.
Ryuu finally stayed alive longer than a quarter-hour on the ninth try. He managed it by leaping out of the nook and running with the wind along the cliff face. Using his [Strength Enhancement] skill, he would reach a higher ground that didn’t flood. He could then head away from the great cliffs and reach forested ground in which the storm god didn’t so easily target him.
But even though he lasted a full hour that time, he lost in the end. Unable to target him from a distance, Ente-Agerak sent crushing spiritual pressure at him, then closed the distance on him when he couldn’t run. Ryuu was frozen in place as the storm god’s titanic fist descended on him.
I moved the observation sphere into the shattered hero’s field of vision. He was covered in death aura, but he would still be able to see and hear.
“Mr. Kowa, I know that if you could speak, you would be yelling, ‘how the hell can I beat this game?'”
Of course, he didn’t react. He couldn’t so much as blink, in this state.
“Whenever you went into battle against strong opponents like the archdemon, Arken fortified you with [Steel Mind]. When you traveled with that priestess, she surely cast some Temple magic such as [Heaven’s Will]. According to popular knowledge, the purpose is to bolster your confidence against a strong foe, but their real function is to shield you from spiritual pressure. Those spells don’t block everything, so the archdemon could still intimidate you into holding back some of your strength.”
I took a sip of my drink while letting the knowledge sink in. Then, I simply asked, “Doesn’t it piss you off that the enemy can stop you without even raising a finger?”
# # #
Chiara hadn’t died yet, probably because her knight training included survival skills. Still, she was becoming frustrated.
Ryuu had not reached a ‘save point’, so his scenario reset to the beginning with each death. Thus, his world and Chiara’s were now out of sync. For her, the sky was growing dark. She had made a crude nest in the intertwined boughs of a mangrove tree.
“How cold does it get here?” she wondered as she settled in. We could talk quietly at the moment; the tide was out and the water had fully withdrawn from the ground beneath us. The merrow patrols would not come any closer than a channel about twenty paces away, which was too far away for the seal-like crawl that was merrow land locomotion.
It shouldn’t get too cold, I assured her. We are practically on the equator here. We are near the coast of the Southern Continent.
I didn’t have a good spot to sleep, I realized. Chiara’s chest looked pretty comfy…
“What am I supposed to do, My Lady?” she asked, sounding a bit pathetic. “All I’ve been able to do is turn a broken seashell into a knife and I have nothing to cast magic with!”
She had evaded the merrow tribesmen who were patrolling the mangroves, but that and building this nest were the extent of her accomplishments. She knew little more than when she began.
I took a seat next to her and leaned against my new cushions. She looked down at me, then giggled.
Folding an arm around me, she returned to her musing. “Is wandering around this forest a mistake? Should I dive down into that deep spot instead?”
That might be worse, My Lady, I reasoned with her. The merrow are faster in the water than you.
“Right,” she nodded. “But are they down there, or do they live in the mangroves?”
Merrow make homes both in the depths and above water, and mangroves were ideal territory for an above-water village. But sharp drops like the blue hole are ideal territory for deepwater villages, since they can fashion cave dwellings in vertical walls and use Wind magic to create air pockets inside them.
The scenario is that you were captured as one of several land-dwellers and slipped away from an above-water camp. You don’t know where their main base is.
I didn’t know, either. The scenario has a lot of variations.
She fiddled with the simple knife she had fashioned by breaking a large shell. It was just a cutting edge. So far, she had only used it to filet a fish she had found stuck in a little tidal pool. It was useless as a weapon.
“I need a way to fight,” she whispered.
I think she was talking to herself, but I answered her, anyway.
Teach me some magic, and I can help, I told her. I can do a lot, even without a focus.
# # #
Dilorè had grown used to the trees constantly shifting up and down in relation to each other. They weren’t ‘trees’ in the ordinary sense. Instead of a single trunk and radiating branches, clusters of trunks and interlocking branches formed latticeworks that soared hundreds of paces tall. These were homes to all sorts of secondary plants that grew from the trunks and branches like barnacles on rocks. Many grew to the size of small trees, or clustered in large thickets and stands.
She had descended to sea level earlier, but concluded correctly that swimming was not a good idea. The root system for this strange ocean-going forest grew in a thick bramble that formed an ecosystem itself. The ocean waves were much slower than Huade though, because the ‘water’ was a thick soup of organics that moved like syrup.
The sun did not reach this deep, but the forest was alive with fairy lights of all kinds. She slid through the psychedelic scenery, using her stealth to avoid attracting the many predators around.
“This mind-shielding trick is too hard!” she complained in a whisper as she went.
She had managed a clumsy elementary mind-shield– a simplified version of my mind bubble– before she left that first shelter. It would have been nice to continue training her there, but a swarm of midge-like critters showed up and drove her out.
“I would like you to cultivate and improve your strength,” I told her. “Find shelter as soon as possible.”
“I’m trying!” she insisted. “Every place I find has something already living there!”
# # #
On his tenth life, Ryuu finally found a save point, bringing his repeated peril at the cliff face to an end at last. He encountered a stone pillar in a clearing with a glowing spot at roughly head height. It went out when he touched it on my instruction.
“From now on, until you find another, you will resurrect here,” I told him as he began glowing. “For now, you’ll go back and rest.”
I sent an instruction to the attendant in my instructor’s booth, and my view changed to an observation sphere in the recovery room, with Ryuu standing in the same pose in the middle of the room. An attendant had a meal laid out for him on one of the benches.
I told him, “Eat and get some sleep.”
# # #
The tide came in after sunset. Since I didn’t make any noise when I spoke to Chiara, I started coaching her through some basic meditation techniques. With merrow patrols criss-crossing the grove in the dark, there really wasn’t anything else she could do.
# # #
Dilorè’s attempts to find shelter brought her luck to an end when she accidentally breached the lair of a ‘Tongue’. The monster swallowed her before she could react. My viewpoint switched to an observation sphere in the recovery room, where the system had laid my cousin out on her sleeping rack.
Ryuu was not in the room. I had given orders not to overlap them, so they were in separate simulations of the same room. I had the attendant rouse her and give her a meal.
# # #
With the three trainees asleep, my doppelgänger joined me in the instructor’s booth. I requested dinner from the attendant, who gave a light bow and clapped her hands. An alcove with a table and two piles of cushions appeared, and a pair of maids entered it and began laying out a meal.
As we sat down to eat, ‘Little Sen’ advised, “You should take a night to relax, as well.”
“I am also here to work on my own shortcomings,” I told her while shaking my head. “I’m not the Senhion from your memories.”
She nodded. “Yes, you’re very much a contradiction. Half of you is a juvenile barely old enough to be out on her own, and the other half is far older than me.”
I tipped my head. “Subjectively, including your memories as me, you are about nine thousand years old. I suppose all my memories together… I really don’t know, since I have yet to unearth all my lives. I have a clear grasp of my last five only. My five thousand years as Senhion are quite dim, only partially recalled, so I have a thousand as Fan li, two hundred as Kwelabi, and three lives that averaged about thirty years each. At best, that’s not even one and a half thousand in total. Really, you’re the elder.”
She shook her head. “My memories of our shared time are a mere copy. I also remember them only dimly. My clear memories are of my time as myself alone.”
“So you don’t have access to my immortal memories?”
The Sea of Knowledge includes personal knowledge, but the key to retrieving personal points of view is the soul.
‘Little Sen’ responded only with another shake of the head.
“That is more evidence that you have become your own person,” I pointed out.
She didn’t have a response to that at all. Perhaps she still didn’t want to accept the idea.
We never settled the question of who could be considered ‘older’, but it didn’t matter. As we tasted the dishes, we chattered about the situation outside, and the issue with Astaroth and the demons.
“I want to spend some time in meditation,” I stated. “But I want to remain in time compression because of the situation outside. I feel I would use up too much time, even at the small world’s time, if I went back out.”
“Is it for cultivation?” she wondered.
“Yes, but that’s not all. While I was swimming out there, I felt more connected with my knowledge and skills as Senhion and my other past lives. It was very useful.”
Although the three trainees were currently in other simulations and other paintings, this instructor’s booth simulation was a traveling show. It moved to whatever sim I was observing, and, because none of the trainees were currently active, it was defaulting to a Huade-like environment and spiritual energy.
She considered for a bit, then told the attendant, “Cha ‘Shara, kindly move us to my garden pavilion.”
The twenty-ish woman called Cha ‘Shara smiled and bowed, and our surroundings changed. Immediately, I felt the increase in spiritual energy, now even denser than in Sky Ocean.
Uneasy, I asked, “What sort of dilation are we in right now?”
She chuckled. “It isn’t dilation. Currently we are at the same hundred times ratio as our training scenarios. We can maintain it indefinitely.”
I frowned, unable to guess an explanation. We ultimately only had the spiritual energy of the imitation Sky Ocean to work with, and our time base was its universe. The varying strengths of the different illusory realities were ultimately derivatives of that.
“It’s Jia’s best work,” she continued, “and a separate creation from my home. It’s an illusory reality of similar scale to our scenarios, but it funnels almost all the spiritual energy in it into this pavilion. If you left the pavilion, you would feel it drop immediately.”
Hearing that left me wondering if Jia was getting assistance from some immortal. I felt very confident that, at my best as Senhion, I never knew how to pull off such a thing.
Outside, I should mention, was fluffy clouds and blue infinity. We were dining in the sky.
“The outer porch has seats for meditation,” she noted. “You can also use the little deck on the roof. But you need to stay within or in contact with the pavilion to receive the energy.”
As I looked around, I recognized it as a recreation of a pavilion that Senhion’s mother kept in the Fundamental realm. Did my doppelgänger remember it in this detail, or had I just identified the mystery immortal?
“Will this work?” she wondered with a smile while sipping her wine.
“It will work very well,” I agreed.
After the meal, I chose the roof-top deck, and ‘Little Sen’ joined me. We sat back-to-back in the clouds and meditated together.
My goal this time wasn’t cultivation, but rather, reconnecting to those memories. My main focus was Servant training, but also spirit craft and magic. I had far too much material for one session.
When Little Jia alerted me that my trainees were awakening, I had her put them in time dilation.
As we shared breakfast, my companion wondered, “You’re going to have them do more of the same?”
“Do you have a better suggestion?” I wondered.
