Thus began the waiting. Patience was something I had an odd relationship with. I was required to have patience during most missions, but I also was required to dislike wasting time for the sake of efficiency. It could be said that my patience had limits, and after just under a week of working for Aavspeyjh with his team of “accountants” and “bookkeepers” I was pressing up against them. The job was relatively simple in theory: Aavspeyjh's workers tracked everything from market prices of goods to profits from sales made at his companies and used them to attempt to optimize the businesses' functions. The problem was that everything about Uwrish mathematics, from the notation to the knowledge possessed by my coworkers, seemed as though it was designed to frustrate me.
The tally-like numbers were annoying but workable because converting them was simple. The other workers understood point plotting on two-axis graphs, as well as linear trends, but their applications of the knowledge were spotty at best. Where things really began to fall apart was algebra, a subject that they had almost no knowledge of, and calculus, which might as well have been its own branch of magic. To make matters worse, due to the nature of their numbering system, my coworkers simply couldn’t really express certain values with the level of precision that was necessary to compute latter-order amounts with any accuracy. Most of their predictions past first-order effects might as well have been based on pure speculation before I began to analyze the data and correct their calculations.
More than once I found myself sitting at a desk, staring at a sheet of numbers, and wondering if I could get away with killing whoever produced it to reduce my workload. Nobody questioned my methods and results after the first day, but then again nobody attempted to learn them either. I wasn't sure if it was even worth my time to teach, so I judged their lack of interest to be a net positive.
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On the morning of the sixth day, I woke up and ate, then went to the office to find that nobody was present. After a moment of brief confusion, I walked back out into the hallway and noticed that none of the cleaning servants were present either.
“Yuwniht?” a voice asked from behind me, and I turned to see Koyl. Dark bags hung under his eyes, and his face was more gaunt than usual.
“Do you know why nobody is here yet?” I asked, gesturing with my left arm to the office. Koyl chuckled, then shook his head.
“It’s your day off,” he explained. “Every five days the workers get a day off. The servants have their days staggered to keep everything running, but the accounting team needs to all be present for work so they take the day off together.” Oh, I thought, that doesn’t make much sense. Why not just get workers who don't need days off? There was an awkward silence as we both stood in the hall, and Koyl tried not to look at my missing arm. “You’re looking a bit better than I am, I think,” he commented.
“Debatable,” I replied after a moment of thought. Again, there was an awkward silence. “Is there something to do around here to occupy my time then?” I asked.
“Probably nothing you would enjoy since my father doesn't want you outdoors,” Koyl replied. “I’d recommend getting some sleep, which is what I’m on my way to do.” It’s the morning though, I thought, why would he have been up all night? “We also have a library on the other side of the mansion, if you’re interested.”
“Where is it?” I asked, trying to recall my mental map of the mansion. I hadn’t come across a library, but I also hadn’t opened up every room I encountered either.
“Just go down the main hall, cross the entryway, then keep going until you hit the right turn,” Koyl yawned. “At the end of the hallway, turn right again, then it’s the double doors at the end.” Yeah, I didn’t go through that one, I thought.
“I’ll go there now then,” I said, prompting another silence. I had a strange urge to say something more, but I had no idea what my body expected me to say at all. Koyl, possibly understanding this, just smiled and nodded once, then walked past me to wherever he was going to rest. My instincts gave me conflicting signals, as though I had failed to do something I should have done, but I ignored them and began walking down the main hallway as Koyl had directed.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I found the double doors and opened them up, but it wasn’t what was on the other side. Libraries didn’t exist on Earth, at least not when I was on it. There were archives, sure, but most of those were digital. Rooms and rooms of nano-silicate crystal storage and computer terminals designed to read that storage. Once the warbreed lost the technology, the archives changed into rooms where written reports were stored and organized in one of many arrangement systems for later perusal and use in strategy. They were utilitarian storage chambers, windowless and dry, designed to preserve their contents for as long as possible.
The room I found myself looking at was nothing of the sort. Two entire floors of the mansion joined together to form an immensely high ceiling with decorative skylights to allow natural illumination. Sunlight shone down onto rows of intricately-carved shelves that stood nearly three-quarters of the room’s total height, each of which was packed with books. A number of chairs were strewn about the floor, and beside them were tables with lanterns for use at night. Two ladders were also placed against the far wall of the room, presumably to allow access to the tops of the shelves. A couple of books sat in a pile on the table nearest to me, having not been replaced by whoever read them last.
This is thousands of books, I thought, Two thousand minimum, probably closer to three. I walked through the corridors made by the shelves, looking at the books and reading some of the titles that had been written along their spines. Not every book was bound the same way, and some had to be pulled out to see their name, but they were all in remarkably good condition. This is all fiction, I thought, I suppose I could indulge myself as a form of cultural research, but do they not have anything more substantial? Surely there must be technical books of some kind. Historical records would be useful as well.
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An hour later, I had leafed through a dozen books but hadn’t settled on one to sit down and truly consume yet. One of the first non-fiction books I found was about early Uwrish history, specifically the provincial wars that resulted from the initial colonization of the continent by Dahmpiyah and the subsequent unification and formation of the provincial congress as a result of Dahmpiyah and K’krowd threatening the colonies with annexation. While it did clear up some of my political questions, such as how each province and region was administered from Pehrihnk, it was quite dry and seemed to care more about the names of important figures than the actual events.
After my history lesson I looked for more books about the Uwrish military, finding a few nearby the history books. Sadly, none of them described much in the way of tactics so much as the outcomes of battles, and again, the names of various important figures. I learned that the average land battle in Uwriy involved around two thousand soldiers on each side, and that common tactics for dealing with powerful magic users were mostly variants of surrounding them in a circular phalanx and stabbing them to death, but aside from that there wasn’t much.
Finally, while searching for books on weaponry I happened across a treasure. “Magical Phenomena: A Study by Aelzmael Mahzvey, 967” appeared to be some kind of a collection of research notes. Even just from the random page I had opened it up to, I knew it would be useful, so I brought it back to the table with me and sat down, then flipped back to the start. The introduction was mostly a treatise about the traditional Uwrish beliefs around magic, which would have put me off if it weren’t for how obvious it was that the author didn’t consider “spirits” to be a sufficient or legitimate explanation of the phenomenon.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Once I was through the introduction, the first chapter explained the author’s viewpoints on magic and promised to justify them over the course of the book. It appeared that he took a view much more similar to the Rehvite position, believing that magic was some kind of fundamental force of the universe which living things were granted access to. The first section of the chapter was devoted to mostly rhetorical argumentation to support his view over the “spirit” explanation, which I skimmed over since I didn’t particularly care about it. Finally, my eyes settled on something interesting just over two-thirds of the way through the chapter.
The source of magic within the human body is the powm, of which there are three. The first is located beneath the stomach, and is thought to respond to instinct. The second is located behind the heart, where one feels the greatest intensity of emotion. The third, and final, is located within the core of the brain at the source of rationality. Through the powm, a human is able to control the force of magic with three methods, and master the world around them. As I read the words, a tingle ran up my spine, and I unconsciously opened up my heads-up display. Four bars, I thought, but three are long-term storage. Seeing the start of the next paragraph, I kept reading.
Powm contain magic into a solid form, called zaathayihdeyl. This form usually only exists within powm, and disappears into nothing if brought into open air as a solid. As the body functions, the powm release small amounts of zaathayihdeyl into the bloodstream, where it transforms into liquid and flows to the rest of the tissues. Magical effects can be created from anywhere in the body where blood may be found. It is not known why magic cannot extend very far past the body, but it is my opinion that zaathayihdeyl’s instability in air is the primary reason. I frowned, trying to translate the new words. Powm means ‘root’ in a literal sense, but here the context is more like ‘core’, I thought, zaathayihdeyl is… substance? No, that’s not quite right. Manifestation? No, not that either, its root word is ‘soak’.
Regardless of the meaning, the explanation made a lot of sense and was the first piece of information I had come across so far that matched up with what I saw on my heads-up display. Three bars for the three cores, one bar for the magic stored in the blood. The cores would release and store magic as needed, maintaining the level in the blood to allow it to be used. Presumably, the magic inside the cores wasn’t normally available for use or was situated too far away from the exterior of the body to produce most effects. Perhaps it was even inactive in its solid form.
“Saturation,” I said aloud, finding the English word I was looking for. The saturation of a dissolved material in a liquid, that’s what it’s describing. The fuel for magic dissolves into the blood and spreads to the body, where it can then be used. The level of saturation of the fuel in the blood must determine the maximum power output. The fuel must be some kind of high-energy compound that’s used by whatever system enables this- I stopped, pacing myself. Can I even say this is technology at this point? I asked myself. Magic appeared to spit in the face of conventional physics at every turn, and the more I learned about it the more I realized that my initial conceptions of it were only partially correct. Thinking of magic as though it was a technology had allowed me to master it quickly, but when trying to learn about its true nature it was possible that treating it as though it was technological would cause issues. Putting the thoughts aside, I turned back to the book.
It is not known exactly how the body generates magic, though direct ingestion of materials with a high saturation has been shown to add some saturation to the body in experiments (See Experiment Logs 5, 9, and 22). Curiously, some materials that are clearly high in saturation, or should be, do not produce this effect (See Experiment Log 17). It is my opinion that the cause of this is one of two things. The first possibility is that, because saturation cannot be directly observed with the eye, we are mistaken about the materials themselves. The second possibility is that the saturation contained within those materials is somehow incompatible with the human body. Neither possibility has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and at this time I cannot say which is more likely to be correct.
Since my curiosity had been piqued, I flipped to the addendum section in the back of the book and found the experiments. Experiment five involved a person being fed blood drawn from another person, and their magical output measured by having them boil water to exhaustion. Experiment nine involved participants consuming the still-beating heart of a pig-like animal, and experiment twenty-two had a single man eating bear meat. That sounds familiar, I thought, looking through the details. While the first two had minimal benefit, the bear meat experiment conclusively showed that someone magically exhausted could recover very quickly if fed the material. Cooking reduced the efficiency of the effect significantly, however, as did air exposure time.
I flipped to experiment seventeen and found that it was much like number twenty-two, except it used the meat of a whale-like creature instead of a bear. The beast, called an ehptey, was a whale-like apex predator of the southern oceans that was known for being able to take down an entire frigate on its own if provoked. Strangely, despite its immense magical power that could be demonstrated through its hydrokinesis and healing, eating its meat provided no benefit whatsoever beyond the general nutrition the meat contained.
Every material dense in saturation is some kind of meat, I realized. That means that the saturation, whatever it is, is some kind of bodily product in that meat. The cores make it, just like in a human body, but there’s no reason that every animal would make the same chemical, would they? It could be like hormones in Earth life, where there are many subtle variations and different uses for them. It would also explain why all the meats with high saturation are from mammals, anything further removed than that from humans would be too different. If an animal has an incompatible magical structure, consuming it would do nothing.
As it turned out, the result was actually worse than “nothing”. Apparently eating the ehptey raw had a chance to cause horrible pain that was localized to what I determined to be the GI tract. The body rejects it, and tries to expel it, I reasoned. Many, many disparate pieces of information started to click together in my head, and a realization shocked me so badly that I almost dropped the book. Yaavtey, I breathed, Yaavety was eating pieces of Koyl. That’s what he said. He would cut open his abdomen, pull something out, then eat it. I stared at the wall, mouth agape and eyes wide, taking deep breaths. He even used the word powm when he was dying, I thought at the time it was just a ritualistic term for an organ, I recalled, That’s how he was so strong, he knew this was possible. Human magic is cross-compatible with humans of course, so it stands to reason that…
Flipping back into the book, I read on in a trance, absorbing information. Paragraphs flew by in seconds, and I finished the entire first chapter in a matter of minutes. In the back of my mind, I was already coming up with a plan to extract cores and consume them to increase my strength, but as I read the last paragraph I realized that rushing into testing was foolish to the point of being suicidal. The author’s explanation of the potential risks spoke volumes of how powerful Yaavtey truly was, and how lucky I was to overcome him in the way I did.
An overload in saturation is not only painful, but it can also be fatal. When the blood is oversaturated, magic solidifies much like the salt in brine does when its water is boiled away. Solid chunks of magic pierce the blood vessels, causing internal bleeding that can only be resolved by consuming magical power. If the brain is affected by these symptoms it is possible for a human to lose their ability to heal, resulting in them dying of aalgiypoybeyy. As such, densely saturated materials should be consumed well-cooked and in moderation, and any hint of pain should be taken as a sign to stop. The cores can expand, and the body can adapt, but such adaptation must be done slowly, ideally over a period of many months or years.
“I don’t have that long,” I growled to myself, translating the unknown word to “aneurysm”. It was as though I had just been shown the perfect weapon, then told that firing it would cause me to fail my mission. For a brief moment I felt rage forming in my chest, and I tried to slap the armrest of the chair to calm myself. When nothing happened, I remembered I was missing an arm and sighed, flipping to the second chapter.
“Chapter Two: Core Manipulation,” I read aloud. It didn't take long after that for a smile to start forming on my face.