Magnus Thorne 03

03 – TLC and Refinement

Both TLC and Refinement are surprisingly easy and intuitive to understand. For me, at least. I will try to explain them to you so that you can understand how magic works in this world. Without such classification, which is nothing more than a label that I put on things, trust me that it would be quite confusing. People have all sorts of systems, and skills can vary wildly between them.

It also helps to mention that sometimes abilities are quite weird and unpredictable, and since I mostly based my spells off of them, my magic is also weird and unpredictable. It only gets worse as we approach higher places in the TLC classification.

TLC measures the strength of a spell that I make, comparing them to methods that System users use to measure their own skills. The three numbers refer to:

· Tier: this metric corresponds to how much power the spell can output. It’s a measure of energy, and the only way that it alters the structure of a spell is by making it larger, more powerful and overall just bigger. There are some contingent cases where a higher tier spell behaves strangely, but most of the time the only difference between a tier one fireball and a tier two fireball is their size, power, heat and destructive capabilities. It’s not a linear metric either, but a logarithmic one. It’s also worth mentioning that destructive capabilities don’t only depend on raw power. For instance, a Tier one fireball shaped in a certain way is better than a Tier two fireball with barely any cohesion. But to shape the fireball, one needs control.

· Level: a higher level means higher control. Get it? Level of control. I can make a huge fireball, for instance, using a T9 or T10 spell, but without at least an L7 compensation I risk losing control of it and dying. Level also applies to stuff like telekinesis. I want to move a mountain? Sure, T7 and L3 work fine. I want to operate brain surgery on someone? Perhaps better if we go 1-9.

· Lastly, Circle. This number represent how much the natural laws of the world need to be bent in order for the magic to be cast. Wind blade? Almost no laws are bent, let alone broken. C0. Telekinesis? Well, forces exist but I would need to manifest them from nothing, at least C2. Inventory? This is where the C definition becomes important. I can do inventory in many ways, and get equivalent results. For instance: creating a pocket dimension with stopped time and dump stuff there would make the spell C4. Shrinking things and making them weightless to carry them around perhaps C3. Shrink them less and put them in a box with an anti-gravity field would be a series of C2 and C1 magics chained together.

Ok, now onto Refinement. Simple: bigger number means stronger body. Stronger body means stronger Astral Soul. Stronger astral soul means more mana capacity and mana regeneration.

What about Astral Soul then? Well, Astral Souls exist on their own, but in order to grow one must use his own mana to nurture them and make them grow. You must cultivate your astral soul.

Fortunately for me the whole process is automatic. I spent so much time doing it manually that now it’s barely an afterthought. I allocate mana to it, and my mind does it on its own. The limit on the growth of an Astral Soul depends on the Refinement of the body, making Refinement the limit but not the mechanism of growth.

With all that out of the way, it’s time we refocus on what’s happening. I walked through yet another corridor in the dungeon, with no idea how deep I was or where I was going. The problem with the Meandering Crevasse is that it’s sort of alive, always changing and so deep that nobody has ever managed to map it all.

Some even say it’s bottomless. I, myself, have never been interested in it. Perhaps at the apex of my power, getting to the bottom of this place would have been as easy as snapping my fingers. I don’t blame myself for not doing it though. I had other things to do. As such, I can only hope that I am going in the right direction.

My hip hurt. The tissues right above it had been shredded by the rat’s claws, and the muscles had to be coerced into working through sheer force of will. Not without pain. The poison was in my bloodstream and an uncomfortable warmness had begun to spread out from the wound.

It was not the pleasant warmness of mana, rather the sensation of fever, weakness and shortness of breath that signified a consistent diminishing of my survivability. Choosing to absorb the rat’s magic instead of healing myself was really a bad decision, I see it now.

I was also limping, but with no charges and no decent magic to heal myself, I couldn’t do anything about it.

Around me the dungeon had slowly shifted from the dark, damp cave full of moss and glowing plants into something radically different. The air was much dryer, and the walls were made of a smooth polished sandstone. There were even torches every now and then, illuminating the yellow stone in warm hues of orange and yellow that danced and flickered as unseen air currents disturbed the flames of the torches.

The walls were dotted with statues, deep within their alcoves and lit by brighter than usual torches. At times, the corridor wandered into a room with a tall ceiling and large stone obelisks, from which many doors opened in just as many other corridors. All of them utterly identical to each other. All of them empty.

This is the sad reality of this place. Despite its size, or perhaps because of it, most of the Meandering Dungeon is utterly empty. It almost looked like a construct optimized for the collection of mana by the Core of this place, rather than a challenging structure made to lure adventurers and kill them gruesomely.

Perhaps the entrance being sealed when I was locked in this place was part of the reason why the dungeon was like this, but from the stories I heard back in the day it seemed like it had actually always been kind of an unique kind of dungeon, unique as in so lame that it was barely worth investigating, so big and so empty it was.

You can imagine my surprise when, upon entering what I thought would be yet another empty hall or great cavern, I saw little shapes moving in the distance. Humanoid, but too small to be actual people, taut and wide of shoulders, they carried torches and great wheelbarrows that were larger than they were, full of mounds of dirt, stones, pieces of wall and glowing ores.

I had found dwarves. A whole city of them, living inside the dungeon.