Chapter 14

“There is an inverse value attached to any given object or achievement based in how easy it was to achieve. The most treasured things in the world hold value only for their owner, and only because of the sentiment they attach to them.”

—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar

Mira was there to catch him when he landed. If she had been smiling, he would have been certain that she was just a figment of his imagination rather than a ghost, but her expression was one of bored contempt. Like she had been waiting in his subconscious or the afterlife or wherever this was for a whole minute longer than she’d intended to, and she meant to be a brat about it for the rest of the day. “Took you long enough.”

Still unsure what was happening Sylvas looked around the empty darkness, then back to her. “Mira?”

“No, I’m your other dead fiancé.” Mira’s smile looked anything but happy. “What was her name? Hotlips?”

Her words hit him like a punch. “I never—”

“No that’s right, it was a complete stranger you let lick the inside of your mouth before my corpse was even cold.”

For a moment, her attacks upset him, but relief won out. “Yep. Definitely Mira.”

She stalked around him, looking him up and down. She looked exactly the way she had on the day that she died, at least prior to being disintegrated. “You’ve had access to everything the universe has to offer, and you signed up to be a soldier? Did that summoning spell you used to murder me also melt half your brains?”

“More than half.” He couldn’t hide his smile.

She stepped in abruptly so close he could feel her cool breath on his face. “Could you at least have the decency to look upset as I lambast you.”

“Sorry, Mira.”

“That’s better, but it still isn’t right.” She was so close he could see every eyelash. “I can still see the smirk lurking underneath.”

He repeated, not in the least bit sorry to see her at all. “Sorry, Mira.”

“You’re clearly never going to get it right. Let’s move on.”

Whatever would have happened next, Sylvas had no clue. He woke up with his regularly scheduled alarm chirping in his ear and groaned. It felt like he had only just closed his eyes, and now somehow he was meant to get up and attend classes.

That dream had been bizarre, but it was hardly surprising. It had been a few short weeks since he had unblocked the memories of everything that happened back on his homeworld, and it was small wonder his subconscious mind was now starting to pick through.

He hoisted himself upright, and after a little fumbling around, found his eye-piece. With a little more patting around the bed, he got his slate and opened up the day’s schedule.

“Rest and recovery.”

He stared at the words in disgust after reading them aloud. He had already wasted so much time on rest and recovery. He wasn’t sure how recovered they expected him to get without ever actually doing anything. Sitting at the side of the bed, he swayed a little before his balance came back, then he caught hold of his staff and set off on the perilous march down for breakfast.

Even with how slow he was moving, there was no danger of being caught up in the rush of other recruits heading down to eat before their training. Most of them skipped out on breakfast entirely so that they could enjoy a little longer in the comfort of their beds, and even the ones who didn’t wouldn’t be up and ready so early in the day. Only he was stupid enough to add a whole exercise regime on top of his already packed schedule of work.

In the infirmary his sustenance had been provided through other means, potions and intravenous injections meant to get him back to health. But that meant that he’d missed out on days of the supplements that he needed to build his next embodiment. Supplements that he knew the medic would have immediately denied him if he’d asked. She would have said that he shouldn’t have been thinking about advancement when he was recovering from near-lethal injuries, let alone even consider embodiment that he picked out. As if there should have been anything else more pressing on his mind than advancement after he had been kicked around by the Eidolons. The fact that everything in the supplement pack was technically toxic to humans probably would have earned him a strange look from the half-elf too. 

A look just like the one that the serving staff in the mess hall were giving him.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I know it isn’t for humans. But I need it anyway.”

“You don’t understand, pal.” The vajash cook was holding the supplement packet he wanted up, as if he could keep it out of Sylvas reach. “This stuff isn’t for you humans. It isn’t like—”

“Please trust that I know what I am asking for. It’s for an embodiment I’m working on.”

The cooks tail was swishing nervously with such vigor that Sylvas was surprised he wasn’t knocking anything off the countertops behind him. “Eh, I don’t know about this. If something happens to you—”

“Then please be assured that I have my decisions fully documented, and Instructor Vaelith will personally absolve of all guilt should something go wrong. Now will you please just… just give me the sachet? I’ll do it myself. Then you don’t need to feel any way involved about it.”

Sylvas resisted the urge to snatch it when the lizard man let out a sigh and finally lowered the packet into reach, holding out his hand and waiting for it to be turned over before politely thanking the man for doing his damn job. There was no point in antagonizing people for no reason, and Sylvas was confident that if he wasn’t already such a mess there would have been no issue in getting what he needed added to his food.

He tore the sachet open in front of the vajash and made a show of pouring it onto his eggs, just in case the cook later thought that he’d made off with it to poison someone else. It glittered on top of the yellow mass. Metallic and crystalline flakes catching the light.

Handing back the empty packet, he made his way to the nearest table and set himself to eating all of the eggs first, before a wave of nausea could intervene. Though on reflection, pouring what was essentially poison into his empty stomach probably wasn’t the best way to ensure that he kept his food down. It took him far longer than he ever could have imagined to force the rest of his food down, but by the time he was finished he felt stuffed and sick.

Originally, he’d planned to take a walk around the campus after breakfast, both to start rebuilding his stamina and to show everyone that hadn’t been around earlier that he was still alive. However the combined effort of coming downstairs and eating had proven to be enough of a workout for the day, so he headed back up to his room.

He couldn’t cycle his mana, which meant that the heavy metals and various other minerals now resting in his gut like a dead weight couldn’t be integrated into his new embodiment yet. They would just continue to build up in his system until they killed him, or he got control of his mana back, which he assumed would come first.

He turned his senses inwards, examining the damage that he’d done to himself. Every channel in his body had suffered some degree of burns and disruption, with the worst being centered around his right arm, which made a nice change. The gauntlet had been entirely destroyed in the fight with the eidolons, the Plover’s beam had seen to that. But the crystals that had held the mana had not been lost the way that the structure of it had. His attempts at healing himself as he fought had closed his flesh around them. 

They were embedded in his arm. Essentially shrapnel left behind that the medic had told him she wasn’t about to to go digging out while he was on the verge of death. Not when he could be scheduled for surgery later to remove it. As a result of that delay, his body had now entirely healed around the gems, making them a part of his body as anything else was. 

Conversely, the scars on his left arm, and the spots where they connected into his subcutaneous channels, had actually suffered the least damage by his estimation. The physical damage that all this had caused had been painstakingly healed, but everywhere else, his flesh was raw and new, so sensitive that just the pressure of his normal mana load would be agonizing. Despite wishing it wasn’t so, the truth was that the medic had done her job perfectly and had assessed the damage completely correctly. He was just going to have to wait for himself to heal. 

Despite that, Sylvas was not going to be idle. In those moments where he could maintain focus, he had been integrating his eidetic memories of all the various paradigms that he might have considered into his awareness, and he was now as prepared as he was liable to ever be to do something that no other recruit on the planet would have even considered. 

He was going to invent his own paradigm.

The mental load of combat simply was too much for him. He could acknowledge that as smart as he was, even he had limitations. He could only process so much information at any given moment, and with his awareness in battle turned towards fighting that meant that the majority of his capabilities were throttled. This was only worsened while he was using his fragmented mind to hold part-cast spells at the ready, when whole chunks of his ability to think were being sectioned off, out of reach. 

What he needed was something external, a second mind that could think alongside his own. 

A mind that could watch for all the details he was missing, that could interface with all of the fragments and his core-being so that he didn’t lose use of them. A second Sylvas, inspired by the fragmented sections of his mind, but added on top of it rather than kept separate. He imagined it much like one of the magical constructs that Vaelith created, but permanent and perpetually learning, and nestled inside his skull. The fact that space was all currently occupied by his brain, and the channels already carved into it, did not escape him. But that was why now was the perfect time to build such a Paradigm, before he needed to focus on his efforts on the next stages of his embodiment, which in turn would make any future alterations on that scale incredibly difficult.

The only problem was that he now had to create the unique paradigm that would do all that for himself.

Modifying spells, or worse yet, attempting to create spells of your own, was outright banned until the fifth circle in the Empyrean, but Paradigms and Embodiments didn’t suffer any of the same restrictions. Not only did they fall under the personal freedom rights all mages enjoyed, they were also slow to construct. That and they were unlikely to harm anyone other than the person committing their life to them. Of course it also helped that that there were so many already on record and peer reviewed that making a new one was generally seen as pointless. It was far better to simply tweak an existing Paradigms or Embodiments to suit one’s own needs.

He already had two of the three corners of a Paradigm to start with. He had the purpose of the Paradigm, and he had the basics of Paradigm construction drilled into him after going through it multiple times before. Where previously he had entangled his paradigms by accident, this time he meant to do it very deliberately, linking through all of his circles so that the other mind he’d made had access to all of the same information that he did. The only part of the paradigm remaining to complete was the intensely technical and complex process of shaping the mana that would run through his own brain into the required forms to create the desired effect. Having a fully separate and permanent construct that was a miniaturized version of his mind took up a fair bit of that, but the connective points were a whole other thing. As was deciding exactly how much of his mind he wanted to copy over. If he duplicated only the bare minimum for function, things would be more straightforward, he’d have an intellectual automaton, but in an ideal world there would be a fully conscious and thinking iteration of himself managing all the functions that he couldn’t in the heat of battle. On its own, he imagined that such a mind would be doomed to utter madness, floating in an isolation bubble without any connection to reality, entirely separate from the world, but he had planned for this eventuality. He meant to hard wire it directly into his body. He meant to hard wire everything directly into his body.

First on the list of tasks was to develop a basic shape for his interface with this construct, then came the creation of the mana structure inside his mind that would link up to that interface, and last would come the duplication of his mind and all its contents into a mana construct. By then he expected his new embodiment would have allowed him to shift some of his internal anatomy around sufficiently to fit the new brain inside his skull, and then it was just a matter of finding some way to imbue this construct mind with some semblance of his own self so that it could function. That last part was a little on the metaphysical side for so early in the day, so he put it off until later. He supposed it was entirely possible that a perfect copy of his brain would just instantaneously manifest consciousness without him having to do anything special, but he didn’t have high hopes of anything going easily for him. 

Nothing ever had, nothing ever would.