259, 2/2

A journey of years versus the work of maybe two weeks; that’s what Erick was thinking of as he flew through the sky as a massive black dragon. He could either spend years journeying through the lands of Layer 1 to reach the way out or he could help out a penal colony achieve a better standard of living and maybe they could make a portal back to Layer 0. He was pretty sure that Eldawae was lying somehow, but even if he was, then Erick would simply be helping people who needed help. The fact that they were prisoners presumably guilty of various crimes meant they needed more help.

… And yet.

Maybe ‘Evil’ people were fundamentally different from everything Erick ever knew, but most people only turned to evil when they had no other choice…

Probably.

It was what it was.

It took Erick a few days of flying, but eventually the land changed.

The storm Erick had cast was on the horizon, like a layer of grey filling up the mirage of the distance. It took Erick another day of flying to reach the greenery that the storm had left all over the Endless. There the desert lay, transformed with green and water. It was not a permanent transformation, though. Erick saw where mud had turned to dried, cracked land, and where trees had toppled over from lack of root support. The sand here was sand, after all. Sand was not a good holder of water at all.

And yet some grasses and cacti lived.

Erick had been toying with the idea of instantiating a crystal mimic into this land because those things were hardy animals that supported desert ecosystems very well. There were problems with that idea, of course. Majorly, Erick had no idea how to actually instantiate a crystal mimic and he wasn’t sure he wanted to try. Secondly, Erick had no idea what lay beyond this land, so unleashing one of Veird’s most virulent invasive plant species could be a catastrophically bad thing.

The time worm was probably bad enough—

And speaking of the time worm.

There it was. Or rather, there was its track.

The green land below was a threadbare carpet, except where the mountain-sized time worm had carved through that carpet, exposing sand once again in long lines and curved dots of tan. It was a good sign. The time worm wasn’t able to eat the greenery faster than the storm could make more, and that’s what mattered.

The worm itself was somewhere up ahead.

Erick transformed into his largest form and plopped down onto the ground in the way that an aircraft carrier would plop.

Sand went everywhere. The world thumped with the weight and power of Erick’s claws. His wings cast away the green surface, exposing the bare sand just below the thin life. His tail thrashed the land, sending up a wave of sand that would have drowned at least ten people, if this land had had people and if they had suddenly appeared in the way of his tail strike. Which would have been rather silly on their part.

… And no worm yet?

Erick stomped down with all four legs a few times and thrashed his tail again, and then he roared Benevolence across the dried desert surface. Lightning crackled kilometers out like a dread storm, crashing and breaking and reforming the world with cacti everywhere the lightning touched.

… Erick waited.

He waited.

And then he waited some more.

“… Where is that darn worm?”

The worm turned out to be having the time of its life another two days further along.

The sky rained hard and tendrils of shadow from an unseen [Undertow Star] pierced the clouds, reaching down from unseen heights above, to touch down upon most of the life below. Erick watched from that rainy, lightning-filled sky, as the time worm leapt in and out of the wet land, aiming for each puddle like the universe’s largest child, playing in the mud. The thing was easily 8, maybe 12 kilometers wide at the front end, and that bulk continued all along the entire length of the monster, of which maybe a few hundred kilometers were visible.

It stitched the green, wet ground like a piece of tan string, stretching out far behind Erick, and racing far forward. It crisscrossed itself. The entire length of it shuddered as it swallowed lake after lake, that water passing down through the entire creature. Where it ended, Erick could not see. Perhaps it had no end?

Looking at it from up here, Erick didn’t really want to kill it. That storm would last forever and thus this land would be green around here forever. Perhaps Da’luwe could find another horrific monster to use as a guard dog?

Hmm.

The worm was obviously having fun drinking all that water and probably plant life. It didn’t seem to care that Erick was up here watching it, either.

Erick knew this because it had eyes all alongside its length. They were tiny, near-invisible eyes, but they were there, and they were all looking everywhere, including at Erick up in the sky. The time worm kept on keeping on, aiming at the largest puddles of water it could see and then swallowing them whole like the world’s biggest suction tube.

Erick had guessed that the worm would have had some sort of reaction to the spellwork Erick had put into the sky. He had assumed the worm would have aimed for the center power of the spellwork, high above the clouds, in order to destroy that [Undertow Star]+[Terraforming]+reson combination. Instead, it merely enjoyed all the water everywhere.

The tendrils of that [Undertow Star] didn’t touch the worm, either. Erick would have assumed that it would have, but of course it didn’t, and seeing that it didn’t, Erick realized his blunder. The worm didn’t have Mana or Health, or even basic mana, and those were the things that the Star would drain. The only things that had mana around here were all the plants and stuff growing out of the [Terraforming]-changed wasteland.

In that moment, a bunch of different minor revelations of Margleknot combined for him.

He reevaluated a lot about the general power level of Margleknot and all the surrounding lands.

Those water towers he had put up in Da’luwe, with their node networks and draining spellworks, would only function by absorbing the mana generated from the life that the water towers grew. Those drains wouldn’t touch any of the people in that penal colony, so they weren’t a deterrent at all to anyone who walked in those lands.

No one had investigated the towers while Erick had been building them, and now that Erick was gone he expected them to be thoroughly investigated by a few elite troops, or whatever. Those who could survive the drain or ignore the drain would be among those explorers and takers.

But there would be no drain for those people at all. Therefore, those towers would rapidly be investigated and probably torn apart by every single person that needed anything at all, from plants to water to whatever, which meant that they would likely be denuded by the time he returned triumphant from this quest.

But also, maybe some people would start actively accreting Benevolence, and thus make themselves both vulnerable to the towers and also able to use Benevolence themselves. Thinking about that, it was kind of amusing that people would need to make themselves vulnerable to the drain of those towers in order to properly benefit from the accretion aspects of those towers.

Strength through vulnerability was a nice idea.

No one was going to do that, though.

Besides that…

This worm was something of a conundrum. Here it was, eating and eating, and the storm would literally never run out. Did Erick need to do anything to it at all? Could this be a ‘solved’ problem?

… It was supposedly intelligent. Could Erick talk to it?

He checked his Status to look at his Psyche.

Over 200 million Psyche.

“It’s enough.”

Erick reached out with [Telepathy], touching the mind of the beast below—

Pain.

Ah.

Right.

Erick had a few different thoughts as he jerked from the unexpected sensation of pain ripping across his entire dragon body, causing his very scales to hurt and a headache to pressure his head so hard that blood gushed out of his snout. He snorted that blood away and blinked out more blood. Rain washed away the evidence of his misstep, and he resumed flight. He doubted if anyone watching would have noticed his pain, but he certainly did.

He hadn’t felt pain like that in a very long time, because it had been a long time since he had been rebuffed telepathically.

Unwanted [Telepathy] gave a blowback that was commensurate with the ‘no thanks’ from the recipient, after all. If the time worm far below had had any sort of reaction at all, then Erick didn’t recognize that reaction. The time worm didn’t change course. Didn’t scream. Didn’t do anything aside from pursue more bodies of water for gulping. It hadn’t been pained, after all.

Had it even felt Erick’s telepathic touch?

Erick needed to fix this.

Erick took a moment and he went into the sky, above the clouds, high into the air. The clouds were stacked up for kilometers upon kilometers. Flashes of white and tendrils of shadow occasionally illuminated the rainy gloom, like some monster lurking in the depths, which is exactly what the [Undertow Star] became when anyone got too close to it. It only took mana from its surroundings while someone was far enough away, but when they got closer it would rip their very bodies to shreds. Erick had seen a few people over the years try to get too close to one of his Stars without any Health or Mana to protect them. It was not pretty.

Maybe he needed to remake the towers in Daluwe with some [Undertow Star]s. Such an action might not protect the bounty on the ground, but it would certainly protect any [Terraforming] the star was attached to, and that might be enough.

Erick avoided the center of the storm, and went higher.

The rain thinned. The lightning disappeared below.

Erick popped out over a land of clouds both white and grey, looking like a slow hurricane of continental proportions. He took a moment to appreciate the sight, and then he cast a bit of Platform and Time spellwork in order to give himself a protected space.

Once so protected, Erick dove into himself to poke at the [Telepathy] spell, to try and understand what was going on with that particular Mind Magic. His goal was to take away the backlash part, or at least mitigate it somewhat. He wasn’t too sure if he could do that, though; he wasn’t a Mind Mage, and he didn’t want to be a Mind Mage. To hear Poi talk about it, being a Mind Mage was not for everyone.

Very few people wanted to know what everyone around them was thinking all the time, but born Mind Mages were able to ameliorate and understand what was going on with themselves and others in a way that wasn’t destructive to oneself, or to others.

Erick peered inside himself.

He saw his goal.

The [Telepathy] crystal was like many others, but there was no such thing as Elemental Mind, so it had none of that in there at all. What it did have, and what almost tossed Erick out of his meditation, was a nexus of ethereal soul-stuff that did not look like soul-stuff at all, now that he was looking at it again.

When Erick had checked out his soul for Malevolent Influences, there had been a little bit in all the Mind Magic, and he had carefully taken that out and eliminated the problematic Nothor Beasts that had come out of those fixes. When he had done that, the spell had looked like a normal crystal spell with some illuminated streamers inside. Those streamers were what Erick thought of as the tendrils that Poi always had around him, always out there and touching the minds of others. They had looked like a weird form of spellwork that he didn’t quite understand, which was pretty normal when it came to Mind Magic.

But here, a week later, and after obviously experiencing some natural soul healing, Erick looked at the [Telepathy] crystal and saw pinpoints of light that looked like the glitter-crystal that made up the Fae Enclave’s greater tower that ran through all of Margleknot, the denser crystal tower at the center of that main tower, and the very matter of the Fractal Fairy itself. It was soulstuff, all tendril-like and simultaneously made of dotted-stars.

It was the mark of this universe.

Just like how Darkness made a mark inside people, giving them Darkness that made mana.

The center of [Telepathy] was a spot of this Fractal Universe.

And since it was the mind that made resons, it stood to reason that this thing here was the thing of the Fractal Universe which allowed for resons.

Or at least that was a working theory.

Okay.

So.

This was a big deal Erick was seeing.

Erick’s ‘spot of Darkness’ was an ocean compared to this ‘spot of Fractals’, if that’s what this thing was, anyway. Perhaps this wasn’t a mote of this Fractal Universe. Perhaps it was just a creation of Melemizargo’s? Did Erick have another marking of this universe anywhere inside of him?

… He didn’t see any, but then again there was one spot of his soul that he couldn’t truly see, and that was the Darkness. That whole part of him was actually all throughout his entire soul, until he frameshifted himself into an observable mode, allowing him to make sense of the separate parts of himself. When he did that, his Darkness became like a floor, or a core, or something that underpinned everything else, but also not really that at all. It was rather indiscernible. Perhaps the ‘spot of Fractals’ was somewhere inside that Darkness? Who knew.

… Were all his ‘universal markings’ in there? ‘Under the floor’, so to speak?

Erick tried to frameshift himself into finding his ‘universal markings’, but even with knowing that he had one due to the Fractal Fairy implying as much in their speech, Erick couldn’t find it.

So he went back to his [Telepathy] crystal.

It was not just a spot of Fractals, it was also a Benevolence crystal, because Erick had remade everything with his own power when he transformed what the Script had given him into his own True Wizard body.

Erick popped out of himself for a moment and simply looked up into the sky, at the Layer 1 Fae Enclave up there. He recalled a story about how Melemizargo had made Mind Magic in the early centuries of the Script, in order to undermine everything and everyone, and to show them the truth of their cage. He had obviously taken a piece of the Fractal Universe itself and turned it into a superpower, because what Erick had seen inside of himself was not a spell that originated in mana at all.

Mind Magic was not mana-based magic at all, and yet it could be used like that by most people born to that power.

More than that, though…

Erick thought of sensing capabilities.

Mana sensing was what people with mana did. And yet, not everyone had mana, and not all manas were sensible in the same ways. There was a lot of mana in Margleknot, though, so everyone could look around with mana if they had some sort of capability in that way. And yet, mana sensing in Margleknot was iffy. Spotty. Not very sure. That’s what Erick felt in those oddities in the air when he mana sensed and felt other powers inside the air that were not the mana of the Painted Cosmology, or similarly comprehensible powers.

Even with all the varied manas out there: Anyone could mana sense and become one with the mana and sense the world through the mana. And through that sensing, they could make miracles.

Or at least sensing the world was the first step toward changing the world.

And so: What was telepathy, except for mind sensing?

Sensing was just the first part, though.

Through sensing came interaction, either on others, with others, or on one-self.

Erick reconsidered his goal of changing [Telepathy] to remove the backlash, and his history with Mind Magic.

He could probably break open the crystal that was [Telepathy] and integrate the Mark of the Fractal Universe into his very soul, ‘awakening the mind slime’, as it were.

He did not want to do this. He liked that people could express who they were without him knowing they were lying, or the fractions by which they were lying. Erick certainly didn’t need to know that this person or that person were thinking about horrific acts left and right, while in reality all they ever did were good things—

The fae mind controlled people all the time.

“Well that makes a whole lot of sense now, too, since they’re empowered by this universe and its mental magics.”

Erick thought for a minute more.

The next revelation came soon enough.

“Ah. You can probably use the mind slime to interact with other realities of the Fractal Universe in a more direct, concentrated way, than Wizardry. That’s probably what this Fractal Mark is meant for. Communication across the— Hmm. Actually. No. Probably not. Maybe that’s what Melemizargo meant it for; for universal communication.” Erick said, “But anyone who actually managed that would have run into Nothanganathor and been killed. Therefore, the only thing that this bit of the Fractal can do is exactly what Poi has been able to do… Or actually… A whole lot less, probably.”

… Hmm.

Well.

Poi can contact people without them being able to say ‘no thanks’.

Could Erick change this spell in that way? To force a mental connection?

Yes.

That was his goal.

Envisioning the whole thing, Erick saw himself being able to contact another peacefully…

Which would require a bit of mental translations, actually, because speaking the same language was a big deal.

… Or could he just do some sort of ‘pure thought’ sort of thing, that would not allow others to lie in the [Telepathy] connection?

… Hmm. This was a big change, actually. Lotta moving parts that would open Erick up to attack because true interaction could allow for the passage of memetic threats, and people surely had a lot of those out here…

Hmm.

“… I’ll just see if I can remove the backlash part, or mitigate it somehow.”

Erick dove into himself once again and found the [Telepathy] crystal looking like a spot of glitter-crystal that was also made of tendrils inside a Benevolence crystal shell with a whole bunch of unknown little bits to them. Erick focused, and everything else vanished off to the sides. All that remained was [Telepathy], coming into superb focus.

The little bits and bobs connected to Erick’s Body and Mind most of all, like overlapping pieces of puzzles that would allow his physical mind to interact with his mental self.

This was unnecessary, from what Erick was seeing. Through some more frameshifting, Erick saw that the tendrils of the glitter-crystal were wholly attached to his Mind. He didn’t need the Body connection at all…

Did he?

Erick came halfway out of himself and summoned a spell he hadn’t used in a long time.

[Imaginary Work Animal].

A large toad appeared and then it started singing which was about the easiest thing for Erick to imagine an animal capable of doing, and Erick liked the sound of frogs in a rainstorm. Even though the rainstorm was far below, the big frog sang anyway. It sounded pretty great.

The animal was a normal animal of its type —giant rain frog— and therefore it had a rudimentary mind.

Erick poked at it with [Telepathy] as he watched the spell work inside of his soul.

A tendril connected to the frog and the frog sent an inquisitive question back up the way, almost as though it was asking ‘what’s up?’.

Inside Erick’s soul the spell functioned ‘normally’. Or at least Erick supposed it did. Erick sent out a tendril of thought, and a bit of some odd tendril came into Erick, allowed inside by his own [Telepathy] extension. The frog’s return signal brushed through the part of [Telepathy] that touched Erick’s Body, which acted as something of a check. Then the frog’s signal passed the Body check, and went into Erick’s physical body, whereupon Erick understood that the creature was asking ‘what’s up?’.

Erick guessed a few things about what was happening there, but he chose not to explore those guesses too deeply at this moment.

All Erick really understood was that he needed to keep the Body check in order to understand the frog. Perhaps a more trained Mind Mage would not need to use the Body to understand anything, but Erick seemed like he needed that right now.

Erick braced himself and sent a [Telepathy] questing down below the clouds, to the time worm far below—

The return signal was a reverse river that crashed into the pipe that was Erick’s tendril outlet, to strike the Body check, and then crash outward, like a river hitting a dam, harming everything in that crash of a return signal.

Erick sighed out blood, dripping red onto the platform underfoot.

The only thing Erick understood at this particular moment was that he had no idea how to fix this problem at all.

The Body check was used to check the incoming signal for ‘no’, and also used to send the signal to Erick to allow for that connection, and thus connecting Erick’s physical mind to the other physical mind at the other end of the spellwork.

Perhaps the ‘physical mind to physical mind’ was itself a check, in that ‘connecting to a non-physical mind’ usually simply killed a person. Erick could easily see that connecting to an eldritch mind could go very, very bad.

And so, changing any part of that stuff right there would allow for anyone to directly attack his mental resources, and possibly break the [Telepathy] crystal itself…

… Hmm.

“The only thing I actually understand is that this [Telepathy] spell is a work of curated art, specifically created in this way to both make it a strong spell, and to disallow anyone messing with it… I guess this is why they didn’t want anyone taking more than one or two Mind spells in most places back on Veird, either. If I had a few tens of Mind Magic spells to poke around with, I could figure out how they all worked and do some reverse engineering.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Even on Veird, though, no one had access to their soul like Erick had access to his soul right now; the Script obscured the soul. But, Erick supposed, multiple layers of obfuscation were simply good security practices.

This particular [Telepathy] crystal was likely the public result of generations of iterative changes, too.

All the initial glitter-crystal-empowered people on Veird were likely long dead.

… This [Telepathy] crystal probably had a bunch of safeguards to disrupt the power within if anyone ever fucked around with it too much. Erick had likely removed those safeguards, though, when he removed the Malevolence inside.

Once again, Erick considered simply breaking the crystal. Could he break this thing open and ‘awaken his mind slime’ instantly?

Maybe!

Erick didn’t want that, though.

So thinking in another direction…

Erick dove into himself, and checked out how the damage from the [Telepathy] crystal was processed. He might not be able to muck around with the crystal itself, but he could certainly change some wires on the back end—

Ah ha!

There they were. The False Damage threads of the [Telepathy] crystal. They attached directly to his body, bypassing much of his Health barrier—

Oh.

Erick saw how the Fae of the Fae Enclave had been able to muck around with him mentally. The entire [Telepathy] crystal had some lines going directly into his Mind, Body, and Soul, bypassing, in small ways, all of his various pools of power.

Well that was an easy fix.

Erick switched out all the transfer lines of influence onto their correct paths; into his millions upon millions of Mana, Health, and Psyche. With a final ‘Yes’ to the changes, they took hold.

Erick sighed as he came back to himself.

With a quick [Telepathy] toward the time worm far below, Erick felt a return stroke against his Psyche and Body. No False Damage equivalents happened at all. No bleeding. No headache. Just a wash of power against Erick that drained a few 10,000 Health and Mind in the return ‘no’…

Oh!

Erick could probably shunt that power directly against anyone who said ‘no’ to him.

He could make the ‘return the False Damage’ go right along his initial questing tendril…

“… Nah. That seems… wrong. Very wrong.”

An idea to keep in his back pocket, though.

Actually.