I watched impassively as all my fear and rage was channeled into a force that ripped Zimisite to pieces. I might not have been particularly happy with Ryia, but she was my friend, more than my friend. She had been there since the very beginning of my existence and taught me everything I knew about everything. And that sniveling weakling of a man who dared to call himself a cultivator had almost killed her, might still end up killing her. When all that was left of the man was a pool on the charred ground, I finally felt my rage begin to cool as I turned my gaze back to Ryia.
An A ranker's body was not the usual lump of biomass held operated by a brain. By the time a cultivator hit A rank, the body itself was composed of mana. While this made it susceptible to a dungeon’s wrath, the control and care that went into an A ranker’s body made it extremely difficult to permanently destroy. This was part of the reason for A ranker’s legendary regeneration ability, their “body” was mostly just sentient magic that didn’t care too much if it was rearranged a little. Basically, the greatest ambition of a cultivator was to be a Core. Manually scattering the mana of an A ranker would normally take an unfathomably large amount of mana and Intent to accomplish; I had the intent and had borrowed the mana.
Another important fact I didn’t know was that dealing with immense amounts of mana invariably had a backlash. Despite the fact that the ambient mana had mostly just moved to my Intent, I was still FAR too weak to be guiding forces of that magnitude. So, as I turned my gaze to Ryia, I began to feel a twinge. It wasn’t from my dungeon, or my mana; It was from my Core itself. It started small, like the first tremors of an earthquake. Then, all at once, it struck.
For the first time in my life, I felt pain. True, mind numbing, excruciating pain. It felt like my Core was being ripped apart, and that wasn’t too far off from the truth. The energy cloud that perpetually surrounded my Core rippled as I watched, hairline cracks beginning to form on the smooth crystalline orb that was me. I had only a moment to gaze in abject horror at the sight before the damage to my true self forced me into oblivion.
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Sigmundr was also a practical man.
However, unlike Zimisite, he did not let his practicality rule him. He’d started at the very bottom, forced to bite and claw for every scrap of power he had earned. He’d seen the casual disregard for life that true power could bring, had felt the scorn of being considered “lesser” just because he didn’t have the ability to accomplish the impossible, and swore that that would never be him. That once he had power, he’d help those under him; never forgetting every being he saw was a person, with their own hopes, fears, dreams, and ultimately, life.
That didn’t mean he was a soft man, far from it. Being director of an Adventurer Society branch meant he was the one making the tough choices that got people killed, that he was the one who executed traitors and dealt with the nobles who thought Adventurer Society was just another name for a country club. But through the centuries, he’d never forgotten where he came from.
Sigmundr looked around the clearing, at the dissipating cloud of mana that had been Zimisite, to the still form of the fairy and at the roiling wall of mana that was the dungeon. He silently reached down and scooped the fairy into his arms, aura control and mana coating allowing his arms to interact with her, then left the clearing, his mind burning with the things he could accomplish with a being like the fairy. They were unimaginably hard to get your hands on even for an A ranker, but the benefits they brought could be large enough to advance his cultivation by as much as a third of a tier. But looking on the small orb, at the fractures spreading through the fabric of her being, he remembered that promise he’d made over the body of a friend a long, long time ago.
He sighed.
Then he was through the hundreds of feet of stone separating him from the Core, clearing out a space to operate as he cursed himself for a ten times cursed fool.
There are three commonly accepted layers to a person’s being. The first is the Layer of the Mind, which exists in a person’s brain. This is where all of a person’s surface thoughts and calculations take place, and is easily influenced or disrupted by simply knocking a person out. The second is the Layer of the Soul, where deeply rooted emotions, subconscious desires, ingrained habits, and values were held. This layer is split between the Layer of the Mind and the Layer of Cultivation, making it possible to be affected, but still difficult.
The final layer, the Layer of Cultivation, is stored in a person’s mana. Sort of. As a person advances, the underlying mana they possess grows increasingly complex. When this mana reaches a certain threshold, the way it responds to stimuli and its tendencies to perform actions outside of the norm causes it to be considered sentient, after a fashion. It wasn’t true sentience, it couldn’t reason or think or communicate, but it was still there. We think. Yeah, scholars weren’t too clear on the details. And of course, nobody knew if any of that applied to Cores.
What Sigmundr was attempting had, to his knowledge, never been tried before. While they had been in close proximity for a while, he sensed the Core and wisp hadn’t bonded. Considering the effort the wisp had gone to apologize, he figured they were similar enough for their mana not to conflict if they did. Bonding was acknowledged by the ambient mana and the World Core by an influx of mana, sealing the bond. This influx would hopefully stabilize both the dungeon and the wisp, or at least let them live.. The problem was that they were both unconscious. Both their mind and soul layers were non operational, leaving only their third layers. Considering that any bond occurred on the third layer, that should be enough. With some help, of course.
Technically theoretically hypothetically plausibly hopefully probably and maybe.
When he’d hallowed out some room around the Dungeon Core, he placed the wisp on the floor before sitting next to her, closing his eyes. He reached out with his senses, his perception so sharp he could make out the individual molecules that composed the air, the minute particles of mana swirling chaotically around him. He sat perfectly still illuminated only by the strobing white light of the dungeon core, concentrating, refining, sharpening his senses until he found it.
A single, infinitesimally small particle of the wisp's mana moved out of its normal orbit, guided by a force no scholar or wise man had ever been able to explain. It was followed by another, then another. Not too many particles, the wisp far too weak for anything more, but enough. They reached towards the Core, understanding Sigmundr’s intent. She was willing.
Sigmundr switched his gaze to the Core, a roiling hurricane of energy surrounding an orb of crystallized mana and Intent, far harder than any diamond. While Sigmundr could guide the process, could spin the thread of mana from the wisp to the core, could protect it from the raging hailstorm that was the ambient mana, he could not make the choice. That was sacred, protected by the ambient mana itself; not even the mightiest triple S ranker could change that. It was up to the deepest, most fundamental aspect of the Core whether or not the bond would be accepted.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Unknown to Sigmundr, there was a difference between the layers of an ENAD and those of a Core or wisp. Both were, when you stripped away all the niceties, sentient mana, the. While they might lose consciousness under extreme conditions, at some level they are always functioning. This was why the air seals Granite had set up were still working, although the hole Sigmundr had torn through Granite’s domain made the point moot. So when Ryia reached out with her mana, she made a semi-conscious decision that this was the correct thing to do. And when Granite was offered that thread of mana, at some level he was offered a choice.
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Pain.
The world, the universe, all of existence was pain, a fire that burned hotter than any sun, a dead numbing worse than any lich’s spell; A fracturing of myself that stretched beyond anything an ENAD could experience.
It stretched on and on, to infinity. A seamless river that crashed against the fabric of my being, washing away everything I was and could be, leaving behind the void of nothing that was pain. It would never stop, never falter until I was gone, subsumed under the ocean of torment that seemed to rip at my very soul.
But through the flaming sun of anguish that was my existence, a single tendril of light flickered. Something familiar, rendered foreign by the jagged edged agony my existence had become. The light that had literally illuminated my existence, that had expanded my knowledge further than I could have dreamed possible.
I sensed the light’s pain, a boiling world of lava matching my own. But through it all, through the flippant exterior and the flaws that pushed others away, a fierce determination struggled on. The drive that pushed her to struggle on through days of travel, through the knowledge that she would die to an A ranker’s callousness, through the agony that even now ripped chunks of her away.
Dedication to a foolish young Core.
There was a need there, something I could barely make out over my own torment. But I managed it, managed to sense the binding nature of the connection offered.
And for a long moment, I hesitated. There was no debate over the pain, no logical pro and con arguments. Just a question.
Did I want to be bonded to Ryia? Did I trust her to stand by me through everything that would come? To be my friend when the world came crashing down? To stay true in sickness and in health, even beyond death? There was one, could only be one, answer.
Yes.
Ryia wasn’t perfect, no one was. But she was, as cliche as it might sound, my friend. And that was enough.
The decision resonated through my world, the pain spiking to a level that made my previous sensations feel like a cakewalk, shrinking my world to a pinprick of burning agony before the world went black.
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When I woke up, it was with a splitting coreache and little memory of the past several hours. This is usually the part where an ENAD would look for the empty bottles of booze, but that wasn’t an option for me. I think. I could probably make mana that might be able to-focus Granite. Ok, I was awake. I was alive. Always a good place to start. I was losing mana like the World Core itself wanted a snack. Less good.
I frantically searched for the root of the problem, finding it in a surprisingly short time. Maybe it was the person-shaped tunnel through my domain, or the powerful cultivator talking with my wisp next to my very valuable and very vulnerable Core.
Or maybe it was something else; never can tell.
I sealed the bleeding artery of a tunnel before looking at the two. I had some hazy memories of what had happened, something about a thread of mana, but the details were fuzzy. Which, considering I had no fleshy bits to muddle memories up, was a new experience for me.
“So… nice day out.” Sigmundr was saying.
“Oh yeah, lovely.” Ryia responded. The corrosive mana was gone and, although her mana density was much thinner than usual, she looked fine.
Silence.
“I heard it might rain next week,” Sigmundr said.
“Interesting” Ryia responded.
Silence.
I could see where that was going.
“So… what did I miss?” I asked in as nonchalant a tone as I could muster.
“Granite! You're alive!” Ryia visibly brightened, shooting from the ground to do a little bobbing jig around my core. Told you that was a good place to start.
“Yeah… ” I still wasn’t quite sure how to feel about the wisp. On one hand, her words earlier had stung to the point of unbalancing me, probably because there was an element of truth to them. On the other hand, she’d almost died to apologize. In my mind, that made us barely even.
Don’t judge me.
“Granite, I’m sorry. I was so worried about making us famous and powerful I forgot that all Cores have to follow their own path. If you want to walk that path alone… I understand. That’s all I wanted to say.” And with that, she turned to leave.
“Wait!” I called.
She turned, her light brightening a little in hope.
“You mean it?”
I let her hang a little, stretching the silence out, before sighing. Well, I swirled my mana around in a sigh equivalent. Expressing emotions as a rock is an art form, let me tell you.
“Sure, you can stay.” The words, similar to those we had spoken in our first meeting, somehow carried more of a finality to them. I knew then and there that, while we might have our differences, we’d work through them. Plus, fighting could set our mana at odds, turning us into a screaming abomination on reality.
So… there was that.
“Enough sweet talk! I have a deal to make and we're burning daylight!” Sigmundr’s signature booming voice completely and irrevocably shattered the moment, gaining him twin glares. Well, mine was more dense points of mana pointed in his direction, but you get the idea.
“What do you want?” Ryia snapped, her usual self once more. I realized I didn’t know what the cultivator wanted. His presentation had been… delayed.
“Glad you asked!” He pulled a piece of parchment from thin air, flicking it into my domain.
Hugh. Spatial magic? That was a thing?
The parchment contained a list of stipulations. Areas C rankers couldn’t survive had to be marked out, no impossible traps, stuff like that. I read them to Ryia, negotiator by virtue of her being Ryia, and she scowled at the man like he’d just insulted her mother.
“And what makes you think we’d do any of this?”
The turd eating grin he shot back at her was mildly disturbing. With a bow and a flourish, the one thing he could have offered that would guarantee my acceptance materialized in his hand. It was the most valuable currency in the world, the result of many masters' efforts, its nature allowed the wielder to conquer both hearts and nations; to affect mana itself. He offered… knowledge.
On his hand rested around a dozen books, each as thick as a man’s thigh. Some of the titles were “On the Nature of Reality” and “Runes and Enchantments: A Complete Work” and “On Mana: A Complete Compilation of the Mechanics and Nature of Magic”. Ryia and I stared at the stack, balanced perfectly in the man’s hand.
“I offer information on every major scientific field, collected by the Adventurer Society over thousands of years.”
A grin broke out over both of our faces. Face equivalents. You get the picture.
“I do believe we have a deal, '' Ryia declared; a grin wider than Sigmundr’s splitting her face equivalent - you know what?
I don’t need to add qualifiers to my internal dialogue.
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Sigmundr’s grin faltered as he looked at the twin mana signatures in front of him, both exuding a gleeful anticipation; a promise of traps to be built, mobs to be made, Adventurers to kill.
He wondered if maybe, just maybe, he’d made a mistake.