Chapter 44: 4-12 Ripples

Ripples 4.12

2000, August 30: Washington, DC, USA

Three hours later, I returned to my lab and worked to carve the last of the runes onto the Worldstone. Then, I dumped another fifty Mana Crystals into it to stabilize the enchantment.

And I was done.

Sort of.

What I had was a pale stone tablet that wouldn't be out of place in a museum. Hell, with the runes inscribed onto it, if I stood it up on its side, it looked kind of like the Code of Hammurabi. But, you know, white. With neater writing. And smaller. Forty-eight pounds of stone wasn't actually that large in terms of volume.

The runes engraved onto the Worldstone were actually on the bottom. I planned to make a relief of the greater DC metro area over the pristine topside. That, coupled with eight focusing wards buried at the edges of the metro area would allow the District Protectorate to teleport to anywhere in our jurisdiction with the help of the Wayfinder. In the event of catastrophe, we would even be able to evacuate significant portions of the populace using this method.

More than that, Cauldron kept Doormaker and Clairvoyant to itself though they could have been used to organize large-scale evacuations and emergency responses. If this project got off the ground, I could make it the public option before Strider ever came along. Visions of a giant Worldstone, one that depicted the entire globe on its face, made me almost salivate with anticipation. The more I worked at this, the more I realized that my little project had the potential to grow beyond just saving Hero.

But this idyllic vison depended on me being able to craft more than one Wayfinder. The Wayfinder wasn't originally a tool in every sentinel's arsenal. It was a weapon made for the Rookie Sentinel, a nameless protagonist who accompanied Lucian and Senna on their mission to stop the Black Mist. Lucian had initially wanted to take the Wayfinder and ditch the rookie, but the Wayfinder was inseparably linked to him and would answer to no other.

In the future, I planned to make Wayfinders that weren't attuned to an individual, but with Hero's that connection was critical. Similar to the Ymelo, I wanted to include an automatic evacuation function, something that would activate when he got injured, just in case he was too bullheaded to get out when the situation called for it.

That meant tying his soul to a weapon.

Not every Sentinel was a mage. Lucian wasn't. Neither was Sarah Fortune when she was deputized. For that matter, Shauna Vayne absolutely loathed magic of all sorts and went out of her way to murder anyone who even vaguely smelled like a mage… including her own adoptive mother. The ability to channel mana actively wasn't a prerequisite to wielding a relic weapon.

A soul attuned to light, a desire to do righteous deeds, and the conviction to fight were more important. Vayne was proof that these desires did not have to be enacted in productive ways, only that they exist. A heart full of righteous conviction was what was truly important. As embarrassing as it was to admit, relic weapons worked very much on shounen anime logic: Power of friendship and a heart of justice surpassed all.

If Shauna Vayne could be attuned to a relic weapon, Hero was a no brainer.

The trouble was, Vayne at least knew that the soul existed. She was familiar with the idea of a magic weapon, even if she loathed them with every fiber of her being. It didn't take her long to learn to draw mana from her soul and empower her crossbow. Hero… didn't even know for sure that souls were real, quantifiable things.

And I had no time to teach him. I could make the Wayfinder. Then, I'd have to spend the entire time making an advanced healing draught just in case he got himself bisected.

I did what I always did when troubled: I sat down to meditate as I wracked my brain for alternative options.

Several hours later, I arrived at one: blood magic. I could use a different medium to bridge the gap between body and soul.

If Hero couldn't channel magic consciously, I would make a runic matrix that did it for him. The power would come from his own soul, but the matrix would monitor his body and teleport him to the Worldstone if it took too much damage. A drop of blood was all that was needed.

Plan thusly made, I packed up another eight pounds of Petricite to work with at home.

X

2000, September 2: Washington, DC, USA

Three days later, I looked upon my newest creation with pride. I even heard an earful from Raquel and Yasmine for being distracted the night prior during our weekly check-ins. In my defense, she had terrible taste in movies; I saw A Bug's Life several times across both lives and it never failed to put me to sleep.

The Wayfinder was a gun made of pristine white stone, much like my own relic pistol. The grip was made of some strange black metal that always felt warm to the touch. That's where similarities ended. It looked a little flat, almost as though someone had taken the slide and barrel of a handgun off the stock and ground the stock into a mirror sheen. The top of the gun had a stylized compass rose embossed in gold and the black metal of the grip was engraved with countless runes so intricately carved that they almost felt like something textured by a machine for better handling.

All that was left was to attune it to Hero.

Unfortunately, the man was down in Tampa Bay, off fishing with the local Wards. Here I was trying to save his life and he. Was. Off. Fishing…

I growled audibly, teeth clenched hard enough to hurt. I wanted to scream when I heard that. He was... a genuinely good guy. Penelope and David told me about how, during his tour of different Wards programs, he dropped by Phoenix and took the Wards to the Arizona Chinese Lantern Festival. From the few conversations I'd had about him with Jonathan, my new Wards leader made it clear that Hero's priority was making sure us Wards got to live our lives as children. Hell, Pyro even told me once about how Hero gave him a signed copy of Back to the Future because that was a favorite sci-fi movie for both of them.

The fishing thing wasn't new or unusual for him. By all accounts, he just wanted to see kids smile. Everyone liked Hero because he was a genuinely good guy who wanted to help people for no other reason than to see them happy.

It wasn't his fault that he was out making sure the Wards were doing alright. He literally didn't know any better. He didn't know that the one most at risk was himself.

"I can't fucking believe this," I mumbled. "Is this the curse of Wildbow? May no good deed go unpunished?"

With a frustrated sigh, I put aside my Wayfinder and picked up one of my other critical projects, the Elixir of Life.

Assuming the Wayfinder's automatic retreat function worked, it would drag Hero to the Worldstone in whatever condition he happened to be in, which could range from a punctured lung to "entrails hanging like spaghetti," leaving me to repair the damage the Siberian wrought. In an ideal world, his injuries would be treatable with a few health potions and a team of surgeons, but if this were an ideal world, it wouldn't be called Earth-Bet.

More than likely, I'd find the literal Cauldron golden boy in pieces, staining my nice floor red.

"But… what if I'm too slow? Or, what if I'm not there? What if I'm out on patrol or grabbing lunch or taking a shit? Or the meeting takes place at night as so many clandestine meetings do and he gets teleported here, only for no one to be there to help him?"

An alarm was the obvious solution.

In fact, even if I did nothing, any unauthorized means of entry into the building would spark a dozen different alerts. Even I had my identity confirmed three times before being allowed entry each day: once by facial recognition, a second by magnetic fob, and lastly by being asked to identify a picture from behind a wall. The inventions here weren't the kinds of things anyone would be comfortable losing. The staff here was used to teleportation tech thanks to Warptek and while I wouldn't call the defenses robust, countermeasures designed to reduce response time did exist.

And they were too slow. I didn't need the staff to respond. I needed to respond and I could potentially be all the way in Clarendon.

The staff responding to an emergency teleport then shutting the building down for investigation would actually slow my own arrival, and that's assuming I found a way to get here at all. A bisected Hero would have mere minutes at most until his brain started to shut down, if shock didn't take care of that already.

Hexflash extended to any location I could perceive, but I couldn't teleport to a video feed; I'd tried. That meant I'd need a way to treat Hero even without my presence.

I pondered the dilemma and settled on the easiest solution: I was going to build him a fish tank and stick my Worldstone inside. If I filled it with some sort of Elixir of Life, he'd land in it as he teleported to the Worldstone and treatment could commence without my involvement.

Fuck it, that was the plan. Operation: Fish Bowl. He could be my goldfish until he recovered.

With that morbidly amusing thought, I got to work processing as much Water of Life as I could.

X

2000, September 3: Washington, DC, USA

If I wanted to make a potion capable of healing any wound regardless of severity, a true Elixir of Life, I'd need a solid hundred Mana Crystals. Compared to the single crystal used for each health potion and two per pill, it was a truly astronomical amount.

That I could afford it with a little less than seven hours of meditation put into stark relief just how far I'd come.

No lie, that realization felt damn good.

I spent all of yesterday acquiring enough crystals. I even put aside infusing the Tear to rush this.

Now that I had enough crystals, I infused each crystal one by one into a single vial of the Water of Life. It wasn't about quantity, but quality. A hundred bottles of the tainted Water of Life wouldn't be worth a single pure vial. I continued, one by one, until I had a fluid so heavily saturated with mana that it glowed blue, so dense that the bottle would explode if I tried to infuse a single crystal more.

Then I filled a bowl with health potions before stirring in the true Water of Life drop by drop. Honestly? If I had to make a mundane comparison, it felt a little like emulsifying olive oil and egg yolks to make mayo. It was a painstakingly slow process, but a full fifty minutes later, I finished.

The liquid in the bowl was thick, almost like maple syrup, and a blend of the health potion-red and crystal-blue of the Water of Life. It glistened like the purest amethyst, the kind of rich violet that Roman emperors would have killed to have.

But even then, the outward appearance was a mere footnote to what the Oracle's Elixir revealed to me.

When people asked about the elixir, I often called it pericognition and compared it to sight. While sight was the most relatable parallel, the truth was that the elixir could show me so much more. In the privacy of my own mind, I likened it more to an overlay, a hybrid of both physical and magical senses that allowed me to see magic as it was being woven. Truthfully, I counted this as the primary reason for my rapid advancement in highly complex fields like alchemy and runecraft.

And the Elixir of Life was positively radiant to my senses. The Water of Life was mana-rich too, but not like this. From memory to healing, water to plants, the water by itself was a powerful relic of life, but one without concrete direction. It was potential, plain and simple. Mixing it with the health potions had a focusing effect, narrowing down its myriad affinities to one centered on healing and healing alone.

My actions were almost reverent as I poured it into a vial.

This, this was a potion that could heal absolutely every injury and malady, from a mangled spine to the most severe examples of blastoma. So long as the target breathed, it would restore them to optimal health, even reversing staving off the effects of age for a time.

I paused.

"I could have my eyesight back," I whispered.

It was obvious in hindsight. Anything that could knit someone back together after being sawn in half was almost guaranteed to be powerful enough to regrow a few eyeballs. If I drank it, I could have my eyes back. I could stop being reliant on the Oracle's Elixir. I could…

"Could… what?" I wondered. What exactly did I gain that the Oracle's Elixir did not already provide? Would this make me a better tinker? A better inventor? Could I build more things if I had functional eyes? I'd gotten so good at making the Oracle's Elixir that infusing a single crystal's worth of mana was the work of but a single moment.

The answer, I reluctantly admitted to myself, was no. I gained nothing. Having eyes would not make me a better craftsman. I would still end up brewing a small lake's worth of Oracle's so I could better sense the magic as I engraved it into my runes or infused it into my potions.

I thought of mom. I hadn't been outside in my civilian identity since we got to DC for the same reason we'd insisted on me being homeschooled. An Asian boy with a single mother and distinctive scars across his empty eye sockets was rather noticeable after all. Pretending to be blind just wasn't worth the hassle.

'But… if I'm not blind anymore…' I thought. 'The Elixir of Life might not make me a better craftsman, but it might be worth it just for mom's peace of mind… Later… After Hero comes Leviathan. Then I should have a few months until Elisburg. Yeah… later…'

Thus decided, I paid a visit Pyro's workstation.

"What's up, Hyunmu?" the chubby definitely-not-Mario asked as I walked up to him.

He was stooped over his gear, a large, twin-barreled bazooka-like jetpack. He typically wore the contraption strapped on his back with the twin barrels facing down. The barrels could each rotate over his shoulders and act as artillery. It was heavy, which was why he wore an exoskeleton helped distribute and support its weight. I had no idea if the exoskeleton was supposed to look like a mechanized pair of suspenders, but if it was truly an accident, the similarities were positively delicious.

"I need you to build me an aquarium."

"You… What?"

"I want an aquarium."

"Kid, go to a pet shop."

"It needs to be big enough for a person. Preferably about six and a half feet tall. Maybe seven."

He finally turned from his jet-zookas and leveled me with an unimpressed stare. "I don't like where this conversation is headed."

"Why? A person-sized aquarium isn't too much to ask for, right?"

"Why can't you bug Metalmaru about this?"

"Because he doesn't have welding tools to build a plexiglass container that large. And he's in a meeting with Director Byron."

"Of course he is." He sighed, but finally decided to humor me. "Fine. Why do you want an aquarium? Why does it need to fit a person?"

"You know about the healing potions?"

"Right." The dots connected. "You want to make a healing tank."

I nodded. His approval was the real reason I was here. It wasn't too hard to build a container for the Elixir of Life on my own but as a Ward, there were limits to new materials I could order without oversight. Any Protectorate tinker could give me permission, but Pyro just happened to be available, and the most approachable. "Yeah. I think it'd be great to have around. You know, just in case. The potions are great stopgaps, but…"

"Alright, fine. You know, not everything needs to be built in-house. Like, we can just order something like this. You know that, right?"

"Who sells aquariums this large?"

"Dunno, that's for someone else to figure out. I'm sure it's going to be a special order, but whoever supplies the National Zoo should be able to manage it. Every procurement request from us gets marked for rush delivery anyway. It'll arrive in a few days at most."

"That's great. Thanks, Pyro. Owe you one."

"Sure, bud. You need anything else?"

"Nah, I'm good. Thanks."

As I walked back to my station, I thought about what else I wanted to do today.

The answer was obvious: Potions.

Leviathan would hit Naples the day after Hero's would-be death. I wasn't about to enter an endbringer fight. The thought of drawing near the ocean normally made me uneasy. The thought of drawing near the ocean during a Leviathan attack…

The world swam around me.

My chest felt tight. I couldn't breathe.

It was cold. The chill of the waves reminded me why I couldn't.

I couldn't…

Then the Ymelo flashed with spiritual flame and I was whole again. The wave of clarity washed away my thalassophobia like winds blowing clear the clouded sky. It was only a moment, but in that moment, I was taken back to Busan.

There was a good reason I tried not to think about Leviathan.

No, no I would not be attending that fight. My mom might actually die of a heart attack if I tried; she was even worse than I was.

As it was, my combat abilities were lackluster at best. Theoretically, if I could reach the core, my Minion Dematerializer might be able to convert enough mass to mana to destabilize it, but I that was a big if. An endbringer's body became denser layer by layer, exponentially increasing in mass, the exact thing my Dematerializer scaled off of. And even if, by some miracle, I got a hit off on the core and the core destabilized, Leviathan would be taking me with him. And likely most of Italy if not more. Behemoth's canonical demise had not been quiet and I had no reason to believe his brother wouldn't explode catastrophically too.

So, potions it was. "Rubedo" would make a quiet return, contributing crates upon crates of potions for the defenders. Why had no one seen him thus far?

Why, surely an asset like him needed to be defended at all costs. He was living a quiet, productive life away from potential dangers, thank you very much. Rest assured that he will contribute in his own way…

X

Sunday turned out to be quite productive.

With the prospect of Hero's impending doom looming over my head, I had to put aside a few projects and paths I wanted to explore. Now that I'd done as much as I could, I turned back to one of them, the Sunstone Talismans.

With my constant experimentation and studying, the runic matrix had been written out days ago. I'd even tested it in my basement by engraving it onto a plywood charm, not unlike one you'd find in a Shinto temple. I drank an Elixir of Wrath then activated the talisman much as I'd done to test the Ymelo.

The runic matrix channeled mana like an electrical circuit, activating each individual rune in the sequence I'd designed. First, the power storage that soaked up my mana like a sponge. Second to activate was the conversion rune that attuned this mana to the concepts of memory and purity. Third, the spell-weaving rune, one designed to weave a spell that would purge the target of outside influence. Lastly, a runic sequence poured that spell-laden mana back into me, all the while modulating the amount to be safe for normal humans.

The plywood? It shattered into a thousand pieces that shot jagged splinters into my hand. I did feel a trickle of the cleansing spell enter my body though. After much swearing, a pair of tweezers, and a healing potion, I worked out what went wrong.

If I needed an object lesson in why the material composition of my works mattered, I got one.

The wood was not Helian Sunstone. It had no affinity for memories, nor was it built to handle the quantity of mana I was trying to process. That had greatly reduced the effects of the spell and overtaxed the fragile medium, causing it to shatter.

Lesson learned but finally ready to craft with actual Sunstone, I got to work and knocked out four Sunstone Talismans before bed. They were one-time use items and would only grant clarity for three minutes, but they wouldn't shatter and could be recharged by yours truly.

One more way to be indispensable.