DAY 58.

I connected some dots. Sung was telling me what system dysmorphia is and why it's so dangerous. After I nearly got myself killed with the timer I stopped experimenting with the system or trying to change it, but I've been driving myself crazy wondering why I couldn't just get it back to Dungeons and Dragons mode and turn myself into a level twenty wizard or something, unlock a whole bunch of spells. Heck, even Plane Shift would've done the trick, and I'd only have to be Level 13 to cast that. If the system could find a Second Wind spell for me, it could probably find other stuff too, right?

But apparently, the way the system works is it decides (I'm oversimplifying here) based on reading your mind what the best way for it to present itself is to you. If you keep changing it, it gets confused. If it gets too confused, it might just stop trying to guess altogether and then, if you're lucky, the System spell and all the mana it holds will just ball itself up and go non-reactive. If you're not lucky it could just discharge all at once. Hence, blowing up, and/or frying your brain.

The lights and weird dizziness I felt were it trying to work out how to present itself. They're bad symptoms. Really bad. The more I change the system, the less defined my belief in it is, and the less I believe it's any one thing the less confidence it has in how to present itself.

Impression, that's what they call it: they take each child to a temple when they first receive the system, and they tell the child that temple is the way the system works. Once you are Impressed in one temple, you can't ever change your Impression in another one or you risk incurring system instability.

I guess my version of a temple was Dungeons and Dragons, at first. I'm not sure what that says about me. Then it was a spreadsheet. Which definitely isn't a compliment as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, Sung says they worked because they're super consistent, abstract, self-contained systems with which I'm very familiar, ideal for the system to glom onto.

There aren't that many of those in the real world here, hence the temples.

He also said that if I change my system any further, even to go back to something that it was before, it would destabilize it even further, so I need to keep it as it is. And frankly, I'm not inclined to doubt him. Can't quite put into words just how terrifying the experience of the Underpinning was. I'll do anything to avoid that again.

I asked him how I got the Second Wind ability. He says he doesn't know, but his best guess is that since I already knew the underlying principles and had an expectation, the system just did its best to find a spell that matched up with them.

I thought it was super cool, and to be fair it did save my life a couple of times, but I guess it's not that great, since it's way too mana-intensive to be practical.

DAY 59.

Gideon wants me to pick a class of spells to focus on now. I asked why I couldn't just be a jack of all trades, since the spells were so easy to get and mana apparently is super flexible. There aren't different kinds of mana; it's one-size-fits-all, whether you want to do.

"Master of none," was his response.

I guess that's a fair point. Although I can learn to use any spell, that doesn't mean that I'll be any good with all of them.

I guess that's why most people in this world pick one area and specialize. It's like the real world. Back home, I mean (yes, I know, this world is real too). Just because you could be a computer programmer and an amazing digital artist and a rapper at the same time doesn't mean it's a good idea to try…

Anyway, I told him that I wasn't even close to being ready to pick yet — I want to make sure I learn as much as I can before committing, so that I can stay committed without worrying if there was maybe a better option out there. Plus, I feel like having some cross-domain knowledge will serve me better long-term, even if it's just for strategizing.

But he's not wrong, entirely. I should learn a couple of techniques really well. As nice as the bullet spell is, it's really not practical in combat. The armor most legionnaires wear is reinforced against kinetic impacts.

DAY 68.

Gideon tells me we're running low on mana, so we're rationing it for now. Soon we'll have to go out on another supply run, liberate some mana cells from the Empire.

DAY 68 (2).

Another way in which the Empire is horrible: apparently these mana cells are people. Can they cast magic? Nope, they had the systems ripped out of them – the Empire doesn't want anybody stealing and using their magic for their own purposes. So they just stuff them full of mana until they're bursting at the seams and then ship them off to be drained dry elsewhere.

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Anyway, they're going to go out tomorrow while I stay at home with Sung. Hopefully everything goes well.

DAY 72

I have begun to see the shape and scope of the problem. These Earthers just aren't soldiers. Although they've pulled together a lot, and it's amazing that they've survived this far, it's clear that they're painfully lacking in military experience, nor are they fully considering the capabilities of the magic they've harnessed.

Don't get me wrong, they have a ton of knowledge and resourcefulness between them, and they absolutely have the will of survivors, but they simply lack the hundreds of years of military training that goes into the formation of the warriors of this world, let alone the modern solider.

Attitude, lacking. Creativity, lacking. Experience, lacking. Don't get me wrong, they do what it takes, but they don't do it right. There's a certain hesitation, a lack of discipline, a lack of vision that characterizes their behavior as a team and as individuals, which will certainly get them killed sooner or later. To put it simply: they're civilians.

It's good that they brought me in. I might not be as familiar with magic as they are, but war is one thing I do know.

Though I hate to write it, it's true that there is a certain elegant brutality to the art of war that they have not seen nor conceived of, a brutality born of necessity and trained over generations, passed on through experience alone.

I wonder how much they lost when Luke died. It seems like they were heavily reliant on his military expertise to keep themselves alive and on track to stealing back the spell. Big boots to fill.

For example, I ran a few booby trap ideas by Sung earlier today, combining basic physical booby traps with magic, and he was horrified. The rest of the day he couldn't look me in the eye. But it's not like I came up with them. IEDs and booby traps have a horrifying new set of applications and possibilities now.

To be fair, I sat down for an hour the afternoon and brainstormed so many new ways to violate the Geneva Conventions with magic that even I started to get pretty worried.

A lot of it is based on the magic of runes, which are what the anti-detection spells around this house, and wands in general, run off of. You store mana in a mana battery and wire it up to a sequence of runes, which trigger runes in a sequence predetermined by the runewright.

They have all sorts of triggers. Physical proximity, time, even the presence of foreign mana. Traps you can set to be triggered only by the mana of the soldiers, and harmless to civilians! Illusion traps to conceal pits: mana-efficient and leveraging gravity (again). Mimicking comrades in distress. Disguising explosives. The list of applications is almost infinite.

The trick is working out how to be mana-efficient with the traps, something which we have a significant advantage in, despite some of the practicalities of the rules of magic (like mana dispersion, etc.) that we've run into. Since we understand the physical laws the universe operates on, we've already been able to coerce a number of spells into operating more efficiently, in some cases reducing mana costs by an entire order of magnitude, for example leveraging gravity into a force with the bullet spell.

Mana storage is hard without a human or other sapient mind to assist. The mana dissipates rapidly; you can capture it, sort of, in the right kind of crystal, but without the stabilizing presence of an aura it disperses fairly rapidly. So you either have to recharge the traps frequently, imbue them with a lot of mana (expensive!) or both.

DAY 83

I finally learned one of the missing pieces to the puzzle, and I think I'm starting to get the hang of things. I finally got to the bottom of why the soldiers (and a lot of other people around here) weigh so much around here. It was really throwing me off, pun intended.

Body reinforcement.

There are two kinds, neither of which will work for me. The basic kind involves using a spell which slowly reinforces the natural bone and muscle of a person's body with denser materials, increasing tensile strength of natural fibers and materials.

There are a handful of different spells we've already found that achieve this, but Graves hasn't really been able to make much headway on understanding them that much despite making something of a focus about it. The one she's studied seems to reconfigure the body's internal structures using the materials already in the body to make them more dense.

How this spell developed with the aid of evolution via natural selection is just an example of the incredible solutions developed by the emergent properties of the neural-net powered system. It seems to have arisen as a result of a combination of the local population's rudimentary understanding of biology and constant, steady infusions of mana.

That leads me to the other kind of body reinforcement, which is perhaps better referred to as body replacement: constructing an entirely new body out of mana. That one, we don't really know anything about. But it's pretty scary. Apparently, it only becomes possible once you reach archmage-levels of power.

But in any case, the reason that neither of them works for me is because increasing your body's natural density and speed comes with serious drawbacks. It took Gideon years to learn to work with the changes to his center of gravity, reflexes, and coordination. Even as a gradual process, it takes a long time to adjust to.

Apparently the locals that choose to do body enforcement start off by devoting most of their mana to body reinforcement as children, and their minds learn to adjust to the constant change from a young age. Mental elasticity is no joke. It also consumes all of their mana, leaving them without the ability to learn and cast other spells. I'm pretty sure that Tiro's friend Galen did body reinforcement, hence his use of a wand to cast spells.

But that won't work for me. The only reason Gideon did it is for the cancer he came to this world with. Leukemia. Body reinforcement's the only thing keeping it at bay, apparently.

And believe me, was that concerning to find out. Put a whole new spin on his motivations: why would he want to come home if the magic of this world's the only thing keeping him alive?