~ CHAPTER 16 ~
THE MAGIC OF SEEING AND PERCEIVING, PART 2
[Refined Copper Cloud Salt]x10, [Thoril’s Needle]x15, [Thwart Grass]x4, [Crushed Red Longshore Prawn’s Shell]x3, [Saproot Seed]x11, [Amarh Elbow Gristle]x1, [Neit Flour]x22, [Dried Black Pepper]x18, [Myrl Rose]x6, [Brightsage Leaf]x8.
She’d told me to look at the list. I’d looked. I’d looked, but I did not see. Specifically, what I didn’t see was where I would find any of these things. What even were they? I had a sneaking suspicion that she’d included the ingredients for the supper we’d eaten right there along with the rest. That or she’d just given me her grocery list to begin with.
“Um, can I just ask… where do I find these?”
“On the other page, dear.”
Nevermind.
…
A few minutes later, I had a rough idea of where I could look for most of the things on the list. Rather than a simple gathering quest, this seemed to be more of a treasure hunt, but at least it was a treasure hunt that didn’t involve any riddles.
Not so my other quest(s).
[Path of the Runemaster], at least, was utterly simple and straightforward. As long as I simply used my Skill ten times, I was golden. At least one of them had to be while under pressure, but that probably just meant using it in combat, and I doubted I would find a shortage of that. The other nine could be completed any time. However, since the Rune cost Stamina to activate and Mana to recharge, it made sense to leave those for after. Two down, three to go.
If I’d been following the Keeper correctly, then [The Ancient Keeper of Runic Magic (Part 4)] would probably complete on its own when I completed [Things Worth Finding in the Mist]. Again, why there were two quests for what basically amounted to the same thing, I didn’t know, but it wasn’t worth worrying about right now. Three down.
As for the other one… whatever.
The place to start was clear: a droplet of the Skystream. Notice how it isn’t an item? Yeah, it took me a minute, but that was almost worse. I knew exactly what the Skystream was, and thus exactly why acquiring a “droplet” of it was basically impossible. It was obviously a riddle.
On the other hand, I did at least have an idea of where to start.
Finishing my climb, I emerged from the long staircase onto the Keeper’s landing, and allowed my eyes to gaze over at my ‘place to start’. The Town Hall Clocktower. A quarter past seven. No inspiration came to me.
The sun should have set a little while ago, so even if I knew better, I’d sort of been expecting the city to be dark. Wait, would a city run on magic really be dark at night, you ask? Silly question.
The terrace gleamed. Multicoloured lights shone from the first, second… second-and-a-half… third story windows all across the city. In front of me, bright blue and green bulbs had opened up on many of the flowers in the gardens, giving the whole place a dream-like impression - one that was undisturbed right up until it got mangled, slaughtered, and torn to shreds by the hilariously massive, glowing, purple rings that floated above the mage’s guild. I’d seen the videos of course, but it was different seeing it in person.
It was breathtaking.
Yeah, I’d already seen my fair share of spectacular sights since coming to the Wild Continent, so in a sense this was nothing new, but the way the whole scene came together, accented by the steamy warmth of the night air, gave it this incredible mystical sensation that left me feeling like I could only move about on tiptoes. I’d never really had a moment where I’d forgotten that this was a magical fantasy world, but it was only now that the reality of that fact started hitting home.
The colourful blossoms were the city lights of a magical alien world, but above them, framed behind the darkened spires and rooftops of Cowl’s Landing, was the one thing that really reigned the stage. It was unmissable. From one horizon to the other, it arced across the sky like a cascading river of brilliant light, painting everything below it in its image: the Skystream.
Oh, I’d seen that in the real world. We got it in Cascadia sometimes, even if I always had to convince my mom to let me stay up late enough. Out in the real world it was called the aurora borealis, but it was still completely epic. Barring a few key differences, this was pretty much the same thing. With that in mind, it might have made sense if this didn’t have quite the same impact for me, especially seeing as I’d been catching glimpses of it here and there all day. Now, however, as I watched it tower and dance across the not-quite-night sky, I found myself dazed and lost for words, reliving that first moment when I was a kid staring up at the sky in wide-eyed disbelief.
Or… I would have.
As I stepped to the edge of the terrace, though, it was something else entirely that caught my attention. I’d seen them earlier. I’d remarked on them earlier. I’d been blown away by them earlier, twice in fact, but now… It felt like something inside me just gave up. You can’t just describe something that’s indescribable: that’s the point.
*ping*
Congratulations! You have discovered a new Skill!
[Eyes of Wonder]
Cost: 1 Mana per 150 seconds, Cast Time: 18 seconds, no cooldown
Focus your sense of wonder with magical power, converting 5% of your Focus into Perception, and enabling your eyes to perceive things that others’ cannot. Lasts until cancelled.
The crystals burned. The sun might have fallen below the horizon, but its rays were caught, trapped, spun around and around, bounced and refracted between the facets until they were like red-gold lightning bolts that arced in a blinding halo around each crystal. They were like guardian angels, arrayed all along the wall to watch and protect the city and everything inside it. They were like… eyes. Burning, red-gold eyes, awakened by the last rays of twilight.
Eyes that were staring right at me, through me, and into my soul.
I sat down with a thump.
This is why we play VR. It was a silly thought, but I felt like there was some important realisation in there.
This moment, this singularity of experience, it was something that you could never understand by seeing it second hand. Trying to capture it on video or in words would be like trying to depict three dimensions on a sheet of a paper: even if you succeeded, you’d still be infinitely far from your goal. It wasn’t something that you could simply see: it was something that you had to feel.
Those awesome, blazing alien behemoths, no matter how small they might look in the distance, were like the sun descended upon the world. They dwarfed everything that I saw. By comparison, anything else was insignificant.
And then… the moment passed.
Something shifted. The angle of the sun’s rays fell a little further. The fire inside the crystals burned a little lower. Their gaze moved on, and I was free again.
Free to think again.
I had a new Skill. I hadn’t missed that.
There was just one thing that was a little confusing: how, exactly, had I gotten it? It had been given to me by the Discovery System, obviously, but why? Was it because I saw something? Because I’d been in just the right place at just the right time to trigger an event? No, that didn’t feel quite right.
If it was just about what I saw, then it could have been any other moment. The system would be giving out Skills at random, which it obviously wasn’t supposed to do. At the moment when I got the Skill, I felt like it hadn’t been about what I was seeing, it had been about what I was feeling.
Well, yeah. Thinking about it, just like the moment itself, the Discovery System didn’t have to be limited only to what I could describe. I felt like that should have been some crucial revelation, but actually it wasn’t new news for me. Of course the Discovery System could react to what I was feeling: if it couldn’t, the entire technology wouldn’t even work. I’d just be laying on a bed wearing a weird chunk of metal as a helmet.
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That being said, the Skill itself was a little strange. My eyes could see what others’ could not? It almost sounded like some kind of detect invisibility spell, but if that was what it was meant to do, it would have just said that. It also wouldn’t cost only 1 Mana per two-and-a-half minutes: I was pretty sure any half decent detection spell cost at least ten times that. Either my Skill was overpowered, which was possible but unlikely, or it had some other function.
Only one way to find out. I opened my mouth: “Activate Eyes of Wonder.”
Nothing happened.
I frowned. Why hadn’t it worked? Was I missing a requirement? Or…
“System: Display Skill Sheet.”
Equipped Skills (8/8):
[Force Infused Palm]
[Myriad Fists]
[Imbued Defence]
[Unarmed Discipline (Passive)]
[Body Conditioning (Passive)]
[Elementary Ingredient Preparation (Passive)]
[Inscribe: Rune of the Creator Flame (1/1)]
[Sign of Inverse Devouring]
Other Skills:
[Eyes of Wonder]
… that.
Right.
Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be much I could do. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I tried to unequip my Inscription Skill, and as for the rest, my combat ability was already bad enough as it was. I’d just have to…
… or, I could just unequip [Elementary Ingredient Preparation (Passive)]. You know. That. Besides, I could just re-equip it the next time I needed to cook something anyway, at least at this stage of the game.
The massive hit to my Stamina and the accompanying wave of dizziness was only a little more tolerable than the first time, but at least this time I was ready. It helped that it was spread out over two steps, since I had to unequip a Skill as well, but I couldn’t help noticing the total cost only came out to a little more. There was probably a reason for that.
After a short rest to catch my breath, I activated my new Skill. “Eyes of Wonder.” I’d been continually impressed by how unique each Skill felt, especially when the Keeper was demonstrating her Signs, so I couldn’t even guess at what the casting process for this would involve. Luckily, I didn’t have to.
As the casting bar started counting down in the bottom of my vision, I felt something twist in my mind. My field of vision narrowed, pulsated, refocussed, tingled. Hot and cold flowed through my veins and gathered just behind my eyes, making every colour I saw pop until they were so vivid they would be impossible in the real world. The image came alive, and as it did so, I started to notice… something.
There was a sort of current to the colours. A shifting in sharpness or a wobble like hot air over pavement that suggested a kind of motion. It was almost imperceptible, but now that I’d noticed it, I felt like I couldn’t look away. It flowed through the streets, around unseen obstacles and through windows, gathering in pools and twirling around the petals of flowers. In some places it moved with urgency, in others it drifted in sleepy eddies, but ultimately, all throughout the city, it always flowed in one direction: towards those mighty crystalline orbs above the walls.
There was a pressure building behind my eyes like an oncoming headache. I shook my head and squeezed them tightly shut. When I could see again, the scene had settled. The colours were still vivid to the point of surrealism, but everything else had stopped swimming. There was no mistaking it now: what I saw, everywhere in the city, were the tangled threads of an invisible web, and they all lead back to the crystals.
Those crystals, that sight that I had seen, had been no accident. I realised. Somebody had put them there for a reason, and if they looked like giant eyes overlooking the city, there was also a reason for that. For them to catch and hold the sun’s rays in that way, it could only have happened if someone had made them that way, and if that was the case, then what was their objective?
I’d felt… awestruck. I’d felt paralyzed, and like they were piercing through my soul, and if I was being honest, that hadn’t been an entirely good feeling. They’d seemed like guardian angels, but if that was what they were, why had their gaze been focussed inside the city? If they were there for protection, why had they been so terrifying? And if they weren’t, what were they there for?
I felt like, somehow, the answer to that question would reveal a lot more than just what I’d asked. If those eyes were a mystery, they were one that was at the very deepest level of this city’s existence.
*ping*
New Quest!
[The Eyes of Twilight]
Discover the mystery of the Eyes of Twilight.
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.
~ ~ 26/1/1/19:18 ~ ~
Status: [River]
Class: [Novice Mistborn Runemaster]
Location: [Cowl’s Landing - The Keeper’s Terrace]
Health 38/38 ~ Mana 39/41 ~ Stamina 25/41 ~ Runes 1/1
[Eyes of Wonder] Equipped Skills (8/8):
[Force Infused Palm]
[Myriad Fists]
[Imbued Defence]
[Unarmed Discipline (Passive)]
[Body Conditioning (Passive)]
[Inscribe: Rune of the Creator Flame (1/1)]
[Sign of Inverse Devouring]
[Eyes of Wonder]
Statistics:
Defence +8
Resistance +4
Constitution +4
Willpower +4
Endurance +4
Spirit +1
Perception +1 (+5%)
Focus (-5%)
Equipped Items (3/8):
[New Arrival’s Simple Dress]
[New Arrival’s Simple Shoes]
[Valesilver Pin] Other Skills:
[Elementary Ingredient Preparation (Passive)] Other Items:
[Special Edition Founder’s Token]
[Novice Healing Potion]
[Novice Mana Potion]
[Small Pouch]
[Small Iron Key]
[Sugary Biscuit]x2
[The Keeper's List] Active Quests:
[Cryptic Flows of the Mist (Part 1)]
[Path of the Runemaster (Part 3)]
[The Keeper’s Garden (Part 1)]
[The Ancient Keeper of Runic Magic (Part 4)]
[Things Worth Finding in the Mist]
[The Eyes of Twilight]
Status: [Demi]
Class: [Novice Freechild Guardian]
Location: [Cowl’s Landing - Rukaan’s Garden]
Health 29/60 ~ Mana 3/10 ~ Stamina 34/40
[Drained (40%)], [Infused: Novice Healing Salve (4 min)] Equipped Skills (6/8):
[Guarded Strike]
[Standfast]
[Shield Block]
[Shield Discipline (Passive)]
[Mocking Shout]
[Strength of Eternity (Passive)]
Statistics:
Defence +24
Resistance +3
Damage +2
Endurance +1
Strength +8
Constitution (-40%)
Willpower (-40%)
Equipped Items (5/8):
[New Arrival’s Basic Short Sword]
[Greatshield of Dauntless Hope]
[New Arrival’s Basic Chain Armour]
[New Arrival’s Simple Undershirt]
[New Arrival’s Basic Chain Tasset]
[New Arrival’s Simple Pants]
[New Arrival’s Basic Leather Boots] Other Skills:
Other Items:
[Special Edition Founder’s Token]
[Novice Healing Potion]
[Novice Stamina Potion]
[New Arrival’s Basic Shield]
[Novice Rejuvenating Salve]x5
[Novice Healing Salve]x2
[Guldrin’s Checklist]
[Saproot Seed]x14
[Mordalk Stew (cold)]
[Luma Feather]
[Garden Pebble]x1 Active Quests:
[Wanted: Dead Spider Monkeys]
[Guldrin’s Experiment]
[Strength of Eternity (Part 3)]
[Asyr Hospitality (Part 2)]
[Establishing the Pecking Order (Failed)]