Chapter 44: Re-Programming Reality

If she were to be asked, Scarlet would probably say it was accepting the second notification that really accelerated everything.

[Primordial Psion protocol: Inactive energy detected]

[Primordial Psion protocol: Subsume in entirety?]

[Yes | No]

Why not?

[Yes]

The most precious thing she had was Maus, and he was already under attack. The most this would do was expedite the inevitable.

[Process in progress. Time remaining: 21:14:06:20]

Twenty one days! Scarlet lamented. Then the numbers shifted.

[Process in progress. Time remaining: 18:12:12:32]

What had started as a small sip of energy had somehow spiraled into the entire pool’s psionics draining into her soul. Whether this would have been good or bad under different circumstances, Scarlet didn’t know. Perhaps if she didn’t have a bond and had intended to undergo a normal Alignment, having all this psionic energy flood into her would be a boon. However, it wasn’t neutral energy.

It was the energy of the pool.

It wanted to change things according to its own will.

And there was a lot of it.

Despite being able to tell that her own connection to psionics was purer, Scarlet was being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of energy flooding into her soul. She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t stop the torrent. In the corner of her vision, the time until the assimilation process completed dipped lower and lower at an alarming rate.

[Time remaining: 12:13:15:23]

[Time remaining: 06:20:11:06]

Volume mattered. The amount of energy she absorbed determined how long it took her body to assimilate it. Quality mattered too. The same little sip she’d taken from the Historian had initially told her two hours. The same amount taken from the pool had been supposed to take over a hundred hours to consume, nearly a week. But that initial sample had given the protocol a blank slate, and it had taken eagerly.

More and more energy poured into her. More and more aggressively did it threaten to erode her, to steal pieces of her mind and add them to her body, to chip away at Maus until he was nothing more than energy meant to fuel her potential. To take from her. To rearrange her. To decide for her.

And it hurt.

Scarlet thought she might be screaming, but she couldn’t be entirely sure. She was working very hard on maintaining a rational mind, but it was difficult. Between assimilating the energy, fighting against the Alignment, and defending Maus, she couldn’t even consider increasing her stats or properly attuning herself to the psionics. It wasn’t like her body could absorb energy endlessly, could it? At some point, she had to be full.

But psionics weren’t like any other energy. They were an essence, the material form of information. It was why they laid the world bare the way they did. She was essentially fighting against a cosmic editor trying to erase one thing and write in something else.

If she couldn’t stop the flood of energy, couldn’t adequately defend everything while it was happening, then she would hold on, hold out, and play defense until she had a chance to strike. Eventually, the energy would be assimilated, and then she’d have a little breathing room. Right?

She felt like a wounded animal, huddling around her mental stats and her bond with her pathetically crude control of psionics. She was a brute against a fencer, a fighter against finesse. It was ugly, and she hated it. The pain and rage kept building as the numbers on the assimilation timer ticked down and down.

[Time remaining: 95:00:47]

The timer switched from days to hours.

[…00:49:29]

Hours to minutes.

[…00:51]

Minutes to seconds.

She felt overfilled. It was too much energy, too fast, and she’d been forced to undergo the process while fending off the remaining energy. She could only struggle for so long, eventually it stopped being about will, and was simply a matter of capability.

By the time it hit zero, only a couple, agonising minutes had passed, yet Scarlet was nearly spent.

[…0]

There was a single moment of calm, then her mind exploded.

The bath the night before was a gentle caress compared to this.

Visions entered her mind like memories, or dreams. Three young vulpians entered the Pool. Two fighters and one with a mage build. She knew because the Pool knew. Plucking the knowledge from the info-layer with enviable levels of literacy that Scarlet couldn’t yet hope to match.

In the first scene she watched almost detached as the two fighters walked out significantly less bulky, and with a new light in their eyes. The third went from looking quite waspish to leaving the pool fighting-fit.

The second scene featured a large, green person with tusks growing from both upper and lower jaw. She knew It was an orc because the Pool knew.

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The orc stepped into the pool, toppled over, and screamed. When he eventually stepped out, he looked like a new person. Thick, rolling muscles trimmed down to more manageable mass. What had been gruff, stilted language became clearer, more legible. Then he left the pool, and the memory cut off.

That’s what this was. Memories she’d subsumed along with the Pool’s energy. Just like with the Historian.

More visions flashed by; more vulpians, more changes, more adaptations. Slowly, Scarlet began to understand just how the Pools were able to ‘Align’ people. She would’ve laughed again if she could.

The process was like programming. Soul programming.

The question was how. She tried to actively sift through the memories, but it was like losing a word on the tip of your tongue. She knew she knew it, the information simply refused to be retrieved.

Something instinctive within her told her she wasn’t ready. A natural safeguard protecting her fragile mind.

Yet she was still fighting a losing battle.