Flying, fucking flying!
Wheeeeeeeeeee!
I’m fucking flying!
Dying apparently wasn’t too bad.
I mean, it wasn’t for me. It probably would suck for you as much as expected. But I was one of the lucky few (or maybe most of us are, how can we know?) who was reborn somewhere that I could break the laws of physics.
The motion of the flight was effortless, controlled by the instincts that I got from the body.
Despite the hurry I felt in, I was having too much fun to really push the pace, so it took a bit more than two hours for me to reach the capital city.
As I came close, I finally was able to see the enemy ‘fleet’.
Shit.
Wow.
I can officially say, I was glad that I wasn’t going to be fighting that thing.
It looked like a floating volcano a mile high, ten miles circumference. It glowed red and huge plumes of smoke and steam were constantly puffed out from the cone.
How the fuck did the emperor do that?
All around the base of the mountain that slowly floated towards the city were tens of thousands of what looked like hot air balloons to provide buoyancy. There were a few ships sailing around it, as outer scouts, but the island held all of the attacking army.
It was enough land that the emperor’s cultivators would be able to draw on and brace themselves with giant ley lines. Of course anchoring themselves on the island was still a weaker point than actual terra firma, but optimal conditions are optional for the bigger army.
And I had the thought, ‘if only it could be destroyed…’. The thought seemed to be dragged out of that part of me that was still the man I’d replaced, an agonized moan of despair.
With well-prepared defenses, it was simply not plausible for a group of external cultivators working from the deck of a ship to overcome a system of warding towers, not without an advantage in power, numbers, and resources substantially greater than twenty to one. The main problem was that the cultivators mainly fought through launching projectiles at enormous speeds, and to keep from destroying the devices they used, they had to have somewhere with ley lines that they could channel force of the recoil into.
No ship ever built was steady enough to do that, until now, since the emperor’s giant floating island was sort of a ship. And the emperor had brought with his ship a large enough army to protect his hurlers and deliver the siege. According to spies in the harbor where the invasion fleet had been assembled, the force included more than twenty sorcerers who had achieved a profound soul, five thousand with purified cores, and many tens of thousands with golden cores.
The cream of a continent, gathered together, and thrown into war against a single small island seated in the northern seas.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
I was glad it wasn’t going to be my job to fight this bunch.
Sesako probably would have gotten killed bad and been very dead if he had successfully unlocked the celestial rank, the fourth dantian, greater power than anyone but the emperor.
His tower was set high above the city, and there were thirty other similarly high towers, built similarly out of white marble, with runes etched in entrancing swirls around and around the external surface. The wardings and magic stored in them were an essential part of the defensive structure of the city.
On the other hand, the walls that were always a central part of fortifications in our world from the beginning of time straight up through World War One were absent. They also weren’t anywhere in Sesako’s memories — not even in his memory of history.
Walls simply weren’t something they used in this world.
Top level combatants had always been able to fly during the evolution of military systems, naturally this made warfare wholly different from on Earth. Towers were still useful, because they were a place that looked out over the terrain, and the building would be stuffed with wardings, equipment and magical batteries. A tower was a defensive force multiplier, but a long fence of stone that anyone who'd awakened their spark and started concentrating their chi could hop over?
Useless.
The city was delicately pretty — tree lined avenues, fine palaces, endless rows of tall brick buildings for the mass of the population.
The decorative scheme of the city didn’t quite match anything I’d ever seen. The buildings themselves were square and arranged in blocks, though the city as a whole formed a rough triangle inscribed in a circle of twenty great towers — this was a defensive measure, with one side of the triangle directly out onto the bay. However, the rooftops of the larger and more ornamental buildings had some great horns rising out of them, and a layering of levels that looked vaguely Japanese, but not quite.
It struck me suddenly as rather obvious that the decoration would not be describable easily in terms of the decorative schemes of earth, just like the Eastern styles in Japan were simply expressing a different vernacular of public architecture than Gothic churches and Baroque palaces of Europe, and once again the architectural schemes of India or the Aztecs were simply different.
The city itself was large and spacious, with a population of one and a half million that was stuck in my head with the tones of an old well memorized figure.
As I came near the tower, I felt a buzz as the wards noted me, and recognized me as ‘Sesako’.
Get in. Grab all his stuff. Now my stuff. Get out.
Simple.
The power emanating from the tower felt like the heat from a flaming fire in my magical senses. Ancient stores of magical essence bubbled out through the tower. Thickly constructed magical lines connected this tower to the others in the circle, and the ten set in another geometric pattern within the city itself. Like through pipelines the stored power was shifted between the different towers to support whichever one was falling most heavily under attack.
Sesako’s pale marble tower hummed, eager, full of vigor, and ready to fight under the command of its master.
A master who would not be there.
And then… a deeply unpleasant reality met me as I alighted on the top of the tower — following instinct, that was how he always entered and left his domain.
A girl rushed out of the tower’s door onto the circular balcony as I reached it. She was dark-haired and looked by the standards of earth to be college aged, maybe twenty or twenty-one.
The detailed thoughts and memories that Sesako had about this girl flooded my mind.
She was his apprentice. Among other points: She was actually a little over thirty. Huh, she was older than I was, or at least than I had been before I died. Hinete. She was not particularly powerful and wasn’t advancing quickly to the point where she could break open her second dantian, but she was beyond brilliant with enchanting — that was what they called carving runes that represented spells into objects.
Sesako had a bit of a crush on her, but he mostly ignored it, both because he saw himself as mostly an asexual tool of his own deep goals — at least ever since a disastrous relationship when he was quite young (by which he meant his early forties), and perhaps more importantly, because the Yatamo culture viewed mentorship and apprenticeship relationships as almost sacred.
They did not think that relationships between superiors and subordinates were generally unacceptable, a boss marrying his secretary, or even just sleeping with her on the side as his mistress, was normal to them. But teaching relationships were viewed as almost sacred.
Hinete hurled herself with magically propelled force against the man who she believed to be Sesako, wrapping her arms around me and sobbing. As she buried her face in my shoulder she said, “Dead — I was sure you died. You were going to use that ritual — I thought you died.”
Ugh. Well.
This was uncomfortable. And, uh, it would not be terribly politic if I just told her that he had.
“Stupid.” She angrily punched me. “Stupid.” Punched me again. “Stupid — don’t ever. Why didn’t you take me with you? — did it work?”
Ummmm… no, totally did not.
I really didn’t know what to say.
“Tomorrow morning. You cut it close.” She glanced towards the harbor with a flash of fear in her eyes mixed with determination. “They’ll be here tomorrow morning.”
I backed away from her awkwardly.
Hinete looked at me with her heart in her eyes. But it wasn’t me who she really was looking at — I was very aware that I was pretending to be someone who she cared for. A pretty girl hugging me like that made my hormones flood, but it would be wrong to pretend to her that I was Sesako in hopes of… something.
Anyway, I had to leave.
Get in. Get stuff. Get out.
One should always stick to the plan.
She started babbling, “I’ve tried to be useful — improving the wards for the tower — I had to undo the music creator we made last year. The mana flowing into it interfered with one of the cross-stabilization patterns. You’d always been a bit unsure about how it would fit in with the defensive set, so I checked — I worked on the heavy hurlers for Fitzuki. Oh, and I helped update with more recent spells those old hurlers for throwing fighters in the park.”
I stared at her. Uh, good job.
It stood on the tip of my tongue. Sesako’s instincts again. He tended to praise his students effusively when they did well, even though he suspected he might be able to push them further if he became the sort of cold brilliant teacher who the students were desperate to win an occasional, rare, nod of approval from.
“Everyone needs you.” Hinete added. “They asked, asked and asked where you were. All I said is that it was ‘important’. Fitzuki came by three times. Himself, not just sending messengers. And I think Kisiko suspects that you deserted.”
The look she gave me was a warm smile full of trust, of conviction, of unshakeable belief in me. As though now that I — Sesako — was back, somehow, we’d be able to stop that giant floating island.
“They all should flee.” My voice was cold and hoarse.
As the girl blinked at me, I stepped around her and past the decorative heavy wooden door, painted on every inch with runes into the tower. “I must go to the storehouse, immediately.”
“Where were you? Was it really that ritual, to —”
I rushed down the stairs.
She shouted down after me, “Sesako — let me help. I beg you. Just let me help. I only want to —”
The whole tower was made out of a single piece marble, except it was not actually marble. Sort of like a giant hollow tooth.
Lines of runes curving around the staircase that went through the center of the tower were carved into the walls, and at each flight, the hall went off in two directions, with doors on either side.
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The storeroom, with the vast amounts of gold, potions, pills, swords, armor, ingredients for experiments, and dozens of the music playing devices that Sesako enchanted as a hobby was at the bottom.
It was guarded by a big fucking door. Layers and layers of steel and a variety of other hard metals with enchantments carved into each bar. The cultivators here had easy access to very high temperatures, so despite not pushing scientific knowledge in general beyond a medieval level, they’d experimented extensively with high temperature metallurgy, and the ways to infuse chi into the metals.
I kind of suspected this door would be fine if you had a main battle tank pound at it for an hour or two.
But as I was the ‘true’ — ha! — owner of the tower, the magic recognized me, and with a push of the telekinetic power I’d gotten along with the ability to fly, I instinctually pressed the giant double door — each side weighing several tons — open.
There was an emotion in my gut, like something deep inside me was demanding I go up and hug that girl and tell her that I’d do what it took, and that she should stop worrying because she would be safe. I should do anything no matter how horrifying or dangerous to protect her, to protect the great one, to save the city and… to defeat that murderous bastard, the emperor.
These were not my thoughts.
Some part of Sesako was still alive, and that part desperately wanted me to fulfill his obligations, and to take care of those who he loved.
I slammed the door to the storeroom closed.
Was there a way to properly lock it now? I pressed my hand on the doorway by instinct. And instinct called forth a few sentences of gibberish, as I traced a motion with my fingertips over the surface of the door.
This shaped power, pulling for the third dantian, the profound one in my gut.
The fourth dantian was present, opened, the crimson power moved through it. But I could not yet control it.
The heavy door was locked.
While I willed it, no one else could enter this room, without destroying the walls and doors, which task would prove neither easy, nor cheap.
I had a sensation of panic.
She is not my apprentice. She is not.
This is not my war.
This is not my city.
These are not my purposes.
I will not serve my values by dying here.
See it was that simple. I had no duty towards these people, and —
Hell.
It was easier before I met the girl. They weren’t really people then, just a mass of individuals. Now I’d met someone who was a specific individual who was counting on Sesako, trusting Sesako, believing that somehow Sesako would magically solve all their problems — he was famous for his brilliance, his capability, for opening his third dantian and gaining the extremely rare profound soul at a younger age than anyone else in the history of the island.
Damn, damn, damn.
It was like that yellow van, with a phone number and a promise of delivery hurtling towards me again.
I wasn’t going to get hit again.
There was a desperate panicked readiness to do anything necessary to survive in my guts. Didn’t matter. Fuck her. Fuck them all. I wasn’t going to die again.
I… I didn’t really recognize those thoughts as my own either, but I knew they were coming from the ‘me’ side, not the ‘Sesako’ side.
Rich walnut shelves and shelves and shelves, all stuffed with money, and things you could use to buy money.
I really wasn’t being selfish. I mean I was, but I was also going to act selflessly.
When I got wherever I was going, the portion of this pile that I’d be able to carry would be able to feed tens of thousands of hungry people for a couple of years, or maybe I’d buy pills to help thousands of people awaken their magical sparks. Or maybe I’d hire several healers for years to cure diseases among the very poor.
My goal was to do the best for other people, and not to do it in any particular way. Feeding the hungry, healing the sick, changing broken governmental systems, engaging in medical research, or working to prepare the world for future pandemics — each of these should be judged by the same criteria of what would make the biggest difference in the experiences of people… or maybe in the satisfaction of their preferences.
I wasn’t entirely happy with any particular model of utilitarianism, though I disliked experience hedonism.
Even if the way I tried to help others turned out to not be perfect choice, it would be worth doing. Any attempt to help others was better than letting a giant pile of stuff sit useless in a tower.
Unless I accidentally caused a catastrophe.
I grabbed four magical bags that stored objects in some sort of hammer space.
No… they were just bigger on the inside, not a real extra dimensional space. They also were made with heavy metal wiring, because the weight didn’t go away, just the size.
I opened several big chests pressed against the wall that were made out of a cold gray metal that glittered oddly in the light. In each case there wasn’t actually a physical lock, instead there was a line sealed shut with spell work that only responded to my magical signature. I wondered if it was probing my DNA, but the memories Sesako had of how the spell worked just told me that it reliably identified the cultivator, but he didn’t know in detail how it worked. Identical twins, however, could sometimes get through these wards. That was a point for the DNA guess.
It popped open, with a hiss of air escaping
Whoooooo.
That was a lot of gold.
Anyway, there were also hundreds of cut jewels that had not yet been inscribed by enchanters. Bags and bags of them.
I started to get into the spirit of the thing, it was kind of like being Robin Hood.
Apparently being one of the greatest cultivators of a powerful trading nation was a good gig.
I filled up two of the expanding bags with the pile of coins from the chests— these bags only expanded the space by a factor of fifty, not an infinite amount. And they weren’t that big anyway.
Handful of gold, shovel it in. Shovel another handful. Another handful.
Lotsa, lotsa gold.
For some reason I started humming, “I've got to be a macho, macho man.”
As I shoveled the gold into the storage bag, I thought about ways to use the money. The core argument of a group that I’d been part of on earth, before I died, was that some ways of doing good were vastly more effective than other ways, and that if you actually were focused on changing the life of other people, rather than making yourself feel better, it was important to figure out what approaches to making lives better would help the largest number of people the biggest amount with the limited resources you had.
Once it was partially filled with gold, the first bag weighed nearly a ton. No, really. Two thousand pounds.
Gold is extremely dense, so there actually was way more room in the bag, but this was close to the maximum weight that the bag could carry without any risk of the fibers snapping.
I then stuffed on top of the gold an entire bookshelf filled with rare old books that all looked as fresh as if the manuscript copier had finished scribbling on them yesterday.
The books took up way more space, weighed way less, and were worth a lot of money, but much less than the gold.
Magically enhanced strength is very cool. I mean Sesako’s arms didn’t look like he went to the gym. Just firm and healthy. But he could lift a ton without a problem.
Well, that was a start to ransacking the place.
I decided I’d head to the other big continent. The one without the empire, and that was politically fragmented into five major states and thirty or so smaller units.
There was a country with lots of trade connections to Yatamo that had become somewhat rich due to the trade, but bordering lots of countries that were very poor. I’d go there and spend at least two months just talking to people before I made any large irreversible decisions about what to do with this big gold pile.
What were the biggest problems in the world? What were the ways that I could use the rare and intense power I now had to earn the most money by doing useful positive sum actions, rather than hiring out my magical ability as a mercenary whose job was to kill, destroy, and in strict static terms make the world a worse place.
There wasn’t a huge hurry to deploy the resources I’d have as quickly as possible, because while now was the only time I could help someone dying from a curable illness today, there would be someone else dying tomorrow, and while my goal was to stop people from starving, I had no particular reason to care which person was saved, so long as I saved as many people as I possibly could.
With both bags full I hefted them up.
In a general way I remembered from Sesako’s memories that these bags were hideously expensive not because of the difficulty of the space expansion enchantments, but because of the difficulty of enchanting the materials so that the heavy weights didn’t break them.
Incredibly fun: It felt like I'd just picked up a moderately heavy bag full of groceries — absolutely no problem to hold.
Instinct had gotten me this far, and I remembered that when he was carrying these bags, Sesako looped them around his belt. I did so, despite knowing that the weight would rip the leather strip apart —except I instinctively started cycling some of the purple power in my second dantian — this was not sufficiently difficult to require the blue coded power of the third dantian, into the belt, so that I felt most of the weight on my hips, rather than the clothes feeling it.
Awesome.
After this I went through the rest of the storehouse, feeling calmer and happier as I went.
Packages of potions in foam-like boxes, carefully designed to keep the glass vials from bumping against each other.
The bag I was putting them in was different from the other bags, less room in it, but with charms that dampened momentum.
If someone drank the blue potions, they would get a burst of magical power. The red potions healed wounds, and restored blood. And purple potions did a bit of both.
Lol. Of course, the color scheme matched the standard scheme in games.
Was any of this real — or was the simulation hypothesis correct, and was my presence here proof of that?
And should that question change my plans in any way?
Well, cogito ergo sum.
So, I existed.
And the only reasonable thing to do was to assume that everyone else in this world existed and had experiences like my own. If they were real people, then whatever the underlying metaphysics of everything it was a worthy goal to try to help them live better, happier, more thriving and satisfying lives. The important question was not whether I was in a simulation or not (or perhaps more precisely whether the simulation ran on observed physics or not), but whether I was in a multiplayer server.
If they actually existed, I wanted to help other people to achieve their own goals as they understood them. I wanted everyone to have the power to control their own lives.
Basically, I wanted to do good.
Potions, and piles of powder, bags of reagents, several lead boxes filled with what I was pretty sure was enriched uranium based on the memories Sesako had of it.
Magically modified deep metal. It made those who were not powerful sick, and it had a few weird niche uses, but not many. Sesako had bought some to experiment with a few decades ago but forgotten about it when his interests had shifted elsewhere.
Another bag was filled with pills to help cultivators break through the barriers in their development.
This bag had been enchanted so that each container with the glowing magical pills stayed as far away as possible from the others in the bag, no matter how the bag got squeezed or pressed — apparently if they got too close together, they might blow up, or equally bad, lose potency.
In the end the stuff in that bag weighed less than thirty pounds, but it was as valuable in financial terms as the huge piles of gold in the two heavy bags.
Objects with layered enchantments could not be put in the space expansion bags, because their enchantments interfered with the complex enchantments on the bag itself. That was also why the storeroom was its real physical size.
It was a big circular room. The walls thrummed with raw power pulled up from the earth, unshaped by having been cycled through the dantians of a human cultivator.
This big circle of power was directly underneath the leafy gardens around the tower.
I donned the most expensive — but not the most useful — suit of armor in the room, and attached three swords to the belt, and a variety of small, complicated enchanted devices that were fairly expensive and easy to resell. I also grabbed to hold in my arms a long rectangular device that was basically a small cannon that used magic instead of gunpowder.
A phrase echoed through my head about how one must never create an enchanted device that drew directly on the power of the cultivator using it.
I looked around, scanning the room, trying to think of anything else. There was a pile of enchanted rings sitting out on a cushion, and I stuffed as many of them onto my fingers as I could.
Many of the enchantments on them conflicted, and it required an ongoing effort of magical balancing to keep the whole thing from exploding out. Whatever, I wasn’t planning to fight anyone, just sell this stuff.
One more look around.
Nothing else that jumped to mind as something easy to carry and sell.
A damned pity.
All of this was going to be destroyed or stolen by the emperor once he’d captured the city. If I didn’t take the stuff, another magically empowered noble who had no particular concern for the ordinary little people and their lives would get it.
I was doing the right thing.
Their wars were with each other; my war was with the ways the world itself was flawed.
I returned to the heavy door, removed the warding I’d placed on it which made it impermeable to anyone but me, and started up the stairs, weighed down only slightly by the two tons of extra weight hanging off of my belt.
Magic was cool. And I was going to have years, and years, and years to explore and use all the features of it.
Hinete sat on the stairs at the first landing.
She looked… lost. Disconsolate. “Sesako… is this because — is there any way I can help? — my life is worth nothing if it might save the great ones. If we can defeat that thing — just talk to me. Sesako, please…”
The pretty appealing face, rosy lips, and the desperation that arose again.
Whatever was left of Sesako was kicking and screaming at the thought of abandoning Hinete.
Maybe I could… invite her to come with me.
She was a brilliant enchantress already… The runic structures and devices she made were already sold by her and her family for large sums, and perhaps she could help figure out some solution to the deeper problems that made the lives of the poor and non-magical miserable. I could —
I opened my mouth.
It was like I’d been kicked in the head.
That bit of Sesako left in me screamed at the thought of telling her that I… he… whatever… was a traitor. Of asking Hinete to be a traitor with him.
Such words could not be said.
Well then, I’d leave her behind, as guilty as I felt about leaving her, leaving this whole city, leaving all of this behind.
Her lips trembled. There were tears in her eyes. She said, “Sesako, please tell me. I can bear it.”
Without saying anything to her, I walked past the girl, and up the stairs to the roof of the tower.
She did not follow me.
I was glad.
Each step felt leaden.
But I needed to be far away from here before tomorrow morning. The giant island would soon be close enough that the cultivators could use it as their base to bombard the city.
I just wished I hadn’t met any of them.
I just wished that I hadn’t had to meet Hinete.
She made them real people, rather than abstractions, statistics and numbers.
Scope neglect.
She was one person; I’d be able to help millions. It was like a trolley problem.
And that triggered my other memory — my least favorite memory from earth.
Loud car horn. Squealing brakes.
An instant realization that I had made a fatal mistake.
And then nothing.
I didn’t want to die. If wanting desperately to live made me a coward, it made me a coward.
Anyways I couldn’t save this country from its returning feudal lord, not even if I tried with all my heart, soul, and guts.
I stepped out onto the balcony at the top of the tower, and I placed my foot on a little ledge in the balcony to leap upwards.
And I could not do it.
I tried to leap again.
Nothing happened.
I suddenly felt full of anger and rage.
An anger and rage that was not my own.
And a voice that was not my own sounded in my own thoughts, “I’ll not! You worthless craven cur! You scum! You cowardly cancerous vermin. YOU. SHALL. NOT. WIN.”
And suddenly the body I inhabited moved again, stepping away from the edge of the tower rooftop, and turning back to the door down. He stripped off the clashing rings as he stepped, dropping them to clink on the floor.
I could do nothing.
Sesako had control of his body again.