Ar'Kendrithyst

Chapter 256, 1/2

Chapter 256, 1/2

Erick had a few different directions he could go.

He left all of Lionshard’s conjured pastries there on the balcony table, for now, and decided to go for a swim.

The waters of his new home were deep and clear, feeling delightfully cool on Erick’s skin, with tiny fishes swimming in the depths and larger fishes hunting them. Erick knew practically all of these species, which was a trick of Yggdrasil’s for sure. There were the normal three reservoir fish that one would put into any lake on Veird to make a stable ecosystem all on their own; Rainbow Flits, Goldscale Slippers, Striped Silvertail. Over there were some bigger fish under some lifted geometric roots of Yggdrasil, with most of them being species Erick did not know. The scarlet kings were rather recognizable, though, their flanks flashing red as they ran from Erick, deeper into the roots. Some giant white fish lazily swam in the full open of the waters, its tails and fins looking like wavy smoke in the water. They were probably good eating, based on how utterly thick their flanks were, and how thin their bones were, but Erick left them alone for now.

For now, he backpaddled on the surface of the lake of his new home, staring at the blackhole sun high above everything and everyone, his eyes lazily shifting to the other suns now and again. It was all so colorful. Enchanting, really.

Erick conjured an inflatable ring and sat in it, enjoying the gentle wind upon his skin as he read Yggdrasil’s guidebook of Margleknot under the many suns.

The Fae Enclave was high on his list of places to visit; probably the top place to visit. He’d probably be doing a bunch of shit there with a bunch of asshole fae… But maybe the fae were simply unconcerned with lower worlds, and were therefore uncaring with Nothanganathor and Veird and the Painted Cosmology. That would be a charitable interpretation of them, and Erick decided right now to adopt that interpretation until proven otherwise.

When it came to higher powers shitting on low places, never attribute to malice what can be easily explained through ignorance.

“Obviously Nothanganathor is a deep exception to that rule.” Erick leafed through the book, adding, “And there are other exceptions, too… A lot of exceptions.”

All these ‘evil-aligned’ places were simply greedy, terrible places that deserved complete annihilation or alteration to make them better people. Normally, Erick wouldn’t go that far right away, and he probably wouldn’t if he had them under his power right now, but evil was evil, and he didn’t need to personally experience evil to know it was wrong.

The Dread Arenas, the Slaver’s Den, the Wraithborne Tower.

All of them were individually terrible. They seemed to form the basis of slavery in Margleknot, too, if Erick was reading this right. This guidebook explained that the Tower grabbed people, the Den captured their own people and sold people to all others, and the Arenas were one of the largest purchasers of slaves for their churn of bodies on the arena sands.

Slavery was prevalent among some of the ‘normal’ organizations, though.

The book had a whole section devoted to how all of that worked, because Yggdrasil would have known that Erick would want to tackle that problem even if he didn’t actually have the eternity it would take to end that horror… But he kinda did have eternity. He was a Paradox Wizard. He could solve this problem.

“I could get allies from all of that, too… Multiple ways, actually.”

Erick wasn’t going to buy slaves —fuck no— but he could easily break some of the slavery systems and benefit from that breaking. Free enough people, and inevitably some of them would want to work for you on the side of good. The Sovereign Cities of Veird were rather great examples of that. It took a while and there were still problems, but a lot of good came of that place once Erick and a coalition of nations and powers finally ended their various evils.

But as for Margleknot, the evils here were a lot more ingrained.

Apparently, when the Wraithborne Tower captured any soul at all, and if those people weren’t bought by any of the big-name buyers, they then sold those people back to their friends or patrons, but with bombs attached. Those soul bombs took many forms.

Some soul bombs were simple things that were disabled and disintegrated after paying enough mana/resons/whatever to the Wraithborne Tower. Other than that, those ‘bomb collars’ did nothing except hurt the afflicted person every day with a minor curse, like ‘you stub your toe on every corner of every door’ whenever the person fell behind on payments. If they tried to remove the curse, the collar exploded, of course, but many people simply lived with the curse, opting to wear strong shoes all their lives, or they’d simply cut off their toes, or other various forms of living-with-mutilation.

Many bombs were much more dangerous.

For important souls, like those directly under the command of any strong force in Margleknot, if the Wraithborne Tower captured those people in the resurrection line then those people got fitted with special soul shackles. As an example in Yggdrasil’s book, an underling for someone at the Celestial Observatory, one of the only Good Places in Margleknot, would expect to get slaved with a death collar and no exact commands at all. They would then be told, in person, that they were a forever-hostage of the Wraithborne Tower, and if they took actions against the Tower, then they would die. With the threat delivered and a forever-boot on their neck, they would be released to go back to the Celestial Observatory to simply go about their lives as normal.

Break the collar? Some people could. But not many. It took a lot to break those collars. The Observatory couldn’t actually do it on their own without killing the person and disintegrating half the soul.

Soul sundering was very illegal in Margleknot, as that was a form of killing that was considered ‘real murder’, but true-killing half of a person? Sure, that was fine.

Erick frowned as he read, because if he was reading this right…

“The Wraithborne Tower is clearly evil, but they’re probably the least evil form of evil?” Erick scowled as he had that thought. “They could be doing a lot worse? Holy shit. They could be doing a lot worse. This is why they’re allowed to exist.”

Erick kept reading.

“… And they have lots of money due to their low resurrection costs. People can opt to be resurrected by them for cheap and not wait in the Waiting Room of Margleknot? How long does the Waiting Room take…” Erick flipped through to the prices section. “A thousand resons for a normal res? A waiting period of 10 years?!” He exclaimed, “All they have to do is sign off 10% reson production per day to the Tower and they get free resurrections forever?”

Holy shit.

This was insidious.

The Wraithborne Tower probably had lots of people who approved of everything they did, and just as many who did not…

“Other evils are much more clear-cut.”

The Dread Arenas hosted blood and death sports. Slaves who lost the fights there were Sundered for their resons, as that sort of True Death was acceptable, as per old capital punishment laws. Winners of those slave fights were locked under even more Contract Magics beyond normal slave controls, to keep them fighting forever.

The Slaver’s Den actively went out and captured people and turned them into slaves of all kinds; they weren’t about passive collection of souls from the Waiting Room, like the Wraithborne Tower did.

… And apparently, if Erick went after any of these places, the Veiled Syndicate would send killers his way.

“Those assholes are probably already sending killers my way, though. Assassins gotta assassin.”

So he would murder all of the Veiled Syndicate, too?

Sure.

Why not.

… Erick breathed, and tried to keep his temper under control.

Erick flipped over to other parts of the guidebook, to read up on some good places for a while, to consider where he wanted to go first for help against Nothanganathor.

Eventually Erick set the book into the air and vanished it with a casual thought. It was still there, though, still inside of Erick’s soul. He pulled it in and out of his Benevolence a few times, just to see what he was seeing, and it appeared that Yggdrasil had tied the book to a wavelength of power that correlated to Benevolence, and since Erick was Benevolence, it correlated to him. When the book was dispersed, it was a fog inside of his soul. When it was real, it was in his hand, or wherever he wanted it to be.

It was loosely tied to his Health, it seemed, which was probably an emergent factor of how Erick had created his True Wizard form to be split between Soul, Body, and Mind. Health was physical integrity, and the book was physical when it was instantiated, and thus…

Erick scratched the book with a fingernail, and watched as his Health dropped a few points.

“So that works as expected.”

Erick watched as the book healed its scratch rather easily. He grinned.

“That works as expected, too.”

He put the book away and then hopped into the air. He had instinctively tried to dispel the floating raft with a thought, but that didn’t work because there was no Script to facilitate canceling. So instead, Erick focused on the floating donut raft with his Authority. He flexed his intent.

The raft vanished.

Erick smiled.

With a step and a wrap, Erick landed on his balcony and put his clothes back on. He looked at the various pastries from Lionshard, but he wasn’t hungry at all, which was probably a small problem. Hunger itself was an annoyance some of the time, but it was nice to satiate hunger most of the time. As for other physical needs, Erick wasn’t tired, either, but it felt good to sleep after a hard day’s work.

When Erick made himself he decided he would never be pooping or peeing ever again, but hunger and exhaustion… Hunger and exhaustion were normal, human feelings that Erick should have in order to remain human. He had built some physical needs systems into his True Wizard form, but those systems appeared to be a whole lot less necessary than what would have been considered ‘normal’ hunger and exhaustion.

Erick picked up the great big cinnamon roll from Teressa and took a bite. It was great, just like Jane’s baklava. Erick got a little bit of satiation from that bite of the cinnamon roll, but mostly the feeling passed. He could probably eat and eat and eat forever, and never get full. He was never really hungry, either.

He could fix that, theoretically, but for now, he didn’t and probably couldn’t concern himself with hunger and sleep. He had other concerns. Like whatever tracking system he had within him that Nothanganathor had used in order to drag him before that Wizard trap in front of the sun.

“It’s time to do some Script-tool cleaning, I think.”

How, though?

Erick looked down, through his castle, through the giant root that formed the ground of his property here in the Dragon District, to the line of tangled, darkly prismatic power that flowed through the very center of the kilometers-wide root of Yggdrasil. There were lots of Elements in that flow.

Maybe he could use some of those weird Elements?

Maybe something like Elemental Purity could clean up whatever problems were lurking in his Script Status?

… Maybe he’d use Purity if he found anything extreme. For Malevolence-derived problems, Benevolence should be enough.

“That’s where I’ll start.”

- - - -

Erick sat down on a nice pillow at the bottom of his new mage tower, focusing inward.

It was pretty easy to recognize all of his soul, now that he was a True Wizard.

Mostly, there was the Benevolence-fog. That was his entire being, after all. There were also crystalline structures inside of that fog, like multidimensional shards of purpose, each slowly moving around each other, some very slightly spinning, others more fixed in place, all of them arranged in some sort of hyperdimensional causality. It was all easy to recognize once Erick actually sat down to recognize it, though.

There were his spells, each of the basic spells of all types looking exactly as Erick expected; like multidimensional crystals in the shape of gridwork. Some were more complicated than others, of course.

[Force Bolt] was a relatively simple collection of triggers and joinings and intent.

[Cleanse] was an incredibly complex arrangement of Elemental Destruction and Book and checks and alterations everywhere. That bit of Elemental Book operated on at least a thousand, maybe 1500 different axes, but it was also not nearly complex enough for what [Cleanse] could actually do. Erick peered deeper into that multi-fractal Book and saw triggers for what appeared to be ‘live air’ and ‘bad air’, and ‘good water’ versus ‘bad water’. The Book had hookups for much, much larger systems, which Erick assumed was the Script, and he probably assumed right.

“Because ‘bad air’ and ‘good water’ don’t actually make sense at all,” Erick said to himself, “They’re actually more like conceptual, generic triggers.”

It was exceedingly interesting to see, exactly, what made [Cleanse] so special.

In fact… Within a moment of gazing upon [Cleanse], for real, for the first time, Erick decided it was a fucking masterpiece of magic. Erick had a hard time coming up with any other example of magic he had ever seen that matched the beauty of the 10-mana-cost-construct that was [Cleanse]. This little thing was useful under so many different scenarios!

Even outside of the Script!

Erick checked out a bunch of other spells. [Grow] was barely anything compared to [Cleanse], but it had multivariable Book in there, too, in order to differentiate from certain types of growing intent. [Mend] was rather impressive, but it was nothing compared to [Cleanse]…

Not much matched up to [Cleanse], actually.

Erick’s big Particle Spells were all solid jumbles of Book and Force magic in a shaped mass that could be called ‘Particle Magic’. They were solidly-made crystal almost-spheres. They were all kinda… simple, really. Complicated in effect, yes. But simple in execution.

Take [Condense Oxygen], for example. There was some Book to designate ‘oxygen’, and the rest was Force and what appeared to be some [Ward] Magic.

“Ah. The spherical stuff is [Ward] magic. Yes. I see that now.”

The more Erick looked, the more he saw repetitions everywhere. Everything was built, at its base, upon a few different things. [Ward], for the designation of a space if a spell had space to it. Book, if the spell was complicated, and even if the mana was simple. And various different types of mana triggers.

[Stoneshape] was [Ward] for space, Book to conceptualize ‘rock’ as ‘rock’, and [Elemental Stone] for more general targeting. All the Shaping spells were like that, but different.

There weren’t many spells that had no Book in them.

Book seemed to form the basis of the entire Script.

Looking at his basic, True Wizard self, Erick was vaguely surprised to see that Benevolence had coalesced into Book-like shapes in order to allow him to have his current Status, giving him his three avenues of experience, of Health, Mana, and Psyche. He wasn’t too surprised at that, because that’s sort of how he had envisioned the whole thing. It was all made of Benevolence, but it functioned as Book here and there.

Erick left his Benevolence Status alone and poked around a bit at the multi-fractal crystals that were his Script Status.

Some of them were linked to others. [Force Bolt] had a base form, yes, but that base form was somehow also inside all of his various other Bolt spells he had made over the many years. [Fire Bolt], [Slow Bolt], and even [Inevitable Bombardment] had [Force Bolt]’s original spell at its center… And also off on its own, at the same time.

Erick smiled. “Just a little bit of paradox in the system.”

This is what enabled people to be able to use the same base spell to create higher tier spells without using up the base spell. Erick had long known, in a general way, the mechanism by which this happened, but seeing how it worked within himself was pretty awesome. It gave him some ideas for making his own soul-imbued spells.

“It won’t be as easy as simply casting a new spell and letting the Script make it up for me, though.”

He would need to force Benevolence into Book-like shapes on purpose…

Which was interesting.

Anyway.

Moving on.

Erick could stare into his soul for a long time and probably discover a lot about a lot, but he was here to figure out what Nothanganathor had put into him, through the Script. Erick had been drawn to that Wizard trap the very moment he Ascended, before his full ascension could truly coalesce, which meant there was a marker somewhere. It couldn’t be a marker from the Script itself, because Erick hadn’t been inside the Script when he Ascended. So it had to have been a marker inside his soul.

That was one of the main reasons that he needed to get away from Veird in order to ascend; to get away from any possible trap laid by Nothanaganathor. The trap was already inside Erick, though, and it had probably been there for a very long time. There was probably a trap in everyone’s soul on Veird.

“Now if I was putting a marker into someone, where would I put it?” Erick answered himself, “I would put it into the most complicated thing that was specifically meant to get rid of me.”

Erick looked to [Cleanse].

It was arguably his favorite spell. His very first spell, too. He had bought it after Melemizargo had thrown him and Jane onto the Surface of Veird, during Purodahlia’s chase of them across the sands of the Crystal Forest. Jane had theorized that ‘the dragon must have scent marked us, and that’s why there are no monsters’, and then Erick had taken that idea and run with it once Purodahlia seemed drawn to them, buying [Cleanse] with his very first point, because [Cleanse] read ‘Purge an area equal to the level of the spell in meters of all Toxins, Disease, Filth, and Corruption.’ and ‘corruption’ might have meant ‘dark dragon smell’.

It had been a gamble back then to buy this spell and try and use it to throw off ‘the black spiker’.

But it had worked.

Maybe that had been Benevolence fucking with the past? Maybe.

Erick peered deep into the Book crystal that was [Cleanse], looking for something Red—

He found it.

Almost instantly, once he was looking for it, there it was.

Erick inhaled sharply, his eyes practically slapping open. “Oh shit. It’s really there.” And then he closed his eyes again and concentrated, muttering, “It’s also odd that I can see my soul so much better now, too. That’s probably the Script purposefully fucking up [Soul Sight], and the unknowability of the soul.”

Or maybe Malevolence made it harder to look at the soul properly, too, and everyone assumed that was just how souls were in the New Cosmology? Maybe.

It took Erick a minute to get back into the proper frame-shift to see his soul again.

Soon enough, Erick gazed into the fractal-oriented-crystal that was [Cleanse], looking for the Red—

There it was. A single note in a long book of options…

It was the spine of the book itself. Half of the spine. The other half was normal Book, and maybe even a connection to the Script to expand that Book. Hard to say exactly what was going on there, but the Malevolence was there inside [Cleanse].

Erick wondered if this was why [Cleanse] was one of the spells that they told you to never experiment with at all, because experimenting with [Cleanse] was one of the easiest ways to kill oneself.

“… Probably.”

Erick wasn’t sure if he could remove the Red without damaging the entire spell. The crystal looked like it would just come apart if he touched it…

He could do this, though.

Maybe he could replace Malevolence with Benevolence?

Erick smiled. Yeah. He could do that.

Worst-case scenario, he could [Return]…

He paused.

Erick came back to himself and decided to run other tests before he mucked around with [Cleanse]. He stood up and grabbed the pillow and tossed it to the side of the room. Then he [Return]ed.

The pillow was back at his feet and he was sitting down upon the pillow again, half looking at [Cleanse] and half shifting back to normal senses.

So [Return] worked normally here? Sure. At this small of a test [Return] worked normally.

Erick went fully into himself and looked at [Inevitable Bombardment]; a rather complicated spell that would cast [Force Bomb]s into the sky and then take a while to rain them down onto a target, giving Erick time to threaten the target and make them give up before the spell obliterated them. It wasn’t an effective spell for multiple reasons. Erick didn’t like threatening people, primarily. He had used the spell a few times, though.

It would be okay if he fucked up this spell; an acceptable loss.

He tore the spell apart, releasing all the underlying spells below the top layer of crystal. [Force Bolt] and all the others he used to make the top layer spell seemed fine.

He rapidly came back to himself and [Return]ed.

Once again inside his soul, Erick looked at [Inevitable Bombardment], and it looked fine.

Success! He could disturb the spell and then [Return] and have the spell return to its previous form.

Erick concentrated on [Inevitable Bombardment], at the part which looked sort of like a multiplicative part of the spell, which came from the base form of [Force Crash], declaring 15 copies of the spell would rain down on a target from afar. That ‘15 copies’ looked easy enough to alter; it was just 15 tiny pips in the Booking.

Erick flexed his intent at the spell, adding five more pips.

It was a massive change.

For a moment, the soul spell crystal looked about ready to truly shift. Maybe even crack in half. But it stabilized. The overall spell cost of the entire thing felt like it was going to cost a lot more, though. The original spell was around 1475 mana. This one was maybe 500 more. Maybe only 400 more? Hard to say. Multi-dimensional crystals weren’t exactly easy things to completely understand even for Erick with his Intelligence and Perception and Concentration.

“This might work, though.”

Erick opened his eyes and went out to the top of his mage tower, to look out across the world.

He pressed the button that was the 1900-ish mana cost spell in his soul and [Inevitable Bombardment] splashed into the air high above, 20 sparkling orbs of Force and Benevolence hanging out in the air, doing nothing much at all.

The spell was a bit white with Benevolence.

It should not be white.

“… So there’s Benevolence in there now. That’s from me using Benevolence to add 5 more bombs, isn’t it.”

Erick attempted to cancel the spell, but that simply wasn’t happening. Canceling was a function of the Script. So Erick swiped at the spells with a casual tendril of Benevolence Body empowered with Mana Siphon. The first bombs burst, but Erick realized what he was doing wrong with the first ones, so he fully enveloped the rest and ate them like an amoeba eating pop rocks.

They tasted kinda forceful, which was an odd thing to both experience and realize that he made himself experience that. He was literally tasting magic? How?

Erick threw some more bombs into the air and purposefully thought ‘do not taste these’.

And he ate those spells without tasting them.

So taste is linked to anything I want to link it to, or to which I accidentally consider myself to be thinking in that direction at the wrong time. Not sure how I feel about that.

Anyway.

Experiment successful, and he discovered he could taste magic if he wanted.

Erick went back to his tower, sat his ass on the pillow, and dove inward.

[Cleanse] was a multi-dimensional jenga, Erick decided, as he really got down to the nitty gritty of the spell. This Malevolence infection was like roots spread all throughout the jenga tower. Removing half of the spine out of the Book part of the spell without collapsing the tower was simply too complicated of a task. Doing what Erick wanted to do would be like extracting the circulatory system for an entire person without killing them, and then putting down a new circulatory system also without killing them.

Pretty impossible.

Luckily, Erick was a cheater.

His first attempt was the fast one; the simple rip and tear and slamming of Benevolence into [Cleanse].

Didn’t work. Whole thing collapsed, half of it spiraling out into nothing, the other half coming up with Red he had tried to pull out.

[Return].

This time when he went to pull apart the Malevolence, he injected Benevolence into the very edges, like a hundred small tendrils trying to flow into the Red circulatory system and gradually replace it.

The Malevolence turned into a living thing, ripping and tearing apart the spell all on its own. It even tried to escape Erick, to get out into the real world, as if such a thing were possible. Maybe it was? Whatever the case, Erick had the solution to that problem.

[Return].

The Third attempt had Erick using a bit of Time Magic to freeze [Cleanse] in place. How did this work? It just did, okay. Erick told himself that much, and it helped solidify that yes, this was possible, and yes, this did actually work. Within a cage of immovable Time, Erick injected Benevolence into the Red, and the Red thrashed. It failed to do anything besides thrash, though—

And then suddenly it tried to escape, to pull away, to flow into the part of the spell that should have hooked into the Script, but there was just a hole into the real world there. Erick let the Red go. He focused on filling in the gaps the Red left behind with Benevolence.

The very second the Red fully pulled out of [Cleanse], Erick fully filled in the spell with Benevolence, replacing what Malevolence tried to break in its escape.

And then it was done. The soul crystal of [Cleanse] was intact. It would probably function more or less the same way, too. Erick imagined that what he had just done was sort of what he had done with his [Lodestar] when he made Benevolence; he had made [Lodestar] work off of Benevolence instead of Light through Establishing Wizardry.

This right here was more manually-done than through Wizardry, though.

Anyway!

Erick opened his eyes.

A Red beast made of Malevolence, like living lightning, roared as it brought claws of sparks down on Erick, trying to rend him apart. It had already caused some superficial damage to Erick’s clothes and the room itself. It looked like someone had released an explosion inside the room that then proceeded to scratch the hell out of all the stone it could reach. But it wasn’t doing any real damage.

It slashed at him again.

It accomplished nothing.

The Red Lightning monster reminded Erick a lot of Fyuri’s apocalypse beast form on the first floor of the Glittering Depths, but more lightning and less physical. It was actually all lightning. Living red lightning.

Erick debated with himself if he should trap the thing or kill it. Maybe he could… use it somehow? Maybe later for some reason? Or just kill it? He almost wanted to try his new [Cleanse] on the beast. But. No.

Erick sealed the room with a flicker of Authority. The windows were still open. The doors were still open. But the entire room solidified, the walls repairing. The floor unmarring. All Red lightning soot vanished, and the beast itself suddenly turned quiet and docile. It lay down under the oppression of Erick’s Authority.

Maybe it was intelligent?

“Can you understand me?”

The thing looked at Erick with eyes made of red lightning.

It said nothing. It did nothing,

Erick packed up his pillow and moved to the room above to check out his new [Cleanse]. The monster remained contained below.

[Cleanse] was looking pretty great. Erick had no idea what it was capable of, but he cast the spell on the air of his house, and on his left arm, and on the ground, and on the waters of the lake below, and he experienced nothing untoward. No bad effects. He scraped off some skin and copied it a bunch, making a mess of flesh and dust and oils that he spread out onto a stone parapet of the house, which he then [Cleanse]ed away. Thick, sort of whitish air, flowed away from the mess.

… White air?

Hmm.

Erick copied some of himself until he got a whole bathtub full of his own blood and flesh and ickiness. He floated the mess in a tub of [Force Wall].

He hit it with a [Cleanse].

The nastiness turned into whitish, thick air and flowed away onto the stone of the house. It didn’t leave any growing plant life at all, so it wasn’t really Benevolence in there, but the eternal stonewood that was the house seemed to soak up the fog rather well. Erick watched the entire trip of the white fog as it flowed into the waters, or into the root, and either spread out, or siphoned into the twisting intentless mana that flowed through the very core of the root under the house.

“So it’s mana, but visible, because it's thick… but why is it white now?”

It was not Benevolence. That much was clear. If it was Benevolence it would have caused plant growth.

It was just Benevolence... colored…

Well. One of the functions of [Cleanse] was to balance the manasphere. Was the manasphere more balanced now? Erick cast an orb of Benevolence into the air, along with several other overlapping and very much not balanced orbs at all. Fire, Water, Air, Lightning, Stone, Metal, and Blood, all hung in the same space as each other; each of them bright as shit and dense with power.

[Cleanse].

Every single orb that was not Benevolence was transformed, at least partially, into white fog that flowed away. Of the various orbs, they were rather balanced now, but they were all muted down from radiant power to something lesser, and more in line with each other. Other Elements were in there now, too. Erick easily picked out Shadow from the grouping, as well as all the various Shadow-ish and Light-ish Elements.

“… [Cleanse] truly balances the mana now, eh?” Erick looked at the balanced space of mana again, adding, “But Benevolence is still dominant.” Erick put his hands on his hips, saying, “Well yeah. I guess so. Fulfill the basic functionality of the spell, but also don’t let it be used against Malevolence…” And now Erick was furious, because a very evil truth of [Cleanse] was revealed in that moment. “[Benevolent Cleanse] is white because it uses Benevolence as a vector for mana altering. [Malevolent Cleanse] is made with Malevolence, so all we see is the thick air. When [Malevolent Cleanse] is used, it balances the world, but now Malevolence is the dominant mana in the air because now everything else is balanced to lesser functions. You literally balance to Red. Fuck you, Nothanganathor.”

Erick had to step back for a moment.

Because wow.

That right there. That was flooring him. Nothanganathor had managed to make [Cleanse] evil, and Erick had never noticed it. One of the best spells Erick had ever known and one of his favorite spells and the one spell that Erick would have given to Earth if he could have…

Erick breathed, then said, “Fuck you, Nothanganathor.”

Erick sat down for a while, thinking.

Then he went cleansing out more of his Script spells. What else had Nothanganathor fucked with?

A lot, probably.

- - - -

Among the spells Erick thought could be better, were all his Rift Magic spells.

Rift Magic was supposed to open actual Rifts into other planes of existence, but all the Rift Magic of the Script did was let loose with a pouring of mana. Therefore, there were artificial limits upon Rift Magic. Were those Malevolent limits? Maybe.

Erick found more Red in those spells.

Rift was not basic magic, though. It was higher tier magic. All of it came out at least tier 3 or 4, and that’s what all of Erick’s Rift spells were, too. The Script had injected Malevolence into Rift in order to make it not work right.

Rozeta probably didn’t even know.

Erick ripped Malevolence out of his Rift Magic and ended up with more Red Beasts. He did not fill up all the rest of his tower with more Red Beasts, but he did put a few down in the second floor of his 12 story mage tower. He used [Cleanse] on most of the littler fuckers, and it worked. The beasts went poof! A lot of white air from those guys.

Erick smiled at that.

Nothanganathor had fucked up [Cleanse] for everyone on Veird, but Erick’s [Cleanse] was great for fucking up Nothanganathor.

“Ahhh… It’s delightful, actually. Love it.”

He didn’t manage to make any Rifts into other planes of existence, though. Instead, when Erick cast [Major (Benevolent) Sunlight Rift], he got a brilliance of radiance and a solid wall of white beyond the rift’s surface that sort of reminded Erick of a certain tree son’s bark—

And Yggdrasil stepped into the room.

“Hello, Father,” Yggdrasil said. “You can only go into the realm of your own mana here in Margleknot. It’s the same-ish sort of restriction that is on Veird, actually, but a whole lot more stubborn. I directly oversee this. Please don’t go making gate networks, though.”

“Ah. Well. Okay— Did you know that [Cleanse] has Malevolence inside of it?”

“Yes. Rozeta discovered that maybe 6 months ago, their time. I figured it out right when you gave me that Gift.” Yggdrasil said, “Anyway! Gotta go. Go check out some of those places, Father. Do you want to give any messages to the people back on Veird?” He rapidly added, “But if you give them messages you will be in breach of laws you don’t know about, which will impair your ability to effectively fight Nothanganathor.”

Erick didn’t have to think much at all before he said, “They’ll be fine without me for a while, right?”

“… I can’t give you much specific news, but I can give you a lot of general news.” Yggdrasil paused, then said, “There are wars happening over the upper layers of the New Surfaces because many different people were rescued from side realities that were rather unique. The minotaur nation, in particular, is the largest example of that. They’re half a million strong now because they’re from a universe where you turned yourself into a minotaur to escape problems. As a minotaur, you developed [Reincarnation] along those lines, specifically. They’re basically a splinter of House Benevolence and they moved up to the topmost New Surface, below the Shining Layers. The you that was with them is four years dead. Minotaur Jane is dead, too.

“Avandrasolaro is going scorched land on all Forever War events. Solomon has joined him in that decision. Those wars have been minimized because of those decisions, reverting a potential world war down to the Quiet War again.

“Jane, Abigail, Beth, Candice, and Evan are all doing great… And that’s probably too many specifics.

“There are problems. They’re solvable.” Yggdrasil said, “Go solve them from here. You’re pretty much done with your Script spells, right? I can’t really tell anymore.”

Erick breathed deep, then said, “I did a first pass. I suppose… I could visit the Celestial Observatory?”

Yggdrasil grinned. “You’ve got a lot of options, Father—” He looked away. “You have about a million requests for an audience. I advise you to disregard all of them, or order them in a way that you wish. You’ll figure it out. Love you.”

And then he stepped backward and was gone.

Erick paused for a moment, and then he looked around his property, his senses going wide.

“Ah,” Erick said. Requests gathered upon the air around the gate at the front of the property, like individual stars, not a single one of them discernible from the other in any true way. “… I have to impose my own organization on them, then.”

He was mostly done with his Script searching. Or at least a first pass. He had cleaned up his Rift magic, [Cleanse], Time spells, and various protection magics. Not a single Benevolence spell had any Red in it, which was great…

Yeah.

First pass done.

Time to get moving.

Erick stepped out of the tower, down to the archway that led to the dark crystal lands and buildings of the edge of the Dragon District. The only things really visible beyond the gate were blurs of people walking this way or that and the solid buildings that they inhabited. It was the same sort of effect that Erick saw when he looked at the properties of his neighbors; he could see land and shapes, but not really people at all. Or anything that moved, really.

Erick turned his attention to the stars beside the gate.

There were a million of them, or some number close to that. Yggdrasil had been rounding when he said a million, for sure. Erick wasn’t about to count them all, and many of them were tiny balls of light centimeters across while others were mere pinpricks, and a lot of them overlapped as they gently hung there, waiting to be plucked.

He picked one at random to focus on. It was blueish and two centimeters across.

It was a construct of magic not wholly unlike a [Force Bolt]. There was a delivery system, and then a payload in the middle. The delivery system was the size of the ball of light. The payload was a… a very large message in the center, if Erick was reading that correctly.

He checked out a few more messages.

The larger the ball, the bigger the message.

Erick wasn’t about to touch the largest of them to experiment with, but he could pick out some of the smaller ones. He focused on a dim yellow pinprick of light, moving to touch it, and all the other competing messages swirled away slightly, like fish scared off as the hunter picked out a single one of them. He touched the message.

The message popped into a tiny light show with three short, green girls in coveralls and wielding hammers and wands. They happily exclaimed, “Congratulations to the new founder of Margleknot! Come visit Gombomblin’s Trading Emporium in the Aetherium Bazaar if you want some explosive power! Gombomblin’s! For all your pure-tech-based explosive needs! From finger-sized nuclear to antimatter worldbusters to other stuff, we got it all!”

A tiny map made of light populated the air with a glowing yellow star in the center. The map flashed and turned into a physical map which then folded itself down to pocket-sized, to hang in the air.

Erick smiled and plucked the map out of the air, saying, “Bombs are worrying, but that’s really cute.”

He could have used his Lightning Path to figure out which messages were the most important, or rather, which ones would be the best for him to answer to create good outcomes, but he decided to muddle through the search for a little while, just to see what everything was. A small blue star unfurled into an invitation to a gala at some ‘House of Lords’ in the mortal lands. A slightly larger pink star became a light show inviting Erick to come visit another shop, this one selling magical goods.

A grey star unfurled into a virus that tried to enter Erick’s flesh but hit his Health instead, draining a good 15,000 Health with a single slip of an attack. Erick crushed it utterly, and then [Return]ed. The grey star was there once again. This time Erick… Just crushed it, actually. His Lightning Path wasn’t pointed in that direction at all, so there was no need to care about the attack.

He moved on.

The next message Erick poked open ended up being a request for money. It was framed as an investment opportunity, but if random solicitations were the culture around making business connections in Margleknot, then Erick wanted no part of that culture.

The next hundred messages were all pretty cute, or daring, or an attack, or just some random ‘congrats!’ from some people he didn’t know at all, but which his memory locked on to, in case he did need to know them in the future. He probably didn’t, though.

Erick decided to use his Lightning Path.

107 little stars lit up, some of them looking like major groundings for Erick’s Lightning Path. Most were small strikes for his Path, that seemed to be less powerful options.

… Erick tried something. He waved a hand, exerting his Authority over this space—

The messages separated into groups and all the ones he picked out were suddenly organized from top to bottom; most most-important to least most-important.

Authority was rather nice.

… Erick turned back toward his house, and looked at the sky.

With a wave of his hand, the sky of Margleknot vanished, and a blue sky with white clouds appeared.

“Oh yeah. That’s… That’s pretty nice. But…”

Erick simply willed the sky back to showing its true nature—

“Ah. The suns were a false sky, too, eh?”

What appeared was not the black hole sun and the rainbow of other suns that had been up there. What appeared were ten thousand lands, all of them jumbled on top of each other, cityscapes intersecting other cityscapes intersecting mountain ranges and oceans and deserts and skies beyond. Waterways flowing at odd angles. Wind moving this way and that. Planets of cities that looked like something Escher would draw rather than any real imagery of any real land.

He saw some places that Yggdrasil’s guidebook mentioned, though. There was the ‘towering, crystalline palace’ of the Fae Enclave, looking like a shard of countless perfect crystals all lined up in a single direction, spearing through all of the non-euclidean space; a bar of white and blue crossing all of Margleknot.

Spearing perpendicular across that Fae Enclave was a solid line of silver with countless etchings upon its surface. Could that be the Quantum Nexus Hub? The guidebook had mentioned the QNH as a ‘sprawling, futuristic tower at the center of Margleknot’. And here were two towers at the center of Margleknot? One was the Enclave, so this one had to be the QNH. Sure, why not.

At the crossing of the two opposed lines of power, there were worlds.

Erick stepped away from the gate to his house, to go up his property a little. He laid down on the soft mosses and grasses.

Erick stared at the sky for a long while.

There was a lot to see.

A while later, maybe an hour or seven, Erick got back up and went to the messages. He had seen a lot in the sky, and his Lightning Path had shown him how parts of it connected to the messages right here. Erick plucked out one of the bigger messages and let it play.

It had been a bright grey and red star, about two centimeters across.

And now it was a cry for help, depositing 8 different books onto the ground, 34 different folders filled with tactical information of various entities, and thousands of maps, a few of which were very large and rather intricate. A message played in the air in the form of a lightward, as though it were a Screen spell. A rather average-looking elfin woman with long ears and bright red eyes and hair appeared in the image.

“Hello…” The woman paused, looking at someone off screen. She whispered, “Is it on— It’s on. Ah. Fuck. We can re-record it.” The woman looked at the camera, breathed, then said, “Hello, Father of Margleknot. I represent an organization of mageknights of the world of Abarial, a former nexus world located on Layer 172,287,913.

“We are very far from Margleknot, I realize this, but until very recently, within the last thousand years, our worlds were doing fine. Better than fine. We had 7 colonized planets in our Abarial system and had begun to expand throughout our layer. We were a nexus world at the further edges of Margleknot’s roots.

“And then something broke between The Great City at the Center and propagated to us, and Margleknot broke connection to our world and 187 more worlds in our nexus in order to preserve the whole. We do not begrudge Margleknot their decision. It was a normal enough decision that happens to lands without world trees, which are only tenuously connected in the first place. It happens.

“It can also usually be repaired.

“We thought we could repair the problem on our end, but we cannot. The pillars are crumbling. The fountains are running dry. The storm is dying, and we have no fuel for the fire. We have only been able to send out this message because of the vast changes of Margleknot into this new form have revitalized a small part of our connection. That revitalization will not spread. It is already fading.

“Our nexus is dying.

“Our billions of people face extinction, and we have thus-far been unable to reconnect to Margleknot except through these most expensive of messages. We have no idea what the problem is. A thousand years have passed since the Degradation began, and none of our people have been able to find out anything solid; anything more than what we have in the books and papers we are sending with this message. With a prayer to the Universe, we hope and pray this message finds you in a charitable mood, for we have had to empty a world of life, evacuating all the people we could, in order to pay to bring this message to you now.

“Please help us, Father of Margleknot, and our gathered worlds will become your staunchest allies in all of your needs, forevermore.” The woman paused in prayer to the camera. And then she said to a person off camera, “That was good, but I need to do better. This thing could actually work, couldn’t it?”

Another voice said, “It could work; if this isn’t some old cousin’s tale. I’m not convinced we’re not deluding ourselves.”

The woman laughed. She smiled, and then she focused, saying, “Okay. Going again.” The woman breathed in, and then looked to the camera—

The message cut off.

Erick said to Yggdrasil, “She wasn’t able to make a different message?”

Yggdrasil stood beside Erick, frowning at the stilled image on the message. “I suppose not.”

“They seemed to think this wouldn’t work… But it did? Do you know what happened there?”

“No. My memories of this problem are fragmented. Abarial was never properly connected, and they liked it that way. Their original settlers of that distant land were like frontiersmen, building where I specifically was not, just so that they could have their own say in everything. Part of the problem of making decisions like that is that sometimes… Systems fail. I’m looking at the connection right now, though…” Yggdrasil looked away.

Erick waited.

“Dead line. Anything past layer 50,000 is rather far and they were all the way past layer 172 million. The problem there broke at a world on layer 102 million which was little more than an outpost for Margleknot. Someone destroyed it. Still hasn’t gotten repaired. These mageknights needed to send their message using… Ah. They sacrificed some mages and an entire world—” Yggdrasil said, “A moon. I think. Hard to know.” He looked away. “They used Rituals of Sacrifice to get the message to Layer 0, but it was an imperfect Sacrifice. I believe… They didn’t Sacrifice anything. Ah. Yes. That’s the problem. They used a catastrophe to send the message. They didn’t actually Sacrifice anything. They had lemons so they made lemonade.”

The scale of it got to Erick again.

“You deal with problems like this all the time?”

“Yes, and I need to get back to them. This particular problem is a systemic problem, and is very much better solved systemically. Maybe talk to Lionshard about it? I would advise against trying to pop over to their layer. It only takes a second to get through layers, but that’s crossing 172 million layers, not to mention part of the universe, too. That would take centuries. You could always go back in time once you got there, of course, but time would still pass here in Margleknot.” Yggdrasil warned, “Time always passes in Margleknot when a person is not here. No one can ever come back here right after they leave.”

“Heard and understood.” Erick asked, “How does anything get around at all in any reasonable amount of time?”

“It doesn’t. Everything gets around very slowly, father, or not at all.” Yggdrasil said, “I have to go—”

“Before you do that— Are you raising Benevolence slimes? For more elemental Benevolence?”

“By Foundational Decree, I cannot raise monsters for mana. I have to raise people.” Yggdrasil said, “There’s nothing stopping you from making a Benevolence Dungeon except for the lack of Dark here, and dungeon slimes, and all of that. Want some space to make an old fashioned dungeon?”

Erick easily said, “Yes. I’ll take that space.”

Yggdrasil smiled. “Good. I’ve added ‘The Benevolence Tower’ to the guidebook. Only you can get there right now, or until you open it. I ask that you don’t open it until we talk when you’re done, though— And now I really do have to go. Talk to Lionshard!”

And then Yggdrasil turned and vanished.

Erick collected the various books and stuff on the ground, set them inside his house after reading them, and went to go see Lionshard.