A Sky Full of Tropes [Reincarnated Psychic Child LitRPG]

I wind up falling asleep before my ghost returns and wake up with a memory of wandering around the labyrinth and an additional level in [Mapping Step].

"Were you sneaking around last night?" Anise asks groggily when she wakes up.

"Yeah, I couldn't sleep," I say.

"Did you remember to grab a wand before going outside?" Anise asks. "I do hope you weren't wandering around town unarmed."

"Yes, Mom," I chuckle. "No one messed with me."

"That's a pity. I bet your sleep spell would work great on muggers. You probably wouldn't just electrocute them. You're too nice. I used to set muggers on fire."

"Funny how there don't seem to be many muggers hanging around the Adventurers' Guild," I observe.

There's plenty of room in the boat for all of Melody's junk, so she just brings everything, broken or otherwise. We've got dabbling crafters happy to take a look at it, anyway.

"I sent a ghost out to check out the ledge last night," I tell Basalt once we're underway. "The maze changed again and it took hours for him to find his way through to Hebron, and he knew where it was."

Basalt groans. "Good defensive measure, not at all convenient for travel and trade. Which core controls that area?"

"Tempest itself, I think," I say. "The closest cores are Amroth and the Adventurers' Guild, but they don't seem to have control over the labyrinth and I would have noticed any other closer cores with [Aether Sense]."

"I'll put finding a way to keep the world from shifting on the to-do list," Basalt says with a chortle.

"Tempest challenged me to visit its core," I say. "Pencil in a journey to the center of the world somewhere, too."

"Oh, that sounds fun!" Melody exclaims.

"I'll remind you you said that the fifth time we almost die," Rowan says.

Rather than leaving the Celestial Duck at Nefern, I fly straight to the Great Oak and land the boat not far from the tunnel entrance, careful not to crush any picnic tables. Now that I can lock the thing, I feel safer leaving it here than in reach of idiot kids with sticky fingers and too much time on their hands. I won't put it past Colt to try to figure out how to break the sigil lock.

For information about the Underswamps, I take my questions to the goblins of Splott. When I describe the way the labyrinth shifted since the last time I'd gone through, they nod in recognition.

"Yes! Tempest changes when you're not looking," the goblin scout, Ruki Splott, says. "That's why we patrol! Places you visit all the time and put markers in take longer to change."

"So I was on the right track with my trail markers," Basalt says.

We approach one of the piles of stacked stones we'd been using as crude trail markers, and I examine it deeply with [Psychometry]. Every time we pass by, we refresh the lingering vis in the area, and the marker in particular since it's a built thing.

"Carve out a tunnel and put in more markers, and make sure people go by regularly," Ruki suggests. "That'll keep the maze from changing."

I left the sigil lock book at Halkyn, but wrote down notes in my own notebook on the topic to be put into my [Mental Library] and shared with my friends. I could have just put the entire book in my mind, but didn't see any need to spend 200 pages on what I could say in 1. Anyway, I've found taking notes of things I read helps in gaining skill levels.

Corwen is not terribly organized and the individual members have had vast amounts of knowledge slip through their fingers because they never wrote it down or bothered to bring a book home.

Our progenitor is probably the worst culprit there. Apple Corwen, the [Tempest Archmage]. Also known as Liz, a woman from 20th century California who got spawned on the first day of a new Age and had to build up the Hearth from nothing, along with Ash, the Legendary Hearthkeeper. They accomplished a lot, but establishing a well-stocked and neatly organized library was not among their Deeds.

There's a downside to being inclined toward chaos. I prefer the sort of chaos that gets powerful information into the hands of everyone I like. And I've got an Epic [Inspiring Philomath] who might just become Legendary if she builds the finest library in the domain. She can't easily travel, but she can rewrite, organize, and teach. Maybe we need a printing press. I have not looked too deeply into where books come from and I probably should.

So I'm helping start Hebron's library off sensibly by writing down everything I know. I may not know much, but it's good practice just to write an essay to establish what I do know and to make sure we don't have to go flying all over the place looking for a book again next time we want to put a lock on something.

I also write down information about Sorcery (Defiance) just in case it's useful to someone, but I don't think anyone will be able to target someone else's quests without [Witness]. Still, it wasn't in Corwen's skill book, and it's better to know it exists than not. Someone might still be able to make use of the mental effect resistance.

Before we get started on any copper working, we work together to build Hebron's new forge. In our absense, the dwarves got a kiln built for making charcoal for fuel. Copper has laid out blueprints and made some pieces while we were gone, but the heavy lifting goes to people who are not nine years old with 12 Strength. I help how I can, but the dwarves honestly have this one in hand.

Experience rushes into my aura, and my vis absorbs it and integrates it. Once the flood from the Deed settles, I notice my rank progress meter is now sitting at over 10%. I hadn't expected to make that much progress from this, but then I remember that Milo got Elite rank when we built our first inn in Grubwick. Civilization milestones are actually pretty big.

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I'm not the only one to benefit from this. Everyone made progress from the Deed, though it wasn't enough in itself for anyone to rank up yet.

We don't have any wine to celebrate with, but we've got Nefern beer that I'm not allowed to drink and grape juice that I am.

Then it's to the pins. We're low on copper and wanting to do some dungeon runs anyway, so we take Copper and head to the Copper Mine. We fight low-level bats and giant spiders and go no deeper than the second floor, collecting as much copper as we can carry along the way.

I carve out a stone mold for my lightning duck pins, and while pouring them, I use [Imbue Item]. With my vis, I attune the little copper pins with the concepts of speed, flight, travel, and connection.

They do not yet work as communicators. I'm sure it's possible, but I don't know the sigils for it yet. For now, we'll need to keep relying on [Telepathy]. I can connect with them more easily when they're wearing the pins, so that's still a bonus.

I still have to wonder, how did people wind up becoming psychic? Was magic always there all along? Were we touched by aliens? Where did vis come from? I don't have any books on the topic, but I do have another reincarnator from my era.

"Basalt, did people become psychic in your time?" I ask.

"How far ahead do you remember?" Basalt asks.

"About 2015-ish, except for trivial things like movies and games. Alex only gave me happy memories and didn't see a point in traumatizing a baby."

"Oh, yeah, makes sense," Basalt says. "I wouldn't have wanted to possess a baby, but it sounds weirdly less traumatic when you put it like sharing happy memories and bedtime stories. Though that also means you wouldn't have learned any hard lessons he did. You are very fortunate to have the family you do."

"I know," I say quietly. "So how did it happen?"

"Dunno. We didn't get further than almost-magic neuro-tech before I died. Let me tell you, people being able to argue on social media just by thinking was not an improvement."

"Well, I'm sure Stephen Hawking would have appreciated it," I say.

"Too bad he died before we got that far." He pauses thoughtfully. "Can we reincarnate him?"

"We can't afford him."

"Man. Fine, who's our next peasant to spawn?"

"I have another idea for that, actually…" I say. "By all means, let's continue the dwarves, but I want to experiment a bit and try to reincarnate one of my past lives with a copper statue rather than stone."

"Alright, I'll keep working on the stone ones, then," Basalt says.

I lived five million lives. It only takes figuring out how to filter them to locate one suitable for my next project.

See, the essence cost of the spawning platform is a cost, yes, but it's not one paid to the Great Orb to "purchase" a soul from. It's paid to the soul we're reincarnating, in the form of the body and skills they're getting. They each have a minimum requirement, which allows people to make Hearths give them a bigger head start and more bonuses.

Alexander Fizzlesnipe was expensive because he/I insisted on being spawned with adult level mental stats and full access to my astral tree. It was a cost paid by Corwen to me, not to some soul slave trader in astral space or whatever. Even without Alex's memories, Drake would have been an extremely intelligent baby, because Corwen did something to give my brain a boost. Anise could probably tell me. I might ask sometime. It's not important right now.

The dwarf spawner is neat and I have been fascinatedly scrolling through the Primary Soul Network. After finding Amethyst mildly annoying, I realize that the best way to make sure someone I'm spawning is compatible with me would be to make him also me. I have not yet figured out how to safely untangle the souls of the children my astral tree has been grafted to, but for this, I don't have to. I don't think I'd even need to use Necromancy for this. The spawning platform already has the mechanism to do this. All I have to do is designate it to be one of my own souls I'm putting in the spawned creature.

I don't carve this one out of stone. I make him from copper. We have only used stone statues thus far, as Basalt was aiming for tradition and I didn't argue. But now's a good time to experiment. Before I get started, I double-check with both Hebron and Corwen that this won't do anything bad like instantly kill the human body I already have in order to spawn this guy. They assure me that it's fine and it works as I assume it does, so I get to work.

Using [Astral Contact], I wake up the ghost of a gnome who died at Basic rank and start chatting with him. He's immediately amenable to the idea of being reincarnated in a new Hearth. It's not like he's doing anything, what with being dead and all. He promises to be more careful this time, which sounds rather more ominous than intended considering he perished in his first life doing what gnomes do best. That is to say, he electrocuted himself. Seventeen times. I am trying not to be judgmental because he is basically me and I completely understand. I'm sure being made of copper and from a place named Tempest will help somehow?

My gnomish effigy is going to be more of an abstract piece than a fancy statue. Two hollow spheres for the head and torso, and simple rods for the arms and legs. For the face, I cover the head sphere with another sheet of copper for "skin" and build a face from it. A big honking nose, two deliberately misshapen ears, a broad grinning mouth, a wrinkly brow, a jutting chin. I use two orange topazes from the Living Stone Caverns for eyes, putting my [Lapidary] skill to good use in shaping them.

I don't actually want to spend that much time on this, as perfectionism could easily turn this task from a few days to a few months. After playing around with the face until it's good enough, I proclaim it finished. He's going to be wanting to upgrade his body himself. I just need to get him started. Having another set of hands sooner is more useful than having a fantastic set of hands later and will often help make that 'later' sooner.

That's worth a bunch of levels in various crafting skills, plus [Labor of Love]. I had a blast making it, and anticipate many more blasts as soon as I introduce him to Klog, the Epic goblin inventor.

Because actually having two of me around might get a bit weird, we block off most specific memories from the root life to allow the gnome to essentially have only the memories of his one previous life plus a bundle of fun Earth pop culture references he will totally thank us for leaving him with.

With the help of Rowan's muscles and additional height (this kid is going to be a tall one), I place the meter-tall copper gnome on the spawning platform along with some random junk we already had lying around for a few easy additional starting skill levels. Fortunately, copper is more valuable than stone per gram, so I'm well over the 10,000 essence minimum. So I select the soul of the gnome in the interface and pull the lever to spawn my new [Gnomish Tinkerer].

The objects on the platform sublime into protean plasm and flow into the gnome, and copper becomes flesh and blood as he opens his vivid orange eyes.

"My name is Pinion Hebron Tempest Tiganna," says the gnome. "And I have to say, that is an excellent name. Wait, did I say that before I spawned, too? Did I pick the name myself, which is why I'm so proud of it? My memories of being dead are a little fuzzy. But I clearly remember being a gnome once before. And also… television?"

I chuckle. "Yes, you're welcome. I'm Drake. We spoke. This is kind of weird."

"Is it?" Pinion asks. "It doesn't seem that weird to me. I'm alive and that's fantastic. If you think it's weird, we don't have to tell everyone that we originate from the same Earthling. It probably doesn't matter much, seeing as I don't remember anything but reading books and watching screens."

"What matters is that we're still both connected to the same astral tree," I say. "Which means we can communicate from any distance through him. And it was less confusing to think of us as three souls working together, even if we're connected and we've shared memories. We may be able to safely remove that connection entirely someday."

"What benefit would there be to doing so?"

"We'd be able to reincarnate independently. I'm a long way off from being confident about trying to manipulate my astral root like that, though."

"Are you planning on doing so?"

I shake my head. "No. But I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't give the five million souls I'm responsible for a chance at freedom, whatever they want to do with that."

Pinion nods. "I understand. And I appreciate this chance at living again and also the fact that you made me immune to electrical damage."