"Magic is an expression of one's soul. To master it, one must first master thy self, thereby taming thy soul to thy mortal whims."

Cere Rathrehk - Teacher of 1st Year Magic

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When Symon woke up, the first thing he realized was that he was not alone. A woman was staring at him from two feet away with a deadpan expression. “Oh, you’re awake.” She said.

For a moment everything seemed normal, like he hadn’t just been through the most excruciating pain of his life. Then he remembered he had, and any thoughts of the woman left his mind.

Instead, he was more concerned with the softball sized hole in this chest that was rapidly stitching itself back together. Dried blood in the soil was liquifying and flowing back towards him. It ran up his arms and legs as naturally as a river flowed downstream.

The rest of his injuries were visibly healing as well; hearing was returning to one of his ears, vision coming back to his other eye, and missing fingers rapidly growing out from bloodied stumps on his hands.

These are definitely not my hands. He thought. The proportions were off.

“I gave you a numbness pill.” The woman suddenly said.

Symon’s attention turned back to her. “Thanks?” He tried to say, but whether it was the numbness in his mouth, or just his injuries, all that came out was the incoherent smacking of flesh. He reached up to touch his jaw and found a mutilated mound of flesh and bone that squirmed between his fingers.

Surprisingly, his mind did not falter. It was peculiar, he knew that something horrifying had happened to him, the type of thing that would traumatize him for life. And yet, he felt nothing. Was the numbness pill for both mind and body? Or maybe the woman had also given him something else?

Regardless, he didn't inspect the condition of any more body parts. Whatever their condition was, he didn't want to know.

“My colleague is off getting the rest of our squad. I’m Alicia by the way.”

She'd moved to a leaning against the cave entrance, keeping a watch outside. He guessed she was in her early twenties by physical appearance, though there was something he couldn't pinpoint that gave her the impression of a seasoned veteran. In one hand, she carried a spear. It looked ceremonial if all the decorations and engravings were anything to go by. Though how they were wielding it suggested otherwise.

When Symon didn’t answer she continued. “If you’re wondering where you are this is the Vencian jungle. Badar and I dragged you into this cave in case the monsters came back. Easier to defend.”

Huh? Symon's mind froze for a moment. The Vencian Jungle was a place of fiction, and one he knew well. After all, he’d created the thing. A figment of his imagination, a piece of worldbuilding for a story he'd always wanted to tell but had never written.

Alicia continued. “Excuse me. Lord? I don’t know how to address you. What exactly are you? Are you one of the Immortal Monarchs?”

Immortal Monarchs? Again, it was an element he recognized from his world building. One coincidence is just a coincidence. Two coincidences a clue. Could the impossible have happened as in so many stories he'd read? That he’d switched worlds into the one he'd created?

No, no, no. That’s ridiculous. he thought, scoffing at himself for entertaining the idea. But then again... here he was, how could he believe otherwise?

The natural explanation was that this was all just a dream, but then shouldn't the shock and pain have woken him up?

No. He’d had lucid dreams before, and the feeling was unmistakably different. This felt as real as his previous reality. With the vast and unknown expanse of the universe, he supposed anything was possible, and anything could be rationalized. Perhaps the world he’d created was no creative work at all, but rather he’d somehow peaked behind the curtain of the universe and into another reality. Maybe that’s all imagination was. Or maybe this was all for the entertainment of a god, one who’d enjoyed casting creatives into their fantasies.

“Hello? Can you hear me?” Alicia asked. Waving her hand in his face.

Whatever the explanation, it didn’t matter to Symon. Most likely he would never know the truth. All that mattered was that he was here now.

Then on to Alicia’s question. Was he an Immortal Monarch? According to his worldbuilding, they were humans who, through sheer coincidence of Astral Quarks, had acquired true immortality. And by true immortality, he really meant it. Not even tearing apart every atom of their being would kill them. Some would regenerate somewhere else, or occupy another body, or, in one case, their body was literally indestructible.

It was a reasonable explanation, if a bit extreme. After all, even Symon, this worlds creator, could not think of a way to recover from beyond death as he had other than this. How was it even possible that he'd had thoughts with no oxygen in his brain? He'd been underground for some time after all. Hell, even if there was oxygen, he'd been completely bled out, there wasn't a drop of blood in his body. The more he thought about it, the worse it got; did he even have a full brain? One hemisphere of his head felt decidedly lighter than the other...

Symon shook his head no before he freaked himself out any more thinking about it. The Immortal Monarchs were a consequence of Astral Quarks; anomalies that were also responsible for such things as wormholes. Likely, an Astral Quark had brought him here, it was probably what was healing him as well. But these anomalies also repelled one another; so, whilst he was very likely afflicted by one, it also precluded him from being afflicted by any others. Sure, maybe whatever Quark that brought him here also made him a true immortal, but in his lore, there were thousands of such cases where people thought they were immortal, only to be proven otherwise when truly put to the test.

Besides, the Immortal Monarchs were, for the most part, insane. Whether driven mad by time, or the very nature of how their immortality manifested, they were too dangerous to entertain any thoughts of associating with.

“What then? Some sort of unconventional necromancy?” Alicia asked.

Again, Symon shook his head no.

“How about a divine treasure? Are you some bigshot?”

Symon shrugged. For all he knew she was on to something. While resurrection magic was technically impossible according to his lore, it was possible that, through trying to make such a thing, someone might create a transmigration tool instead. Maybe the previous occupant of this body was enough of a bigshot to have such a tool, and he was brought here that way.

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“Do you even remember who you are?”

Again, Symon shrugged and shook his head no.

“Well, half your brain was sticking out and turned to paste when we found you so I guess it’s to be expected that you would have memory problems. You must be a somebody though, I’ve never heard of any magic that could recover someone from such a state as you were in.”

There isn’t Symon thought. On that he could agree. It was a curious thing. Though his most fatal injuries were healing themselves, many minor ones persisted. Notably, many shallow gashes decorating his body and his broken elbow remained.

Soon after this Alicia got bored of playing twenty questions. Symon didn’t blame her, there were a million things he wanted to ask about, but without the ability to speak it was a rather annoying affair to ask about anything.

He was also thankful, because it gave him a minute to think about his situation. The first question on his mind was could he perform magic?

Hypothetically, the answer was yes. Everyone in this world had the capacity, but Symon’s concern was more practical. He knew all sorts of magic theory, but naturally, he’d had never actually done it.

Magic was a phenomenon produced with power from one’s soul in the astral realm. That was the tricky part, because the soul didn't experience the same sort of consciousness as the brain. The two shared all the bodies senses but shared no direct connection in thought. The soul could see what the mind saw, feel what it felt, hear what it heard. But it couldn't think like a human. The closest it got was a vague notion of human emotion.

To practice magic then, one had to train their soul, much like a dog, to associate certain actions with a response.

The result was a variety of activation methods, from incantations, to gesture control, to magic circles.

Naturally, Symon's soul was completely untrained, and he had no clue how magic actually felt to cast. Even though he had knowledge of hundreds of spells, and knew their inner workings, he had no idea how to cast them.

The only thing to do was start at the beginning.

With that in mind, Symon drew a spell circle in the dirt with a stick. Whispering Glow, a common spell of the Central Astricon, it produced a faint glow of white light that lasted for as much mana as the caster supplied. He waved to get Alicia's attention and pointed at it excitedly.

“You want me to cast that?” Alicia asked.

Symon nodded. Alicia gave him a strange look. He supposed that was to be expected considering even children could cast Whispering Glow. But the best way to learn a spell was to feel it as someone else cast it.

Luckily, she didn’t protest. Alicia pressed her hand in the dirt and instantly there was a glowing ball of white light hovering one foot above the spell circle.

Learning spells was done by sharing a medium while casting, so Symon too pressed his hand against the spell circle.

Instantly, the world changed. Symon could suddenly see and feel projections of the astral world in the physical one. A phenomena which did not map in a way that could be adequately described; for the astral realm and the physical world did not overlap in a way that could be perceived in three dimensions. And yet, in flickers of understanding, he grasped it anyways. He could feel the connections the spell formed in the astral space around it and felt the weave that they came together to form.

But his perception was imperfect; limited in range and detail. The more he focused on it, the more his perception of reality warped. It was a schism of thought, a point where two overlapping minds deviated, their patterns of thought increasingly tearing apart the fabric of his existence.

Symon took his hand off the magic circle and quickly his existence was forced to collapse down to a single entity and his headache dissipated.

What he’d experienced was far from normal. The usual response would have been no sensation at all, or a vague tingle at most, not whatever trans-dimensional trip he had just been on.

It wasn’t a bad result however. Quite the opposite. He had been expecting to feel nothing at all. It was only the exceptionally gifted that had even the slightest glimpse into the astral world but instead he'd been treated to a front row seat, no it was more than that, he was on the stage.

Symon excitedly drew a new circle and pressed his hand into it. He pulled on what he'd just felt, willing his soul's power into the world. It came as easily as breathing, a task that was supposed to take years to accomplish yet he'd just executed without even thinking about it.

Symon didn't dawdle on this achievement, rather, he immediately set in order all the connections he'd felt when Alicia had cast her spell. The strange perception or dilation of time meant that, while only a second had passed, it felt as though he'd been at it for several minutes.

A glowing orb slowly grew in front of him. It was the purest white light he could imagine, slowly it grew brighter and brighter, eclipsing the brightness of Alicia's and only growing more.

It was a bit strange that it behaved so differently, but nothing outside the bounds of the spell. After all, casters could tweak spells slightly to suit their needs.

Curious, Symon pressed his hand against his spell once more and phased into the astral realm. What he found was a turbulence in the weave of mana he'd just created. New connections appeared, and other faded. New colors and modes of vibration appeared forming completely different emergent patterns.

“What the hell?” Alicia said. “What exactly did you do?”

Symon pulled his mind back to find Alicia perplexed with her own orb, slowly growing brighter and radiating a shifting light that gradually grew into a pure white.

Immediately, Symon disassembled the spell, but he knew it was too late.

The pieces all came together in his head, like a lightning bolt, he was struck with the realization of what had happened.

Whispering Glow was a spell which utilized the Akashic Records, and intertwined web of understanding within the astral realm. When Symon had cast it, his soul made its contribution to the records.

Ordinarily, even if his mind understood it perfectly, the soul wouldn't, and any contribution would be diluted within the billions of souls who'd made their own contributions.

But Symon's soul was rational. It explained how his mind persisted in a new brain, it explained how he could think even when that new brain was missing, it explained why he could perceive the astral realm so clearly.

And it explained this too. His soul had effectively opened the Akashic Record for Whispering Glow, torn out the pages, and in bold letters on the first page, written everything he knew about photons; what they were, how they were created, how they behaved. He'd figuratively turned a verbose and winding poem into a concise and exact definition of the physics that would describe a glowing orb.

He'd probably just turned Whispering Glow into a spell that eclipsed its higher tier counterparts.

This was bad. Very bad. He'd drastically and irreversibly changed the spell Whispering Glow forever, effectively announcing his presence to the whole world. Worse, it was one of the most common spells in this world; even a complete recluse who lived in the middle of nowhere would notice when they cast Whispering Glow in the dead of night to light their way to the bathroom.

Many of the oldest and most powerful beings in this world were on an endless quest for knowledge and power. If they had a deep enough understanding of how spells functioned, then they would look for him after this. And some would have the means to find him.

A magic circle suddenly appeared before Alicia pointed at him. Symon recognized it, Harmonic Rejuvenation.

Alicia snapped her fingers and instantly a new energy flowed into him.

Another spell appeared, Lifeblood Rejuvenation. And another, Mend wounds.

More appeared, though Symon lost focus, pulled into another world as the spell weaves overwhelmed his mind.

He didn't know how much time based when he came to, and Alicia was shaking his shoulders violently.

"What did you do? How did you do that?" She kept asking.