AN

the stuff I talk about in this chapter is coherent with all of what I have explained before, and it will be another big ass Worldbuilding. During the whole story, I strictly respected the limit explained by canon, forging explanations for them that would leave me some wiggle room to branch out with new stuff. The last pair of chapters, besides closing the story proper, giving an end to Voldemort and setting up the break of the Statute, have been there only to remark the base from which I am building this stuff.

If it's been a long time since you've read this story, reading back the explanations on magic-souls-sacrifices-ritual will likely help you follow the reasoning behind the Magic in this chapter.

As I have always said, this whole ff has been written only to allow me a proper sandbox to play with magic, creating paradoxes that nevertheless don't go directly against the 'rules'. I had fun, and it's been my first story, so Yahoooo for finishing it, and thanks for the support, probably I'll start a series of one-shot crossovers, there is already one in my 'Plots and Oneshots' story on my profile.

If you enjoyed the worldbuilding and the lore, which are the selling points of this story, you'll likely like my other works, since in them I have kept the same 'respect the rules set in canon' premise, while exploring them and exploiting shamelessly every loophole to build up a coherent Lore.

In my other stories however, I've tried to build a relatable character, be it an SI, an OC, or an OOC, so someone not as robotic as David Taylor. In my other stories, the MC tends to be more involved with the main plot, and gets to interact with characters present in canon, who I try to portray as the original were.

So, thank you all for your support up until now, and for keeping up with my LSD-worthy Pindaric flights around the concept and topic of magic.

I don't think I'll write another Harry Potter ff, sure as hell not before concluding Path of Knowledge, the one with an OOC Ron as the main character, even so, in that story I'm building the Lore around the concept of Magical Core, which is remarkably similar to how chakra works in Naruto, so I'm already halfway there, thanks to my Revolution ff.

Thank you all for your support and suggestions about magic, as well as the several PMs that have pointed out areas in which I have been less than perfectly understandable.

SHAPING THE FUTURE

February 14th 2003

In hindsight, limiting myself to kill Voldemort hadn't been my brightest idea.

Going on a rampage to end the reign of terror of the Dark Lord, Potter and Friends succeeded where the Deatheaters had failed (even if not for a lack of trying) and broke the Statute of Secrecy.

So, even if not particularly overjoyed by it, I had done it.

I had wrought storm and death, leaving pain and ashes in my wake, reminding to the world that yes, magic can be terrifying like the sun itself. Safer if seen from a distance. Surely, the continent breaking earthquakes and the random scattering of parts of the poles around the world had been proof enough that magic beings were better left alone.

Nothing says 'fuck you' to a muggle as a whole island carved out of an iceberg sitting in the middle of the Red Sea.

Muggles had pushed and pushed, like I knew they would, their elephantiac bureaucracies stalled those procedures that should have been quick as lightning while the opinion of the many prevailed over the wisdom of the few.

Of magical beings, muggles demanded to know everything wizardkind had ever known, and from witches and wizards themselves, the muggles all around the world had demanded a form of servitude. In many countries where magic-kind and muggles were forced to live together, a government composed by almost only muggles (since following the principles at the base of democracy the voice of many has to be represented by many persons), while the few wizards ad witches, all muggleborns, that tried to cooperate with the change ended up as some kind of over-glorified paper pushers, giving freely secrets and information that weaponized the muggles on the side.

The secret accesses to the only magical quarters of the city had the first to be opened to the world, and through laws that enforced the market freedom against racial distinctions, muggle shops had been set up in magical districts.

Obviously, after the first months of curious convivence after the ICW accepted the complete collapse of the Statute of Secrecy as unrepairable, there had been a few years pf cautious curiosity, then realizing that any half-trained wizard or witch would make the ultimate spy and special agent, the governments went all out trying to secure themselves the next generation of human-weapons.

Less than legal authorities started experimenting, some countries feigned ignorance, but still stood watching as human experimentation was conducted over wizard and switches too weak to defend themselves, that generally meant people 'suddenly disappearing'. It was almost like the beginning of another Blood War against Voldemort.

So I offered sanctuary to wizards and witches, Atlantis, which magic was beyond the grasp of almost everyone but me and the select few of the 'World Builders' like I had started referring to the group founded by me, Fleur, Flitwick, Nathan and Sam, and the world kept being ruined.

With the appearance of another world from under their nose and the realization that magic was real, the witch hunts started anew, even if under new guises. Wizardkind was accused of being greedy and not sharing our power with the rest of the world, muggles demanding with thundering voices healing and potions, while wizardkind' rights kept being restricted.

You need a permit for a wand.

You need a permit for each class of spells.

There is a tax involved.

You must swear an unbreakable vow to not breach the law.

And many more.

The tensions had bubbled over until the inevitable happened, and magic started to be feared, hated, and hunted.

I didn't play politics, I couldn't care less for the Blood War happening on my front door, I could care less about the whims and fleeting wills of the people living in the world. Earth did well before humans, it would do well after we somewhat managed to erase each other from the world.

And yet, while the wars moved from human to human never interested me, and I had only acted after Fleur went and got herself into the mess I couldn't save her from, I would dislike being the only spark of magic left on the world. Oh, even if wizardkind was to be exterminated, Magic wouldn't end, new muggleborns would rise with time, and one day another secret society of magic would be born.

But I disliked the idea that my world had to be condemned to a millennium of fear in dark corners and sideways alleys to stay still and allow people: be they well-meaning fools or greedy smart bastards, I still cared about magic before anything else. Some could say it was an empty existence, devoid of human contact, and it was, but I couldn't bring myself to care.

Like had happened often during my life inside a book that I knew was fiction, I shunted the creeping madness caused by that awareness into curiosity and my evergrowing obsession with all things magical. Perhaps there was a way to cause a permanent change... something to blur the lines between magical and not magical, to break apart the stone walls that defined what was 'possible'.

December 7th 2004

A four meters tall me walked across the forests of Wonderland, letting his mind flow through and around every being that he could perceive, from rock to river, from cloud to salamander, from grass to fire breathed by that annoying mutation of the chimaera...

I shook my head sharply. No thinking in the third person. I reprimanded myself as I returned my focus to my current project.

Fleur's failed attempt to become Fire, despite her great affinity and long weeks of experimenting, had been successful only halfway through, since the whole point was being able to turn back from the dip in the world-soul's shard that was the element you aimed to become. If her attempt taught me anything however, was that I needed something to anchor the sense of [Self] int order to not lose myself into the world-soul's shard.

With a tired sigh, I poured Fleur out of the glass jar where I had her stay. I should stop calling her Fleur. I reprimanded myself, I knew that while she 'sounded' similar to what the veela once was, her soul and consciousness had long since lost themselves into the Worl-soul's shard of Fire.

The last attempt. I reminded myself while I eyed carefully the white and blue flames that quietly churned in the palm of my hand. I placed the fire in a small cup of stone, knowing that I had several minutes before it grew curious enough to jump out of it to look for something consume. Not that she... it... I corrected myself again, needed anything beyond the oxygen it already consumed, but it was undeniable that fire didn't love being constrained.

Raido, the Norse rune for Travel, was the first to be inscribed in the ground by me manipulating Fleur's fire to burn it in the correct shape. Since the Fire lacked any actual will, I pressed the meaning of travel with my own understanding of it.

Peorð was the second one, which meant Uncertain, Hidden, Future, Secrets and Feminine. It was extremely appropriate since I was trying to send Fleur's soul into a body that she should be able to recreate at will.

With a white flash, the runes blurred out of existence, leaving me blinking for a few seconds before I managed to actually see: in the middle of the clearing, the blue and white fire was still placidly burning, but as I came closer to 'hear', I noted that it retained faint memory of Fleur, likely in the same way I retained a memory of Voldemort after having learned Parseltongue with my ritual, so many years before.

So, Fleur wasn't in the Fire anymore, or at least most of her wasn't. Looking around, It was clear that she hadn't reappeared anywhere near me. Where did I cast her? I had oped that an abrupt change would be enough for her to find her way back, but now that the fire she left behind 'sounded' even more alive, I had no clue as to where to look.

A week of pondering and deep thinking later

It was obvious, in retrospect: if Fleur isn't here, and chose to ignore the possible path I opened for her, either she has already come undone in the World-Soul, or she still exists there, without a way to come back here, since she doesn't have a body to hold her. Either way, I had exhausted every option I could think about to apply in order to bring her back. What I could do, I had already done, the rest was up to her, if there was still something that could be referred to as 'Fleur' in the World-Soul.

Abandoning with a tired sigh the failed project of bringing Fleur Back, I compartmentalized the delusion and twinge of hurt in order to be able to focus on the next project, one that I had been working on on and off for years: becoming [Lightining] (without ending up like Fleur).

True Knowledge already acted as an anchor for my soul, specifically giving me a landmark against which I could keep track of myself when roaming through the tethers that composed [Reality], but what I was looking for, and the imaginary and 'plan' that I had birthed so many years before, was something completely different: to change the [shape] of myself very much like I did when I turned in a fox, without losing any of [Self] to it.

Now, the animagus transformation at the end of the day was reasonably simple to obtain, Pettigrew was proof enough of it. Turning myself into Lightning, however, was extremely different.

A relatively simple animagus transformation simply changed the shape of wizard, allowing him to retain the thought complexity typical of a human. It was curious that an animagus could only be a full animal or fully human. There was no middle ground. Oh, sure, self-transfiguration was a thing, but no matter how much I tried, without the use of a wand for the connection to the world, I couldn't assume a fox's head over mine.

So, a focus for the transformation to happen. It had to be something along the lines of a trigger that enabled the change, and something that kept the ability under control once used, it had to be something that kept the user from following Fleur's path, and something that your soul could 'tug' upon in order to turn back. I suspected that I needed to realize said focus with something to counteract it as part of the enchantment. A totem of some kind? But no, it would mean that the only place where the change was possible would be said totem.

Something that could always be with me once I finished it, something that would follow me in the change through lightning and be able to act as a focus for me to come back. I thought with a frown as I moved around Wonderland, the trees swaying gently out of my way in order to make my passage as smooth as possible.

"I need to craft some sort of hard override of the change, something that causes the transformation to unravel into the previous state..." I murmured as my free hand scratched my growing beard.

I walked slowly in the deep forests of Wonderland, my eyes trailing over the tres that I could feel on the back of my mind in the same way I was aware of where my feet were without need to look at them. It was only natural, I had been the one to pour himself so much into the creation of the hidden and evergrowing Being that was Wonderland after all.

With a sigh, I returned to think about my current project: it had to be something that worked to change the connection between the soul and the world soul. Becoming Lightning was easily done. Well, I could do it, but I would encounter Fleur's problem if I were to try without an anchor of some sort. My eyes then kept going over the world that I had created, and landed on the lake of saltwater that connected Wonderland to the English Channel

An organic solution then, likely based on the Elixir. It needed to affect the body deeply, and reach the soul. I needed a ritual to give meaning to the act of changing your soul. It couldn't be something as complex as injecting yourself with the organic compound, it needed to be... primal. Something that leveraged its effectiveness on one of the biological imperatives. Eating, which was at the base of the simplest organism's thought pattern: eat what is good, avoid what it isn't.

The ritual would have to be inscribed in whatever organic vessel would host the change of the soul, that sounded like an elegant solution in my head.

An exchange of sorts needed to be inscribed in the ritual, made a part of it, I needed to define some sort of price to be paid, it didn't really matter what this price was, what was important, since I was dealing with changes not only in the physical manifestation of the soul, but with changing the soul itself, granting it another form of expression, in the current version of the project, I wanted a human soul to go from being expressible both as human-shape and Lightning-shape.

Undoubtedly, the soul-shattering pain that characterized an horcrux creation would translate in a pain related to the taste, since the ritual would be enabled through the act of eating. So, changing your soul would leave a rotten taste in your mouth. A single bite would be enough, since souls were not quantifiable, the act of accepting the change brought the silver of world-soul tethered to a specific element.

In another of my admittedly numerous strokes of genius, I planned the hard override of the change to be linked to the price paid, to the sacrifice that enabled the change. Accepting the transformation through the act of eating, would deny natural evolution, the stable path that everything had always followed. Not a simple act of eating however, the act needed to be something... more, more symbolic, more... something more deeply tied with the racial-memory of humans...

Eating a fruit. The answer came to me with a bright flash. From the nature of the fruits, which existed in order to be eaten and their seeds to be brought around by the eaters, that would expel them through their feces, to the biblical imaginary of eating the forbidden fruit. And in a way it was a pretty similar thing: the Fruit, upon which I would inscribe and craft the Ritual of Soul-Change would be something that enabled a stark denial of the Natural Path of evolution. Yes, Yes I could work with that!

How to symbolize it? And by then I had reached the inside salt lake that connected Wonderland to the Channel, the water rippling in concentric circles from where my feet touched it.

After the stabilization of Earth, when waters could exist as a liquid, the presence of volcanoes and high geothermal energy warmed the water. In the water following the movements and flow of energies caused by the differences in temperature, random molecules that would one day be called lipids wound themselves together, forming spheres, isolating a part of said water from the rest.

That proto-molecule eventually started to be pierced by molecules that found themselves more stable inside of it.

Fast forward for several millennia, with the countless iterations of the creation of the proto-molecule, and evolution started in earnest.

All life came from the sea. I blinked.

"All life comes from the sea." I repeated out loud, feeling the heaviness of the statement on my lips.

Accepting a fundamental change to the [Self] was a refusal of the natural path of evolution, was an act of refusal, of detachment... a death of sorts. So, I found both my hard override over the potentially Soul-Shredding change of the [Self] and symbolic price to pay for the change.

"The [Sea] will hate those who take part in this ritual..." I nodded to myself, and seeing the water at my feet whip just that bit more wildly was a good enough confirmation.

Why stop to the elements? After all, everything had a soul, rocks, birds, iron... and more... there were concepts deeply tied to mankind's imagination. Old gods still influenced us through their forgotten runes, and pieces of magic for those sensible enough to pick up on them still twisted and tweaked reality here and there.

Why only for humans souls? I asked myself, at the end of the day, every limited being that could be characterized by a [Self] could undergo the change, animals were not that different from humans, I knew that much, while I had proven that inanimate objects could assume a proto-personality of sorts. From the Talking Hat to Hogwarts to Griffindor' Sword, to my own Wonderland.

I had the idea, now I only had to balance the strand of [change] with [Lightning].

March 9th 2017

As I stood calmly over the waves, I thought about how far I had come, nd how far I still could go. And like I had always done in order to deepen my understanding of Magic, I kept playing with the Project List, until, slowly but surely, the points on it became fewer and fewer: I was left with less than twenty projects, each beyond the wildest dreams of the craziest wizard to ever live. Even if, in hindsight, perhaps that wizard is me.

A complex ecosystem localized in bubbles at the bottom of the ocean could work, but I wasn't eager for manipulating time in order to allow it to grow fast enough for us to see any worthy change in the next couple of centuries. Even if the sub-water environment would naturally come to develop its own ecosystem, I didn't want it to exist only because of my spells.

Since I had truly grown into what I was, after wielding True Knowledge for the first time, I had come to realize that in a way I had limited myself: while before I could build enchantment upon enchantment until I obtained the result I wished, akin as the watchmakers of old managed put together countless gears to create something beyond them, while now I could simply channel reality to accommodate my wishes, but I couldn't openly go against the flow of the World-Soul, that meant no slowly building up towards an end result.

I was still very much free to create what I wished, to shape and change reality towards a goal in my head, but said shape and change realized itself in a single, gargantuan twist that didn't rewrite the rules that I had spent a lifetime discovering, but that made use of them like a supercomputer could make use of the logical truth [not 1] == [0]. On one hand, I had an undeniable connection with the World-Soul, and I managed to hold onto my individuality thanks to the Anchor-Channel that was the spear True Knowledge, on the other, I understood the nuances like gravity in the same way an avalanche did, or in the same way the tides answered to the Moon's call.

"Why do you want it so isolated? Can't you make a bridge for air and light to travel through?" Sarah had questioned me when we went once more over the complex projects that at the time covered the desks around us.

"Because sooner or later whatever constructs not based on a living being collapses, the world-soul reclaims the souls without a true physical anchor, that is why ghosts are only imprints of the souls they once were, robbed from their will to live, and robbed from the opportunity of dying." I had answered blandly, seeing the solution truly present itself in the corners of my awareness.

The solution to making a form of magic last forever, I had found, was to make it alive, and set up a way for it to survive to the slow and inexorable march of time.

Plucking the concept of [City] and twisting it so that it could be accommodated with the bottom of the ocean, was, sadly, impossible, since the very definition of the deepest parts of the ocean included an absence of light and air. So, I was left with building something around the concepts defining a city and the depth of the ocean.

The trunk would need to be like optic fìber to transmit light, while behaving like an independent forest on both of its extremities. So... maybe some kind of mangrove island on the surface of the water? While the trunk itself should be able to grow, so making it a collection of thousands of single filaments would likely be the optimal solution, The island above would be akin to a water lily on the surface of a spec of water. Even f said water lily was of the dimension of an island, and the spec of water was a stretch of the ocean.

So I started to work with a single groove seed.

May 6th 2010

The sky, at 10 kilometers above sea level, started to stop looking light blue and started to turn darker and darker, the atmosphere thinning and failing to refract sunlight in a way that could hide the void of outer space. The wind was harsher than one would have expected, and colder, but then again, as I recycled the solar radiation that hammered down on me, I was protected from the more nocive side effects.

Obviously, castles weren't made to float around. It was common sense, and yet one of the most fascinating challenges that I had ever faced. Why make only a random castle fly among the clouds? Why not islands, or continents? The latter would cause problems, since moving fast or not, its shadow would be so great that it would undoubtedly kill whatever fields and forests it was cast upon, but an island? Especially if kept high enough to keep its shadow small.

So, flying islands. I could probably figure out something more elegant than a simple lump of rock that actively recycled some of the vast energy that would otherwise move the tectonic plates, or even some adaptation of the magnetical field of the planet. No, what I needed had to be... subtler, and still more simple than the runic based enchantment that would one day fail.

It was extraordinary, how the most beautiful magics were also the simplest, at least conceptually. So, while I hovered at 10,000 meters above the sea, I laughed at myself for how long it had taken me to try this. I reached through True Knowledge to the wider world, falling into myself at the same time.

It was a process that I had grown accustomed to during the years, my perception of reality had been shattered time and time again, until the synesthesia that my brain crafted in order for me to have a point of referment started to make sense.

First, the air. I thought, and I pulled on the respective elements of the World-Soul, gently coaxing them into following my bidding. Physics was put aside in order for the Impossible to become a Pillar supporting this section of Reality. Air multiplied itself around me, solar winds being leashed along gravitational pull of distant asteroids in order to have enough energy to twist the strands of reality in a more acceptable tapestry.

Slowly at the beginning, and then faster and faster, air blossomed around me, the Earth's atmosphere growing beyond what the planet's gravity ould have otherwise allowed. Still, a part of my will had kept still the strand of Sunlight, which pierced without issues the outer layer of the atmosphere, ignoring the refractive properties of the newly formed air.

Clouds immediately started to drift in patterns that followed the newly forming winds, cumulonimbus and cirrus alike twisting and breaking apart under the contrasting forces of thermodynamic nature which would have pushed the clouds where the air was warmer and the gravity that kept them from rising where their density was higher than the air itself.

As I pulled upon the strands of reality, a distant element made itself known just beyond the corner of my eye: the moon.

Without forgetting my plans for making colonization possible, and since I was already manipulating the atmosphere, I tugged on the gravitational pull between Earth and its Satellite, turning the gravity that kept the moon from skyrocketing away through outer space into something... different.

As the kinetic energy of the moon lowered itself imperceptibly, and the distance between it and the Earth started to shrink in order to gain a new balance, Air blossomed once more following the channel I had prepared in the World-Soul's Tapestry.

Like an umbilical cord, air that didn't refract or reflect sunlight stretched through the distance, until Earth and Moon where liked together, a thin and Impossible atmosphere tying itself around the satellite, empowered and kept there by a fraction of the kinetic energy that kept the Moon moving. While the connection between Earth and Moon would still be unaffected by light, separated by it like oil was from water, I let the Old Reality Rules, or Physics, minutely affect the atmosphere on the Moon, gifting it with the possibility Dawn and Sunset that otherwise would have never been appreciated on the satellite.

Time tended to become wobbly when I directly acted upon the strands that defined Reality, so, hours or days or weeks after I started manipulating Air, it was the turn of adapting the concept of [Cloud] to my designs.

My will stretched, plunging in the World-Soul and orientation itself keeping my spear as a starting point, as an anchor to not lose myself, until I stumbled, or found, the concept of [Island].

It was a strand that stretched throughout the concept of [Sea], and it made sense. So I plucked it, no, I tested the tapestry in order to bring the concept of [Cloud] and [Island] closer in a way that broke clean through Physics, and yet the transition was smooth and clear.

But an island needed a sea, and I couldn't use the [Air] like a sea for the [Isand], since Islands are still, and I wished for something more dynamic and ever-evolving. So, another twist of reality's tapestry saw [Sea] and [Cloud] intertwining one with the other, and the previously formed concept of [Island-Cloud] immediately latched on the [Sea-Cloud], keeping it as both anchor and base.

The [Sea-Cloud] was kept together with something different than gravity, something different than kinetic energy, it was a deeper connection of the voices of concepts that had existed since the first island was born on Earth, it was a communion of the soul, and not something that could easily be torn apart.

Slowly, I retracted myself from

A fraction of my awareness plunged into Reality's tapestry once more, and I pictured the strand of [Self] back in London, and so I was gone.

Month Unknown, Day Unknown, year 2058

Giving self-awareness and sapience to random animals had been difficult, but since I had managed it with Raven, albeit with an improvised ritual at the time, replicating it without giving to the newborns previous knowledge of the world had been much easier. The growing sociopathic in me hadn't cared about the collateral effects, but I recognized that I was firmly in Frankenstein's domain.

Regular animals could become self-aware. Gorillas had learned the sign language, and one had been explained to Quigley, a western lowland gorilla, that one day he was going to die. The animal had expressed sadness, gone into depression, panic, self-hatred because he couldn't find a way to avoid death. Sadly, it was something limited to primates, because of how their brain was structured and their simil-human body-shape, which allowed us a relatively easy way to communicate with them.

Creating a shape that could comfortably host the blend of human and animal, and develop accordingly to the animal chosen for the new life form had been tricky, and more than the animagus transformation, the werewolf curse had proven itself of fundamental importance.

I walked slowly in the small building I had built in Wonderland for me to conduct my more time-consuming researches. It was a two-story building with the space inside suitably enlarged, which allowed me several wings to dedicate to a particular venue of research.

As I entered the third corridor, I felt the big oaken doors behind me lock themselves, I wouldn't want a specimen to run away, would I? I made my way towards the silver cage where the man I had captured was sleeping. He was remarkably prone to cannibalism, preferring the tender flesh of children when he could manage. Truly, the man without matched the monster within.

Like all deep-changes, the werewolf was magic that acted upon the soul. Not tearing it apart like the procedure to create a Horcrux did, but adding to it, somehow forming a bridge between the human and the wolf, that sadly ended up as an unholy mess of rage and claws. Since when I first gave form to the magic that shaped the Sky of Wonderland, several changes had naturally occurred, albeit aided by the meddlesome me.

I had plunged myself deep into the world-soul, letting it flow around me and not trying to manipulate it, only seeing if I were able to recognize a strand of it. Which was the equivalent of recognizing a single drop in a churning whirlpool while being tossed around by the currents. It had taken me years only to be able to feel myself, to keep a hold over my purpose while submerged in the dance of the souls that composed the reality I had always lived in, and even longer to be able to reach that exact state of mind on command.

That had been the starting point. From there, I had started to 'hear', looking for a particular voice amongst the apparent-chaos. Even then, I had to relearn how to not lose myself while listening, and once I had reliably managed it, I started to refine my hearing. The bigger was the familiarity with something, the easier it was for me to hear' in the right direction, before pressing (the more delicately I could) my soul over what I deemed necessary for me to observe. Like I did once to learn Parseltongue, albeit without need for a ritual to aid me, I slowly managed to find the strand I had been looking for.

As I was deep into the flowing of the souls, I found myself more often than not cast outside the realm of time and space, with every heartbeat of mine as long as an Ice Age. While the soul of every living being subject to a cycle of birth growth reproduction and death was primed to be able to adapt at speeds that were mind-blogging if referred to the time needed for the smallest change to naturally occur on their not living counterparts, like the rising of mountains or oceans running dry, I still needed time to properly manipulate those.

I watched with a clinical expression the baby elephant that I had managed to produce. I called it a baby elephant, but it was already 20 meters tall.

Since I have already played enough with other species and humans, maybe I can make myself 4 meters tall? It would be hilarious, if only to see if I am capable of it.

100 years later

They didn't manage to find a common ground. I sighed. It was to be expected, really, muggles and wizards were still humans, and as such they feared what was different, like evolution had engraved into their minds before they were even born.

Which was the common ground where I could bring everybody? On what could I bet the peace among humans, beasts, plants and world? Change. Everything changed, and everything was connected through change. Time brought change into both the DNA and the souls of every being, it was evolution at its simplest after all.

How to make it so that vampires wouldn't distrust mermaids, unicorns wouldn't distrust humans, wizards wouldn't distrust the muggles?

It was my last Act of Great Magic for the world. A common ground for them to live into, sharing the understanding born from the will to live, which was their common denominator. Granting Magic to [Everything].

I didn't quite know how Magic would adapt to every living being, but I knew that it was possible. If something had a will, then what I was about to do would make it so that will could be expressed instinctually, leveraging and growing of the biological imperatives that everything alive shared [Survive], be it through toughening oneself, through becoming capable of discerning the best path to walk, or simply through the willful violence over others that was imperative in every pack-minded beings, I didn't know, but sure as hell I was going to make it real.

I walked aimlessly in Italy until I spotted what I had been looking for: a small hill, with only a few tended fields over it. With a negligent wave of my spear, people started trailing away from the location, bringing with them their machines and all that they could carry while I walked in a circle at the base of the hill, the sharp point of my spear dragging itself slowly in the ground, while my will shaped the act of cutting into something else.

After my first successful prototype (tested on a muggle man that I had kidnapped), I had realized that I couldn't create copies of the same weeks I hadn't understood. Why couldn't I craft more than a single Ritual of Change for each element or idea it referred to? The answer was fairly obvious: while the souls of eagles alive were indeed countless, (the same went for everything, really) the "imprint" of [eagle] on the world-soul was singular. Each eagle was unique, because of the experiences it had accumulated through its life, but when the egg was firstly fertilized, an idea of the soul it would grow up to be was already there, taken from a shard of the world-soul.

Once I had completed my circular walk around the hill, I walked to the top of the small hill, and with a grunt, I tethered myself to the world-soul, slowly but surely displacing a tiny amount of its kinetic energy.

Again, for this Act of Great Magic, I would need to leverage an imaginary set of beliefs that humanity had always shared. Something impossible coming from the sky, where more often than not gods were thought to reside.

The price for granting to every living being the possibility of channelling their will in a reality-defying manner was going to be steep, but even then I wanted to create ever possible Soul Changing Fruit.

I also knew however, that I couldn't spend the rest of my eternity to craft Soul Fruits. I was in the middle of what was likely to be the most complex magic conundrum of my life, when the result had come to me from the most unexpected sources: once more the collective imaginary built through the Bible.

They were fruits, were they not? They were a blend of Elixir and Ideas, a metaphysical mixture between what was real and what could be real. So I needed something that could pull from the world-soul, and infuse a shard of it in a ' Soul Fruit'. Which was the name I've given to the Edible Ritual of Soul-Change.

Basically, I was going to make the creation of Soul Fruits industrialized and automated, and once more forced by symbolism, I needed to use a tree to make it happen.

The small hill shook, and with less of a whisper of displaced air, we were orbiting around Earth.

The ground and dirt clung together and toughened under my will, it swirled and flowed in patterns and shapes that served its function. For a brief instant, I looked around, my eyes falling over countless stars and planets. There was a beauty to it, a rhythm to the Dance of Stars that I could almost hear, something.. something...

I shook myself back to my senses when the Sun harshly glared on me. And taking advantage of the lumps of straw waiting around the small hill turned into an orbiting island, I shielded my head from the wild sun that burned so harshly. With a twist of will that was more instinct than anything else, I realized a straw hat, securing it to my forehead tightening it with a red stripe of cloth that I permanently conjured.

I had to enlarge myself several times, my regular human form wouldn't be enough for me to properly guide each branch of the Tree. Yggdrasil. The price would be steep, asking of me what I held most dear, and I couldn't pull back from even a single part of the sacrifice.

The island was floating peacefully in orbit, and by then I only needed to breathe life into the stone, and it could be done only in one way.

I gathered myself, holding with both hands the spear at the top of the orbiting hill and shaping the rock around it with a slow and steady speed. From the core of the hill, the fossilized wood I had painstakingly collected and prepared rose like a weed. As soon as the 'tree' reached two meters of height, flowing around the spear that was being used as a fulcrum, it parted in three major branches.

Slowly, writing themselves as I acted, simbols start writing themselves on the trunk, flowing in patterns that would have made me lose myself if I were to look too closely. Raven hopped out from an enlarged pocked when the moment came, and as my hands closed around her, she gave a croaking laugh, like she was telling me to not worry about what was going to happen. As I placed her at the beginning of one of the three main branches, I guided a tendril of the spear that was slowly coming undone to my familiar, who gave up a part of herself with a squawk of understanding.

After a minute during which I carefully pulled and pushed at the forces that regulated the foundation of newborn souls, the stone closed around feathers and blood from Raven, burying those within once my hands loosened their grip. The branch flowed upwards, forking again and again, as the types of Fruits it would need to produce required a different setup. The Soul Changing Rituals born from Raven's branch would pluck their imprint out of the imprints of all that came into being with a well defined vital cycle.

I moved sideways, my hands fishing the jar that contained Fleur out of another pocket: pouring the liquid blue and white flames in the palm of my hand, I placed her at the beginning of the second branch, once more guiding tendrils of my spear to the 'presence' of Fleur. And like it had happened for Raven, the liquid fossil wood closed around her, flowing forward like another branch of the tree, I knew that from there would blossom fruits capable of acting both as the bridge toward an element as well as the anchor necessary to keep the ones that one day would use them tethered to their original body.

The third branch was going to born Rituals that tied the soul of the eater to everything that did possess neither a quiescent nor a conscious will, to the all things that didn't match either the first or the second branch: with a wet lurch, I pulled out from my eyesocket the philosopher stone, which had remained part of me for so long that it could no longer ignore its bond to my soul.

I waited for the fossilized wood branch to envelop the red stone, a curious tendril of vines already tethering it to the spear that acted as fulcrum of the tree. And once all three branches were linked to the spear hidden in the core of the growing stone wood, I witnessed the flowing branches of fossilized wood which was now closer and closer to coming back to life intertwine themselves together, streamlining my work following ideas I could no longer witness.

I tested with longing the smooth characters flowing on the surface of my latest creation, finding them alive and hungry: and as my last act, to give life to something that didn't have one, and that didn't have any right to, I gave my ability to affect my world with my will.

As the bond between my soul and the world thinned, my understanding of reality grew dimmer, the colors shifting in shades of themselves, and I was quick to return what was left of Fleur and Raven to pockets of my enchanted coat.

What was magic? The ability to impose your will on the world.

So, as water condensed on the surface of the fossilized wood, droplets started forming small rivulets that soon found their way to the edge of the hill, raining on the world below, crossing tens of kilometers of atmosphere and dispersing themselves in a thin mist that would reach everywhere in the world, giving to those that lacked it what was necessary for their will to breach the cold laws of the mundane world.

With a last spasm of consciousness, my heart lurched, and as the tether that tied me to the reality I had so deeply affected broke, I was no more.

AN

Did I use the MC's OP-ness to turn the World into a base for One-Piece?

Yes.

Yes, I did.