by Kyle Johnson
He opened his eyes and rose to his feet, noting how small and dim his mana spirals were. He noticed a blinking notification and opened it, smiling as he read the text:
Jeff turned to question Lythienne about the message, but before he could utter a word, he felt himself rising from his mindscape. He blinked and looked down at the now-dimly glowing orb. “Guess I used my question already,” he chuckled, removing his palm from the orb. His mirth vanished as he heard a series of growls fill the room. Jeff looked up just in time to see one of the wolves leap from its alcove and slam into his chest, driving him back off the walkway onto the black, crusted lava. As the heat seared his back, he realized that he had drained his SP too far to maintain his armor. It was the last thought he had as he plunged into the molten rock and was engulfed in darkness.
As he respawned before the obelisk, Jeff sighed and shook his head. I didn’t expect my armor to fail while I was in my mindscape, he said heavily. Not that it would have mattered. It hasn’t done more than slow down my deaths so far.
“Welp, one more to go,” he spoke aloud, trying to reassure himself. “Once more into the breach…or something like that.” He reached for his staff, preparing to head across the bridges, but to his dismay, his hand found nothing but air. He quickly glanced around, but his staff was nowhere in sight. He opened his inventory, hoping it had somehow ended up in his pouch, but he found nothing but his herbs and crafting glue. Panicking a bit, he replayed the last encounter in his mind.
Okay, he began, trying to calm his thoughts. I had the staff when I went into the room. I used it to swat those wolves off my back. Well, sort of. Then, something grabbed it, and…it’s probably back in the room, which is probably still sealed off since I don’t need to enter it anymore. Just great.
“Hey, Veronica!” he called out despairingly. “Can you lose items when you respawn?”
“Typically, any item on your person will respawn with you,” Veronica’s voice sounded in his mind. “There are some abilities that can prevent that, but those are very rare and powerful. However, in this case, your staff was taken from you. Unless an item is soul-bound to you, if it is not in your possession when you die, it will not respawn with you.”
“Wonderful,” he sighed, sagging against the obelisk. “Now, I’ve got no weapon. I mean, I guess I could go try to get one from the forest, but I don’t have anything to cut it with. I remember how well that went last time.”
“Not to intrude,” Veronica’s voice interrupted, “but I believe if you think carefully, you’ll find a simple solution to this problem: one that became recently available, perhaps?”
“What do you mean?” he snapped, irritated. “The only recent thing was my dying in lava – again – and my shield spell...” He trailed off and slapped his forehead. “Which evolved so I could make it into a weapon if I wanted, didn’t it? Thanks, Veronica.”
“Of course,” she replied. “I also suggest you check your status. It might explain why it took you so long to remember that. Try focusing on Status changes only; it’ll show you what’s different from the last time you checked.”
Jeff quickly opened his status, focusing only on seeing the changes and easily spotted the issue:
Well, that explains why I’m so grouchy, Jeff snorted as he saw the Fatigued debuff. Guess I need some rest after all. Not sure where I’m going to sleep, though. I think my Survival Skill lets me make a shelter… Oh, wait, my Meditation Skill lets me meditate instead of sleeping! Okay, we’ll do that.
“Hey, Veronica,” he called out. “I’m gonna Meditate. Can you wake me up in about 2 hours?”
“There is an alarm function,” Veronica’s voice assured him. “Merely think about setting the alarm for the time you wish to wake. You can also enable your clock, if you’d like.”
Jeff hurriedly enabled the clock and realized why he was so tired: it was past 2 am, and it had been a long day. He set the alarm and drifted into his mindscape.
When he awoke in his dojo, he decided it was time for a chair. First, he focused on expanding the mindscape a couple feet, not enough to drain him completely but enough to give some extra space. Then, he concentrated on forming a soft, gray leather recliner, the kind he had seen in stores but couldn’t afford to buy with the scarcity of leather. His SP drained a bit more, but when he opened his eyes, the most perfect chair he could imagine rested before him.
“Sweet!” he cheered as he clambered to his feet and lowered himself into the chair. To his disappointment, it felt a little bit off, at first – too firm in some spots, too soft in others – but once he realized that the chair was just a product of his imagination, he altered it until it felt totally comfortable. He settled back to relax and let his thoughts drift to the swirling vortices of mana above him.
He relaxed his focus and summoned the mental graph of his mana flows, checking to see if any spots were losing coherence and making changes as necessary. It’s a chaotic flow, he mused as he fine-tuned the spirals, allowing his mana to flow in and out of them freely. Left to its own devices, it will eventually decohere from any pattern I put it in. I’ll need to maintain it occasionally to keep it running smoothly.
He thought about trying to add a set of internal spirals but instead decided to spend time smoothing and separating the spirals he had. When he looked at the whole picture, the spirals appeared to be orderly and steady, but when he looked more closely, he could see the paths he created had tangled and overlapped, slowing the mana flows. He patiently unsnarled the affected areas, trying to create tiny voids of separation between each spiral flow to deter them from tangling again.
When he finished, he simply let his mind drift, watching the mana flows without touching them. Again, he was struck by how the vortices seemed to act as chaotic attractors, stabilizing the entire pattern. The seeming permanence of these nodes allowed him to draw mana from every spiral equally rather than draining a single section and waiting for it to refill: as one spiral’s energy was tapped, the lowered potential of the system would draw power from every spiral it touched at an equal rate. Each of these would draw from the ones they connected, and so on until the whole system stabilized at a slightly lower global potential. Something about the flow tickled the back of his mind, as if he could almost perceive the greater function driving the system, and for a brief instant, everything about his mana made perfect sense, and he could see the flow as part of a much larger pattern; an instant later, the moment shattered, and he was left gazing at the smoothly flowing system.
Jeff sighed and opened his eyes. There was a pattern there, he knew: something beyond the rather basic one he had imposed on his mana flows. If only he could grasp it, he was certain he could move the energy around in much more interesting and potent ways. Sadly, he realized, if there truly was a pattern, it was one created by a multitude of quantum AI’s; he was certain it was far too complex for his mind to handle.
With his mana flows smoothed out, he spent his time training with his bokken, going through his stances and forms repeatedly, trying to make them instinctive. He wasn’t looking to grind his skills, really – he knew that mentally practicing the forms was vastly different from trying to drill them into your muscle memory – but the exercise relaxed him. Besides, he grinned in his head, it’s not like a level or two will hurt, right? I’m still a Novice with swords, and I’m guessing Novice is probably the only level you can really raise quickly by practicing in here.
The time passed swiftly. It felt like he had been practicing for a few minutes at the most when a loud, piercing beep echoed through his mindscape, causing him to put his hands over his ears and wince. “What the hell is that?” he said loudly before realizing what it almost certainly was.
“Your alarm,” Veronica’s voice seemed to cut through the shrill beeping sound while still sounding calm and unruffled. “You can customize it to something else if you’d like.”
“Okay, well let’s turn it off,” he spoke, almost shouting over the noise. When the alarm ceased, h
e sighed and lowered his hands. “That’s a bit over the top,” he informed the empty air. “Can we make it something softer? Maybe a chime?”
“Of course,” she replied. “I would point out, though, that when you are lost in your mana, you are very difficult to disturb, and you might miss an alarm that is too quiet.”
“That’s a good point,” he admitted, thinking. “How about this: we’ll start with a chime but increase the pitch and volume slightly every 10 seconds until I respond. If that hasn’t worked in one minute, you can use that beeping thing you did there. Okay?”
“As you wish,” her voice replied. “Your settings have been recorded.”
Jeff racked his bokken – he figured he didn’t need to, since he wasn’t even sure if this place even continued to exist when he wasn’t in it, but it was a good habit to have. If you don’t want your toys broken, he remembered his mom telling him, you’d better put them away! He didn’t think that anything in here could break, but as a programmer, he knew that sloppy habits made for sloppy work. If he started taking his weapons for granted in his mindscape, would he start letting things slip out of it, as well? He wasn’t sure and really didn’t want to risk it.
He willed himself to rise from his mindscape and awoke still resting against the obelisk. He rose to his feet and groaned as muscles that had sat still for too long protested. Really, Veronica? he cast the thought outward silently. I get wanting realism, but did you guys have to include stiff muscles? He spent a few minutes stretching and working the stiffness from his joints before focusing on his newest spell.
“Let’s see, I need a weapon,” he mused aloud. He opened his status and glanced over his weapons skills, talking himself through his decision. “Technically, I suppose, my highest skill is archery. Problem is, I’ve never actually even held a bow. Plus, I don’t know how I’d make one out of mana, so I guess that’s out.
“My next highest skill is with my staff,” he continued. “That’s probably the best one to use. Thing is, I really want to get better with swords, and I kind of think this is a great place to do it. It doesn’t matter how often I die here, so it’s the perfect place to screw up and get better.”
Decided, Jeff focused on the image of the sword he wanted to make. He decided to only pour the bare minimum SP into it at first, just in case he did it wrong. He started by imagining a bokken. He pictured a cloth-wrapped grip, the flat, oval handguard, and the long, curving blade, sharpened on one side with a wicked point. When he felt he had the image correct, he slowly added SP to it, holding the power firmly in the mold his mind was creating. After almost a minute, the image was filled, and the weapon swirled into reality.
He was immediately glad he hadn’t poured all his SP into the spell: the blade he was holding now was totally wrong. The image in his mind had made the blade too long and too curved. The guard was so small it barely wrapped around the handle, and the handle itself was too thick to grip comfortably. Plus, since he had been imagining a wooden bokken, the blade had a diamond-shaped cross section, just like the practice sword, instead of being slim and able to cut.
He sighed and dismissed the blade, waiting for a minute or so for his SP to regenerate. He reformed the image in his mind, trying to correct the flaws, but again, the weapon was flawed. He had overcorrected: the blade was too short, and the entire weapon was too thin to be usable. He dissolved the blade a second time and tried once more.
It took him four more attempts to finally envision an acceptable sword. Once he had it, he dismissed the blade and reformed it over and over, being sure to impress the image deeply in his mind. The resulting sword looked like a katana, although the curve was a little less than standard and the guard was a little larger. The entire blade was formed of translucent white that gleamed in the orange glow pervading the cavern. The edge was as sharp as he could imagine it, which as it turned out was sharp enough to give him a nasty cut on his thumb when he tested it, but he had a feeling that a real blade’s edge would feel much different. Well, it’s the best I’m gonna come up with without spending some time with a real sword, he decided. I’m not going to spend all day at this!
Creating the sword had taken much longer than he thought it would. Originally, he intended to just make the sword, but it occurred to him that if he needed a different weapon, like a staff, he wouldn’t have time to spend in trial and error in the middle of combat. Although the delay grated, he spent some time forming a staff, which it turned out was much easier than the sword. His staff was really no more than a long, thin cylinder, although it did take him a few tries to get the diameter and length the way he wanted. He tried to make nunchaku or a bow, but both were epic failures because he could only make rigid, inflexible structures. As he held his final attempt at a bow, nursing fingers he had cut trying to draw a ‘string’ that felt like a razor-sharp wire of mana, he had a feeling he’d need to level the spell significantly before he could create anything so complex.
Re-summoning his mana blade, he trudged down the path to the final part of the Trial, glancing through his notifications as he did:
700 XP? he thought in amazement. That would have been exactly enough to get me to Level 2, if I hadn’t created Mana Barrage and Forge Mana. Feels a little on the nose, though: I wonder why the AI didn’t just make each quest worth 250, instead? Maybe they wanted the last one to feel special? Veronica’s voice didn’t answer his unspoken question, which he assumed meant that she probably wouldn’t tell him even if he asked directly. She hadn’t seemed to mind supplying him with answers to questions he hadn’t asked so far, after all. He grinned as he thought he heard an unamused grunt in his mind.
The final passage was wide and short, only about 10 feet long, so he could see into the next room the moment he stepped into the hallway. He could see the orb in front of him, in the center of his view, pulsing a violet light. The wall beyond the orb appeared a pale lavender, which Jeff guessed meant it was actually white, and from this distance, it looked perfectly smooth. He couldn’t be sure about that, though, since the wall was probably a good 20 or 30 feet away from him.
He walked the length of the passage without incident, slowing down and hesitating before stepping within, and he was quite glad that he did. The passage floor ended abruptly at the entrance to the room, plunging down 30 feet or more in a sheer drop. The room’s entire floor was depressed, all the way to the smooth, lavender-colored walls, and bristling with what looked like 3-foot-long stone spikes. The spikes were set so closely that there was no way he could avoid hitting several of them if he were to jump into the pit below…not that he planned to do that.
The room was shaped like a semi-circle, maybe 15 feet in radius, with the orb sitting securely on a pedestal that lifted it up to the height of Jeff’s waist as he stood in the passageway. The pedestal itself looked to be made of the same smooth, lavender stone as the walls and was flush against the center of the back wall, across the forest of spikes from where Jeff stood. The only good thing that Jeff could see was that, so far, there didn’t appear to be any enemies in the room: it looked like it was just a puzzle for him to solve.
Jeff sat at the edge of the passage and dangled his feet over the edge, still holding his mana sword. Just because no enemies had appeared, after all, didn’t mean they wouldn’t. He looked around the room, scanning for details, trying to puzzle out the best way to cross the 15-foot gap to the orb. Well, I guess flying is out, he chuckled to himself. Maybe I’ll figure that out once I can cast Air-aspected spells, but from what Lythienne said, that’s a fair way off.
Before he got too far into analyzing the layout, he shook himself and rose to his feet. The solution is pretty obvious, he realized. The first challenge was something I could complete by myself, but after that, to beat each challenge, I had to use the spell I learned in the previous Trial. No way I could have beaten the bats without Mana Bolt: even if I hadn’t developed Mana Barrage, I still could have done the same thing, retreating down the hallway and blasting a few each time. Same t
hing with the wolves: the armor gave me enough time to run to the orb. Without it, they could have grabbed me and dragged me down into the lava way before I reached it.
So, he realized, he needed to use his last spell to complete this challenge. And, since the last spell was supposed to be Mana Shield, the answer was simple: he needed to use the shield as a stepping-stone to let him jump across the gap. In fact, he’d probably need to make multiple shields, since one wouldn’t give him the distance he needed to make it across the gap.
With a smile, Jeff stood and dusted off his pants, allowing his mana sword to disperse. Gonna need all my SP for this, he thought. Still, not much of a challenge, Veronica! The solution is way too obvious! He took a quick look at his stats: he had 344 SP, currently, which meant he could create about 62 cubic inches of solid mana using 90% of it. He could make an inch-thick disc to stand on that was about…3 inches in radius. Yeah, that wouldn’t work. What he needed was to make a thinner disc: he needed maybe 4 platforms, each about a foot wide, so he could jump to them. He quickly ran some calculations: to do that, he’d need to make the platforms about an eighth of an inch thick. No problem, he grinned internally.
He began to picture the first platform and found that the simple disc shape was incredibly easy to create, at least compared to his sword. As he expected, the circle took a bit more than 20% of his SP. He began to create a second disc…and instantly, the first disc faded into wisps of mana.
Jeff blinked, startled. Okay, that was a surprise, he admitted. Can I only have one Forge Mana active at a time? That doesn’t seem right. Maybe it was just too far out? He reformed the first disc and tried to summon a second directly in front of him, but once again, the first disc vanished the moment he began to form a second one.