Magic is Programming

Ressara's gaze roamed over the six people who were checking in at the bar. If not for their attention-diverting wards, she might have thought they were a somewhat larger than average but otherwise normal adventuring party. They all had armor and various sheathed weapons that looked well used, and four of them bore large and well packed backpacks with buckles designed for easy and quick release on their straps, so they could remove the encumbrance almost instantly if ambushed. Exactly the sort of thing experienced adventurers preferred for bringing their belongings with them while traveling.

The wards weren't trying to push her attention away from the people themselves, of course. That would have interfered with booking their rooms; it's difficult to book a room with an innkeeper who doesn't notice you're there, after all. It would also have risked getting them in a great deal of trouble. Such wards aren't infallible or undefeatable - case in point: Ressara herself - and if the city guard caught someone trying to go that thoroughly unnoticed they would naturally suspect criminal intent.

No, those wards were pushing attention away from the group's level of soul development and, curiously, from certain pieces of their equipment. She could tell their level was impressively high, unlike with Carlos and Amber's guards who had an additional layer of soul disguise that covered up and concealed their real souls, though not quite as high as Haftel's. It was hard to pin down numbers for it with that large a gulf separating their levels from hers, but that gulf was definitely a little wider with Haftel.

Aside from their levels, Ressara's attention was also pulled - contrary to the wards' intent because of her soul structure inverting the effect on her - to a few of their weapons, but what really intrigued her was that she was catching hints of a few more things hidden away in their packs. Had they found a hidden and warded treasure of some kind, and taken it with the ward intact? Oh, she would love to examine and document such a find!

She was on her feet and had taken several steps before she even realized she was approaching them. She hesitated for a moment, wondering why she was acting so bold, but then she remembered Carlos giving her such gentle encouragement when she'd finally gathered her nerves to actually talk with him. Yes, the cautious and circumspect approach had only gotten her caught spying, scolded, and rebuffed. The direct approach had proven better, and she could learn from that experience. Then again, these people weren't Carlos.

Ressara reached the group and stopped a few feet behind the nearest one's back, and gulped quietly. This close, she could smell how badly they needed baths. They were speckled with dirt and dust, and a few spots on their clothes were damp with sweat. One of them was giving her sidelong glances from a few paces to her right, but they hadn't otherwise reacted to her approach. "Uh, sir? Excuse me."

The heavy backpack in front of Ressara swung away as its wearer turned to face her, revealing him as a tall and muscular heavyset man with thick eyebrows and darkly tanned skin. He was covered from neck to feet in heavy chainmail, held his helm in his left hand, and scowled down at Ressara. He stared at her for a moment, and openly swept his gaze down to her feet and back up, pausing momentarily on her sizeable chest. She flushed and shrunk back a little when she noticed that, but stood her ground.

The man glared at Ressara, and spoke gruffly. "What?" Two more people in the group turned their heads to watch.

Ressara nodded back politely and gathered her courage. "You seem like capable adventurers, with well loaded packs. Did you, by any chance, find and recover some treasure recently? I'm a scholar, and I might be able to help identify and assess such things for you."

The man stared blankly for a moment, then let out a sharp breath and shook his head. "Ha. No. Stop bothering us." He turned his back to her before she could respond, his full backpack swinging back to in front of her face.

A few seconds later, the innkeeper handed one of them a key, and the whole group trudged off to the stairs. Ressara watched them go, and sighed when they were finally out of sight. At least nothing bad had happened. She shook her head and walked back to her corner table to resume waiting for Carlos and Amber.

Carlos idly stretched as he paced back and forth, impatiently waiting for the mana that kept pouring in to build up to his next level. A few days ago, stretching and pacing like that would have strained his ability to multitask and focus on keeping the absorption going, but now it was easy. He couldn't do it automatically yet, but he was getting close.

The first day of this expedition, they'd taken several uneventful hours to reach a level five area from Dramos's level three, and to get far enough into it for Lorvan to be certain that actively absorbing the ambient mana wouldn't temporarily deplete it down to level four before they finished. Carlos had experimentally disabled his reflex improver and tried to absorb mana while walking, and had stumbled so badly he'd almost fallen on his face. Good news: his reflex improver definitely could help automate the tedious mana absorption; bad news: it had already been doing that, so he didn't have a quick improvement available to implement before leveling up.

After some frustration with swapping between different types of difficulty - hard to do it correctly with the reflex improver disabled, versus hard to avoid getting distracted with the reflex improver enabled - Carlos had finally hit on the idea of explicitly thinking of dismissing distractions and staying focused on task as a reflex, and focusing the soul structure on improving that reflex for now. Then he'd been startled out of focusing on mana absorption by Amber shaking him vigorously, and was shocked to see the sky darkening toward sunset and his stomach growling, hungry for dinner. Hours had blurred together in a haze of almost trance-like focus.

Surprise had soon given way to triumph at achieving such focus, and then to growing excitement and awe. He had experienced periods of intense and extended focus like that before, but it was rare and he could never control it. He usually felt like his focus was being pulled in a dozen directions at once by various distractions, and it was frustratingly common to look up and find he'd just spent over half an hour on something he'd meant to do only for a few idle moments. It had been the one great bane of his grades in school, and of his performance at work, and the realization that magic in this new world might finally let Carlos master his own focus, that he might actually be able to choose to focus like that, was wonderfully exhilarating.

They had gone to sleep that first night in the Wilds about three quarters of the way to level five. Finishing that level up, or mana compression by the more technically accurate original translation, had been a relatively perfunctory act in the morning, and then they'd had to walk another few hours to get into the level six zone. Things had proceeded similarly through the following days and levels, and now just after lunch on the fourth day of the expedition they were level eight and about to advance to level nine. They had encountered half a dozen beasts along the way, but most just ran away and the two that tried to attack died instantly to Lorvan's spear. Supposedly there were many more that noticed them coming from far away and skedaddled, but Carlos didn't know what signs of that would even look like, much less how to find them.

Absorbing mana and walking at the same time had still been impractical at level five, then shifted through difficult at level six and reasonable at level seven, to now moderately easy at level eight. Carlos could choose to focus strongly on absorbing mana if he wanted to, but he didn't need to anymore. Multitasking with routine things was getting easier, and absorbing mana itself was getting easier too. It was getting close to being a motor skill like walking now, and both activities combined still left enough of his attention to spare that he could - with some caution - think or talk about other things too.

Stolen novel; please report.

Other things such as the fascinating interplay between soul structures that was involved in casting a spell, which he could now observe with his introspector. It all started with his spells activator, a structure that he'd all but forgotten about because its function was so thoroughly in the background. Carlos decided to cast a spell, and his spells activator reacted to that decision, prompting his spells database to retrieve the spell in question from storage. The stored spell as initially fetched was a compact bundle of what amounted to just labels, but the spells activator brought the spells linker into the process, and for each label a corresponding spell fragment was retrieved. The resulting assemblage was several times larger than the bundle of labels, and most mages learned spells by storing the entire assemblage. The spells database had limited capacity, and Carlos estimated he could probably learn four or five times as many different spells as a typical mage of his level before running out of space.

Then, Carlos started speaking the words that corresponded to each piece of the assembled encoded spell, and his spells activator really got to work. Each of those pieces was like an incredibly focused special purpose miniaturized soul structure; it did one extremely specific exact thing, with not even the slightest flexibility, and nothing else whatsoever. It was like if he made a soul structure for the sole purpose of vertically lifting a nail held in his left hand - but only if the nail was exactly the right type of nail, the right size and shape, made of the right metal, already standing vertically on his open palm with its point up, and only when he triggered it by snapping his fingers on his right hand. At full size, a structure like that would be all but unstoppable at the one incredibly specific thing that it did, and useless for anything else. At the almost microscopic size of learned spells, they still had enough potency to be useful, but so little mutual repulsion that they could be packed tightly together with many others.

Each piece of the spell reacted to its own specific trigger by creating the corresponding part of the spell structure that would actually achieve the spell's effect. Those triggers were the spoken words of the spell incantation, but the spells activator connected to the encoded spell's pieces and pushed to substitute its own signal in place of the normal triggers, or at least to augment them. It couldn't activate a spell entirely on its own yet, but it was already greatly increasing the flexibility of what could count as matching the correct trigger closely enough. Normally, casting a spell required clear and precisely correct pronunciation. With his level eight spells activator, Carlos could do it with an indistinct mumble. He'd tried doing it by just thinking the incantation, and the spells activator had definitely reacted to that, but it wasn't developed enough to make that work yet.

Maybe someday he wouldn't even have to think incantations anymore, and could just choose a spell to cast and have it happen. Surely tapping into a mana wellspring would be enough for that, right? Something to look forward to, anyway. For right now, today, he just mumbled the incantation for the new spell he'd learned before they left Dramos, and kept a metaphorical eye on Amber with his mana sense for when she cast hers. They'd each taken a sheet at random from the few that remained of what Trinlen gave them, and agreed that this time they wouldn't say anything about those two spells until after they'd succeeded in learning them purely through mana sense to fix their last two synergies and reach orichalcum rank as they'd originally planned.

Though, on that topic... Carlos frowned, and turned to Lorvan. "What is the Crown's policy on nobles who reach orichalcum rank?"

Lorvan raised an eyebrow and chuckled. "Are you asking for curiosity, or because you think you can do it yourself?" He shook his head idly. "Either way, the answer is the same. The Crown is not the only orichalcum rank noble house in Kalor, but it does not want the identity of other such houses to be publicly known. It would diminish the Crown's prestige, and would single out those houses to be targeted in house rivalries. If you reach orichalcum rank, the Crown will pay more attention to you. Much of the details beyond that depend on how you develop in the second stage."

Amber stood up and glared at him. "There's that 'second stage' you keep mentioning, again. We're deep in the Wilds with no one around, we clearly don't need all our attention to keep absorbing mana, and we're not busy with anything else. It's a perfect opportunity to explain whatever secret knowledge you want! So when are you going to finally explain it?"

Lorvan smiled. "It will be largely self explanatory when the time comes, and there is no danger involved. I see no need to explain before you reach it."

Carlos joined Amber in glaring at him for a moment, but then laughed quietly and shook his head. He suspected Lorvan was hiding a smirk, and if it really was harmless and inevitable that they'd find out on their own in due time, he supposed he should let the guardsman get some amusement out of it.

Carlos settled down and exchanged a look with Amber. He nodded to her and nudged his spell with a bit of mana, knowing that she would sense it. She nodded back and mumbled quietly, casting her spell for Carlos to examine, and he focused most of his attention on it. He identified most of its structure easily, leaving just the one piece that determined the overall spell's effect. It had a connection to Amber, like the Compass spell he'd tried to learn this way from her before, but this one wasn't sending signals to her. There was a sense of information flowing through that connection, but in the other direction, from Amber to the spell. Information... about Amber? That connection wasn't carrying her intent or choices, he was sure of that. It could be input for calculating a parameter, possibly.

He turned his attention to the effect output part of the spell, trying to figure out what it was doing. It was using very little mana at the moment, but he had a feeling that it had to do with heat or temperature in some way. Actually, there was a distinct hint of cold about it, not heat. Or opposing heat, maybe? Then it all clicked in his mind, and he laughed. It was the opposite of his warmth spell, cooling her down if she got hot, rather than warming her up if she got cold.

Well, that made the concept laughably easy to get correct for that keyword, but he had no idea what the spoken word to trigger it was supposed to be. For every keyword he'd learned before, he'd started with knowing the exact spoken word, and had to fiddle with the concept to get the resonance just right before the mana would settle into shape properly. This time it was the opposite.

He felt the resonance of a nearly-but-not-quite correct new keyword immediately, with a strange gap for the completely absent verbalization. He considered experimenting with various syllables and using any changes in the resonance to guide his search, but that seemed unsuitable for his real goal of finalizing synergy links by learning it via his mana sensor. He imagined a connection between the spell incantation fragment he was making and the end product the fragment would produce every time he used it, and tried to link the sensed form of the end product to the resonance of the incomplete fragment to guide the formation of the missing part. He thought he felt some faint hints of sound.

After straining to decipher those faint whispers for a minute, Carlos settled down to wait. He was closer than in any of his previous attempts at this, and the advancement to level nine in... nine minutes and thirty seven seconds just might be enough. The timer ticked down to zero at last, and things changed. His mana sense became sharper. His intuition about how to interpret and use what he could sense became clearer. He stopped holding part of his attention on absorbing mana, focusing completely on the problem at hand.

For a few moments, nothing happened. Then something clicked in his mind, and the spell fragment's resonance peaked. Suddenly, he knew exactly what the correct word to speak for this was, and things changed inside his soul.

Spells or fragments learned:

• "cool" keyword
• mildness spell

Synergy links activated:

• mana sensor and spells database
• mana sensor and spells linker

Active synergy links: 45 / 45

Overall mana absorption and development efficiency increased from 96% to 100%.

Alert: Synergy unification has passed 50% and will complete in 6 more levels.

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