"He actually did it... the bastard has gone insane."
-A comment made in passing, by an unknown Academy lecturer
"Almost 1200 years ago, the war of the gods began," Mr. Jacobs said, drawing out a rough timeline on the blackboard in front of him. At the beginning was the year '433' with a heading of 'Galem's Betrayal', all written in white chalk. The lecturer continued adding to the timeline from there, speaking on Alium's ancient history. "Galem, the old god of space, betrayed his brother, the old god of time, Gaia, and sealed him away. The motive for this was lost to history, though many claim it was just a consequence of Galem going insane, rather than a genuine reason. After this, he went on a killing spree, slaughtering his and Gaia's offspring, beginning with the lesser gods. Obviously, the gods weren't enamoured with the idea of getting killed off by one of their progenitors, so they fought back.
"After 178 painful years of war, the gods were victorious and Galem was slain. All that remained of Alium's pantheon were three gods: Dhalene, the greater god of storms and lightning; Obelisk, the royal god of darkness, destruction, and chaos; and finally Elase, the royal god of light, creation and order. However, it seemed that betrayal ran in the family. Obelisk and Dhalene killed and banished Elase for the last time, becoming the sole rulers of Alium, perpetuating the war. It has been 996 years since that betrayal which signified the beginning of the endless war, or the thousand year war as it is called in recent times.
"Now we aren't exactly here to talk about history, are we? So let's go on ahead and skip to the important bits. The significant part of all of this is that because of all the gods' deaths, we have Nodes. Fragments of the gods' souls themselves, they have been bestowed to all of us here, granting us power beyond imagination with Arts. We access this power using a method known as Pathing. Pathing is a..."
As the lecturer droned on, teaching practically the same lesson that Lanyon taught all that time ago, Daniel sat bored out of his mind at his desk, trying not to fall asleep. Glancing at his 'friend', he saw Yul frantically taking notes, latching onto Ziron's every word. Yet, Daniel couldn't shake the feeling that it was all a bit odd. The history lesson at the beginning? It was nice, but not needed. On top of all of that, it was something that was taught to him in much more detail but later on in the year, and with a lot more context that helped understanding. So what was the point of that? It just seemed like an unnecessary bit of information tacked on to deliberately confuse people, especially those who didn't know such things already; just like who Daniel used to be. Putting that thought to the back of his mind, he sat back and allowed himself to relax, turning off his habit of constant suspicion of everyone and everything, something he inherited from Nameless; though, he could argue it was partly from the original too.
A smile suddenly broke out on the boy's face as he got nostalgic about the first time he was 'taught', in a much different manner than the lesson he was having now. Thoughts drifting to Avos' unique methods, Daniel couldn't help but relive some of the most treasured and terrifying moments of his life.
"Ladies and gentlemen, all be welcome to the grand opening of the world-renowned Platinum Muscle Magic Show!"
"YAY!"
"Thank you, thank you..."
Daniel could only scream in horror and embarrassment - internally of course, he wouldn't be the one ruining his fun - as he was presented like a gift horse to a small horde of manic children swarming his and Gulliver's usual spot by Avos Ashbeck himself. Trying his best to put on a smiling face, and failing horribly, Daniel crouched down and greeted the many children who reached up to his knees, including Anya who he ruffled the hair of, much to her delight. Just as he was thinking that whatever Avos was putting him up to wouldn't be too bad, the platinum announced his fate.
"Today you will all witness the transformation of a teenage boy into a stool!" Avos grinned ear-to-ear, kicking Daniel's thighs and bringing him to the ground.
"YAY!"
"Now I know it won't be the most comfortable for you all but-"
Before the platinum could even finish his sentence, several of the children, including the traitorous Anya herself, took it upon themselves to test the new stool. Wilfully ignorant to Daniel's protests, they all gleefully took seats on his back, their chattering drowning out the sounds of the boy's painful grunts and complaints.
"A-Avos.. you-"
"Oh my! It seems my magic transformation spell is more popular than I thought! Well then, if you all liked a regular human stool, how about a moving human stool!?"
"YAY!"
Eyes widening in realisation, Daniel's expression morphed into one of absolute despair, his wide eyes looking up to his executioner in silent pleading. His smile somehow widening even further, the cruel magician leaned down and dispensed his judgement.
"100 push-ups. Now."
Daniel's last conscious thought, away from the agony of exercise with a group of children sitting on top of him, was a cry to the world itself for help, wondering what he had done to deserve his unusual punishment. The world, however, did not respond to someone as lowly as him, and his suffering went unheard.
Shivering from the memories of his aches after the fact, Daniel was brought out of his reverie to the lecturer announcing the long awaited break. While the rest of the class stood up and shuffled away, the lecturer also left the classroom pretty quickly, he turned to Yul, who was still finishing noting some things down, and gave his best smile.
"Want to go check out the gardens with me?"
"Um.... I-I'm going to the cafeteria... -haven't had breakfast yet..." Yul stammered, avoiding Daniel's, hopefully, friendly gaze.
"Oh. I see. I'll see you after then!" Daniel said, disappointed but taking the rejection in his stride. Standing up from his seat and taking the briefcase, he tried his best to not look too put out as he walked out and headed towards the central gardens. As he had turned his back on the merchant boy, Daniel didn't notice his sigh of relief at seeing his own intimidating form leave.
When Daniel had first enrolled in the Academy, he hadn't found the central gardens until almost two weeks in, invited by Nyn when she was fed up at seeing him stay in the lecture hall every time at break, only leaving for lunch and the end of the day. He had of course seen some of the smaller green patches when the corridor walls opened up to reveal them, but he hadn't ventured far enough into the Academy itself to see the true greenery. It took a minute or so to reach the gardens from where he was now, it being a longer walk than that from the lecture hall, but the view was pleasant and always worth it.
Sitting in the centre of the plaza was a massive oak tree, reaching far up and hanging over the top of the opening in the roof. Little to no porcelains populated the gardens yet, it being too soon for them to discover the inevitably popular place. Other than the main crossroads, there were no other paths dotting the gardens, not exactly helping with the lack of porcelains, only those that had been trodden out by others before them; a majority of which were probably dead. Shaking his head to rid himself of the grim thought, Daniel marched up to his favourite spot by one of the smaller trees, and ran his fingers over a certain spot at the base of it. Carved into the bark was his own name. It was scrawled in rough and proud letters with a smaller 'was here' underneath. Patting the familiar carving, Daniel set his suitcase down and plopped onto the springy grass, his 'seat' no longer flattened from where he used to sit, leaning back into the familiar bark of his tree and closing his eyes.
An indeterminate amount of time later, noise fluttered into Daniel's enhanced ears, indicating the arrival of others and disturbing his rest. Lifting one eye open, he spotted them; a sizable group of noble girls all flocking around a particularly pretentious looking one. Not wanting to be disturbed, Daniel shuffled to his side and ignored them, hiding his grimace too. However, the rabble only grew once word spread, and it seemed his rest was destined to only be short-lived. Daniel grumbled some creative expletives, all originating from Avos, and opened his eyes, revealing just how many people were now here. It was a lot, to say the least. Could I shut off my hearing with an Art? No, I wouldn't know when everyone else is leaving then and miss break's end. Don't want to actually fall asleep after all.
A sly quirk of a smile formed on his mouth as a possibly dangerous idea to pass the time with came to being. Was it stupid? Most definitely. Could it ruin the mission? Almost certainly. Did Daniel care what Lucan thought anymore? Hell. No.
Twitching his hand to practice the motions, Daniel hid them away from obvious sight and channelled his Node. A mote of electricity sparked to life on the tip of his index finger, before leaping to his little finger with a twitch, and then to another as he did the same thing. Juggling the charge of lightning between his fingers, Daniel slowly ramped up the intensity of it and the speed, it beginning to hurt his unprotected fingertips if the charge lingered too long on one before jumping over to the next. Fingers flashed and lightning danced, creating a miniature light show on his hand. When he finished adjusting to the new pace, Daniel started to vary the path the lightning took as well as its intensity along the path, adjusting the resistance of certain pathways in the air to make curves, loops and sparks. Combining this with an abrupt increase in speed once more to blur everything together, the picture he had in mind came to being: a smiley face, floating over the palm of his hand.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Just as he was about to include his other hand to make an even bigger smiley face but in the space between them, he noticed other porcelains making their way away from the gardens and back into the Academy. Dispelling the light show, he sat up and took a hold of his suitcase, taking one last look at his engraved name before he left. Jumping up and back onto his feet, Daniel joined the slowly moving congregation, thoughts drifting to what Ziron had in store. Hopefully something fun.
* * *
"Welcome back everyone... at least I hope that's everyone," Ziron said, looking over his class to see if anyone was missing before shrugging and giving up, "Well, if they're missing this then they'll be missing the only interesting thing I'll be teaching all day. Let's get started then.
"Soul mechanics: big fancy word with big fancy connotations; but what does it actually mean? Well mechanics in the real world is just the study of how things affect each other in different ways, and how that translates to what we see. Say, what happens if we apply a force on an object? Mechanics tells us that the object begins to move. So, from that, we can infer what soul mechanics means. Soul mechanics is the study of how things behave in the spiritual realm, the place where all the important stuff happens, at least for us and our Nodes.
"But then, one may ask, what is the spiritual realm? Or what is a realm in the first place?! Well calm yourself, imaginary strawman, your questions shall be answered; all in due time."
Turning around to face the blackboard, Ziron began to draw a seemingly unrelated picture to what was being taught: a sky filled with clouds; a small ball floating in the sky; a lake below that; a bridge spanning across the lake; and the land surrounding the lake. All the while drawing this, he continued his lesson.
"Existence as we all know it is actually segmented into three separate layers, realms, if you will. For most people, life as they know it is contained only in the physical realm, or material realm as some, including myself, like to call it. It is where our bodies exist, interacting with physical and material objects, as normal. As most if not all of our existence is contained in the material realm, we are considered a materially inclined species, compared to the gods, who are spiritually inclined.
"Moving up in the world, we reach the cognitive realm, where our mind goes to occasionally. Our thoughts, mostly subconscious ones, are projected into this realm, acting like a collective subconscious of sorts, but for everything that can 'think' even on the most basic of basic of levels. A plant, for example, exists in the cognitive realm somewhat, even if it can't strictly think or feel. For what effect this has on our lives as a whole, have you ever had a feeling that something or someone wasn't right? Or a gut feeling that you should do something right now, even if you had never considered to do so up until that point? That's your subconscious entering the cognitive realm and sensing the 'ripples' made by the thoughts of other minds around you.
"Finally, you have the spiritual realm, where your soul resides. For the vast majority of people, this realm might as well shouldn't exist, its effect being so negligible on their life that they most likely don't know of it. For us all here, on the other hand, it is what's most important to us. Now that I've gotten all the broad strokes down, it'll be time to go more in depth about how we develop in these realms compared to our development in the physical one. Then, I'll be going over how the realms interact with each other in different ways, the realmic hierarchy, and finally, the three principle laws of soul mechanics."
All the while listening to Mr. Jacobs' lecture, Daniel couldn't shake the feeling that something was off, a distant thought that had been hanging in the back of his mind returning to the forefront. This lesson was all too rushed. It had taken almost a month to get through the history of Alium and the Guild before Lanyon even considered going over soul mechanics, and even then it wasn't until Gulliver that Daniel had started to learn some. And now they were already learning soul mechanics and its laws before history, the complete opposite of how he had been taught. Even with Gulliver, it wasn't until lesson three that he had been taught about the principle laws, the first being about the structure and composition of the realms and the second being about the fundamental differences between the spiritual and material realms. Could this be the difference between the upper and lower classes? These are only brief summaries compared to what I got! If its this bad when I'm in class 3-A, then what about the class 4s or 5s?
"For the first part, we have development. When we are all born, we are born as physical beings, babies. Mindless, stupid babies. At that point in our lives, we don't exist in either the cognitive and spiritual realms, because we simply haven't done enough to warrant making contact. It is only a couple weeks after that babies often start forming lives in the cognitive realms, establishing thought. After enough thinking is done, this amount needed being random and varying from person to person, we establish an anchor of sorts in the cognitive realm, a nascent mind. At this point, our material and cognitive existences become inexorably linked. This means that if our existence in the cognitive realm is destroyed, then so will our life, and vice versa.
"After even more thinking is done, usually a few months after being born, we make contact with the spiritual realm by forming our spiritual bridge, something you don't know about yet but I'll say for completion's sake. Unlike our first contact with the cognitive realm, a soul is almost immediately formed from the surrounding soul energy of the spiritual realm, which then reserves a space in that realm for our own. Just like with the cognitive realm, we become linked to the spiritual realm, this soul as our anchor. If the soul is destroyed, our life is too."
Taking a quick breather, Ziron turned around with a small smile on his face and continued the lecture, as if enjoying what was about to come.
"Plants, using the prior example, would only ever touch the cognitive realm and never form an anchor and hence a mind, their only 'thoughts' being that of needing to sustain their own life. Rocks are, of course, purely physical beings having no capability to act. Most animals have anchors in the cognitive realm, but only some have souls and even fewer, developed souls. That's a bit beyond the scope of this lesson right now so I'll move on. Essentially, keep this development in mind when I teach what's next.
"Let's cover the interactions then. Ironically, this is the topic we know the least about in soul mechanics as it's a lot more complex than we could possibly imagine. A good place to start though is with an analogy. Given to us by one of the gods, it, ironically, isn't a very clear analogy but it gets the point across well. The reason for this lack of clarity will be explained at the end.
"Consider an object, floating in the sky; a rock, a ball, whatever you want," Ziron instructed, pointing at the round sphere among the chalk clouds, "Imagine that this object is floating in the sky, free to fly around and explore wherever it wants; except there's a catch. It can't float up or down. This object is us, in the analogy, and this sky is the material realm. Yet, there is something else available to us, to the object. A new sense of sorts, something you would never notice if you didn't phase out your other senses and leave just that. This sense is the ability to move up and down. In this analogy, moving up isn't useful. If anything that's just simple meditation, becoming more with the physical realm.
"Floating down is what we want though. As we float down, into the unknown, we reach this lake and make contact," Ziron pointed again, this time at his drawing of a lake with a bridge across it, "As we make contact, we make ripples in the lake, propagating through its waters; the waters of the cognitive realm. Our subconscious imprints on the cognitive realm, these making and sensing of ripples are just accidental movements with this new sense, something we'd never usually be able to detect.
"Now that we're down at the lake, we can use our normal spatial navigation to explore it, and maybe even dive deeper into the lake. Don't do that though, that's an incredibly easy way to get yourself killed in real life, your mind disintegrating under the pressure of all the thoughts above your own. Yet, when you've got the level just right, where you're barely touching the cognitive realm and partially into the material one, you 'see' something. A bridge. A way out of everything you've ever known; this isn't sky, or water, after all, its land. If you time yourself just right, moving with your new sense and spatial ones at the same time, you'll leap onto this bridge, the spiritual bridge into the spiritual realm.
"As you find yourself on this bridge, you discover that this isn't some part of the land that you've never known, but an intrinsic part of yourself, just like that sense. It belongs to you. In many ways, this is your own section of the spiritual realm, your own spiritual space. And so you can do whatever you want with it, move along and change it however you wish. Curious, the object moves up and down this bridge, testing its limits, until coming across true land; the true spiritual realm," Ziron points once more at the drawing of the land around the lake, "It is foreign and harsh, not of your own being, but its land. And land? Land is something you've never known you could have. So, you explore. And that, my porcelains, is the analogy of the realms."
Just as a confused porcelain was about to raise their hand to ask questions, Mr. Jacob's whipped his head to them and beamed.
"I know, right? It's confusing as shit! It makes no sense and, frankly, it's kind of stupid and contradictory! But, at the same time, it's an analogy given to us by the gods, and often the best to convey concepts about the joining points of the realms alongside the realms themselves too.
"Another point of confusion is the fact that it seems... backwards. Why are we in the sky, and the spiritual realm, the land? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Well that, yet another one of my imaginary strawmen, is because of the gods. When the god who gave that to us taught it, they taught it how they viewed it and then reversed it. And, as I said before, gods are spiritually inclined beings, not materially inclined ones. So, for them, when they enter the physical realm, it is akin to reaching into the skies, into places they have never known. It's just a bit unfortunate that its as confusing as it is when reversed.
"I know it may be hard to understand at the moment, especially with the unhelpful analogy, but try and wrap your head around it at least a little; understanding even just a small aspect of that will help immensely in the weeks of soul mechanics to come. Finally, we have our three principle laws. In the spiritual realm, these laws tell us how interactions within it must behave, no matter what. The first law is the conservation of soul energy in an interaction. Soul energy is simply a type of energy just like heat that exists only in the spiritual realm, but unlike the material realm, can crystallise and form soul masses - energy given mass. The second law is just that all transfers in the spiritual realm are completely efficient. If an interaction isn't completely efficient, so all the work you're putting into something isn't translating into what you actually want to happen, then that's a consequence of you not having enough will of your own to power it, meaning only part of the interaction occurs, the part that your lesser will would power all on its own, normally. Explanations on what will actually is will come later, but take it as face value for now; will is just your will. Finally, the third law describes the fact that all interaction involving soul energy, or, in specific, transfers of soul energy, come in multiples of a constant."
After finishing his sentence, Ziron took a long breath, just giving himself a moment before continuing.
"That is all we have to get through today and I've purposefully left time so that you can ask questions. So, my not-so-imaginary strawmen porcelains, ask away."
In an instant, dozens of hands raised up, alongside a few porcelains who rudely raised their voices, to ask questions. Looking to Yul, Daniel noted that his hopefully new friend was also one of the confused, being one of the first to raise their hand. As Mr. Jacobs answered his porcelains’ questions, Daniel sat back in his chair, thinking over everything that he'd supposedly learnt. It was all disjointed for the most part, unrelated and random, jumping from development, something even he didn't know about, to the analogy, then to laws. It was missing information out, and Daniel needed to know why. And who better to pester than the man posing as a teacher himself: Lucan Duskwalker.