+1 Charm

Not exactly a success, but not exactly a failure either. For one, I was still alive and so was Farhaan. I also hadn't massacred a whole angry mob either. Instead, I was sent on my way with a bag of borderline rotten bread and pungent wine, a fresh change of clothes thanks to some friendly elderly women, and the dubious well wishes of their headman.

I hadn't been able to stay there for long enough to absorb any of their language appreciably, though the grannies did talk up a storm. I imagined I would sound like an infant if I tried to speak like them. That said, it was remarkable how fast I absorbed information. Would I even need a month before I learned how to speak?

Then there was the matter of my Charm. On the one hand, I didn't expect it to ever be important to me in any capacity, but discounting its use in my former situation, I felt remarkably different as well.

I always assumed that my body's movement was the domain of Coordination, but even now I felt like I was walking more purposefully through the dirt path, finding flat ground and avoiding sharp rocks. Though it only improved the efficiency of my walking by a single-digit percentage, I was still rather surprised. Even my vision had gotten better. It wasn't completely proportional to the increase in Charm, but it was still a full fifteen percent lurch in acuity and… well, the result was beautiful. Charm made even the world more charming, it seemed. The question that remained was, had I gotten prettier?

Using Sense Life, I couldn't measure any appreciable changes to my physiology except for my eyes, which reduced the likelihood of the theory that more Charm would make me prettier. That said, it could be an incremental change. I would have to gather more data over time. The idea that I would be even more noticeable didn't exactly enthuse me, so I hoped that it wasn't the case.

Something I couldn't readily measure was my charisma. Without a person to speak to, I could be as eloquent and insightful as I wanted, and it wouldn't matter. To truly test my improved gift of gab, I needed a moving target so to speak. It was like speech crafting in the shower versus formulating points in a live debate. There was a substantial difference.

Perhaps my confidence would also increase? Would it also offset things like depression and anxiety as well in higher values, or even autism? More likely, it would be easier to mask.

I was never that talkative, myself, so I was happy for that at least. I was lucky enough that I only had to act in my native language, where no one could detect anything awkward.

I was almost a mile away from the village when I decided to dump the bad excuse of food, not even minding the waste. If I encountered anyone starving, I would likely use my own magic anyway to help them out, rather than put them through more misery.

Instead of food, I collected dozens of rocks and filled the sack almost to the point where I feared for the integrity of the leather straps tied around my shoulders. It was heavy, though not anywhere close to my limits. If anything, I would at least put in more training into Power.

I made another sweep with Sense Life, and felt three very human—or whatever these weird pupil-less beings named themselves—presences. They were about three hundred meters behind, jogging up the road at a considerable pace, though perhaps that was only because they had high Power?

It was only a minute until they arrived, and when they did, they slowed down upon seeing me. Their eyes glinted in the low light, like nocturnal animals. Most curious. The centermost man's eyes were the red of rubies, beautiful and resplendent. The one to his right was a warm, amber topaz, and the one on his left was a cold, icy diamond.

That, and they likely had night vision, which would have been troublesome if I needed to escape them.

Ruby chuckled maliciously as he walked towards me slowly, muttering to his friends, who all seemed to assent and add in their own comments.

I took several quick steps back and they increased their pace. That was confirmation enough of their intent.

Against my better judgment, I sunk a point into Power, ripped my backpack’s strap straight from my shoulders with one hand, and swung the sack of rocks at the nearest assailant, Topaz.

The improvised weapon crashed into his midsection, cracking and crunching as he fell on a heap.

[Gem-Eyed] Human slain - 75 experience

I hefted the bag of rocks once more and smashed it on the dead creature, marveling at the sheer ease at which his flesh gave in to my strength and weapon. How dare he even assume that he could victimize me? I wasn't even angry, just... frankly, I was just shocked at his audacity.

To his friends' credit, they immediately stepped back as they reevaluated my threat level. Unfortunately for them, they were probably off the mark. I barely took a moment to marvel at the sheer difference that an additional point in Power had me feeling as I decided to switch to magic.

Shifting my Signature and casting Purge Life took a full second and a half, impractical for numerous targets, but it did the job plenty enough in my current situation.

I struck Diamond on his head. He seized up on his feet before falling like a bowling pin, stiff as a statue.

[Gem-Eyed] Human slain - 55 experience

Ruby looked at him in shock, then at me, as he backtracked frantically before turning around to sprint away from me with all his might.

Without haste, I took aim and let my spell fly, striking his right leg at a high speed, then his left, each time making sure to limit the spell’s spread to a single location. His best bet was amputation just below his hips if he wanted to survive the coming days, but I wouldn't be the one to deliver him that mercy. No, I was fresh out of that.

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I approached him calmly and crouched before him. He tried to drag himself away, but when I dropped the sack of stones on his back, he could only wheeze.

I opened the bag and picked out a stone. I went around him and crouched in front of him, holding the object near to his face. "Vri strayavsk?" I asked him.

This would be a long night.

000

Arlo was helpful in illuminating me in his language. We spoke for hours as I asked him the meaning of various words and objects in our vicinity before moving on to other things. At first, he wasn't very respectful or very helpful for that matter, not until I lied to him about giving him his legs back if he humored me. I could tell that he didn't believe me, but hope was just the damndest thing, wasn't it? Interrogate a person forcefully and they would clam up or bullshit. Promise them the world and they wouldn't believe you.

Take away all hope and return them with a pittance and there you had it.

In the first hour, I learned enough to hold a rudimentary conversation. In the next, I absorbed a lot more by applying my conversational skills. He even taught me how to read, scrawling symbols on the dirt illuminated only by moonlight, something I assumed was a rare skill until I realized that the system probably made sure you knew how to read, if not automatically, then through societal pressures.

Yes, he had the system. So did everyone on Allmother, the name they gave to this world. It was equally trite as Earth, I would argue, though a little more on the spiritual side. Then again, the Romans and Greeks named our planet after their gods, so we didn't exactly have a leg to stand on.

I asked him about magic. He told me it was banned.

"Where is it not banned," I asked.

Drenched in sweat, Arlo shook his head vigorously. "Nowhere! It's-it's magic. You can't do magic!"

He was even more distressed than usual. "Why?"

"You will go magic!" I raised an eyebrow. "You will lose all your wits and go magic!"

Ah. I understood. They didn't have a dedicated word for magic in the Aellian language. To them, it was all just… madness. On any other day, I would agree with them. I regularly broke laws of thermodynamics entirely. Then again, I liked to think that I was practical enough never to get stuck on the how if it was a life and death matter.

That said, I probably wouldn't have gotten so far into magic if the rewards didn't outweigh the risks, desperate as I was. The risk of madness was an ever present specter hovering over me on every spellmaking attempt. I knew I had it under control — I wouldn't risk my child if I didn't — but there was a time where I could easily have failed, when I decided to create my own spell to cure illnesses. If I didn't have the ability to concentrate completely on complex, dreary tasks for hours on end, if I didn't have the intelligence and wisdom that years in modern school gave me, not to mention my own endeavours in pushing the limits of my mind for mere amusement, failure would have been imminent.

My Intelligence and Wisdom, high as they were in the beginning, only boosted or represented what I already had, something I doubted even one percent of this world's population had. If I was one in a million, then it made all the sense in the world that everyone knew magic only by its reputation of driving its practitioners insane.

Even refusing to attempt spellmaking wouldn't keep one safe from the clutches of otherness. If my mind strayed too radically, or deviated during a casting in any capacity, a misfire could be imminent, along with a helping of raw otherness engulfing your mind.

I already experienced that once, after creating ‘Conjure Seafood’.

Magic needed more safeties. They needed to be invented and shared through a World Obelisk before things would change. On that specific topic, Arlo couldn’t help me as he didn’t know what they were. I wrote it off as the ignorance of a country bumpkin and moved on.

I talked with Arlo for hours more, and when the first predawn rays of the sun peeked over the treeline, I ended the ruby-eyed man's life. Though I was indeed set on leaving him to suffer for the rest of his days, that was before I knew that magic was anathema to all civilized societies. His silence was vital as such.

I pulled him and his compatriots off the road until I reached a wooded area, hiding them there. They would be found in time, especially if searches were mobilized, but nothing would come of it. I stabbed the ones I killed with Purge Life, using the knives they brought, on the low chance that they checked the bodies for how they died. Off-handedly, I designed a spell that would take care of all the blood-spatter on my clothes, an issue I had only noticed at the arrival of sunlight. I was lucky that the stains were biological, although tenuously. When I cast the spell on both me and on Farhaan's bundle (and cured him of any bloodborne disease that may have been transmitted from it, then myself), no stains remained.

Before I left, my eyes fell on the corpses, and I realized my folly. I needed to study them. Using Sense Life, I explored Arlo's eyes. True to my suspicions, he had an abundance of photoreceptors and an increased range of the electromagnetic spectrum that even included infrared and ultraviolet. It was impressive, and from my examination of the diamond-eyed companion of his, color didn't factor into it. He also had a layer of tapetum lucidum covering his eyes, creating the eyeshine effect that nocturnal animals typically had and enhancing his night-vision by receiving more light.

As well as this, they had a much wider range of vision, and his occipital lobe seemed to accommodate this with its prodigious size and the residue of neuron activity that still persisted minutes after his death.

They were human everywhere else, even in the kill notifications I received for ending them, albeit with a [Gem-Eyed] descriptor. Still, they were fascinating, in a way that made me feel like a little child.

For the first time, I considered if I could use magic to spoof something similar. Not a specific biological trait, but rather… everything.

I imagined a general biological manipulation spell that would let me change and shape life, not just within the narrow paradigm of single situation spells. Even though I knew that a generalized spell would lose out on intensity, not everything had to happen on the fly.

If I could disguise myself as a Gem-Eyed human, or rather any new race I came across, I could easily avoid the unwanted attention of people like Arlo or the headman's ire.

But would that be a long-term solution to my problems, to what I wanted out of this new lease on life in Allmother?

What… did I want? As always, my eyes fell down on my happiness, my Farhaan, and the answer came easily. I wanted a better life for him. I wanted him to be happy.

Regardless of whatever grand ambition that the demon had for me, that was truly what I wanted.

I was under no illusions that I could do that on my own. I isolated myself all my life because it was what I preferred, but I wasn't dim enough to think that my child would be the same way. In fact, I would hate for him to do that.

I wasn't happy, after all, and I didn't think I ever would be. The tradeoff was power, freedom and knowledge, and the trinity granted me a measure of comfort, but it would never be as intense or warm as true happiness.

I needed my son to be happy. That was how I could be happy. I needed a village, because it would take one to raise him. I needed people I could trust, and power to enforce an inviolable domain around my son's childhood, to shield him from everything that would do him harm.

I looked out towards the country road that would take me to places unknown. No matter the case, I knew I would find what I was looking for in my travels.