256, 1/2

Erick had a few different directions he could go.

He left all of Lionshard’s conjured pastries there on the balcony table, for now, and decided to go for a swim.

The waters of his new home were deep and clear, feeling delightfully cool on Erick’s skin, with tiny fishes swimming in the depths and larger fishes hunting them. Erick knew practically all of these species, which was a trick of Yggdrasil’s for sure. There were the normal three reservoir fish that one would put into any lake on Veird to make a stable ecosystem all on their own; Rainbow Flits, Goldscale Slippers, Striped Silvertail. Over there were some bigger fish under some lifted geometric roots of Yggdrasil, with most of them being species Erick did not know. The scarlet kings were rather recognizable, though, their flanks flashing red as they ran from Erick, deeper into the roots. Some giant white fish lazily swam in the full open of the waters, its tails and fins looking like wavy smoke in the water. They were probably good eating, based on how utterly thick their flanks were, and how thin their bones were, but Erick left them alone for now.

For now, he backpaddled on the surface of the lake of his new home, staring at the blackhole sun high above everything and everyone, his eyes lazily shifting to the other suns now and again. It was all so colorful. Enchanting, really.

Erick conjured an inflatable ring and sat in it, enjoying the gentle wind upon his skin as he read Yggdrasil’s guidebook of Margleknot under the many suns.

The Fae Enclave was high on his list of places to visit; probably the top place to visit. He’d probably be doing a bunch of shit there with a bunch of asshole fae… But maybe the fae were simply unconcerned with lower worlds, and were therefore uncaring with Nothanganathor and Veird and the Painted Cosmology. That would be a charitable interpretation of them, and Erick decided right now to adopt that interpretation until proven otherwise.

When it came to higher powers shitting on low places, never attribute to malice what can be easily explained through ignorance.

“Obviously Nothanganathor is a deep exception to that rule.” Erick leafed through the book, adding, “And there are other exceptions, too… A lot of exceptions.”

All these ‘evil-aligned’ places were simply greedy, terrible places that deserved complete annihilation or alteration to make them better people. Normally, Erick wouldn’t go that far right away, and he probably wouldn’t if he had them under his power right now, but evil was evil, and he didn’t need to personally experience evil to know it was wrong.

The Dread Arenas, the Slaver’s Den, the Wraithborne Tower.

All of them were individually terrible. They seemed to form the basis of slavery in Margleknot, too, if Erick was reading this right. This guidebook explained that the Tower grabbed people, the Den captured their own people and sold people to all others, and the Arenas were one of the largest purchasers of slaves for their churn of bodies on the arena sands.

Slavery was prevalent among some of the ‘normal’ organizations, though.

The book had a whole section devoted to how all of that worked, because Yggdrasil would have known that Erick would want to tackle that problem even if he didn’t actually have the eternity it would take to end that horror… But he kinda did have eternity. He was a Paradox Wizard. He could solve this problem.

“I could get allies from all of that, too… Multiple ways, actually.”

Erick wasn’t going to buy slaves —fuck no— but he could easily break some of the slavery systems and benefit from that breaking. Free enough people, and inevitably some of them would want to work for you on the side of good. The Sovereign Cities of Veird were rather great examples of that. It took a while and there were still problems, but a lot of good came of that place once Erick and a coalition of nations and powers finally ended their various evils.

But as for Margleknot, the evils here were a lot more ingrained.

Apparently, when the Wraithborne Tower captured any soul at all, and if those people weren’t bought by any of the big-name buyers, they then sold those people back to their friends or patrons, but with bombs attached. Those soul bombs took many forms.

Some soul bombs were simple things that were disabled and disintegrated after paying enough mana/resons/whatever to the Wraithborne Tower. Other than that, those ‘bomb collars’ did nothing except hurt the afflicted person every day with a minor curse, like ‘you stub your toe on every corner of every door’ whenever the person fell behind on payments. If they tried to remove the curse, the collar exploded, of course, but many people simply lived with the curse, opting to wear strong shoes all their lives, or they’d simply cut off their toes, or other various forms of living-with-mutilation.

Many bombs were much more dangerous.

For important souls, like those directly under the command of any strong force in Margleknot, if the Wraithborne Tower captured those people in the resurrection line then those people got fitted with special soul shackles. As an example in Yggdrasil’s book, an underling for someone at the Celestial Observatory, one of the only Good Places in Margleknot, would expect to get slaved with a death collar and no exact commands at all. They would then be told, in person, that they were a forever-hostage of the Wraithborne Tower, and if they took actions against the Tower, then they would die. With the threat delivered and a forever-boot on their neck, they would be released to go back to the Celestial Observatory to simply go about their lives as normal.

Break the collar? Some people could. But not many. It took a lot to break those collars. The Observatory couldn’t actually do it on their own without killing the person and disintegrating half the soul.

Soul sundering was very illegal in Margleknot, as that was a form of killing that was considered ‘real murder’, but true-killing half of a person? Sure, that was fine.

Erick frowned as he read, because if he was reading this right…

“The Wraithborne Tower is clearly evil, but they’re probably the least evil form of evil?” Erick scowled as he had that thought. “They could be doing a lot worse? Holy shit. They could be doing a lot worse. This is why they’re allowed to exist.”

Erick kept reading.

“… And they have lots of money due to their low resurrection costs. People can opt to be resurrected by them for cheap and not wait in the Waiting Room of Margleknot? How long does the Waiting Room take…” Erick flipped through to the prices section. “A thousand resons for a normal res? A waiting period of 10 years?!” He exclaimed, “All they have to do is sign off 10% reson production per day to the Tower and they get free resurrections forever?”

Holy shit.

This was insidious.

The Wraithborne Tower probably had lots of people who approved of everything they did, and just as many who did not…

“Other evils are much more clear-cut.”

The Dread Arenas hosted blood and death sports. Slaves who lost the fights there were Sundered for their resons, as that sort of True Death was acceptable, as per old capital punishment laws. Winners of those slave fights were locked under even more Contract Magics beyond normal slave controls, to keep them fighting forever.

The Slaver’s Den actively went out and captured people and turned them into slaves of all kinds; they weren’t about passive collection of souls from the Waiting Room, like the Wraithborne Tower did.

… And apparently, if Erick went after any of these places, the Veiled Syndicate would send killers his way.

“Those assholes are probably already sending killers my way, though. Assassins gotta assassin.”

So he would murder all of the Veiled Syndicate, too?

Sure.

Why not.

… Erick breathed, and tried to keep his temper under control.

Erick flipped over to other parts of the guidebook, to read up on some good places for a while, to consider where he wanted to go first for help against Nothanganathor.

Eventually Erick set the book into the air and vanished it with a casual thought. It was still there, though, still inside of Erick’s soul. He pulled it in and out of his Benevolence a few times, just to see what he was seeing, and it appeared that Yggdrasil had tied the book to a wavelength of power that correlated to Benevolence, and since Erick was Benevolence, it correlated to him. When the book was dispersed, it was a fog inside of his soul. When it was real, it was in his hand, or wherever he wanted it to be.

It was loosely tied to his Health, it seemed, which was probably an emergent factor of how Erick had created his True Wizard form to be split between Soul, Body, and Mind. Health was physical integrity, and the book was physical when it was instantiated, and thus…

Erick scratched the book with a fingernail, and watched as his Health dropped a few points.

“So that works as expected.”

Erick watched as the book healed its scratch rather easily. He grinned.

“That works as expected, too.”

He put the book away and then hopped into the air. He had instinctively tried to dispel the floating raft with a thought, but that didn’t work because there was no Script to facilitate canceling. So instead, Erick focused on the floating donut raft with his Authority. He flexed his intent.

The raft vanished.

Erick smiled.

With a step and a wrap, Erick landed on his balcony and put his clothes back on. He looked at the various pastries from Lionshard, but he wasn’t hungry at all, which was probably a small problem. Hunger itself was an annoyance some of the time, but it was nice to satiate hunger most of the time. As for other physical needs, Erick wasn’t tired, either, but it felt good to sleep after a hard day’s work.

When Erick made himself he decided he would never be pooping or peeing ever again, but hunger and exhaustion… Hunger and exhaustion were normal, human feelings that Erick should have in order to remain human. He had built some physical needs systems into his True Wizard form, but those systems appeared to be a whole lot less necessary than what would have been considered ‘normal’ hunger and exhaustion.

Erick picked up the great big cinnamon roll from Teressa and took a bite. It was great, just like Jane’s baklava. Erick got a little bit of satiation from that bite of the cinnamon roll, but mostly the feeling passed. He could probably eat and eat and eat forever, and never get full. He was never really hungry, either.

He could fix that, theoretically, but for now, he didn’t and probably couldn’t concern himself with hunger and sleep. He had other concerns. Like whatever tracking system he had within him that Nothanganathor had used in order to drag him before that Wizard trap in front of the sun.

“It’s time to do some Script-tool cleaning, I think.”

How, though?

Erick looked down, through his castle, through the giant root that formed the ground of his property here in the Dragon District, to the line of tangled, darkly prismatic power that flowed through the very center of the kilometers-wide root of Yggdrasil. There were lots of Elements in that flow.

Maybe he could use some of those weird Elements?

Maybe something like Elemental Purity could clean up whatever problems were lurking in his Script Status?

… Maybe he’d use Purity if he found anything extreme. For Malevolence-derived problems, Benevolence should be enough.

“That’s where I’ll start.”

– – – –

Erick sat down on a nice pillow at the bottom of his new mage tower, focusing inward.

It was pretty easy to recognize all of his soul, now that he was a True Wizard.

Mostly, there was the Benevolence-fog. That was his entire being, after all. There were also crystalline structures inside of that fog, like multidimensional shards of purpose, each slowly moving around each other, some very slightly spinning, others more fixed in place, all of them arranged in some sort of hyperdimensional causality. It was all easy to recognize once Erick actually sat down to recognize it, though.

There were his spells, each of the basic spells of all types looking exactly as Erick expected; like multidimensional crystals in the shape of gridwork. Some were more complicated than others, of course.

[Force Bolt] was a relatively simple collection of triggers and joinings and intent.

[Cleanse] was an incredibly complex arrangement of Elemental Destruction and Book and checks and alterations everywhere. That bit of Elemental Book operated on at least a thousand, maybe 1500 different axes, but it was also not nearly complex enough for what [Cleanse] could actually do. Erick peered deeper into that multi-fractal Book and saw triggers for what appeared to be ‘live air’ and ‘bad air’, and ‘good water’ versus ‘bad water’. The Book had hookups for much, much larger systems, which Erick assumed was the Script, and he probably assumed right.

“Because ‘bad air’ and ‘good water’ don’t actually make sense at all,” Erick said to himself, “They’re actually more like conceptual, generic triggers.”

It was exceedingly interesting to see, exactly, what made [Cleanse] so special.

In fact… Within a moment of gazing upon [Cleanse], for real, for the first time, Erick decided it was a fucking masterpiece of magic. Erick had a hard time coming up with any other example of magic he had ever seen that matched the beauty of the 10-mana-cost-construct that was [Cleanse]. This little thing was useful under so many different scenarios!

Even outside of the Script!

Erick checked out a bunch of other spells. [Grow] was barely anything compared to [Cleanse], but it had multivariable Book in there, too, in order to differentiate from certain types of growing intent. [Mend] was rather impressive, but it was nothing compared to [Cleanse]…

Not much matched up to [Cleanse], actually.

Erick’s big Particle Spells were all solid jumbles of Book and Force magic in a shaped mass that could be called ‘Particle Magic’. They were solidly-made crystal almost-spheres. They were all kinda… simple, really. Complicated in effect, yes. But simple in execution.

Take [Condense Oxygen], for example. There was some Book to designate ‘oxygen’, and the rest was Force and what appeared to be some [Ward] Magic.

“Ah. The spherical stuff is [Ward] magic. Yes. I see that now.”

The more Erick looked, the more he saw repetitions everywhere. Everything was built, at its base, upon a few different things. [Ward], for the designation of a space if a spell had space to it. Book, if the spell was complicated, and even if the mana was simple. And various different types of mana triggers.

[Stoneshape] was [Ward] for space, Book to conceptualize ‘rock’ as ‘rock’, and [Elemental Stone] for more general targeting. All the Shaping spells were like that, but different.

There weren’t many spells that had no Book in them.

Book seemed to form the basis of the entire Script.

Looking at his basic, True Wizard self, Erick was vaguely surprised to see that Benevolence had coalesced into Book-like shapes in order to allow him to have his current Status, giving him his three avenues of experience, of Health, Mana, and Psyche. He wasn’t too surprised at that, because that’s sort of how he had envisioned the whole thing. It was all made of Benevolence, but it functioned as Book here and there.

Erick left his Benevolence Status alone and poked around a bit at the multi-fractal crystals that were his Script Status.

Some of them were linked to others. [Force Bolt] had a base form, yes, but that base form was somehow also inside all of his various other Bolt spells he had made over the many years. [Fire Bolt], [Slow Bolt], and even [Inevitable Bombardment] had [Force Bolt]’s original spell at its center… And also off on its own, at the same time.

Erick smiled. “Just a little bit of paradox in the system.”

This is what enabled people to be able to use the same base spell to create higher tier spells without using up the base spell. Erick had long known, in a general way, the mechanism by which this happened, but seeing how it worked within himself was pretty awesome. It gave him some ideas for making his own soul-imbued spells.

“It won’t be as easy as simply casting a new spell and letting the Script make it up for me, though.”

He would need to force Benevolence into Book-like shapes on purpose…

Which was interesting.

Anyway.

Moving on.

Erick could stare into his soul for a long time and probably discover a lot about a lot, but he was here to figure out what Nothanganathor had put into him, through the Script. Erick had been drawn to that Wizard trap the very moment he Ascended, before his full ascension could truly coalesce, which meant there was a marker somewhere. It couldn’t be a marker from the Script itself, because Erick hadn’t been inside the Script when he Ascended. So it had to have been a marker inside his soul.

That was one of the main reasons that he needed to get away from Veird in order to ascend; to get away from any possible trap laid by Nothanaganathor. The trap was already inside Erick, though, and it had probably been there for a very long time. There was probably a trap in everyone’s soul on Veird.

“Now if I was putting a marker into someone, where would I put it?” Erick answered himself, “I would put it into the most complicated thing that was specifically meant to get rid of me.”

Erick looked to [Cleanse].

It was arguably his favorite spell. His very first spell, too. He had bought it after Melemizargo had thrown him and Jane onto the Surface of Veird, during Purodahlia’s chase of them across the sands of the Crystal Forest. Jane had theorized that ‘the dragon must have scent marked us, and that’s why there are no monsters’, and then Erick had taken that idea and run with it once Purodahlia seemed drawn to them, buying [Cleanse] with his very first point, because [Cleanse] read ‘Purge an area equal to the level of the spell in meters of all Toxins, Disease, Filth, and Corruption.’ and ‘corruption’ might have meant ‘dark dragon smell’.

It had been a gamble back then to buy this spell and try and use it to throw off ‘the black spiker’.

But it had worked.

Maybe that had been Benevolence fucking with the past? Maybe.

Erick peered deep into the Book crystal that was [Cleanse], looking for something Red—

He found it.

Almost instantly, once he was looking for it, there it was.

Erick inhaled sharply, his eyes practically slapping open. “Oh shit. It’s really there.” And then he closed his eyes again and concentrated, muttering, “It’s also odd that I can see my soul so much better now, too. That’s probably the Script purposefully fucking up [Soul Sight], and the unknowability of the soul.”

Or maybe Malevolence made it harder to look at the soul properly, too, and everyone assumed that was just how souls were in the New Cosmology? Maybe.

It took Erick a minute to get back into the proper frame-shift to see his soul again.

Soon enough, Erick gazed into the fractal-oriented-crystal that was [Cleanse], looking for the Red—

There it was. A single note in a long book of options…

It was the spine of the book itself. Half of the spine. The other half was normal Book, and maybe even a connection to the Script to expand that Book. Hard to say exactly what was going on there, but the Malevolence was there inside [Cleanse].

Erick wondered if this was why [Cleanse] was one of the spells that they told you to never experiment with at all, because experimenting with [Cleanse] was one of the easiest ways to kill oneself.

“… Probably.”

Erick wasn’t sure if he could remove the Red without damaging the entire spell. The crystal looked like it would just come apart if he touched it…

He could do this, though.

Maybe he could replace Malevolence with Benevolence?

Erick smiled. Yeah. He could do that.

Worst-case scenario, he could [Return]…

He paused.

Erick came back to himself and decided to run other tests before he mucked around with [Cleanse]. He stood up and grabbed the pillow and tossed it to the side of the room. Then he [Return]ed.

The pillow was back at his feet and he was sitting down upon the pillow again, half looking at [Cleanse] and half shifting back to normal senses.

So [Return] worked normally here? Sure. At this small of a test [Return] worked normally.

Erick went fully into himself and looked at [Inevitable Bombardment]; a rather complicated spell that would cast [Force Bomb]s into the sky and then take a while to rain them down onto a target, giving Erick time to threaten the target and make them give up before the spell obliterated them. It wasn’t an effective spell for multiple reasons. Erick didn’t like threatening people, primarily. He had used the spell a few times, though.

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It would be okay if he fucked up this spell; an acceptable loss.

He tore the spell apart, releasing all the underlying spells below the top layer of crystal. [Force Bolt] and all the others he used to make the top layer spell seemed fine.

He rapidly came back to himself and [Return]ed.

Once again inside his soul, Erick looked at [Inevitable Bombardment], and it looked fine.

Success! He could disturb the spell and then [Return] and have the spell return to its previous form.

Erick concentrated on [Inevitable Bombardment], at the part which looked sort of like a multiplicative part of the spell, which came from the base form of [Force Crash], declaring 15 copies of the spell would rain down on a target from afar. That ‘15 copies’ looked easy enough to alter; it was just 15 tiny pips in the Booking.

Erick flexed his intent at the spell, adding five more pips.

It was a massive change.

For a moment, the soul spell crystal looked about ready to truly shift. Maybe even crack in half. But it stabilized. The overall spell cost of the entire thing felt like it was going to cost a lot more, though. The original spell was around 1475 mana. This one was maybe 500 more. Maybe only 400 more? Hard to say. Multi-dimensional crystals weren’t exactly easy things to completely understand even for Erick with his Intelligence and Perception and Concentration.

“This might work, though.”

Erick opened his eyes and went out to the top of his mage tower, to look out across the world.

He pressed the button that was the 1900-ish mana cost spell in his soul and [Inevitable Bombardment] splashed into the air high above, 20 sparkling orbs of Force and Benevolence hanging out in the air, doing nothing much at all.

The spell was a bit white with Benevolence.

It should not be white.

“… So there’s Benevolence in there now. That’s from me using Benevolence to add 5 more bombs, isn’t it.”

Erick attempted to cancel the spell, but that simply wasn’t happening. Canceling was a function of the Script. So Erick swiped at the spells with a casual tendril of Benevolence Body empowered with Mana Siphon. The first bombs burst, but Erick realized what he was doing wrong with the first ones, so he fully enveloped the rest and ate them like an amoeba eating pop rocks.

They tasted kinda forceful, which was an odd thing to both experience and realize that he made himself experience that. He was literally tasting magic? How?

Erick threw some more bombs into the air and purposefully thought ‘do not taste these’.

And he ate those spells without tasting them.

So taste is linked to anything I want to link it to, or to which I accidentally consider myself to be thinking in that direction at the wrong time. Not sure how I feel about that.

Anyway.

Experiment successful, and he discovered he could taste magic if he wanted.