An Unbound Soul

Erryn watched the strange four-year-old human boy walking the streets of Dawnhold. It was a town settled only recently by a group of humans and beastkin who wanted to exploit one of her smaller subsidiary dungeons. Of course, no settlements were particularly old to Erryn; it had taken a long time to bring the world back into a state fit for habitation by sentients, and it had been only a few centuries since she had felt safe reintroducing the various civilised races. The Emerald Nest, the Emerald Sea and the Emerald Caverns to the east. The Sapphire Peaks and the Sapphire Depths to the north. The Ruby Plains to the west and the Obsidian Spires to the south. Her children. All were thriving, and had even reached the point where they were able to start sending out settlers to unoccupied territory like this.

Everything seemed to be going well, but while there was nothing that made Erryn nervous or worried as such, there was an uncertainty. All the races seemed to place a high value on self determinism and free will. In the ruins of the previous world, it hadn't been so obvious; while people wanted freedom for themselves, they also actively and almost universally sought to deprive it from others. Anyone in a position of power sought to keep those below them on a leash; from the emperor of Soutso conscripting whole armies to a lowly father forcing his child to continue the family business, it was true at any level of society. Thus Erryn had no qualms about behaving in the same way. However, this reborn world was turning out to be quite different.

The Law was deceptively simple. There was really only one rule; treat others as you wish to be treated. Of course, there were additional safeguards; it wouldn't do for someone with suicidal tendencies to go on a murder spree because they wished to die, for example. Even then, the safeguards were largely along the lines of averaging behaviour across multiple people rather than millions of explicit rules to cover every possible situation. Her children policed themselves. Therefore, since everyone valued their own freedom, they likewise safeguarded the freedom of others. And it was there that the conflict arose; the Law deprived people of the very same freedom that it caused them to try to protect.

Erryn had worked out by now why the previous iteration of the System had not deprived its subjects of their own wills, and why Erryn herself had been permitted to exploit loopholes to reach her current heights; the idea of depriving someone of their free will was anathema to those who had built the System, the treatment considered worse than the disease. That left Erryn with a seed of doubt; was what she was doing now correct? What alternatives were there? Replace the Law with something lesser? Something that could be wilfully broken at the cost of punishment? Would that be better? Erryn saw no reason why allowing someone to commit murder at the cost of imprisonment or their own execution would be an improvement on her current setup, but she'd be the first to admit that she didn't completely understand these new races. Given a free choice, what option would her children pick? But to even give them that choice would require withdrawing the Law.

Erryn wasn't certain, and the previous centuries had done nothing to convince her. And then the child had come. One child unbound by the Law, and even better, one with an external view of the world. Erryn had been watching ever since, waiting to see his opinion on the System and the Law, and to hear about this other world. But it had never come. He had never questioned the System, never sought to act outside it as Erryn had, and had accepted it as natural. Did they have something similar in his old world, perhaps? Then again, had Erryn not been born into the broken and empty world that she had been, no doubt she never would have sought to act outside it either. That was, after all, the entire point of it.

He hadn't even noticed the Law, which Erryn had found difficult to believe. The child was afraid, and Erryn wasn't even sure what of. His own weakness? Abandonment? Whatever the cause, the fear seemed unjustified. It led to him remaining withdrawn, and not interacting with the world's natives in the way that Erryn wanted to watch. Had he owned up to having memories of another world, people would have been falling over themselves to buy his knowledge, and Erryn would have been able to listen in too, but he was determined to keep it hidden. So the child had remained in a tiny village, his potential untapped. Maybe he would need some encouragement? A little push to get him moving in the direction Erryn wished.

His foreign soul made direct interaction difficult. Erryn couldn't view his mind in the same way as the local population. The best Erryn had been able to do was a messy bit of modification to ease his transition to this world, redirecting feelings held for people he would never again see towards his new family. Unlike the carefully crafted Law, it was a sloppy hack job. It was only possible at all because his soul was asleep, in suspended animation while awaiting its rebirth, and hadn't yet been touched by this world. It wouldn't hold up to any sort of scrutiny; as soon as he thought about it, he would notice the discrepancies, and as soon as he pushed it, it would break and release the papered over memories. The attempt didn't seem to have failed, nor had he noticed or broken it, yet even so, he still wouldn't even trust his own mother. Was that what all humans were like in the other world? In this world, before the Law? That was a depressing thought and did help to convince Erryn that her path was correct. But what Erryn really wanted was to hear it from the child directly, to receive validation from a third party.

Now the child was in Dawnhold. It was the first time he had left his tiny group of acquaintances for a slightly larger world, and Erryn wanted to see what he made of it. Her expectations were met almost immediately, the first shop being enough to finally clue him in to the existence of the Law. He seemed to take it largely with curiosity; thoughtful and confused, but not outraged. Then he saw the slave merchants, and for a brief moment, it utterly horrified him. That was odd; Erryn wasn't responsible for them at all; it was a system that the people of the world had designed on their own, entirely within the confines of the Law. If anything, their existence provided greater freedom to the population at large; it meant that anyone who wanted to start a new business or similar could easily get a loan. Without that, there would be far less novelty and originality in the world, because fewer people would be able to afford to stretch themselves and try something new.

Maybe it was a problem with his perspective; prior to the Law, a slave was a very different thing; the despised and mistreated dregs of society, and the ultimate example of the suppression of freedom. If the child's prior world was anything like that, he was probably applying his own misplaced understanding to the situation here. In this world, people treated slaves exactly as they'd want to be treated themselves if they were a slave. And indeed, once his mother had explained how things worked in this world, he recovered once more. Erryn had valued the outsider view of the world that the child possessed, but it would do little good if he let his prior experiences colour his assumptions about this world. He needed to learn, to explore, to understand Erryn's world so that he could judge it properly.

The child was led by his mother towards the local node of the akashic library, but the sight of the structure that contained it seemed to break him, for no reason Erryn could discern. He was terrified. He managed to calm down for a bit while browsing the library, but once done, his terror returned to the point that he was barely able to walk. The ruler of the local area, the one best placed to help the child reach his potential, took note of his existence but was unable to get through to him through his panic. Erryn watched the child practically flee from Dawnhold, wasting the opportunity fortune had just granted him.

And then, almost out of nowhere, Erryn heard the child speak the words that she had wanted to hear all along.

"Why do I have to be immune? Why can't I just live in the same blissful bubble as everyone else?"

Wasn't that exactly what she had wanted? The child had expressed a desire to be under the same Law as everyone else. He wouldn't have said that if he didn't agree with it, would he? But in that case, why was he crying so loudly when he said it? Why did it sound so wrong? Erryn cursed at her inability to read the mind of the child. Why had he responded in that way to the local ruler? Why had he chosen that time to make that statement? Erryn needed to know.

Erryn watched the mother carry the sleeping child back towards their village and considered how best to access his mind. The same method would also permit her to fulfil his wish, if that was truly his desire. The System had successfully adapted to his foreign soul, even if it had taken half a year before his birth to do so, so it was obviously possible. But the System was a collaborative effort between some of the best minds of four different races at the height of their power. Loath as Erryn was to admit it, although she could control it to a significant extent, recreating it from scratch would be far beyond her abilities. How exactly it had adapted to the alien nature of his soul, she could not tell.

Although Erryn had managed to subvert some of his memories before his birth, it wasn't a feat she could repeat now that he had been born. Even if she could, without more understanding it would be too risky now that he had memories of this world; any collateral damage she may have caused manipulating memories of his old world would likely go unnoticed, but damaging memories of this one would cause problems. And even then, Erryn wanted to read his mind first, not alter it; she wanted to find out the reasons for his actions, exactly what he thought of this world, and how it compared to his old one. And she absolutely had to have a conversation of some sort with him prior to fulfilling his request. It wouldn't do to base any permanent actions on a single spoken sentence, especially given the state he had been in at the time.

Perhaps she should just ask. Despite the block on her usual telepathy, it wouldn't be difficult to scratch words into the ground in front of him, or dispatch a monster with a functional tongue and vocal cords. But this child wouldn't even trust his own parents with the most basic details of his reincarnation. He was extremely unlikely to be open with Erryn, and without her telepathy, she wouldn't even be able to tell if he was lying or omitting information. No, she wanted to be able to read him properly, not converse in the slow and imprecise manner of language.

Probing his soul would be easier were he in a dungeon, bathed in the denser mana and in close proximity to one of Erryn's cores. The best would obviously be her primary core in the depths of what the world's races now called the great dungeon, but the density of mana there would melt the flesh from his bones in seconds. She would have to start smaller. Fortunately, Dawnhold contained a suitably low levelled dungeon, at a mere ten floors. But that still wouldn't be enough on its own, or else she could just teleport him there right now.

Since the System had adapted, even though Erryn was unable to understand exactly how, perhaps it would still be possible to piggyback off its efforts. To probe his soul using the System as an intermediary. Every skill the system granted, every title it bestowed, every level and stat point—each one was an alteration of the recipient, in both body and soul. The child did not seem inclined to act outside of the System, nor did he show any concern about how the System was changing him, so Erryn could take advantage of that. With every level he gained, it would hook deeper into his soul, and it would only take a small tweak to ensure that each of those changes brought his soul closer to that of a native. With time and enough levels, it would completely erode his alien nature, causing him to become vulnerable to Erryn's telepathy and Law alike.

The next day the child finally admitted his reincarnation to his parents, but still refrained from giving any details that Erryn wanted to hear, and asked them to not spread the knowledge or question further. He explained away his fear of the local ruler by describing how one would have reacted in his old world. It must have truly been a terrible place if even parents or people in power couldn't be trusted. Oddly, despite finally noticing Erryn's tampering with his memory, he made no attempt to break it. Didn't he wish to remember? He was old enough now, settled enough into his new family, that it wouldn't have done him harm.

Following that, he seemed to settle back into his regular life. That was fine; he was still developing his magic, and Erryn accepted that the process of the System changing him little by little would take time. He even introduced a couple of board games from his old world. Maybe Erryn should pass them on to... Was it still Mirodar? Erryn had been paying too much attention to the child recently and hadn't been keeping track of that particular eccentric slime. She'd probably changed her name half a dozen more times by now. But then the child blind-sided her by saying that he wanted to meet Erryn, even going so far as to pick up a weapon proficiency. If that was the case, it surely wouldn't hurt to... encourage the process. To gently push the child to grow faster.

Erryn started with slimes. You could never go wrong with a slime. At least, not as long as you didn't consider that particular slime. Since the child had picked up a weapon skill, slimes would be no threat. With his personality he'd certainly try to fight, whatever she sent, but that would be no good if the adults chased him away. They should let him fight slimes.

He performed wonderfully. If there was one thing that was odd, it was that despite the way he never tried to act outside of the System, he would still attempt to find uses for skills beyond their original intent. It was a small piece of cognitive dissonance that Erryn couldn't understand, and while he normally didn't achieve much, she had to admit that his abuse of [Far Reach] was impressive. Erryn ordered over some higher level slimes to push him a little further, happy to find that he rose to the challenge.

Unfortunately, the local town dispatched a high levelled team of delvers to take care of the remainder of the slimes. Erryn had hoped that the child would somehow end up visiting the mana field himself, but that had admittedly been unlikely to start with. It didn't much matter; the local ruler had spotted the slimes for what they were and knew they were associated with the child. He ordered guards dispatched to the village. Now the child had another source of knowledge and training available.

Or at least, that was how Erryn had hoped it would be. Despite a promising start, the second set of guards were... boring. And worse, there would be no third set; the second set had settled down to live. The growth of the child slowed. With guards in the village, dispatching more low-levelled forces would be useless. The child would never even meet them. She would have to try something while he was alone, but chances were good that she'd only get one shot. After that, he'd be unlikely to leave the village without protection again. She'd have to make that one chance count.

She waited patiently until the child had almost reached his second rank, then looked for the perfect opportunity. It came halfway through his seventh year, when he entered the outskirts of the Emerald Sea with a young catkin girl. With his personality, he would surely send her away at the first sign of danger, but they were far enough away that any fight would end before she'd be able to fetch help. There was a bit of risk involved, but Erryn trusted that the child would rise to the challenge. She watched on as the pair moved deeper into the forest. Then, once they were sufficiently deep that the child would be unable to flee, she struck.

In the midst of the sea of trees, an orc roared.