While nothing attacked me that night, I still had to face my nightmares.
Once again, I was being chased through the burning jungle. Every which way I looked, tiny horned shadows crawled towards me. Each time I would swat one away, it would return twice as large. Rapidly growing overwhelmed I called out to a hunter in the distance for help. As he turned I caught sight of the knife in his neck. The malevolent smile on the face of the dead man was the last thing I saw as the dream faded in the morning light.
By the time I had finished my breakfast, I had mostly forgotten the details of my most recent nightmare. After years of practice, I had gotten quite good at forcing myself to get moving after a night of tormented sleep.
As I continued my trek to the north, I practiced with my invisible force spell. I practiced with lower amounts of mana to try improving my precision and control without depleting my mana pool. Spending two mana at a time, I got a pebble gently bouncing and clattering along the roots in front of me. I couldn’t quite get it to fly exactly the direction I wanted it to, but I was slowly improving.
As my mana pool dipped down towards 30, I decided to stop playing with the pebble. All the practice in the world wouldn’t do me any good if I was out of mana when I really needed it.
I wasn’t sure how long I would have to walk to reach the Three Sisters. I was already much further from the Myriad Cliffs than I had ever been before, but I figured I still had a long way to go.
The day passed relatively uneventfully. I did spot a few rather dangerous-looking beasts, including a small cat gliding through the air atop a tiny whirlwind, but none chased after me as I slipped by mostly unseen.
As I was starting to look for a good place to hole up for the night, I once more heard the obnoxiously loud sound that I had grown to both love and hate.
DING!
I was strongly considering taking the interface customization just to quiet that sound. Curious if it would work, I tried willing my interface to open directly to the descriptions of my available boons.
Boons available:
Interface Customization:
Allows the user to adjust several aspects of their interface, including layout and design.
Codex Link:
Allows the user to draw information from the codexes of other nearby system users.
Codex Identification:
Allows the user to rapidly draw information from the codex about viewed objects and entities. Functionality may be limited without Codex Link.
Codex Map:
Automatically maps known areas. Functionality may be limited without Codex Link.
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It was nice that it worked, but I didn’t see any new boons. Switching to the other parts of my interface, I confirmed that there wasn’t anything new to pick from. I was a little disappointed, but I didn't let it get me down for long.
It seemed that I was left with one useless boon, two boons that would possibly not fully work, and one that would be kind of nice, but not overly important. I would definitely want the Codex Map later on, but I wasn’t planning on backtracking any time soon. I didn’t really need a boon to tell me that I was walking in a straight line. The Codex Identification probably needed me to fill my codex a bit before it would really help me.
Left with only one boon that would be immediately useful, I made my choice.
Name: Kyo —-----
Class: System Initiate (6/10, 0%)
Boons:
System interface
Mana Pool
System Codex
Interface Status
Codex Recording
Interface Customization
Current status:
Mana Pool: 98/100 mana available
Codex: 99.99% available space
Environmental Conditions:
High Ambient Mana
Hostile Entities Recently Perceived
Limited Available Resources Perceived
Personal Status:
Mana resistance level: 237
Total Physical Enhancement Level: 0
As I set up camp, I experimented with my newly integrated boon. Staring at a pretty purple flower, I willed the system to store an image of it in my codex. With another thought I tried instructing the system to show me the flower.
Instantly, a perfect copy of the flower flashed through my mind. I intuitively knew that I could hold the image there for as long as I wanted and dismiss it at will.
Bolstered by my success, I listened to the sounds of the various insects starting their nightly songs. I decided to test how specific of a sound I could record. Choosing one bug in particular, I tried recording just that sound.
The result was a little disappointing, but not bad. While the codex’s version of the intended sound was much clearer, it couldn’t filter out other noises entirely. Though mostly muted, I could still make out the sounds of the other insects.
I didn’t particularly want a random bug sound taking up space in my codex. I tried willing the codex to remove the sound, which seemed to work.
For my next test, I tried recording the memory of launching the pebble into the woods the night before. Viewing the memory was very strange. I was able to watch the events unfold exactly as I remembered, but the world had a dreamlike quality. Many details were exceedingly clear, like the dirt spraying to the sides or the pebble shooting off into the dark. Other details, like the surrounding plants or the calls of nocturnal animals, were blurry or completely missing. I was able to freely slow down and speed up the memory. Watching the dirt slowly float through the air back into the small hole, I found I could make the memory run backwards as well.
Greatly amused by the memory, I wondered what else I could record. Curious, I focused on the mana form for my fire starting spell. Strangely, the codex seemed to record this information even easier than it had the image of the flower.
Calling up my stored spell, I was astonished by how crystal clear it was. Normally, even when I did my best to focus, it was hard to imagine the complete mana form. With the codex, it took almost no effort at all. With a snap of my fingers, I easily conjured a burst of sparks that would have normally taken me several attempts.
I would have likely experimented with my magic long into the night if I hadn’t heard otherworldly moaning in the distance.