of cracks from the corners, to the slab. As for the smooth slab of stone that now had more than just a nick in its surface, there was no sword in it. She should have been feeling a myriad of emotions at this discovery, however for one reason or another she didn’t feel much of a rise as the calm was still subsiding, not completely gone.
Most of the lack of a disturbance at this discovery had to do with the fact she could feel it. Though it wasn’t a proper explanation of the feeling. There was no specific feeling connected to her hand, still when she focused she could feel a soft ball of energy. What allowed her to identify it was the fact it had that same uncanny movement as she felt from the sword. Only this time it didn’t make her hair stand on end and made her feel more at peace.
As the last of the calming from the visualization was wearing off, she tried to come to terms with the fact that nothing had changed. Her only way to escape her predicament was now riding on the being inside the sword. Though it did raise the question of how fucked was she…
There were some notes on it in the old man’s study, but the books were boring, so she didn’t really carefully read them. Still, there was no other way. This was a soul binding. Unlike the owner of Thirsty Ruins, the binding of the two was different from a perspective point of view. What that person did was dangerous, while this was a ritual of ownership. There was nothing beneficial outside of ownership and convenience in this magic.
This wasn’t a very well known magic, it was outspokenly famous versus its counterpart. If one was seen as an evil act, binding one’s soul with an inanimate object would easily cause problems for the recipient. Worse, if bound to another being it was akin to not just suffering from multiple personality disorder, it was trying to combine two souls into one. The best result is a deranged, fractured multiple personality disorder of randomly combined traits of the two involved. Obviously, as an act seen as evil, the most common result was death.
This on the other hand was closer to branding cattle or simply writing one’s name on a piece of paper or property. It was extremely rare, as the requirements to cast said magic was so expensive that nobody outside the founders of nations would use it to bind national graded weapons to the ruler. It wasn’t once or twice a rebellion had happened in the past that has resulted in the end of entire kingdoms and cultures. While everything was built up in the beginning by power, half of which came from national level weapons that grew with their owners.
As time passed, these weapons started to become favored as the founders were prodigies beyond imagined. With time the power was said to be around sixty to eighty percent with the national level weapons. Yet when these weapons were soul bound they wouldn’t come out unless their owner wanted it to show itself. In case of death there were ways to get the weapon to show itself, only, that was with the will of its previous owner. If not set up beforehand, the weapon was forever lost to history.
This was a proven fact when the first and the strongest empire that held around fifty percent of the continent in its territory lost its founder. The fight for the throne was fierce, and the most despicable of his children took the throne. Unlike his father, he was a dictator that was quickly put down. Even after turning his corpse into mesh, the soul bound weapon was never recovered. So the empire quickly disappeared as the human race lost nearly all but the lowest eastern coast to barely have enough land for the number of people. Those that were closer to the east could escape to dwarven occupied land. Those in the middle lost all protection and were raided and killed by random beasts and bandits.
After playing with it, she quickly realized all she had to do was will it into being. At the moment, she didn’t understand it completely, but she could make the weapon appear in one hand. As she inspected it, she was able to find that the cracks did in fact appear to not just be on the surface. The weapon looked completely worthless. Then again, that was possibly a good thing, she didn’t really want a soul bound finished product.
A soul bound weapon couldn’t be gotten rid of, not without an insane amount of resources, which she didn’t or couldn’t even fathom. Finished products were notorious for being cursed items. Instead of helping her escape it would get her killed faster than she could leave the laboratory. Since this was clearly a defective good, maybe that meant the curse would be defective too. All she needed was the soul inside, once they found a way to communicate it would become possible to find a way out.
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Since her mind was being preoccupied, she didn’t pay it any mind. Only once she left the stage did she realize she had failed to think of this beforehand. The second her foot touched the ground, she quickly thought of the old man’s face that usually just made her want to punch it, as time after time of being caught doing things she shouldn’t. In the end, the face was full of love and countless memories of punishments and teaching to better herself. But in this room it was a holy artifact that kept the madness at bay. Only it was completely different at this moment. Slowly she started to pay more attention and the emotions were not attacking and seemed to be held at bay, in fact if she probed deeper she could even feel a connection with them.
She wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing, she had been correct in one of her wild guesses. The likely owner of those emotions was the kid locked in the sword. With a glossy look in her eyes, she couldn’t help but look at the marks on the walls before looking towards the door. If the marks were his, then did that mean the wall was his doing?
It was strange. The more she looked around, the more she could feel more comfortable with this place. Not only did the emotions that were like a bunch of pikes stabbed into the wall with their pointed end directed at her. Even if she was not going anywhere close, just having something dangerous pointed at you was uncomfortable. This fact was easier to overlook, as the darkness hid much of the deadliness that the walls held. It made it easier to ignore and focus on things that distracted her from that fact.
Looking down at her left hand, she couldn’t help but swallow involuntarily. She could really see much better. Ever since they entered the laboratory, she had been using mana to supply a bit of perception in the shadows. When she fell, this amount of mana had risen, as she was alone and needed to do everything alone. When she tripped the trap and had a vein in her arm nicked, she had to use most of her mana to support it so she didn’t bleed out.
Even if she was getting more used to the darkness, it didn’t change the fact that what she could see was basically a foot around her. She didn’t have extra mana to try and decipher the darkness. Only at this moment, her mana reserves were still abysmal. But her vision was drastically increased. Pushing stray thoughts out of her head, she tried to calm back down and started to meditate to recover some of her mana.
This continued for days. It wasn’t just the water that got screwed when she fell. She now had to estimate the time she was down here. The clock that used mana from the sun and moon to tell the time even underground was broken. And what started off as ambition to escape started to dwindle as the boy in the sword hadn’t woken up. She had the majority of her mana back.* *****
Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore and did something a bit ballsy. She was cautious in her actions, but it didn’t change the fact that she could be provoking something she couldn’t handle. In the end, she decided to do it anyway, as it was connected to the boy in the sword. The amount of water she had was dwindling, and there hadn’t even been a single speck of movement from his side.
It was for this reason, she decided to take a closer look at the marks on the walls. She didn’t just decide this at random. In the time she was resting, she had noticed that the marks on the walls were mixed with a number of emotions. The ones she was going to look at were next to the stage and were rather happy, filled with excitement and optimism.
As she grew closer, she saw that each series of marks had a total of five lines. Four straight and a fifth crossing the four from the top of one end to the bottom of the other end. Not all the marks were the same size. In fact the ones next to the stage were small, in fact they matched about the length of a child's finger. Closer to the broken wall that was a door, here the marks ranged closer to an adult and a few that didn’t appear to be made with a finger at all. She could feel a great amount of anger and frustration from those.
As she traced the marks she could almost physically feel the emotions but nothing outside of that. With a bit of hesitation, she injected a bit of mana into them, and she was washed over with a large amount of emotions. She quickly drew her hand back and as the emotions started to influence her she felt it all being pulled to her left hand before they quickly disappeared. The soft ball of energy that grew and contracted like it was alive showed a bit of movement.
She heard a whisper at first but slowly like the volume grew, she started to understand the words coming from the soft ball of energy, “Today marks one, seven months and five days. I can now move very close to the door, it appears I will only need a few more months until I can reach it.”
Silence, she didn’t really understand it. But she could tell from the whisper the emotions in the mark were similar to those spoken. That was to say, these marks were injected with not just simple emotions but with entire thoughts. It is rather memorizing, she had never seen anything like this. Mana could be used in magic to do an untold amount of things, but never had she even heard of anything like this. This was less like modern magic and was closer to primitive magic or the first magic that had less to do with channeling and more to do with mana utilization.
Hesitating for just a moment, she found a section where the marks started to lose their optimism but wasn’t filled with negative emotions. She questioned if she should be prying into them, but the revolutionary style of mana usage caused her to put aside her ethical dilemmas and inject her mana into the second mark, like the first time she heard a whisper, only she couldn’t understand it all as only after a bit did she start to make out the words.
“...years since I have been here. I have finally been able to reach the door. Unfortunately, it appears to be locked. When I slammed on the door with this body, I could feel the connection between me and the sword start to change. It hurts, it appears I am not strong enough to interact with the world from this distance. But I should be able to do it within time, I will get out of this room. I only wonder what the outside world is like…”