Crunch, shuffle, crunch.

The snow under my feet has only stacked a few inches. Not enough to impede my movements through this hike, but enough so that every step of mine can be heard, the resulting noise resounding through the mostly silent woods surrounding me. A certain feeling of peace wafted through the trees, that same sense of quiet satisfaction that you can only really find during the first snowfall of the year. Delicate flakes gently falling through the air, blown off of tree limbs by a cool breeze. Not strong enough to genuinely say that it’s windy, but enough to cause the powdery snow to stir up.

Ever since my Baptism, my first night with Sophia, the event where I lost my eyes and received my Markings, I have been relatively immune to the discomfort found in changes in temperature. After all, my soul has been touched by True Flame, the Aspect of Reality that is the very concept of Fire itself. Now, this doesn’t mean that I can channel Sophia’s Aspect of Desire’s Flame with no risk to myself. After all, her Flame only ever came into direct contact with my eyes and my soul, and the rest of my body was only strengthened as a result of repairing the damage caused by containing the sheer amount of power of an Aspect of Reality within myself.

Think of it this way, imagine the soul as an indestructible balloon, and the Aspect of Flame as some sort of red paint. This red paint absolutely coated the deepest parts of my soul, but the paint never actually made it to the outside of the soul. Now imagine the body as a kind of container, holding the indestructible balloon. So much red paint was inserted into the balloon, that the container that is my body started developing cracks, and nearly crumbled from the internal pressure. However, by fixing these cracks after the pressure died down, the container became far firmer and stronger as a result. This is why my body became so much tougher as a result of the Baptism. However…the red paint still never touched outside of the balloon, or, in other words, it never coated the container.

This means that while my soul may now be completely immune to the effects of channeling Desire’s Flame, my body is not. This is why I’ve spent the past two years constantly practicing channeling Sophia’s mana from her soul to mine, and then from my soul directly into the clothing crafted from my Dreamsilk. In the hopes that I will one day be able to wield Desire’s Flame even as a mortal human. However, this begs the question, if the container was never coated in red paint, or rather, if my body was never directly Marked by the Aspect of Flame during my Baptism, then why am I fireproof? Shouldn’t it just be that my soul is fireproof, while my body can still burn?

The answer to this seems to be something both extremely simple, and yet extremely confusing at the same time. Basically, from what I can tell, it boils down to a certain genre of Magical Law that I’ve been theorizing about, and that I’ve been tentatively referring to as Authority. You may remember that during my experiments, I noticed that Sophia and Sean were not nearly as affected by gravity as Veronica was. From this, I inferred that something about being Titled causes natural laws to not affect you as stringently as they affect others. The theory that I had come up with is something like changing the height of your State of Existence. As your own State of Existence increases, the less that Natural Laws affect you.

My theory is that as you increase your State of Existence, from normal to Titled, from Titled to Whatever comes next, all the way up to Godhood, you gain a certain amount of Authority, which is what you use when you manipulate an Aspect of Reality. Theoretically, this Authority could also be considered something like a precursor to Divinity, or maybe even just a watered down version of Divinity itself. The reason that I share all of this, is that my theory is that by being Marked by Sophia’s Aspect of Flame, even though only my soul came into contact with it, I have been granted a certain amount of this Authority over flame.

This Authority is what would potentially allow me to Channel Sophia’s Aspect, and by possessing this Authority, while it’s not enough to completely protect my body from the semi-divine Aspect of Flame, it’s more than enough to prevent normal flames from harming me. If Sophia is something like the Queen of all Fire, who can never be harmed by the flame, then I would be something like the Prince of Fire, who can only be harmed by the flames of the Queen directly. Of course, if another Titled manipulating the Aspect of Flame were to come along, I would also be vulnerable to their flames, however, Titled should be extremely rare on this world, if not downright nonexistent.

This means, for all intents and purposes, I am completely fireproof on this world. Not only that, but the Authority of Flame is something that lives within my soul, constantly sending warmth flooding through me. As a result, ever since undergoing the Baptism, I have never once felt discomfort as a result of the temperature. Hence my current state of walking through the snow, completely cozy despite wearing only thin sweatpants and a hoodie, and completely barefoot.

After two years of development, I have produced a truly absurd amount of Dreamsilk, and besides crafting additional versions of my Magellan, I have mostly used it to update all of our wardrobes, gaining experience in the art of tailoring. After all, I’ll need to coat the outside of the spacesuits in Dreamsilk, and I can’t risk any sort of imperfections in them. In my latest version of my own outfit, I’ve added several enchantments to greatly improve my own quality of life.

Adorning the pocket on the left side of my sweatpants is a rather sizable battery, and attached to that battery by my golden circuits down the side of my leg are various enchantments for:

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Air Conditioning: Not for the temperature control aspect, but as a constant source of clean air no matter what environment I end up in.

Stealth: The ability to dial my entire being into a different placement on the light spectrum, so that I can only be seen in ultraviolet, without having to actually spend my own mana to do so.

Self Cleaning.

Self Repair.

And Noise Cancellation: The ability to store any sound I make as Mana, and then transform it back into sound whenever I want.

Then, on the inside of my three pockets, right, left, and Hoodie, I’ve placed a stitched in box enchantment, commonly referred to in standard fantasy books as an Item Box enchantment, for storage purposes. Basically, when I put my hands in my pockets, I can pull out any item that I have placed in any of the three storages. Generally speaking, I’ve been placing all of the various enchanted tools that I come up with in the storage connected to my right pocket, all of my various weapons in my left pocket, and my hoodie pocket is connected to everything related to project Horizon.

However, the two new enchantments on my hoodie are the biggest improvements that I’ve made to my outfits so far. On the front, over the left of my chest, I’ve sewn in the image of a plug that you generally see in a bathtub or a sink. By sending out mana from the battery and then activating this enchantment, all of the surrounding environmental mana is pulled in along with the original mana that was released. Yes, I have finally found the first step in creating a Mana Generator. Now, it still has some issues, like the fact that I need to manually release mana from my battery every time I intend to use this enchantment, but it’s definitely still an excellent start.

Whenever I use the Plug enchantment, I get about double the mana that I sent out from the battery, meaning, if my battery is half empty, and I send all of the remaining mana out in a wave, then use my plug enchantment, I end up with a completely charged battery. This process does take about ten minutes where I can’t move, or I risk destabilizing the whirlpool of mana that forms and drains into the plug enchantment that then connects to the battery, but 10 minutes is honestly way better than the hours it originally took to refill all of my batteries. Not to mention the fact that things like my Loom or my Spinning Wheels don’t really move around in the first place, so I can just start everything off then leave them alone, meaning that the number of batteries that I actually have to inconvenience myself to fill are extremely low, especially since my Magellans all function as charging docks, so by filling those batteries, I’m also charging the hundreds of knives that I’ve made.

The other advancement that I’ve made in relation to the Plug Enchantment is that the battery that it’s connected to not only connects to the circuit going down the left sleeve of my hoodie, but also to the battery on my left pocket of my sweatpants, and the Storage enchantment in my right pocket. Meaning, I’ve successfully made my enchantments cross from one item, to a completely separate one. This may not sound all that impressive, but it is something that I absolutely needed to figure out for how I plan to make my spacesuits.

Now, the second big enchantment on my hoodie takes up the entire back of it, and is a slightly tricky one. A long time ago, when I was trying to figure out how to make my loom, I tried out an enchantment where I had engraved a spider. I couldn’t tell exactly what this enchantment was doing, but I definitely could tell that it was causing the stick that I engraved the spider into to interact in some way with the Dreamsilk. At the time, I had hypothesized that if I put this enchantment directly into Dreamsilk, I’d be able to figure out what exactly it was doing, but I only somewhat recently ended up in a situation where I had enough Dreamsilk to spare for experimentation.

What I found is that my Spider Enchantment…it allows me a certain amount of direct control over the threads that I create. Rather than simply craft clothing with it, it allows me to manually manipulate the threads of Dreamsilk into my own sort of Web that I can command as I wish. Does this mean that I’ve somehow cheated my way into Manipulating my Aspect, rather than simply Manifesting it? No. After all, it’s not Dreams that I’m directly manipulating, but Dreamsilk. However, as far as I can tell…once I figure out how to actually use the Dream side of Dreamsilk, rather than just wearing it as cloth, this Spider Enchantment of mine will most likely provide me with a truly insane amount of control over it.

As of right now, I only have two real uses for the Spider Enchantment, but they’re both absolutely indispensable. The first use is that I’ve been storing several spools worth of thread inside of my soul, and through the Spider Enchantment, using them to capture and restrain any targets within a radius of about 10 yards. While practicing this move, as you could imagine, I semi-constantly hummed the Spider-Man theme song under my breath. I also wanted to learn how to swing from them, but given that I can already fly, that would be rather pointless to learn.

The second use, however, allows me to completely unravel the things that I’ve made from Dreamsilk, and return it to its original cloud-like state. This has made it so that rather than just having several useless extra sets of the same outfits, I’ve been able to reuse the materials for all of the old outfits, and not end up wasting them.

I thought of the years that I’ve spent here on this planet, and how my appearance has evolved as I’ve been exploring it.

“First, I probably looked like a pretty normal hiker, then, after a few months of traveling, and constantly abusing my poor original clothes, I started looking more like fuckin Tarzan. Then, I started making leather clothes and shit, so I ended up looking like a stereotypical Fantasy Ranger, then I started wearing a blindfold along with my leather clothes and that bearskin cloak I used to have, and I probably just looked homeless. Then I got the sweatpants and hoodie, now giving me a blind modern man vibe. Soph, be real with me, on a scale of 1-10, how ridiculous do I look?”

“If we assume 1 to mean not ridiculous at all, I’d have to say 4. Though that’s not really due to the outfit that you’re wearing, and more so the fact that you’re blind and deaf, yet seemingly moving around on your own, and also the fact that you refuse to wear shoes. Oh also the fact that the pure white of your clothing just so happens to perfectly blend into the snow all around you, making you look like you’re just a pair of feet and a face wandering around the woods. Other than that I’ve got no complaints.”

Oh yeah. I kinda forgot that part. I lifted my leg up and looked down, to see that she was perfectly correct. My leg genuinely does kinda look like it’s just not there, and all that exists is a floating foot suspended in midair. Gotta say, it looks just a little-

Extremely obvious? Out of nowhere, the white of my pant leg was all of a sudden extremely noticeable against a wood paneled flooring, the snowy forest around me completely gone. Next thing I knew, I heard a familiar voice calling out,

“Daddy! You’re home so early!!”