“The Accords of Fae and Unfae are known throughout the world but little of their content is common knowledge. For example, it is widely accepted that all major population centers must have a divine embassy. However, this stipulation is not present anywhere in The Accords.
Various sources suggest that the belief originates from during the reign of Emperor Lothril. Some may argue that the history of the embassies is not important. Personally, I feel that the more information we can gather on them the better.
Every day, hundreds of people make deals with Lady Mhyrra, and dozens offer blood to Lord Nocteus for some minor boon. Every week someone exchanges a coin of Lord Valeon with varying levels of effect. Nations have risen and fallen because of the gods and ignoring one of their most potent avenues to manipulate the world is plain foolishness.”
From “A History of the Gods” By Humphrey Miller
5th Maril, Spring, 375th Year, 84th Era, 2nd Age (2 days later)
The original plan had been for several different mind and soul cultivators to coordinate in connecting Voidling’s mind to his new soul. However, after Maria ascended to elder, that was no longer necessary. Any additional cultivators would provide more hindrance than help. New as she was, an elder was still an elder.
Maria, Elder Ashbourne and Ancient Dantor stood, or floated, in the fifth-floor work room. All of the tables had been moved to the edge of the room and Voidling’s mind now hovered in the center.
Ancient Dantor would create the soul, body and spirit as one, connected unit. Maria would then link the spiritual body to Voidling while Elder Ashbourne kept him alive.
One of the few ways that Voidling’s utter mess of a mind resembled a normal one was its shape. The mind, being only one part of a person’s spiritual body, would usually take the shape of an eggshell.
The spirit would then sit within. A complex tracery of aether essence forming a copy of the person’s nervous system, with a large clump in the head for the brain.
Resting in gaps within the spirit, would be the six nodes of the soul, which were connected to the mind, the spirit and each other by strands of sethir essence.
Needless to say, Voidling did not have a spirit or soul within his mind, but it did form the same egg-like structure as any other person’s. The central nucleus of a person’s mind would typically be at the tip of the egg, linking down to the mind node within the brain of their spirit.
The pseudo-central nucleus they had selected to treat as a central nucleus sat in a similar place within Voidling’s mind, albeit very slightly off center. All Maria had to do was connect that nucleus with the strands of sethir which Ancient Dantor would provide.
“Are you both ready?” Ancient Dantor asked the two elders. Maria took a brief moment to calm her mind before replying. The massive tide of mana that would pour through the room when they began could very easily be a distraction. As could the watching crowd of researchers.
They had removed the dividing wall between the two rooms on the fifth floor to avoid crowding. It would be unreasonable to bar the people who had worked on the project from observing after all.
“Then I shall begin,” the fairy said after the two elders had replied. He took a hold over about a tenth of the mana in the room, drawing it in to occupy the same space as Voidling’s mind. There it twisted and warped as it slowly changed into various soul, spirit and fauna essences, forming the living system that Maria would link to Voidling.
To the naked eye, a body slowly built itself up from tendrils of marrow, to bones, organs and muscles until it was finally covered by skin. For those watching though, it was an even more impressive feat. They knew that each and every sliver of flesh contained thousands of tiny balls of essence that had to be formed in just the right way. It was the sort of feat that only an ancient, with tens of thousands of stat points, could perform.
On the spiritual plane, the work was both more delicate and more hurried. Any mistake in the construction of the spirit or soul could cause the same cascading destruction they had seen in the early tests. Even if it didn’t, a faulty spirit could have deeply unpleasant long term side effects, a faulty soul even more so.
The most difficult part of the spiritual work was that the various parts of the spirit and soul each had to be created in balance. Where the physical body could be built up piecemeal, the spirit and soul would fall apart if the same were done with them.
The only blessing was that neither the soul nor the spirit needed to be made in accordance with Voidling’s physical laws. Not even the body node required the same complexity. The soul mages had worked with Ancient Dantor to design a method of creating a body node based on that of a new-born’s, which would take an impression of Voidling’s body before its structure became fixed.
When the ancient fairy was close to finishing, Elder Ashbourne grasped the majority of the remaining mana, and began channelling regeneration mana into both the newly formed living system and Voidling’s mind. At the same time, he deactivated the enchantments supporting his mind, allowing Maria to take up some of the slack, though most of the support was simply abandoned. Maria only held the soon to be central nucleus and its tethers together, allowing the rest to crumble and reform in the sea of restoration mana.
Moments later Ancient Dantor completed his work, allowing Maria to seize the three strands of sethir essence reaching out from the mind node, and begin the process of forming the connection. Naturally, it was not as simple as just plugging the sethir into the central nucleus.
First, Maria had to take pieces of filum essence from the collapsing tethers elsewhere in Voidling’s mind. Then she fashioned them into half a dozen new tethers, which were connected to the central nucleus and brought down to meet the three strands of sethir.
Using ambient fragments of the three spiritual elements, Maria then formed a series of compound essences along both the tethers and the sethir strands. After several minutes of delicate fusion, she connected two tethers to each filament of sethir, the progression of compounds forming a smooth transition from mind to soul.
Even then she wasn’t done. With the link made, Maria turned her focus back to the central nucleus. She slowly carved out the pathways needed for animus to flow down towards the soul, bearing a record of Voidling’s mind, before returning after it reached the point where soul and mind met. It was difficult work, taking all of her recently improved mental stats to complete.
As time passed, she grew increasingly weary, the effort just slightly too much for her. However, in accordance with the plan, the tenth of mana that Ancient Dantor had been using was seized by Elder Ashbourne once they were done with it, and used to restore Maria’s mind. The ancient fairy, meanwhile, drew in mana from further away than any elder could reach and released it, easing the process of the ambient mana redistributing itself.
Eventually, Maria finished carving the pathways, left only with breaking the thin barriers of arca essence, from which the nucleus was made, and allowing animus to flow down the new pathways to the soul. After taking a moment to check everything was right, she did just that.
Everyone present watched with bated breath as the flows started. Slowly, the parts of Voidling’s mind that were contained in his new mind node stabilised and Elder Ashbourne began to ease off the restoration mana.
As the last of the redundant pseudo-central nuclei crumbled away, a resounding cheer echoed through the room. They had actually done it. They had saved an impossible creature.
They would need to run a huge battery of tests to make sure everything was working. But for now, a celebration was very much in order.
Then, just as Maria was about to turn away, she noticed a tiny fragment of a tether appear from nothing. It didn’t form from ambient mind essence, it wasn’t created from mana, it just popped into existence. From that fragment grew a full tether, which formed a nucleus and even more tethers sprung out from there.
By that point, most of the other people in the room had noticed. They all watched in horror as ever more tethers sprung from nothing, growing and combining until they had reformed every part of Voidling’s mind that had fallen apart.
Then they tried to link back to the existing mind. The attempts at reconnection created a cascading failure through his mind which spread and grew until it reached the connection to the soul.
Elder Ashbourne had restarted the flow of restoration mana by that point, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. The link to the soul collapsed. That in turn, caused the soul, then the spirit to crumble.
In mere seconds, everything but the mind and body dissipated into ambient essence and they were left right back where they started. All they had to show for their work was a lump of body shaped fauna essence that barely counted as alive.
Stunned silence blanketed the room as they all stared at the utter failure with the same question in their eyes: what the Maw had happened?
???
Learning Sioran had been a challenge. And not just in the way that learning any new language was.
Sioran didn’t use anything resembling speech at all. Nathan was certain that he didn’t even have the senses to detect whatever the crazy language was using.
Fortunately, Fariel seemed to have accounted for this, so the first sections of the guide focused on the written language before moving on to how the weirdly detailed hieroglyphics related to the ‘spoken’ language.
Even then it was a struggle. The first few dozen words took as long to learn as the whole of Kathreshi. But Nathan soldiered on.
As he slowly worked his way through the guide, he got better at interpreting the swirling, shifting motions of what he eventually found out were aura and mana.
He knew that they were called that from comparing the words for them to words from the earlier guides. In the first guide, on Nocturnal, there had been a brief definition of what they meant, since there was no perfect equivalent in English.
Mana was a kind of ambient energy that was used in a branch of magic called sorcery. Aura was a mass of spiritual essence attuned to a given person’s spiritual body.
Neither explanation really helped much but Nathan supposed it was better than nothing. They did raise some questions though. Did he not have a spiritual body and thus couldn’t feel auras, or did spiritual bodies his world work differently? The definition of vitality seemed to imply that he did have a soul, but he couldn’t really be sure.
Regardless, Nathan pressed on with Sioran, slowly learning more and more words until, after getting several hundred words in, something strange happened.
[You have gained the Mana Control skill.]
[Mana Control 1st Lvl 1: You are better at manipulating and learning to manipulate mana.]
[You have gained the Aura Perception skill.]
[Aura Perception 1st Lvl 1: You are better at perceiving and learning to perceive auras.]
That was strange for various reasons, not least of which was that he had never manipulated mana in his life. But also because the skills had taken far longer to manifest than he had gotten used to.
After giving it some thought, Nathan suspected that interpreting aura and mana were part of perceiving auras and manipulating mana. That had allowed him to get the skills by just interpreting the sensations from the guide.
His guess for why they took so long to get was that since interpretation was only one component of the skills, it took him longer to generate the right kinds of sentiment.
He didn’t know for sure of course, so he stuck his questions and hypotheses in a small shack which he threw together on his mind street. Then he realised that he had a huge number of unanswered questions, and the shack grew into a small, still dilapidated, mansion before he finally got back to learning Sioran.
Armed with his new skills, he made better progress. And his speed only grew as the skills levelled up. However, by the time he reached the end of the Sioran guide, he was still two levels short of level ten.
Annoyingly, while the next guide was written in Sioran, it didn’t trigger the corresponding sensations of mana and aura when he read it. Offended by the idea of having skills that weren’t maxed out, Nathan set about rereading the Sioran guide.
Thankfully, he only had to read it through once more before he maxed both skills out. A quick bit of maths showed him that the tenth level of the skills had taken slightly longer to get than the first eight levels combined.
While he had known the later levels were much harder to get than the earlier ones, he’d never taken the time to work out just how much, though he really should have noticed after the maths training. It made him wonder how long it took to level skills while not in unbelievable agony.
Dumping the question in the question shack, Nathan moved on to the next guide. As he skimmed over it, slightly disappointed by the more mundane nature of the language, he wondered how high Fariel’s stats would need to be for him to make so many guides in one day.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
The next language was called Eternal, which seemed a little pompous to Nathan. Strangely, it had some similarities to Nocturnal, though they were more in the structure of the language rather than anything obvious.
Presumably he only noticed because of his Language skill. It certainly wasn’t the sort of thing he would have picked up on before. Musings set aside for later, he rolled up his non-existent sleeves and got to work.
By comparison to Sioran, learning Eternal was a breeze. In the time it took him to learn one Sioran word, even with high level mana and aura skills, he could learn a dozen words of Eternal. It was actually kind of exhilarating. It was almost as revelatory as when his Time Perception had reached level ten.
He had been so focused on the weirdness of the Sioran words that he hadn’t realised how obscenely complex they were. It was like the difference between learning to fly a plane and learning to ride a bike.
Revelling in the sheer simplicity, Nathan worked through the Eternal guide like a man possessed. Over time, a small corridor of nouns became an expansive ground floor, with wings of verbs and grammar rules. One floor became two, then three, and just as he was putting the finishing touches on a portrait of wet bark, which was distinct from dry bark and burnt bark (who didn’t need three words for bark), something strange happened.
For one thing, the pain was worse, it had been stuck in a consistent range for so long that he’d almost stopped noticing it. It was still there of course; it had just become so familiar that he didn’t think about it much. But in that moment, the pain was far worse than he remembered it ever being, to the point that it almost overwhelmed his 1st tier pain tolerance bonus.
Beside the pain though, his thoughts kept being disrupted. The most obvious effect was that parts of the corridor would flicker in and out of existence. It was as if the memory of their presence was gone for a moment before returning.
The biggest problem though, was how difficult it was to think. It seemed to take minutes just for him to understand that his thoughts were stuttering. But even that estimate could have been wrong; his time perception wasn’t working properly either.
Then, as he was slowly getting used to thinking through the disruptions, the pain grew to such a level that Nathan couldn’t even comprehend how bad it was. The only reason he wasn’t a mindless ball of agony was his pain tolerance ability.
He tried everything he could to distract himself, but the pain was too overwhelming. Images he conjured up crumbled away as the pain fluctuated wildly, drawing his attention back to it again and again. He tried doing simple calculations but it wasn’t monotonous enough to hold his focus against the pain. Not even running through words from the various languages he’d learned worked for long.
Just when he reached the point of cursing his pain tolerance for allowing him to experience this hell with any degree of coherent thought, he noticed something. Three tiny sensations. Next to the tsunami that was the pain they were almost nothing, but Nathan latched on to them like a drowning man to driftwood.
With the focus that he had cultivated over his time in the void, he gave the three little threads as much of his attention as he could. The pain never truly faded from notice, but with something mindless to concentrate on, it became slightly more tolerable.
As he followed the threads, Nathan could feel them more and more clearly. He was receiving system notifications at a rate that he hadn’t ever come close to before. He assumed that they had something to do with his increased clarity, but he didn’t want to check. Reading was beyond him.
Eventually, the threads connected to a ball made from slightly different stuff to the threads. After watching it swirl for a while, Nathan picked one of the threads leading further away from where he started and kept going. By the time he reached the next ball, he could vaguely feel the place where the threads had begun, as well as a total of six balls, including the two he had already found.
Not having the capacity to focus on more than a tiny segment of thread, he picked one that led away from the balls and followed that. The new thread eventually took him to a massive network of strands which were made from yet another substance.
It was as he meandered his way through that network that it happened. For just a few seconds, the pain completely disappeared. He could feel again, actual normal touch. The memory of laying on a smooth, tiled floor burned itself into his mind. Partly due to his enhanced memory, but mostly just from how unfamiliar it felt.
But, when he went to open the eyes that he suddenly had, the pain returned in full force. It was so extreme that he couldn’t focus on anything.
He was reduced to a tiny blip of awareness drifting in an ocean of suffering. His time perception told him that it only lasted for several seconds, but evidently, his first-tier bonus had limits, because it certainly felt longer to him.
Regardless of how long it took, the pain eventually faded back to the normal level and Nathan regained his capacity for thought. He spent a while just luxuriating in the relatively lower level of pain, before he realised how depressing that was.
After taking a while to ‘look’ at all the weird stuff he could see floating around himself with whatever new skill or ability he had gotten, he decided to actually check his notifications
[You have gained the Enhanced Aethereoception ability.]
[Enhanced Aethereoception 1st Lvl 1: Your sense of the spiritual plane is improved.]
[You have gained a level in Enhanced Aethereoception]x6
[Grade Error sentiment spike detected. Contacting Administrator.]
Well, that was completely insane. If his time perception was right, he had gotten seven skill levels in a few minutes. No wonder his pain tolerance couldn’t keep up. Maybe it would be a good idea to finally ask Fariel what was happening.
[Administrator Fariel: What did you do now?]
I didn’t do anything. Don’t you have access to files or something?
[Administrator Fariel: Yeah, yeah, I’m looking.]
[Administrator Fariel: Ok, so it looks like you experienced a level of pain that shouldn’t be possible, which in turn generated so much sentiment that you managed to exceed the grading for sentiment spikes.]
You do realise that I have very little idea what you’re talking about right?
[Administrator Fariel: Right. Ok. So, you can feel your mind now, yes?]
The weird tangle of shapes and threads, made of magical gubbins? That’s my mind?
[Administrator Fariel: It’s mostly made from mind essence, but yes. Your world doesn’t have anything like that. At least as far as I can tell. But when you got summoned to Kelric and the respective natures of our worlds butted heads, you spontaneously generated a mind.]
I was summoned?
[Administrator Fariel: Not intentionally. The ritual used was designed to summon inanimate objects from beyond the void. Unfortunately, since you don’t have a soul, you registered as inanimate.]
Well that’s one question answered at least. That’s why I can’t use aura perception even though it’s level ten.
[Administrator Fariel: How could you not know whether you had a soul or not? You have level seven Enhanced Aethereoception.]
Aside from the fact that I only got the ability a few minutes ago, having eyes is irrelevant if you don’t know what you’re looking at.
[Administrator Fariel: Fair enough. Anyway, the mind that you generated is, to be blunt, complete shit. It’s an inefficient, pointlessly complex mess. But its worst feature by far is that it experiences any direct interaction with itself as pain. Normally, only actual damage would hurt.]
So the constant pain is my mind rubbing against all this other stuff drifting around it?
[Administrator Fariel: Essentially. Normally it wouldn’t make a difference. One of the functions of the soul is to maintain a barrier that protects the spiritual body, which your mind is part of, from external influence, similar to your skin. Since you don’t have a soul though, nothing is protecting you.]
Lovely. Where did the spike in pain come from then?
[Administrator Fariel: That was the people who have been keeping you alive trying to save you. Unfortunately, that necessitated the creation of several new pathways in one of your nuclei, the balls, and as I mentioned, any interaction causes pain. The only explanation I have for the extreme degree of pain, is cross-reality nonsense. It really shouldn't be possible.]
I’m guessing that, whatever they tried, it didn’t work.
[Administrator Fariel: No. Your mind is too complex to fully record in a mortal soul. And, as long as part of your mind exists in a stable form, the rest will constantly reform, which will collapse anything that they use to stabilise it.]
And you wondered why I didn’t want to know before.
[Administrator Fariel: I know that this probably isn’t what you want to hear, but it actually gets worse.]
How could it possibly get worse than almost certain death?
[Administrator Fariel: Do you remember the ability that multiplies your sentiment generation by ten?]
Echoes of the Barren Cosmos, right? I’m guessing that’s part of why I level so fast.
[Administrator Fariel: It is yes. It does increase the training sentiment that you generate. But it also increases all other sentiment. For example, your blood would be worth far more to a vampire than your level would suggest. The important sentiment though is existence sentiment.]
Wait, you have vampires?
[Administrator Fariel: What? Yes. Look, let me finish. Existence sentiment is the foundation of memory, but it also causes aging. It builds up in a part of the soul called the history node until the node gets too big and causes the soul to collapse. The only reason you haven’t had trouble already is because you don’t have a soul. The sentiment doesn’t have anything to latch on to and just drifts off.]
So even if I did get saved, I’d only have a tenth of the lifespan I should have because this history node would fill up ten times faster?
[Administrator Fariel: It wouldn’t necessarily be too bad. If you levelled a class high enough and trained your vitality, you could still live for a century or two. With ten times the sentiment generation, you would actually stand a decent chance of success.]
Doesn’t that mean that I should be able to live for millennia at that level?
[Administrator Fariel: Yes, well… to live for two centuries you would need to reach the pinnacle of the elder realm, and have your vitality trained to the limit for that realm.]
And how many people actually manage that?
[Administrator Fariel: To be blunt, almost no one. From a human population of one billion, there are 43 elders currently living. Excluding vampires.]
Those are some slim odds. What about becoming a vampire, would that work?
[Administrator Fariel: It wouldn’t be easy. The standards are quite high and nine out of ten turnings fail, but it’s definitely an option. Now that I think about it, you could become the servant of a Dominari vampire. They can make their servants ageless, though you would be bound to them for the rest of your life.]
So even that isn’t exactly a get out of jail free card. At least I have options, small mercies and all that.
[Administrator Fariel: What’s a… never mind. How are you getting on with the languages by the way?]
Hmm? Oh, it’s been going well. Eternal is a bit dull after learning Sioran, but being back at a normal speed is nice.
[Administrator Fariel: HOW ARE YOU ALREADY ON ETERNAL?]
All caps? Really? Didn’t you read my files? Aren’t you also reading my mind? That’s still weird by the way.
[Administrator Fariel: The status is in a different section. Let me just check... oh. I knew you had Enhanced Aethereoception levelled up, but the rest of this… this is insane.]
I have literally no frame of reference for the sanity of my status.
[Administrator Fariel: A normal, mortal person will have around six to ten skills and abilities, and maybe one skill will reach level ten before they die. Even most seekers would only have two or three level ten skills and abilities by the end of their life. You already have 15.]
What normal person would be in this situation? What normal person would be able to take advantage of it? Actually, that reminds me, how am I even remotely close to sane?
[Administrator Fariel: You have a point. There have only been four other void-walkers, and they all died within minutes. You are impressively anomalous. As for your sanity, one of the things keeping you alive is an enchantment that pumps huge amounts of restoration mana into your mind at all times. That both stops your mind collapsing and keeps you sane. Well, mostly sane. I’ve got to go now. The extreme nature of the incident gave me a bit of wiggle room on the time, but I can only push things so far. Bye.]
Well… Fariel was as abrupt as always. Alone in the void again, Nathan decided to do the only reasonable thing: train his new ability to level ten and then get back to learning languages.
Hmm… I think I see what he meant by mostly sane.
5th Saril, Spring, 375th Year, 84th Era, 2nd Age (5 days later)
Joseph stood in his garden, looking over the city. The damage had been repaired and the plants had been restored, but his aura filled the space with misery and frustration.
It was over. They had made three more attempts. For the first two they had tried to reinforce Voidling’s mind to prevent the rest of it from reconnecting.
Before the final attempt, in a desperate last-ditch effort, they had destroyed his body, hoping that the regenerating mind was originating there. It didn’t work.
“You need to let it go, Joseph. Half the council think you’ve gone mad,” Arthur Maxim said from beside him. The elderly councillor leaned heavily on his cane as they looked over the city below, his white hair almost reaching the floor. “You have done more than anyone could ever ask of you. The longer you wait, the more the poor creature will suffer.”
Joseph smiled sadly at his old mentor, “It doesn’t feel like enough. he didn’t ask to come here, but now he’ll die because of our technological incompetence.”
Arthur gave him a flat look, “You aren’t some newly ascended adept, Joseph. You’re old enough to look past your emotions. It’s one thing to do all in your power to fix a mistake, but it is another thing entirely to pursue that to the point of causing additional harm.”
“I wish I’d never translated that ritual,” Joseph muttered with a sigh, “But, when you’re right, you’re right. Come on, let’s go turn off the enchantment.” As he made to turn away from the city, the musical voice of Ancient Dantor sounded from behind him.
“There is one thing no one has suggested yet.” The fairy floated over to the edge of the garden, where they were stood.
“I fail to see what could have been missed in two seasons of discussion,” said Arthur, shooting a frustrated look at the hovering archon.
Amusement filled the garden through the fairy’s aura, “Most humans would not dare be so blunt with an ancient.”
“Most humans aren’t eight hundred and eighty-six years old. Spit it out,” the grumpy elder said, gesturing at Dantor with his cane, before having to catch himself on it.
Dantor chuckled briefly, before forming a single word, “Mhyrra.”
Joseph stared at the fairy in shock, “What could I possibly have that would interest a god?”
“I knew the Kathreshi didn’t put much stock in witchcraft, but I didn’t know it was this bad. You really should educate yourselves better.”
Arthur glared at Dantor, “Are you here to insult my city, or to help?”
“I suppose that was a bit far,” they replied in the same jovial tone. “You may indeed, not have anything she wants, but if you never ask, you will never know. How hard is it to visit the divine embassy?”
Joseph found himself suddenly fascinated by the floor as Arthur coughed awkwardly before answering, “Kathresh, ah… Kathresh doesn’t have a divine embassy.”
The wave of utter bewilderment in the fairy’s aura spoke for itself.
Status
[Status]
Name: Nathan Emmanuel Fellwood
Age: N/A
Species: Void-walker
Realm: Mortal
Level: 0
Strength: 3 (3/10)
Agility: 2 (2/10)
Vitality: 10 (10/10)
Tempus: 10 (10/10)
Scope: 10 (10/10)
Stat Points: 0 (0)
Achievement Points: 2
[Class/es]
N/A
[Skills 8]
Aura Perception 1st Lvl 10
Language 1st Lvl 10
Mathematics 1st Lvl 10
Mana Control 1st Lvl 10
Memory Technique 1st Lvl 10
Multitasking 1st Lvl 10
Reading 1st Lvl 10
Visualisation 1st Lvl 10
[Abilities 9]
Echoes of the Barren Cosmos 1st (Innate)
Enhanced Aethereoception 1st Lvl 7
Enhanced Memory 1st Lvl 10
Enhanced Time Perception 1st Lvl 10
Insomnia 1st Lvl 10
Isolation Tolerance 1st Lvl 10
Lightning Resistance 1st Lvl 10
Pain Tolerance 1st Lvl 10
Trauma Tolerance 1st Lvl 10