Universe's End

Chapter 199: Oversaturated

"And there we go," Rory whispered to himself. "At long last, decades and decades later, it's finally been done."

With a smile, Rory dusted himself off and stood up.

"Tier eight achieved."

Or so Rory had assumed.

One moment, he'd been standing up, the next, he was seated cross-legged just the same as he had been.

Huh?

Trying once more to stand up, Rory found himself moving upright with no problem, leading Rory to believe that perh-

Nope, that's not right.

Once more, he was seated cross-legged as if he hadn't moved an inch.

Am I under an illusion?

Sweeping his senses outward, Rory attempted to frown, only for his face to remain frozen.

No, not under an illusion, or any external effect from what I can tell.

That was a bit of an oddity considering he couldn't move an inch.

Why not?

Playing with a straight thought, Rory considered whether he was somehow in a time loop.

No, no, not a time loop. I can still vaguely tell time is moving regularly. Wait, no, it's not.

He wasn't in a time loop, but there was something off with time.

Or more accurately, his perception of time.

Oh. It can't be… unless?

Long, long ago, Rory learned that, as useful as attribute density in any given attribute was, there was a potential downside to oversaturating a single attribute. Something like strength was easily understandable, too much strength and not enough durability, and you'd self-destruct your own body with every movement.

In fact, it was partially why attributes worked a little differently for non-monsters. Monsters tended to gain their attributes over time rather than all at once; in part because they had more attributes to begin with, it prevented a sudden deluge from overwhelming a monster.

While humans did receive all their attributes at once, there was essentially a 'limiter' self-imposed by the mind to prevent a sudden increase in attributes from being too much to handle, easing over time. As tiers increased, eventually even that wouldn't be enough, and they'd gain their attributes over time, but that wasn't a problem for quite some time.

Thanks, pre-Eon, for that lecture.

Too much of any attribute would override the self-imposed limiter, causing varying issues.

Too much strength? The body would tear itself apart.

Too much durability? Moving would become a struggle, as your body locked up like a muscle constantly flexed.

Too much flexibility? Mustering any strength would become difficult as your muscles couldn't properly 'strain' and push back.

Too much pneuma? Your body would burn out from the inside out.

Too much growth? You'd die before you could ever reach your subsequent ascension in time, or die from lack of other attributes.

But too much cognition?

Too much cognition, and you'd probably find your brain signals moving too fast for your body to keep up with or even properly register.

Time was moving linearly as always, but to Rory, it was also moving much more slowly. Seated cross-legged in his basement, it had been easy to miss if he didn't take the effort of specifically focusing on the passage of time.

Well, shoot.

As for why it had seemed like he had moved only to snap back to reality, that was also a problem with his mind. Rory was well practiced in his Mind Palace with mentally 'constructing' an image. Combining that with an extra powerful processor known as the brain, and tack on an effect found even back on Earth, where the brain could 'see' things that weren't there if it assumed they should be there. Combined, you'd have a recipe for the brain sending the 'move' signal, and then expecting to move, would construct an extremely vivid self-imposed 'illusion' that Rory had stood up, until the visual stimuli caught up to the fact that he hadn't moved an inch.

That's a bit of a predicament.

Rory hadn't expected to find himself oversaturated on cognition, but it wasn't impossible to square that circle either. He'd been primarily focused on cognition investment for some time now, added into the fact that he'd never gone very hard in adding attributes to his physicals, and then a sudden fifty percent attribute distribution to cognition in tier eight, where the attributes counted for more then the tier prior, and finally even Eyes of the Architect had a passive aspect to the skill that applied the active ocular release effects at all times, just at a lower rate, meaning he always had a minor cognition boost active.

All of that was to say, he was a bit lopsided right now.

Alright, well, I'd rather not suffer the rest of my life with self-afflicted locked-in syndrome, so I gotta figure this one out.

The first and 'easiest' area to target was Eyes of the Architect and the passive effect. Typically, the passive was only beneficial, so he'd never really attempted to see if he could 'shut off' a part of it, but now he really didn't need that extra cognition, at least not for the current moment. Turning his focus inward, Rory seamlessly transferred into his Mind Palace. It was always easier to focus on skill stuff within his Mind Palace, where he was 'closer' to them. Focusing on the Eyes of the Architect, Rory briefly considered when he'd spent time working on creating Earth Soul with the use of a skill slate. Precision work with skills, specifically on the skill itself and not its application, wasn't something Rory had spent a whole lot of time doing, mainly because it hadn't even been something that had crossed his mind most of the time. Thus, the work with the skill slate was the most 'obvious' example he had to draw from.

With that in mind, Rory continued to turn his attention inward as he remained within his Mind Palace until he 'located' where the skill resided within himself, even if it wasn't a genuine physical location. Grabbing hold of the skill, Rory blinked momentarily, surprised that within his Mind Palace, a skill slate had suddenly appeared.

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"Wait, not a skill slate, or at least not an actual skill slate. Just how my mind is interpreting and understanding the metaphysical information I'm grasping."

Rory knew instinctively, though it wouldn't have been a hard guess, that the skill slate he was looking at belonged to Eyes of the Architect.

It was…. Really god damn complicated. So complicated that it made Earth Soul look like a grade-school math problem.

"Nope, I am not ready to deal with this, at least not in totality," Rory admitted without a hint of shame. Eyes of the Architect was the result of several skills evolving, fusing, and evolving again. Hell, Seams Unseen had just been integrated into the skill with his crossing into tier eight. The entire thing existed at a higher dimension than Rory could comprehend, and that wasn't merely flower-y language; Rory had a vague sense that of the countless nodes, whirls, connections, and concepts existed in several points and places at once, at both higher and lower levels.

In a sense, it was a lot like a metaphor. While a metaphor had a literal meaning or translation that made little sense, the deeper meaning was where the intent lay.

And what Rory was looking at was a dictionary of 'metaphors' translated into five languages, turned upside down, and then written in Pig Latin just for funsies.

"Right, well, I don't need to actually unravel the skill. I just need to understand a single, tiny little piece to turn off."

The benefit of his oversaturation of Cognition, while within his Mind Palace to boot, was that for every second that passed in the real world, he was probably getting minutes worth of time here.

And so, Rory spent roughly a week straight within his Mind Palace puzzling out the single piece he needed to find. A week that, in real time, was closer to an hour.

Finally, having found the single node he was looking for, Rory 'pressed' it. Vaguely aware that something felt different from within his Mind Palace, Rory withdrew as he found himself back in reality. Attempting to move, Rory found his hand moving sluggishly, but moving all the same.

Alright, progress!

His cognition no longer outpaced his body, even though his mental processing remained far faster than his physical movements, making everything appear to move slowly.

You know, it would be one thing if it made it possible to track things magnitudes faster than I, but my visual perception is still linked to my physical attributes, so I'd still get weird laggy responses. Maybe I could skip that if I used magical perceptions? Wait, getting sidetracked.

While he had made progress, Rory was far from happy. Trying to do anything with such misaligned physical sensory and reactions compared to his mental processing would drive him insane, even with minds that had been galvanized against such flaws in their very earliest tiers.

Cognition has already been slowed by turning off the cognition boost passive aspect of Eyes of the Architect, but I need to limit it further… Wait, limit?

Just earlier, though, to Rory, it felt as if it had been a week ago; he'd been ruminating over how the body naturally limited the attributes upon an ascension. Clearly, cognition was exempt, as the mind couldn't seemingly limit itself naturally, but that didn't mean that the idea of an imposed limiter was a bad idea.

In fact…. I wonder.

Slipping into his Mind Palace once more, Rory released the pause on his cognition boost passive from Eyes of the Architect. Thankfully, within his Mind Palace, where everything was just a mental construct, he didn't suffer from perception and physical action misalignment.

After spending a 'week' investigating Eyes of the Architect and better understanding how to 'tweak' the skill, Rory had also gotten more of an understanding of attribute manipulation. It wasn't exactly a new concept; in fact, Zoey did it all the time, but for Rory, the limit of attribute manipulation was the cognition boost effect of Eyes of the Architect.

"The question is, can I apply that same sort of logic to myself without a skill? In this case, it should be possible, as I wouldn't be boosting something, but limiting."

Whereas figuring out even the single 'on-off' switch for a mere minor passive aspect of Eyes of the Architect had taken him a week, his next attempt at cognition manipulation only took the better part of a day. It essentially boiled down to forcibly slowing his own thinking, as if he were deep in meditation, while also holding his awareness. Rory was sure the Rong family would have some deep philosophical thoughts on self-introspection or other things Rory figured were mostly buzz words back on Earth, but that didn't mean there wasn't truth to it on Aelia.

In the end, the result came in the form of a notification that reached him even within his own mind in the form of a scroll appearing like a royal declaration.

Oh, funny how my mind interprets that within my Mind Palace.

Skill Creation successful:

Cognition Limit

Rarity: Common

To slow one's mind is to find inner peace. Or so some would say. Allows flexible limitation of the cognition attribute.

That was it. It was a short and mostly to-the-point description, which Rory appreciated.

"Success," Rory sighed. Having managed to create a skill from scratch, even if it was only a common rarity skill, was still an accomplishment. More than happy, Rory was about to vacate his Mind Palace when he paused.

"You know…. Why stop there?"

Having spent so much time working on Eyes of the Architect and now the creation of the Cognition Limit skill, Rory felt like he was on a roll.

It would be a waste not to do a little more, right?

Having successfully created the skill, it took only a bit of effort to 'summon' its skill slate. Unlike Eyes of the Architect, a divine creation in comparison, Cognition Limit was little more than a basic blueprint laid out, each node and its 'role' beyond simple.

Which makes sense, I made the skill from scratch after all.

Examining the structure, it took Rory only a little bit longer to alter it, with minor adjustments to the connections between several nodes. The only 'big' change was his focus on the node that represented his internalized aspect of cognition. Having seen from Eyes of the Architect firsthand that a node could exist in several 'dimensions' at once, Rory applied the same principle, albeit to a lesser degree. Rather than add several new nodes, each representing a different attribute, Rory focused on the single cognition node and layered within it 'parallel' nodes for Strength, Durability, Flexibility, and even Pneuma.

Skill Modification successful:

Cognition Limit

Rarity: Common

To slow one's mind is to find inner peace. Or so some would say. Allows flexible limitation of the cognition attribute.

-->

Attribute Limiter

Rarity: Common

To understand oneself is to know how to return to basics. Or so some would say. Allows flexible limitation of all non-growth attributes.

Smiling to himself, Rory was once more about to return to the real world when again, he paused.

Now…. Wouldn't it be a waste not to do a little more when I'm on a roll?

Two hours later in real time, Rory finally returned to the present, blinking his eyes.

By his sense of time, three weeks had fully passed since he'd crossed tier eight.

Real time? A little over three hours.

Standing up, no longer with any misalignment in perception and processing speed, Rory actually dusted himself off with a grin.

It had been a bit of a detour, but the last three hours or three weeks, depending on who you asked, had been immensely productive.

And that was all before actually investigating any of the tier eight changes.

Obtaining Cognition Limit had been necessary. Modifying it into Attribute Limiter had been nifty.

But the final modification he'd gone about fashioning? That transcended nifty into pretty fucking useful.

Opening his interface, Rory admired his newest skill.

Limiter Release

Rarity: Rare

One must first learn to pull away into oneself before one may learn to undergo the reverse and fully give everything of oneself. Having done as much, you may now forcibly release the self-imposed limitations of the mind and body, temporarily allowing one to draw upon the full capacity of their attributes before one is ready. The effectiveness of Limiter Release will decrease as attributes are acclimated to with time and practice.

WARNING: Releasing Attribute Limiters may result in significant harm or prolonged incapacitation, if not death.

Sure, the skill ended with a big fat 'Don't die stupid,' warning, but Rory had expected something along those lines.

"I did say I needed a boosting skill." Rory grinned to himself.

It wasn't a real boosting skill, in the sense that a boosting skill would be just as effective at the start of a tier all the way to the end of a tier, whereas this would gradually lose effectiveness the closer one was to the end of a tier where they'd more than likely be capable of harnessing the full extent of their attributes without issue.

But for the time being, it was better than nothing.

"Now I can be the mom lifting a car off her kids," Rory snorted, in a relatively good mood.

And the best part?

He still hadn't even properly investigated the boons of tier eight yet.