Chapter 64 - Creating A Vision
'On 28th of the month of Winterveil, Year 731, I will construct my own Vision and imprint it into my Thought Space. While I have not yet comprehensively grasped all the governing parameters that distinguish a Vision from mere manipulative acts of the viewpoint, I believe my foundational understanding of surrounding concepts is solid enough to proceed. I currently possess several conjectures that require further scrutiny, and I will record them here as I go.'
This is what Vern would have written in his notepad had he a little less common sense. He ripped one page after another from the pad and shredded them into countless pieces.
He had already gone too far by recording the details of what happened in this land on paper. His justification for doing so until now was that he had an easier time linking his thoughts if he saw them laid out with ink.
But that wouldn't do in this case. They had to go. He wasn't going to bring a record of anything that transpired in here to Elmhurst. If Observers can locate Esther from the eyes of others, who was to say they couldn't find ways to read his notes?
This wasn't to say he was completely giving up on jotting down his thoughts because of the paranoia, but the risks and benefits had to be balanced.
The risk that came with the leak of the secrets he had gleaned in here would set him back too much. He had to pile up his advantages, not make them public for anyone to benefit from.
Once he removed all the evidence of his endeavors from the notepad, he scattered the paper around him like confetti and settled the pad next to his coat on the ground.
Every once in a while, the world shook, and another fragment of that Pyramid disappeared. Blisters appeared on the ground, and particulates of ash in the air began to coagulate.
But he couldn't be bothered with analyzing it. As long as there was no immediate danger to himself, he had better things to do.
Let's start simple and figure out how a Vision is different from plain old manipulation of the viewpoint like I did in the library. Why and how is Instability Inducement different from changing the balance a little.
He had a conjecture. It came from his experiences with Instability Inducement. Every time he executed that Vision, he felt like he went through a chain of specific thoughts, and they somehow brought to life the changes he envisioned.
Keywords being 'Chain of Thoughts.' So, the real question here was how to build one such chain for Stability Inducement. One idea would be to divide the process into steps and link them together, creating a chain. However, it seemed a little farfetched. If that's all it took to create Visions, it wouldn't be as big of a deal as everyone made it out to be.
But it was worth a shot.
With a perfectly shaped gear from the umbrella in his hand, he first went ahead and induced an instability into it. Its teeth became dull and lost their shape, morphing from perfectly usable in any machinery to utter junk in mere moments.
The next step was to stabilize it back. He had done it just a while ago, so that shouldn't be too hard. His plan was to repeat it a bunch of times and see which parts of the Vision could be further divided into steps for the chain.
So he considered a balance of stability in his mind and imagined the teeth going from being dull and abrased to perfectly angled and sharp—the way they were before instability. And as if on cue, the gear reshaped into a perfect sample in the very next moment, its curved edges stretching to become straighter. It was actually far faster than Inducing the Instability.
Hmm, wait…
That hadn't happened last time. Previously, It had taken him quite a while longer to fix the sprockets and gears. Did he just get so much better in one stroke? Or maybe it happened because he was only focusing on a singular item? The latter possibility made more sense.
Anyway, it was easy to confirm with a simple test. So he perceived ten of the sprockets that spilled from the Umbrella under 'Complexity' and induced an Instability within them. It took about double the time compared to destabilizing a single sprocket. That was to say, the Time or Representation cost didn't exactly depend on the number or volume of items he perceived. If it was, it should have taken him ten times longer to achieve this result.
Still, specifications of Instability didn't matter right now. Stability Inducement was what he had to focus on.
So he emptied his perception and started again with 'Stability' in mind. He mentally shifted the balance of everything to become lighter and imagined the gear in his hand turning back to its unharmed state.
And something interesting happened. The gear in his hand morphed into perfection almost instantly, but other sprockets on the ground took more than a second. It was still faster than Instability Inducement for all of them, but he didn't expect this odd spread.
So he reflected on his actions and quickly rushed through possible reasons for this uneven distribution of time it took to Stabilize items. It wasn't the distance. He had measured the potency of his Visions based on distance before, it never produced a similar result.
Oh. Damn. It's so obvious!
He had gotten so lost in analyzing everything in terms of the underlying details that he forgot one of the earliest observations he had made about manipulating reality. The more comprehensively he 'imagined' the results of his manipulation, the better and closer they would be to his ideal.
He had been applying this concept to the 'Balance' aspect of his Visions ever since the library, but today, he stumbled into this situation by pure coincidence. He wasn't focusing on the exact steps like usual and just happened to also be deeply pondering on what changes should occur to the chosen object in reality.
Well, it was easy to test whether imagining in both types of realities made any difference at all. He could compare the times with and without considering the objective reality.
He cracked his neck and induced Instability in all the sprockets yet again. But this time, when he reached the next step and considered 'Stability,' he went ahead and only visualized how the Balance should be affected to make the teeth of the gears angular and neglected visualizing it happen in reality—like he had always done.
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The Vision still worked—the sprockets became useful, but it took about two seconds. Far longer than an instant it had taken last time.
That confirmed it. His imagination and visualization in terms of subjective reality, as well as objective reality, played an important role in determining the cost of the Vision.
But then he nodded to himself and suppressed his bubbling excitement at all these findings. He had to take these results with a grain of salt. This wasn't the most rigorous set of tests, and he only had one measure of success or failure—the time it took to bring the Visions to life. Generally, he would have another factor to figure out if he was doing the right thing, which was the amount of Representation used.
However, in this land of the Dark sun, not once was he pinched for Representation, nor were his eyes ever exhausted. In Elmhurst, doing what he had done in this past hour would've been impossible. That feeling of emptiness would have permeated his body long ago, followed by the veins around his eyes bursting into a bloody mess.
So, in one sense, it was a boon that he didn't have to worry about Representation here, but on the flip side, he had one less variable to observe and measure the correctness of his approach.
But obviously, it was far too big of an edge to trade it for some extra experimental value. This was a great balance between usability and practicality.
Anyways. That was an insightful detour, but I should be figuring out how to partition the manipulation process into more steps, not this.
However, the very next moment, a pensive look overtook his face, and he ran his fingers through his hair as he stood there, staring at nothing in particular.
.
.
.
Yeah. That can't be right.
He found a big hole in his previous logic about dividing the process into steps. How could the chain of thoughts needed to stabilize one object be the same as a wholly dissimilar one? For example, one wouldn't follow the same steps to fix a gear as one would follow to…uh...patch up shredded paper? Or any other kind of stabilization, for that matter?
Then, did he need to subdivide his Vision into very general and common steps that didn't assume the behavior of the object under influence?
He ruffled his hair and threw the sprocket down as he groaned internally, Wow, this is too fucking complex.
If someone told him that Observation just happened to work like this, then he was going to get into a very heated argument that day. There was clearly a system and set of rules behind all this. Rules that didn't seem to be borne of nature.
One could argue that human life itself and the basic fundamentals of physics were products of cosmic coincidence, but who was to say they weren't? Maybe there was no true creator, maybe Fundamentals were always the way of the world, maybe Subjectivity is the nature of reality, but there was also the possibility that it was all engineered.
The truth of creation has always been one of the most heated yet futile debates in a majority of the conferences. But add these Elden Ones to the equation, and all the previous arguments became flimsy. What was their hand in the Creation? The evolution of intelligent species? The planet? The solar system? And beyond?
.
.
.
He let out a deep breath and set aside these existential queries. They weren't going to help him in any shape or form right now.
He knelt down and picked up the torn bits of paper. Could he consider these bits and pieces as some sort of Instability in the paper's structure and patch it back up?
He nodded and tried just that—Observing it under the lens of Stability. After wasting a couple minutes getting the grays just right for the paper, he considered how things should change. The dull darkness of each bit of paper should come together to form a more stable and bright structure. And in terms of reality, the pieces should fly towards each other and connect.
That sounded reasonable.
He executed these thoughts…and the pieces moved. But only for a brief second. In a flash, everything lost momentum, and his perception shattered into nothingness—jerking him out of his world of grays.
Uhh…
Damn! Right, that's not how it works for Structural Fundamentals.
Distractions really were the bane of good ideas. That was stupid of him. How could stability inducement do the work of Gravity or Force? His imagination there had combined more than what the Fundamentals of Structure would be able to encompass on their own. The Structure didn't involve any concepts that'd help papers fly toward each other.
That was to say, he should isolate the problem to primarily be a structural one. So, he took a bunch of pieces of paper and put them next to each other, assembling them into a rough shape of paper on the ground.
Doubt gnawed at the edge of his thoughts, but if he was right about his previous idea not working because of mixing Fundamentals, then this should be promising.
He repeated his earlier set of actions, populating the pieces in his perception with grays. But the moment he envisioned the changes—pieces of paper combining together, something happened. Something unexpected. It was like dots connected in his mind, and he skipped a few steps.
When he came to in the next instant, three of the twenty or so torn bits had lost the seam between them—fused together as if they were never apart.
He let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding, his heart pounding like a drum. Did I just...? He couldn't finish the sentence, his mind racing ahead, already contemplating the possibilities this revelation had flung open before him.
That felt similar to when he used Instability Inducement. It was like he went through checkpoints in his mind, and his thoughts automatically guided him in the right direction.
But it wasn't the same experience either. It was…incomplete.
Many hypotheses whirled in his mind, and he rejected the dumb ones outright while setting up the grays of papers in his perception once more. He had to experience that again. He had to be sure that it wasn't a random fluke, that he didn't just get lucky again. Because luck was very hard to factor into his calculations.
So he assigned a light gray to the row of bits that were now fused together and a dark gray to the completely separate pieces. All of them hugging each other, and he imagined them fusing into a singular entity. Both in terms of balance and in terms of reality.
Stabilize.
The moment the thought crossed his mind—it happened. His thoughts became transient, and something steered them through particular notions, delving into the concept of Stability. He observed the process closely this time, not missing a single detail.
The gaps between each of the torn pieces became finer and finer, and the curl on their edges straightened out. It was like watching a film in reverse.
CRACK
He didn't hear that sound, but his brain had already come to associate it with his perception shattering. It happened again.
Damn!
At least it wasn't a fluke.
So the Vision was executed like a chain of thoughts—yes, but it halted midway. Which could mean this chain wasn't complete.
No, that's what it has to be.
One of his myriad hypotheses seemed more and more likely by the second. It conjectured that Visions didn't need to be subdivided into steps, rather, he just needed a lot of thoughts relating to that Vision.
In simpler terms, he needed more experience with inducing stability to mature it into a proper Vision.
However, the fundamental reasoning he theorized for it was far more intriguing. He believed that he needed a lot of thoughts related to inducing Stability, so when he tried to envision something similar, his lens would automatically pick and choose some of his previous insights to infer what should happen in this new scenario.
It made sense. And again, there was a simple test to confirm it.
He emptied his perception of the papers and induced instability in the sprockets instead. Tens of dull and abrased gears dotted his perception, which he now switched to Stability.
His heart pounded faster and faster, almost matching the rate at which the ground around him shook, and the pyramid disintegrated. If this worked, then he would have figured out the core secret to making one's own Vision.
With a deep breath, he shifted the balance of Stability in the cogs.
And there it was. Unlike the last time, where he had to envision the whole process himself, his thoughts rushed through a series of notions on their own before interrupting abruptly.
But the sprockets had changed. That meant simply knowing how to induce stability in another situation—patching up the bits of paper—had boosted his ability to do the same in this scenario.
It didn't finish the process, sure. But that can be easily remedied by practicing to induce stability in more such scenarios. And it would only grow from there until it could accommodate any situation.
This…
This was fascinating.