LIGHTNOVELONLINE 254, 2/2
Erick sat atop the mossy stone chair.
He breathed; in, out, in, out.
He spoke his Truth yet again, as he had many times over the last several days of meditation.
“For the good of all, and every individual, we give assistance to those in need and do what we must to prevent apocalypse before it happens, to found and cultivate an evergrowing cycle of less war, less horror, and more hope, for now, and for all always.”
Erick’s soul was a less-tattered mess and his mantra pulled that mess together just a little bit more. It had been days since Erick had started this accretion/cultivation project of True Wizardry, and while problems plagued the compound underfoot, they were all solvable problems. Everything was a solvable problem, including Erick and this ascent to True Wizardry.
“For the good of all, and every individual...”
He spoke the words and his soul aligned a little bit more. He was keeping every part of his mortal life, he had decided, which included a lot of the Script which had raised him to power.
This was sort of like soul surgery, but really it was closer to advanced healing. The pieces were all there inside of him, but they were muted and out of alignment, in the case of his Stats, or hooked up to functionality that didn’t exist, like [Cleanse], or hanging out pretty much fully intact but unable to be used at full power instantly like usual, like all of the his spells with costs in the thousands.
The way in which this was exactly like soul surgery was in how he was envisioning all of this stuff working in his soul.
The soul was mostly incomprehensible. Even the best necromancers only saw something like 10% to 40% of a soul. But the best necromancers, and even Erick with his [Reincarnation], had a trick. One simply had to frameshift, to recategorize oneself and how one viewed the world, in order to interpret the soul into something understandable and able to be operated upon.
And so, Erick was reorganizing his soul into something able to be changed based on need or want. Something that could grow with him, and change with him, that could categorize the magic he made and protect him from outside magics, like how the God Pact and the Script did for Veird.
Something like a personal Script.
Erick was still workshopping a name and the ultimate powers of such a personal Script, and how to make it truly categorize his Wizard nature… Which was pretty much impossible. All of these little spells in his soul only looked like spells, and only from certain angles. If Erick wasn’t focusing on the frameshift of his own mind into turning the unknowable into the known, then all these ‘tools’ in his soul and core would simply look like bits of benevolence-white fog, melding with each other, completely unable to be separated from each other into discernible things.
Erick wasn’t going to make something as robust as the Script, or at least not here, at the beginning.
At this new beginning, Erick was just going to transform his existence into an unassailable tree.
Poi had once spoken of the three ways that Mind Mages eventually grew. The Unbreachable Wall, shutting out everyone and everything else, becoming completely immune to the outside world. The Growing Tree, which took in good things and withstood the bad things. And the Perfect Gestalt, which took in everything, both good and bad, in order to become one with the people around them.
Erick would become an infinitely inwardly growing tree, with his heart protected by a density of True Wizardry, and with his Benevolence touching and influencing and being influenced in return by everything out here in this universe, or any other universe.
Nothanganathor was a great evil that must be killed, but to think that Nothanganathor was the only evil out there was to set oneself up to be blinded later. So Erick wasn’t planning for just that battle. He was planning for the unplannable, as much as could be done.
He repeated his mantra.
“For the good of all, and every individual...”
- - - -
Erick likely could have forced himself to True Wizardry the very second he was out of Veird’s Script. He was glad he had not done that. Everything could be made better, and that included his own ideas of Wizardry. Being truly alone for the first time in forever —and the slimes didn’t count— had done a lot to clarify a lot…
Erick looked behind, to the staircase.
A slime with a green tint to its white body was desperately trying to climb up the stairs, to get outside.
“Bartholomew,” Erick said, “You know you can’t come up here. You almost got sucked out of the room the last time you came out… Okay. I guess you’re rolling in my meditation space now.”
Erick probably should have cleaned up the mossy floor more than he had. These little slimes could climb up anything that offered as much grip as solid moss. Erick watched as Bartholomew plopped across the ground, toward the edge of the invisible shadow walls that separated the room from the vacuum. Bartholomew rolled forward fast, right to the Great Empty beyond, the Call of the Void drawing him right through—
Erick grabbed him back, pouring a little bit of Benevolence and Healing into the slime. The little guy looked dead, but he was not. Slimes only really had cores that floated in a water-like sack, and Bartholomew’s core was intact, even if all the rest of him was not. His goo had popped, though, and he rapidly turned into a puddle of luminescent goo, which was not good. Erick placed Bartholomew downstairs, in a divot of stone. He would heal.
As long as his core was intact, and the rest of him was mostly there, he would heal.
Erick would be a lot more impossible to kill than a simple slime, soon enough, but the idea was basically the same.
He sat back down on his chair, and considered Stats.
Erick was pretty set on Stats being the basis of his personal system. But what was a Stat, exactly? Well, the little slime down there had given Erick a good example of what a Stat was, considering it was pulling itself together right now and coming back to life where it had almost looked dead. Stats were like slimes in that way.
A slime was a confluence of mana that became magic in the living expression of a mutated bacteria into something more. When Erick accreted his core originally, he accreted for size and then density and along the way he gained Stats, because Stats were the expression of a life turned solid by magic.
Strength, Vitality, Willpower, and Focus were the original Stats of Veird; they were the way that the creators of the Script decided that living things would quantify themselves through magic. Then along came Melemizargo and the New Stats and the ways in which life could quantify itself doubled. Constitution, Dexterity, Perception, and Intelligence were not the end of quantification, though.
The original four Stats weren’t the start of quantification, either.
They were all simply the directions that the creators of Veird had decided to make life live upon.
Erick could pick entirely new Stats for his personal system, if he wanted. And he kinda did. Willpower and Focus meant nothing outside of mana well size and mana regeneration, but those were defunct variables in Erick’s new system. Strength still provided physical power, and Vitality recovered that strength faster, but there wasn’t a ‘Health’ unless he made Health exist.
Erick already had those original 8 Stats, though, and those were doing a lot for him already, so he wasn’t going to ditch his core and start all over again.
He could rearrange himself, though.
Erick liked being able to have a very large mana pool, so that was one of the foundations that he was going to build upon. He’d be using his own mana generation per day, all by himself, thank you very much. Sorry, Rozeta! Erick was using his 12-ish million mana per day now; not Veird.
A core was only naturally able to churn through around 500ish mana per second before it stressed and began to break, though. Erick was far beyond that because of a blessing from Rozeta, but he still had limits that he needed to eliminate, and the natural limitations of using one’s own mana was one such roadblock. So he’d Paradox himself beyond that throughput-limit, for sure.
He’d probably go for an infinitely deep mana pool that constantly filled with his own mana, and pushed out all other influences and manas. He would want to be able to open himself up and pour out mana to get rid of outside interference as well.
So that was part 1 of his new Stats. That would be his ‘soul’. Infinite depth, infinite capacity, constantly filling from his mana generation, constantly cleaning itself. His main source of clarity of purpose. This is where he would include all of the parts of him that the Script had given him. The spells. His Familiar Forms. His ‘dragon’ form. His ‘Erick’ form. All of his Class Abilities. The soul would be the main foundation for all the rest.
Soul, Body, and Mind; Erick had already decided that, but now came the organization.
Erick would put all of his Old Stats into his soul, so that they could be expressed through all the rest to come.
His body came next, and his body would be the physical expression of his soul. His ability to move a claw and slice apart steel, or to hold a cup of coffee and not break it while still being able to enjoy the heat of the mug. The strength of his scales. The power of his breath. The ability to heal completely and never tire.
Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Perception, and Vitality would be mostly expressed through the body. All of that would be rolled into one number; simply ‘Body’. All of that would create a confluence called Health, that would be the main shield protecting Erick from physical harm. That shield would be a lot harder to weaken than Health on Veird, too, because it would be a secondary infinite well of resources that could be used to keep the body running well.
No limits to Health, either, in this new True Wizard world, thank-you-very-much.
For the third Stat, Erick wanted ‘mind’. ‘Mind’ would be an expression of his body, and be his conscious self. It was on this level that he would primarily exist, but he would also exist in soul and body. Intelligence would mainly express itself here. Willpower and Focus had nothing to do with Mana Points or Mana Point Regeneration anymore, which were deprecated Stats under Erick’s True Wizardry, so Erick would roll both of those into a new stat called ‘Concentration’, which would also go here, and simply be a part of ‘Mind’. Concentration would be the ability to focus on goals. It’d be something he could ignore when he wanted to, though. No one wanted to be ‘on’ 100% of the time.
And on top of all that, what Erick had done to make this compound in the middle of Nowhere, FENRIR, was what he would do to himself.
His soul would create a mana barrier automatically, keeping control over his mana, and in that control he would become immune to all forms of spell and skill which attempted to battle him magically.
His body, meanwhile, would form a physical barrier protecting him from the vagaries of the physical world, and in that protection, keep his physical form intact. Erick imagined that his physical barrier would be the most tested of his barriers.
His mind would be the conscious control of the first two, and also have a ‘barrier’ against manipulation. Erick imagined that his mental barrier would be the weakest link here, since he didn’t have any true mental magics, but he had been using [Telepathy] and such almost all his life on Veird. He knew what mental magic was, even if his ‘mind slime’ was ‘asleep’. And besides that, this personal Script was meant to grow eventually. Erick could figure out that functionality later.
A ‘mind shield’ would protect him from mind damage just like a Health and Mana shield would protect his soul.
… yes. That seemed good.
The main purpose of splitting up everything like this was to make it so that he could build himself up more, later, and also for what came next.
Erick envisioned 3 forms of ‘Health’ in his personal script. There was mana, which was his main fuel and also a Mana Shield of protection for his soul. There was Health, in the traditional sense, for his body. Maybe ‘Psyche’ could be the name for the mental shield around and composing his mind.
Splitting them up like this would also allow him to understand anything that attempted to maliciously interact with him. Whichever ‘health bar’ started decreasing in the face of various threats, be they magical or environmental or mental, Erick could look at his personal Script readouts for his various health bars and understand better the threat he was facing.
“Maybe I don’t need an exact number readout either. Maybe a stability meter would be more than enough. The numbers could go from -100 to 0 to 100. Any positive numbers would be me gaining resources while anything negative would be indicative of an attack of some sort.”
Of course Erick still wanted some actual numbers, but he didn’t much care for knowing if he had 21 billion mana in the tank, versus 22 billion. Once the numbers got that high then there was no practical way to spend them except in Grand Wizardry. For that, Erick would want actual numbers. But after 100 days, Erick would already have 1-ish billion mana in his core.
… He would likely have to adjust the displayed numbers when life proved his choices as inadequate to the nature of his future needs. Erick’s goal in this part of his personal system was to be able to experience a threat and categorize whatever primary threat it represented through the depletion of his… Existence Points? Like Health Points?
Sure. ‘EP’. That worked.
… Or maybe not.
Erick threw a lightward image into the air, displaying a possible… ‘benevolence box’? Instead of a blue box? Maybe.
- -
Erick Flatt, [timer for age goes here, make it subjective age] [timer for current age goes here; needs update from sources to be determined]
Overall Stability: [-100 to 100]
Mp: mana pool, [-100 to 100]
Hp: health pool, [-100 to 100]
Pp: psyche pool, [-100 to 100]
- -
Erick thought for a moment, then said, “I like that. Simple. And I can accrete for stronger versions of body and mind— Ah. Wait. I should account for that. Soul is infinite and impossible to accrete for… but it still grows based on actions. Hmm.”
He tried another display.
- -
Erick Flatt, [timer for age goes here, make it subjective age] [timer for current age goes here; needs update from sources to be determined]
Soul: [-100 to 100]
Body: [-100 to 100]
Mind: [-100 to 100]
Overall Stability: [-100 to 100]
Mp: mana pool, [-100 to 100]
Hp: health pool, [-100 to 100]
Pp: psyche pool, [-100 to 100]
- -
“Soul would grow as the Darkness in my soul grows and my actions become more renowned and influential, so while I can’t grow that directly, it will be growing… usually? Usually. Body is something that will degrade if I don’t keep it up, so that needs to be tracked and improved upon… and people can surely attack my soul directly, and this sort of degradation should be tracked.”
… And yet, was this redundant?
And not even indicative of anything, really. Did Erick need to keep track of the exact amount of mana his soul produced per day? Well… Actually. Yeah. But this didn’t do that. This showed him his rate of growth.
So let’s change that.
And the body would be refining or degrading based on the Hp number down there. Not some nebulous ‘body’ rate of change.
That should be a number, too. But what would the number even mean? Nothing, really. Not when everyone else’s systems of measurements were different.
How was he supposed to change his Mind, anyway?
And there was something Erick was missing from this readout. Probably a lot of somethings.
Erick changed the readout again.
- -
Erick Flatt, [timer for age goes here, make it subjective age] [timer for current age goes here; needs update from sources to be determined]
Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 34%, 33%, 33%
Soul: [some number, use mana production per day; New Hidden Stat (Darkness)]
Body: [some number, use average of all hidden body stats; Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Vitality]
Mind: [some number, use average of all hidden mind stats: (Willpower+Focus= Concentration), Intelligence, Perception]
Overall Stability: [-100 to 100]
Mp: mana pool, [-100 to 100]
Hp: health pool, [-100 to 100]
Pp: psyche pool, [-100 to 100]
- -
“Ah! I need to do this, too.”
- -
Erick Flatt, [timer for age goes here, make it subjective age] [timer for current age goes here; needs update from sources to be determined] [CURRENT REALITY]
Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 34%, 33%, 33%
Soul: [some number, use mana production per day; New Hidden Stat (Darkness)]
Body: [some number, use average of all hidden body stats; Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Vitality]
Mind: [some number, use average of all hidden mind stats: (Willpower+Focus= Concentration), Intelligence, Perception]
Overall Stability: [-100 to 100]
Resons: ??? [-100 to 100]
Mp: mana pool, [-100 to 100]
Hp: health pool, [-100 to 100]
Pp: psyche pool, [-100 to 100]
- -
“… Or maybe not include resons? They’re rather impossible to measure… But I should include them…. Somewhere— Ah! Let’s put them under Mind, because resons are the precipitation of reasons-for-being-and-doing.” Erick smiled, as he understood something deeply. “I might not have a mind slime but I surely have resons.”
- -
Erick Flatt, [timer for age goes here, make it subjective age] [timer for current age goes here; needs update from sources to be determined] [CURRENT REALITY: God Pact, etc; needs update from sources to be determined]
Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 34%, 33%, 33%
Soul: [some number, mana production per day; also New Hidden Stat (Darkness)]
Body: [some number, use average of all hidden body stats; Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Vitality]
Mind: [some number, use average of all hidden mind stats: (Willpower+Focus= Concentration), Intelligence, Perception]
Overall Stability: [-100 to 100]
Mp: mana pool / mana shield, [-100 to 100]
Hp: health pool / health shield, [-100 to 100]
Pp: psyche pool / mind shield, [-100 to 100] ; Resons: ??? [-100 to 100]
- -
Erick was happy with that.
… Except Resons were probably uncountable since they were the form of Wizardry in this universe, and Wizardry, while based in numbers somewhat, was also a lot more than numbers.
But this would do for now. When Erick got some real learning about resons he’d fix up that part of his New Status.
What came next was Grand Wizardry, to impose this personal Script.
… Erick was going to wait on that until his soul was fully healed to do that. Maybe in a few more days.
His Lightning Path wasn’t too active at the moment since there was nothing out there to interact with, but his Lightning Path was telling him that there was something coming the moment he passed this gate. Erick would need to be absolutely ready for that.
And so, he planned for the worst possible case: At the very least, he needed to be prepared to abandon this outpost at a moment’s notice, and that meant securing his mana and body and mind against outside influences, like the vacuum of space, and Primal Lightning.
There. That was the worst possible case of becoming a True Wizard; being able to ignore the dangers of the world.
And then Erick planned for success. What did the best possible version of this endeavor look like?
This Personal Script would allow him to fire off countless spells outside of the Script Second. With a pool of mana that was as deep as he regenerated, and with full access to his own mana, he’d be able to fire off spells faster than he could ever before. It’d be like that time he got to use that [SSS] spell from Rozeta at the end of ‘Last Shadow’s Feast’.
Other benefits to setting up these various permanent accretion and protective magics inside his body included being immune to Mind Control and Soul Control and Blood Magic, too.
If Erick could make this work, and he was pretty sure he could, he would get all of the benefits of the Script, but with none of the controls imposed by the Script.
It seemed like a good base to start.
- - - -
Two days later, and after expanding the compound a few times, Erick decided to try opening a [Gate] into Benevolence Itself, because he hadn’t tried that, actually. He opened a hole into a very small part of reality that was foggy as shit, and empty as could be.
Erick rapidly closed the entrance into Benevolence and decided not to do that ever again, for a few reasons.
If he did that, and if he decided to make a Gate Network here on FENRIR, it could possibly connect back to Veird, and that would make Veird vulnerable to whatever fuckery is happening here on this adamantium land. However, if he did need to get back to Veird —more like ‘when’, not ‘if’— then making a gate network here would be the way to create that path to Veird.
Opening up that hole to Benevolence Itself did clue him in that the various upgrades to the compound’s domainwork were making a Benevolence-capable space in this small area. What Erick had done here was pretty much exactly what the Script was doing when it held on to Benevolence on Veird.
Good to know.
… Which gave Erick a great idea for an upgrade to his future Status.
“Or at least a potential one. I could make a personal gate space that I could always carry around with me, inside my infinite depth core… Hmm. That might not work out how I want. I should workshop that, first. Put it on the list for potential future upgrades.”
So far that list included:
The Luck Stat. His Lightning Path might work well when quantized into ‘Luck’
A personal ‘inventory’, which Erick had been considering to place inside his soul. This was probably unnecessary. A personal inventory could go right alongside an extradimensional gatespace.
Various other Stats, like ‘Reality Sense’, which would be great for using to figure out where he was at all points in time; he just had to actually figure out how the heck such a ‘stat’ would even work.
“… And yet, that opens up the problem of me accidentally making a path back to Veird. I probably don’t want to make a gatespace right now, for any reason. Not only could it be used to find Veird, but someone could attack me through that dimension… probably… Hmm. I’m probably going to get attacked from a lot of weird angles. Dimensional attacks? Yeah. And yet...”
Part of successfully fighting an enemy was deciding how the enemy was able to attack you.
Like, sure, people could come through the walls to get you, but most people came through the doors and windows.
“Can I do that with Wizardry? Enforce the avenue of attacks upon which someone can harm me? Decide how I’ll let myself be harmed? A good enough Wizard could overcome that… But… No. Maybe not? Could I…?”
… Erick wasn’t so sure such a thing was possible...
But as he considered that particular thought…
“Oh. Shit. This is a Big Thought, isn’t it.”
And then.
“Wizards should be able to define avenues of attack quite well, actually. Especially Paradox Wizards. I need to incorporate this. This is like… foundational— Oh! I can use my Class Ability Failsafe that triggers [Time Stop] and [Return] and mutate that into anti-egress magics and also…”
Oh.
Oh yes.
Erick began drawing out plans in the air out of light.
Fifteen hours later he had filled the compound with all of his ideas and their follow through with runic notation and full wording. He ended up forcing himself to take a nap and then he woke up refreshed with even more ideas.
He worked on his True Wizardry, taking his time, figuring out his future.
Gradually, Erick refined his lightward ideas scattered across the whole compound into words lightly etched onto platinum chalkboards. He ate as much as necessary, he slept as much as he could, but the ideas flowed, and they had to be transformed from soft light into hard truths, and sometimes refined yet again.
It took him another 17 days before he thought he was ready to actually ascend.
This personal script had a lot going for it, and a lot of expansion opportunities for the future. It was mostly made of Benevolence, but it also had a lot of Book Magic involved everywhere, for that particular element was great at ordering the impossible into the solid. This right here was sort of like the Identinomicon that Erick had never made on Veird because he had simply never needed to organize his thoughts and identification magic like that, thanks to Intelligence. But the Script was surely Book Magic, and this would be Book Magic, too, because he would be ordering ten thousand thoughts and feelings and magics into clean lines of intent and power.
As he worked, Erick lightly chided himself for never truly interrogating every single person who made the Script on how, exactly, they made the Script. He forgave himself, though, because he had asked those specific questions now and again, and the answer had always been a variation on a theme, ‘We got the original Script from the dwarves and back then it was just a manaminer. Only with the Sundering and the help of people on Veird at that time did we transform it into the Script. Rozeta did a lot of the hidden work.’
Rozeta had better answers than that, but she wasn’t willing to give them up to anyone. She had promised Erick that she’d talk about all that with him after 70 years of peace, but they never got there.
Quilatalap had not known the full details of the Script, even though he was there at the Sundering helping to make it. Farix, the Professor Shade who had manaminer classes at his arcanaeum, had only the largest, most broadest of ‘insider knowledge’ as to how manaminers functioned. Other people were not much better. Kirginatharp was more like his mother than anyone else when it came to answering those specific questions, and forget Melemizargo.
Erick had enough details to work with, though.
He was pretty sure that this thing he was creating was going to be a personal manaminer in effect, and maybe also in truth.
“Still don’t know what to call it, though,” Erick said, as he continued to write down every spell he had ever made, putting his full status on the walls of this particular room, just so that he would be able to make sure it was all there when he was done.
As he got to Rozeta’s Recovery, which made all his regen add together and apply to both his Mana and Health, Erick was truly starting to understand how many of these grand abilities were superfluous in the real world. ‘Recovery’ was built upon systems that did not exist for Erick, or even naturally. Multi Ward, the ability for Erick to have multiple Personal Wards, was completely useless, as the ‘only one Personal Ward per person’ was a limitation of the Script in the first place. Erick had already cast ten layers of [Unbreakable Form] on himself, just to see if he could, and he could.
The ‘absolute damage reduction’ of [Unbreakable Form] was even a lie, too, because what was ‘damage’ but a categorization of the Script’s interpretation of standardized damage?
As Erick kept pulling apart lies from truth, he mumbled, “Well maybe the lies are truth when under the auspices of the Script.”
Minutes later, Erick said, “The ‘definition of damage’ is certainly something that needs to be put into my personal Script, though, that can be the thing that allows enemies to harm me in certain ways, and closes off all other ways… Could I actually cut off all damage? This is Wizardry after all… But no. To be a person living in this world or any other is to be vulnerable sometimes, otherwise life is shit… Yes. That is more correct than making myself immune to damage. ‘Immunity to damage’ surely does not exist—”
And then he realized something.
“The dimensional ban of the script is a limiting of harm done to Veird through dimensions. This is most likely the source of the various Elemental Bands of the Script. This also correlates to my own planned route of making Soul, Body, and Mind the only avenues in which I accept damage, but I can still interact with all sources of everything out there, just like the Script.
“The infinitesimal ban of the Script seems like it’s the true foundation of the Script, though. The Script is at the underlying everything of Veird, and everything builds upon that, sort of like how I’m going to make my core infinitely expanded inward, and constantly pushing mana outward to get rid of all unapproved influences.
“The propagation ban of the Script is another limit of damage done, saying ‘nothing can make more of itself’. Seems like a good way to prevent corruptive influencing, so maybe I’ll steal that base idea, too...”
Erick wrote and rewrote ideas.
And then he got to experimentation with infinitely-dense mana crystals.
Infinitely-dense crystals weren’t hard to make at all, outside of the Script.
- - - -
Erick felt that maybe he was already primed to go a day later.
He had planned some experiments with a second and third core, and so he created a second and third core that he poured mana into, transforming them into densities beyond the norm. Both experiments were basic creations of his final idea, like mockups of a prototype. They didn’t function how he wanted, because they weren’t actually his core; they were separate cores.
But they still worked how cores normally worked; each one held his soul, and each one allowed him to cast more mana into spellworks faster and easier, with less stress on the structure of the core itself.
More experiments had Erick opening [Gate]s into Benevolence Itself, inside his experimental cores, and he had room on the other side. One 5 centimeter wide sphere had 10 cubic meters of space on the other side. Erick had no idea what the heck was happening there, but he was pretty sure that with this experiment he was witnessing what it meant to not be subject to the Dimensional Ban.
He plopped a slime over to the other side, left it for a minute, and then brought it back to this side, and it was safe.
Erick wasn’t going to play around with Benevolence Itself here and now, but it was good to see that his various theories about what he was doing were already checking out, even if the experiments revealed nuances that Erick wasn’t able to deal with right now.
Five days later, Erick thought he was actually ready to make this happen.
He had even come up with a name for his Personal Script, and it seemed appropriate.
His personal Script would be his Path.
Just think of all the jokes he could make once he returned to Veird and Rozeta was all like ‘why aren’t you back in the Script, Erick?’ and he could say ‘I’m on my own Path now, Rozeta.’
Erick chuckled at his own jokes as he read over his platinum walls to make sure it all looked good.
If nothing terrible happened during his ascension then, in the following days, Erick would refine his Personal Script. He’d clean up all the stuff that didn’t matter to him anymore or figure out how to make it apply again, like Clarity for 50% mana costs or Intelligence for even more mana efficiency than 50%. Erick already had a pretty good idea how to make Elemental Mystical work for him again without needing to actually spend the mana he Altered to Mystical and thus end up back at square one. The idea involved automagic mystical infusions to cast spellwork, and it might not work. All that stuff was beyond the scope of the initial instantiation of his personal Script, though, which was pretty much Benevolence-based.
And when he was done with that refining, he’d send out the Call to the Universe, like he had during that Star Mapping ritual. Erick was absolutely sure that he hadn’t actually mapped the universe at all when he had done that. He had tapped into some other power that was already there.
He had to tap into that power again. Simple stuff, really.
Erick breathed deep, taking in the scent of water and plants and moss and mist, as he listened to the burble of the fountains and the plopping of the benevolence slimes all around.
“Yup. I’m ready.”
- - - -
Erick stepped onto the roof of the center of his compound.
Everything below him was black, everything above him was stars.
The nearest life was right below Erick’s feet, and also millions of kilometers away, or more. That storm on the horizon was gone now, having orbited away days ago, making everything out there truly dark. Was Melemizargo here, in this moment? Probably not. If he was, then he would have said hello by now.
The slimes surely said hello. They had also tried to suffocate Erick in his sleep three times, too, but that wasn’t really their fault. They were just blobby cats, looking for warmth in the night to share. They had been good company over the last month and some change and Erick would try to save them if he could.
But it was time to move on.
Erick’s original platinum ‘chalkboard’ workboards rested downstairs in a stack against a wall. The slimes were already playing on them. He’d keep them around for a while, but he’d likely destroy them as soon as this worked out. They had served their purpose; they had helped him to make 3 more platinum tablets, each deeply lined with words and intent and power, each of them sitting on stone platforms around Erick in what might have been the North, South, and Western directions. A fourth tablet held a carving of Erick himself, and nothing else. That tablet sat in the Eastern position.
It was the same sort of arrangement he had made with Melemizargo, Rozeta, Fairy Moon, and himself, twice already; the God of Magic, the God of Ordered Magic, the God of Unbound Fairy, and the Wizard.
Only one of those designations was correct, but Erick didn’t imagine that any of them would mind the designations that Erick had given them.
Erick took a deep breath… And then he turned and watched as inquisitive Bartholomew managed to overcome the ridge that Erick had put by the stairs. Erick had tried to block the slime from coming up into the open. It hadn’t worked. With a gentle nudge, Erick put Bartholomew back down the stairs, much further down, and then he put a slate stone over the stairs, blocking out the light from below.
Now it was truly dark.
Erick turned to the tablets.
And then he turned inward.
“It’s really quite simple,” Erick rhymed, to his mana.
“We start with a dimple, that expands to nirvana.
“Into this peace we are our own system,
“Into prosperity we make infinite wisdom.
“A foundation of might washes out all opposed
“From this benevolent land, this power enclosed.
“Send out a path! Soul, to body, to mind.
“Rend evil inroads! Forever declined.
“This is a life, cultivated, secure.
“If I should falter, I am my own cure.
“Here I walk, up a path of ascension.
“Show me myself, my growing progression
“A paradox of benevolent wrath
“A True Wizard on his own Lightning Path.”
The air of the compound sparkled.
Erick’s core went from simple white to white on the edges, to a shade of blue, to something far, far more brilliant with depth than could ever be grasped. Mana poured outward like soft lightning, grabbing hold of the platinum tablets, disintegrating them, and then flashing inward. The iridescent depths of Erick’s core turned iridescent black, becoming a perfect sphere marked with edges of brilliant white.
And the Lightning expanded.
His voice never faltered as his throat and chest exploded, revealing the darkness in his core to the star-strewn darkness of the universe. There was no pain as Erick’s flesh evaporated into red mist, revealing light underneath it all. He was not dying. He was Becoming.
Brilliance appeared out of the death of self, becoming something stronger than flesh, replacing all that was lost. Like a dragon shedding his skin, Erick shed his mortality in full.
His All-Seeing Amulet, with Yggdrasil’s secret attached to the back, broke into two pieces. Yggdrasil’s secret fell to the floor, a shining beacon of power revealed to the world. Erick’s All-Seeing Eye turned from physical power, to purpose and possibility, the eye of Melemizargo becoming a tiny bolt of Benevolence that sunk into his core.
The magic was 95% done.
Erick felt like himself. He did not look like himself. He stood in his body as though he were a Benevolence Elemental, shaped in the manner of flesh and standing nude against the universe; a person of white light among the black. He saw the world a little differently right now, but not that much different.
He would help Veird. He would see Jane, Abigail, Beth, Candice, Evan, Solomon, Poi, Teressa, Destiny, all the gods, all the people of home, soon enough. But for right now, he had one more step to take.
The magic was 95% done.
He saw his Lightning Path calling him; the final bit of magic, the final step toward Ascension.
Erick took a Step that was not in any visible direction, but he would be hard pressed to call it any way other than Forward.
- - - -
Erick did not breathe. He did not need to. He did not panic at his new surroundings, for that would not be useful. He did check his Lightning Path, though, because it was leading him forward, to speak to the man behind the desk up there.
He was in an office room with bare grey walls, fluorescent bulb lights that buzzed angrily, and grey carpet. And there was a desk. And a man. He looked bored.
Erick had no idea where he was, but the man at the desk looked like the kind of guy who knew what was what, and so Erick felt that maybe he should talk to the man, and ignore the fact that his Lightning Path was actually branching out in every single direction around him, telling him to get away, while only one direction was going forward, through the man at the desk—
Suddenly, writing appeared across his eyesight, and Erick felt like himself again, but different.
- -
Establishing Path Protocols.
Welcome back from death, Erick Flatt.
The Ascension was successful. Your soul is now your own to do with as you desire. Here is the initial Status readout that you built (And here is the code that you gave yourself to make sure it was you that was doing this: ‘I am the very model of a modern major scripted system’)
Notice: Some parts are missing. Fix them, Erick.
- -
Erick Flatt, [60ish?] [Current Year: This one?] [CURRENT REALITY=BAD!!!]
Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 34%, 33%, 33%
Soul: 14.8m per day, [Darkness Level = ???]
Body: 207
Mind: 304
Overall Stability: ↓↓↓↓↓ [+171, -1062] Directed attack (ALL). Time to death 2.5 seconds (Health>Mana>Psyche)
Mp: 2327/∞, ↓ [+52, -339] Warning: Under directed attack. Time to death 8 seconds
Hp: 1671/∞, ↓ [+51, -634] Warning: Under directed attack. Time to death 2.5 seconds
Pp: 1298/∞, ↓ [+51, -89] Warning: Under directed attack. Time to death 34 seconds
Resons: ??? [???]
- -
Erick recognized many different things in that eternal moment when his Path came online.
His Intelligence was fully online now and working overtime, as was his Perception and All-Seeing Eye. Everything was working in conjunction with each other to show him the Truth of his surroundings, and that truth, like his ‘Current Reality’ readout, was bad. He was in a room that was not a room. He stood upon a blasted, molten land, filled with Red Lightning that was constantly striking him like a thousand lightning strikes a second, and the guy at the desk was a figment; an illusion.
This was a trap of Malevolence, made for Wizards who ascended.
Erick would find out the rest soon enough.
Erick instantly focused and started Mana Siphoning all of his surroundings—
It was like turning on the air conditioning and slathering oneself in aloe after a day of dying on a beach of sun exposure, and it was a lot more effective than it had any right to be. The Script had obviously screwed with the power of Mana Siphon in the name of ‘balance’. Erick realized he would likely be discovering a lot of little things like that for a long time. For now, Red Lightning crashed into his fleshy body and instead of ripping apart anything, it soaked in, absorbed like water into a sponge.
Erick hadn’t even turned on his sunform yet. He was still nude, too. This was just him, standing under Red Lightning, atop molten something, soaking in the lightning and feeling mostly fine.
He flicked on his Status with a mental command.
- -
Erick Flatt, [60ish?] [Current Year: This one?] [CURRENT REALITY=magically delicious]
Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 34%, 33%, 33%
Soul: 14.8m per day, [Darkness Level=?]
Body: 207
Mind: 304
Overall Stability: ↑↑ [+1233]
Mp: 3590/∞, ↑ [+52, +354] Warning: Under directed attack.
Hp: 2886/∞, ↑ [+51, +354] Warning: Under directed attack.
Pp: 2,483/∞, ↑ [+51, +354] Warning: Under directed attack.
Resons: ??? [???]
- -
Erick would mentally simplify that later, but for now it seemed to be telling him that while he was under attack on all sides his Mana Siphon was working well.
Very well.
It was negating all damage and giving him resources instead.
Nice.
His eyes confirmed what his soul was telling him.
Erick stood under an assault of Red Lightning and soaked it in, turning it into power for himself. The soaking would increase with more surface area, though, so Erick transformed into his sunform, his fleshy body becoming Benevolence that snapped and crashed and joined with the Red Lightning all around to suck it down into his personal Script, his Path, like a greedy Drain Ward, or rather more like the spell that he eventually made out of his Drain Wards.
Erick became a tentacle Undertow Star, with a thousand limbs and each of them soaking up the spellwork all around.
He was the light in the dark, tendrils soaking into the Red, pulling down all the power of this trap into himself, transforming it into his own mana. It was a glorious sort of feeling to consume an enemy who had laid this [Teleport Trap] for Wizards, and who Sundered the Old Cosmology. It seemed poetic, almost. Erick wasn’t sure how the [Teleport Trap] worked, but now that he wasn’t dying, and he was, in fact, doing very well, he saw the trap for what it was.
Erick mentally asked for a simplified Status before he got into the nature of this casual horror all around.
- -
Overall Stability: ↑↑↑↑↑ [+8917] Time to Death = never
- -
“Yup,” Erick said into the Lightning air, “Looks good.”
Erick’s Mana Siphon probably wouldn’t work this well with many other types of magical assaults, but for this trap, in this location, wherever this was, Erick was doing just fine. Benevolence was the perfect counter to Malevolence.
Overcoming this trap did have one unintended side effect, though.
Erick was trying to decide if it was time to panic, or not.
Erick stood atop a blasted surface of land, scoured in every direction by Red, pools of molten metal and rock laying in the open under the light of a sun overhead that was closer than Erick ever imagined it could be. The Red Sun took up half the sky. Somehow, some part of Erick’s ascension had taken him not only inside the FENRIR system, but to a planet near the sun.
Close enough to see.
Close enough to know.
There was Nothanganathor, resting in the sun’s surface like someone had taken a black hose and left it to float in a glowing white puddle. It was too long of a body. It was too big of an enemy. A thousand Jupiters would have been smaller, and by a lot. Erick noticed many things at that moment. Nothanganathor was white. Not black. Not red. But he was pressed against the sun and backlit hard. From a distance, he looked black. In the shine of him, he was red. But from this close Erick could see his edges, and know him as a white dragon, tens of millions of kilometers long, and probably longer.
And his head was right there, laying with one side against the sun, one eye pointed outward, staring at Erick, here on this inner planet of Veird’s system.
Erick bolted away, flashing white and vanishing fast, trying to circumnavigate the planet in a jolting second—
The Malevolence of the solar system gathered, crashing into Erick, as Erick left the opposite side of the inner planet, rushing into the sky, flying fast and faster, trying to keep the planet between him and that baleful eye. It was only when he was far, far beyond the gravity of the ‘planet’ that he realized he wasn’t on a planet at all, but on a thousand-kilometer-wide moon, or something.
Erick kept flying away, trying to keep the moon between him and Nothanganathor—
Red Lightning flickered the void. The moon between Erick and That Eye suddenly slipped to the side.
Erick locked gazes with something he did not know how to fight.
Something like a voice came to Erick, all casually hateful.
“Time to die, Erick Flatt number 17,212.”
Uhh—
And then Erick caught sight of the rest of space, and he saw stars. No eternal blackness. No adamantium plates locking in Nothanganathor. The FENRIR system was gone. Erick was not near the God Pact world at all.
Lightning and worse descended.