NOVEL NEXT 109 - Unlocking Another Skill That Will Come Useful In Later
Rory left to harvest more Monsters, and Archmund fashioned some carpets and tarps into a makeshift cot for Mary and placed her there to heal.
It would be quite some time before Archmund's companions were at his level, even if he'd given them Gems to advance their capabilities. No matter how hard they strove, he would keep running ahead of them, as fast as he could.
It wasn't an intellectual motivation. He could admit that much.
He was afraid — deathly afraid — of failure. Of letting them catch up. Of being exceeded.
He wanted to be successful. He wanted to survive and do well in this brutal fantasy world. He would squeeze out every last drop of potential from the resources presented to him, in the hope that when he finally truly collapsed from exhaustion, he would be so far ahead of his peers that he could take as long as he needed to recover.
He had been tired, then dead, then alive again. In this life, he wasn't tired yet. Sure, he'd been "tired", but not the bone-aching weariness that made him want to curl up and sleep dreamlessly forever. No matter what hits he took, he could stand up to fight again.
But he knew he wouldn't last forever, so he needed to survive long enough.
Unless, of course, he could powerlevel his Wisdom stat to boost his willpower so he could keep doing this forever.
But he doubted that was the case. His stat was "Wisdom"; only the dead, for some reason, had "Willpower" in its place. There must have been a significance to that, but he'd be damned if he knew what it was.
You couldn't rely on other people, and you certainly couldn't rely on the remains of the dead, be they traditions or relics, to guide you through new situations. You had to take their leavings as guidance, not as gospel, and forge your own path through a new world.
And that was how he found himself holding the Diamond Hand. It was an impromptu name that was unfortunately likely to stick, because he could not for the life of him think of a better one. It looked like diamond — clear crystal that refracted light — and it was a hand.
He had to confront the fact that he could use magic and he was actually pretty good at it, but he still didn't get it. Why did this hand survive being severed from the Ghost of Granavale, while tentacles he'd cut off other Monsters wisp away into miasma? What caused particular Monster parts to survive or evaporate? Gear and the core Gem always seemed to drop, but that was the only consistent rule he could recall from his battles.
That was a matter for philosophers of magic. Maybe Raehel had a point after all when she said he should consider pursuing magic as a field of formal study, but again, if he was going to do that, he wanted to be independently wealthy. Which meant he had to be powerful. Which meant squeezing the Dungeon for all it was worth.
Wealth and power were always intertwined.
He let his magic flow into the Diamond Hand. It felt honeycomb-like, as if made of emptied cells, vacated by the essence of the dead, waiting for his power to fill them. His magic blew through it like a breeze, the slightest flows whorling and eddying in each cell of the structure, before flowing back to him. With time, practice, and acclimation he'd be able to strengthen the flux, dense the concentration in each cell, but even this light tap was enough to flood his mind with a new instinct, the stirrings of the Skill contained within the Hand: it was Gear, shaped and defined, not the open-ended potential of Gem.
The instincts of the Monster seeped into him, a ravenous yearning mingled with a need for control.
He could relate.
"Gemmy, is there any way I can tell what the Skills in this hand actually do?"
"You can channel magic through your Tablet and the Gear simultaneously to determine its capabilities with minimal Attunement!"
He checked his Storage Gem at his waist. It still glowed a deep blue.
Expending an unknown amount of power to force the Skill learning and getting an intuitive grasp of it, or using his magic Tablet to get a high-level summary — the intuition could come with practice. He didn't have the power to spare. When he'd Awakened his Ruby of Energy, he'd been practicing with it for a hundred days, knowing every aspect of the Gem intimately. If he wanted a similar level of mastery with the Hand, he'd either need time or knowledge.
"Yeah, let's do that."
The basic Skill was called Warp.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
It granted control over space.
That had been one of the Monster's capabilities.
But he hadn't expected it to be the basic Skill unlocked by its remains. It seemed like such a powerful ability for someone to get intuitively if they just happened to stumble across the item.
"You're underestimating yourself!" Gemmy whispered in his mind. "Not anyone could cut off a body part from a Monster with a hide as hard as diamond, much less preserve it! And not everyone has the magical reserves strong enough to fuel such a spell, nor the mental capacity to understand what it's doing and its implications!"
Archmund frowned. "Gemmy, is there something inherent to your… existence, where you feel compelled to flatter me?"
"Just trying on personalities to determine which one will perpetuate my continued survival with a mote of consciousness! Currently, I'm deploying a basic level of flattery! You are brilliant!"
Archmund frowned. "Hmmm. Don't do that."
"Your wish is my command!"
"Also, don't respond to my thoughts unless I actively ask you to by thinking at you or something. You're in my head. You know what I mean by that."
"As you say!"
"So the preserved state of this Diamond Hand is because of my Disarm Skill?"
"I believe so! By Disarming, you break the link between wielder and weapon on a physical and metaphysical level!"
Great. There were metaphysical implications to it as well. Another thing for later.
Unless, of course, Gemmy was just restating his own subconscious thoughts back to him and not providing him with any insights into the true nature of things. Which was still possible.
A matter for later.
He raised the Diamond Hand and recalled the fight he'd won it in.
The Monster had expanded space, throwing his companions to the four corners of a vast but surmountable room. It hadn't been an extreme transformation, a hundredfold expansion at best, turning five feet of distance into five hundred.
He certainly could use more space in his office. It was pretty messy, what with the goop explosions from all his experiments and also Mary thrashing in her sleep in the corner.
Obviously he didn't want to accidentally stretch her bones or rip her in half, so he would have to make do with adding more space away from where she lay resting. He'd add a few feet of space between the door and his desk. Nothing too dramatic.
His magic pooled within the Hand, in each of the cells like globules of honey. He pushed, forced, flowed.
The bubbles popped, the walls burst, overflowing, running one into another, thick and gloopy yet also like the wind, like the stretching of limbs, like the cracking of heaven and earth — and the room stretched.
It wasn't by much. Only a foot or so. But it was more than nothing. Mastery would come with further practice. Of that he was sure.
He walked over and took a closer look. The material seemed stretched, but not distorted. Something about it defied simple examination. It was as if it had been duplicated so there was more, yet also less. Something had come from nothing, which felt impossible, yet he felt there wasn't more.
And yet his mind was set racing once again at the possibilities.
"It's more powerful within the Dungeon itself," Gemmy said, interrupting his imaginings.
"What did I say about reading my thoughts?"
"Sorry!"
He waited for a second, but Gemmy was silent. "…Please continue."
"Within the Dungeon, Warp is able to draw upon latent environmental miasma to create and distort space. Outside of its confines and area of influence, the amount of power necessary to create space is far beyond someone at the First Awakening."
"I see," Archmund said. It was disappointing, but it made sense. Breaking the laws of the universe couldn't be done for free. "So is this useful at all outside the Dungeon?"
"It's weaker, not useless. If you brought it into another Dungeon or a nexus of sacred power, it could likely draw on that environmental energy to similar effect. Another power of the Warp Skill is the ability to fold and unfold existing space, but generally this is difficult for 3-dimensional beings to comprehend."
"I see," Archmund said. He didn't know what Gemmy was on about.
Sure, it was difficult for 3D beings to visualize bending a 3D surface from 4 dimensions or above. But it was easy to get around that by imagining bending a 2D surface in 3 dimensions. It wasn't perfect, but the analogy was good enough.
Take one corner of his office and the other corner, for example.
Instead of warping them apart by adding space, he could instead fold space, touching the two points to each other, like folding a piece of paper.
The magic flowed out of him and into the channels of magic that infused the Dungeon, following the veins and arteries that already existed from his seat of power and authority. The Dungeon already had the natural capacity to grow and expand — and this allowed him to fold one corner to another.
He knew what he had done intellectually, but it was still odd to look at. It was an opening to a tunnel that had no border. He walked through it, and emerged on the other side of the room. There were no hints of borders or cut-offs or edges — when he walked, the space was continuous. Gemmy had been right; he could know it intellectually, but intuition was a far different matter.
I wonder if there's a way to make it less disorienting. Gemmy?
Gemmy gave him a few tweaks, and in a few seconds, a thin glowing border emerged around the wormhole. The portal flattened, becoming a 2D disc, a straightforward cut in space as opposed to a proper 3D wormhole.
It was easier to perceive, but Archmund couldn't help but feel he'd lost something profound — that he'd abandoned the world of understanding for one of convenience.
"And Gemmy, this is also restricted to the Dungeon?"
"If you're powerful enough, I'm sure you could use its capabilities elsewhere. But can you project your magic far enough on your own to fold one corner of the world to another?"
He couldn't.
Not yet. But perhaps one day.
For now, he could master his power in the Dungeon. It was a hostile and dangerous place, but it was also his proving ground. He could see every inch of it through his Gemstone Tablet, and he noticed that Beatrice was beginning to head back.
He might as well show off a bit.
The Dungeon carried his will and his magic, shaped by the Diamond Hand, bubbling, swirling, popping, connecting distant corridors to his office, and a gate tore itself open right in front of Beatrice's surprised face.
"Beatrice," Archmund said. "I assume you wanted to talk?"