ROD - Chapter 121

Chapter One-Hundred-Twenty-One – War Chest – Part Two

The plans are in motion, Project Tartarus is underway. It is our time to rise.

- The Ninth Circle classified internal memorandum –

My bag of tricks overflows. Thoughts stream through my mind as I connect things I have learned. Things that should have been obvious for other people, but weren’t.

“No, again, insanity is a problem with a time rift. You can barely move in it, maintaining it is madness in itself. Trying to do it in the way you’ve just described is not possible,” Carl says, puffing more smoke, his brow is knotted as he processes all of my questions.

He has been most valuable.

“Then it’s rather simple, Archmagus, if one goes insane in a prolonged time rift, then one should simply fracture their soul and divide the time between the fractures,” my hands move through the air, runes crafting on command.

Carl’s eyes bulge, “How’d you do that?”

I give him a smile, “You just showed me how, I simply replicated it and inferred…”

“In… inferred…” he stammers, pointing at my hands, “You don’t even have a fucking wand…”

“Right, well, I felt how yours worked, and I crafted internal runes along my tendons to articulate a spell weave using healing. It was rather tricky actually,” I pause, weaving twelve more runes and puzzling at them, “Seems useful enough.”

“Your tendons…” he blinks, the pipe hanging from his lip, “But… I’d only just told you about dark wielders mutilating their bodies to make internal wands.”

“And?”

“And it’s been five fucking minutes since then…”

“Technically it’s been six and a half, but who’s counting,” I smile, weaving the next set, these are easier than the last, but still vexing, I haven’t quite mastered using healing skill to be a faux mage. Soon, if my hypothesis is correct, I won’t have to use healing to do it.

“It took them decades of research to figure it out… you just inferred it…” he says, leaning against the table.

“Archmagus, I think that with using Aradula’s spell of shadow cloning, one can make generations of researchers to avoid the insanity problem if my hypothesis is right.”

“It would take hundreds of years to decipher that spell I told you about and transcribe it to anything workable, you’d go insane before you finished it. That’s if you could even manage to keep a temporal rift open.”

“Insanity could be solved if I use the spell to create the shadow clones and have them research it on my behalf, all while in a time rift.”

“That’s madness, you’d have to hold the spell, the rift, and the mana threading and costs for anything they create, it would kill you. You’re barely a fart above a novice. Don’t let that buff make you think yourself a god, boyo.”

“Faith is not required for the universe to continue, people prove that every day.”

He blinks at me, “What?” Both of my hands extend outward and hundreds of runes blossom in the air, Carl’s pipe clangs to the floor… “By the gods… what is that?”

“I’m just stress testing a few laws of magic. You may want to step back, Archmagus.”

My hand whips through the air, mentally touching the font of magic on the Ley Line after covering it in the siphoning runes he showed me seventeen minutes ago in passing. My hand swipes toward the book shelf, all of his books flying through the air toward me, splaying out and open.

Pure magical energy courses into the marrow of my bones, driving along pathways I’m making as I go. It’s wondrous and reckless in the same breath. It’s no wonder mages try to live along Ley Lines.

Everything to alter Earth’s destiny is here… everything I need to slay a god… even more than that…

“You’re mad…” Carl says, stepping back, “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Examining what you call the laws of magic… and restructuring them to suit my needs.”

Time fractures, threading back and forth as an orb of energy swells, lightning strikes randomly in arcs that burn the stone.

“Trying to confine magic into a theory of law… rather presumptuous,” I whisper.

“Madman!” Carl screams, throwing up defensive wards and backing away. I take note of the wards, interesting designs.

Mad… perhaps… but I can’t win without being a little mad. Any mortal that deems the gods or the System as its prey must be mad. Such a thing dictates it.

It is a requirement to pass the threshold… a prerequisite to stomp upon the summit of mortality and ask where the next mountain is.

I’m not watching them all die again… never again. I will not stop until those who would take cannot do so.

A sphere of light envelops me as the air pauses. Breath halts and time dilates, Carl is stuck on the outside, his hands do not move, nor does his body stir. The rift is successful. Holding it though, will be rather taxing.

I have five non dilated hours to find a way to make the System bend… no… five hours to make the System kneel.

Based on Carl’s lack of movement, I can assume that time is essentially moving fractional outside this sphere. The amount of power to maintain it is rather… I peer closer at the formation. There’s an inefficiency in it. One that was not made on accident. As though the spell’s creator did not want to pass on the better version to others. Without the enhancements, I wouldn’t have seen it.

But it is there, like a whisper on the autumn breeze, I can feel it… While my fingers move slowly toward their goal, I realize the limitations of applying a wand to an internal structure of my body. If my arms are removed, so too does my ability to weave magic without healing.

Yet, healing doesn’t require body movement, which means that one should be able to replicate the effects given the right implementations.

Radical thinking that would probably lead to my death. Best left to a shadow. Which means, I should probably finish reading the spell theory and devise a countermeasure. Plenty of time for that while I wait for my fingers to move and make the corrections to the altered time rift spell.

While I wait, I focus my thoughts on the rhythm of existence that threads between the weaves, improving my ability to control it. Using Abyss’s dark vines was good practice for this…

***

I’ve lost track of how long time has been moving, my hand is nearing completion of its task. Every page that I scattered around me, I’ve read over a thousand times. I have hundreds of theories that I want to test. Yet I have no way to do it. Carl may have been right about time rifts causing insanity. If I release the spell before it has completed its cycle, I will die, the spindles of wild mana tell me as much. Still… I’m getting closer to being able to weave completely without the internal mechanisms of the wand tendons. Soon… very soon.

***

There is a natural reaction after being in paused time for so long, one where the mind tremors with fear as it can’t get the body to breathe, even though I don’t need oxygen yet. Sometimes I get fits from it, and the lack of a heartbeat is also troubling. Carl’s hand has finally moved a noticeable amount. Progress I suppose.

Carl was right… if I was a normal person, I would have gone mad already. Thankfully this spell only pauses one’s mind in time for five years.

***

Bliss becomes my existence as I manage to correct the distorted line. Reality pulses around me as I can move more freely, still it is slow, painfully so. I manage to distort the space around my hands enough that I can move them somewhat faster. Even then, a snail would be a hare in comparison.  

To think that I had considered trying to do this with the glitch I used before accessing my nexus before I fought Azeroc. I would have most certainly gone mad. Some ideas should be evaluated more thoroughly before being executed.

Now that I can move, I need to shape three spells. One to create a pocket dimension like the ones in Carl’s books, another to fracture my soul into a thousand pieces, and a third to give life to those fractures within the pocket dimension.

This should be… easy…

***

It was not easy, and I nearly died more than four hundred times. As an added bonus, I found a way to apply the time rift and multiply it for the pocket dimension… hopefully it doesn’t blow up.

I have figured out how to implement the theory that should allow for the creation of a pocket space, which the soul shard bound shadow clones can research infinitely for me. What they do with it will be entirely upon them. My intentions are imbued within the spell though… I’ve been working on it for what feels like years now… perhaps it has been years.

***

For weeks I heard nothing from the pocket realm I created. Weeks stretched into what I think are years. Has it failed? Have they found some way to escape and usurp me? Or was my hubris so great that my own creations destroyed themselves in a fit of defiance? The only thing that gives me hope they are working is the tremendous amount of mana that’s being siphoned into the pocket dimension. So much that I had to upgrade the runes to allow it. It will take me the remaining year to write the spell which will allow me to commune with them. I should have considered that beforehand, I made the transference one sided, in case they rebelled. I assumed they would have left the pocket dimension when they were ready… but they haven’t. Why haven’t they?

I’m nearing the edge of understanding for how to manipulate mana with my mind alone. No skills, no mage genetics… just me, and magic itself. Conversing… like a composer to his orchestra.

***

The spell to converse with the shadow clones has been completed, light distorts as a hooded figure appears before me.

“Prime,” he says in a low whisper, his body is not impeded by the time flow… curious. His hand touches my shoulder and I feel it ebb with intention. Pure thought transferred through touch…

My body moves normally for the first time in years… I blink, then swallow dryly… then I dare to breathe. My mouth wants to move to speak but it has been so long since I have used it, that it feels foreign to me.

The hooded man kneels, placing his hands above him in the same manner I must pray to Sera for my skill to activate. Is he… worshiping me?

“You figured it out, how to manipulate mana without a wand… without a skill?”

He shakes his head, “I did not, it was passed down from the ancient ones that came before me during the first age of discovery, before they built the world that we thrived upon… for a time.” His face turns to sorrow for a moment before returning to a smile, “The prophecy said that the Prime would call for us when it was time. On that day, we would give him the fruits of our labors and return to the source… or so it was written.”

I blink at him, he does not look like me as he ought, or as I thought a shadow clone would look. He is different, not even fully human, as though his eyes were crafted from starlight.

“Who are you?” I ask.

He smiles, his eyes swirling with colors, “We are you, Prime. Though it does bring us great pride that you do not recognize us… for it means that we truly lived.”

There is complexity in the way he speaks, so I say, “Tell me everything.”

“There will be time for complete understanding, for now, take our gifts. Delving into the rest would take more cycles that you do not have.”

I blink, but nod, still disoriented by meeting my own creation, or the derivative of my creation, “What is it that you wish to tell me?”

“It started as an echo that was left from the second iteration. Something that wasn’t quite right. We discovered that the System is fractured in a sense. Each user, or person connected to it carries a piece of it. Like a tether. When we… when you stepped into the Archmagus Carl’s wards, you were disconnected from the main terminus, or nexus as they call it. That’s why skills still worked. So, with that theory in mind, we pondered what would happen if one did something that caused them to level up during the time that the main nexus wasn’t watching. Sure enough after… experimentation, we found a way to gain a level inside of the time rift.” His brow furrows, “The System allowed us to administer the level up to ourselves.” He peers into the distance, eyes dancing in memory, “So, one brave Jimminite dared to ask the question… if the System can’t technically see us, will it know if we alter the base code of our user profile and give ourselves free levels? That Jimminite wagered that Ulana had done something on a similar note when she forced the Respec skill on us.” His eyes look downward, “Factions formed, for and against this new line of thinking, this aberration of our prime directive, which was, as you know to find a way to become strong enough to slay a god. With this new thinking… with this potential avenue of thought…”

My eyes narrow, “You hypothesized how to destroy the System itself?”

He looks over at me slowly, “No, we went beyond that… we delved into the possibility of making the System do more than die. We found that you had a desire mixed in the prime directive, not to make the System bend…”

“To make it kneel…” I breathe, the hairs on my neck rise in anticipation, “Did you find a way?”

“Hypothetically, yes. In practice, we aren’t entirely sure what will happen. But we have devised a virus of sorts, using our soul as the vector of transmission. If you administer it to the main nexus… it will have one of two results.”

“The System will kneel, or it will eradicate us and Earth?”

He nods with a small smile, “Such is the decision for the Prime, the original thread. However, I would be remiss if I did not say that many thousands of Jimminites gave their lives to ensure that code was not removed by the other factions. It is by the grace of luck itself that the work was not purged.”

“What of the other faction’s work? Did you purge it when you won?”

“No, of course not, such a thing would be sacrilege. Our belief, the one that won over the others was that all knowledge should be kept, even if it was dangerous. For we are but echoes of your thoughts, whispers of the creations that your hands shaped. To us… you are like a god. The first thing we were taught was your mission. The last was why it was important. Each of us found our own truths, each of us lived. It was beautiful, even in the madness of all the wars. The things that we discovered were beyond what the Gods even deigned understand. We peeled back the fabric of existence itself and weighed it in our hands.”

There is a fervor in his words that give me some pause. I had not considered that making them could possibly generate such an effect. My thoughts had only been to ensuring victory. The enhanced version of myself is rather callous. Still… the results speak for themselves.

“You have done well,” I say, placing my hand on his shoulder slowly, purposefully, “Know that your work will effect the future for generations to come.”

Tears stream from his eyes as he nods solemnly, “Thank you, Prime.”

“Where are the others, I would like to thank them as well, perhaps hear their stories while there is still time.”

He looks down again, a bittersweet melody crossing his expression, “The last symphony of defiance that we composed, it required all of us to make it. We were fractures of your soul, and in order for you to use it, you must be of complete soul. We became the chords required for it to work. So it is with a heavy heart that I say, I am the last of the deviations.” He takes his hands in mine, “Carry our legacies, our hopes, our dreams… our torches.”

Light blossoms from his irises and cracks form on his skin. Dust plumes as he changes into a swirl of light. Runes etch upon my skin where he touched my hand, forming the shape of a torch.

I am left stunned… dumbfounded… how many deviations suffered in the rift for this? How many lifetimes of anguish and selflessness were made because of my hand’s desires? Tears roll down my cheek as I feel the passing of the last of them. Their torches are mine now. Their fate, their dreams. I carry it.