I made an effort to seem normal while in the Reizenbrahm estate. I had made my desire to not have alcohol clear, and attended every meal on time despite wanting to sequester myself and constantly practice magic. I had also seen Reizenbrahm’s daughters, a group of three teenagers only a few years younger than myself, but we hadn’t really spoken at all, which I preferred anyway. The servants were insistent on taking care of my child, but I made sure that they knew I liked a more hands-on approach to raising my own flesh and blood. Just some light intimidation, really.

I wasn’t being unreasonable. They were the ones that couldn’t take no for an answer.

Five days had passed since I arrived and Reizenbrahm used his legs more and more. His wife had now completely changed her tune about me, and insisted on compensating me for all I was worth. I gladly accepted payment and the lord decided to hire me as his personal in-house physician, but it was all just noise in the end. The money was stored in my room, a simple pouch of precious metal, but I had no need for it just yet anyway.

I only needed to advance in my studies and take care of Farhaan. I would leave behind a new world of magic for my boy, a world past strife and toil, of starvation and sickness.

Time, space, energy, matter. Those were the four principal ways in which magic affected the world. Regenerate Wound spoofed time and matter, creating more of both of them, Purge Life drained energy, but space… was more of a hypothesis, really. None of my spells ever manipulated space at all, but if time was affected, then space could just as likely be affected as well.

I couldn’t find any clusters that was based directly on any of them. Sure, there were two for energy, fire and ice as arbitrary as that was, and matter had a couple more as well, but time was nowhere and space had only one which allowed you to create a portal to somewhere right ahead, by way of creating a region of pinched space. It was called Portal.

In my bid to prove my hypothesis true, I isolated every glyph from spells that trifled with time, found the most common form, and tried to will it into existence.

Of course, I felt an immense potential for Chaotic Immersion the moment before I tried it, on a level far beyond any single glyph had the potential for, and decided to take that as a… confirmation of sorts, that I was more or less on the right track.

Thus, time, space, energy and matter.

Though I would have liked to complete the set by knowing the glyph for space, I couldn’t do that without spending a Spell Point on the Portal spell. And seeing as healing the body did not have much in the way of spatial manipulation, at least not on my level of mastery just yet, I left it alone.

In my magic fundamentals book, I posited that at least one of those four elements were used in every spell. In Biomagic, matter was the most common, with energy and time following in a descending order. Binding these glyphs to the natural world required glyphs connecting them to a specific purpose, usually the most glyph-intensive part of a spell. Thus, I had already discovered three categories of glyphs. The elements, the connectors and the purpose.

And already, my labors were beginning to bear fruits.

You have successfully optimized the Purge Poison spell.

You have successfully optimized the Purge Disease spell.

You have successfully optimized the Purge Life spell.

…

You have successfully optimized the Biological Manipulation spell.

2+ Spell Point awarded!

I went through every single spell in my arsenal, but although I earned no additional attribute points, the optimization was largely just as valuable. If, for an average brain, it took six and a half seconds to successfully evoke the classical Purge Life, then this optimized version took at least half that time, with less Chaotic Immersion as well. It was an all-around success.

But of course, not even minutes after discovering this connection between types of glyphs, I had already found a glaring exception. Metamagic had a different element entirely than time, space, energy and matter. There was chaos, and then there was will, two elements and their function decided by their ratios.

The will glyph was sensitive to intent. Indeed, it was the will behind the spell that shaped it precisely. For Magic Manipulation, the intent was to control the flow of magic or chaos in the world, allowing you greater flexibility in spellcasting, usually its intensity. I spent a point on Magic Manipulation so I could use Purge Life faster, but I also used it to dampen its effects. The ruby-eyed villager that I had interrogated was only ‘killed’ entirely below his hips. Perhaps I could have found a way to truly kill Reizenbrahm that time as well, when his finger was on my forehead, but I would have exceeded the amount of magic my Wisdom would allow me to manipulate.

With Shift Signature, the chaos outweighed the will, but in this case, the image of chaos was layered in tiers of different axes that signified a specific signature, and I could use it to also tap into purity, allowing a greater whole of chaos enter my spell, dramatically increasing its potency.

It was very likely that in my current level, I could take out an entire city if I shifted to purity and used Purge Life in concert with Magic Manipulation, and I knew this only now that I understood the chaos glyph to a greater extent.

I hadn’t purchased the Ritualism spell from the metamagic cluster yet, and because of its vague name, I wasn’t certain about what exactly it entailed. I knew that on Earth, people purported that a ritual was necessary for magic to work, a ritual that tapped into another world, allowing for communication with the dead, or to hex a specific target.

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I was already sitting on more spell points than I knew what to do with, so without mulling it over too much, I purchased the spell.

Chaos, will, whimsy or mischief (basically the average between those two concepts), and manifestation.

In a way, whimsy already was chaos, but so was mischief, though watered down to harmless fun and games. It was sometimes at the expense of others, rather than the complete breaking down of rationality in all its forms.

The last glyph, therefore, was mild chaos in a social context.

This was… an enormous find. Anything that could annoy others, be dismissed as nonsensical or even repulse, could be used as a vector to boost a spell beyond its normal limits. All spells degraded upon being cast if it did not strike a target, but this could open the door for long-distance casting. I could even imbue a sort of will on a spell, allowing it to stay dormant before activating upon the fulfillment of any given condition.

It almost felt like magic knew that it was taboo, and reflected itself as such in this spell, but I knew better. Someone had invented and shared Ritualism, a mirror to how the world viewed magic, as something completely deviant, and let this deviance propel its casting. Someone that was unabashedly deviant from society believed in the spell, and breathed life into it, likely by learning the requisite glyph from Chaotic Immersion.

Finally, the manifestation part, the ability to summon the glyphs into reality in such a way that a spell could be drastically improved in effect with the trade-off of a heightened prep-time.

In essence, it could take me a few days to create a Purge Life bomb that could wipe out the entire city, with minimal Chaotic Immersion if I did everything correctly.

The whimsy part seemed even less important, however. Was there a way to cut that out and instead rely on the chaos, will and manifestation? Was the whimsy really that necessary?

Some preliminary poking around proved that yes, the presence of a glyph such as whimsy was important, but not that glyph specifically.

I wasn’t so flush with knowledge of glyphs to try and experiment with metamagic, however. The last time I played around with a metamagic spell, I wiped out a section of forest and almost hurt my son in a fit of madness.

For now, whimsy stayed.

Could new spells of the metamagic cluster be created that reflected a certain perception of magic? Could I create evil magic or a magic fueled only by kindness? Was that a false paradigm, and could I stretch my hands even further than that? I needed a spell that negated or circumvented Chaotic Immersion. Was there a specific glyph of this new natural language category that could directly negate it?

I decided to dive back into the Sea of Chaos, the aptest phrase I had for something I could barely actually describe with regular words. With more Wisdom, I could see more of it, a greater part of the whole. Once upon a time, I could only take what I needed and get away before something bad would happen, but now I had to actively search for something before the strain became too much.

I found many things, but that was exactly the problem. I found too many things, and for all I knew, they could all be correct. My augmented mind noted them all down and when I resurfaced, I was left with a long line of glyphs waiting for experimentation.

There was a knock on my door, but this time, it wasn’t the handmaidens come to alert me about a meal. It was Reizenbrahm.

I stood up and suddenly, a mild stench hit my nose.

Farhaan had peed his breeches. I used a spell to clean both him and myself, and stripped him of his clothes before putting him on the bed. I opened the door for the lord to enter, and he did. Today, he wasn’t dressed in his usual robes, but a militaristic and green regalia, a green jacket with white buttons and epaulettes, and green pants as well, all matching his eye color.

“Good day, Reza,” he greeted. “I hope you’ve had a fruitful day.”

I nodded. “I have. Are you back to work, now?”

He nodded. “It is better I get a firsthand lay of the land, if you catch my meaning,” I nodded, and he continued. “Pardon my directness, but… what are the major difficulties you now face in the pursuit of making me…” He gestured. “You know.”

I nodded, and carefully, I tried to pick my words. “If you have time, I can walk you through the fundamentals of… life science,” I told him. “Anatomy and such.”

He nodded. “I may not look it, being the brute that I am, but I have a fairly high sum of mental attributes on account of my work. I can take it.”

I launched into an explanation about cells, what they were, how they proliferated, and how they died. I talked about embryology, how a zygote carried information from both parents, determining the blueprint that the zygote would actualize. He knew easily enough that things carried from parent to child, as any person with common sense in any era would know.

I told him how this information carried by cells would eventually degrade with every proliferation, and how that would make him vulnerable to disease and cancers.

Of course, I left out the necessity of non-degraded telomeres, a method to remove indigestible waste from lysosomes and other non-lysosomal intracellular and extracellular waste matter, and a way to reverse the subtle changes that occur all over the brain, and a plethora of other things. I had plenty of power to do so already; I just had to lock down all the places that needed reworking, and with the trillions of cells in the human body, I would need an Intelligence in the hundreds just to keep up.

Or just a really, really, really good ritual.

“But,” I said as I watched him lose more and more hope. “I can restore you right now, temporarily of course, to a more or less youthful state. Outwardly, I will have to tread lightly as I don’t want us to be found out, but—”

“That works,” he said quickly. “You-you can do this… right now?”

“Yes,” I said, “But keep in mind, this is a stopgap measure. It does not heal you of age. You may still contract age-related disease and—”

“That works,” he repeated. “It works. Whatever else, that is for you to figure out. If you can do this for me right now, I will be very grateful.”

“It will take a while,” I told him. “More than an hour.”

He nodded. “Then, my library.” He looked around at my room, and saw some of the discarded books on the floor, and several more open books on the table. “I will leave you to it for now. Ah, but before I leave, I promise I will give you something very valuable, and I will pay you even higher if you complete another service for me afterwards.”

“Thank you,” I bowed my head at him.

Truth be told, I didn’t want us to go through with this at all. He already had enough of a god complex as it was, but I truly feared how volatile he could get without the sensation of aches borne from age tempering him. He was content enough to leave well enough alone, but if he suddenly felt that the power dynamic had shifted, and grew a taste for what I could do for him, then how would he act on that?

I bit my lower lip and shook my head. I wasn’t without teeth of my own. Not anymore at least. I was thinking like a weakling when I knew I was stronger than that.

And whatever the case, he still felt the need to reward me. Knowing him, it was definitely something of substance. Who knew; perhaps it could aid my current research of a madness-negating glyph?

That would be getting ahead of myself.