Magic is Programming

Amber absently followed Carlos, barely noticing the gentle winding of their path or the obstacles they weaved around. She trusted Lorvan and Ordens to keep them safe, and Carlos to choose a path their force bubbles would fit through, while she focused on puzzling out what was bothering her about Lorvan's explanation of mana wellsprings. Draining such a small but incredibly potent source of mana made sense for how a single noble could drop a large area's ambient mana to a level safe for civilians, and doing so would naturally give the noble great power. But then what?

"How do noble heirs gain power?" She belatedly realized she'd spoken the question aloud when Lorvan made a questioning noise in her direction, and she raised her voice to clarify herself. "If a noble founder drains a mana wellspring to build his power, then how does the founder's heir develop anywhere near as much power with the wellspring gone? It seems like every descendant would be a faint shadow of the founder's strength, but I've never heard of such a difference."

Lorvan continued walking without reaction for a few seconds before he responded. "As high nobles and the leaders of your house, you will often have to make decisions with incomplete information. Deducing things you do not already know will be an important skill for you to have. I suggest that you use this question to practice. Can you reason your way to the answer from what you already know?"

"Uh. Hmm." Amber cocked her head and chewed her lip. "Ok. Will you at least confirm that founders and their successors actually do have similar power? I'm pretty sure if founders outclassed established nobility I would have heard of it before, but maybe it's not talked about much because of how rare a new founder is?"

Lorvan chuckled. "Yes, the heads of old noble houses usually have power similar to their founders."

Amber nodded. "Ok. So, a new founder gets most of their power from a mana wellspring, and no other source is even close to matching that level of power. Their successor is similarly powerful, so they must also have absorbed mana from a wellspring."

Carlos spoke up. "Or they literally inherited it, with the founder transferring their power when they pass on. Er, if that's possible?"

"I... suppose that could be. I've never heard of such a thing, though, and it seems a horribly vulnerable way to maintain a noble house's power."

Lorvan shook his head, up ahead of them. "That has been tried. Elderly nobles gifting their own soul development to a favored heir. Most of the known attempts severely damaged the recipient's soul. Some of them never recovered. Even ignoring that risk, the greatest success still gave the recipient only a small fraction of the elder's mana, too little to be worthwhile. A house that relied on such methods would weaken with each generation, until they could no longer stand as true peers of other nobles."

Amber resumed reasoning out loud. "Right. So, as I was saying, nobles of descendant generations must also gain power from mana wellsprings. Noble houses are not all constantly expanding into yet more Wilds to find and drain yet another wellspring, and new wellsprings aren't just spontaneously appearing in already tamed areas all the time, so it can't be new mana wellsprings. They must be reusing the same wellspring, generation after generation."

Carlos cocked his head and put his right hand on his chin, barely paying any attention to his feet as he weaved between a pair of trees that just barely had space for his force bubble. "But if that's true, then why would Jamar come out here instead of using House Tostral's mana wellspring?"

Amber laughed. "That's an easy one! They have their wellspring all bottled up somewhere, not spreading its mana all over the entire region, so it doesn't have room to decompress down to her level. She has to develop enough to keep her soul from dissolving from the wellspring's extremely high level before she can use it."

"Ah, right." Carlos frowned in thought for a moment. "But what's stopping them from taking just a little bit of it out and decompressing it for her to use?"

Lorvan glanced back at Carlos. "Blocking mana from spreading is simple. Difficult and expensive for high level mana, perhaps, but simple in principle. Releasing it unconstrained is also simple. Regulating the release of a limited portion is complicated. Some theoretical methods have been devised, but all are too impractical to be feasible."

"You can't just make a small mana container in the wellspring's area and carry it out?"

"Hahaha!" Lorvan actually stopped walking and bent over laughing for a few seconds. "Hehe. 'Carry it out.' Kid-" He cut himself off and took a moment to restore his normal composure. "Sir, if you open a hole of any size in a barrier that's blocking a mana level difference as extreme as between a mana wellspring and a civilian living area, you will not get that hole closed again until nearly the entire reservoir of the barrier's interior has vented through it and the flow has almost stopped. You would have to be many levels higher than even the wellspring itself to be capable of halting an already-moving mana stream that strong, fast, and concentrated."

Carlos blinked. "So make an extra layer of the barrier in one spot to seal a tiny section off from the rest, and let just that section vent?"

Lorvan turned to face Carlos and stood still, his expression grim. "High House Ginmal tried that two centuries ago. The joins between the inner layer and the main barrier failed, and the entire wellspring vented. Tens of thousands of people died and did not respawn, their souls dissolved in the flood of too-dense mana. Forty years later, High House Larna thought they could do a better job of it, reinforcing the joins to the point of absurdity, and putting similar effort into addressing every possible problem they could think of. It is fortunate that they evacuated the area, just in case, before testing it."

Solemn silence reigned for a few seconds, until Amber shook herself and took up the vein of questioning. "What went wrong the second time?"

"No one knows." Lorvan faced forward again and resumed walking. "Or more precisely, no one understands. Several witnesses watched it happen, from House Larna, the Crown, and the Enchanters Guild. When the separated section vented, the wellspring's ambient mana reacted... violently. It struck the secondary barrier with a focused attack, and the barrier gave way before it as though many times weaker than it was."

Carlos frowned. "Sabotage?"

"Many suspected that, of course, but none knew how it was even possible, especially without even a single witness noticing signs of the mechanism."

"Huh." Carlos trudged after Lorvan quietly, temporarily stumped. "How do people ever visit the place after the barrier's up, then? Does everyone teleport in and out every time, or something?"

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"Yes. Many houses even construct a pair of permanent linked short range teleporters for the purpose. The wellspring itself is an excellent power source for such a thing, after all." Lorvan paused and shook his head. "And before you ask, teleporting does not transport ambient mana, and putting the mana into an item would negate the point. People have dedicated entire careers to solving this, with lavish funding from hopeful nobles, to no avail. If you manage to find a practical way to extract small amounts from a contained wellspring for low level scions to absorb for their development, that all previous attempts somehow overlooked, every noble house in all of Kalor will want to either buy it from you, steal it, or seize it by force."

"Including Royal House Kalor, the Crown?" Carlos raised an eyebrow and smirked as he asked the question.

"Hmm." Lorvan stayed silent for several seconds, and cut through a thick curtain of vines in their path as he walked.

Amber smiled at Carlos's back as she followed behind him, waiting for Lorvan to finish his answer. Carlos often seemed an endless font of ideas and questions, and hearing him instantly respond to news of a problem by asking about creative solution ideas was fun. She didn't even care that he'd effectively taken over what had started as her own exercise in creative problem solving. Actually, no, that wasn't it. He was working with her, voicing his ideas to combine with her own in tackling the same problems together. It was so much better than all the stares and ridicule the kids she grew up with in Erlen used to give her.

Lorvan finally finished considering Carlos's question. "Such a technique would be of less direct importance to the Crown than to other houses, but would still be highly valuable."

Amber looked at Lorvan as she nodded. "I see." Her smile grew into a wide grin as she walked, and she excitedly focused her mind on her telepathic connection to Carlos. [Are you thinking what I'm thinking?]

Carlos's stride hitched for a moment, but he recovered and avoided stumbling. [That depends. Are you thinking about a mana wellspring and Purple?]

Amber could feel him grinning back at her.

Purple carefully laid yet another thin line of mana in the precisely arranged weave of thoroughly tamed mana he was accumulating, all the while continuing to draw in the slow trickle of new mana that the vault's wards allowed to flow through. He had been doing this for many hours, making smoothly steady progress the entire time. A human observer might have called this activity an extraordinary display of patience, but to Purple it was simply his current project and task. The accumulated stockpile was approaching the amount he needed to make his next soul structure, and he was content with the continual progress.

This one would be the automator that Carlos had explained to him this morning. Purple had briefly thought that it was merely filler for easy synergy with everything, but after considering the concept Carlos called a "smart home" in more detail, he had realized its value. He could easily watch one person all day and night for prearranged signals to brighten or dim the lights, open and close doors, and all sorts of other things, but he would eventually host dozens or maybe even hundreds of people, and watching and responding individually to signals from each of so many people would normally be impossible. Building a soul structure to do that for him solved the problem neatly. Besides, he got the feeling that Carlos had some more esoteric uses for it in mind, too.

He would need to come up with something to use it for right away to finalize it, though, and the secure safe he was in was not at all suitable for making a smart home. He could set up and then remove a useless automatic response of some kind just to finalize the soul structure, maybe emitting a flash of light whenever Carlos opened the safe, but Purple's instincts cried out against the idea of doing something intentionally useless. It should be something to finalize the synergy with his bond maker, too. Carlos had explained the need for that as well.

Purple could automate the process of collecting and taming mana for soul structures, he supposed. It was certainly clearly defined and simple enough. That wouldn't involve a bond, though, and it would leave him with nothing to do himself. It was also temporary; once he finished all ten structures, developing them would not require the same painstaking laborious process. For an idea related to his bonds with Carlos and Amber... Carlos had died, and it had taken Purple many minutes to even notice that anything noteworthy had happened. He wanted to prevent that from happening again. His friends helped and protected him, and he should be quick to respond if they ever needed his help in return.

Whenever anything important happened to his bonded friends, he wanted to automatically notice it immediately. He couldn't sense much through his bonds, but for whatever he could sense, if it might be important he wanted it brought to his attention the moment it happened. Yes, that idea would be perfect. It would finalize the automator, finalize the synergy, do something useful, and remain useful indefinitely. It did everything he wanted from it.

Ressara pushed away the remains of her lunch, sat back in her little corner of the Adventurer's Haven's common room, and sighed. Her first meeting and conversation with Carlos and Amber had gone far better than she'd feared, but now she felt stuck in limbo, waiting for discussions and decisions that would likely determine the course of her entire life, with nothing to do but bide her time and wait. The young noble pair had departed into the Wilds two days ago in the morning, and she didn't even know how many days they intended to be away. She had ended up spending most of her time just lurking in the common room, idly watching people come and go while she waited for those two and their guards to walk in the door.

At least the number of people bothering her to ask if she needed an adventurer had decreased. Maybe word had gotten around about her, or maybe she'd just gone through the entire local supply of people who might ask. Regardless of the reason, she felt more comfortable with taking her hood down and letting her cloak fall open. She just wished that more interesting things would happen. She'd spotted several aspiring novice mages over the last few days, of course, but none showed any sign that stood out from the rest.

Ressara was staring into her mug, debating with herself whether to return to her room for a nap, when a shadow fell over her from someone approaching her corner table. She looked up, and momentarily flinched in surprise. She barely even noticed the man's height, his long thin arms, and the daggers fastened in seemingly every available spot on his outfit; one of the strongest souls she'd ever clearly felt stood towering over her, and she just nodded timidly as he pulled out the other chair and sat down.

The man rested his arms on the small table and casually leaned forward. "I'm Haftel. And you're Ressara. I hear you've been looking into Carlos and Amber. You even asked to join their party, and had a talk with them personally. What have you learned?"

Ressara blinked, and her face paled. "I- Um, I-I don't think I should be talking about that."

Haftel flicked a hand, and suddenly a gold coin was on the table just inches from Ressara's hands. "No trouble will come to you for telling me, I promise you that."

Ressara hesitated, glancing between Haftel and the gold coin. A memory of Carlos speaking gently came to mind, and she narrowed her eyes. "What do you want to know? And why? What will you use the information for?"

Haftel took a deep breath and sighed slowly. "I and my friends had... an encounter with them of our own, and now we have a decision to make. We need to know what kind of people they really are. Proud? Humble? Selfish? Generous? Honest, or manipulative?"

Ressara nodded slowly, and mulled it over for several seconds. "...Kind."

Haftel waited attentively, holding his face expressionless. Ressara looked over his shoulder, her attention drawn involuntarily by some wards borne by a group of half a dozen people entering the inn. Haftel noticed the direction of her stare and looked briefly, then shrugged and turned back.

Ressara shook her head and wrenched her attention back onto Haftel. The second set of attention-diverting wards she'd personally encountered was a mystery she could investigate later. She swallowed, and slowly put her right hand on top of the gold coin. "Their guards may be scary, but they themselves... They are... perceptive. Gentle. Reasonable. Stern when it's called for. Insightful. Determined. And... yes, they are kind."

Haftel continued gazing at her for a moment, his face unreadable, then slowly nodded. "That matches our own impressions as well. Thank you." He stood up, and walked directly to the stairs.

Ressara's eyes snapped back to that group with attention-diverting wards the moment Haftel was out of sight.

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