An Unbound Soul

Autumn passed with nothing much of interest happening. There were no signs of new parties visiting from Earth, and Gregory Charles hadn't had anything to share in our regular communications either. If anyone else on Earth was building portal equipment, they were keeping it quiet.

Trade was going fine, though. We gave them monster cores, they gave us knowledge and equipment. More knowledge and equipment than we could usefully process, but there was no harm in having a stockpile.

My search for Law solutions hadn't uncovered anything beyond my existing pair of options; touch the crystal and hope everything all worked out somehow, or hope Erryn recovered. 'Hope' being the common factor between both options.

I'd taken the time to check up on Erryn, and she was indeed visibly healing. I couldn't imagine it being in time, but she'd get there eventually. Would it still count as saving Harry if he fell to the Law for a few years and got rescued later?

Harry's side hadn't seen any useful progress either. Blocking portals didn't seem hard, and they'd come up with several new strategies of doing so. The problem was blocking Earth's portals without also shutting down all local teleportation. Still, having a planet-wide teleportation kill-switch would be useful, even if it wasn't something we'd want to use long term. Alas, nothing they'd come up with was yet planet-wide, so their current ideas failed on that count, too.

The first issue with building something to block remote portals without blocking local teleportation was that they had no remote portals to test with, so they'd set out to solve that. They were, basically, building a portal generator in the institute. It would be another season before it was ready for use, but they were hoping it would provide some useful input to the problem.

I was visiting the institute with Darren; I always accompanied him when he was opening portals, both for moral support and for translation. The people still on Earth didn't have the advantage of the [Language: Common] skill, and were struggling to learn. It wasn't as if we had school textbooks we could send them, and contact periods were massively limited by our mutual desire to not hold portals open longer than required.

Our own worries about our kids needing to buy a language skill before they could speak turned out to be unfounded. While everyone was born without skills, everyone picked up [Language: Common] within a season, with no soul points required.

Of course, just because everything was fine here didn't mean it would be fine on Earth. If Earth babies were all getting [Language: Common] or [Language: English], there might be trouble. I was quietly confident that wasn't the case though, given a subtle change to the description of my own [Language: English] skill.

[Language: English] - A language spoken and written by the occupants of realm β. (Rank 1)

'The' had changed to 'a'. The System had realised Earth was multilingual. Probably when it had assimilated the entire planet, but because I'd disconnected everyone so quickly, no-one could say if other language skills had formed. [Eye of Judgement] didn't work through a TV screen, and the Earth side had been reluctant to bring babies into the portal chamber.

'Had been' being the operative phrase, there.

Darren concentrated, ripping a hole in the universe and connecting us back to Earth with all the ease of strolling down a street. The portal revealed the usual group of hazmat-suited porters and soldiers, and Gregory's face plastered on the back wall—they'd taken to using a projector instead of a monitor, to save having to move it around and keep portal open times to a minimum—but this time there was also a perspex box on wheels. Some tanks were fitted underneath, along with other equipment. Life support.

The box contained a baby. Too big to be newborn, but small enough that he must have been one of the first affected by the System.

"(Okay, what's wrong?)" I asked as others started passing monster cores through the portal.

"(With most of them, nothing, yet. But others are developing too fast in oddly specific ways. This one is only three months old, but he's already starting to 'talk', for want of a better description. Others are already crawling. Can you use that appraisal skill of yours to tell us what's happening?)"

Name: Ian

Species: Human (β)

Age: 0

Class: Commoner (Level 1/1)

Soul Points: 0

Health: 6/6

Stamina: 4/6

Mana: 0/0

Strength: 2

Dexterity: 3

Endurance: 1

Intelligence: 2

Wisdom: 3

Charisma: 7

Rank 1 Skills: [Language: English 5]

Traits: [Eloquent]

Titles: None

Status Conditions: None

Attuned Affinities: [Water] [Soul]

"(He has a trait that boosts his charisma stat and language ability,)" I pointed out. "(The others probably have traits that boost whatever it is they're doing.)"

He also had the chains of Law hanging loosely off him, just like everyone else in the room. The System had succeeded in spreading it.

"(Well, it means that people have noticed. You're out of time.)"

Damn. With all my obsessing about the Law, I'd forgotten the other apocalyptic ongoing issue... But it wasn't that obvious, was it? It wasn't as if he...

"(Wherefore art thou, Mother?)" asked the baby.

... Okay, yes. I'll give them that. That was pretty damn obvious. Also—if I remembered my Shakespearean English correctly—wrong, but he was only three months old. I could forgive a mistake or two.

"(The System won't let me detach them from here. There's still nothing I can do about it.)"

"(You need to stop delaying and start treating this like the emergency it is,)" Harry complained, glaring at me. "(You say you can't use System skills to gain access? So what? Send Darren to this ark, open a portal there, and we can have a special forces squad breach the door for you.)"

"(Please don't unilaterally promise military aid...)" grumbled Gregory.

"(Even if you could get through the door—which isn't guaranteed given that the entire exterior is made from enchanted super-materials—the System has proven capable of other defences. I've seen it summon new walls from nothing. If you want to prevent babies getting System abilities, your best option is to use the portal blockers you're developing to shut down the portals the System has opened. Unless it has made further adaptations, that will prevent anyone buying skills or changing class.)"

"(Nothing we've made will protect the entirety of this planet, let alone Earth, which is far larger. On top of which, everything we've made depends on mana-materials and enchantments that won't survive Earth's environment.)"

"(Then keep trying!)"

"(That's rich, coming from you.)"

"(What?)" I asked, confused.

"(If you two are going to have an argument, please close the portal,)" said Gregory. The flow of trade goods had long since ceased, and the baby wheeled back out, with everyone just waiting on us. "(I think we're past the point of hiding that anyone born since then has System access, so we're going to need to admit to it. That'll be painful, but not as painful as when people start to notice the Law. If you don't resolve that within the next few months, there will be calls to take matters into our own hands.)"

I blinked in astonishment as Darren forcibly collapsed the portal. Damn my naivety! I'd cleanly divided our visitors into the 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. These people, who were politely trading with us, were the 'good guys' and on our side. The people who had stolen the portal technology were the 'bad guys', and were coming to invade us. But of course, that wasn't at all how the real world worked.

The 'bad guys' would fear our diseases and—at least until they discovered the Law—military power. Even if they wanted to invade us and take our resources by force, it was entirely plausible they'd make the pragmatic decision to trade instead. Yes, they might look for backstab opportunities, like they'd done on the island, but as long as we never gave them an opening, they may well do a good impression of being friendly.

Likewise, the 'good guys' wanted to have a good relationship, but we were corrupting and brainwashing their kids. Expecting that sort of thing not to lead to retaliation was stupid in the extreme.

I'd already considered that the Law would give them reason to start pouring bombs through portals without ever stopping to consider what I meant by 'them'. It could easily be Gregory giving the order, despite our current relationship.

"Because you found a solution, and refuse to use it!" exclaimed Harry, causing me a moment of confusion as I context-switched back to our conversation. The sudden switch in language didn't help, either.

"What?" I repeated as my brain tried to catch up.

"Don't play dumb. Cluma told me everything."

Dammit. Of course she had. Why would she think it needed to be kept secret? I'd told her I had an idea but didn't want to go through with it, and she'd repeated that information right back to Harry. No wonder he was cross.

"I don't know what Cluma told you, exactly, but that option isn't safe. I have a second one, too, but while it's safer it won't be ready for a few years."

"... A few years. So you'll let me lose myself to this mind control, with a promise of maybe doing something about it later? That's not acceptable."

Far from shouting, his voice went quiet and soft. Somehow, it felt far more dangerous.

"That's why I'm still looking for other options! Look at it this way; you've got almost all of your time left, and we've already found two options. Yes, they both have drawbacks, but we have plenty of time to search for alternatives. And if we don't find any, there's no harm in trying the unsafe option later."

Harry said nothing further, stalking off with a shake of his head.

Then again, if he hadn't been doing the portal research, I would have never reincarnated here. The Emerald Caverns event would never have happened, and Erryn would have continued her slow descent into madness. Perhaps she would have noticed, or perhaps not. If she hadn't, one could argue that Harry had saved this world. Yes, it had been a complete accident, but that was equally true of what was happening to Earth as a result. Nothing was ever simple.

I took Darren back home and teleported to the Emerald Nest. I'd never walked its crystalline green streets on my own before, but today I was feeling some amount of kinship with a particularly ancient catkin. Someone else who had allegedly decided that being human was ridiculously overcomplicated, and solved the problem by deciding not to be one any more.

Her statue was in a circular plaza near the city centre, life-sized and standing on a low plinth. She wasn't posed in any particularly special way. She was just standing there, with an odd grin on her face, as if she was well aware of every problem in the universe and was feeling rather smug that none of them were hers. It was fashioned from gold, of all things. No, a closer inspection with [Mana Sight] showed that the gold was only skin deep. The insides were not something I recognised. A pre-System metal?

I did a full loop around it, but didn't spot any differences from the 'child-friendly' version of her outfit.

... No, actually I needed [Mana Sight] for that, too. Okay, that was another mark against this progenitor being some sort of hyper-intelligent mystic and towards her not being entirely sane. Or—looking back at that grin—maybe she just didn't care.

I sat down on a public bench in the plaza, watching the residents milling around. Mostly humans and beastkin, obviously, but I spotted a party of dwarfs. They were all smiling, too. No-one seemed stressed or worried about the world ending. They were just doing perfectly normal people things, unconcerned about Earth, the System or the Law. Sometimes I wished I could be like them too, and just not worry about any of this stuff. Milling around in a bubble of contentment with Cluma, right up until the point Earth nuked us to stop the System encroachment.

My melancholy was interrupted by an odd tingling sensation that I immediately placed as someone messing with one of my detached body parts. It took longer to work out which one, but after a quick scan of them, of course it turned out to be Serlv's. With a sigh, I sprawled out on the bench and activated [Redistribute].

"A new mana anomaly," she stated the moment my teleportation completed. "Let us..."

She stopped and frowned.

"It has already closed."

Seriously? Even though I teleported immediately? But the short duration was secondary to the fact it had existed at all; Harry had promised two years. It had only been a single season!