MAGUS INFINITE

Meditation: 94 → 95 (Arcanist)

I woke up from my Meditation on the third day and I decided to keep a journal of everything, my experiments and everything that I experienced in this place, at least that was the plan at first, but I never knew how much those plans would change, and if there is anyone reading this journal, then you know that the decision to write it came from this moment.

To create a journal using Lightning Edict was a rather simple process for me at this point, it just required me to gather lightning essence and with Edict, command the shape of lightning into what I wanted.

For some reason, I did not want to do this now. Usually I was always in a rush when I made these decisions, and most of magic was made in the heat of the moment, but here I was surrounded by darkness, and there were no demons or Sovereigns in this place, just me and my thoughts.

I wanted to create a journal, but I did not just want any journal... I wanted something a bit more permanent, that should hopefully last for me past this life, and into another one... something that could tell my story, even when I was gone.

Maybe it was the darkness that inspired these thoughts from me; I could not tell, but all I could think was that my parents and my sister might never know what had happened to me, just because I was somewhere I could not easily return from.

I would not want them to know everything I had experienced, gods no, my mum would throw a fit, and my dad would... he would be broken, but I wanted them to have something of me.

After thinking about this for a while, I knew that this was a significant task that should and could not be rushed, so I made do with a normal journal and pen, and began my experimentation with Lightning Edict, as I hoped to see how this mysterious space would handle my spells.

I filled a patch of floor with lightning essence until it was saturated; that took almost four hours, since I was the only source in here and the darkness was greedy, always collecting my lightning essence from the ground, and then I put my hand flat on it and said,

"Break."

Nothing happened... There was no resistance. The stone did not even push back against my command, I just felt my spell reach for the ground and it arrived at nothing, and if I was not looking and feeling the ground below me, I would have felt that there was no ground beneath my feet.

I did not like that, not one bit, but I was here to learn, not to judge what I discovered. I shook my head and manifested a thread, and when I commanded it to Break, the thread broke instantly and perfectly, and I could not feel any disruption in this process, so Edict worked in here, even when I used it for extremely small things, so this meant that there was truly nothing for it to touch... so weird.

Then I tried it on the darkness itself. I saturated a volume of the air with essence, several minutes of standing there feeding lightning into empty space, and told it to Burn.

Well, the essence burned, but the dark did not. It sat there around my little sphere of fire, and when the essence was spent the fire went out and the dark closed over the spot with no more ceremony than water closing over a dropped stone.

I sighed and wrote on my note: The darkness is not a substance. Lightning Edict has to have something to speak to, and the dark is not a something... even the ground cannot be touched, damned spooky.

I closed the journal and closed my eyes in Meditation, allowing everything I had discovered on this day to just linger in my mind, and like this, the third day passed.

∞

On the fourth day, I decided to focus on the loom. I already knew the darkness eats threads. What I did not know was the rate, or the manner, all important details to learn if I wanted to maneuver through this place with any degree of assurance.

I laid out ten anchored threads at ten different thicknesses, from a hairline to a bolt, and I sat down and watched them for eleven hours.

The thin ones went out first, as they slowly thinned evenly along their whole length at once, like a line of chalk being rubbed out by a hand that pressed the same everywhere. The thick ones took longer and went exactly the same way. I had to revise the way I looked at the darkness, because I don’t think I was looking at consumption, nothing was eating them. They were simply becoming less, uniformly, from the whole of themselves.

The hairline lasted about nine minutes, and the thread I weaved into a bolt lasted a little over six hours.

And I kept one thread aside while constantly running a trickle of Anima into it, and it lasted as long as I fed it. When I stopped, it began thinning from that instant.

That matched what I knew, but it was great to know that as long as I maintained the Anima in any of my spells and constructs, they would remain.

I do not know what that means yet. I wrote it down and left it.

∞

The fifth day was first focused on Stormstep. This spell had been growing extremely rapidly in this place, and I was curious why this was happening.

After a few hours of casting this spell, I finalized on the answer after crossing out a dozen possibilities, and the answer was quite simple at the end of the day, and it is that this place is the worst possible training ground and therefore the best one.

Stormstep: 96 → 99 (Legendary)

Everywhere else in the world there was ambient lightning essence, thin but present, and Stormstep used it, even when I was not fully in control of that process. In here there was none at all, so every single jump had to be seeded by me first, and the seeding has to be precise, and my margin for error was nothing, as a badly seeded jump in a place with no landmarks would put me somewhere I could not find my way back from.

So I have been doing the hardest possible version of a technique, hundreds of times, with real consequences for sloppiness. Of course it is growing, it was a good thing that I had a ridiculous amount of Anima, or I would not be able to use this spell more than a few times in this place.

I made a note of this difficulty of wielding spells and what it may mean for my growth in the next nine months, and then I decided to test an Adjacent ability to Stormstep, Lightning Incarnate, and here is where the day turned rather unpleasant.

Since I had access to Stormstep, I no longer used Lightning Incarnate as a means of movement, but I did it here to test how far I could travel in that state, and as far as I can tell, the state itself worked perfectly, and traveling was no better than flying.

But when I came back into my body, I was... thirsty.

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