An Unbound Soul

I lay in bed conducting my somewhat regular night time introspection. Eric had cut me off in the middle of a very uncomfortable thought earlier, that maybe people were brainwashed into thinking they couldn't do anything without skills. Regardless of whether they were physically able to consider alternatives, it was obvious that everyone was completely dependent on the System. That meant that research and development wasn't a thing that could usefully happen, because it would take massive amounts of effort to get to the point where you could start making things that the System otherwise gave you for 'free'.

To make a better sword, you didn't give a team of scientists a lab and a research budget; you just raised your smithing level. A delver then used that better sword to go deeper into a dungeon and bring out better materials, with which an even better sword was forged. Rinse and repeat until the smith died of old age and was replaced by someone with lower skill, or until the delver hits the bottom of the dungeon and there were no new materials to get. You could only make incremental progress that way; at no point would the development result in, for example, a gun.

Would a gun even do anything here? Presumably armour improved with tailoring skill, just like my staves improved with my carpentry skill. If I built a gun, would it even penetrate my own leather armour? What if it was made by someone with a high smithing skill? Would the System recognise it as a weapon and apply its physics breaking changes? What if we did develop a gun, and the gunpowder was mixed up by a high level alchemist while the barrel was made by a low level smith? Would the whole contraption explode the first time it was fired?

Putting this all together didn't make for a great picture. There existed the System, which I originally thought was cool because of Earth stories and games, and hadn't really questioned in the way that I should have. From the way skills were grouped based apparently on human convenience instead of reality, I had concluded it was artificially built, rather than being able to explain it away with hand-wavy magic. Then I noticed the way the System insinuated itself into people's lives, made them dependent on it, and blocked off outside progress.

It looked to me like the System was designed to keep people at a low tech level. On top of that, there was something that had attempted to interact with me via the System; either the System itself or something controlling it. Presumably either the System was intelligent or else whatever intelligence was behind its creation was still there, watching. That raised the uncomfortable possibility that if I did start to introduce Earth technology, I'd find something worse than an orc standing over me. It would probably be advisable to forget all about building a generator or radio.

Then there was the brainwashing. Was that related at all? I knew Lord Reid couldn't see my soul magic affinity, and because I could see it just fine in my own status, I had concluded that the brainwashing blocked his perception of it rather than the System not displaying it. That would imply that the brainwashing was something separate; if the brainwashing came from the System, why wouldn't the System just not show soul affinity stuff at all? That way even I wouldn't know I had it. But if it was separate, why was it separate? Was it done by someone else? I'd more or less concluded that the brainwashing was worldwide, and so had made the admittedly large assumption that it was linked to the System. If it wasn't, then where did it come from?

The primary purpose of the brainwashing seemed to be to get everyone to follow some unspoken set of rules, and to hide the fact that they even were rules. Any individual in this town could walk into a store, grab everything and walk out, and there was nothing there to stop them, yet they not only wouldn't do it themselves but also couldn't consider the possibility of someone else doing it either. I could rob this whole town blind if I so desired; even if I did so in front of a room full of witnesses, they would probably just ignore or forget the evidence of their own eyes. But again, doing such a thing raised the possibility that I would very briefly wake up one night to a dragon chewing on my guts.

There were secondary effects, that I could charitably describe as numbing society. Less competition, less growth, less innovation. On its own, it wouldn't completely kill progress, technological or otherwise, but it certainly slowed it. Combined with the System, I could believe that this world would stagnate at its current stage of development indefinitely. The stage of development it had been created at. By all accounts, during the seeding fully grown adults popped into existence into fully furnished houses. It was like this whole place was created to be a stagnant society. Maybe this whole planet was a zoo, and some aliens somewhere were deriving enjoyment from watching the quaint little humans live out their boring little lives.

I'd been summoned to the guild master's office on my way back into the guild today, who, after berating me for causing him more work yet again, went on to ask plenty of good questions about how to organise this tournament and how to get the most out of it for all the delvers involved. He recognised it was a good idea, and once prompted jumped on it immediately, but it was an idea anyone could have had. Maybe they had, and just hadn't acted on before. It was almost like I was walking around a town of NPCs who had to wait for me to walk up to them and bash a button before they'd progress the story.

If the System and the brainwashing came from two separate entities, then which was the one talking to me? I'd been communicated with through the System, which obviously pointed at the System or its controller, but I'd also had my memories tampered with and watched Xander's party forget all about the dungeon core. But then the effects on both were different from the global brainwashing; I'd been allowed to notice my own changes as soon as I thought about them, as had Xander's party been allowed to remember most of what was beyond the final door of the dungeon. Could the one who messed with my memory not be the one responsible for the global brainwashing?

This raised another possibility of why the unknown entity wanted me to grow. If someone was brainwashing the whole world, and it was someone different to whoever was running the System and dungeons, perhaps they wanted me to release the world from its mind control. The one person in the world immune to it, being forced to acquire significant amounts of power before the world's greatest hypnotist noticed my existence. That was a terrifying thought; if that was the case, my 'quests' would never stop. I'd be forced to gain more and more power until I was ready to fight something capable of puppeteering the entire world, or else die trying.

But then, if there were two different powers at play here, why would people be brainwashed into relying on the System? My previous line of reasoning suggested they were competitors. Once again, I was stymied by the lack of available information. I needed to get to the bottom of this bloody dungeon again and have a good long chat with the mysterious voice that I found there. I would also quite like to look up any new inventions that had been made in the past few centuries, to see just how dulled progress really was here. It should also be simple enough to experiment with whether System reliance involved brainwashing, by asking someone if they could learn how to do something without a skill and watching if the memories drained from their head. That was enough of a to-do list to be getting on with.

ding

For your efforts to uncover the nature of the world, [Researcher] awards 2 soul points.

And there rang my alarm to alert me that it was time to sleep. Almost.

ding

New skill acquired: [Mana Perception]

Skill [Mana Sense] consumed by superior skill [Mana Perception]

Skill [Mana Perception] advanced to level 2

Huh? An immediate level up? Was that because it ate [Mana Sense], which was above level ten? An unexpected bonus, but one I would happily take. I turned it on, managed to last all of two seconds before slamming it back off, then spent the next ten minutes desperately battling against my dinner, which had a sudden desire to not be inside me anymore. There was just... too much. The dungeon shone brightly at the other end of the street. A hundred people lit up around me. My own body became a complex image of currents and flows. Even the air above the town and the earth beneath it traced out faint patterns. [Mana Sense] had only given a vague impression of where mana was and wasn't, but this was something else entirely. Maybe this was what it would feel like to be born blind, to live your life never knowing what light was, then to suddenly have your sight restored.

How did it even work? A human brain didn't have anything in it capable of this, or at least an Earth brain didn't. I'd asked before what exactly the System was doing to my body when a stat increased, and I'd waved [Mana Sense] away as being not much, but that excuse wouldn't fly here. Did the System just rewire a significant chunk of my brain? That would be downright scary. A better option would be if humans in this world had this capability to start with, and the System just switched it on. Again I remembered that I had first sensed the presence of mana without any System aid, so there must have been at least some potential there.

Actually, there was an even scarier option. The System awarded physical and mental stats alike, but increasing strength never bulked up my muscles. In that case, there was no reason why increasing intelligence would bulk up my brain. If so, what else would it be doing? Physical stat buffs were body affinity, but mental stat buff spells were soul. If that carried over to what the System was doing, was it mucking around with my soul?

Back on Earth, a soul wasn't a thing that I could see, and if someone told me something was messing about with mine, I wouldn't have believed them, or cared in the slightest. Having my brain messed around with, on the other hand, would have been terrifying. After being reincarnated, things had changed somewhat. There was a 'me' that had survived my own death, which presumably meant there was a part of me that would continue to live on after this life, too. Having my brain played around with would be scary, but it would only affect this life. Eventually I would die. Having my soul messed around with could cause problems forever.

Then again, calling things 'soul' magic might be nothing more than brain manipulation to begin with. And maybe I had been 'reincarnated' simply by transplanting memories from a dead human corpse, particularly if this was all some alien zoo. I'd ruled out the possibility of me being back on Earth stuck in some sort of VR thing, because the technology required to insert knowledge into my head was so far advanced compared to anything we were supposed to have that anyone who possessed it would have far better things to do than kidnap random people off the street. That didn't mean I wasn't caught up in some alien equivalent. Some alien version of the Truman show. As time went by, I seemed to be getting less and less certain of what the heck was going on.

I really, really needed a proper chat with the voice at the bottom of the dungeon. Maybe I could find another party to speed run the whole thing with me again.

"That won't be necessary. Let me introduce myself properly, child. My name is Erryn, the one my children refer to as the earth mother."