A Jaded Life

Chapter 1345

One thing I quickly learned while experimenting with Mind Magic on a sleeping subject was that the Realm of Shadows, with all its spatially warping nature and its other impossible traits, was a rather quaint and usual place, compared to the madness that manifested within a sleeping mind. Or maybe it was just Joshua’s mind. The guy was weird enough to make me concerned, so it might just be that weirdness I was witnessing. Maybe I would have to poke someone else’s mind while they were sleeping, just to get a somewhat useful comparison.

However, experimenting on a mind ripped from sleep proved much more useful. Normally, Joshua did his best to disrupt my experiments, though he might have been doing so subconsciously. Or it was just a function of a scared, wandering or plainly distracted mind, an attempt to protect itself, just like a human would flinch away when encountering a pain-response. And most of my experiments were undoubtedly painful. Even working on my own mind was uncomfortable, so having someone else intrude where no one was supposed to tread could only be agonising.

His agony didn’t change what I was learning, though. Each time I poked and prodded his mind, I found a few more things and learned a lesson or two. Lessons I could then apply to other aspects of Mind Magic, allowing me to delve deeper into my own mind, to visualise the intersection between Body, Mind and Soul even better than before and slowly make sense of it. At least I was hoping the lessons I was learning from Joshua’s mind were universal, that it wasn’t a complete coincidence I could apply them in limited ways when exploring my own mind and get somewhat stable results.

Curiously, the System was woven into all three aspects of the self. It wasn’t truly external; it didn’t seem to be tacked on, at least not within the visualisation I was employing to make sense of the information presented to me by my magic. Instead, the system was composed of grossamer thin strands of something unknown and woven through every aspect of the mind. I was fairly certain that I would detect similar strands within the Body and Soul if I had the magical and mental tools to look for them, but I wasn’t that capable yet.

My Soul Magic and Blood Magic had taken a stride forward recently, namely when I created the symbiote that made Waylon into a Warlock, but it was a lot less capable than my Mind Magic. I wasn’t all that far from becoming a master of Mind Magic, raising the skill to one-hundred. And my current experiments had already borne fruit, giving me one of the last few points I was still missing in the skill, raising it to ninety-two. Given how long it had been stagnant, realising that I was making actual progress in the skill was quite exhilarating.

As were the breakthroughs. Not so much for what I learned, Joshua’s mind and memories weren’t all that pleasant, but each step of progress brought me one step closer to my beloved Sigmir. To get her back, I was completely willing to rip Joshua’s mind to shreds, only to immediately go out and find additional subjects to tear through.

But I couldn’t do so, it wouldn’t be useful. I didn’t need to learn how to forcibly read minds while tearing them to shreds. If anything, I needed to learn the opposite; I needed to subtly read minds, to extract memories without causing harm. After all, the memories I was hoping to extract were stored within my Mind, or rather, within the Legacy of Morgana, bound to me by the system. Hopefully, I would be able to find the EXP Sigmir had transferred to me upon her death and extract the experiences and memories those EXP contained. Or even leave the EXP intact and just transfer them to Sigmir. It would weaken me, likely cause me to lose some levels or possibly some other advantage from the Legacy, but it would return a good chunk of Sigmir’s memories and mind. Hopefully, it would be enough of a foundation to build upon and somehow bridge the rest.

Given that those EXP were within my own mind, forcibly ripping the mind in question to shreds would be… problematic. I didn’t think Sigmir would want to return to life, only to find out I had killed myself to make it happen.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

After experimenting on Joshua for a while, testing new and exciting things, I gave him a bit of food, some water and left him alone. He would keep in his cell, even if the space wasn’t exactly healthy for his state of mind. Sooner or later, probably sooner, the darkness, the sensory deprivation and the general atmosphere would break him. I had no idea how long it would take, but I knew humans didn’t do well when trapped in a narrow space underground.

However, I was confident that any issues with a broken mind wouldn’t keep me from experimenting on it. If anything, a broken mind might reveal new and exciting insights into how it works, much like breaking a mechanical object could reveal a lot about its insides. Or cracking an egg to get to the yolk, or making an omelette. Sometimes, destruction was necessary to progress.

With the newly learned lessons, I let myself sink into my own mind, exploring the visualisation I had developed on Joshua, and a few others before. It was quite fascinating to experience how my own mind dealt with the scrutiny, how parts of myself were lighting up under my own examination, making me wonder if these were the parts that I was using to examine. It was utterly fascinating, but my general mind wasn’t what I was after.

Instead, I focused on the grossamer threads spun throughout my being, the system that had become part of my very essence. For a moment, I wondered if that intrusion was somehow responsible for Shattered, or if it was a consequence of the surging Astral Power, or maybe a combination of them.

Slowly, I started to try teasing out the strands. I had tried that a few times with Joshua and managed to see a few images that might have been his experiences, condensed into what the system labelled as EXP, but they had been a little too distorted to make sense of. But there was a lot of emotion bound into those strands, making me wonder how much of the EXP came from outside and how much of their essence was generated internally.

Not that it truly mattered.

EXP were just a fact of the system; studying where they came from and how they were generated were questions I could try to solve in the far future, when I had no other problems to worry about. Not while I was working on a much more important project.

Finally, I managed to tease free one of the strands and started to slowly pry it apart. This part was just as fiddly and annoying as the entire rest of the process, and, to my great frustration, the strand tried to escape and weave itself back into the tapestry of the system. Whenever I tried to pull a little too hard on it, I felt a stinging pain in my skull. Eventually, I decided to try to figure out that part and stumbled down a rabbit hole, trying to understand how pain worked.

It was truly fascinating. I had always thought the overlap between body and mind was much smaller, but the more I explored this area, the more I realised that I was constantly switching between Blood Magic, trying to make sense of a physical construct within my body and Mind Magic, trying to do the same on a mental level. Nerves were carrying signals that seamlessly became mental stimuli, making me briefly wonder if there was a way to magically activate those nerves and use them to my advantage. It would be rather simple, especially when I started to gently tug on the strands of the system, making it trivial to create signals of pure pain, without any actual physical component.

By the time I noticed I had lost track of my original goal, I was fairly confident that I’d be able to use a combination of Mind and a bit of Soul and Blood Magic to create a targeted version of this. Maybe even one that affected the whole body, causing every nerve within to fire and report that the nerve in question was in pain. It would be rather harsh, likely utterly debilitating, but it’d also be incredibly effective. Especially if the pain I used as the basis for the spell was truly a construct of the system, used to keep people from messing with its fundamental parts. Because if that were the case, the pain would likely be a universal thing, something that even beings usually immune to pain would feel.

And the idea of a spell that caused skeletons or zombies to scream in pain was oddly fascinating.