A Jaded Life

Chapter 1332

Once Joshua was gone, some of my focus returned to the windows I was working on. The repetitive task allowed me to parse the information I had gained earlier, and what I concluded wasn’t good. If I wanted to look at things from a purely positive perspective, donning completely rose-tinted glasses, I could say that Joshua had an incredible affinity for Mind Magic. Additionally, he had an incredible amount of Charisma, almost as much as I had, which was quite absurd given the different traits that inflated my attributes, and my much higher level. Sure, Charisma was my lowest attribute, but it was still in the fifties, far beyond the level I would have expected for someone below level fifty.

Those were the good parts, but, sadly, they came with some equally impressive negative parts.

While affinities and attributes were relatively easy to detect, at least for me, the rest I had concluded had a much weaker grounding. Quite a bit of it was based on my instincts from the contact I had with his mind. While I could have tried to sort through his memories and look for patterns and issues, it would have taken a long time, especially if the issues were subtle. So, I had to rely on the information I had gleaned in that short moment of contact and my instincts, which were still screaming at me that the guy wasn’t to be trusted.

While I had come across his interest in healing people, the undercurrent had never been about helping people. Instead, the interest in healing was entirely self-serving, focused on the fact that people who could heal would always be in demand. He wanted to learn something that would secure him a comfortable place in society, no matter where society went in the future.

His interest in Mind Magic also stemmed from a prior education in psychology or a related field, though what little I had glimpsed there always had a manipulative undertone, making me wonder just how long Joshua had been manipulating people, and whether he even realised that his manipulations could harm them.

Which made dealing with him a priority. If he were the social operator and manipulator I thought him to be, he would likely know what levers to pull in people’s minds, what to say to convince them of his point of view. It was, sadly, a field in which I was admittedly horribly incapable, unless I had a good amount of time to plan a conversation out ahead. Otherwise, things could easily go awry, especially when it came to emotionally sensitive topics.

Like the mental and physical health of a number of people who had come here from the Blessed City. That was a lever any fool could try to pull, pushing people here to force me to teach him what he wanted to know. He might even have prepared such levers in advance, painting himself as the innocent party who only wanted to learn and help people, while I was the villain, hoarding important knowledge, keeping it hostage to maintain a position of power and privilege. It was a foolish and rather simple manipulation, as evidenced by the fact that I could think of the possibility this fast, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work on the locals. Or his plans might be even more complex, with further, deeper layers of manipulation, leaving me trying to catch up if I wanted to unravel the insanity he had woven.

Or I could take an entirely different approach.

If his goal was to fool the locals into putting pressure on me, using them as leverage, I could simply change my position, thereby removing all the leverage. In other words, I needed to figure out how to give him what he wanted, or rather, what the people wanted me to give him, without giving him any opportunity to wield powers I didn’t think he should have.

It was an incredibly arrogant, and maybe hypocritical, stance to take, that I could determine who was allowed to wield what powers, especially given my own, somewhat spotty records when it came to moral judgment, but if he wanted to force me to teach him, how the taught powers were used became my business.

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I couldn’t help but grin when I realised that the solution was incredibly obvious. If Joshua wanted to use popular opinion as leverage, I could simply go along with it. Only, to properly teach Mind Magic, he would have to travel over to Jademoon Tower, where I could teach him without outside minds disturbing us. Why, even the presence of outsiders would make teaching dangerous; the emanations from their minds could disturb the fragile equilibrium necessary to teach properly.

His first test would be to reach the tower, maybe within a day or two, without outside assistance. I would just have to head out, prepare the tower for his arrival, and then, after waiting a few days, I could return, claiming he never managed to reach the tower. It would be a huge tragedy. I might even offer to search in the forest, just to make sure he didn’t get lost, and return him to Maggie’s community. He might not be fated to learn Mind Magic, but if I could find him, he might become a councillor or therapist.

Nodding to myself, I started to consider where I would dump the guy after making him disappear in the forest. His mind was quite unique, making me wonder how useful it would be to study it, even if I would have to crack it like an egg.

I didn’t want it to happen in Jademoon Tower, nor did I want him to be exposed to the wild energies of the Nexus Tower. Sure, they were contained within the tower’s walls, only flowing through them and allowing me access to wield them while I was atop my throne, but that containment wasn’t perfect. If someone was powerful, desperate or just flat-out insane enough, they might be able to draw on those powers anyway, and who knew what that would result in?

No, the Nexus Tower wasn’t suitable to house prisoners, and Jademoon Tower was a little too close to home for comfort, so another place would be suitable.

Stepping back into the shadows, I walked through their gloomy realm, traversing hundreds of kilometres in seconds, and soon I reached my destination. The underground base I had used while we were trying to clean up the mess in the Burned Land was exactly as I had left it, just as I had hoped. Well, the air was a little stale, forcing me to take a closer look and rework the enchantments that controlled the climate within, but that wasn’t a difficult thing.

Once those enchantments were done, I quickly checked that the mountain itself maintained its integrity. The creatures of the burned land had tossed a lot of their burning goop atop it, adding a thick layer of rock to the mountain, and closing off some of the air passages, but that was easily cleared up. The mountain was even sturdier than it had been in the past; the shelter I was in now was only accessible if one could walk the shadows or dig through an entire mountain. This could easily become the perfect prison.

Still smiling, I started to shift the earth around, opening a new passage within the underground shelter, but only digging a few metres. Then I started digging straight down, altering the earth and stone to make the walls of the shaft as compact and hard as possible, weaving runes into the earth, similar to those I had used on the Nexus Tower.

The result was a long shaft of perfectly smooth, incredibly hard stone that led down some twenty metres. Once down there, I extended it out in all directions, so no wall was leading into the shaft, meaning anyone who wanted to climb up had somehow made their way across the equally smooth ceiling before transitioning onto the shaft’s wall. It wasn’t perfect, but it made climbing the shaft exceedingly difficult.

Then I started to add a few vertical tunnels, each with a few cells on each side. Those cells had no doors at the moment, but I was planning to add them, and within each cell was a narrow ledge of stone and another drop, each leading a further two metres down into the actual cell. The cells were made similar to the other shaft, round with a funnel shape up top, so no blind spots remained when looking into them from above, all made from the same smooth stone I used everywhere down here.

Then, I started the difficult job of enchanting all this, weaving runes into the walls that would hopefully disrupt all magic but my own down here. Anyone else would have their powers drained away, using their Astral Power to fuel the very enchantments that kept them trapped.

Once that was done, I only needed to add the correct doors and metal grates, all in the service of containing whoever I wanted to imprison down here.