Knowledge is Power, an interlude

Chapter 24: Knowledge is Power, an interlude

And then, Mercury practiced. He had thought about his next step, no, his next steps. Controlling individual masses of magical energy was only the first one. The second step was learning how to use it in energy conversion, and the third was figuring out how to have it push against something, as it did when he separated two instances of it.

For the first bit, he didn't need to know much about the properties of magical energy, but he decided he wanted to know anyway. Mercury thought that he would become stronger faster if he had more knowledge, so he wanted to figure out the principle behind magical energy.

He only knew of things he had learned in school, or read in his free time. But he knew energy was transmitted somehow. Sound and heat were transmitted through particles, since they were properties of those particles. Gravity was omnipresent in space, but speculated to be caused by particles. Electromagnetic force acted between electrically charged particles. Light would interact with substances when it came into contact with them, but would freely travel through a vacuum.

In essence, all of them were created by- and/or caused interactions between particles. Be it the force caused by magnetic fields or gravity, be it the vibration of sound and heat that spread through physical contact with other particles, or be it light, which could carry energy over vast distances. But, in essence, they all created interactions between objects, because when a force doesn't interact, it cannot be perceived.

Mercury could perceive magical energy, so it had to have some interaction. It felt like his mind was pushing against something physical, but that made little sense, did it?

To figure it out, Mercury had to understand magic more deeply, but he didn't quite know where to start. Yet, this was an obstacle that kept his mind occupied for an entire day, only to be broken through when he fell asleep.

When he fell asleep, he found himself back in the place where he had been before. It was the same endless field, the glass spires to the west, mountain range to the east, the citadel of flames to the north and the small fountain to the south. And then he looked at himself. He looked… different from before.

He had no skin, or flesh, or bones, his entire body was made up from tube-shaped objects he recognized. His mana veins, of course. But now that he thought of it, this was weird. This wasn't how he pictured himself, after all. In fact, it was quite far from the typical shape one would take in a dream. It was also peculiar, in the sense that it always perfectly reflected the position of his actual mana veins.

Slowly, Mercury came to a conclusion.

Maybe this wasn't actually a dream.

When he thought about it that way, he began to notice many more peculiarities. He noticed he didn't have any sensory organs, so he wondered about how he perceived things. He wondered about the air, and as he thought about it, he noticed how dense the magical energy was.

He thought how some place in his mind could have actual, physical magical energy, that he could use to replenish the mana in his core.

Then, he thought about what this meant. If there were physical forces present, this had to be a real place, especially if they stayed consistent with the real world. So this couldn't be a construct of his mind.

Then, what did <Dreamwalking> really mean? Did it not talk about the ability to walk in one's dreams, but to walk to different places in one's dream? And how did <Astral Body> fit into this?

And then, he slowly began building up his theory.

It was a complicated one, of course, and heavily relied on speculation. But it was what Mercury thought to be the most likely.

The <Dreamwalking> Skill didn't allow him to control his dreams. It allowed him to "walk", in essence meaning to move his <Astral Body>, at the times he was supposed to be dreaming. In other words, it allowed him to move this construct of himself, his core and his mana veins and his "soul", if there was such a thing, to another place.

He concluded that there had to be a soul, because otherwise he would have to be in wireless contact with his brain, and that didn't quite make sense. So, he concluded there had to be another way for him to think, maybe using magical energy instead of electric signals. He decided to dub this organ his "soul" for now, since that was usually what the essence of a being was called. He thought this fitting, since if something would hold his consciousness, what separated that from "him"? He thought, and therefore he was.

But then, if he was in a different place, where was he? On another planet? It would be a little strange for his astral body to go to such a place, since that would require high speed flight. So what if it was a different direction from three-dimensional space? What if he could move in another direction instead?

He didn't believe he was moving through time, that would be a stupid twist and everyone reading this knows it, but maybe he was moving in another spacial direction. Maybe his astral body, with no sensory organs, could perceive this fourth spatial direction and move along it. And maybe, the space where he was not was, in some way, in the same 3-dimensional place as the planet he was on and only separated by some 4-dimensional space.

He could have just as easily called it a different plane, but he always found that dissatisfactory, so this was the best answer he could come up with. It would also make sense for there to be magic here then, since another spatial direction is just another direction for forces such as gravity to influence.

This was the first step Mercury made towards teleportation magic.

Sadly, he had absolutely no idea what to do with his theory. This information meant very little. Really, it was only a complicated way of saying that his soul could move independently from his body when he was asleep. It didn't contribute at all to his understanding of magical energy.

But that question was soon answered with the feel of the magic around him.

He noticed something.

He noticed that magical energy was similar to both light and gravity. With it being more dense, he could feel it weighing against him as physical pressure, and partially dissolving into him, as it slowly seeped through the outer layer of his mana veins. And once the concentration of magical energy inside him matched that outside him, the pressure had adjusted and almost vanished.

It was almost like heat, spreading out over time, while still having the ability to be more concentrated in one spot. It was like light, in the way that it could be seperate from other matter, not interacting with anything else if not forced to do so. It was like gravity if one only looked at how it influenced other things in its pure form, putting pressure on them.

And Mercury knew that, most of all, while he could feel it all as one instance, he also felt singular bits of it. That meant there was a smallest instance of magical energy and that it interacted, somehow, with his thoughts.

So, all in all, Mercury concluded that he could control the particles of magical energy with his soul, and that they had unique properties. They were attracted to each other and wanted to be available everywhere in equal quality, spreading out all over space, slowly but surely. And it could be transformed into other energies if one forced it to interact with regular matter.

Alright. That was quite some knowledge Mercury had gained, now he only needed to prove that this was all correct and then learn how to apply it!

And if that didn't sound hard enough, well, it was.

But this time, instead of tunnel visioning, Mercury was diligent. He wanted to be thorough and understand what he was doing, rather than just force a way forward. He wanted to fully get how this all worked, so he also tested his hypothesis while practicing, and found them to be largely correct.

Magical energy was easy to get to interact with normal matter though. It was fairly easy to direct it close to something and let it "flow" into it. It felt more like opening up a hole in a thin membrane, like he was poking a plastic grocery bag with a needle. From then on, the energy just flowed by itself and only had to be regulated.

He also began to understand how to create different kinds of energies.

Heat was the easiest to create, since it simply required the regular process of creating flow, after which the magical energy would do the work itself. Kinetic energy was a bit harder, since it required a different kind of transformation. Mercury had to imagine the magical energy, which he had always thought of as a cloud or a liquid, more as a wall, and use it to push against things like that.

If he had it bump into an object, it would get absorbed and push the object forward. This was immediately noticeable to Mercury as a form of limited telekinesis, since it only supported motion in singular directions and had very limited range while requiring a lot of focus.

… Yeah, just pushing things by hand was really more effective in that case.

He also managed to create light, though that was even harder.

Light wasn't created by having the magical energy interact directly with something. He needed to visualize the mass as single beams and then give them a direction of motion in order to create beams of light. In essence, this was the purest form of transmuting it he could come up with, especially since he didn't quite know how to create anything else.

He couldn't really get it to create electricity or gravity, but he was able to create kinetic energy as well as light, which was most certainly progress.

This took him about a week, since it was more experimenting than hitting learning barriers. Then again, that week really was just figuring out how to even create different kinds of energy, rather than learning how to do it well. In essence, it was more of a proof of concept.

Because afterwards, he spent all his brain power on learning how to control multiple masses of magical energy. He came up with multiple ways of keeping them separate, pretty much. First, he wanted to keep them boxed in, which worked, but applied permanent pressure to the walls and kept him from actually putting the energy to use.

Then he tried the brute force method, attempting to simply counteract the attraction using his ystirs. It worked, eventually, with a lot of effort and exhaustion, but then he had to focus on just keeping them apart, unable to actually do anything with the two masses. Increasing the amount didn't even cross his mind with this method.

So, he had to figure something out.

He tried encasing the masses of energy in liquid mana, with little result, simply being torn through. Same result with the lower budget gaseous mana. Didn't stop it for a second.

Mercury also had the idea of maybe using a reverse version of the magical energy. Like antimatter is repelled by normal matter, he thought that maybe anti-energy would repel magical energy. But sadly, this wasn't really something he could test, since he had absolutely no idea how he would be able to create such a thing.

And then, Mercury turned back to the basics. His fancy ideas hadn't worked, or were unachieveable, so there was no point in pursuing them. Instead, he decided to go back to the basic concept of visualizing what he wanted to happen, just like he had started off his whole journey into magic by visualizing his core.

Instead of just evaporating the mana as he had grown used to, he made only two separate, small puddles. Then, he very clearly focused on each of them. It wasn't some half-hearted focus based on practice; he was treating it like this was the first time he had ever used his mana.

He evaporated it very slowly, keeping them as separate as he could in his mind. He envisioned the two clouds of energy as perfectly unique in his head. He split his mind in two, or tried to do so as much as he could, and attempted to treat the energy as entirely separate.

It had nothing in common. One was not the same as the other. He tried to convince himself, but it was hard. Still, he tried treating them as though they were different, slowly attempting to move what he envisioned as two distinctly unique things, apart.

To help himself, he dyed them differently. He kept one mass silver, and one mass lavender, similar to the colour of his eyes. And then, he had a breakthrough.

He had seen the magical energy and dyed it a colour. With that, he had achieved three monumental feats, the first being perceiving them with one of his usual five senses, not his newfound sense for magic. Technically he didn't really see it, but in essence, he had linked his sense of sight with his sense of magic.

The second was altering its properties. He had only been able to transform it into different forms of energy before, never change it in and of itself. Dyeing it a colour, as insignificant a change as it may be, was a change.

And the third was differentiating between the masses. All magical energy was no longer the same, and if it wasn't the same, why would it strive to be one? This also separated it entirely from the outside and from the other bit of energy, making it way easier to contro-

But as soon as he thought that, he viewed all of it as the same thing again, and with a crash, the masses of energy recombined and began leaking to the air around them. And with the same crash, Mercury felt a blow against his head, his vision going black for half a second, before he found himself back in his basket with his trusty blanket over it.

There was no one around and he came back from it fairly quickly, though there was still quite a bit of pain pulsing in the back of his skull. It probably wasn't done by anyone attacking him, then. Which meant that more likely than not, he had experienced yet another form of backlash from fucking up while doing magic.

Well, then again, he was used to the headaches he got from overexerting himself, but almost blacking out was quite new. It also completely fucked over his concentration. Yet, Mercury couldn't help but smile.

He had made yet another breakthrough. With this, he would be able to heat and move an object at the same time. It would take far more effort than actually just creating a fire, and the way he had split his mind couldn't even be compared to ystirs in terms of difficulty, but it was progress. It felt like he was really advancing towards magic step by step.

But he also knew he had to rest and digest this new information he had gained, so he decided to take a break for the rest of the day. After all, great progress deserves great reward. But he still couldn't fully abandon his practice, so he simply set out a handful of ystirs to scan and collect mana. Maybe it wouldn't be much, but over a whole day, he could probably expect maybe half an Mp if he was lucky.

So, he went inside again and greeted Kintra with a smile, laying down on her reception desk and happily waving his tail in the air.

The guild office was cozy, structured similarly to an inn. There was a fireplace to the right wall, warming the hall, and simple round tables with chairs strewn in the room. There, godseekers could discuss their quests in peace, as well as form groups.

The notice board was to the left of the entrance, in the form of a pinwall. There was a bit of space cleared around it so people could search for the quests they wanted to take. Anything between B- and E-rank was available, fairly typical for a town such as this, Kintra had said. A-rank quests were usually reserved for larger cities, or even custom requests sent to singular, famous godseekers.

Not to mention S-rank requests, which were only offered to select godseekers who had proven themselves over and over again, even being visible fairly high up on the global fame leaderboard. As to be expected, one of the most famous ones was nicknamed "Dragonslayer".

Sometimes this world was a bit cliché, Mercury thought. The "Dragonslayer" Goradon, huh. It was a borderline legendary figure, because "slayer" wasn't a title gained from a single kill. This man was on a hunt to absolutely exterminate any dragon in his path. Seriously, it was borderline obsessive.

But well, that didn't matter much to those who supported him. After all, dead dragons had many uses. Not only in the form of the items they dropped, which were already incredible, but afterwards their corpses could still be processed.

This was something Mercury had only found out while casually talking to Kintra, but apparently in this world, drops weren't everything. Of course, the items that dropped form a monster had special magical characteristics, such as increasing stats or Skill levels, but the monster's corpse was just as useful.

Monster corpses were made of raw materials, such as meat, scales, bones and so on. All of these could be used to craft weapons and armor, feed people and sometimes even help them grow stronger, or be used in research to develop new technologies.

So, as it turns out, monsters are usually harvested after killing them and collecting the drops. For large monsters, corpses were sometimes dragged back to cities on carts, sometimes cities even established themselves around carcasses of some legendary monsters or arches, the dungeons of this world.

If there's a dead dragon, camps with blacksmiths and restaurants offering delicacies might be established next to schools and libraries performing research. Such places sometimes formed small towns or cities, even when the direct drops had already been collected by godseekers or guards.

Talking about guards, they were an interesting topic. Turns out that most godseeker in this city didn't much like them.

The two groups always were in a bit of a rivalry, apparently, since guards viewed themselves as having the moral high ground. After all, they protected the citizens consistently, not wandering around however they please. In essence, they viewed the godseekers as mercenaries, or even worse.

Of course, the other side wasn't too fond of the guards either. Because they thought they held the moral high ground, godseekers were oftentimes punished harder than normal citizens, and sometimes even accused of crimes they didn't commit when up against a corrupt guard, which only gave them more reason to wander from place to place.

Of course, the godseekers weren't entirely innocent. Many of them thought they didn't need to fear consequences, since they could simply head for another city's gloryhall. Oftentimes, cities didn't share criminal records, so a wanted criminal in Treyno might be a free man in the capital of Stormbraver.

Killer city name actually.

It was really astounding how much gossip one could pick up in a single day. He also talked to Kintra a bit whenever he needed an explanation, which she provided almost like a lexicon. Sometimes she'd even elaborate in things herself.

She told him that Stormbraver was called that because it was a fortress city, surrounded by towering walls, full of ballistas and archers. This was the city that had allowed the people of the Nevarzahri Aristocracy to hold out in the war against the Evlenor Kingdom.

Yeah. Turns out he finally found out who was at war!

It was two of the larger political factions on the continent. Well, then again, they were still just kingdoms. At least it wasn't a race war. The shortened story really came down to the fact that the kingdom of Evlenor wanted more land and Nevarzahri was an easy target, since it didn't have as strong a military force as other lands.

Evlenor was established as a kingdom quite some time before Nevarzahri was created, taking the mountains that laid unclaimed in the harsh north as their own territory. They took the few tribes in as their brothers and united them under the banner of the first king Therag. He kept every tribe united through iron rules at first, and slowly started building relationships between them, aiming at a unification project that was still going on today, though it had made major strides.

Compared to the harsh climate the warrior people faced, Nevarzahri had it far easier. They were established in a field of good soil as a small village, constructed by farmers. Then, merchants joined and soon, the town had turned into a trade city and established a council.

Then, it only continued to grow, buying new land and populating it with cities, all under the jurisdiction of the council of sages, as it would be later called. The 7 sages were wise men, who had led the country to prosper, each owning territories in different sections of the aristocracy.

Of course, these territories weren't managed by the sages themselves, as they still lived in Stormbraver, but rather by their houses. The city Mercury had been in before was managed by the house of Sylvenne, known for their prominent ability in trading, meanwhile Treyno was under the control of house Loftring, a small house of honorable knights, aiming for universal wellbeing.

That might be why the city didn't have slums, and a rather large amount of orphanages.

Talks like that one continued until much later in the day, with Mercury learning quite a bit more about Evlenor and Nevarzahri, but that is a story to be told another time. Because then, Mercury's head was so full of things he thought of that he actually had a real, normal dream for once, seeing warriors and battles.

And then, the next day he woke up rested to more magical practice.