Chapter 179: Learning To See

“So, just to clarify, you picked an eye Ability on the night before a critical duel, and now you can’t see?” Loth asked.

“Sounds familiar,” Alicia whispered.

“Sure, it sounds bad, when you say it like that,” Will groaned, holding his head in his hands.

“Hey, Will, how many fingers am I holding up?” Travis asked.

Will couldn’t feel body heat with enough accuracy to count fingers, but judging by his tone and the angle Travis’s blob of an arm protruded from his torso…

“You’re flipping me off,” Will said with complete confidence.

“I was holding up two fingers.” Travis said.

“He was flipping you off.” Reggie said, dipping a piece of bread in his soup and watching the situation with vague amusement. The Tank didn’t really have anything to add to the conversation, but he wasn’t being annoying like Travis, at least.

“Both of these things can be true,” Travis said. “What face am I making?” His face sounded a bit more hollow immediately afterwards, so…

“You’re sticking out your tongue,” Will said.

“Wow, damn. You sure you’re blind?” Travis asked, waving his heat-blob hand in front of Will’s face.

“Yes, I’m sure. I can only see…”

Blue…or, something like it. It reminded him of the glowing blue of miasmatic light.

Opaque, and blocking his vision no matter where he looked.

“…Blue.”

“Let me try something,” Loth said, her chair shifting under her as she got up and walked over to her gear on the other side of the camp.

“You said you were supposed to see Charge and dimensional energy?” Alicia whispered.

“Dimensional effects, Charge, and miasma,” Will said.

“So, are you just seeing the miasma that’s…everywhere at all times?” Travis asked.

Like a fog. Will realized, straightening. It was in the atmosphere.

Then how do Uru drakes see anything? Will thought sourly as Loth came back from her pack with something metal in her left hand, a handful of grubs wiggling in her right.

Glowbugs. And a parabolic mirror.

“Face towards me and keep your eyes wide. I’m going to shine a light in them.” Loth said.

Will complied, and a moment later, a searing pain in his eyes forced him to blink and flinch away.

“Pupilary response is there,” Loth mused, “And the pain response.”

“…Ow.” Will muttered, rubbing tears out of his aching eyes.

“So good news:” Loth said, rubbing her chin as she studied him. “Your eyes are still receiving light and responding to overstimulation. Bad news: Whatever the problem is, it might not actually be with your eyes.”

“How could a problem with my eyes not be in my eyes?” Will demanded. For once, Loth seemed to be as puzzled as he was.

“Maybe the Ability is incomplete?” June suggested.

It wasn’t a bad suggestion. Will’s Uru Drake Breath was an example of an incomplete Ability, since it only gave some of the powerful reality-warping effect of an Uru Drake’s breath.

The problem was, incomplete or nerfed Abilities would always say they were incomplete.

This one had said nothing of the sort.

“…really?” Reese asked from his perch near the wagons. “Nobody else knows? Just me?” The skinny immortal scanned the group of young Climbers in apparent disbelief.

Will couldn’t see his expression, but he assumed the old man was shaking his head ruefully as he hopped down off the wagon. “The way the education system is failing kids these days is downright criminal…

“Alright, listen up. You don’t live as long as I have without visiting the optometrist a few thousand times and picking a few things up. When light goes into the eye, it’s not processed in the eye. The image is transmitted down a pair of nerves that go aaall the way to the back of the brain to the visual cortex. The visual cortex is what processes vision, then it relays that to the rest of the brain, which decides what to do with it.” As Reese spoke, he walked around behind Will and tapped the back of his head to illustrate.

“And…why is my…visual core-tecks not processing it anymore? Did it get damaged when the Ability activated or something?” Will asked. He did remember pressure in the back of his head when he added the Ability to his Class.

As weird as it was to think, if the problem was simply damage to his brain, that was a good thing. His Immortal Serpent Ability would have that sorted out in a matter of time.

Unless it just continues damaging it every time it heals. That would suck…

“If my guess is right, it’s a bit more complicated than ‘damage’.” Reese said, giving air quotes to ‘damage’…Will guessed by the way he felt Reese raise his arms at that exact moment.

“Loth, what do you think happens when you restore the sight of someone who has been blind from birth?” Reese pointed at the kobold listening in fascination.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Will could tell from the way she was holding her breath. Like a predator that had located a juicy new source of knowledge, and was waiting to tear it apart.

Loth cocked her head. “Their visual cortex has never processed sight before, so it’s…bad at it?”

“Correct! Someone who has never seen something before will only be able to make out light and dark, then shapeless blobs of color, then eventually, over many months, their vision will refine into something closer to what we know, although it may never be as good as someone who was born with it.”

“But…I’ve been seeing things my entire life.” Will said.

“Have you been seeing Miasma, Dimensional Effects and Charge your entire life?” Loth asked.

“…No.” Will admitted.

“So what I’m getting at, is that your eyes are perceiving things that your brain has no context for. What color are you seeing?” Reese asked.

“Miasmatic blue.” Will said.

“See, that’s the only link your brain has to work with, is the blue glow when miasma is concentrated enough to be visible to the naked eye. That is the closest thing to what you’re seeing that your brain understands, so it’s perceiving it as miasmatic blue.”

“You know, the brain is super cool, especially with regards to language and vision. For example, some tribes have a hundred different words for snow, while people in a tropical area have never seen it before. The people with the snow-descriptors can perceive dozens of variations in different types of snow because their brain has built categories for each kind using language and experience, while the ones in a tropical area can only perceive ‘snow’, and ‘not snow’.”

“So you’re saying…I’ll get it eventually?”

“If I’m right,” The ancient cracked climber said with a shrug. “Then your brain is currently building the neural network required to understand what you’re seeing. Seems likely.”

“And if you’re wrong?” Will asked.

“Then you’re probably screwed.”

“Well. Hopefully not,” Will mused, digesting Reese’s diatribe about people with experience being able to see things better, and the blind needing time to learn how to see.

There was a common denominator between them:

Practice.

How do I practice seeing things? I can’t see anything.