37. Slow Burn

Chapter 037
Slow Burn

As the weeks went by, Zorian became increasingly bored with Mind Like Fire’s lessons. While they continued to pay results in terms of his increasing mental combat proficiency, they were also very repetitive and had increasingly marginal results. It didn’t help that his mental defenses were by now too good to be casually collapsed by his teacher, which meant that he no longer ended the lessons with a raging headache and an urge to lay down for a few hours. The lessons mostly just taxed his patience now, leaving him a bit tired and frustrated but otherwise ready to do something else.

He decided to do just that. He had never really finished sounding out the rest of the aranea, wanting to get some basics of mental combat from the River Navigators first, but he was becoming increasingly certain that Mind Like Fire was stalling him with her demands at mastery in order to avoid teaching him anything more advanced. His mental defenses were already good enough, in his opinion, so there was no harm in giving the other webs a visit to see what their offer was.

The Luminous Advocates were his first destination. They were, after all, supposed to be very interested in teaching someone like him, as well as hungry for resources he could provide. Unfortunately, that didn’t quite work out. Their initial offer was utterly ridiculous, calling for Zorian to pay a simply staggering amount of money and magical artifacts. He didn’t agree to that, of course – couldn’t, actually, even if he wanted to, since the whole thing would cost twice as much as he had on his person. Even if he gathered all of his savings and sold every single mana crystal he’d found under Knyazov Dveri, it still wouldn’t be enough. It took more than 3 weeks to talk them into a more reasonable price, since they seemed to finally realize he was in a hurry. By that time, the restart was already near its end. Undeterred, he tried to approach them again over the next four restarts, varying his approach, but in the end only managed to reduce the negotiation period by a couple of days.

Admittedly, the few lessons he actually managed to finagle out of them really were top-notch. Not only did they give him some crucial advice in regards to strengthening his mental shell that really sped up his progress in Mind Like Fire’s lessons, they also helped him hone other aspects of his psychic abilities. For instance, he was now capable of forming two-way telepathic links that allowed non-psychics to talk back to him mentally, as well as form links with multiple people at once. They even taught him how to better handle the information from divination spells which dumped their results directly into the mind of the caster. Some useful information, that. Nonetheless, Zorian decided to give up on seeking their help after the fourth restart. While their help was useful, the sheer amount of time and nerves he lost arranging for said help to actually materialize made the whole thing a poor deal in his mind. It didn’t help that they categorically refused to teach him memory manipulation unless he subjected himself to a total memory probe, courtesy of their elders, which made their web a bit of a dead end as far as he was concerned. Because that was basically never going to happen.

Since negotiation with the Luminous Advocates involved a whole lot of waiting for the web to respond to his offers, Zorian had time to approach the Filigree Sages at the same time. They too took a lot of time to convince, although in their case it was because they were a suspicious bunch and also more than a little bit unhappy about him selling telepathic relays to the River Navigators. Thankfully, the first time he managed to convince them to teach him, he immediately found a shortcut that allowed him to drastically cut down on the negotiation time necessary to convince them. All he had to do was demonstrate his proficiency with spell formulas and promise to help them adapt human techniques to their own ‘webcraft’. They cared about that a lot more than about any material trade goods, and so long as he did so it only took a week of negotiation before they agreed to teach him.

Zorian was more than a little shocked when he was first shown an example of the Filigree Sage’s webcraft. He had expected something relatively simple and crude, like a piece of spider silk cloth with familiar Ikosian symbology embedded into it, or perhaps even individual threads woven into the glyphs. Instead, the Filigree Sage crafter he was to work with led him to a rectangular formation of stone pillars, in the middle of which was suspended a complex, multi-layered sphere made out of spider silk. The sphere glowed with pale white light in the darkness of the room, points of brighter lights constantly racing along this or that thread in a complicated dance that Zorian couldn’t decipher. Every inch of its surface (as well as every inch of the inner layers too, he would later find out) was covered in glyphs. Unfamiliar, non-Ikosian glyphs. And his guide claimed this was just one of the lesser practice spheres, since they weren’t going to bring a potentially-untrustworthy outsider anywhere near the real thing.

He had realized at that point that he had bitten off far more than he could chew. Helping the Filigree Sages refine their webcraft basically required becoming adept in a whole different tradition of making spell formulas. A tradition that descended from the Ikosian one, thus making the job much easier, but still. This was a task that could take years. Not something that you could do on the side while focusing on something else.

He still gave it an honest try (mostly by completely giving up on rest and free time for several restarts) and the Filigree Sages seemed pleased by his work, but in the end he decided that he simply couldn’t justify the spent effort to himself. While the topic itself was extremely interesting – indeed, many researchers would have quite literally killed to be in his place, studying an otherwise unknown magical tradition – it was ultimately a distraction he, at the moment, didn’t need. And really, the actual mind magic instruction he was getting in exchange for his work was little different from what the River Navigators were offering. He did admittedly get to experience a slightly different style of mental combat from the one practiced by River Navigators and most other aranean webs, since the Filigree Sages used methods that revolved around group combat. Not very useful to him, since he didn’t have a fellow telepath to use it with, but he did learn some tricks to deal with multiple attackers.

Originally, the Filigree Sages were completely unwilling to teach Zorian any form of memory manipulation. However, after two restarts of studying their webcraft, it became impossible to pretend he was starting from scratch. The next time around, he used an excuse that he’d learned the bare basics from the Cyorian web. He was promptly taken to their matriarch (who had mostly ignored him up until then, preferring to have her underlings interact with him), who seemed very keen on sending an expedition to Cyoria with Zorian’s help in order to establish some kind of contact with the Cyorian web. Not even finding out they had all been killed dampened her enthusiasm for the idea of an expedition to Cyoria – it just meant the focus of the expedition shifted from establishing contact to looting the place down to bedrock. Lovely. Regardless, in exchange for transporting the expedition to Cyoria, protecting them from any threats and transporting them back, Zorian was promised… just about anything, really. Even memory manipulation was on the table.

Aside from the fact that agreeing to such a thing would require Zorian to go back to Cyoria, and the fact that he would be helping a group of aranea loot the remains of his friends, there was the little matter of him not being actually sure that the Cyorian web actually used any webcraft. He suspected they did, and many of the things the matriarch had mentioned in her stories and off-hand comments seemed to indicate so in retrospect, but he wasn’t actually certain. It was just an excuse he made up to explain his otherwise inexplicable knowledge.

He should definitely go down into the ruins of Cyoria’s web and check to see what’s in there before agreeing to any such expeditions.

With the Luminous Advocates and the Filigree Sages essentially eliminated from the list of options, at least for the time being, Zorian was left with only three options to serve as an alternative to the River Navigators. The three ‘shady’ webs that the Illustrious Gem Collectors had warned him about. Zorian was about to start approaching them when Mind Like Fire finally decided to move on from basic telepathic combat drills.

– break –

When Mind Like Fire declared that Zorian’s mental defenses were ‘passable’ and that they would be switching over to honing his offensive arsenal, he was cautiously optimistic but didn’t expect much. Practice would probably become less painful, since Mind Like Fire would be on the receiving end of attacks this time, but he didn’t really think his attacks would be very effective. Her mental defenses were bound to be excellent.

But then Mind Like Fire told him to hit her with his best shot and simply stood there, content to passively weather the attack and Zorian decided to oblige her. He dumped a positively huge amount of mana into his next attack, the most he could manage without the entire thing losing cohesion, and slammed it straight into her mental shell.

The results were beyond all of his expectations. Rather than simply bouncing off her mental shell like he had expected, the attack effortlessly blew her defenses away and slammed into her unprotected mind like a battering ram. She screeched in pain, spasming and flailing with her whole body, and, for a brief while, there was pandemonium as other nearby aranea burst into the room to see what the fuss was about. Zorian tried to explain what had happened without the whole thing devolving into a fight. For a moment he was sure he would have to flee and was already clutching the recall rod in his hand to teleport away, but Mind Like Fire recovered in time to defuse the situation.

She also insisted on continuing the lessons as if nothing notable had happened, and proceeded to shoo away all the other aranea that had come to her defense.

[Damnation,] Mind Like Fire grumbled once they were alone again. [Not only did I get taken down by a human rookie, but everyone saw it too. I won’t live this one down for a long while.]

[Uh, sorry?] tried Zorian. He wasn’t sure what to even tell her, in all honesty.

[Don’t be,] she said. [It’s my fault, really – your inexperience has automatically put me in the mind of one of our young and I foolishly assumed your attack would be like one of theirs. But while your skills at mental combat leave much to be desired, you are still a qualified mage with plenty of mana to burn and considerable experience in managing it. I should have let you face my best defenses and then lowered the strength afterwards. I should have waited to see what your strongest attack was like instead of making assumptions about how strong my shield needed to be. Let that be a lesson to you as well, should you ever teach someone – it is always unwise to be arrogant and carelessly presumptuous, lest you get taken down by some precocious hatchling.]

He was not a freaking hatchling! He was only a year away from being legally recognized as an adult, and was already one if the time spent in the time loop was factored in!

[I didn’t do anything permanent, did I?] Zorian asked instead.

[No, of course not. Why do you think- Ah. I see that in my haste to bring your practical skills to a workable level, I have neglected some crucial bits of theory. Like what happens when an attacker manages to break through the defender’s defenses.]

[Bad things?] tried Zorian.

[Yes, but perhaps not quite as bad as you’d think,] she countered. [To grossly simplify things, there are four main things one can do to an unshielded target. The first is to simply assault their mind telepathically, seeking to damage it. This is, in almost every case, simply a way to incapacitate the target for a while. It is very difficult to actually kill people through purely mental attacks – usually such attacks simply cause a lot of pain and make the target lose consciousness for a while. Maybe quite a while, and they may suffer from headaches, confusion and amnesia for a time, but even then they are almost guaranteed to eventually recover.]

[Oh. I didn’t know that,] Zorian admitted. He honestly thought that getting hit by a sufficiently powerful telepathic barrage could cripple you permanently. Then again, ‘for a while’ could perhaps mean months or years, so still not something to take lightly. And he was pretty sure a pain-inducing attack could be easily adapted to an instrument of torture. [So you were never in any permanent danger, then, but you’ll probably be hurting for a while.]

[Yes, that is the short of it.]

[And the other three things the attacker could do to the target?] Zorian asked.

[Well, the second possibility is that the attacker extracts information out of the target, either by reading their thoughts or probing their memories. Reading thoughts is the easiest option, of course, but often ineffective. Aranea, mages, and quite a few human civilians as well, have learned to maintain certain discipline over their surface thoughts, making it hard to pluck information out of their minds that way. That leaves deep memory reading, and this is not nearly as easy as it sounds, as most people have quite a lot of memories to sift through and can sense when someone is rooting through their heads and resist. Even non-psychics can resist deep memory scans, if they’re strong-willed and the psychic isn’t very practiced in the skill…]

Zorian remained silent. He had raised the possibility of being taught memory manipulation plenty of times in the past, and she had always told him he wasn’t ready yet. He couldn’t imagine her answer would be any different now. At least it wasn’t a flat out no, he supposed.

[The third and fourth options are what we aranea call deep and surface manipulations. Surface manipulations consist of temporary manipulations, such as fooling the senses or amplifying a particular emotion in the victim to produce a desired reaction. Deep manipulations, on the other hand, are more… permanent. They consist of things such as modifying someone’s memories, blanking out entire sections of their life, instilling lasting compulsions or turning them into unaware sleeper agents. Deep techniques are what a lot of humans associate mind magic with, but they are actually rarely used. Such lasting mental alterations require the attacker to dive deep into the victim’s mind and spend a lot of time tweaking things, making them hard and time-consuming to use. This is not something you use in a fight – this is something you do to a foe that has been decisively defeated and cannot strike back at you at all. Even among us aranea it is considered something of a dark art. Few of us are proficient in its use.]

Zorian sighed. “This is all leading up to an explanation about why you don’t want to teach me any memory manipulation, isn’t it?” he said out loud.

[Yes and no,] Mind Like Fire said carefully.

“So a no couched in flowery language,” said Zorian derisively. “Man, that’s the third refusal in a row. I’m going to have to find more webs to investigate…”

[Oh, have you gone to other webs with this?] she asked, not in the least bothered by his little outburst. [Sounds like quite a story, you’ll have to tell me about it later. But don’t write us off yet. While it’s true that we are not ready to let you root through our minds, even as practice, that doesn’t mean we can’t help prepare you for when you do eventually find an aranea brave enough to let you read her memories.]

“And you’re going to do that by…?”

[The main problem you are facing when trying to read aranean minds is that our ways of perceiving the world are very different from yours. Our many eyes allow us to see the world in three different ways, only one of which – the one provided by our pair of big, forward-facing eyes – is in any way analogous to human vision. We can also sense vibrations through our legs, and our sense of touch is much more sophisticated than yours. It’s how we can navigate through the tunnels so easily with no light to see by.]

“You can’t see in the dark?” asked Zorian. Most Dungeon-dwellers could.

[No, we need at least a little light to see,] she said. [We do have excellent low-light vision though. But we’re getting off track. What I’m trying to say is that even if you received access to an aranean memory, you probably would not be able to parse it. If you want to be able to read aranean memories, you first need to learn how to process the way we perceive the world. And that is where I can help you. I can let you tap into my senses and let you adjust to them. I can even package some of my more inconsequential memories into little packets and send them to you over the telepathic link to help you understand how to deal with memory packages.]

“Oh,” Zorian said lamely. Yeah, that did sound useful. Somewhat mollified by her response, he switched back to telepathic communication. [So can we perhaps switch to that right now? I must admit I am getting thoroughly sick of combat drills. I know it’s important to practice my mental shields, believe me, but I’m going to go crazy if this continues for much longer.]

[As a matter of fact, yes. I had wanted to wait with such instruction until you could actually break through my mental shields before starting you on that path, but you did succeed with that. Not in a way I had expected or planned for, but fair is fair. We shall start with surface manipulations, since you will need some proficiency with them before you can tap into someone’s senses. How much did your other aranean teachers tell you about them?]

[Very little, other than the fact that they exist,] Zorian said. [But surface manipulations are basically mind control, yes? We covered those back in my mage academy. Only theoretically, with an emphasis on identifying the type of mind control and how to fight it, but still.]

[Summarize those lessons for me, please,] Mind Like Fire ordered. [I’d like to see what I’m working with.]

With a wave of his hands, Zorian created a glowing geometric diagram that was informally known as the ‘mind control rectangle’ among the students and whose official name escaped Zorian at the moment. It was something far too loquacious and complicated for what were basically four words arranged into a simple two-by-two grid – a rectangle divided into four smaller ones, each of the four major methods of manipulating people through mind magic assigned its own corner.

Domination, Suggestion
Puppeteering, Illusion

[Pretty,] Mind Like Fire deadpanned. [But I must confess I have never learned how to read human script, so you’ll have to explain to me what that means.]

Ah. Right. He sometimes forgot that for all that aranea interacted with humans, they were still alien beings with a completely different culture. Ikosians had possessed an almost religious reverence for the written word, and had spread literacy to every place that had fallen under their domination, so literacy was near universal in places they’d once ruled over. Universal literacy most likely made it much easier to train as many people as possible into mages as well, thus providing tangible benefits for the policy. The aranea, on the other hand, had no such tradition, and probably couldn’t use human-style writing effectively anyway. He knew that the Cyorian web had a number of aranea that could read and write, but most aranea probably had no need to master such skills.

[Domination and suggestion represent spells that enforce the caster’s will upon the target,] said Zorian, pointing at the upper row of the rectangle. [Domination spells involve the caster outright ordering the target to do something and compelling them to do so against their will. Suggestion attempts to present the order as something the target wants on their own. They are will and situation based; depending on the sort of person you cast such spells at and the circumstances they are in, it might be completely impossible to affect them with this sort of mind magic. Most people will resist orders to kill themselves or their loved ones, for instance, and it is next to impossible to convince a patrolling soldier that you are not the person they are looking for if they had been given your picture or someone singled you out to them.] He pointed at the lower row of the rectangle. [Puppeteering and illusions, on the other hand, are not directly affected by the target’s personality and circumstances. Puppeteering flat out usurps the target’s control over their body and pilots it like a… well, puppet. Illusions manipulate the target’s senses in some fashion. Neither can be resisted as such, although puppeteering has to overcome the target’s magic resistance first and illusions can be detected and dispelled.]

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Zorian waved his hands again and the illusion split in half, separating the rectangle into left and right halves – domination and puppeteering on the left side, suggestion and illusion on the right side.

[Domination and puppeteering are forceful methods,] he said. [The target knows they are being targeted by a spell, and will usually be furious at the caster when it ends. As such, they are usually used in combat situations, against people who are clear enemies to you. Suggestion and illusion are subtle methods. The target doesn’t automatically become aware they have been affected, and in fact the goal is for them to remain unaware as long as possible. They are generally used for criminal and espionage purposes.]

Compulsion spells on the top, hijacking spells on the bottom, forceful spells on the left and subtle spells on the right. Yup, he’d covered everything. He let the illusion evaporate into smoke and settled down to wait for Mind Like Fire’s response.

[An interesting breakdown,] she said. [It has a sort of simplistic beauty to it. I’ll have to remember that one. The reality is far more complex and less sharply defined… but we’ll get to that later, when it’s actually relevant. I was never very big on spending time on theory, truth be told. We’ve wasted enough time on it today and I’d like to get started on something productive.]

The resulting lesson was exceptionally painful, reminding Zorian of his initial lessons with her, several restarts in the past ago… and despite her insistence she was being no harder on him than she was on any of her other students, Zorian knew the sudden ferocity of her lessons was her revenge for catching her off guard.

On the bright side, she calmed down after a week of that. On the less bright side, he would have to piss her off like that on every subsequent restart as well, so he was looking at a week of painful headaches at the start of every restart.

Sometimes you just couldn’t win.

– break –

As it turned out, Mind Like Fire’s statement about him being unable to understand aranean senses turned out to be not just correct, but a vast understatement. Even after a full month of practice, he couldn’t make heads or tails of aranean senses. Even trying to limit his sensory tap into their vision alone left him dizzy and confused, and the less said of their sense of touch, the better. They had a rudimentary sense of taste on their leg hairs! They tasted the ground they walked on! Why for the love of all that was holy would a species need to have an ability like that!?

It also put Novelty’s habit of touching everything, him included, in an entirely new and unsettling light…

Not that he’d learned nothing during the entire month. Mind Like Fire did manage to teach him how to affect the minds of others in minor ways. Some of these, like the ability to induce spasms and limb failure, he already knew how to produce – but not very consistently before he’d been lectured on the proper way of hijacking other people’s nervous systems. Others, like inducing full body paralysis, lightly dampening or amplifying their emotions, subtly redirecting their attention away from things or inducing failure of one or more of their senses were wholly new to him. But while these things were all unquestionably useful, the total lack of progress on the one thing that he really had to master hit him hard.

In the end, he reluctantly decided to consult the Luminous Advocates for help. As much as they annoyed him, they probably had an answer to his problem. He managed to short-circuit the negotiations with them only two weeks into the restart by simply paying their ridiculous price. It required spending day after day on exploration of the lower levels of Knyazov Dveri’s dungeon and selling everything of worth he had found there, but he did manage to talk them down to something halfway reasonable and then just pay them off.

According to the Luminous Advocates, his main problem was that he was basically trying to take on too big of a challenge at once. For one thing, he was trying to tap into the senses of another while still retaining his own, forcing his mind to process different perspectives at once. And no, sitting still with his eyes closed was not nearly enough to get around that. In order to deal with that issue, the Luminous Advocates taught him how to turn his mental abilities inwards and shut off one or more of his senses, leaving only the foreign sensory stream for his mind to process.

Their second suggestion was that he had to practice sensory tap on something easier first. Preferably his fellow humans, as their senses were closest to his own, but some of the more similar animals might also suffice. Only once he’d mastered the art of tapping into the senses of his fellow humans should he bother trying to tap into something as alien as an aranea.