Universe's End

Over the next four weeks, Rory learned several things. First, Pneuma did not like being corralled. Often, attempts at drawing on the mystical force left him a spasming heap of flesh on the ground, groaning in pain.

Second, even when he did succeed, Rory was beginning to realize he wouldn’t be summoning giant firestorms or meteors on his foes any time soon. It was hard to state for sure without any frame of reference to compare to, but Rory could almost sense that he wasn’t a natural for it. He could feel and see the potential of Pneuma, and his Potential-Vision gave him a sort of hazy understanding of what could be, but his results were far from matching them. It was as if you took a gallon of milk and poured it all into a single cup, yet the cup only filled halfway; for whatever reason, when he tried to use the force directly, he lost most of it through reasons he did not yet understand.

Lastly, Pneuma was strange. It seemed to have no limit to usability. When he imagined it as a pushing force, it did precisely that. When he imagined it as a pulling force, it did exactly that. When he imagined a flame, bingo, fire. Electricity? Boom, a spark passed between his fingers. He’d even managed to twist his mind around, manifesting Pneuma as threads that he shaped into a tiny net strong enough to suspend his knife. The only rule of Pneuma he’d managed to pin down was that there was no standard rule.

Maybe it’s my earth sensibilities?

To Rory, everything had to obey specific standards, universal truths he’d seen his entire life. Even on this new planet, for the most part, the standards had been upheld; things would fall when they dropped, heat radiated outward, Kraken tentacles smacking your body hit like a damn truck.

And yet, Rory had to at times remind himself that those universal constants were only partially true now; he wasn’t in the old universe but something far vaster and more abstract and, most importantly, nebulous; it was still in the process of shaping itself. He’d seen that himself firsthand when he’d accidentally established the System, a video game-styled system, for lack of a better word, that had become intimately interwoven with everything.

The point being, as strange as Ascending was, as bloodthirsty rabbit monsters and world spirits were, they didn’t break the rules he had adopted as a fact, quite like Pneuma did.

“It’s useful, just not that useful to me.” Rory had said one afternoon of rather painful experiments with the magical force.

It was the same day that something intriguing occurred. Recovering after his last round of Pneuma-Wracked, Rory had been lying on the ground when his interface appeared of its own volition, a message appearing on display.

Minor Law establishment earned:

Defeat of the first Territory Alpha. Minor Law established: System name change enacted. Renamed to Existential Oversight Network- E.O.N.

“Huh.” Rory pondered the notification as it vanished, replacing it with a spinning circle that lasted only a moment as the System -correction- E.O.N updated. “First off, what’s a Territory Alpha?”

When no notification appeared, Rory chalked it up to one of those things that the Sys—E.O.N wanted him to learn himself.

“Second, nice to see someone else thought ‘The System’ was a stupid moniker. About as generic as being called Skynet.”

Of course, it meant that someone, somewhere, had wasted a law, even a minor law, on renaming the former System, but that was their loss, not his.

That had been a week prior, but it wasn’t the only incident. Experimenting with Pneuma several days later, his display suddenly interrupted him as he was mid-attempt at sending a shock of electricity between his fingers. The abrupt interruption led to a sudden thumping headache -the signature symptom of Pneuma-Wrack- as he prematurely released the gathered Pneuma. Still, it was mild as far as the status effect generally went, something he now had extensive experience with. Ignoring it, he quickly scanned the interrupting notification.

Minor Law establishment earned:

First settlement to clear five consecutive waves. Minor Law established: Creation and assimilation of Skills within the Existential Oversight Network.

Now, that was far more intriguing than the last E.O.N. update. Giving his interface a moment to update, Rory opened the ‘main’ display. There, next to the Vocation information, a new tab appeared titled ‘Skills.’ Curious, Rory flicked a finger toward it, his display opening a new overlay.

“These are skills?” Rory raised an eyebrow at the surprisingly populated list.

Basic Archery: Common. Skill level: Low.

Knife fighting: Common. Skill level: Low

Shield Mastery: Common. Skill level: Low.

Basic Armor crafting: Common. Skill level: Low.

Maker’s Arsenal: Uncommon. Skill level: Low

Eye for Potential: Rare. Skill level: Low.

Blood Essence Binding: Rare. Skill level: Low.

“Maker’s Arsenal and Eye for Potential were reclassified as skills. Makes sense.” Rory mused as he took in the list. “The fact that it calls using a bow a ‘skill’ is rather surprising, same thing with knife fighting and shield mastery. Basic armor crafting is there as well. I wonder if it would be replaced if I took Maker’s Armory on my next ascension?”

There was a single thing listed that genuinely confused Rory, that being the last listing.

“Blood Essence Binding? What is that?”

Like a gentle tickle at the back of his mind, Rory felt his memory jogged. Freeing his crafting knife, he examined it.

Bloodbound Crafter’s Knife

Grade: Poor

The tool of choice for nearly any profession, the knife is considered invaluable. The first knife of a fledgling craftsman. This particular knife has been directly bound to the blood essence of its crafter and may grow alongside the skills of its master.

“Oh.” Rory tapped a foot as he considered the implication. “So, that’s more than just flavor text.”

Rory had used his blood in the creation process of the knife, which is where he assumed the blood essence binding came from. Still, he’d used his blood to make several tools and weapons, yet none of them had seemingly benefited from it, aside from the blood acting as an acceptable binding agent.

“Maybe because my skill level is classified as low?” Rory questioned, perplexed.

Yet another thing worth investigating, but I’m not keen on bleeding myself like a pig to test any theories right now.

Shelving that train of thought, Rory had spent the rest of the day doing random tasks or activities, seeing if he would suddenly earn a skill for them, but nothing had changed by the end of the day. As the day ended, and his most recent, albeit impromptu, experiments led nowhere, one day bled into the next.

Finally, back to the present, with four full weeks behind him, Rory opened his Physique information. Smiling, he clenched his hands several times, free of the last bit of pain. Confirming it, the “Broken” status hovering next to his arms for the previous month had finally vanished.

He was healed.

“Thank god.” Rory sighed, pleased. His durability had done most of the heavy lifting. First, the extent of the broken arms wasn’t as bad as he’d initially assumed; what should have left his arms little more than bone dust had instead been a reasonably clean, if not painful, break. Durability continued to show its worth after that, healing more than twice as fast as an average human would have.

It's weird how that works. I don’t think I’m twice as durable, but my healing rate is more than twice as fast. Meaning not everything scales up evenly.

It was a fruitless thought; E.O.N. had made it clear that it wasn’t about to start using exact numbers to explain the mechanics of how attributes directly affected his body and other things. As it had described, too many extra variables would have made such numbers pointless anyway.

Makes sense. Rory had to admit. In a video game, you can be level fifty, and another person can be level one hundred, but the level one hundred is rarely only twice as strong. Hell, take a level eighty or ninety, and in most video games, they still wouldn’t be half as strong as a level one hundred.

Numbers were, at the end of the day, far too cut and dry for something as complicated as real life, even if real life was now posturing as a video game.

Putting aside the question of attributes and skills, Rory had another focus for the day: an idea he’d begun to formulate over the last two weeks. The skill update had further cemented the thought, a brain worm he couldn’t rid himself of, an idea he found himself constantly turning over in his mind.

Pneuma and magic were extremely useful; that was undeniable.

Rory also sucked at using magic and harnessing Pneuma directly. That was also undeniable for the time being.

But Rory came from a universe where you didn’t need the strength to tear a tree down by hand or the intelligence to compute long equations all within your head.

Where human ability failed, why not hand the task off to something that wouldn’t fail?

Thus, he had the idea that rather than forcing himself to become some grand wizard or mage, he would attempt to figure out a way to manipulate magic and Pneuma without his input, much like a computer could run code.

Mystical coding, if you will. Rory snorted, amused, as he looked down at the preparations. A circle had been carved into the ground, which then shot off into another concentric circle before finally traveling through the ground in tracks that launched into his walls at five different points. As for the walls themselves, they had been the victims of what looked like vandalism; several symbols had been carved into them. At first glance, the symbols weren’t all that complex; five symbols connected to his concentric circles through the carved channels in the ground and up his walls. The first symbol looked like the letter C, with the number six lying within the C itself.

Because it is, Rory mentally chuckled as he examined his work.

Rory had never been accused of being overly imaginative. Thus, his attempt at coming up with ‘symbols’ to channel the intent of what he wanted the Pneuma to do had been surprisingly tricky. Ultimately, he’d opted to ‘borrow’ from the meaning of things he already understood. Representing the concept of ‘earth,’ the first symbol was pilfered from the periodic table, element six, carbon. In this new universe, the old periodic table was probably outdated, if not entirely useless, but to Rory, its meaning mattered; intent was perhaps the most valuable thing he’d learned regarding Pneuma.

Well, aside from the fact that he sucked at using it, even with all the intent in the world.

The second symbol appeared almost like three connected triangles, though that wasn’t the intent of their design. Much like his first symbol, its origin was the periodic table of their old universe. Representing the concept of air, it drew inspiration from the most abundant element that made up the air back on earth, element number seven, nitrogen. In the case of his symbol, it was what you got when the English letter N and the number seven were superimposed upon one another.

Following the trend of the first two symbols, his third, a representation of liquid, was an oddly complex symbol bounded by a circle. While it looked fancy, it was the result of superimposing the number two on the letter H before drawing an O surrounding the newly created icon.

H20, the lifeblood of earth.

His fourth symbol was the first to diverge from the pattern he’d made by simply copying the periodic table. A subtraction symbol drawn over three circles arranged in a triangular pattern represented the concept of fire, of plasma. The subtraction line referred to the negative charge within a plasma, whereas the three empty circles represented the free-floating positive charge of superheated gas.

In truth, Rory admitted as he considered his fiery inscription. I’m not sure if that’s how plasma works, but it sounds good, and more importantly, it looks cool, so that’s all that matters.

Like his fourth symbol, his fifth and final symbol didn’t borrow from the periodic table for inspiration. Earth, air, fire, and liquid—the jury was still out on whether water existed anymore—one more ‘base’ element still had to be considered, especially in this new universe.

Magic, or, in more simplistic terms, energy.

The symbol itself was four lightning bolts meeting at a singular point, the conjunction of natural and supernatural forces.

All in all, Rory was proud of his work, if somewhat miffed that it had taken him several days longer to decide on the symbols than had been his intention.

“Doesn’t matter how or why, just that it works,” Rory grunted, pushing aside any budding annoyance with his relative lack of creativity or inspiration.

I’d bet even Newton wasn’t constantly budding with inspiration after all.

What mattered was that he was on the verge of a massive discovery if he was right.

Standing up straight and tall within the center of the concentric circles, Rory began to reach for the feeling of pneuma-induced static, letting it build upon his skin until he felt like a carpet of lightning ants crawled upon him.

If this doesn’t work, well… this is probably going to hurt.

When Rory used himself as the director, the shaper of magic, something crucial was lost in the process, a significant loss of efficiency or viability. However, gathering Pneuma had never been the problem, and it was only in actually using it that something, somewhere, went wrong.

Standing within his array, it felt as if even the air he was breathing had become suffused with electricity, absolutely brimming with an energetic charge of supernatural origin. Still, he continued to build it up, gathering as much as he could before a stray thought would send the energy careening and instantly fry him on the spot.

Unable and unwilling to gather more energy, Rory pinched the mental divide that represented his intent, letting it freely escape. There was no magic, no specific ‘spell form’ Rory was shaping, just pure, undirected energy. Under normal circumstances, using Pneuma without any shaping intent was a surefire way to suffer from Pneuma-Wrack, and with this much gathered Pneuma -he’d just spent the better part of an hour gathering it- he could imagine his brain simply splattering in backlash.

Thankfully, his brain didn’t splatter. While Rory wasn’t the one specifically shaping the intent, there was still something that greedily sucked up the energy, constructed to have only a single intent that could not be interrupted by things as silly as stray thoughts. Unstrained, it flooded downward into his circles, filled with soft blue light intermixed with strangely glowing motes of darkness. Moments later, that same light traveled outward at an almost lazy, sluggish rate. Flowing through the channels, the entire array, including the symbols carved upon his walls, glowed softly, the occasional dark mote sparking away before fading into nothingness. Several seconds passed like that before Rory finally released a breath; nothing had exploded, and his brain hadn’t been reduced to a static fried mush.

“It worked.” Rory felt a subdued surge of elation like the first time he’d ever won a race as a kid, too exhausted to revel in the success.

The array was more proof of concept than anything, and the energy would fade as he hadn’t yet figured out a way to sustain them renewably. The point was that when fed with Pneuma through his array, his defensive walls would become more like reality had been willing them into existence. To a degree, it was inspired by the process of ascension. Ascension was something he still didn’t truly understand; excess energy of ‘creation’ as he understood it would cause things to become more, whatever form that took. While Pneuma wasn’t the same as that energy that allowed for ascension, the fact that Pneuma seemed capable of nearly anything had inspired Rory to attempt something akin to a temporary form of ascension. While energy flowed through his array, his walls would become more attuned with each of the five primal aspects of reality, or at least what he suspected were aspects of their new reality.

The earth symbol was inscribed to reinforce his walls physically with the concept of solidity, of the earth itself. The symbol for air was there so that projectiles would find themselves resisted by the air surrounding the walls. His liquid symbol was there for repair. The fluid nature of liquid meant that if his walls weren’t wholly vaporized, they could reform themselves like they were made of some smart material, something they already did but dialed up to an eleven. His fire symbol was perhaps the most straightforward aside from the earth symbol itself; it was there to protect the wooden walls from being burnt, but in the future, he planned to restructure the intent within the symbol to instead protect from attacks that would destroy matter itself so that his liquid symbol would have stuff to repair in the first place.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, was his symbol of energy. It served two functions, though neither did it achieve very efficiently if he had to guess, based on how his walls were already dimming. First, the energy symbol served as the ‘catalyst’ for his inscriptions to draw Pneuma in the first place. They might have worked without it, but having a symbol that quite literally denoted the concept of energy could only help. The other purpose of the symbol was as an entrenching of his physical walls, of their proposed bastion of safety from non-conceptual attacks such as magic, and expanding it so that while energized, his walls could even provide a degree of protection and nullification against magic.

Five symbols, none too difficult or complex, but the fact that his walls now glowed with energy proved his theory true. A beeping red icon appeared in the corner of his vision as if to reinforce the point. He could have dismissed it if he wanted to, but Rory wasn’t exactly busy now that his experiment had succeeded. Tilting his head toward the icon, his display suddenly flickered into existence before him.

“Skill obtained: Runic Inscription.” Rory read the notification as a tired smile spread across his face.

Looks like E.O.N. recognized my efforts.

His smile quickly turned into a confused frown when the notification suddenly changed.

“Skill attainment adjusted due to Vocational aptitude. Runic Inscription has been modified into Ancestral Inscription.”

“Ancestral Inscription? And Vocational aptitude? Does that mean my Architect of the Precursor’s caused this?” Rory frowned as he reexamined the textbox.

Weird. And I never even got to see what exactly Runic Inscription did or was.

It was a discovery he’d made shortly after the introduction of skills. While a cursory glance would reveal nothing more than a skill's rarity and skill level, he could ‘select’ the skill to see more information. Most of the information wasn’t precisely valuable. Archery, for example, just noted the user as a beginner-level user of a bow, but it did offer some potential insight for advancing the skills themselves; in Archery’s case, he could either get better with a bow or begin using more varied ranged weaponry. As for the skills he’d gain from his ascension, their extra information was the same as when he’d been presented with them in the first place.

Which is neither here nor there. All that matters is that I can’t reference what Runic Inscription was all about.

Rory had an inkling that anyone else who attempted to use magical inscription would find themselves earning Runic Inscription, but there was only one way to know.

Ancestral Inscription: Extreme. Skill level: Low.

“Damn.” Rory whistled as he looked the skill over. “Extreme rarity?”

From what Rory had picked up, there were ranks of rarity. For things that weren’t crafted objects, they started from Common, then went uncommon, rare, extreme, and mythic. If there was anything beyond that, well, he hadn’t yet gotten to the point where he would have seen any, the only mythic ranked thing he’d seen being his essence spire, and it also had the great benefit of an ominous warning of future dangers. The only extreme rarity thing he’d seen had been the same spire before it had been ‘upgraded,’ though time would tell if it proved to be an upgrade or a curse. If one discounted the essence spire, in truth, he’d never seen anything higher rated than rare.

That was, until his newest skill.

“Now, what exactly do you do?” Rory mused as he mentally selected the skill, expanding the information displayed.

Ancestral Inscription

Rarity: Extreme. Skill Level: Low.

While neither the progenitor of magic nor its most gifted user, the Architect has proved an aptitude for the metaphysical. Charting a course that will undoubtedly be followed for the rest of history, the Architect founded the School of Runic Inscription. As the founder, the Architect gains bonuses when working with untested concepts amongst the fringe frontiers of Inscription.

“Not… not as helpful as I was hoping,” Rory admitted, rereading the text before dismissing it a moment later. “So … It’s the same thing as normal Runic Inscription, but I get ‘bonuses’ when working with untested stuff. Whatever those bonuses may be. Great.”

The good news was everything involving inscription was currently considered untested.

The bad news was that he still wasn’t sure what counted as an inscription.

Was it akin to an alphabet where you took building blocks and formed sentences and words from the meanings of those building blocks, creating new meanings, or was it closer to the periodic table he’d drawn inspiration from, where it was just a catalog of things that were always there but needed to be discovered?

Also, has the concept of earth, air, liquid, fire, and energy been codified now? Or could I use other symbols to recreate those same concepts?

He’d have to test it carefully if the meanings had been codified. Using symbols, Inscriptions, that held no meaning would likely result in consequences along the lines of intent-less usage of Pneuma, Pneuma-wracked at best, and potentially something even more dire at the worst.

“I need a journal.” Rory suddenly blurted, crossing his arms as he spoke. If he were the ‘Progenitor’ of Inscription, it would probably help to keep notes of his discoveries and the individual inscriptions he came up with.

Man, I wish I had a periodic table with me.

His knowledge of the old periodic table had been rather convenient for inspiration. The closer his ‘inspiration’ was to his thoughts and intent, the easier it was to work with. The more abstract his inspiration was, the more difficult it would be to translate into practical results.

Arms still folded one over the other, Rory began pondering how he’d get his hands on a journal, by which he meant how exactly he’d make a journal. Contemplating the relatively low-stakes conundrum, Rory absent-mindedly tracked the passage of time, watching how long it took for the glow within his walls to fade. It had nearly faded at fifteen minutes, and by the twenty-minute mark, the light was entirely gone.

An hour of energy gathering provides twenty minutes of uptime. Whether it retains a full effect for that entire duration or gets weaker as time passes remains to be seen.

Rory already had ideas to modify the array, modifications that, if they worked as he hoped, would prove extremely useful for catching up a bit on the waves.

“Time to get to work then.” Rory grimaced, considering the mountain of effort before him. “I’ve got a month of downtime to catch up on.”