Chapter 70, 1/2

Chapter 70, 1/2

Before Erick knew it, a month and a half had passed him by. Classes came every day, and every day he learned a little bit more. The stability of it all was something Erick had no idea he needed. No monsters outside the walls. No shadows looking at him from darkened corners. No great big problems. And he was learning all sorts of important stuff! About the math and intricacies of [Teleport], about the nuanced, not-magic of Professor Rue Down’s Esoteric Magic. About different spells and different paths to power, and about the truly world-changing spells out there that every mage longed to master. All in all, Oceanside was rather relaxing.

The most dangerous thing to happen to him the whole time was Erick’s every-other-day beat down in Professor Ulogai Tinawa’s stone arena, where he sometimes won his fights, but not always. Erick’s anonymity in the arena had been ripped away after the third class, just as they were moving on to magical combat. After that, the fights got both a lot harder, and a lot easier. Some of his opponents wanted to give him a polite nod and then scamper off, but some of them were all bravado and power. Erick learned a lot more from those magical fights with young hotheads than he had learned in all his physical combat since falling to Veird. Mostly, Erick learned that he was not cut out for hitting someone with a stick. But telekinetically slapping someone out of the air with a block of stone? That was okay.Witness the debut of this chapter, unveiled through Ñôv€l--B1n.

According to Poi’s occasional updates and Ophiel’s vision, Spur was doing alright. Erick rained on the farms every afternoon. Mog sent requests every so often for him to kill various monsters headed Spur’s way. Erick responded with lightning and fire and violent dehydration. With a bit of math, and some time to think, Erick took the time to count the distance between Oceanside and Spur and discovered the two were not 12,500 kilometers away from each other, but 13,700. It wasn’t much of a difference, though.

He talked to Jane when he could, though she had been off killing unicorns for a while and that extra distance was a bit harder to overcome, not to mention other emergent problems. Every time he tried to contact Jane she was either busy with her new friends, or busy being an ooze, and [Telepathy] didn’t work on oozes. But she had gotten her unicorn form and she had made some new friends, so that was pretty great.

The updates of the last few days were a bit concerning, but Jane was back home in Spur, and she had told him of most of the hunt, and nothing too concerning jumped out, so that was that. Hopefully Redwood’s story was true, and they weren't being set up to be killed, but they were out of there. Erick was glad Jane escaped that situation as fast as possible. Just yesterday she even talked of possibly coming to Oceanside before she went on to finish her Polymage quest.

Rats signed up for work at Oceanside’s Hospital after the first week of arriving on the island. He was learning a lot about a lot, especially since people from all over the world came to Oceanside for medical help. [Greater Treat Wounds] and [Cleanse] solved a lot of problems but some problems required technique. Cancers in stranger locations, like inside the brain, demanded knowledge of the body and skilled hands so as not to damage the psyche or personality or memories. Parasites of all kinds were also a major concern, but Oceanside had some of the best anti-parasite magics and techniques known on Veird.

There was no way to truly prevent parasites aside from walking around encased in metal and completely cut off from the world. For most worldly interacting, this was not a valid strategy. You just had to know how to deal with them after the fact, though identifying the vectors for such infections and thus preventing the infection in the first place was helpful in combating common parasites found in nature. Don’t drink water from strange sources, even if you [Cleanse] it first. Don’t eat meat left out for the flies. That sort of thing.

The parasites created by the Parasite Mages or Parasite Warriors of the world were best defended against like how you would defend against any insidious attacker; through constant vigilance and knowing your enemy. The problem there, was that not many people knew they were under attack by a Parasiteer until they were already infected.

As for Teressa, the grey-armored orcol often accompanied Erick to Rue’s classes. They worked on Mana Sense as a group and individually every so often, but even the other, smaller Esoteric Magics of the world had Teressa chomping at the bit to know more. Teressa would sometimes remark, after classes or back in Windy Manor, that it all reminded her of her tribe’s hunting traditions. She never really spoke past that point. Erick could tell that her past was bloody and uncomfortable, so he never pushed.

As for his own Mana Sense, Erick was not doing well.

Poi was ever-watchful, as always, but even he seemed to relax a little as time went on and nothing happened.

Hocnihai died two weeks after leaving Oceanside. He passed from the world the age of 116, surrounded by his family, friends, and a few other archmages. Daily treatments of [Greater Treat Wounds] and [Regeneration] helped him to dictate three final tomes of his accumulated knowledge, for the use of future generations. Each tome was three hundred pages long and filled with all of the magical knowledge Hocnihai had accumulated during his long life. These tomes were bequeathed to his grandson, who was already an accomplished Warder, already on the precipice of becoming an archmage himself.

When ambassadors from the Wasteland Kingdoms came to Erick on Oceanside to tell him this, they also gave him copies of those three tomes and a formal state-backed invitation and an assurance of peace, if he should ever want to visit the Kingdoms. Hocnihai had given the Kingdoms, in detail, every bit of knowledge that Erick had given to him in that singular lecture. They were already developing ‘electricity’ and ‘lightbulbs’, and would love if Erick could see what they had managed on so little information. Erick sent them off with a ‘maybe’. That was good enough for them.

Kiri was doing fantastically well. Being Erick’s apprentice opened a lot of doors for her, like being invited to classes outside of those Erick chose to attend. She even got an invitation to Professor Ulogai Tinawa’s advanced mage combat classes. She was busy all the time.

As for Erick himself? He was barely passing almost all of the more ‘important’ classes. The math involved with Spatial Magic was too much for him. He understood the pictures, but when the professor linked those pictures to equations made of squiggles and letters, Erick felt lost at sea with no land in sight. Kiri had no such problems. Kiri helped Erick to understand some of those classes, after class, back at Windy Manor, but not all of it, and Erick was honestly tired of asking for her help. She was way too busy with homework of her own and Erick was not going to hold Kiri back from her own success.

So Erick read a lot of books, over and over. The lessons were all in the books, anyway.

But as time went on, the math of every single magical class was too much for Erick. From Defensive Theory, to Spatial Magic, to Basic Enchanting, all of it involved math, and all of that math was too much, because none of it involved what Erick would have called ‘real geometry’. None of the math of Spatial magic seemed to be based around real, tangible space; all of the math went off of imaginary, nonsensical insanity. Erick would have called it multi-dimensional calculus, but the professor was adamant that real Spatial Magic never involved other dimensions at all. And besides: Dimensional magic was Banned, after all.

But not every magic taught revolved around non-real space. For certain disciplines there were diagrams and charts all based in real reality, and all of that seemed rather intuitive. Like how to plot out the best way to place defensive, anti-specific-magic runes around a room, or how to design a dungeon. Basically, you just had to know the rate of mana flow, the direction, and about a dozen other smaller facts based on whatever situation and furniture and lives lived in the space, and the rest was easy.

Defending a house through anti-specific-magic runes turned out to be kinda fun. Erick wasn’t able to do a lot of the math that Professor Egallia Stomp demanded, so Erick failed many of the paper practice tests, but by the time physical tests came around, Erick was able to routinely place anti-[Teleport] runes where they needed to be without doing any math. He just sort of placed them were the mana swirled. It wasn’t perfect placement, but it was 90 percent effective, which was pretty good for just looking at a room and feeling the mana therein. It also only took him a minute to rune a room, instead of the ten or twenty minutes it took to do the proper math. Egallia Stomp was simultaneously furious and fine with it all.

“Some people just have a natural mind for mana,” she would say. “The rest of us need math.”

A real Mana Sense would have helped, for sure, maybe even allowed for 98 or 100 percent effective rune placement, but the barely-there vision and feelings given to Erick by Meditation was enough to allow him to see and feel the flow of mana all around him. It was enough, for now.

Nowhere was this fact more apparent than in Professor Apell Calloway’s class. While Esoteric Magic and Professor Rue Downs’ continual round table discussions of stranger magics was a delight, Dungeoneering was the single class where Erick excelled.

Professor Calloway’s class had taken Erick and twenty other students into the deeper parts of Oceanside Island to build dungeons that spun the flows of mana into slimes, and in the rare occasion, into ‘naturally’ occurring elementals. Both of the starter dungeons voted on by the students were partial successes, each with their own failures or bounties, but the textbook dungeon was an all around success providing for the growth of two to three slimes for every one produced in the students’ attempts.

All three of those starter dungeons were all dismantled a while ago. Now, everyone in the class had been charged with building their own dungeon in one of several different locations scattered around the Island, from the western coast where mana rushed against the cliffs, to the relatively calm interior with forests and few mountains, to the beaches of the eastern edge, where eddies and swirls produced odd currents and so many water slimes.

With all those slimes, the threat of oozes was always close at hand. But the professor wasn't really worried. Water oozes were a danger in every dungeon on Oceanside, but the danger was minimal.

According to Erick’s Monster Ecology class, as well as his dungeoneering Professor, Apell Calloway, different slimes needed to get to different levels, or to fulfill other requirements, in order to transform into an ooze. For water slimes, the level for a transformation was generally around level 45, and those kinds of levels just did not happen around Oceanside, which was naturally between 20 to 37. It was only when students died in their own dungeons to their own slimes that oozes came out, but even then, those oozes tended to rush for the water to hunt more prey. They were water oozes, after all, and the oceans were the largest source of food around.

(According to Monster Ecology, monsters leveled differently than Matriculated people. Mostly, they gained levels based on how many rads they ate, or how many essences they gained, or any of a hundred other ways. Age was a major factor for levels, for those monsters which didn’t lose physical power as they grew older, as well as how much they dominated others in their territory. Slimes were one of the monsters that fell into this category. Wyrms were another. Unicorns, were yet another. But really: there was no set path for monsters gaining levels like how there was for people.)

Erick’s own attempt at dungeoneering was not in the western cliffs, taking advantage of the mana river, or the eastern slope to the beaches, but in a relatively calm area north of Windy Manor, in a part of the forest where no one lived for a hundred kilometers. Whereas everyone in the class visited everyone else’s dungeons in order to learn from each other’s mistakes, the Headmaster and Calloway both agreed that Erick’s location should remain a secret. Oceanside was safe, but Erick was an archmage, and certain things were expected to remain hidden. This was fine with Erick. He had experiments to do.

- - - -

Erick stood in the forest with tiny Ophiel on his shoulder. The sun shone down from above, scattering light through leaves.

The land around here was vibrantly green and full of tall, thin trees. Occasional cracks in the ground broke up a monotony of small hills and slight rises, while a heavy undergrowth of ferns, grasses, flowers, and mushrooms accented the forest floor. This was not an ancient forest, barely tread by people where monsters ate other monsters. This was like any forest back on Earth, near where Erick lived his previous life. It was wild, for sure, but there was this feeling that civilization was just over the next hill, or around the bend. If Erick walked for ten minutes in any direction he felt like he would accidentally end up in someone’s backyard.

This was, of course, a failing on Erick’s part. Civilization was a hundred kilometers away and this might not have been an ancient forest, but there were monsters that lived around here.

‘Were’ being the operative word.

Right now, there was no one here except Erick, Ophiel, Poi, and the natural wildlife. Erick had already killed the larger monsters that roamed into this part of the forest with a quick application of [Domain of the Withering Slime], as he had done every time he came here for the last two weeks.

As the white sphere of Erick’s Domain peeled away like flaking ash, Erick gazed upon an inconspicuous bend in the forest floor near a larger tree than most, like the bend in the ground was a present waiting to be unwrapped. This is because it was. Erick glanced at his most recent notification. It had finally happened.

You have slain Light Slime A!

95% participation!

+3040 exp

“It happened, Poi!” Erick said, stepping through the underbrush to the entrance to his dungeon.

Ophiel flitted off of Erick’s shoulder to hold in the air behind him.

With his face falling a bit, Poi asked, “Really?” He eloquently added, “Uh.”

Erick rushed the entrance to his dungeon, located near the ‘roots’ of the larger-than-most tree. The ‘tree’ was fake; it was completely hollow. Erick had [Stoneshape]ed the land upward into a rather well hidden intake system for both the mana flow from the west, and for depositing platinum rain all the way to the end of the dungeon. Here and there, and all around the rest of the nearby forest, were other intake and exit vents that fed and nurtured what laid beneath.

Erick reached the bend in the forest floor. Poi followed close behind. With a quick [Stoneshape] he pulled up the ground, revealing a tunnel and stairs and bright sunlightwards. Ophiel flew down first, disappearing behind a bend in the hallway. Erick smiled wide as he walked down the stairs, past twists and turns, to reach the first floor of the dungeon. This room was nothing special—

Poi said, “Uh. Sir. Uh. Maybe we should not be—”

“Oh, Poi. It’s fine!” Erick said, “I just cleaned it out. The whole place. There’s no oozes down there.”

The first floor of the dungeon was a flat, boxy set of hallways and staircases that curved around and down. It was designed to keep slimes from coming up. The stairs were too big for them to roll up, while the mana that flowed though here was made to flow down; nothing should ever spawn on these staircases.

He pointed to lightwards he had set up near two weeks ago, saying, “They’re all in different mana flows.” He said, “Dungeoneering is really fun, but I don’t think I want to keep around any slimes, no matter how cute they are. But I’ve been reading practically everything there is on [Permanent Special Ward]s and how they work in different mana flows.

“There’s a problem in your schools—”

“They’re not my schools.” Poi said, “You do that a lot, you know? Conflate individuals with all of civilization on Veird.”

Erick amended, “Okay fine. Yes. You’re right.” Erick said, “The point is, is that I’ve come to a conclusion, Poi. The books of those learned people who came before? The ones upon which all Magic is taught? They all say the same thing. You guys— The professors here, I mean. They’re either teaching the millennium old material, but in a new volume, or some other person’s take on the knowledge of those who came before. Even those books from Hocnihai; all of it is knowledge laid down with the expectation that people follow it exactly.” He stressed, “No one is actually experimenting! And I mean proper experimenting.”

Poi frowned, as Erick continued to lead him around the room.

Erick continued, “There’s a vastly good reason for this, of course. The old ways work and they work well. The problem is with the tiers of magic. I know why Rozeta and the other Relevant Entities decided to do it this way, but this decision has affected everything that came after.

“Even if you only stick to tier 2 spells, you can only try to combine them once every day. Experimenting with tier 3 or above that takes a personal commitment for weeks, or months, or years, to try again. So every mage does what came before, because it works, and then they stop experimenting further, because monsters need killing and they can’t afford chancing a bad combination. There are a few instances outside of magic where this reluctance to experiment is frowned upon, like with Alchemy. There’s some proper experimenting there, but still, there are books with knowledge that works, so people make the potions how they have always made them.”

Poi looked around as they walked down the winding path toward the center of the room. He asked, “Did you make this place bigger since last time?”

“A bit.” Erick turned to Poi, saying, “Anyway: Now we have Particle Magic. Aside from a few personal contributions to the Script, namely [Exalted Storm Aura], no one is making tiered Particle magic beyond Aurify or Shaping.” Erick quickly added, “But I guess you can’t do what I did without the Class option— But still! People should be making higher tier Particle magic, using different Particle spells, together! But no one has. This is a tragedy.

“So when I get back to the Manor, Rozeta willing, I’m going to try for some actual Particle Magic tier magic, to help set the stage for what could happen with tiered Particle Magic. You know: Rozeta willing.”

Beneath the shaded glasses over Poi’s face, his eyes went a little wide. He said, “I feel that Kiri would want to be here for this.” He looked out across the room, saying, “This talk seems to be going all over the place.”

“I wanted her to be here too, and she’ll be there for the experiment if you decide this is a good idea, but I honestly have too much power over her. You’re a much better sounding board.” Erick added, “Sorry. The ideas are kinda jumbled and everything seems to be coming to a head, especially since I was able to do yet another ‘impossible’ thing down here, and make a Light Slime spawning zone.”

Poi just nodded as both men continued to walk slowly across the large, large dungeon floor.

Erick continued, “But tiered Particle Magic isn’t even that big of a deal. Whatever happens with that will happen. What this room was all for, was for real experimenting. Not just for doing things how the book said, but for discovering if the books were right at all.” Erick stopped. “Here we are.” He gestured outward, saying, “The purpose of this dungeon.”

They had arrived at a jut of stone that poked out over the shallow waters of the central pool. Ophiel floated above, still thrumming like a violin harp. From here, seeing the true purpose of the room was as easy as looking out across the space, and turning on Meditation.

In every direction, the same scene played out, primarily along the ceiling but also along the distant walls and the pillars of the room. The same kaleidoscope hung against the ceiling, each one slightly different, either spinning slower or faster or damaged in some way, each in slightly different flows of mana that poured against the [Ward]s from hidden inlets above. Some of them were not in flows at all, but in calm areas of mana; these ones were the least damaged of all. They were the control group.

Erick said, “So I’ve gone on a bit of a ramble, but the first thing I have seen that really needs to change is that Oceanside teaches from books and sparring experience, and not much else. There is no method for magical study. There is no scientific magic. Maybe I’m missing something with the math; I admit that all of that is evading me, but I don’t think I’m missing anything at all. The Scientific Method is missing on Veird. But that’s another problem for another day. Hopefully I will prove the importance of such a protracted methodology by the creation of what this room was also meant to create: A [Renew] spell.”

Poi suddenly looked out at the kaleidoscopes of the ceiling again. He said, “This Permanency effect. It’s a [Renew] effect, isn’t it?”

“Yes!” Erick said, “It’s not perfect, but it is if you give it some space! If you were to close off any of the tiny vents on any of those kaleidoscopes out there, the damage you see here —the dimmed lights or the altered colors— all of those issues would go away. This bombardment of mana is what gradually decays the permanency, but in a calm space, the lightward will reconstitute to wholeness over a period equal to density of the ambient, calm mana.” He said, “The reason that lightwards in the streets have to be redone is because there’s ambient mana everywhere and people fire off tiny spells all the time, and that contributed to the decay of those lightwards.”

Erick said, “To sum it all up. This dungeon works, it makes light slimes.” He added, “It also allowed me to test some theories regarding the scientific method and to see if what they said in the books really was the best for creating slime-producing dungeon environments. Spoiler: The books are pretty darn spot on about slime generation, but no one talks about why their ideas work; they just want the students to read and know the material, and never have any deeper understanding other than that.” He said, “This dungeon also allowed me to investigate the permanency effects of lightwards and what they really mean. So far, I think it means that there is some sort of [Renew] effect inherent to permanent [Ward]s. But even more than that...” Erick laid it out there, “I think this [Renew] effect is what makes [Ward]s regenerate at Rested Regen, in the first place. [Renew], in some intrinsic way, is a part of [Ward].”

Erick went silent. He waited for Poi to say something.

Poi looked out over the waters. He watched the light slimes bumble across the dungeon floor and play in the prismatic light from above. One bumped into another, sending both of them plopping in opposite directions.

Poi said, “There’s a lot to unpack there. [Ward] is already a very large blue box.” He asked, “What’s the ‘Scientific Method’?”

Erick answered, “Ask a question. Do research. Form a hypothesis. Test that hypothesis. Analyze the data. Draw a conclusion. Repeat.”

Poi said, “I was taught to do what I needed to do. It works well enough.”

“Yes! But there’s no advancement, there!”

“I get it.” Poi said, “But I don’t think all of what you said is true. Oceanside has been producing archmages for a long, long time, so they know what they're doing. And that part about [Renew] already being in [Ward] seems... suspect.”

“Maybe.” Erick looked across the room, to say, “It’s hard to keep it all straight. Spatial Magic is still going poorly. I thought I had a breakthrough a few times in the beginning, but as time goes on, I think I’m actually missing something rather crucial.”

Poi asked, “Like what?”

“Years of study, most likely.” Erick added, “Or something else even more fundamental.”

Poi looked down as a light slime bumped into his leg, then rolled away. He asked, “Are you going to do anything with these guys?”

“I’m not sure. Jane says that [Lightwalk] is pretty good. She’s even offered to give me that giant horn she got, but I don’t think I should take it.” Erick looked down at the slimes, saying, “She said Liquid and Killzone still have no news about what happened to her in Killtree, either about the fight between the dark and the light, or the discrepancy in the size of the Queen. Have you heard anything new yet?”

Poi said, “No updates since I last checked. That was this morning.”

Erick frowned. “Nothing? Nothing at all?”

“I heard the story from multiple angles and I still don’t believe it, even though her Mind Mage teammate, Marric, verified her story.” Poi added, “The whole thing seems like a trick of the light. Ancient Unicorns are like that, you know.”

Erick frowned, saying, “There’s a 9 meter long horn sitting in the Interfaith Temple back in Spur. 20 meter tall Ancient Unicorns don’t have 9 meter horns. They have 4 meter horns. That’s irrefutable proof of Jane’s story.”

“I also can’t believe that Jane almost had it stolen from her.” Poi added, “And that she needed to stock it with High Priest Darenka. Though Darenka is rather happy to have it sitting in her own prismatic cathedral.”

Erick looked to Poi. He stared at the sapphire scaled man, then said, “You’re avoiding an answer, Poi. Is this some internal Mind Mage politics, or something?”

“... Something like that.”

“Fine. You can keep your secrets.”

“Thank you, sir.” Poi said, “I shall.”

Erick gestured to the slime bumping up against a nearby pillar. “Is light slime a good Familiar Form?”

“Not around Ar’Kendrithyst. Shadows that strong love a strong light. But for everywhere else? [Lightwalk] does alright since almost everything needs light to see.” Poi said, “Whatever you choose, know that Light Essence is rare. If I were you I’d show this place to the Headmaster and see about working out a deal for some larger plot of land. This dungeon is big, but it could be a lot bigger. Perhaps you could start a light slime farm and sell the rights to someone, or even the Headmaster himself.”

"I was already considering that, but it’s good to know that it’s a decent option.” Erick said, “Anyway. Gotta get back home. Work on that tiered Particle Magic.”

Poi frowned. “Maybe work on not invoking gods so casually, either.”

“Oh, Poi. That wasn’t a casual invocation at all.”