The next morning, they moved camp again. The new site had aether only 1 level higher, to be safe for Ressara who had only just compressed her essence to Level 7, but that still meant about 25 miles distance at this point, so they had Esmorana fly them out again to save time. They touched down without incident, and Carlos was about to place Purple in his new spot when he noticed something surprising.
"Whoa, what killed that thing? The neck stump is still bleeding fast!" Carlos took a few steps closer toward the moose-like headless corpse, then started looking around nervously. "Is it still around? Must have been something strong; that looks like a very clean cut."
"Thank you for the compliment." Carlos turned around to see Esmorana smiling at him. "I noticed that this clearing came with free meat for dinner and hit it with a wind blade while we descended."
"Oh." Carlos stood still and blinked dumbly for a moment. "Um, good job? I'll just… set up on the other side of the clearing, away from… that." He chuckled awkwardly. "I'm sure it will, uh, taste good?"
Carlos tried to ignore the assorted stares and raised eyebrows that followed him as he walked away from the scene. Amber caught up after a few steps and held his hand as she walked beside him. [So, what was that about? Have you never seen a dead animal before?]
Carlos shook his head. [It's not that, not exactly. I've never seen an animal being butchered, cut up into pieces of meat to be eaten.] He sighed and shrugged, then spoke aloud. "I'll get used to it if I need to, eventually. But for now, let's just focus on our next step: leveling up the new structures."
Amber gave him a long look, then nodded and set her pack on the grass-covered ground, preparing to sit down beside it. Carlos placed Purple a few feet in front of them, then followed suit.
Settled on the ground, Carlos closed his eyes and focused inward. Alright, I've finished filling out a new set with the soul hardener and training scaler, and I'm finally in an area where the merged superstructure can absorb aether. Time to stop holding all that aether out and satisfy my curiosity: what happens when soul structures of drastically different levels absorb aether at the same time?
He watched closely and caught a brief glimpse of Level 16 aether decompressing down to Level 1 as it entered his soul to stream into each of the 9 new soul structures. Then Carlos reeled in shock as that stream got lost in a veritable tsunami of aether flowing through the singular Level 15 structure. The one higher-level structure was pulling in tens of thousands of times as much aether. Probably exactly 32,768 times as much as any single new structure. Seems like this should be too much, but I don't feel any damage?
Carlos inspected the flowing aether that was bouncing around inside his soul. It seems… tamed, I guess? Leashed or contained? Attuned to me by its passage through the structure that initially pulled it in? It's definitely safe despite the amount, anyway.
He switched focus to examine the movement paths rather than the aether itself. Fascinating, this imbalance is making it so much easier to trace the flows. Let's see, the soul structure pulls in as much aether as it can handle, attunes it all to me, and the aether splits into 10 equal portions, one going to each section of the soul. The portion that stays gets condensed into essence and merged into the structure to augment it. Each other portion… I get the feeling that the synergy links are improving cohesion and control of the streams, but each stream would still exist regardless. I wonder exactly what difference a missing synergy would make in this process.
Carlos mentally shrugged. Eh, I can experiment with that later. What I can sense right now for how it works with all synergy links present is… Yeah, that makes sense. The same split happens all over again in each other structure: 1/10th of the incoming stream stays, condenses to essence, and is absorbed, and 1/10th bounces onward to each of the other 9 structures.
Wait, am I going to have to remember formulas for infinite geometric series summations if I want to work out the math of all this? He let out one chuckle at the thought. Not like that would be a hardship for me. In any case, this is one hell of a power-leveling boost for the new structures, and it's even one that every noble gets automatically so we don't have to hide it. The new soul structures are… wow, Level 6 already? It's only been a few minutes! Then again, there's an exponential slowdown as the imbalance evens out.
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Carlos was about to just settle down for a long boring session of meditation when he remembered that he didn't need to meditate to keep his aether absorption going anymore. He opened his eyes again, letting the effort of pulling in aether go to the back of his mind as the reflex that it now was. Now what should I do in the meantime? He glanced at Amber. She had already gotten out Secrets of Sandaras from her pack and was scrutinizing the first page of it, studying one of the spells that weren't locked away. Carlos considered for a moment, then scooted over. "Mind if I join you in reading that?"
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Across the clearing from them, next to the beheaded beast, Sconter scowled at Esmorana. She returned his glare with a raised eyebrow, unperturbed. After a solid 10 seconds, Sconter finally sighed and shook his head. "Really? 'Free meat for dinner'? Will you tell him that about every critter we kill to keep them safe? The vortex of ambient mana they're drawing in is luring more than all of us combined could possibly eat!"
Esmorana shrugged. "It was just a pithy comment. If it bothers you, why not just tell him about the pests we deal with yourself?"
Muttering imprecations under his breath, Sconter turned to the animal corpse and started getting out his butchering equipment.
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Late that evening, after declaring that Sconter's cooking with the freshly-butchered meat was indeed delicious, the new soul structures finally reached Level 16 and unified as expected. To Carlos's surprise, their first merged superstructure was still at Level 15. It's been absorbing the whole time and had a head start. How did it fall behind? It's absorbed more at Level 15 than the new structures have, not less! He paused, then slapped his forehead. Oh, right. Duh. It's absorbed more than one of the new structures, but there are 9 of them, and the combined absorption of all 9 went into the new merge.
Carlos looked over at Amber. His mana sense could tell there was now a second hard spot in her soul, but he wasn't sure which spot was harder.
Amber was looking back at him, Secrets of Sandaras actually closed and by her side instead of open for now. She brightened a little when he met her gaze. "So, next step as planned?"
Carlos glanced longingly at the spellbook for a moment, but then sighed and nodded. "Yes. I'm positively itching to get started on analyzing and designing spells, but making the metaphorical hardware to support that will be done sooner if we focus first on speeding up the process as we planned."
She nodded, and they both closed their eyes to focus on the concept for their next soul structure. Carlos mentally reviewed his reasoning to help get himself into the right frame of mind. Our current bottleneck is making new soul structures, because we have to make so many of them and each one takes a couple hours of focusing on its intent. The degree of focus required is too much to allow doing anything else significant at the same time, such as designing or analyzing spells. In particular, it's too much to allow making another soul structure at the same time.
To solve that and allow making multiple soul structures at once, we need to either reduce how much focus it takes or increase how much focus - or should I say, how many focuses - we have available to allocate. The latter option seems much more useful in general to me, so that's what we're going with. I'd analogize it to multithreading in computers, but I think a multi-core CPU is a better fit. Threading would be splitting my mind up among however many focuses of attention, and that has potential problems I could have nightmares just from thinking about. Carlos shuddered. For one thing, each "thread" would experience only a fraction of actual time passing, and I hate the very idea of living my life in fast-forward.
No, definitely not multithreading. I am not splitting my mind. This soul structure will make additional minds for me, additional consciousnesses, that can each focus on their own separate thing at the same time in parallel. Then I can make as many soul structures at a time as I have parallel minds.
Carlos let out a chuckle. I could ask Lorvan about the idea, but I'm pretty confident about my guess for what he'd say: that people have tried it before, and they all went insane. Thank you, fantasy authors of Earth, for your endless creativity in depicting every pitfall any of you could imagine for having multiple minds in one body, or people creating duplicates of themselves, or any number of variations on those concepts, as well as some depictions of it actually working well. I'll treat my parallel minds as myself, not as subordinates to take care of distasteful work, and I'll dedicate the second mind-themed structure entirely to maintaining a singular cohesive shared personal self-identity!
He let the train of thought run to its conclusion before putting it away for later. Tonight, concurrent parallel minds, then various assorted improvements to how they work, some of them inspired by computer multithreading concepts. It may be a late night, but I want to get aether absorption rate back up to full before I sleep. Tomorrow, finally the development environment for analyzing and designing spells like programs. And then we can start on the projects I'm really excited for!