Chapter 739: I'm Going to Change the Laws of Reality

As soon as she entered Jason’s soul realm, Sophie was blasted with heat. They were in some kind of industrial facility with a massive foundry pit of molten iron, her mother dangling over it from a chain. Sophie’s ire rose as she watched Arabelle and Jason banter, finally exploding as she flashed in front of Jason in a blur, grabbing his shirt and hoisting him into the air.

“Does everything have to be a joke to you?” she growled.

The amusement left his expression as he looked down at her from where she held him in the air.

“I’ve tried being serious all the time,” he told her. “It didn’t work out. The more I—”

“THIS ISN’T ABOUT YOU!” she bellowed and tossed him hard onto the ground.

Jason looked up at her, eyes wide with shock before his expression crumpled with remorse. The room around them dissolved into nothing, replaced with a grassy field the size of a football field, ringed with trees. The chains holding Melody dissolved and she floated into a chair that appeared under her, falling into it, unconscious. A glass box appeared around the chair, preventing her from rushing off. The radiant heat of the vanished foundry pit started dissipating.

“I’m sorry, Sophie,” he said softly.

“As am I,” Arabelle added. “I have worked with Jason a long time and I sometimes indulge him more than I should. He has a habit of affecting the behaviour of those around him, those of us that should know better have no excuse. I apologise, Miss Wexler.”

Sophie glanced at Arabelle, giving her a curt nod, then realised Jason was no longer at her feet. He was standing away from her without having tripped her senses.

“I can sense the thing inside Melody,” Jason said, neither his habitual half-smirk nor his usual tone of amusement in evidence. “The fact that the influence on her hasn't penetrated her soul makes it fairly easy to detect. It feels like a waterproof ball, caked mud. I could strip it out of her right now, but it would shred her body. I don't know enough to rebuild it.”

“Healing magic uses the soul as a model, right?” Sophie asked. “Can’t you just use that to make her a body without that stuff inside it?”

“No,” Jason said. “I can’t access her soul to do that. Healing magic is intrinsically benevolent. A soul recognises that and works with it. I am a lot of things, but innately harmless and helpful is not one of them.”

“Can’t she let you use her soul for that?”

“No. The conscious mind requires considerable effort to overcome the inherent protectiveness of the soul. I saved all the messengers here by accessing their souls. There was one who, knowing that it was life and death, failed to overcome their inherent instinct and grant me access. At the cost of dying.”

“Melody has had her soul under siege for years,” Arabelle said. “There is no way it will let Jason in, even if her conscious mind recognises that she should.”

“Which leaves torturing her soul until she capitulates,” Jason said. “Which I flatly refuse to do. The Builder did it to me and I did it to one messenger. I don’t know that I’ll ever wash off the stains from either event.”

“I know that Jason giving us a shortcut is the only reason any of this is possible,” Carlos said. “But now we have a path forward, we should avoid any other shortcuts we don’t have to take. Going slowly and being as sure as we can of every move before we make it is what we need to do. Miss Wexler, it’s how we give your mother the best long-term prospects.”

“There’s no getting around that the trauma she has been and is going through right now will be with Melody forever,” Arabelle said. “Even if — when — we extract this thing inside her, the physical recovery is only the start. Sophie, you need to be aware that the effects of what she’s been through will affect her mind forever. There will be years of recovery and permanent after-effects.”

Sophie nodded.

“I’ve seen you working with Jason for years,” Sophie said to Arabelle. “I know what my mother is going through is worse, but you’ve helped Jason, and he turned out alright.”

“Thank you,” Jason said brightly.

“Even if he is insensitive, self-impressed, self-important and too busy being what he thinks is clever to think about how his actions hurt the people around him.”

Jason opened his mouth to retort and then stopped himself. After a moment, he let her words stand and returned to the previous topic.

“I need to learn healing magic theory,” he said. “I don't have any, but in this place, I can have all the healing magic I like. The problem is, I don't get the instinctive grasp of how a type of magic works that comes from getting it as an essence ability. That's not a huge problem if I want to throw around lightning magic, but we’re talking about putting people back together. I don’t want to see what happens when they leave this place and I’ve got the healing wrong.”

“Fortunately, all Jason needs is a solid foundation of knowledge,” Carlos said. “The intricate details fall to me.”

“And when will this study be happening?” Sophie asked. “Jason, we’ve been out adventuring for weeks. Months, almost. I’ve seen you cooking, fighting monsters, taking naps. I haven’t seen you studying.”

“You’ve all seen the replicas of me in here,” Jason said. “Meditation, training swordsmanship, etc. You’ve sparred with copies of me. One of the buildings here is a fairly impressive library where I have a small army of avatars studying all day, every day. Mostly astral magic, that being my specialty, in a futile attempt to catch up to Clive’s expertise. Since Carlos first proposed what we’re doing now I added healing magic as well.”

“Are you saying that you can just learn as much as you like by having copies of yourself all learning things at the same time?” Emir asked.

“I’d been hoping that was exactly what I could do,” Jason said. “Alas, even magic has its limits. A silver-rank spirit attribute makes for a mind with powerful information retention and memory capacity, but there is only so much I can take in at a time. I tried absorbing too much at once and it left me unconscious for three days, and loopy in the head for weeks. Plus, the information didn’t stick.”

“You never told me that,” Carlos said.

“That was when things were strained between us after you wanted to run experiments on the best ways to kill me,” Jason said. “I was convalescing after I overtaxed myself portalling out of the underwater complex. I had a lot of time to do things like study.”

“You should have told me. The potential for self-damage—”

“My team has a healer, Carlos,” Jason cut him off. “He and Arabelle monitored me carefully throughout that time. They knew what I was doing before I did it and were waiting to look after me if anything went wrong. Which it did, and they were ready.”

“Oh,” Carlos said, deflated.

“The way it works is that I keep the copies of myself isolated from my mind until I absorb their knowledge. I stagger it, absorbing the knowledge of one avatar at a time until I hit the limit. It still allows me to absorb massive amounts of new information and the fruits of various training, none of which takes me any time. Hundreds of avatars means that for every hour that passes, hundreds of training and study hours take place. And all the while, I’m cooking or adventuring or, yes, napping. The only limit is how much my mind can take in before it starts burning out.”

“Like the limitations on skill-book learning,” Emir said. “You can only use so many skill books at once before they stop working and you do yourself harm.”

“Exactly,” Jason said. “It’s pretty much an overcomplicated skill-book system. But we’re getting side-tracked. What we’re doing today is — hopefully — taking the first step in learning to extract this taint from Sophie’s mother and others like her.”

“Yes,” Carlos said, perking back up. “Jason, now that you’ve examined her with all the power you have here, do you think you can suppress the Flames of Redemption without causing any harm?”

“Yes,” Jason said. “In this place, I’m not bound to the usual rules of… anything. Not so long as I don't need to remain true outside of this realm. I can resurrect the dead. Absorb all that knowledge we were talking about in an instant. I suspect I could even…”

He stopped himself.

“Nope, not going to talk about that. But I can do things here that violate the laws of not just physical reality but even the laws of magic. I can sense the influence the stuff inside Melody is having. I don’t understand what it’s doing, or how, but I can make it stop doing it.”

“And what if she needs that?” Sophie asked. “What if the stuff they put in her, the fires of whateverwhocares, is something she needs to survive now?”

“That shouldn’t be an issue,” Jason said. “I’m not going to take it away or change it. Or change her.”

“Then how will you suppress the influence?” Emir asked.

“I’m going to change the laws of reality so that the Flames of Redemption influencing people isn’t a thing. Think of it like throwing someone into the air by changing the universe to swap what up and down are.”

The others all looked at him incredulously.

“What?” he asked. “Look, even if that approach creates unanticipated problems, I can undo everything. I can't fix any problems she came in here with if I don’t know how, but I can revert her to the exact state she was in when she arrived. She'll forget anything that happened, although her soul would retain some emotional echoes. I can't touch that.”

“Can you do that to all of us?” Emir asked. “Could you just reset us to the moment we entered and wipe our memories of whatever happened here?”

“Uh… no,” Jason said unconvincingly, then quickly moved on. “What I can do is stop her from dying, even when something should definitely kill her. I can just turn off death long enough for someone who knows what they're doing to heal her body.”

“What do you mean, turn off death?” Arabelle asked.

“I mean turn it off. As a concept. It's probably a bad idea unless I really need to. Easier just to bring someone back by reverting their state to when they first arrived here, still alive. As long as the soul hasn't floated off into the astral by then, of course. Once the Reaper gets it, it's out of my hands.”

“Is it possible to trap a soul here?” Carlos asked. “Prevent it from leaving?”

Jason’s face darkened.

“Yes, Carlos,” he said, “ but I can't just grab it and hold it. Souls are the ultimate rule-breakers, and I can't directly control one, even here. Gods and great astral beings are just as powerless, but there are indirect methods we can all use quite easily. The vorger, for example, turn people's own bodies into immortal prisons of twisted flesh. I could do that. Wouldn't even matter if the body was dead since I can just bring it back. Or even make a whole new body, it doesn’t matter. As long as I only need to keep them in my realm, I can do whatever I like. But I don't like what I just described, Carlos. I don’t like it at all. What the vorger do to people is unconscionable. My team and I spent half a year hunting down and freeing their victims. But I am curious as to your interest trapping souls, Carlos.”

“I was just asking,” Carlos said. “Academic curiosity.”

“There are some things you don't do, Carlos, whatever the payoff. I could lure a few hundred people in here, break them down to their component parts and rummage through what’s left. I’d learn all I need to know about how bodies work in an afternoon, save myself all that trouble with avatars and the library. But I don't do that. You have a bad habit of throwing ethics out the window the moment you think it can further your research, Carlos. That's not a good look for a priest of the Healer.”

“I know,” Carlos said softly. “It’s something my god and I talk about a lot.”

“We keep getting off track,” Arabelle scolded. “We need to stop following tangents.”

“I disagree,” Emir said. “Slow and deliberate was what we’re going for, right? Jason’s capabilities here are critical to what we’re doing. I think that interrogating what Jason is capable of in this place is critical. We shouldn’t wait for something to go wrong before finding out what he can, can’t or won’t do.”

Arabelle nodded, acknowledging the point.

Jason turned from Carlos, floating away like a messenger.

“I agree with Emir,” he said. “I think we might be ready to begin, though.”

“How do we do to start?” Sophie asked. “What do we do?”

“I’ll suppress the effects and see if there are any adverse reactions,” Jason told her. “If that works out, I’ll wake her up. I think it’s best if only you and Arabelle are here when Melody comes to. Emir, Carlos and I will absent ourselves, although I'll project a duplicate of Melody for Carlos to examine magically. It will accurately reflect any changes happening to the real Melody.”

“You can duplicate my mother?” Sophie asked. “Like those avatars of you?”

“Only her body,” Jason explained. “I can’t recreate her soul, so the body will have no animus. It won’t do anything. It will be closer to a reflection in a mirror than a person. Something for Carlos to examine so he can leave your mother alone for the moment. That way, Carlos can get his data and you can have as much privacy as I can offer.”

“I’ll need some time and a space to set up the tools and rituals for the examination,” Carlos said.

A building rose from the ground at the edge of the massive clearing and Carlos vanished.

“Emir and I will walk over there while Carlos sets up,” Jason said. “Is there anything you would like before I go?”

“Some furniture,” Arabelle said. “And some food.”

Jason nodded and furniture made of cloud stuff appeared. He conjured a few armchairs, a corner couch and a dining table with three seats. Then he made a large wooden gazebo with a round table in the middle with three dining chairs. A long side table appeared in the gazebo and was populated with a massive buffet.

“It’s not just empty mirage food,” Jason said. “I’ve infused it with raw mana, so it’s really a pile of spirit coin variants that don’t taste like licking a car battery.”

“Thank you,” Arabelle said.

Jason nodded and walked off, Emir beside him.

“I don’t suppose you could get me something to eat?” Emir asked.

“I already have,” Jason told him. Emir lifted up his hand to find it holding a sandwich.

“I didn’t feel you put that there,” he said. “That’s a little disturbing.”

“You don’t have to eat it.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to eat it.”

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