"Dinner is on me!" Evelyn shouted as she busted through the door to Michelle's and Audrey's house, only to see Audrey comforting Michelle on the kitchen table. "What's wrong?" She asked.
Michelle swallowed before answering, "It's my uncle, Thomas."
Evelyn noticed that Michelle wasn't sad, but instead incredibly frustrated.
"Thomas always wanted to help others, no matter the cost. It's why he became a priest when everyone told him it's a bad idea. He's been on the verge of death for years, giving up his body to Valeria, so that she can suck his blood and control him like a puppet. And now, he comes here, wanting to destroy the one god that can offer him a better life." Michelle finished her rant.
"I... Can see why you're angry. After seeing what the tower can offer, I don't want to lose it either."
"Michelle was all excited earlier today. The kids learnt fast, and we wanted to go for another trip in the tower after you came back. Maybe learn a few new symbols, and climb higher." Audrey said.
"Sounds good to me, but I do first want to buy something good to eat with this gold." Evelyn said, jiggling the gold wholes she'd Sold the powder for. Both Audrey and Michelle snapped their heads up, shocked to see actual gold between Evelyn's fingers.
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I was observing tiny individual cell's, and the smallest of insects for clues on what caused life to gather and control magic. Earlier that day, I had proved that magic didn't cause consciousness, painstakingly removing all the magic from a crow. It had taken hours of intense concentration, bloodletting, infecting the crow with my carbon spheres, and keeping a magic vacuum around it at all times. Until eventually, I could no longer feel any magic in it. The crow didn't act any different from normal.
So with proper proof, I had started on figuring out one of the biggest question that had plagued the human mind, what caused consciousness. For that reason, I observed the insects and cells, from their birth and onwards, trying to figure out why they could manipulate magic.
For cells it took a few minutes before they started to attract magic, while insects took a few seconds after their conception. It kept baffling me, as I couldn't come up with any good reason that would explain the results. But it did at least confirm my fear, there definitely was something I couldn't sense.
After more testing with no differing results, I started thinking back to my death. I could clearly remember the mushroom, or nuclear cloud if my suspicion was correct, then I died painlessly. After that, all I could sense was incomprehensible noise, until I figured out what everything was. I built upon my knowledge, and then became able to sense organic molecules, and eventually life.
There just was one thing I couldn't understand. I still remembered my very first interactions with magic, and back then, I couldn't sense it at all. It had taken the course of a year for me to better sense it, as my understanding of what it could and couldn't do grew. It clicked, like lightning striking my domain. I could sense what I understood.
Over the next few seconds, or maybe minutes, I went through my memories. The theory explained much. It was why it took so much time for me to fully understand what the atoms around me were, from sensing them with mere theoretical knowledge, to intricate knowledge of every fiber of their being built on experience. Why I could sense entire cells not only as the parts that made them, but as the whole. It even explained why the humans could only manipulate relatively large objects, assuming the same rule applied to them.
If I could only understand what caused conscious thought, and the ability to manipulate magic, I could create life from thin air. Then my thoughts came to a halt with the second realization of the day. Could I be able to sense and manipulate gravity, spacetime, or reality itself if I had a good enough understanding of what they were? And what about things like emotions? Could I bend human minds to my will? I decided not to do that, even though that could be used to gain loads of magic, it was creepy. The thought just made me uncomfortable. So, I would gain all the magic the world had to offer, without resorting to slavery.
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Now that I had a new hint to the workings of my existence, I knew how to progress. I finally knew how I could figure out what I was missing.
In just three hours of concentrating on everything I even remotely imagined might cause consciousness and watching cells split, I finally felt it. The smallest sensation of something I hadn't felt before. Something infinitely small popped into existence inside the newborn cell, before it started rapidly moving all around its insides. Immediately thereafter the cell started gathering magic. I wouldn't have even noticed it if the thing, the consciousness, or maybe even the soul hadn't suddenly appeared out of nothing.
Something itched at the back of my mind, breaking my focus. Likely because I now knew what caused the magic draw, and what probably caused conscious thought, my senses had expanded without me noticing. So much in my domain felt off, and after just a second, I felt the same barely noticeable sensation in every single cell of my domain, rapidly moving all around them. With many insects and animals having one or more freely moving all around their brains. There were even a few just floating in midair, not even connected to anything as they remained stationary.
Though I could barely feel them, it was enough. I formed a small cell, and tore the consciousness out of it. It stopped gathering magic that very moment, allowing the magic to freely flow out of it. Then I pushed the consciousness back in the cell, and after a second, it continued as normal. I would have been laughing like mad if I could, instead my tower shook with my magic.
I didn't waste a second. I started destroying a bunch of the cells around me, recycling them, and their consciousnessess into the living body of a large crow. When I was done, it had already started gathering decent amounts of magic, but it was still basically braindead, not even capable of opening its eyes. It was missing a consciousness from its brain, so I took one floating in midair, and pushed it in with my magic. Nineteen seconds later, once the consciousness had quickly scoured every cell of the crows brain, its eyes snapped open.
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I spent the following hours creating more diverse life. I made small rats with tiny steel claws, giant grasshoppers and flies, all sorts of luminescent plants, rabbits, salamanders, snakes and everything else that could be found from my domain with slight modifications to their bodies, because why not. I filled all three floors with plenty of life, and redesigned the labyrinths to better suit them. All the while I kept a part of my focus on my very first truly alive animal, my pet crow.
It kept puzzling me. So far, the intelligence of my animals was determined by what I had taken the consciousness from. When I had given the body of a rat the consciousness from an amoeba, the rat just squirmed around randomly. Give something intelligent the body of a insect, and it quickly adapts to the body, only to freak out and remain still out of confusion. The best option was to put the consciousnessess in something that resembled their old bodies. But the crow, which had a consciousness that hadn't been attached to anything, was clearly intelligent and curious.
It adapted to its body rather quickly, and decided that learning how to fly was a good idea. It spent some time figuring that out, before it started exploring my floors. I was curious, so I didn't stop it. Then it found the vials of carbon spheres along with the runes and their explanations. The crow just stared at the writing, standing unmoving for a good minute before it half-jumped, half-flew away.
I followed it for a while, wondering what it was trying to do, untill I was distracted by new visitors stepping in my domain.
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Having finished their delicious meal, the trio had decided to leave the tower climbing for the following day. All of them had stomachs much too full to go into a potentially dangerous spire.
The next day, after Michelle had finished her lessons, in which Evelyn had decided to take a part of, the two of them went to get Audrey, and headed for the spire. They planned to follow their earlier grass path to the second floor, where they'd try to find more of the black dust, and new symbols to use. The moment Evelyn stepped in, she realized they'd need a new plan.
The labyrinth walls were covered in some sort of glowing moss and vines, the leaf path they had made was gone, and from the distance, echoes of scampering claws bounced in Evelyn's ears.
"This is... different." Audrey said from behind Evelyn, before they walked deeper in.
Fortunately, the first floor wasn't much different, other than a few rats they encountered, and the fact they could see without the use of a torch.
The second floor however... was more dangerous, which was made clear when a human sized grasshopper tried to eat Michelle. There were a few more huge insects on the floor, but the most dangerous encounters still were the stone golems.
After an hour on the second floor, they finally found a new symbol. It was an odd shape, like an elongated semicircle with two lines attached to it at its base, and one line at its peak. After a bit of experimentation, none of them had any idea what it did. Even so, they drew the symbol in a small booklet they had bought with Evelyn's gold, before continuing exploring. Soon after that, Evelyn shouted in warning as she heard the flapping of wings, moments before a large crow landed before the group, curiously staring at them with one eye.