After a lengthy lecture from X that fully demonstrated to me how annoying it was for Ash when I did the same to her, the four of us continued our walk around the Capital. Apparently, Duke knew a guy who was working on some new kind of Enchanting tool, and wanted to see how it turned out. The shop that we went to was…odd. Most of the shops that we’d been to were all immaculately maintained, as though they were accustomed to high-class clientele. This shop, on the other hand, was completely disorganized. A massive collection of tools and equipment was strewn all over the floors and counter, so in order to pick something out, you would end up having to dive through it all, potentially getting yourself stabbed on one of the blades I could see poking haphazardly throughout the pile. A thin layer of dust seemed to have settled on every available flat surface, begging the question if this place had ever actually been thoroughly cleaned. To be completely honest, it looked a lot more like my own shed than I cared to admit.
“Hey Rich! You in?” Duke yelled out.
“Duke? Come to the back!” An answering shout.
The four of us made our way towards the noise, and when we finally managed to tiptoe around the mess and arrive at the back room, we saw…Just a normal looking human man. This room, completely contrary to the front of the shop, was pristine, not a speck of dust to be found. If I had to guess, this was the actual crafting room, something he kept perfectly maintained so that his work wouldn’t be interfered with.
“Oh, you brought guests? Hello there Lord Xavier. Beastkin girl, blind man. Gotta say Duke, you’ve got yourself an odd collection of people there.” The man seemed cordial enough, though…something about him seemed…off. I couldn’t quite place my finger on it, but if I had to guess…it was something in his eyes. They seemed…almost familiar for some reason I couldn’t place. It was completely nonsensical. I knew basically no one in this world, so there was no reason that I should recognize this man’s eyes in the slightest. However, no matter how I tried to rationalize it to myself, I noticed my mind running through people I knew in my previous world, and an irregular sort of pacing to my heartbeat. All indications of a feeling of vague familiarity.
We spoke to the man for a while, mostly pleasantries between him and Duke. It seemed that they didn’t know each other all that well, and mostly just through gossip from all of the other crafters, having only met in person a small handful of times. As they caught up with each other, rather than fading away, my sense of Deja Vu only got stronger. Eventually, the man, whose name was apparently Richard, turned to me and Ash to speak with us. “Sorry for my poor manners, did you two come to buy something? Or just tagging along with Duke?”
I responded with, “Not particularly. Just like you and Duke, I happen to be an enchanter, and Duke said you were working on a new kind of Enchanting tool, and we came to check it out.”
The man let out an odd sort of chuckle. The kind of laugh that an elderly person would give when their grandchildren started a new kind of hobby. “Well, I wouldn’t call myself a real enchanter. I’ve got a lot of various hobbies you see, and I’ve dabbled in just about everything under the sun. Tailoring, blacksmithing, woodcarving, enchanting, you name it I have a little experience with it. However,” his eyes narrowed, seeming to bore directly into mine. Wait, no, I don’t have eyes anymore, which meant it was my blindfold that he was inspecting, “I must say I’ve never seen enchanting like that. May I take a look?”
Curious, I pulled the subspace around my hand, and reached into my shed, pulling out one of my two spare blindfolds, specifically, the second one I’d ever made, that was still connected with Project Horizon. I then handed it to him, and he started inspecting it. He asked a few questions, and I explained about the windows, how they could segment my vision, about how the eyes and ears were sort of magical prosthetics, and how I could fly my knife drones around, and see what they saw.
“So they can fly, and you can see what they see, but why haven’t you added any sort of long distance attacking enchantment to them? Wouldn’t that be better than just ramming them into whatever you wanted to attack?”
I nodded, explaining, “Well, three reasons really. The first reason is that I’ve been pretty focused on another project right now, and haven’t really had time to focus on the problems I have in this one. The second reason is that any sort of long distance attack would drain the battery too fast, and cut down on my flight time. The third reason is that I haven’t yet figured out an enchantment for long range attacks.”
Richard nodded, considering my responses. “Well, I can’t help with the first or third problems, but as for the second, why not just make the battery bigger?”
Confused, I asked, “I don’t think you can just make enchantments work better like that?”
Richard shook his head, “I mean physically carve out a bigger battery. From what I can tell, enchantments work by performing tasks associated with our deepest understanding of the symbols or words that we use, right? Well, it stands to reason that you can modify or influence that understanding by playing around with things like size or color right? That’s the ‘new enchanting tool’ that I’ve been working on that Duke mentioned,” He stood up, rummaged through a cabinet behind him for a second, and pulled out a bottle. “Enchanting dye. You see, I had a thought that if I made my enchantments different colors, then it could add a certain context to my enchantments. For example, if I just carved a droplet, then that enchantment would probably be something related to water right? But hypothetically, it could also potentially be any liquid. However, if I dye that droplet blue, then it will certainly be water. And if I dye the droplet red, then it would be an enchantment related to blood, right? If I put some of this dye on my enchantment, I can use magic to infuse color into it, meaning just one bottle can be used to create any color you can picture in your mind.”
A whole new world of possibilities seemed to explode in my mind. Not just the potential for bigger batteries, an incredibly simple solution that I’m actually rather ashamed I hadn’t come up with personally, but also for another piece of equipment…something to finally get started on getting to the moon.
I pointed at the bottle, unconcealable excitement flooding through my voice as I asked, “How much?”
Richard laughed jovially and tossed it to me, saying, “Just take it. I’ll be stealing your battery idea after all, so I think we can call it even.”
I nodded, thanked the man, then quickly put the bottle away in my shed, paying no attention to the alarm bell that was ringing in my mind, and grabbed the enchanting diary I had sitting on my desk, I started writing down all of the plans that could be furthered with this dye. There are specifically two enchantments that I could use this for, both of which will be extremely useful, but I haven’t been able to figure them out, due to the fact that they look very similar. The first one is a target. A simple cross set inside of three rings of circles. If I wanted to add long range attack enchantments to my knife drones, a targeting system would be absolutely critical.
The second enchantment, however, was something that would make it so that we could officially start the moon project. The biggest question that needed to be answered before we could make any sort of solid plans, and I now have a possibility of answering it. The enchantment that would provide this groundbreaking information? Radar. If I had the ability to emit electromagnetic waves at the frequency of radar and detect them, then I would be able to calculate the distance to the moon. Radar is just extremely low frequency light after all, below infrared as a matter of fact.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
For people who don’t understand the inherent problem with trying to enchant radar detection, allow me to simply describe the symbol used to reference it. It is a simple cross set inside three rings of circles. In other words, it is exactly the same enchantment design as the targeting system I also wanted to make. And for good reason, as radar was originally used for military purposes, a way to locate and target enemy aircraft, hence the same motif being used for both common targets and radar. However, using the same motif in two separate things, while useful in technology, is particularly unfeasible when it comes to enchanting. However, there is one crucial point in which the design for targets, and the design for radar differ, and that is:
Targets are red,
Radar is green.
It’s a simple distinction
Of which I am awfully keen.
Okay, that was bad, and I admit it, but still, with this dye, I can finally make use of both of these ideas, so long as it works correctly. Now, you may be asking, “If Radar is just another frequency of light, and your eye enchantment on your blindfold allows you to shift the frequency of light that you perceive, then why have you never used magic to emit high end radio frequency em waves, and just used your eyes to detect them?” If you are in fact asking that, I would respond that that is an excellent question, the answer to which is slightly tricky.
You see, when you cast magic yourself, it comes directly from your soul, making it strictly ‘your magic’. Now, this is normally a good thing, as it’s this sort of claiming that the soul automatically does that prevents other people from manipulating the mana in your spells to cast their own spell against you. However, this does come with one slight drawback, and that is Range of Effect. After mana gets a certain distance away from your soul, it loses the connection that it has to you, destabilizing the spell and diffusing uselessly into the atmosphere. This means that if I were to make a radio wave light spell, then the low frequency em waves would be able to travel very far, and very fast, but the moment they got a certain distance away from me, they would simply dissipate rather than returning, and I wouldn’t receive any information. They would need to bounce back for me to actually gain positional data after all.
However, enchantments are different. The magical effects of enchantments do not originate in the soul after all, and instead originate from the enchantment itself. You may recall that refilling my mana batteries is more efficient than refilling my own mana pool, due to the fact that the mana batteries accept environmental mana, whereas my own mana pool forces the environmental mana to go through a kind of morphing process, where it gains some unknowable property, distinguishing it as MY mana. What this means for this particular enchantment, is that making a Radar device would operate exactly the way I want it to, and the light emitted would be able to travel all the way to the moon and back.
Another question you may have is why I keep referring to Electromagnetic waves, light, Radar, and radio all as the same thing. The answer to that is…they are. I don’t quite remember the reason, but the scientific community refers to frequencies of light waves as EM waves, despite the fact that they do not actually have anything to do with electromagnetic fields. Radar in particular happens to utilize the same frequency of light as radio. The word Radar itself is actually an acronym that stands for Radio Detection And Ranging.
The third question you may have is how exactly I can use Radar to calculate the distance to the moon. Well, that’s just a simple division. The speed of light is roughly 6.71 x 10^8 miles per hour, so you take that, multiply it by however much time it takes to send out the signal and get a response back, making sure to correct for whatever units you happen to be using, and divide it by two, since the light went all the way there and all the way back. And boom, the end result is the approximate distance between us and the moon. I’d have to ask Sophia if she had a way to more accurately determine the speed of light once we really started the calculations for the trip itself, but to set a baseline for what kind of planning we would need to do? This was more than enough.
I was so excited about the new possibilities opened up to me that I barely registered that the alarm bells going off in my head were still there. That there were a few things that were off about what Richard had said to me. Even as we left, carrying on our trip around the Capital, the vague sense of familiarity I had, the feeling that I had missed something in his words, they plagued me, but I couldn’t figure out what exactly the problem was.
Richard’s POV
As the four of them left my shop, I took a long look at the receding back of the blind man in white. For millennia, I have roamed this Earth. I have lived various lives, accomplished numerous things. I have been hailed as a hero, despised as a villain. I have been both a noble king and a wretched slave. This current life of mine, the life of Richard, the simple craftsman, has been particularly relaxing. Even without particularly trying, when you have lived for thousands of years, you tend to pick up various talents, various trades, and various skills. Especially on a world like this one, brimming with monsters and magic, with danger around every corner.
I have been raised by various families, growing up learning their various crafts. My father in my third life was a woodcarver, and my mother in my seventh a talented seamstress. In this way I did not lie to the group, as I have indeed dabbled in many fields throughout my existence. They just weren’t all during the same human life. By chance, in this life, I happened to be born as a citizen of a country I had founded in the past. I couldn’t help but cringe to myself any time I saw the highly respected ‘royal attire’, but I mean come on, I was working in the mines all day, I needed clothes that could handle it!
Due to the fact that in this life, I was born into relative safety, I’ve been able to finally consolidate all of the things that I have learned over the past several lifetimes. My goal for this life was to figure out a way to combine every kind of crafting that I’ve learned over the past millennia into one cohesive style, something I could use for all of the subsequent lives I will end up leading. A little gift for future me if you will, something that I never had enough time to breathe to consider before.
“Was there something interesting about that group?” The voice of Sam, the God of Life That Becomes Death, and of Death That Brings About New Life rang in my soul. I thought about the enchantments that the man in white had shown me. The knives clearly modeled after drones, and most interestingly, the batteries that powered all of his equipment.
Nothing much. I just found someone from my original world. Is this your doing? He happens to be from roughly the same time period you plucked me from after all.
Sam went silent for a moment, before responding again, an intense note of seriousness flooding into his voice. “That is not my doing. I have moved souls past the veil that protects this world of course, but they have all been properly wiped clean. Tell me everything you know about him.”
I already did. He possesses knowledge from my old world, and he is using that knowledge in his enchanting. Whether it was a mistake on your part, or whether he came here by some other means, I do not know.
“That is impossible. As you are well aware, the only way to prevent soul cleansing is to experience enlightenment in the Aspects of Nonexistence or Death. I would notice any individual who experienced such an enlightenment the moment it occurred. And as for coming here through another means, if he is truly from your old world, then he is a stranger to magic. That means that for him to be here…that is the design of another. Someone whose knowledge of the borders between the worlds rivals my own. I can think of only two possibilities.
“Either A), he experienced some kind of enlightenment in his old world that caught the attention of a God that I happen to be unaware of, and this God decided to gamble on him and bring him to this world, similar to what happened to you. Or B), He was brought here by the designs of a truly monstrous Immortal. It wouldn’t be the Angels, they have a strict noninterference policy with…well…anything really. This leaves the Demons. Now, regular demons would not have nearly enough power to circumnavigate the veil, and while a particularly powerful Archdemon could, it seems unlikely. Most likely this was the work of a Devil.”
Angels were firmly attuned towards Nonexistence, which meant that most of their lives were spent in meditation, attempting to diffuse themselves into the very fabric of reality around them. Rather than gaining dominion over their Aspects like demons do, they instead Become the Aspect itself. This meant that Sam was probably right, and it wasn’t the work of the Angels. Demons, Archdemons, and Devils were all subcategories of demonkind. Demons were the weakest and most common demons, who had yet to discover their True Names. However, once they did, and they became Titled, they were called Archdemons. From there, Archdemons would build their connection to their own Aspect of Reality, and eventually, they would reach Enlightenment, and gain a Spark of Divinity.
Immortals who have obtained a Spark of Divinity are altogether referred to as Demigods, including both the Demonic and Angelic variants. However, if you are a demon Demigod, then you are a Devil, whereas if you are an angel Demigod, then you are a Seraphim. Two things happened to you once you obtained this Spark of Divinity. The first thing that happened, is that you began to truly be able to fully manipulate your own Aspect of Reality. What Titled could do was downright primitive by comparison. It was kind of like the difference between throwing water at people, vs actually controlling the water itself, how it flows, what form it takes, what properties it has, the whole works.
The second thing that happened once an immortal obtained a Spark of Divinity, is that they would be kicked out of their world. Heaven and Hell cannot contain true Divinity after all, so Devils and Seraphim are forced to leave to create their own little pockets of Subspace, where they work to grow their Spark into a fully fledged Divinity, and gain access to the Divine Realm, the world of the Gods.
If a Devil has taken interest in that man, then that means that they think he can assist their own Divinity progress in some way right?
“I do not know. Unlike the vast majority, I am a Born God, my knowledge of the process of building Divinity is entirely secondhand. I have not heard of any way that a human could assist with it, but that is irrelevant. If there is a Devil backing that man, then they have plans for him. I would recommend that you stay far away, and do not engage with them. You’re having enough trouble with your own task, there’s no need for you to get caught up in a Devil’s scheme.”
Yeah, that’s fair. I sighed in response. I took a look around my shop. Decades of work, strewn all about haphazardly. I let out a light laugh, it looks like I’ll finally get around to cleaning. I then waved my hand, putting every single object in my inventory space, and teleported away. The Capital was huge after all, so I wouldn’t have to move too far away to avoid the man in white. Just somewhere where they didn’t know how to find me. I did feel somewhat sorry that I wouldn’t get to see Duke again, as I was actually rather fond of the Gnome, despite having only met him a few times. However, if there’s one thing millennia of life teaches you, it’s how to handle goodbyes, no matter what form they may take.