“Thomas curled into a ball at the base of the cliff, tears streaming down his face. The low growls of the dire wolves echoed through the trees as they closed in.
He’d only wanted to see what was so special about the forest. How could a child live so close to the fabled Geistwood and not be curious? His grandfather always said “Curiosity killed the cat, boy. Learn from its mistake.” Now he knew why.
The boy whimpered as he felt the breath of one of the wolves against his back. He squeezed his eyes shut; maybe if he couldn’t see them, they wouldn’t be able to see him.
Suddenly, for just a moment, a flash of purple light filled the clearing. It was so bright that, even facing away from it with his eyes closed, Thomas could still see it.
Slowly, fearfully, the boy raised his head. As he did, he saw that where there once had been wolves, there now floated a gently glowing ball of purple light. Of the wolves, there was not so much as a single hair.
“Are you lost little one?” the ball asked in a voice like a symphony. “Come, let’s get you home. Your parents must be worried sick.””
From an old Fer’sandi folk tale
13th Teril, Summer, 374th Year, 84th Era, 2nd Age (5 days later)
The fifty seventh floor of Elder Ashbourne’s tower was a cluttered, disorganised mess. Despite spatial enchantments more than doubling its floorspace from 400 to 900 metres squared, the room still felt too small.
In one corner, a small statue of a snake spat out a stream of water which flowed through the air. It spiralled around several nearby projects, before abruptly ending several metres off the ground and falling into a bucket that never quite filled all the way up.
Elsewhere, a group of small, purple birds staged an escape from their cages. Filing away at the bars with their claws before bursting out in complete silence and flying around the room. Then, at some indecipherable cue, they would fly at one of the windows and burst into multicoloured dust, only to reappear back in their suddenly pristine cages moments later.
Wherever one looked there was something bizarre. Whether it was a group of opening and closing boxes with too much space inside, a set of beakers mixing and moving strange liquids on their own, or a collection of antique guns being cleaned by floating cloths. It was impossible to avoid the fantastical.
At the center of it all, Joseph stood with his eyes closed, wearing a thick woollen lab-robe, as a cluster of platinum discs flickered with purple light under his left hand.
In his mind’s eye he formed the mana around himself into discs of the same shape, size and essential intensity as those before him. Then, with precision born from five centuries of practice, he slowly passed the mana discs through the corresponding platinum ones beneath his palm.
As they passed through, each circle of energy took on the nature and intent of the enchanting templates they shared space with, held back from warping the world by the logic Joseph impressed upon them.
After a few final tweaks to the slivers of mana, he picked up the first blank platinum disc from a tray to his right. With a twist of his will, he bound one of the clumps of mana to the piece of metal in his hand before doing the same with the others.
When he had completed the process for the last one, he released his grip on the room’s mana and stepped back, collapsing into the leather armchair behind him with a sigh. Lamenting the headache growing behind his eyes, he glanced at the finished set of array markers.
This was the fifty fourth set he had made in five days. The effort required, while quite small under normal circumstances, was almost too much for him after the damage he had done to his mind a week ago.
Controlling that much essence was for young elders; he tried to avoid doing it now that he was in the final sixth of his lifespan. His stats wouldn’t decay until the very end, but everything took more energy than it should. With his agility as high as it was, he could feel himself getting worse every week. He had decades left of course, but that didn’t make him any less tired.
“The final set is needed, Lord Elder,” said Marius from behind him.
With another sigh Joseph got back up and took off his lab-robe, leaving it draped over the chair before picking up the array markers and transferring them into his storage orb.
“We only just made it in time,” he muttered as he navigated around the various tables, heading to the small antechamber in one corner of the room.
He took his formal robe from the stand just outside and put it on, tying it at the waist with a sash of the same pale green as the robe itself. Once more dressed in his family colours, he stepped, with Marius, through the small room and into the lift contained within.
They soon arrived on the fifth floor, walking down the hall to the second door. Inside was a workroom which took up half the floor. The walls were lined with blackboards and the windows opposite the door were small and high. Workbenches were laid out in a grid, leaving plenty of room for movement, and racks of lab-robes lined the wall either side of the door.
At the far end of the room, Maria kept watch over two large tables, jotting down observations in notepad.
On the left table lay a body from which a constant sizzling noise emanated. Four clusters of array markers sat on the table around it, though only one set glowed with the purple light of active enchantments.
The second table on the other hand, had several hundred markers scattered across it, though again, only a few were active. Above this table floated a spiritual monstrosity.
A normal mind consisted of a dozen nuclei, to store the information a mind needed to function, with two or three in a state of change as memories were copied from the soul and discarded once used. Besides the nuclei, there would be two dozen or so disks slowly spinning around their centres, shifting the points at which the flows of animus entered them to change how information was processed. Tying all this together would be seventy-six tethers carrying animus from the various nuclei and disks to the central nucleus and back. The central nucleus in turn linked to the soul, spirit and body.
What hung above the table however didn’t come close to resembling that standard. Countless thousands of nuclei hovered in the spiritual plane, dwarfing the still excessive hundreds of disks.
Stranger still were the tethers, of which there were quite possibly millions. Dozens attached to each disk and nucleus before leading off in seemingly random directions. There may have been a central nucleus, but the whole thing was such an indecipherable mess that it was nearly impossible to tell.
Joseph strode up to right-hand table and set down the fresh set of array markers. The penultimate set flickered out as a purple glow ignited on the new one. The cycle was finally complete, the old sets at last having enough time to regenerate before they were needed again.
Despite exhaustion making the flow of his own animus sluggish, Joseph turned to join Maria. There was still so much work to do, after all.
???
After Fariel disappeared, Nathan’s mind drifted for a time before the pain started eating at the edges of his clarity. Trying to ignore the fact that he was alone again, he opened the Host-User Contract and jumped to the dotted line at the bottom.
When he focused on it, a copy of his name appeared in his handwriting, along with a notification asking him to confirm his consent. After selecting [Yes], he brought his status up again and looked through the stat definitions.
[Strength: The amount of force your body can exert.]
[Agility: The speed and efficacy of your nerves.]
[Vitality: The capacity of your body, mind, spirit and soul to stay alive.]
[Tempus: The speed at which you can think.]
[Scope: The maximum amount of information you can conceptualise at once.]
Hmm… if the notification he had gotten about his vitality increasing was an indication, he should be able to raise his other stats by pushing them beyond some limit. Being disembodied, he couldn’t really do anything for his strength and agility, but he was fairly confident he could try to increase tempus and scope.
Of course, before he could try, he would need to come up with some kind of method. Easier said than done while feeling like the assembled hordes of Genghis Khan were trampling over the soul that he apparently had. Nevertheless, he pushed through the pain to assemble a plan.
Training tempus would be more luck than anything, since he had no way to track time. He could probably still try to push himself to go faster at a repetitive task, but Nathan felt that scope would be an easier place to start.
He seemed to remember that the human mind could only picture something like five things at once. It seemed reasonable that there would be a limit, even if it was either more or less than he thought.
Assuming he was somewhere close to right, Nathan figured he should be able to raise his scope by picturing more than five things at once. Not really being in the mood for extreme creativity, he decided to start with six rocks and go from there.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Plan made, Nathan set about the complex and perilous task of imagining rocks. Almost immediately though, he realised that he wasn’t actually picturing six rocks, but rather two blurry lines which his brain claimed were two sets of three rocks. When he tried to make them more distinct, two or three would come into focus while the rest actually became fuzzier.
Now that he had something simple to concentrate on, the pain faded into background noise, albeit extremely loud, unpleasant background noise. Focusing on the, frankly quite ridiculous, challenge of imagining six distinct rocks, Nathan lost track of what little sense of time he had.
From moment to moment the image in his mind changed and morphed. At the start, the six rocks were all uniform blurs. However, over time he found his focus staying on the bottom four and the upper blurs shrank in size. By the time a set of notifications broke his concentration, he had honestly forgotten that he hadn’t started with four.
[You have pushed upon the boundaries of your mind, Scope +1.]
[You have gained the Visualisation skill.]
[Visualisation 1st Lvl 1: You are better at imagining sensations and learning to imagine sensations.]
It was certainly nice to know that he was on the right track. Nathan supposed that he should have expected to get some kind of skill but he didn’t exactly have much information to draw on.
For all he knew, the two skills he had, and the two that Fariel mentioned, were the only skills available. It didn’t seem very likely but it would be kind of funny if he managed to max out all of the skills that existed so easily. Setting those thoughts aside, Nathan returned to what was really important: picturing rocks.
With his new skill, and increased scope, the four brown blurs in his mind’s eye became much clearer. Rather than blurs they were closer to spheres. Ironically, this left Nathan with a problem. His original plan had been to picture increasingly large numbers of rocks until he reached ten scope.
Now however, he was faced with the question of how detailed the rocks should be. Would it even make a difference? More detail would still be more information. What made the decision for him in the end was a far simpler question. What would be more fun?
And so, Nathan set about adding detail to his rocks. One changed from brown to green as he decided it would be an emerald. Another turned white with vague lines across it as he turned it to marble and the third he made the shiny black of obsidian. When he came to the fourth, he ended up leaving it as a generic brown because he realised that his emerald had returned to a blur while he was thinking about the other rocks.
Falling once again into the rhythm of holding and losing his focus, Nathan let time drift past him. As he received more levels and stats the images in his mind became increasingly complex. The emerald gained facets and distinct edges, the lines in the marble became clearer and it slowly changed into a pillar rather than a ball. The obsidian lump developed a wavy pattern, based on Nathan’s faint memories of seeing it in a gift store somewhere, and the generic rock became vaguely conical as he formed it into a little mountain.
[You have pushed upon the boundaries of your mind. Scope +1.]x5
[You have gained a level in Visualisation.]x3
Even after he reached his goal of ten scope, Nathan decided to keep going until he reached level ten in Visualisation. Although, he didn’t understand why it was easier to improve his mind than his ability to visualise.
In the process of reaching the level cap for his latest skill, the images in his mind eventually developed into more than just detailed rocks. The emerald became the head of a silver staff with long, Chinese dragons carved into the metal. He probably got some of the details wrong but he was so far from caring that the thought barely crossed his mind.
The marble pillar morphed into an entire temple, vaguely reminiscent of the Parthenon but with fewer columns, and the chunk of obsidian grew into a shining, black sword.
Just before he got the final level he needed, he placed the temple on top of the mountain, which had gained snow, steps to the summit, and a ring of clouds around the middle. A statue he had put in the temple’s center stood tall, armed with a dragon staff and obsidian sword, its majesty only offset by its tiny, baby-like head.
Nathan had used his recently born cousin as a model. Although looked ridiculous, he was pleasantly surprised by how realistic he had been able to make it.
[You have gained a level in Visualisation.]x6
[You have reached level 10 in Visualisation. Increase your realm to level further.]
His target reached, Nathan took a moment to bask in how much better his mind felt. He could clearly picture ten objects at once, which he assumed was directly related to his ten scope. Thanks to Visualisation those ten objects were much larger and more detailed than they might have otherwise been. So long as he didn’t get too bogged down in extreme detail anyway.
His mountain, for example, only seemed detailed if seen from far away. He couldn’t picture the whole thing at once as it would look up close. Still, in spite of the pain he was in, he felt such a visceral sense of improvement that it almost made his absurd predicament worth it.
Eventually though, he turned his mind to improving tempus. The way he looked at it, he needed something that he could already do fairly well, which was both simple and had a series of concrete goals to reach.
Obviously, speed visualisation wouldn’t work. It was too hard to set a target. And while speed reading was possible, Nathan really didn’t want to re-read the host-user contract again.
Finally, after considering everything from reciting the alphabet to just straight speed thinking, he hit upon an idea so obvious that he felt like a bit of an idiot for not thinking of it sooner: maths.
It was simple enough. It had easily definable targets: finish x number of calculations. And, while he wasn’t anything special, he had the basic ability to do mental arithmetic.
That only left the question of keeping track of where he was and how fast he was going. For that, Nathan used an aspect of Visualisation that he’d discovered when he gave the mountain snow; The skill helped him picture any sensation, such as the cold, wet feeling of snow or, more relevantly, the sound of a (mostly) regular ticking.
Once he was confident that the ticking sound was consistent enough, he created an image of a two by five grid. His scope meant that for picturing actual separate numbers, he was stuck at around ten, though he had some wiggle room since detail wasn’t that important.
He filled the top line of the grid with one to five, then added a one just outside the table to the left. His plan was to do 1 times 1 to 1 times 5, then clear the second row and do two, then three and so on. At the same time, he would count the number of ticks each row took.
He wouldn’t be repeating the same calculations because, while the pain put a bit of a damper on his mathematical ability, that seemed like it would be too easy.
Consequently, he would soon be dealing with something slightly more difficult than the one times table. Nathan was hoping that having to count the ticks per row and do maths at the same time would also get him the multitasking skill that Fariel had mentioned.
Once everything was ready, he set to it with the same focus as everything else he’d done in the void. Nothing provided motivation quite like unimaginable agony. 1x1 is 1, 1x2 is 2, 1x3 is 3…
15th Thoril, Summer, 374th Year, 84th Era, 2nd Age (14 days later)
On a free-standing chalkboard that had been added to the workroom once the others were full, Maria scrawled notes around a diagram of one tiny section of Voidling’s bramble thicket of a mind. Voidling was the name they had given to the person Elder Ashbourne had summoned.
She ran a hand over her face as the ache in her mind grew just a little bit stronger. Before she could get back to work, she heard the clink of a cup and saucer behind her. Maria turned to see Marius pouring a cup of farin, condensation forming on the porcelain as the chilled drink filled it.
“One would think, Lady Adept, that a healer of the mind would understand the value of rest.”
“You’ve got me there, Marius,” she replied as she picked up the cup and took a sip.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” The butler said, “what makes designing a soul for Voidling so difficult?”
“It’s the redundancy, more than anything,” Maria answered, turning to the table where Voidling’s mind floated. “There’s so much wasted essence. Tethers that serve the same purpose, disks that only serve one and nuclei that store memories, of all things.
“A mind node that recorded all that would be so much larger than the other nodes that it would cause the soul to collapse from the imbalance. As a consequence, we’re forced to leave out parts of Voidling’s mind, which is…” she gestured at the blackboards full of notes and calculations, “difficult.”
“Of course,” Maria continued, “none of this will matter if Lord Elder Ashbourne can’t convince Ledal Ancient Dantor Elin to help. They’re the only Ancient with 3rd tier Creation outside of Eurus. Without an archon of Creation to make the Maw blighted thing, the design will be pointless.”
“Well,” Marius said, “let us not give up hope before we absolutely must.”
“You’ve got me again,” she replied, draining her cup of farin and swapping it for a stick of chalk. “I’d better get back to work.”
“Then I shall leave you to it, Lady Adept.”
???
The first few sets, naturally, only took Nathan a few ticks to work through. As he got to the teens, he started needing dozens of ticks per set, which he may or may not have been embarrassed by if he actually knew how much time that was. Eventually, as he finished 23x3, he received a set of notifications.
[You have pushed your mind to work faster. Tempus +1.]
[You have gained the Enhanced Time Perception ability.]
[Enhanced Time Perception 1st Lvl 1: Your perception of time is improved.]
[You have gained the Mathematics skill.]
[Mathematics 1st Lvl 1: You are better at doing and learning to do maths.]
[You have gained the Multitasking skill.]
[Multitasking 1st Lvl 1: You are better at multitasking and learning to multitask.]
That was more than he was expecting. The Mathematics skill he probably should have seen coming, but the Time Perception just wasn’t something he could have foreseen. Not that he was complaining, he had already altered his ticking to be a little more consistent.
Regardless, he didn’t see the point in pondering the intricacies of the system when he could be training four things at once. He took the time to adjust his table so that he was doing times 3 to times 7. There wasn’t much point in multiplying anything by 1 or 2. After that he was back to the crazy thrill ride that was grinding.
Over time he noticed that not only was his tempus increasing faster than the skills, like his scope had, but the Time Perception ability was faster as well. When he got to 159x3 he had maxed out both his tempus and Time Perception. That, as it turned out, may have been a mistake.
[You have gained a level in Mathematics.]x3
[You have gained a level in Multitasking]x3
[You have pushed your mind to work faster. Tempus +1.]x5
[You have gained a level in Enhanced Time Perception.]x9
[You have gained the 1st tier bonus for Enhanced Time Perception. Increase your realm to level further.]
[Enhanced Time Perception 1st Lvl 10: Your perception of time is improved. Your perception of time is not affected by your mental state.]
Nathan would have expected to be experiencing time slower than it was actually passing. The tendency for unpleasant situations to feel longer was pretty widely acknowledged after all. However, after getting the bonus for enhanced time perception, it was very clear that the opposite was true.
Because he could think through the pain, Nathan had assumed that he was thinking normally. With his latest ability though, he realised that what he would have previously guessed to be seconds, might actually be closer to minutes, though he had no real frame of reference.
Obviously, it was significantly more unpleasant to be thinking as if through treacle when you could feel how slow it was. It took Nathan a while to move past this new and unusual form of torture, not helped by the fact that he could feel exactly how long that was.
Eventually, after adjusting the accuracy of the ticking, as well as adding an entirely pointless grandfather clock to the background of his mental image, he managed to wrangle himself back on task. 159x4 is 636, 159x5 is 795, 159x6 is 954…