"I've never seen an enchantment that made something explode before," Maaata said. "I hadn't even considered the possibility. It happened so quickly, as well, how did you know?"

"I didn't know," I said. "But it made sense that there would be some countermeasures to the weapons falling into enemy hands. If I had made the weapons I would have done something similar, but with portals so I could deconstruct the weapon. Did you both make recordings of the enchantments working?"

"We did," Chantelle said. "You want us to send you a copy?"

I nodded. "I'll be spending quite a bit of time on it," I said. "The enchantments are created by physical elements that I can manipulate with my power, if I can work out the principles behind how they do it I might be able to get around the restriction on my being able to use magic."

"If you're going to be setting up a complex simulation for your testing you should do it in a simulation off of the common simulation," Chantelle said. "So others can come and see what you're doing more easily. I know I'm interested in how it works, as it seems to bypass the intent that all magic requires, which is one of the consistent laws of magic."

We were standing in the well lit part of my Pocket Dimension, near my bed and the portal to the top of the fortress.

"I'm going to send this body to bed," I said. "I'll send you an invite to the simulation I set up."

I queued up a set of movement instructions for my body and set them to run in the background, sleepwalking my way to the bed.

Shifting my focus I connected to the common simulation, matching the time perception there that was still running at its maximum and headed down the infinite hallway to the empty white room to spawn a new simulation. There were more simulations since the last time I'd come through, though the only one that really caught my interest was of a room lined with bookcases full of books. I resisted the temptation to enter, I was sure 'a few minutes' would turn into days if I got distracted.

Getting to the blank room I entered and brought in the full physical model of the marksman weapon, displaying it on a raised white table. Chantelle and Maaata both joined me at my invitation, sending me their full recordings of how the mana interacted with the weapon at different stages.

Chantelle looked around the simple simulation. "Do you want some help setting up?" Chantelle asked. "This simulation doesn't even simulated basic mana interactions. There are templates you can use that set all of that up for you now, you know?"

"No, I'm fine, thank you," I said. "I'll just copy them from the war games simulation."

"Okay," Chantelle said. "Send me a ping when you're done, or find something interesting."

"Me too," Maaata said.

Chantelle disappeared from the simulation and Maaata quickly followed. I got to work importing all of the physics and mana rules from the war games simulation. After that I synced up my detailed recording of the physical interactions of the weapon with the two recordings I'd received of the mana.

With that done I began breaking down how the enchantments were working in reverse when a shard was fired. The last thing that happened was the end of the tube of the weapon added an enchantment to the shard as it accelerated out at incredible speeds. I had little idea as to what the enchantment was doing, but I was more interested in the mechanism that applied the enchantment.

The start of the sequence of symbols that created the enchantment was triggered by an electrical stimulus. In fact, electrical signals were flying all over the device while it was active, which didn't show up in the mana recordings at all.

I wasn't going to be able to create the rules needed within the simulation to model what was happening, as other than a few obvious things like accelerating the ice shard out of the tube I had no idea what effects the different enchantments were causing.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

The solution was to split everything up into its smallest components and test them individually out in the world. So that is what I set about doing. An advantage of working digitally was that I never got tired and my focus never wandered. I didn't keep track of the time I spent on it, but I was soon done with splitting the weapon apart into its individual components, and some of those into single symbols to test.

With every part that I isolated I made a small waist height white table to place it on before moving on to the next one. And with the entire weapon deconstructed I moved on to the parts of the models I had of different people, and the wisp, that were responsible for interacting with magic and began deconstructing them in the same way.

It turned out that different people having different aptitudes for different sorts of magic was hard written into their brains, though whether their aptitude was due to training or not I didn't know.

I was taking a break from deconstructing brains and was comparing the differences between the Forest Keeper forest sense and the Plains Keeper plains sense, in as much as I could from just knowing where the inputs were coming from, when Mal'Thorn walked through the front of the simulation that led to the landing room.

"What is all of this?" Mal'Thorn asked.

I stopped to look around the simulation, at the whole rather than the parts that I'd been focused on. There were thousands of raised tables with little pieces of matter on them, the largest of which only measuring a cubic centimeter. The smallest weren't even visible.

"It's... My work on exploring the physical ways that mana is manipulated," I said. "For example, this-" I pointed to a larger specimen. "-When given a mana source and complicated electrical input, like this..."

I had gone through the motions not expecting it to activate, just showing what the tests I had prepared for it would be in the outer world, but the whole thing triggered and was outputting electrical signals that showed that it was working.

"Huh," I said. "I didn't think that would work in here. That is how you all sense mana in the environment."

I looked around at all of the tables I had set up. Quite a few of them would work inside the simulation, I realised, and it was only the ones that were hard-coded with symbols that I didn't understand that I would have to test out in the world. Though perhaps Chantelle or Maaata would be interested in looking through the symbols...

"My lord," Mal'Thorn said. "I wouldn't have bothered you, but the tree that we were using as a relay to the Forest has been damaged, and the portal destination to the outside of the Fortress has disappeared as a destination."

Oh. Right. The marksman weapon detonating likely did a lot of damage to the area.

"That was my fault," I said. "We tested an enemy weapon out there and it tried to blow up in our faces. Is the tree alright?"

"I don't know for sure," Mal'Thorn said. "It is still living, but the connection has become too weak to see its condition remotely."

"Alright," I said. "Meet me at the top of the Fortress and we can go outside that way, I'll repair or replace the portal when we get there, depending on how damaged it is."

Mal'Thorn nodded and disappeared from the simulation. I sent a ping to both Chantelle and Maaata, who arrived shortly after.

"Have you been down here the entire time?" Chantelle asked, looking around at all of the tables.

"I have," I said. "It's an interesting project."

"It must be," Chantelle said. "You've been working on it for more than a year at this point. You've finished?"

"Not quite," I said. "I've got a lot of it broken down into it's base components, and I could probably build up from them, but they use or create symbols of magic that I don't know what they do. I've been called to go fix the mess we made outside the fortress. Would either of you be interested in annotating the symbols?"

Chantelle and Maaata shared a look, and Maaata nodded slightly and stepped behind Chantelle.

"We are very interested," Chantelle said. "Where do we start?"

"It should be pretty obvious which samples have symbols," I said. "And there is one sample per table. I don't know what any of the symbols do, so I don't know if there is a better order to start working through them in."

I opened up a private communication channel to Chantelle. "I don't know how to phrase this," I said. "Is there something wrong with Maaata? She's been acting oddly."

"I wouldn't say there is anything wrong, exactly," Chantelle said. "You told her that you created the System, and everything to do with the World Magic becoming interactable?"

"I may have said something like that, yes," I said.

"And you created life from nothing, and had her help you create a body for that life?" Chantelle asked.

"Yes, that happened too," I said.

"She's just a bit intimidated to be in your presence," Chantelle said. "There are quite a few stories told about you, shared among the Demi-AI particularly, as well as outsiders. There is a growing faction that considers you to be a new god, one that has the Neutral Realm as a domain. She is one of those."

"Someone can't just become a god, can they?" I asked.

"I don't know," Chantelle said. "The gods have always simply existed as far as I'm aware. But they have died in the past, so perhaps new ones can be created as well. You have done things that even Champions have never had the power to do before."

"The System would have told me if I'd become a god," I said. "It hasn't, so I'm not. I need to go fix the portal outside, I'll be back soon."