September 19th, 629
The initial lecture Maxwell gave me was short, put to a pause as soon as Umara found out I was awake. Apparently the difference in my demeanor was different enough to immediately notice, but the relieved sigh she let out when we first spoke was audible.
I had slept for a full day, so I was more than rested despite what my mind had been pulled apart trying to accomplish. Stressing myself so much had its perks, namely the massive increase in power I had gained. Based on the feeling alone I had at least doubled my Psyka reserves, not mentioning whatever improvements had been made to its potency. Then there was the techniques I had learned and derived from the voices and songs of the universe.
I had never been so capable before. My advancement formation had already long been comprehended and completed. I had only been focusing on cultivating my power with it and preparing myself for the next Authority. Now I was well beyond the point of being ready. With but a thought I could start the advancement, and to be honest, I had to be careful a stray thought didn’t trigger it. I was surprised that nature itself hadn’t already stepped in and forced an advancement out of me.
The only issue now was everything else. Maxwell spared no detail about how precarious of a situation I was in. I knew it well enough myself too. I had dabbled in a realm of power I had no business even knowing was there, and with as popular as I was, I was garnering no shortage of malicious intention that not even my guardian angel could protect me from. Whether it was a matter of power or not, it was clear that I had flown too close to the sun and got burned. Not enough to send me to the seas, but if I didn’t fix my shit, I’d be well on my way.
My next advancement needed to be dedicated to more than just multiplying my pool of Psyka and preparing for Authority 10. I needed to learn Maxwell’s formations and set up my Mind Palace in such a way that they protected it. Based on some cursory glances at the formations I’d have to use, learning them would definitely be the hardest part. Renovating my Mind Palace afterward would be easy, even if it wouldn’t be as easy as during a major advancement.
On top of that, Maxwell was a ticking clock. The old man was too weak to sustain the formations for long. I had no more than a few weeks to learn and advance before he reached his limit, and if I was going to have trouble learning his formations, then I was willing to bet that extremely few people in the Church knew them at all. I could probably buy more time with support from the Pope and perhaps a Paladin, but that would be an expensive endeavor. I’d rather not incur them at all.
I wasn’t that concerned though. If I really couldn’t learn the formations in a few weeks, then I’d just have to blame my own incompetence. I had taken my comprehensions so far that the Great Barrier was already knocking itself into my nose with how close it was getting. That didn’t mean I could necessarily break it at the moment, but chances were, few other summoners had ever come close to my level in all of this world’s history. Maxwell was one of them.
I shouldn’t have any issues learning whatever else he had in store. Although it may be more complex conceptually than my Programmed Magic, it couldn't be by much. Programmed Magic was the child of a nation of summoners, and I had reverse engineered it from an impenetrable shield protecting an anomalous bio-crystalline Mana-Vigor transmutation artifact. I dared not say that I had reached the limits of its technological prowess, but I certainly wasn’t far from it. Whatever Maxwell had devised was unique to him, but nothing could be too far beyond my abilities because a summoner had never breached the Great Barrier. There was a certain maximum in complexity they could’ve reached, and with my recent fun with the Outer Waters, I was more prepared than otherwise.
Right now, I had every advantage, and I literally wouldn’t sleep until I had advanced and completed my goal.
As much as I wanted to spend time with Umara, Maxwell wasn’t sleeping until I could finish either so just about every minute was spent with us engaging. Both of our minds were far beyond anybody else’s in this world and as much as I had loathed having to deal with slow thinkers when I long ago advanced to Authority 7 and 8, I had finally found someone who could keep up and more.
The room flashed with constant formations and arrays between Maxwell and I, our voices constantly bouncing off the walls as waves of Psyka carried more information than what could be transmitted through something as basic as language alone.
After a few days of us lecturing and learning, Luna left the estate seeing as everything was under control. The only times my focus was taken otherwise was when we had to eat or take care of biological needs. Otherwise, Maxwell and I never stopped. It took everything I had to keep up with the man shockingly enough. I had never exercised myself intellectually for so long.
Approaching the end of the first week though, I finally saw my progress soar.
Maxwell called them Living Arrays. If I had thought moving from a two dimensional to a three dimensional array was difficult before, this was a whole other realm.
Living Arrays were unique in the fact that they could react, change, and adapt on the fly. As soon as they were completed, they were for all intents and purposes an independent, intelligent system of Psyka. They couldn’t necessarily be called a lifeform, given that souls and spirits existed, but taken far enough, they were as close as a non-living system could get to true intelligence.
My first indication of this came while initially learning about the different components. A basic Psykic array was a formation of runes and circuits that ultimately carried instructions. Like every other spell for a Warlock, they were meant to warp Psyka to a person’s will and carry out their coded purpose.
My Programmed Magic took that to the extreme. The basic arrays merely spit out the results of their instructions, like a spell launching an elemental arrow. On the other hand, my magic’s most prominent feature could be considered its self-perpetuating nature outside of its complexity.
This perpetual programming could overwhelm even the most powerful Psykic arrays through sheer processing power, using the power of a target against itself.
The only downside was the fact that in the end, it was still programming. My Programmed Magic couldn’t change and adapt like Maxwell’s Living Arrays could, but his Living Arrays also didn’t have the same perpetuity that Programmed Magic did.
They didn’t have too many similarities in theory, but in practice both of them were still Psykic systems of spellforming. After getting past the initial hurdle of understanding a Living Array’s basic components, my mind worked overtime to compile and understand.
It was to Maxwell’s immense chagrin that I could learn it so fast despite the mutual desire to take the burden off of him. Nevertheless, when we approached our second week of study, I finally found myself crossing our major milestone.
……
…
“Just deploy the damned formation, boy.”
“I’m trying to focus.”
“You’re wasting my energy.”
“I’m making just as much progress, so you’re getting the same value out of your energy as you have been for the last two weeks.”
“We both know you figured out how to deploy the formation six hours ago, so stop trying to make it better and just do it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Maxwell groaned as I continued to splice magics, the air in front of me filled with thousands of morphing structures.
I hadn’t started trying to make his formations better six hours ago. I had been doing so since we first started. Merging his Living Arrays with my Programmed Magic was bound to produce incredible results. It would completely change the way I did things, as evidenced by the fact that with every step forward I had taken, I had constantly brushed against the Great Barrier.
Living Arrays were Maxwell’s Magnum Opus, the system of Psykic formations that allowed him to create those to touch upon the Outer Waters. It was of natural course that I come so much closer to the barrier and the ability to break it.
Now I needed to merge the two into one cohesive system. That goal itself was almost complete.
There was just one thing I needed to do.
I took Maxwell’s spell formation he cast over me, the same one that protected me against interference from the Outer Waters. It was not just a physical and magical protection, but a spiritual one. The Living Array portion of it allowed the spell to automatically conform to the soul of the individual and protect them by blocking everything else. It seemed to be the perfect spell, but I wanted to add my aspect of perpetuity.
I already developed a translation and compatibility layer between the Programmed and Living Arrays, but now I needed to do away with that. That was a crude splice. Instead, making them into a cohesive whole would require me to develop an entirely different language.
For this, I took inspiration from a few places. First was the programs that I developed for my SEER Knife, which included my studies on the Neural Gem. Then I took what knowledge I had acquired from the Island of Continuance, primarily both the Automaton Cores and the Anomaly.
While we hadn’t cracked the true secrets behind those cores, making them a still useless technology, they were now helping me immensely.
Bridging the coded and the living. It came to me as easily as an athlete would put one foot in front of the other. I felt no roadblocks in my comprehensions of this new language as I built it layer by layer, developing the right conceptual foundation.
Maxwell eventually went quiet as well. For the first time in two weeks, he simply sat there and watched, making no corrections or criticisms.
Then, by the end of the day, I had it.
My hands smacked together with a resounding clap, a wave of Psyka snapping through the room and wiping out every formation, enchantment, and active device. That included Maxwell’s active array, which was deconstructed in a mere instant.
He didn’t seem to mind, aside from the backlash hitting him all at once. As I felt his mind reel from the deactivation and sudden stop to his expenditure, my body once again came under attack from influences beyond the world.
They wanted to burrow into my skin, parasites that would destroy my body, brain, mind, and ultimately, my soul. They attacked on all levels. Just because they were metaphysical didn’t mean they couldn’t have very real physical effects.
I glanced around, seeing and hearing the voices of the world echoing around my estate and through the entirety of the Whetted City. My mind, not yet recovered from the withdrawal of the Symphony, flooded with the pleasure of knowledge and awareness once more.
My mind was open, my thoughts resonating with reality, bringing me a comprehension of all things that could only be granted by otherworldly forces.
And as Maxwell tried to recover fast enough to redeploy his protections, I pulled apart my hands, revealing the fruits of my genius.
A small orb, complex with the seed of my new magical language. With a flick of my finger and a small injection of Psyka, the orb exploded to fill the room around me, releasing what I was calling Quantum Psionics.
Thousands of grand nodes, all of them shifting in real time as they coded themselves to my soul before building a structure around me that protected the space I was in. It repelled all voices, attacks, and afflictions that were heading my way, everything going quiet once more.
I smiled in satisfaction while glancing at Maxwell, his face contorted into a frown.
“Don’t scare me like that. For a moment I thought you wouldn’t protect yourself.”
“Who do you think I am? I’d never bit off more than I could chew. I was just getting one last feel.”
“I’m not going to dignify that ridiculous statement with a response. Now, time to focus on your advancement. You need to readjust your Mind Palace in a way that makes the protective effect of the formation passive, regardless of the amount of Psyka you’ll need to devote to it. Do you need any help from me to do that?”
“I shouldn’t. What I just did improved the formation significantly. It costs less and is far more effective since its resistant to direct magical interference as well, not to mention the fact that I could apply it as an enchantment now. I could send these to Wonderland and have them pump out a whole suite of devices and augments for gear.”
“I’m not interested in having you steal my techniques again.”
“Its not stealing if I turned it into something else. The language I’m using technically isn’t even a Living Array anymore. I’ll still wait though. In the meantime, I want some history.”
“Hmm…”
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Maxwell groaned under my eager gaze. Perhaps more important then the formations themselves was what exactly the man had done to warrant their need. I already had my ideas but I wanted to hear it from the source directly.
Eventually, the man deflated, looking a decade older.
“Advance first, then we’ll talk. I need a day to rest anyway. I can already feel a few of my nerves coming down from the effects of crystalization.”
“Oh. Alright then. Well, if you need a day then I’ll take one to rest as well. I’ve been neglecting my wife too much anyway. I want some time with her.”
The two of us stood from where we sat with those words, leaving the room and catching attention as Umara and Erhan noticed.
Setting Maxwell up with his own bedroom, I let the old man rest and get some sleep while spending the rest of my time with Umara. As casual as she wanted to be about it, I could tell she had been worried sick so seeing my success eased her of a massive burden.
A date and several hours of fleshy fun later, I had my sleep and woke up to focus on my next list of goals.
……
…
……
“Alright old man. Let’s get this done with so I can completely rebuild every spell formation I’ve ever conceived of.”
“And render them unusable to anyone but yourself.”
“No need to make me more excited.”
I responded to Maxwell while laying on a special medical bench of my design, custom made and armed with enchantments laid down by Umara. Maxwell turned his gaze, not wishing to look upon my marvelous half naked body, even if I was still wearing shorts.
While I had theories on the topic that could make temperings an actual technique, rendering them several times more potent than before, that would require me to acquire knowledge on Invocations. At that point, I would just get myself some.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t put off this advancement no matter how much power I was potentially losing out on. It simply wasn’t worth my time, which was becoming potentially one of the most valuable resources in this world.
The sooner I could advance, the sooner I could move on to everything else, especially when considering what this advancement would do to me.
After spending that day with Umara and making up for any lost romance my other self had failed to give, I had taken another two to prepare for the advancement. I already devised the formations I’d use during the advancement itself, and the rest of the time spent had been working with Umara to develop the very bench I was laying on.
I smiled a bit while she armed all of the containers for White Crystals. There were several Authority 11 crystals, each the size of a basketball and worth a large fortune each. In fact, a couple were only being lent to me by Ironheart.
Umara glanced at me with anticipation, excited as I was to see the results of our work.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
I answered back to her, feeling her arm the enchantments. Magika flooded the area right after she did, the sheer amount stinging my skin as it turned tangible, looking like a clear fluid as it flowed within the confines that the enchantment established.
Seconds later, I felt my stomach churn in a way that made my body convulse, attempting to vomit and failing as a result of nothing being in my stomach. I had fasted since devising my initial ideas, expecting this days ago.
After the area had become so dense that my advancement initiated by itself, the devices within the bed activated, causing changes in my body. The enchantments laid down by Umara were serving the special purpose of resonating the Magika with every part of my body. By doing so, the Magika, as well as some healing magic from Umara, would force the surrounding power to meld with my body and align my flesh with not just my genetic code, but its most perfect version.
Whether it was through external environmental factors or not, plenty of things caused the human body to get all messy. The food that was eaten, the subtle poisons that was ingested, the small or large wounds and ailments they sustained. Plenty of things caused the body to compensate and fall short of its maximum potential. Of course, the body was designed to handle just that as well. It was adaptable, built to fight and survive anything that came its way no matter how chronic or acute the effects. That’s why most medical techniques on Earth, as well as most healing magic on this world, involved simply enabling the body to do its own thing, whether that was preventing it from dying before it could heal or giving it the room it needed to build its resistances stronger.
That didn’t mean it was resistant to everything, however. In fact, it was just as vulnerable to the one thing that managed to be every other thing’s greatest weakness.
Resonance.
Umara had developed her most potent healing spells by taking that concept even further after studying and conquering the Violet Madness. Now, she was using that and the dense Magika around me to refine my body. Basically, she was casting one of the most powerful healing spells to exist, falling barely short of what a Sovereign was capable of.
Every bit of magic was stirred as Umara’s formations bloomed to life around me. They carried through the resonance, matching my body with my DNA. If the match was good, it would do nothing but pump me full of Vigor and Mana. If the match was bad, however, it would seek to resolve it.
The result? A bit dirtier than most would want to be described.
There was a lot of blood and partially failing organs though. The magic was basically rejecting any part of my body that didn’t match my most perfect biological form, no matter how close it was. I had guessed it would need to be done beforehand, but it wasn’t long before Umara started cutting me open, allowing the “foreign” material to be rejected and ejected, the “perfect” material swiftly being regrown and replacing it.
Thankfully for me, I wasn’t conscious enough to care about what was happening to my body. I may have gotten a few seconds of agonizing pain, but by this point I was used to it.
Instead, I was taken into my Mind Palace, gazing down upon the ruined structure with a faint sense of displeasure.
“Can’t believe I let myself do that.”
I was under no impression that I hadn’t fucked up. Every last bit of what happened was my fault, even if only for the fact that I hadn’t notified the necessary people about what was happening while I still had the self awareness. It was my own hubris, no matter how beneficial it was.
It made me painfully aware of the more subtle ways of the universe, including its supernatural side. Even now, resisting the voices of reality was impossible without Maxwell’s formations. Like I had confirmed in my brief moment of exposure, the Symphony would come back in full force if I let it, and as much as it allowed me to affect the flow of the universe, the same became true for everything that sought to affect me maliciously.
It was a double edged sword, a two way street, an open doorway, and I had engaged without the ability to resist.
I was lucky to be protected and cared for like I was, but if I wanted any chance at eventually bringing down a King, then that could never happen again.
So I quickly got to work. While my soul and mind were in a vulnerable state, I completely restructured. I repaired and reinforced the foundations of my fortress, bringing every weapon from autocannons to missile launchers back to service, before moving in and fixing up the internals.
I extracted and contained every last trace of external influence before planting down enchantments across my structure specifically built to combat them if they every came back in the future. Doing so was easy. What was coming after was not so.
I moved to my fabrication facility, noticing it in disarray. Totenstahl sat upon its own workbench, surrounded by various types of bullets and feed belts. It was in this place that I was able to adapt my summons to my needs on the fly, even if the ability was still fairly limited. Spirits were spirits and changing them involved changing semi-living things. While I could mix and match spirits, changing them completely was still fairly beyond my ability, if it was even technically possible.
I still didn’t know enough about them, even though I was sure that such knowledge would be revealed when I broke beyond the Great Barrier. For now, I decided to compress everything.
The fabrication facility split in two, one side being repaired and kept generally the same, the other side completely breaking down. I wiped everything away, leaving the bare room before creating several projection and information storage devices.
This place would be designed to hold the active knowledge of my summons when I decided to hand them off to others. While I had a perfect memory, it was still easier for me mentally to have a dedicated area for the task, making it a place that I could engage with one of my Sparks while disengaging from when I wasn’t using it the majority of the time.
After finishing that and giving it a direct line, I moved to my Data Center where the Sparks resided in two Sectors.
Those were damaged too, not that it did too much to affect my memory or processing capacity. They made my thoughts muddled but the damage was mostly representative of the places the voices had used to interfere with my mind.
First, I cleaned up my first Sector. Used for my perfect memory, I went through all of the racks filled to the brim with tens of thousands of data crystals, as well as each of the optical reader devices attached to them.
Bringing them back to spec and making sure each of the fiber optic cables were attached to the Spark, I covered the data crystals and their reader devices with some of my new Quantum Psionics. These enchantments weren’t meant to block out the voices though. Instead, they were meant to detect and filter the voices from my memories. Without destroying the information, the voices themselves would be quarantined while still being associated with the memories they were meant to affect, thereby preventing me from thinking they had been there my entire life and by extension, providing me with the historical benefits that they did.
After applying them I moved to the other Spark, the one dedicated to augmenting my processing power. Acting as a sub-mind, it was responsible for sheer intellectual operating ability, a whole host of quantum and conventional supercomputers visualized to help process and allocate the sheer amount of information that could move through my head at any given time.
I repaired damage while applying some more small scale enchantments. They were generally the same as the last, except instead of protecting historical memories, they were meant to actively detect, alert, and filter new incoming information. It would do it passively as I allocated a certain amount of the supercomputing array and thereby the Spark. These enchantments would even work independent of my previous biases held within my memories, making me aware that the voices were there and take the precautions to process them in an area sealed away from the rest of my cognition. In theory it would completely protect my conscious and subconsious rationale.
After that I modified the paired link between the two Sparks, still allowing them to work together with my new enchantments while making those critical functions independent, a fail safe in case one side failed in their function.
The point was to make sure that there was enough of a difference in my memories and rationale that even if one part of my mind failed, the other would pick up on it and give me the opportunity to call it out. The Symphony had infected my memories just as it had changed the way I thought, a part of the reason that I hadn’t thought it was an issue. Early on I still had the mind to wonder if I was going insane. That had been the last time I did, and it had been Umara’s last opportunity to nip the issue in the bud. At least now she knew what to look out for, but I was also aware of that fact, and I knew that if it happened again, I’d do too good a job at hiding it from her and allowing the issue to fester until I was irrecoverable.
I needed to protect against myself using myself against myself.
Still, even these functions couldn’t compare to what I did after.
After fixing my entire fortress, I did the last thing I needed to. I moved to the Core, the place that held the Orb which brought together both Sparks in a cohesive whole.
Held within a cradle connected to the Sparks, I saw the massive projection of what the Sparks looked like. They were a dense neural network, a visualization of a secondary mind, two sides of the same coin brought together in a cohesive whole despite both functions being separated in two Sparks.
Around the cradle, I saw enchantments running across the surfaces of the structure, strewn across the walls of the blank room. These enchantments went on to run through the entire structure of the fortress, touching every system, defensive and offensive. It was a unification of the entire Mind Palace and where I’d be deploying my changes.
Through the Orb, I brought up my Quantum Psionics. Specifically the enchantment that I had developed in anticipation of this.
The Orb flashed with the image of it, an impossibly complex array of perpetually changing and adapting Psykic magic. Not only was it built from Maxwell’s supernatural protections against evil spirits and gods utilizing Living Arrays, but it was augmented with my perpetual Programmed Magic to provide the filtering and error checking functions.
The need for more functions wasn’t necessary here. Instead, it was the way those functions were implemented that made it so powerful. After enchanting the Orb with it and giving it my instructions to activate, I saw it do its work firsthand.
The enchantment spread from the Orb and into the cradle, and from there, the Array moved across the walls in an endlessly repeating pattern. From those walls it extended through the entire base, literally everything being affected like it was a virus.
It wasn’t long before the fortress was thoroughly enchanted with the Array. Even the ordnance for the weapons were enchanted, and that was doubly true for my fabrication facility that touched Totenstahl and any spirits that I summoned through it.
I smiled, the Array doing its job perfectly. However, there was a slight concern with it, that being the power cost.
It was quite significant. My pool of power was visualized as a Vortex of Psyka that spun beneath the fortress, churning upward like a tornado as it permeated the structure and made everything work. However, whereas most of the power simply slipped through the fortress before, now, about 90% of it was absorbed to power the new additions.
Thankfully, my rapidly increasing power changed that soon enough.
My advancement formation went active during my changes, and the vortex of power grew as my soul opened itself to more power. Psyka flooded in without end, backed by the force of the unbearably dense Magika around my body, forcing the Vortex open even more than my soul wanted to allow, bringing me discomfort that bordered on pain.
Yet my thoughts were laced with ecstasy. The increase in power continued for hours and hours, the vortex growing deeper and denser. My Psyka was refined not just by the advancement formation, but my newfound knowledge as I sought to manipulate it further, using my Mind Palace as the conduit for my actions.
I was so focused that I instantly knew when the increases came to a slow, and then a stop as my soul solidified with its new and improved form. Then, I calculated the changes with a broad smile that bordered on incredulity.
My pool of Psyka had expanded by 23 times. And its density had increased by 7 times.
On paper, that was a total effective increase in power by 161 times.
I knew that Authorities 8 and 9 would prime me for Authority 10. The necessity for sheer power was only going to increase, even after this advancement. But I hadn’t quite expected that much.
It was the single largest increase in power I had ever experienced. Yet, when I looked back at my memories of when Umara and the others had advanced, I knew that this kind of power jump was only, just barely, above average compared to them.
It was the reason that the others had been able to subdue me so easily after our siege on the Nexus. While I had given them trouble and some wounds, they had still only used drops of their total power, especially Umara. She had been able to use spatial spells to outright disintegrate parts of my armor, an impossibly costly spell considering she was creating thousands of tiny spatial fissures that she actively moved through reality, requiring far more control than sheer power, and yet punching through my defenses like paper while I was loaded with all the Psyka I could use.
The only reason I had done so much was because of my technique, the fact that they had to do their best not to accidentally kill me, and the Symphony. In that fight, I effectively had clairvoyance alongside my sheer intellectual power and knowledge of how they thought. I had every advantage. The fact that I lost, in some ways, was embarrassing despite how little power I had compared to all of them.
Now though, I had just bridged that gap. Now, I had about as much power as any one of them now that I was also Authority 9.
If we fought again? Even if they had no qualms about actually killing me, in a real fight to the death, I would kill every last one of them, especially with my new Quantum Psionics.
But that wasn’t even considering what I was going to get from my 9th Star.
I looked up, watching the barrier to it shatter, revealing all the new toys I was gonna get to play with.
