ushernet Chapter 516: Creation
Chapter 516: Creation
For the next few days, Felix felt as if the settlement fell into a constrained, rigid routine. The most notable thing was how little time outside of the settlement the adults spent. The crop fields, which hadn’t even been plowed yet, were abandoned, out of fear that the mist clouds would ambush and kill the farmers while they were away from the settlement’s defenses. The hunters, who had previously been planning how to hunt and kill the few animals of the forest, quickly gave up and hovered near the edges of the settlement. The woodcutters stopped going to harvest more lumber and firewood. Housing construction stopped. The adults were largely constrained to watching over the children, training, and waiting anxiously for the results of the craftsmen’s experiments. The anxiety grew with every day, and Felix was fairly certain it was because people could feel their food stores running lower and lower with every passing meal. The fish in the lake could supplement their diet - but there were nowhere near enough fish to completely sustain the settlement. Worse, the calories per meal in this world was evidently far worse than in their previous world. There, a few berries could sustain a grown man for half a day. Here, while meals still gave people far more energy than they ‘should,’ people who burned lots of calories, such as fighters, still needed a few fish a day to keep them going.The craftsmen of the village didn’t have quite the same anxiety that the rest of the settlement did - but they weren’t immune to the growing, gnawing anxiety of being hemmed in by an unknown threat, either. The craftsmen flew through the experimentation and production process, as they struggled to replicate Miria’s extinguish as an enchantment. This meant that six craftsmen, plus Miria, spent the next few days sitting in one of the few fully built training rooms as Miria cast weak extinguishes at the craftsmen, over and over again. Miria’s only other job was to occasionally heal people who got injured doing other miscellaneous tasks around the camp, which didn’t happen very often since people weren’t going outside of the settlement to train or gather resources at the moment. Felix could tell that worry and boredom were gnawing at Miria even more than most of the other people in the camp, since Miria didn’t actually have much of a place in the research process itself. He wasn’t sure if she was using the concept of ‘hope’ to boost their research at all, but even if she was, her role had pretty much been reduced to ‘stand in the corner and cast the spell when we need it.’
While he sympathized with her boredom, Felix had to admit, he was having fun with the whole research process. Now that the craftsmen of the village had latched onto the idea of replicating Miria’s extinguish, Felix spent every day trying to figure out how to weave Miria’s attack into an enchantment. To his surprise, it was actually much harder than he had expected. For one, most of the materials native to this dimension wouldn’t actually hold on to any ‘life force’ based attacks - it was kind of like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The few materials that some of the adults had carried with them through the rifts had zero compatibility with the enchantment they wanted, and most of the materials they found in the area weren’t that useful, either. Eventually, a few of the other adults got fed up with the lack of progress, and successfully convinced Veritum to go lead a few people to the fog pillar at the center of the lake, and trade for some materials. Felix wasn’t quite sure how the negotiations went, but when the trading party returned, they had four large pieces of reddish-green wood. Unlike previous materials, these ones were actually capable of holding enchantments that could interact with the connection between bodies and souls, which was a relief. Felix was more than a little glad to confirm that the pillar of fog really did seem to mean well.
Unfortunately, material limitations weren’t the only problem that the research group ran into.
The next problem, as Felix quickly came to realize, was that Miria’s conceptualization of the Extinguish spell… wasn’t quite what Miria described it as. Miria had already noted that this might be a problem, since she was using alteration essence, which allowed her to play a little more loose with the laws of physics than most other magic systems. However, it wasn’t until they started trying to replicate her spell that Felix realized just how different some things were when it came to Miria’s symbolic representation of the world versus reality. In this dimensional cluster, there was no such thing as life force - which took both Felix and Miria completely off-guard, since the existence of a [Vitality] stat seemed to imply that life force existed. However, there was no ‘source of energy’ holding souls and bodies together, the way Miria visualized it. Instead, the [Vitality] stat seemed to strengthen the body, then weld the body and soul more tightly together, kind of like adding some extra ropes to the knot that tied a soul and a body to each other. Miria’s ‘Extinguish’ spell did still saw and cut at these ropes, so her visualization method wasn’t completely incorrect - but the reality in this dimension was quite different from what Miria had been using this whole time.
On one hand, Felix felt quite amused by this. It was actually quite impressive just how far Miria’s magic system could bend the laws of physics and biology. Felix remembered seeing the same thing happen from a mostly nonmagical source, when they had fought the Heroic-grade combatant back in the Market, but it was kind of amazing to see just how much alteration essence could mess with basic laws of physics on a fundamental level. It was almost like alteration essence-based magic systems could let their users activate some kind of pseudo-heroic grade abilities long before their users met the natural requirements to use those abilities.
On the other hand, it also made it a nightmare to try and base anything off of Miria’s understanding of her own magic system. Felix couldn’t help but wonder whether Miria’s transformation into a part-human and part eldritch horror had made this issue worse, but that was a question that Felix firmly decided not to think about, because if he tried to get too deep into all of the changes the four of them had made to their bodies and minds over the last several lifetimes, he doubted he would ever be able to sort out how much each change had warped them further. Instead, he focused on what he could do - which was hammer out every single detail of Miria’s extinguish spell.
After three days of using small chips of one of the four pieces of wood, Felix and the other members of the crafting team finally started to get a real idea how to replicate Miria’s Extinguish spell. After a few days of testing, Felix realized that the connection between bodies and souls was a set of three different things: the soul, the body, and a sort of ‘glue’ that held the two together. This ‘glue’ seemed to be partially physical - Miria had already observed in multiple worlds that damaging the brain screwed up the connection between the soul and the body, after all. However, part of the glue seemed to be undetectable. Felix could tell that something was there, if he and Miria worked together to hyperfocus both of their magic systems on detecting what was dissipating and then killed a fish - but he had a hard time figuring out what, exactly, he wasn’t understanding.
Even more interestingly, after a few days of constantly testing and observing fish that the fishermen of the settlement caught for them, Felix learned a few other things about the soul. the soul and the body constantly reshaped each other in very small, subtle ways. It was kind of like pouring molten metal into a mold - the soul would actively expand to ‘fill in’ the shape presented by the physical body, and as time passed, it ‘hardened’ and became less malleable to further change. This also meant that the soul and the body grew to fit each other like a hand fitting into a custom glove.
Of course, the analogy was far from perfect - but Felix suspected that even if one directly severed the connection between a soul and a body, the two would still kind of link together, unless someone applied a bit more force and separated the two manually.
As far as Felix could tell, what Miria’s Extinguish actually did, on a deeper level, was to cut off the connection between the soul and the body, then try to push the soul out of the body. This was why monsters that she killed with extinguish didn’t show any signs of physical disfigurement after they died - Miria was essentially spending extra essence to cleanly remove the soul from the container entirely, rather than using a bit of essence to just trash the brain and let the two separate naturally.
said Miria.
Felix laughed.
Miria was decidedly grumpy after that, and needed several hugs to calm her down, but Felix was just glad that the research group had finally found a direction to go in.
By day five, the group finally got their first soul-severing sword built. The sword blade was made entirely out of the wood they had traded for, and it was… bizarre. The sword would not cut physical objects at all - in fact, if someone tried to cut a tree with a sword or something, it would just pass through the tree as if it were an illusion. However, while the blade itself seemed illusory, it still inflicted a huge amount of damage to the connection between the body and soul of whatever was ‘cut’ by the blade, just like Miria’s extinguish.
When the group finished making their first weapon, they created two more, using up the last of their materials. The fact that there were only three weapons, and the fact that they didn’t know where the mist pillar had acquired the wood, were both problems - but at the very least, if things went the way they were hoping, the settlement finally had real, effective weapons to deal with the fog banks.
They presented the new blades to the village at another meeting, where they were met with widespread approval for their experimentation. A new hunting party was quickly formed, with three [Swordsmen] leading the group.
It was time to test their newest set of weapons against the mist monsters.