NOVEL NEXT 146 - Townhouse 1/3 - An Idle Mind is the Devil’s Workshop
After the propaganda snoozefest of the Imperial Museum, Archmund was perfectly fine spending the next day within his townhouse. He had work to do.
Well, that was the realization he settled on after 3 hours of fruitlessly trying to escape.
His father also had "work to do", mostly consisting of talking to other nobles and extracting concessions from them. He'd sealed Archmund within their townhouse, behind the strongest magic protections money could by. Archmund, naturally, had tried to break through them. It wouldn't do if he was trapped within the townhouse if an enemy were to make it in.
After a few hours of testing the wards for any weakness at all, he had to conclude that they were far, far beyond his level, even with the Capital Wall allegedly bringing everyone's magic power down to Second or Third Awakening. So he'd contented himself with "internal work".
This was, he noted, supposed to be a leisure trip for him. And yet he was "working". Though not in any sense that his father would recognize as work.
To his father, work meant flattering other nobles, arranging for export deals and other financial manipulations. To Archmund, work was the matter of building a personal power base that could stand up against the grim machinations of Empire.
The population density of the Imperial Capital compared to Granavale County suggested to him one thing.
There was either magic or technology that could grow massive amounts of food and transport it to the capital before it could spoil. There were estates between the Terminal Wall and the Elysian Wall; doubtless a large portion of that land was dedicated to farming. There were efficiencies that made it possible to grow so much land consistently in a way that wouldn't lead to famine, the slow starvation and decay of a once-grand city.
He gazed out the window. He'd grown reliant on his Tablet, which remained so very far away in Granavale County.
Gemmy.
Present.
Archmund nodded gently.
How many people would you say are in this city?
It was pretty likely Gemmy didn't actually "know" that, since Archmund didn't have any real level of authority over the capital city, but Gemmy soothed the paths of his thoughts and rounded away inconveniences.
Ten buildings on this block. Fifty blocks in either direction to the Imperial Palace and the Capital Wall. Ten streets in view, all covering maybe 60 degrees of a circle. Even assuming a low population density of ten people per building, that's 600,000 at least.
That's just within the Capital Wall.
Correct. I would estimate the population of the City as—
In the millions.
Which was a lot for a medieval technology level, which suggested that their tech level was decidedly post-medieval.
He needed to learn how.
Maybe the solution was magic, in which case he wouldn't be able to duplicate it easily — not without a significant expenditure of wealth. But maybe there were simple technological principles that had already been discovered and could be followed.
This world understood that visible light could be split into a rainbow, after all. There was a mental tug-of-war, a push-pull between tech that he thought made sense for them to have and tech they actually had. Technological development wasn't linear; the Incas didn't use the wheel because it was impractical in their mountain empire.
So there was no proof his assumptions about easy discoveries that he could make would hold, unless he did some serious investigation into what he could improve.
But some truths were plainly evident.
There was amazing food technology.
The Empire was global. The Elysian Wall was filled with exotic plants, but the food of the Imperial City was richly spiced, unlike the food he had back in Granavale County. There was a way to either transport those spices, or to grow them locally.
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"I should ask Raehel for some books," Archmund said, thinking out loud. "Specifically the state of agriculture. Do they have crop rotation? What do they use for fertilizer — mined minerals or manure or something more effective? What about sowing and harvesting — are they reliant on having people do all those tasks?"
His misgiving intruded upon him, of course. He was a Granavale in the Duchy of Agraria. If there were any books on farming, his family would likely already own them.
Your family has been constrained for generations in the type of magic they could use, Gemmy said. You have a very limited number of Gems, and none of them were fit for mass agricultural purposes.
Archmund nodded pensively.
Raehel, as a University Master, could doubtless get access to their books on magical agricultural enhancement methods. Unfortunately, these methods might be wholly and entirely useless to us given our material constraints.
"I would be amazed, personally, if they have something equivalent to the Haber-Bosch process," Archmund said. The Haber-Bosch process allowed for the conversion of gaseous nitrogen, with its triple chemical bond and famous unreactivity, into ammonia, an easily accessible source of chemical energy for a growing plant. "But it wouldn't surprise me if someone's determined a way to split the air. When I fought besides Angelina Omnio, her lightning made the air smell like ozone. I doubt any of our books would… Gemmy, can you connect me to Mary?"
Your spirits are bound. You may want to be sitting down for this. I can trigger the process.
Archmund sank into an armchair, leaning slightly forward, wondering if he should do the Charles Xavier psychic pose.
And then he completely and utterly collapsed, slouching onto himself like a ragdoll, as his consciousness was shifted into the realm of the spirit. He was his body, but now his sense was almost all in his magic, in the spirit that poured from his form and mind, scattered across the land, embedded so deeply in his Attuned and Awakened Gems. He could see his body from across the room, from his bracelet where his three Gems sank embedded.
The world was brilliant, blazing with color, now that he was in the means of the soul. The Gem-conduits running outside the window blazed, rainbow-white around a black void, so bright he couldn't see anything else outside the window. It was all just a sea of power and energy and mystical light.
He panicked. This must have been like what it was to be dead. He felt the fear bubbling up in his stomach, the suddenness of his breaths, cold sweat upon his brow and palms.
He opened his eyes. The world snapped back to normal.
"What the fuck. What the fuck was that," he muttered. "How was I able to do that? Gemmy, was that all you?"
I was able to induce the state but it is you who has the natural capability to enter it. If you were not capable, I would not be able to induce it in you. I wouldn't be able to induce it in any of your friends from home.
Already the memory was fading from his mind, replaced by words to define and contextualize profundity. His magic was him, every bit as much as his body and mind were, and so when he ignored the senses of his body, entered a state where he wasn't stuck in the constraints of his own flesh, his self was stretched over all the physical things he'd ever embedded his magic in. Therefore, he could be all those other things.
This time he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.
It wasn't like teleportation or any such transport. It was simply an extension of being. Of existing across the world, in many places, everywhere all at once—
"How come I can do this?" he said, opening his eyes, breaking the spell. "It seems… really powerful. I'm only at the Second Awakening."
Gemmy didn't answer him.
"Right. You don't know anything I don't, not really," he said. "If I had to guess, my theory's right. Something I did while training or something I did out of ignorance lets me exist in this disembodied state, which Gelias and Raehel haven't thought to mention."
It's not disembodied, Gemmy said.
"Then what is it?"
Gemmy didn't answer. It made sense. Gemmy oscillated between obviously having a mind of its own and being nothing more than Archmund's subconscious thoughts made manifest. It wasn't really his problem. But there wasn't a lot of detail in being told "it wasn't disembodied."
What did that really mean?
He leaned back into his chair, into the state, paying careful attention to the sensations running through his body. As his mind extended, slipped the cage of flesh for crystalline Gem, the magic coalescing of the universe itself and the will of the mindless dead, reanimated by his tiger-force flowing through it.
It wasn't disembodied. It was…
He was here. He was in his seat, seeing with sight beyond eyes. He knew the motion of magic, of the brilliant flare of the Imperial City, not from vision but through his magic sense. But he was also sitting on the table embedded in a bracelet, for that was where he flowed; he was locked up in Granavale Manor's armory for safekeeping; he was trapped deep beneath the Dungeon, in an endless cycle of death and rebirth and suffering as he strove to burst out to the surface, consumed by Monsters stronger than he, never to escape the cycle; he was cleaning his room, folding his sheets lovingly, fluffing and sniffing his pillow and then fluffing it—
He opened his eyes. "I must be imagining things."
You imagined nothing.
He sank back into the morass.
There he was, sitting upon the table, surrounded on all sides by the embrace of cool metal. The metal hugged him, and yet he knew that if he just strained a little bit, gave the slightest push, it would yield.
There were daggers in his heart, shards that chained his motion, that kept him from moving freely. But he was strong. He could dodge those shards, push against them instead of letting them pierce him, and so he could push against his mortal cage and burst forth, freed of the metal embrace.
He jumped into his own awaiting hand, and then he opened his eyes.
"Truly bizarre," Archmund said. "But how does this help me speak to Mary?"
Gemmy said nothing, but the feeling of sniffing his own pillow returned to his mind—
"No. No. You can't be serious."