NOVEL NEXT 105 - Influence
In his old life, Archmund had been a voracious reader from time to time, when the mood struck him.
When he was very young, he could sit for hours reading all sorts of stories. Picture books. School assignments. Fantasy novels. Medical books for the layperson — a guide to allergens his parents had bought for him when they realized he'd had a deadly peanut allergy. Books on "how things worked", visual bibles that in retrospect were meant to rouse interest instead of being truly informative. More fantasy novels.
But as he'd gotten older, the siren song of social media had undeniably weakened his ability to sit down and read a long text.
He wondered whether it was his fault or the fault of the world. At some point before his prior death, he'd learned that new student admittees to even elite universities were unable to sit down and read multiple books in half a year. They'd been constricted to only reading excerpts.
Anyways, there were two books that he swore buy, even now, in this new life.
Unfortunately, both of them were self-help books, that insipid and insidious genre that was the antonym of high literature. And yet they were still so very useful.
"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie was a book written in the 1920s. It contained some very basic principles like "being nice to people will make you like them", "people love talking about themselves", and "people like being called by name because it makes them feel special."
The other was Robert Cialdini's "Influence", which took a lot of the things in "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and made them more "scientific". These included things like "reciprocity", which was a fancy way of saying "people return favors done to them" and "consistency" which meant "people like it when others look consistent" and "social proof" which meant "people follow mob mentality".
People seemed to be the same, even in this new world. Human psychology, somehow, was aligned across these different universes. But at this point, he was utterly numb to these kinds of surprises. At some point, he had just accepted that a lot of his knowledge about the universe and human psychology still applied here, even if they had been emergent properties of evolution or the initial boundary conditions of the universe or the whims of whatever God or Goddess was in charge of it all.
The universe hadn't been designed with the goal of making mayonnaise possible, for one example. And yet all of the complex social and societal assemblages meant that it technically was, even if it wasn't practical for mass distribution.
Archmund had no idea if any of this had anything to do with his "Influence" Skill. So far as he could tell, the Skill was entirely mystical and supernatural. He could feel his magic flowing out of him, into the Gemstone Cufflinks and from there into the the Dungeon, but once it left his immediate vicinity and entered the foundation stones of Granavale Dungeon, he lost track of it. He didn't know where the power of the Skill ended and the inherent structure of the Dungeon began.
There was another book he'd read, a long time ago. John Kenneth Galbraith's The Anatomy of Power, not to be confused with The 48 Laws of Power. An investigation of "influence" from another angle.
Galbraith broke power down into three categories: compensatory, meaning bought with money, condign, meaning by the threat of violence, and conditioned, meaning through persuasion or ideology.
Archmund wondered which situation he was presently in as he stared down an Undead Clerk, as if holding it still with his gaze.
This Clerk was unblemished and uninjured. He hadn't laid a hand on it.
He'd harvested five or so high quality physical enhancement Gems from its fellows, but when he'd channeled a tiny bit of his magic through them, he could feel mental stimulation — He could feel the magic resonating in his mind as well as his body. Mental aspects felt like fluid mirrors and lenses that twisted the air about his mind's eye, rather than iron-like tent stakes that moored him to the physical world.
Yes, there were stakes, and yes, he felt bound to earth. But he could tell they weren't pure enough for his liking. There was still a slipperiness, an ephemerality, a sense of the indubitable and ineffable spirit within those Gems. They could've been top quality, among the best of the Empire's Gems, but they weren't the best.
(Though obviously he wasn't going to sell these to the Empire. Just the dregs. These he was going to keep for himself and his associates as a secret weapon.)
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He'd tried many things to purify the Monsters.
He'd thought the best way to create a physically-oriented Gem was to summon a Bestial Monster, abuse it until its Constitution was immense and dwarfed its Willpower, then restore its well of power by feeding it other Monsters. The power would go to the physical stats, and excess mental stats would be vented as Gemstone excreta of pure mental energy.
In theory, in a world without limits, this was true. But this still left some Willpower remaining.
He'd also tested whether Intelligence-linked attacks, such as his various heat manipulation techniques, could affect Willpower.
It was a mixed bag. His Infrared Lance and Microwave and Heat Wave all caused Constitution to increase, so they were of no use compared to just hitting the Monsters with his swords. His Strobe attack disoriented and blinded the Monsters, and affected their Willpower, but it was slow. Far too slow for his purposes.
Hence his needed to master this Influence skill, which hopefully would be far more powerful and far more efficient and far less of a drain both on himself and the Dungeon.
Because the power of the Dungeon had limits.
When he'd first stepped down here, in his first forays into the First Tier, and even his early explorations into the Second Tier, that power had seemed unlimited.
A twisted reflection of his home, and a demented shade of his mother. Magic swords that sung of rage and nobility. Horses that became men and shot fire. An impossible blue sky, and a labyrinth with fountains of coffee.
While he was exploring, all things had seemed possible. On the way down, Monsters had spawned as far as the eye could see, and the Gemstones they dropped followed strange and arcane and almost-logical rules. But now that he was tied into the systems of the Dungeon itself, he was straining against limitations just barely visible.
("Back when". As if it had been all that long ago. As if it hadn't literally been that day. Or was it? It was hard to tell time down here. But it still couldn't have been more than 1 or 2 days.)
There was only so much miasma to go around. He could only control so many Monsters at once. The more he tried to spawn, the weaker they would each individually be. He could concentrate power via Amalgamation, but the lost power didn't dissolve back into the Dungeon, it just seemed to vanish entirely, going somewhere that he didn't comprehend.
Maybe they had been created or worsened by the Princess's Grand Working, or maybe they always had been this bad.
But no matter how bad his understanding of the limitations was, he had to persevere anyways. There had to be something he could do. He just needed to get more efficient. He needed to squeeze out every last drop of power as Gem or Gear before Amalgamation, instead of
And if he fed the Gems or Gear to Monsters, instead of the Monsters themselves, sometimes the stat bonuses were preserved at a much higher ratio. Power extruded as Gemstone Gear or harvested from Gems often was higher than a mere 50% preservation, closer to 70%-90%.
It took him a few trials to realize that this only applied to Gems that he'd infused with a tiny sliver of his own magic.
He really wasn't sure how to feel about that. He felt fine. And it didn't seem like there were any maluses or negative status effects or titles or literally anything else that could indicate anything was wrong in his Gemstone Tablet.
If a tiny bit of his magic was all he needed to give to increase efficiency, he would. Every other time he'd burned through his magic, he'd ended up coming out the other side stronger for it anyways with a deepened magical pool and some new Skills as well.
Anyways, since the miasma reserve was limited and the natural bounty of the Underworld wasn't unlimited, efficiency was paramount.
So if he could master his Influence skill, he could attack and manipulate the Willpower of the Monsters directly, on the spiritual level. He would make them harden their instinct-driven minds, or extrude mentally-fortified gear. He would create a perfectly-polarized Monster, one that consisted solely of physical strength without any mental defenses — and vice versa.
The plan was simple.
He would hit a bestial Monster physically to turn it to a vessel of pure Constitution, and kill it to recover its Gem of Pure High Constitution.
He would give this Gem the tiniest amount of his magic — just enough to corrupt its purity and make it his own.
He would take another humanoid Monster and attack it mentally, draining it so it would extrude armor that enhanced Willpower, draining its Charisma and Intelligence to as close to 0 as he could get it.
Then he would take that armor away, leaving it a beast of pure physicality with no reinforcements.
He would force-feed it that Gem of Pure High Constitution, making it a vessel for physical attributes.
And then he would let it feed. On lesser Monsters, fresh from the miasma, or their Gems, corrupted with his influence to preserve their purity. If necessary, he'd repeat the process to purify the final product further.
The last step would be to hit it hard enough on the unwanted dimension to extrude the unwanted attributes as Gear.
Perhaps he could develop better substrate as feed. Perhaps he could figure out what stimuli could create materials attuned to "Strength" or "Intelligence" as opposed to "physical" or "mental" aspects.
He wished Gelias had taken one of the Gemstone Keycards, so Archmund could reach him. Gelias was in-tune enough with magic that he'd probably know just what was needed to generate Gems of greater nuance. Gems of Strength and Dexterity as opposed to Gems of the Physical Attributes.
But what he could do was give the proper instructions to his other companions. Even though they didn't have proper mental attacks, they'd be able to beat the Monsters up to create Gems of Pure High Constitution, allowing for the creation of perfected physical vessels.
The deeper Archmund delved, the more sure he became that an ideal was possible. He would create the perfect husk. The blank slate, the Tabula Rasa.
The ultimate canvas upon which to express his power.