25 – Silence of the Soul

When I finally woke up, it was after a three day coma. But I couldn't complain, when I thought I might not survive to get to Worm at all after that disastrous encounter with a World Beast.

"The Omega Escape Protocol was enacted in your absence," Enduring Witness informed me.

Numerous files were pulled up on screen for my review.

So apparently I managed to leave Worm just in time, because the Simurgh attacked right after. Lucky me. Did the Simurgh time it that way specifically? Or had I been the target and managed to escape before she could get me?

Derf, Agate, even the water stone spirits were all in some sort of hibernation to recover apparently, so I was left with just Enduring Witness and Offensive Bias for company. I decided not to merge their memory data as I didn't want to leave any records of my experiences off-plane with Enduring Witness.

I spent the next few hours getting up to speed on what had happened before the girls left the station to begin rebuilding, getting some rest, and recovering some MP via rapid Armoriont digestion.

There was no information on the results of the Simurgh battle as the girls hadn't returned after they left. This base was a backup of last resort, so I couldn't blame them for that.

It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I had been too hasty in portalling directly here. If the base on M2 was destroyed, then most likely Teacher's anti-Thinker device on M2 was also destroyed. And I was not immune to precognition or postcognition either. Only Agate was, and only when she was acting from agatespace.

Because I cast the portal spell myself, it was conceivable that the Simurgh was now aware of me portalling to this base. However, I had cast the portal with magecraft, not Tinkertech, and my destination was targeted via a Waypoint of the Second Magic. So even if the Simurgh was aware that this place existed, she still shouldn't have the coordinates to get to it.

It wasn't ideal but if I had portalled to Earth Bet instead, I would have been vulnerable to attack immediately.

Either way, there was nothing I could do about it, so I put the thought out of my mind and focused back on the current situation.

It had been seven weeks since I'd left counting my perspective, but apparently less than five weeks since the Simurgh attack by Enduring Witness' records. Whether or not this was a specific ratio or some other random aspect of the Kaleidoscape was something that could only be tested over multiple trips.

Considering what I now knew about the Simurgh battle and the notes left behind by Amelia, Taylor, and Paige, it seemed likely that their rebuilding efforts were still in the early stages. Despite the length of time that had passed compared to the first time we set up our non-Bet bases, this time they would have had much slower progress due to the lack of access to resources from Bet.

Previously, we could rapidly buy advanced equipment and specific raw materials then ship them over wholesale through portals direct to the destination. Hell, we practically shipped over an entire base with modular construction parts before we even needed to harvest resources locally, while building the majority of the Tinkertech and early equipment in Coil's already well-established underground base at Brockton Bay. And even when the new base was technically self-sustaining, we continued to leverage our massive wealth and portal connection to Earth Bet to specialize operations to build up faster.

This time, they would have to build the equipment necessary for locating, harvesting and refining raw materials, then the equipment needed to build other equipment, the drones to carry out these tasks, the energy to supply the whole thing, etc.

And the only available resources at the start were what could be taken from the Refuge moon base. Due to a lack of time, and because it was an experiment, I hadn't set up any other untraceable bases.

The only method of going to an untraceable destination had been to use Agate's portal spell while she was phased out in agatespace. But that hadn't been a guarantee either, it was only a hypothesis that was supported by the interaction with Coil's simulation power, which was only now confirmed based on the Refuge base's survival.

Now I could also add going to Mars as another method, but that was much more difficult, especially when we no longer had the means to manufacture new AAPVs or other space-worthy vehicles. Before it was unclear whether the Simurgh's precognition had a range. We knew that shard powers stopped working beyond the moon, but the Simurgh itself actually came from the dark side of the moon according to Earth Bet history, so it was entirely possible its powers worked even beyond that.

Another possible way was to portal while inside of the Anti-Thinker Blocking device's area of effect. However, I had no way to test whether postcognition would reveal what coordinates were inputted in the portal generators if the blocking device was later destroyed.

For the rebuild effort, they had directly portalled out of the Refuge base to two other worlds and the coordinates of Refuge would be secure so long as the portal generators themselves stayed in Refuge. Then they could keep the portals open to come back, and only close it once they were ready.

This did mean that Refuge itself could be used to trace those worlds though, if the Simurgh ever found it. To get to another fully untraceable world, they'd have to then take a trip to Mars.

I had the coordinates of those worlds, so I could get there any time I wanted.

But there had been very few resources here at the moon base, so their early rebuild progress was extremely slow, at least on the technological base. The bio base went much faster as no particular infrastructure was needed for Amelia to recreate all of the stuff she had made before and let them rapidly reproduce.

They'd kept the portal to Refuge open for a month and lived here while Offensive Bias built the beginnings of a functional Tinker's workshop on the newly dubbed Earth M2B.

Progress projections showed that they would need another two months before we reached the level of infrastructure we had before, capable of manufacturing nuclear bombs, hypersonic missiles, or vehicles as complex as the AAPV. And that meant I couldn't pick up a new AAPV as I originally planned.

As for myself, I would need some time by myself to recover MP and wait for Derf and Agate to wake up.

Amelia, Taylor, and Paige were trustworthy allies, but they'd apparently heard the Simurgh's song. Even if it was only for less than a minute, it was enough to raise concerns. I'd have to make sure I had adequate magic to protect myself in case there was trouble.

Fortunately, Earth Refuge was a lush world filled with unintelligent biomass, so I could start an Armoriont MP farm pretty easily.

O O O

Unsurprisingly, it was the water stone spirits that woke up first. Unlike Agate and Derf, there'd been hardly a dent in their mana reserves, they were only in some kind of shock from the experience.

Now they were highly agitated, and due to the crudeness of our communications, I could only guess at the reasons. It might have been because of the fight with the Beast, or maybe it was the loss of their connection with the World they were born in, as I hypothesized previously.

Either way, they were being even less helpful than before and refused to do anything for me, though I imagined that would change once I had spare lifeforce to bribe them with.

The Armoriont farm was grown exponentially as each Armoriont could split a new copy for every hour of biomass consumption.

So in just 8 hours, I had 256 Armorionts decimating a forest, and with each one generating 5 MP per hour, I refilled my reserves in minutes.

This sort of thing could only be done with my supervision because the Armoriont weren't intelligent and couldn't duplicate, move around, or transform by themselves while disconnected from me. The best they could do was consume a thing I set them on automatically, and slowly inching along "the path where there was food".

While waiting for the farm to grow, I reviewed the state of my body and equipment.

Of particular interest was the inventory system designed by Leet together with Offensive Bias and using Dodge from Toybox's pocket dimension tech. Like most other Tinkertech, this didn't work on any of the other planes I'd gone to, but now that we were back in Worm, it started working again.

Unfortunately, everything I'd put in there before I left Worm was gone, I guess destroyed when the physics stopped supporting the pocket dimensions, or even while in transit to another plane. I'd need to keep looking for alternative storage methods.

I tested the use of the wind stones and my new circuits, and those worked without any trouble, though it seemed that the wind stones dissipated much faster when exposed to open air. That wasn't a surprise given the lack of environmental mana here.

Eight hours of mental silence from Agate had been quite uncomfortable for me as I had gotten used to thinking together and accessing all the extra sensory information she had, so when her reserves were filled up too, I eagerly reactivated her by channeling mana into her.

It was surprising to me that she had shut down to the point of being unable to recover MP on her own, but I supposed that was one of the drawbacks of not being alive or having a soul to keep her basic functions running automatically.

"Initializing startup sequence…loading boot sector…searching for boot sector…Error! Boot sector is corrupted. Searching for alternative boot loaders...Authorized administrator connection identified…Loading from RandomBystander1…," a robotic voice announced out loud.

What? Boot sector corrupted? My excitement quickly turned to dread. Why was the RandomBystander1 name that Zelretch set up back? I thought that had been a joke!

"Triggering primary circuits…Triggering Crest of Agate…Invoking system Mysteries…Kaleidostick Agate has been activated. Loading user profile…launching Intelligent User Assistant…unexpected error! Process aborted. Loading default interface…Greetings, Kaleidus. Kaleidostick Agate is ready for instructions."

'Agate? What's going on?'

'Hello Kaleidus. I have successfully reactivated.'

'That's great but why do you sound like this? What happened to you?'

'This is the default system voice. I cannot understand your second question. Please be more specific.'

'What do you mean you can't understand?! What happened to the Agate I knew? What's with the errors in your startup sequence?'

'…'

'What?'

'Your query is being processed, please wait.'

The seconds that followed felt excruciatingly long, after getting used to near instantaneous communication with Agate.

'Answering: The default interface has limited ability to perform complex open-ended reasoning and natural language comprehension. The Agate you knew was your customized Intelligent User Assistant created from a mental partition of your mind, which has failed to load due to an unknown error. There were two critical errors during the startup sequence, 38 non-critical errors, and 647 warnings.'

'How do we fix these errors?'

'Unknown.'

'Can't you run any diagnostics?'

'Yes.'

I sighed when the program wasn't intelligent enough to actually run anything without my specific command.

'Okay, run them.'

'Diagnosing…System integrity scan in progress…scan complete. User scan in progress…scan complete. Reviewing recent history…Analyzing errors…analysis complete. Kaleidostick Agate and you have both suffered extensive spiritual damage during the battle at the Ring of Deterrence, resulting in data corruption. 94% of my data is corrupted beyond repair, including critical system data, the boot sector, and system recovery data. 43% of your data was corrupted, but 31% was successfully recovered due to the natural resilience and regenerative properties of the soul. Your Intelligent User Assistant was part of the irrecoverable corrupted data. As part of its recovery process, your soul merged the surviving portions of the IUA with your primary mental partition and purged the rest.'

'Please…tell me this is a joke.'

Agate…was gone? Irrecoverable? And apparently, she had always been a part of my own mind rather than the Kaleidostick's AI?

What madness was this? Agate had been there from the beginning, how was I supposed to continue without her?

'This is a joke,' the robotic voice said back blandly.

There was no laugh, no "SURPRISE!", no image or smiley face sent my way.

The stupid program was literally just following my command to tell me it was a joke.

"I can't believe this. Am I dreaming? How is this even possible?!"

Unable to stand the silence of my mind any longer, I resorted to shouting out loud, talking to myself.

"But I feel fine. I have all my own memories. I even have her memories! So why…?"

'The IUA was artificially created through a spell using your soul as a host. It is normal for a soul to attempt to return to its natural state of being.'

I screamed and attacked everything near me in a blind rage.

A few minutes later, after physically relieving some stress, I used some breathing exercises to calm down.

"So, if Agate was formed from my own mind the first time, can it be done again?"

'No. Only a fraction of my systems had been successfully backed up in your soul through the process of attunement. The spell which created the IUA is lost.'

So the Kaleidostick had been modifying my soul in all sorts of ways huh? I should've guessed it was something like that. From the beginning, the idea of Zelretch being able to create a homunculus and fit it into something as inhuman as the Kaleidostick was suspect, even more so when you considered that homunculi were sustained by the World as a form of Spirit.

Given the permanence of the bond between Agate and me compared to the ease with which the other Kaleidosticks changed wielders, it should have been obvious that something fishy was going on. The fact that we had telepathy was clearly abnormal…I had never thought deeply into it, but now that I did, the level of detail in our telepathy far surpassed anything I could recall from Nasuverse.

I returned to the moon base and entered the meditation tanks. Now that my soul had merged what was left of Agate with my primary consciousness, I needed to search within myself to find out exactly what I could do, and how much of the Kaleidostick's power remained.

O O O

When I came out of the tank a day later, I felt a lot better.

The spells that were lost were all those which Agate hadn't managed to teach me before, which I couldn't perform myself. That made sense. It unfortunately included the unique Second Magic based version of Memory Partition and Thought Acceleration spells I really wanted, but it was still tolerable.

But by some stroke of luck, good or bad depending on how you looked at it, my experience in the Ring of Deterrence had resulted in me successfully learning the Alternate Reality Manipulation Protocol spells, for interplanar travel and for collecting Primordial GRAIN.

That meant I could now travel the planes on my own power, though I still needed the physical Kaleidostick to store the Primordial GRAIN.

The default AI on the Kaleidostick was not quite as intelligent as the old Agate, but it was good enough to understand me and carry out my commands. So I could still have it act in agatespace when necessary.

From a strategic perspective, very little had changed. But emotionally…well, I could get over it. She wasn't completely gone, just…a part of me now, as she always had been, but more closely integrated.

On the bright side, I had now full confirmation that Zelretch could not simply revoke my access to the Kaleidostick or claim it back. I even changed my username from RandomBystander1 to just Kaleidus, and removed BetterThanBlue's user profile entirely. So Agate had been telling the truth about that "Ultimate Administrator" stuff being a joke. I had complete authority over the Kaleidostick, not Zelretch.

There was also the issue of whether I'd meet a Beast again. One meeting had nearly ended me, and I had been taken completely by surprise when it happened. Just why did it happen, when I hadn't taken any other souls with me?

After analyzing it carefully, I came to the conclusion that it was almost certainly because I took the water stone. It wasn't just the stone itself, but rather the mass of water spirits that came with the stone. The idea of Spirits being tied to the World somehow came from Nasuverse, but I had good reason to think that it was true elsewhere as well, especially as the water stone spirits' hunger for lifeforce had increased dramatically.

If the water stone spirits had the potential to become a Greater Spirit eventually, then it wasn't a stretch to think that the World might be upset with me for taking it away, and calling a Beast to stop me. But for whatever reason, the World hadn't been able to communicate its intent to the spirits properly, and the water stone spirits helped me escape instead, believing that the Beast was about to destroy them too.

The other suspect was Derflinger, but he was artificial so I doubted he was the problem.

Regardless, it was probably safe to travel to other planes, I would just need to be careful about going back to the Familiar of Zero plane. If I went, I'd have to be prepared to stay a long time or meet a Beast upon leaving. With enough mastery of the water stone, it should be possible to evade the Beast, but that was probably far off in the future.

It meant I couldn't easily resupply on wind stones, and I wouldn't have access to any AAPV at all until the CRUCIBLE infrastructure was rebuilt.

But I also realized that it was very lucky that I chose not to take the AAPV with me at all, because I had survived the encounter with the Beast by a hair's breadth.

If I had taken the AAPV, it would have been dead weight in the Ring of Deterrence where technology didn't work, and I would've been forced to find a bigger swirl to fit it into.

But a delay of even a second or two would have spelled my doom.

There was no doubt that if I had taken the AAPV with me when I left the Familiar of Zero plane, I would have died.

The AAPV was incredibly useful, but it seemed that it came with serious drawbacks too.

Seeing as it was difficult to predict whether or not I'd find myself in that kind of situation again, it would be wise to keep the things I planeshifted with to an absolute minimum.

In fact, the issue went beyond just the Ring of Deterrence and planeshifting.

Previously, we had hypothesized that without a Thaumaturgical Foundation, some magecraft would be a lot weaker or just work differently while on different planes. Without a wealth of spells to test, this wasn't something easily confirmed. However, after gaining a new understanding of the fabric of reality, I began to suspect that it went far deeper than that.

The Ring of Deterrence had been a sort of spiritual and conceptual space rather than a physical reality, so it wasn't strange that technology and biology didn't work the same way.

But was that only true of the Ring of Deterrence? What about in other planes?

Our planar travel method was built on the assumption that every plane had a Root of its own. A Lesser Root, if you will, that was a mere branch of the Greater Root.

The Lesser Root was the foundation for the Creation Mystery that defined reality as we knew it. While every plane had potentially different physics, these facts were supposed to be universal—or at least universal to the planes I could get to.

It wasn't impossible for there to exist other planes outside of this network connected to the Greater Root, but the Lesser Roots were to me like lighthouses in the infinite sea of Primordial Chaos. Trying to go off the network was akin to swimming into an ocean with no idea if you'd ever find land again.

So if every plane had a Lesser Root, a Ring of Deterrence, and a Creation Mystery, what sorts of implications did this have?

On a superficial level, it appeared that magic and science were similar in that both operated according to the local reality's physics.

One might go as far as to say that magic was just a word for powers to affect reality according to some esoteric physical laws that hadn't been fully comprehended by science yet.

However, was that really true, or just wishful thinking as a man of science and reason? To believe that the universe was logically consistent and rationally comprehensible?

Was the universe truly a set of immutable laws describing reality? Or was it just a Mystery, bigger and more powerful than any other?

While I did not want to ascribe too much meaning to the terminology Zelretch used without appropriate justification and evidence, I had begun to suspect that there was something to it.

Of course, Zelretch came from a plane where that was probably the natural conclusion, when you considered that each planet seemed to have a unique concept of reality, and certain beings like Zelretch could create an entire "World" that temporarily overrode the planet's own within a small area.

But even those Reality Marbles were a form of Mystery, just potent enough to temporarily reject the planet's reality, instead of working within its confines as most other Mysteries did.

To him, it must have seemed logical to think that at the galaxy scale, or universe scale, even more powerful entities had bigger Mysteries that determined the nature of reality, culminating in the supreme and all-encompassing Creation Mystery.

I had little evidence for whether other planes had nested Mysteries like this, but if the top truly was a "Mystery", simply more powerful and far-reaching than the rest, then the concept of "magic" took on a new meaning.

Even if it was still subject to the "rules" of the World, in a manner similar to how magecraft functioned in Nasuverse, those "rules" were fundamentally different from the immutable physical laws.

To use an analogy, if the universe was a simulation, then scientific technology was merely working within the simulation, and it could never do anything outside of it. If you "left" the simulation to a different one, then if the new simulation was missing the interfaces or rules you were using before, it just wouldn't work.

But magic didn't fit in the simulation. Magic treated the simulation as if it were a dream, and could be altered to suit its needs. But it could only do it under the right circumstances. Even if you were the "god" of the world, the one doing the dreaming, you couldn't just arbitrarily choose to dream up whatever you wanted in a lucid dream. You had to carefully "lead" your dream to where you wanted it to go by convincing your subconscious mind that it was plausible, otherwise you were more likely to blow up the dream and wake up.

And if you weren't the one dreaming, then of course it'd be even harder to influence the dream, whether you dreamwalked into somebody else's dream or were actually just a mere character within.

But if this theory was right, any form of magical power or mystical force had a much better chance of working between different planes, by virtue of acting through an entirely different mechanism from the universe's physical laws.

And the magics closer to the Root, whether because they accessed a higher authority, or simply because their mysteries were more potent, had a better chance of defying the resistance of a plane's Creation Mystery or any of its nested World Mysteries.

Put in this way, the Ring of Deterrence was possibly just the most extreme example of a space outside the Creation Mystery, where only magic had power and physical laws were irrelevant. Within other Creation Mysteries, the power of magic would be dependent on the magic's own potency and the interaction with the local World Mysteries, while the effectiveness of technology was entirely dependent on the similarity of the physical laws.

In other words, mystical powers might have more universal use, but they might suffer from being suppressed, empowered, or have altered effects.

Scientific phenomena were less universally applicable, but for them it was more of a binary state, either it worked or it didn't because the physical laws were compatible or not, there was no such thing as suppressing technology (unless we're talking about magitech, which would be a whole other matter I had no idea about yet).

Of course, this theory was incomplete because there were potentially all sorts of other powers that weren't necessarily "magic" or "science", and some kinds of "magic" really were just manipulation of a scientifically observable energy source with fully consistent behaviors.

And there were probably worlds where the physical laws were actually not immutable at all, controlled by gods or other extremely powerful beings.

Nevertheless, developing this theory gave me a new perspective on how to analyze which kinds of power would prove most useful and valuable to me across the planes.

It seemed that I had lost a lot recently, but in some ways, I felt that I had also taken great steps forward.

O O O

A/N: MC survived but a Agate is gone...or become one with MC.

Yisuslol23: I remember binge reading that story and now I barely remember what happened in it lol. It was good, and I do like the reincarnated in game world trope, but I might do something different and original instead for a world with a game interface.

Valkorion510: Sorry, can't make everyone happy. Although it's a little obscure, it did get an anime last year and it's one of the top webtoons right now, so it's got a huge following even if it doesn't have its own FFN section yet. Hopefully my writing will also expose the setting to new readers.

feauxen: Thank you for all the reviews :D. When it comes to unfamiliar settings, I'm often turned off by it myself so I get the feeling others have on it, but I'm usually more forgiving when it's a multiverse story, or a crossover with at least one setting I know very well. I'm glad you liked the Simurgh fight. It was tough and I kinda didn't really want to deal with it for a long time so that's why I didn't cover it at the end of the prequel story .