Magic is Programming

[The spell gained extra mana just because you had it pushing down instead of up? That is bizarre.] Amber shook her head idly and laughed. She was sitting at the main desk of their suite this time, leaving Carlos to one of the three other chairs scattered around the suite's common room. [You keep discovering new things, yet you're not even trying to. It's fascinating. Someday you'll actually try to discover some new world shaking secret, and I don't know whether you'll ironically fail abysmally, or succeed beyond my wildest imagination. I'm excited to find out.]

Carlos chuckled too. [I expect there will be some of each. In any case, please be cautious about using that. I've already thought of some ways to use it to do things that are far more powerful than we should be capable of, and I'm sure there are many more, but I don't understand how and why it works, and that worries me. I'm pretty sure the extra mana doesn't come from our souls - my introspector would have reported losing mana like that - but I don't believe for a moment that it's truly coming from nothing. What if it's coming from some monstrously powerful dragon who will hunt us down for stealing from it? Or what if it's coming from the source of all magic and permanently weakens magic in general? Or who knows what else?]

[Right.] Amber nodded gravely. [I may be endlessly curious about this, but even I know better than to risk poking a sleeping dragon when I don't have to.]

Silence stretched between them for a while, in voice and telepathy, as they both waited for their souls to absorb enough ambient mana to develop. They had found that doubling their own mana density at the second compression had doubled the rate they could absorb mana - or maybe it was the same rate, just absorbing mana that was twice as dense - but they had farther to go this time because they didn't have a head start for the third compression. They had continued perhaps an hour or two past sunset last night before admitting that they clearly weren't going to finish in one day. Now it was approaching lunch time the next morning, and both Carlos and Amber were rapidly approaching the third compression of their soul development as well.

Carlos yawned, and stretched his arms. The process of actively absorbing ambient mana had been fascinating at first, but his mana manipulator and debugger made it easy enough that he didn't need to really focus on it, and as the hours stretched on it had turned into the boring tedium of watching a progress bar slowly fill. He'd explained the strange behavior he'd discovered of the levitation spell just for something to pass a bit of time.

Now, tension was starting to ramp up, as that progress bar - a literal progress bar at least for him - was some fraction past 99.8% and climbing. Just about another minute - uh, make that 47 seconds - to go. He watched the seconds count down one by one, and started paying more attention again to how his soul was feeling. Everything in his soul was feeling... kind of bloated, actually. All his soul structures were oversized and putting more pressure on each other, and the layer of mana on his soul's outer surface had a not quite complete duplicate layered on top of it, with just a few tiny holes that were shrinking as he watched.

The timer ticked down to zero, and Carlos felt the pressure in his soul reach a threshold, and overcome some resistance that had been pushing back against it. Two adjacent infinitesimal specks of mana collapsed into each other, moving to overlap and merge into one. That collapse and merge pulled the mana around it into a smaller space, giving all of it an extra shove to collapse and merge as well, and in bare moments one soul structure after another suddenly shrank to half its former size, while the surface layer's duplicate was pulled in to merge as well. After growing steadily for hours, everything was suddenly back to the size it had all started at yesterday evening, but all of the mana was denser now, more concentrated and powerful.

The sudden reduction in pressure was a relief, and after a moment Carlos realized that the relief went further than he'd expected. He hadn't really noticed before because he was so unaccustomed to feeling anything in his soul, but there had been a constant pressure surrounding him ever since they'd arrived in Dramos, and now even that pressure was gone. The ambient mana wasn't trying to push itself into him anymore, because his soul's mana density finally matched it.

He experimentally tried to pull in more ambient mana anyway, but it resisted his pull. He focused his will and pulled harder, trying to force more to come in and be absorbed, but the small amount he managed to move just sprang right back out, and that spot in his soul felt sore. No, wait a moment, not quite all of that mana had come back out. A tiny portion had stuck to his mana manipulator and his debugger - the structures that he had used to do the pulling.

Right, one of the ways to absorb mana for soul development was to use your soul structures. Apparently, when you didn't have a favorable density gradient, making use of your mana was an actual requirement, not just something that incidentally aids development as a byproduct. Hmm... He'd used his debugger before to move mana he'd already absorbed from one structure to another. Maybe he could use that to re-establish a favorable density gradient, making one structure low density enough to continue absorbing even though all the others were too dense? Something to try later. For right now, he could sense Amber had finished her third compression too, and they had plans for what to do next.

Carlos looked at Amber from his chair, smiled, and nodded. She nodded back, and they spoke together, each activating the spell they'd learned yesterday and prepared this morning. He turned his attention back to his mana sense, focusing on the tiny bundled structure of her compass spell. They had intentionally avoided letting each other hear the essential keywords of these spells, because that would negate the point of this exercise by just turning it into learning a keyword the normal way. He did, however, know what the spell did, and had a more powerful and capable mana sensor than before. Would that be enough?

As he examined the tiny pipe-like structure of mana created by the keyword he was trying to learn, the improvement from developing his mana sensor was immediately obvious. The fuzziness in his impression of it was greatly reduced, and he could feel that it was indeed divining a direction, just as Amber had told him. ...In hindsight, maybe telling each other the effects of these spells had been a mistake. It was hard to be sure whether he would have sensed that detail without foreknowledge of what to expect.

Carlos narrowed his eyes and concentrated, trying to put his knowledge of what Amber had told him about the spell out of his mind, and focusing only on what he could actually sense from the spell's form. He made a tiny blob of mana, just as he would for beginning to learn a keyword from a written incantation, and started trying to shape it into, well, whatever it was that would make the mana construct he sensed. He sat there for a minute, looking for inspiration that never came. Finally, he let out a huff, and started poking and prodding at the blob. Maybe if he tried enough variations he'd notice something he could use as a starting point.

In the common room of the Adventurer's Haven, a large man sat quietly at a random table near one of the walls, outwardly minding his own business as he ate a slightly early lunch. Inwardly, he was closely following the movements of mana around a certain pair of souls on the third floor. Mana had been positively racing into them for hours, at a rate that made him all but certain that they were not only nobles, but high nobles. Adamantium rank, and likely high even on that scale. Exactly what he'd been worried about. Those two would be able to drink mana wellsprings dry once they got their souls dense enough.

He shook his head. He wouldn't let it come to that if he could help it. Esmorana was preparing, fine tuning their plan's details, as he waited for the two unwelcome noble scions to emerge and finally proceed into the Wilds. He just needed to keep an eye on them, and keep the team updated.

Carlos and Amber had reached the third compression a good half hour ago, so it shouldn't be long now. That was as far as they could get in Dramos at the rapid pace that ambient absorption allowed. The farthest anyone could develop within the bounds of the city without resorting to the plebeian method of actually using and exercising your soul structures. Sure, nobles were faster than normal people at that too, but their advantage was a lot smaller, and they wouldn't have bothered coming here if they'd planned on doing things that way.

What were they doing, though? They had each cast some kind of weak spell, and then just... sat there, seemingly doing nothing? For thirty minutes and counting? They weren't sleeping. It was hard to pick out details from this distance and with so many barriers in between, but he did get an impression that they were actively doing something focused on mana.

He sighed, and ordered another light ale. He would wait however long it took.

"Argh! Damn it!" Carlos growled in frustration. The keyword he was trying to learn simply refused to even begin taking shape without him holding its concept in mind. He'd been trying for... he didn't even know how long, actually, to form some kind of connection between the shape of the spell he sensed and the shape of the keyword's encoding, and had exactly zero progress to show for it. If he focused on the concept of pointing towards a known location, the keyword would start to take shape, but his knowledge of the concept was tainted for this purpose, having come from the wrong source.

He suddenly felt the edge of a stack of paper shoved into his hand, and opened his eyes to look at Amber. She looked at him and smiled, then sighed. "You're more persistent at this than I am. I gave up a while ago on trying to ignore what you told me about the spell. Learned it easily enough with that knowledge, but it didn't activate the synergy. So, pick a new spell, and this time don't tell me."

Carlos took a deep breath, then another. He looked at the papers in his hand, each with a spell incantation written on it. He looked up towards the little bundle of Amber's compass spell, and thought about how much he could sense about it instead of what he could sense about it. He sighed, letting his breath out slowly. Then his stomach gurgled, and he laughed.

"Haha. Right, that settles it. Let's eat, and move on for now. You're right that we shouldn't have told each other what the spells do, but I honestly think our mana sensors still aren't developed enough. Let's talk with Lorvan about a trip into the Wilds."

Amber frowned, almost pouting for a moment, but then released a small sigh of her own. "I don't want to admit it, but you might be right." She raised her voice and called out toward the suite's door. "Lorvan, we need some advice! And food!"

Carlos wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin and put aside the tray with the dishes and crumbs remaining from his lunch, and turned to Lorvan. The ever dutiful colonel had again declined to eat with them, and had spent the time explaining how he expected venturing into the Wilds to go, while Carlos mostly listened and sometimes grunted in response while chewing something. Now that he was done eating, his mouth was available to ask questions back. "So you really think we'll both be practically helpless on our own until we learn more and better spells?"

"Yes, sir." Lorvan nodded matter-of-factly as if this was patently obvious.

Amber glared at him. "Hey! I hit a bear with three distant cut spells when I was still silver rank with only once-compressed density."

Lorvan raised an eyebrow at her questioningly. "Did that even meaningfully wound the bear? Or did it just decide to avoid you like it would avoid a particularly thorny plant?"

Amber blushed and lowered her gaze.

Carlos frowned. "I know you and Ordens are capable, but I don't like not having a backup option. I... have an idea, just in case of emergency, but it could use improvement. Do you know anything about how to make a spell that can change its own target after it's cast?"

"The backup option if it comes to that, which it won't, is that you respawn, sir. It will cost you one density compression, but at this point that is minor. As for any knowledge of crafting spells, you will have to wait for your teacher to arrive. Some functions of our enchanted equipment can change targets as you suggest, but we do not know how such things are done."

"Oh?" Carlos smiled and leaned forward. "Can you show me the runes of one of those enchantments?"

"I suppose." Lorvan shrugged. "But I don't see the point, sir. You would not gain any understanding from seeing it without an expert enchanter explaining it to you."

"Show me anyway."

"Very well". Lorvan held out his right hand, and the outer layer of the metal gauntlet he wore retracted, revealing an intermediate layer of jointed metal plates on top of the softer leather and cloth that enclosed his skin. Each plate was covered with a dense array of runes written with inlaid platinum. He pointed with his left index finger at a specific plate. "This one paralyzes a target temporarily, and can be switched to a new target without reactivating it."

Carlos cautiously took hold of Lorvan's partly uncovered hand, narrowed his eyes, and looked closely at the identified plate. Sure enough, spell incantation words appeared in his vision, overlaid on top of the runes in extremely tiny script. So small it was difficult to read, but after a few minutes he had picked out the words he needed. He released Lorvan's hand, who promptly returned the gauntlet to its normal state, and nodded. "Thank you."

Lorvan looked at him for a few seconds, face blankly expressionless, then shook his head slightly. "There's another secret involved in this, isn't there? Sir."

"Maybe. Or maybe I'm tricking you into thinking we have more secrets than we actually do." Carlos grinned cheekily.

"As you say, sir. Do you have any further business before we set out?"

"No. Amber?"

Amber shook her head. "I'm ready."

"Then there is only the formality of a request to join your party that the Haven's staff passed on to me. Shall I inform them that you decline so we can get on with it, sir?"

Esmorana sat on a small portable chair a few miles outside of Dramos, idly swinging her feet under her dress, the flowing folds of its long skirt appearing incongruous with the trees around her. A small stone she held in her left hand buzzed once, and she stiffened for a moment before raising it in front of her face and smiling broadly. "Ah! Finally, they're moving!"

The shorter woman standing several feet to her left looked over her shoulder at her and scowled. "You're one to talk. You've been sitting here since last night."

"Just because you can't sense my air manipulations doesn't mean I'm not doing things. Keeping that stench from dispersing isn't easy, especially while sleeping."

A gruff voice interrupted their argument as the lanky man sitting on a log to Esmorana's right spoke up. "Enough. We all know the plan, and there's no point arguing nonsense like this." He tossed a dagger from one hand to the other. "Are we ready?"

"Oh yes." Esmorana grinned hungrily. "They'll never see it coming."

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