Magic is Programming

Carlos lay in bed awake that night, too absorbed in his thoughts to sleep. Why had that dungeon with the swarms been so incredibly hostile, so dramatically different in attitude from Purple? It was considerably more powerful, and not at all starved for mana with how rarely anyone extorted a wish from it - and it definitely regarded wishes as extorted under threat - but that alone would just make it more confident and satisfied with its general situation. It got delved much less often, and defeated even more rarely, so he supposed it could have been upset and angry about losing for once. That didn't feel adequate to explain the intensity of its rage and hate, though.

Come to think of it, hadn't it reacted and gotten worse when he asked Purple for advice? He pondered his memory of the confrontation and nodded. Yes, he'd asked if Purple had any ideas, and the other dungeon had gone from, well, already murderous to berserk. Could it have been angry because of them talking with Purple earlier in the delve? Wait, no, it had been surprised, like it had never observed such a thing before. Its core was extremely different from Purple's, maybe that indicated something about its mind or personality? But what caused the differences?

He sighed, and rolled onto his side underneath his blanket. He just didn't have enough information to draw any conclusions firmer than speculation. He'd have to delve more dungeons and take notes, or ask the Enchanters Guild. They'd probably demand payment for whatever information they have, though. And try to force him to hand over Purple unless he revealed his noble status to them, too. It wouldn't do to forget that issue.

Carlos firmly dismissed the question of the swarm dungeon's hostility from his mind for now. He had more productive things to think about. What soul structures to suggest to Purple, for one thing. Six slots left, and for best results they would all need to have synergy with the bonds Purple's first structure made. Purple had already agreed to the smart home idea, and one obvious synergy came to mind for that - having the "smart" features of the home only work for approved people who have a bond. Focusing on that would kind of pigeonhole everything into all being about smart home stuff, but that actually might not be a bad thing considering that Purple is normally immobile.

Can't forget about size, too. Purple's a dungeon, and dungeons are big. Technically he could try to rein in the size, but Purple had already complained about feeling cramped, and that would probably get worse as Purple got stronger. Purple would not be just a smart home, but more like a smart mansion, or even a smart palace. Or maybe a smart castle? That seemed more practical and useful. Hmm, practical buildings. That reminded Carlos that he wanted to make a magic school and teach his programming expertise as applied to magic. A smart school sounded awesome. He'd have his own version of Hogwarts. Can't get much more awesome than that!

Now for a school, he'd have lots of students, and if it follows software engineering paradigms all the biggest and most important projects and achievements would be collaborative works. Something to coordinate all the collaboration and maybe also a repository of the results, like a standard source control system for programming, would be wonderful. It would have really obvious and easy synergy with the bonds, too. Purple would have to be an absolutely incredible multitasker to handle all of that, though. It only worked so well for software engineering on Earth because they could have computers automate it. ...Oh, duh, make a soul structure for automating things. That seemed kind of similar to Carlos's reflex improver, but more specialized with setting up specific defined reflexes.

Hmm, could his reflex improver help with automating all that tedious mana absorption? Or was it already helping with that, and just wasn't powerful enough yet? He should see if turning it off temporarily makes a difference tomorrow. It was unfortunate that he couldn't just test it right now while he was thinking of it, but he'd already advanced past Dramos's thrice-compressed mana to, uh... 'Once', 'twice', 'thrice', but what came next? Was there even a word for it in English? He couldn't think of one, but he didn't have a dictionary or Internet access to check. 'Four times compressed' was a bit of a mouthful to keep saying. Well, thinking at least. The local language used the same grammatical structure for every degree of mana compression he'd ever spoken or heard, just with a different number.

The phrase was shorter too, with fewer syllables. More like 'level four', rather than 'four times compressed'. Makes sense for something that's so common and integral to people's lives. Hmm, he'd changed how his comprehension aid translated something before, and he could do it again. Thinking of it as levels like in a game would be easier and less cumbersome, and it seemed a pretty good conceptual match too. In fact, with how well it seemed to match, why hadn't it translated that way in the first place? Oh, right, it would have lost significant meaningful information. The word 'level' would not have conveyed anything about the nature of the difference between levels, and how lower level mana could become higher level by being compressed. Well, that was background information that he already knew now, so from this point onward let it be 'level'!

Carlos felt a flicker of acknowledgement from his comprehension aid, nodded in satisfaction, and started reviewing things with the new terminology. He was level four. Amber was also level four. Dramos was a level three area. That noble girl, Jamar Tostral, was somewhere in the level eight to level twelve range, he was pretty sure. One level lower after she died and respawned, but as a high noble she could easily have regained that by now if she had access to a high enough level area. Jamar's guards had been level twelve to fourteen, he thought. His own guards were, uh... Huh, that was weird. How did he have no idea what level Colonel Lorvan and Major Ordens were? He'd been near them long enough that he should have pinned it down to the exact number without even trying by now. Wait, that scholar, what was her name, something starting with 'R'? Resser, no, Ressara, hadn't she said something about soul disguises that pushed attention away? He should make a note to make certain to follow up with her about her specialized soul structures, because seeing through that kind of thing was a valuable capability, and she'd implied she might have some others too.

Anyway, he and Amber needed to level up a lot, still needed to fix those last two synergies, and they desperately needed to learn a lot more spells. No use being a wizard with enough power to destroy a planet if you don't know how to use that power. Trinlen would teach them a lot, but he was weeks away. Wishing for it from the swarm dungeon had turned out as a dud, but maybe Purple could do it? Purple at least would understand their request. On the other hand, he'd already said he didn't know anything about incantations, so he'd have to magically pull the information from somewhere, and who knew if that was even possible, or how much power it would take? Maybe they could learn what they needed from their royal guards' equipment? That stuff was absolutely loaded with enchantments, and he'd already revealed to Lorvan that he could at least gain something from studying the runes. All of those enchantments were really powerful, though, so they might need more levels first to get the mana to fuel any spells they learn that way.

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At least leveling up was a solved problem, if tedious. For now. Lorvan and Ordens were power leveling them, to use the gaming term for it, but there was a limit to how far those two could carry them. He didn't know how high that limit was, but it had to exist. Well, that was a problem for Future Carlos to solve. Present Carlos had to deal with the tedium of hours and hours of a repetitive manual process he couldn't automate yet. And how to learn more spells, ones that they could use.

Back to the spells problem. Hmm... Trinlen in a few weeks, Lorvan's high power gear, maybe ask Purple. There didn't seem to be any useful spellbooks available for sale. Enchanters Guild probably had some good stuff, but he didn't want to open that can of worms yet. What else was there? ...Come to think of it, how were all these spells created in the first place? Or were they discovered instead? Discovery didn't seem likely, since he was pretty sure the spellcasting system itself had been artificially created, but maybe some of the knowledge had been lost and later rediscovered? Regardless, could he duplicate that process to bypass the need for a source? He would have to ask Amber if she knew anything about it.

He was pretty sure he couldn't just make up whatever spell he wanted, at least; otherwise he wouldn't have needed to fine tune and adjust his conceptualizations to learn the spells he'd already picked up. There was some kind of resonance between the mana that he formed into newly learned keywords and the correct concept of what they represented. Could he use that somehow, maybe just trying a concept and looking for any hint of that resonance, then adjusting until he got it right? Or maybe even try to connect himself to whatever repository of knowledge held the information of which concepts were the correct ones? The dungeon-style mana manipulation they'd learned was weak and inefficient, at least for humans, but maybe he could use its extreme versatility to help?

Carlos's thoughts grew fuzzy and slow, speculating on increasingly vague and wild ideas, as he drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, Carlos and Amber wore backpacks as they left the city, filled with tents, food, water, and camping tools in preparation for staying a few days in the Wilds. They had to reach a level five area to even begin absorbing mana for their next compression - or their next level, as Carlos was increasingly thinking of it as - and keep going to even higher level areas to level up beyond that. There was no shortage of such areas in the Wilds, of course, but traveling to them took tens of miles of walking through dense forest with no trails. Lorvan and Ordens could have carried them across such a distance in short order, but Lorvan said that such undignified haste for a noble should be reserved for emergencies. Dealing with the aftermath of a treacherous attack on them, especially one that successfully killed the head of their house, justified it. Wanting to skip some inconvenient walking just because they wanted to level up a little sooner did not.

As he walked around yet another giant tree, once again sporting a transparent bubble of force, Carlos idly practiced using his mana sense. He didn't have the knack of avoiding obstacles with his eyes closed yet, but he thought he was making progress. The tree he'd just passed didn't stick out anywhere near as much as a person's soul, but it did have mana in it. That mana just tended to get lost in the background noise of the all-enveloping ambient mana if he wasn't paying close attention.

Carlos cocked his head as the ubiquity of the ambient mana brought a question to mind. "Hey, Lorvan? We're supposed to absorb so much mana that it drops the ambient mana to a level safe for civilians to live in, right? How are we supposed to do that? I mean, there's so damn much of it, and it's everywhere. We can only absorb enough to level up to match the area around us, and even with two of us it feels like we only remove a single drop from a whole ocean!"

"A fair question." Lorvan cut a break in tangle of bushes ahead of them. "Consider the amount of level three mana around us. If you had a supply of level thirteen mana, and you let some of it loose to expand and dilute down to level three, how much level thirteen mana would it take to match what is around us now?"

It was disconcerting to hear Lorvan suddenly speaking in terms of levels instead of density and compressions, even though Carlos knew it was just an artifact of his own intentional change in translation, and Lorvan was actually still speaking the same as before. "One part level thirteen mana to match one thousand and twenty four parts level three mana."

Lorvan glanced back at him with a raised eyebrow, then shook his head. "I won't even ask how you could answer that so quickly and precisely without already knowing what I'm explaining. I take it that you at least understand the magnitude of difference that enough levels can make. Anyway, while the plants and beasts living in an area do supply a small amount of ambient mana, most of it comes from denser mana flowing from a nearby area and decompressing. If you follow that flow in reverse, you will travel through a succession of higher and higher level areas, and each one will be smaller than the one before it. Until you at last reach a very high level and tiny area that actually produces the mana within it."

"Oh." Carlos nodded slowly. "Small enough that even absorbing all of it won't give us another level."

"Yes, though in part that is because of the greater amounts required for advancing in the second stage."

Amber spoke up from behind Carlos. "You've mentioned the 'second stage' before. What is it?"

"A development that you are still many levels away from. You will know when you reach it." Lorvan shrugged, while still looking ahead and choosing their path. "These places that produce high level mana in quantity are called mana wellsprings. For most people, mana wellsprings are things only heard of in stories. For nobles, they are the greatest treasure, and the greatest danger, to be found anywhere. Even the weakest mana wellspring has mana so high level that, at your current level four, your souls would dissolve from visiting it. Unclaimed wild ones also host similarly high level monsters that are fiercely territorial. To tame the Dramos Wilds and secure your claim to them as your domain, you will have to defeat those monsters and take the wellspring for yourselves."

Carlos raised an eyebrow as he walked. "You won't help us with that?"

Lorvan shook his head and chopped off a particularly low and sturdy tree branch in their way. "It is part of how you must prove yourselves capable. Besides, even we are not high enough level to fight a mana wellspring's guardians. Few non nobles ever reach such heights."

"I see." So they'd need a whole lot more levels, and spells powerful enough to match. Well, they were already working on that. They just had to keep going.

Jamar Tostral was in a foul mood. Her father forbidding her from returning to Dramos until "the Carlos problem" was resolved was bad enough, but then her swords instructor had the temerity to correct her in today's training session! So what if she was too distracted with anger about what Carlos had done to perfectly maintain flawless form? Her anger was perfectly justified, and that instructor should have known better than to piss her off even more! A few lashes to teach him better of it, doubled for daring to contradict her account to her mother, was just what he deserved. She smiled briefly at the memory of watching the idiot's punishment, but it couldn't displace her scowl for long.

That damnable Carlos! He was only level three, and she'd been level ten when they fought. He should not have been capable of shoving her into the dirt like a bug, but somehow he had done it anyway. Him, with his own spell, not his escorts or equipment. Her expanded senses weren't specialized for mana, but she could still sense mana well enough to be certain of who that spell had come from.

She sniffed angrily. Maybe she should demand training for resisting spells. The next time she fought Carlos, she would be prepared to shove him into the dirt like the bug that he was! Though, if her father's plan worked, there would never be a 'next time', because Carlos wouldn't be around anymore. Ah, removing annoying pestilent bugs so they can never bother her again, what a great idea. That would wonderfully improve her mood if it worked.

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