Headquarters of Milkway’s Orion Arm invasion corridor.
I take a deep breath as I step toward the Grand Arch Druid. I may have been promoted and put in charge of Earth’s portal in full even after the invasion started, but constantly bringing bad news to your superiors isn’t very conducive to a long life span.
However, delaying would only make the problem worse. So I knock three times on the solid wood and perfectly carved work of art that makes the door to his office.
Unlike what I would have seen if I walked to the other compounds for other races, I can feel the life infused in the wood, still connected to the ground by a tiny thread to keep it luscious and presentable. It needed no oil, varnish or any other form of treatment, only that a talented druid artisan shape it correctly and periodic maintenance by a druid with even minimal control.
A small rustling from inside and I’m fully alert, as I run through my message one last time in my mind.
“Come in.”
I push the door forward as the bolts locking it retract seemingly by themselves. With a small bow for brevity's sake, I dive right in.
“Grand Druid. I’m a bearer of bad news. Satomi of the Bright Leaves has fallen.”
I wait patiently as his mind whirls for a moment, his knuckles pop and whiten and I can see his temper threatening to rise before he gets it under control. Then the question we both knew was coming arrives:
“How?”
“You know that what we can get from the invasion force is limited, especially this early on, but our best guess so far is that soon after the last transmission they were attacked. I mean their decision was contented. Not pushing out just yet seems unthinkable for most of our commanders. But all the lone scouting efforts failed and their magical scrying efforts showed severely limited utility. Satomi is probably the most talented early integration general of our Elven coalition of planets, so I have to trust that his decisions had more basis than they managed to tell us.”
“Get on with it.”
“I apologize. After his last letter, for a full 24 hours, there was silence, which is fairly unusual and then two words: “devastating attack”. Probably a newbie on the control that didn’t know the limitations and tried to send it without checking how long it would take instead of following the proper codes.”
“Then how do you learn of his death?”
“The goblins send a missive of their own twenty minutes ago and though it isn’t proof, after those two words…. I think they correctly interpreted their own messages.”
“He was talented, but I will come down in time and meanwhile we can just sand in someone to hold the post. Any luck on pushing the system?”
“No, and this isn’t all bad news. We got the worse of it, but after hearing of the attack on the goblins, I sent a missive to the other invasion headquarters and at least one more has been attacked.”
His eyes lock with mine.
“It was a good initiative to delay the message a few minutes to get proper information given that it wasn’t anything time sensitive, just don’t make a habit of it.”
I dry swallow and nod, as he wrings me out of every drop of knowledge that I have with a proper accounting of Satomi’s last letter.
Well, I’m slowly getting used to it. Now, I just have to hope that the humans don’t come up with anything more to throw any more wrenches in our plans.
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Nash’s POV
The following days go on as we expected. There weren’t a lot of intricacies and my book covered them all in detail years ago.
The end of the month arrived and the second wave of people arrive from the instance. Plenty simply didn’t pay at the end of the month, but many more simply wanted to come back early. Millions of people popped out near the thousands of cities and villages that the system constructed and we helped to get them in good working order.
Shock and incredulity are still rampant like in the first wave and this grows our population by roughly 5 fold. Instead of something in the near 2% of humanity, now around 10% of living humans are back. 600 million people. An unfathomably large number that we had no way to control if we wanted and this time teams of people much more well organized from powers all across the board were trying to reestablish the old ways of power or create spin offs. While most of humanity would have likely followed them under any ordinary circumstances, they didn’t have our infrastructure or knowledge. With Pando’s village and a month to get ahead of them, herding the millions of cats around the world became just barely within our capabilities. Most groups tended to trust us more than their old allegiances given how well organized we are and how we dealt with everyone. Though many other new groups started to ‘go their own way’.
Nationality, political parties and so much more had simply been left by the wayside almost instantly in the instance, only for the vocal fractions of the population to try and bring them back on earth. That probably had something to do with geography. Seeing old friends, neighbors and even the occasional reminder of their old homes was something powerful that a few tried to use to their advantage, though luckily most only used those memories to help herd their own cats while working with us.
I can almost feel in the air, proto identities floating, trying to sping Aether fields. I try not to pay too much attention, but I can’t help myself but to crush the ones that pass over my head with songs of dissonance. No matter what I did there would always be a few that wanted to look at someone else and put all their problem on something external. Hell, even I did that sometimes, but if I could help it, I wouldn’t let Aether be conscripted into a power to influence others into hatred or similarly dark paths.
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Pando takes notice of my actions and he replicates some of what I do all over the world, even as his own efforts to learn higher and higher levels of Aether control seem to bear fruit. If right now even without controlling Aether his very soul could bandage my injuries, what amazing things could he do if his control of Aether grew to be greater than mine?
Then my mind comes back once again to Aster. Her life span running out.
In the most fundamental sense, the problem was that the system was withdrawing from her. Conceptually I knew that it couldn’t and maybe even that it shouldn’t freely give eternal life for everyone devoid of restrictions, but the artificial limitation on her race and instance origin grated at my nerves.
Those feelings however are very far from being able to help her. What I probably could learn to affect in shorter order were the symptoms, that in a roundabout would actually cause her death.
It wouldn’t come in a day or a month, but her time was growing shorter and either a slow decline in Health or her very heart seizing from lack of stamina would be the same as death.
Mana, she could do without while I didn’t figure out another solution.
Health I could just heal when she got injured. Even most healers could probably get her back to full health, when we finally get one.
However, stamina is a different beast. Even with the constant injection, Vigor couldn’t be replace it… or could it?
I inherited the resource from Pando that somehow ‘created’ it even before the system or something similar enough that it made little difference after the full transition of the system. This infinity capability of passing through people’s polls without causing harm or being rejected was probably its most useful feature.
Soon after the system arrived, I without conscious thought learned to completely replace my stamina with it.
I adopted it into one of MY resources.
Replacing two of the resources carried for some reason a fundamental danger that I probably couldn’t conceive of and I only survive by sheer luck before getting my third, but for someone that wasn’t trying to avoid taboo things and just wanted to live longer, the lack of danger of wielding a single special resource seems like the way forward. Or at the very least it would give me the time to research another option.
How to guide her into adopting Vigor entirely is the real question.
If it had been simply a question of wishing it or random chance, the centuries everyone spent in my inner world, as Aspen gifted Vigor to everyone regularly would have made a few switch resources. I look at the stream from Pando, who had taken it upon himself to fill Aster up when she was in range. Helpful, but she can only tangentially use it to lessen her stamina drain ever so slightly.
Her body had grown too used to the system. All her movements were powered by stamina and stats provided by the system. She had never lived outside the system, not like myself. And outside of the system, she wouldn’t have lived even a fraction of this time.
Hours pass as I keep ruing through my mind scenarios and testing things, but then a light bulb explodes in my mind, flashing so brightly that it almost blinds me.
“Her soul.”
I reach out with my own and let go of all my senses, including my perception field and I approach her.
Something seems wrong, as I brush my soul against hers. But I use my senses, to not only locate but knock on the door and somehow she recognizes me.
Her soul is a tiny fragile thing a dozen meters wide. As I touch it, I phase through almost instantly. Even this wisp of a soul seems to be shrinking. Not in a visual way that I can measure, but that is the sense, the echoes of memories tied to it compressing the Aether constructs she has.
She doesn’t have conscious awareness of her soul like I do, let alone the stats to allow dexterous control, but her mind is simple compared to humans and everything she does happens on multiple dimensions. So I can still feel the waves of emotions as our connection deepens. Inside, the entire thing is filled to the brim with Aether constructs. Instead of nearly invisible lines, made with technical pens and complicated apparatuses, to produce impossibly precise lines of perfect thickness and direction, symbols wider than my hand fill every little corner, and I’m squeezed between the threshold and the thousands of runic like symbols of Aether filling the place.
I can feel the system’s touch in their creation, but it is like an old dot matrix printer with splotchy ink versus the best laser printer. Sure both are machines, but one is precise. This entire thing looks like giant plastic runes pieced together like a poor man’s lego, instead of what I had come to expect from the system.
But this isn’t just the quality of our constructs as system users compared to the rabbits, there is something more going on. From the constructs that I analyzed mine were the smallest and had the best quality that I remember, while most other people were just one or two steps below with larger runes, but still very small letters. And although I didn’t observe them directly, I would guess that the Titan’s Aether constructs were almost at my level.
Excitement at the discoveries, though what it is would not be obvious at a casual glance, I mentally note down that I would have to look at many more people’s souls and increase my perception and control along this avenue to learn what I wanted to know.
I try to shrink my ‘body’. From normal body size, I got to about a foot tall before squeezing between larger cracks. But this reduction of size takes effort. It’s different than when I tried the same inside my own soul. Before I was just switching my perspective, now I fundamentally changed.
As I think about it, I realize that the distances that I spout in my head mind may not have anything do to with reality. Something else to investigate.
As I explore, for the first time I get an actual glimpse of the fine structure of an Aether construct.
Here there aren’t even a hundred thousand ‘runes’ in her whole soul.
Then it strikes me that the creatures that the system made to populate the instance simply couldn’t support anything more than they did. Sure it was intentionally fazing them out after they reached arbitrary limits, but it created these minuscule souls and filled them with constructs that took up every smidge of space.
After running over everything twice trying to memorize the basic structure, though later I would make a proper diagram, I drag my own pure Aether in and a bit of soul scruff that I had laying around before I get back to experimentation.
The nearly gaseous Aether runes constructs are all around me and I find something that looks to be a connector. That seems to be the safest place to experiment.
I should probably find some way to make her stamina pool work with Qi, but this feels even more important, though a hint of a warning in the back of my mind tells me that messing with system constructs is like touching live wires. Great if I’m NOT grounded and I’m only touching one wire. But if I close the circuit, all that untapped potential will go through my body seizing my heart and charring flesh.
I touch just one wire. All my control goes into the attempt as I smooth out the Aether weaker than a twisted dried hair strand that I had no hope to strengthen.
My actions lead to connection. A linking of our souls that no distance apart could split.
Then the gaze of the system just outside her soul descends and its disproving nature fazing through into her soul with no hindrance.
“Oh, shit.”