tobiasbegley

PSTH: Chapter Thirty-Two

Arcane essence! A very arcane subject, that’s for sure, pun fully intended without any remorse. It perhaps offers the least benefits to a person’s pneuma out of every type, barely better than raw essence flowing from a spirit without a condensed core. Even null essence pneuma is stronger, faster, and tougher! But where it lacks in pneuma empowerment, it more than makes up for with its anima based spellcraft. Teleportation, levitation, divination, telepathy, technomancy, the sky seems to b...

PSTH: Chapter Thirty-One

There’s a lot of discussion around the phrase ‘War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!’ and its use in Pre-Arrival culture. Some, such as myself, believe that the phrase was an ironic one. With a culture dependent heavily on an inherently limited resource, and with the proto-Obsidian Kings working to stymie and slow the development of re-usable sources of technology, magic, power, and even food and farming? It seems like, as inconceivable as it is to you and I, there was an endles...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Eight

I sat in the waiting room, a handful of other people buzzing around me, Dusk sitting on my shoulder. I took a long, slow, deep breath as I prepared for the first round of the Elysian Mastery Tournament.  

True to his word, the Craftsman had left my staff sitting on the nightstand of the room that the Silent River Sect had given to the competitors for me to find the following morning. It now revolved around in my ungated mana, allowing me to keep both of my hands free. I couldn...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Seven

As soon as I spoke, the entire demeanor of the Craftsman changed. He stretched, popping his back, and I caught a flare of a strange, layered, complex mana that I wasn’t able to identify fully before it vanished. He scrabbled around in his pockets, looking for something, then removed a marble glowing with spatial mana within it. The thing glowed with dense, potent mana, and between my mana senses, my general knowledge of spellforms, and my spatial sense, I was pretty confident that it would ...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Six

After the official opening of the tournament, it was late, but not so late that I wanted to immediately return to bad. Instead our gaggle of people meandered around the accommodations of Silent River Sect. The atmosphere there was electric, as competitors rushed from place to place, ate from the freely provided platters of food, and flirted desperately with one another. There were people there for the core tournament, like me, but there were also hundreds, maybe even thousands, of specialists...

PSTH: Chapter Thirty

Shade essence! Finally, we’re back in the category of reasonably named things. We’ll start with the first thing: shadows aren’t real. And that’s true if you’re removing essence from the equation. But shade essence is undeniably linked to shadows, and is one of the more conceptually grounded mage types. It has a few okay offensive and defensive spells, but its real utility shines in utility spells. Shade’s got it all! Walk through walls, layer curses on someone, or turn invisible, ...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Nine

Does the differential between a magian’s strength and the strength of the ambient essence matter? First of all, let’s acknowledge that once you’re above the strength of an area’s ambient essence, standard cultivation will drop off a cliff, and set that aside. There’s no denying that, but it’s not really the question being asked. Let’s look at two similar level one magians. One is cultivating in an area with an ambient essence level of five, the other in an area of fifty. Which w...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Eight

Combat essence… It sure is a weird one. It’s another essence type with multiple proposed other names: somatic, bodily, corporeal, form, meat, enhancement. The issue is, none of them fully encapsulate the type. It’s great at empowering people, sure, but there are a handful of unique aura spells, shroud-like effects, and short term future sight spells that fall under combat essence’s purview. That essentially gets rid of most of the names. Generating a sphere of spinning aura and willpo...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Five (and a Half)

A wine glass tumbled from Atsila’s fingers as she stared up into the sky where the flash of light had come from, even as Ama fed her a stream of information via their bond. An instant later, a dozen different emotions raced through her, but there was one dominant one: Frustration. 

The Storm King had cheated, and he hadn’t even done it well enough to really win. The Storm King had simply lifted a massive block of steel plating surrounding the overblown light spell, brought it t...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Five

After Kene’s grandmother broke the tension, things relaxed, and we began to stream together toward the central arena where the opening ceremony would be held. I put my mask on shortly before we entered the absurdly busy entry hall.C Even though all of the tickets that I held were putting us in the competitor section, and thus we didn’t have to move through the spectator’s lines, there was still an immense crowd around the entry we did move through. When we finally took our seats, it was...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Four

“You’re going to jinx your next ascension if you keep muttering to yourself like that,” Kene said, causing me to let out a sigh and lean my head against the window. Kene had at first simply told me that I’d experienced a pretty normal fourth gate ascension, reminding me that my third gate one had been rather unusual, but had quickly gotten annoyed at my half-muttered comments the following morning while we got coffee and loaded onto the train. The mumbling was really more directed tow...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Three

I considered for a long moment, before I looked at Rebecca and nodded. I had known that there was a risk of Dawn’s true nature leaking eventually, but there had to be a reason that Meadow had insisted that we get her a mask and pass her off as the shade of a solar-aligned sky estragon. We’d gotten powerful, absolutely, and I didn’t want to devalue all of the work that we had put in. But I also knew that, apart from being Meadow’s apprentice, I had little enough protection against a ro...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Seven

Why do eyes start glowing when a person gathers enough essence into their body to ignite it and actually form the right mix of ousia, anima, and pneuma that we call essence, rather than the tiny pools modern people are born with? The answer is a lot more complex than you might expect, but it essentially boils down to this: humans have ousia, but we aren’t entirely constructed from it in the same way that Primals are. But there are a few spots where our ousia shines through and fundamentally...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Six

Toxic essence, or poison essence, or venom essence, or what I like to call it: pedantry essence. “Oh, anything can be toxic in a large enough dose, toxicity is a scale, not a binary”, yeah yeah, we know. But when you say something is toxic, we all know what it means. I’m not going to slap a sandwich on the ground and tell you it’s toxic, even though technically everything’s toxic. And by the same token, a toxic magian can’t reality warp through pedantry. It’s a great debuffer, p...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Five

Thank you, thank you, you’re too kind. Well. I suppose since John gave the announcement of what I’m here for, I can jump right into it: the synthesis of essence based items, like essence stones, essence hearts, and mystic jewels. If you look on screen, you can see we’ve managed to successfully increase the percentage of essence compaction, and were able to overcome the first plateau, creating a liquid essence. While that was not our goal, our liquid essence seemed to have some interesti...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Two

We still had several days in port, and with our distance from the Sekhem Court, I seized upon the opportunity to see a better run part of the country. I wasn’t sure if I was just going through a particularly unlucky streak and running into the problem areas of just about everywhere I came across, if I was simply inured to the problems in Mossford, or if it was some combination of both, but I was relieved to no longer be in the Sekhem’s territory. 

That relief did make me feel a...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-One

To my disappointment, the Skehem Court did not allow me to see their ritual chamber. I supposed that was to be expected – they were already giving me materials for it, if they also let me see the spellwork and enchantments, then to their minds, it was as good as leaking the entire ritual to the rest of the vampires in the world. 

That actually caused me to pause for a moment. 

I didn’t really hate the Sekhem Court for the Sekhem part, but rather for the Court part. T...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty

“Tell me more about this earring,” I said. “You’ve placed it on par with two favors or an entire selection of personalized rewards right from the Storm King. Why?” 

“It’s a powerful artifact, constructed out of a bloodruby set on a chain that is a tripart alloy of mana-enriched gold, rune-brass, and intent-cobalt. Each of the metals, as well as the ruby, is a ninth gate material that’s also undergone massive amounts of spellwork and enchantments. I don’t intend to...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Four

Lightning essence! It’s got two main attributes that make it stand out: speed and power. When powering pnuema, it has a strong preference to empowering speed, and when its anima is used in spells, they tend to hit really hard. There’s actually something interesting with that. Did you know pretty much all of the tech from before magic ran on electricity? There was a pretty big gap between essence based physics and non-essence physics, which is one of the reasons so many of the devices were...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Three

A fascinating insight from our recent history is to look at the way essence awakening and average essence levels in people have changed. Three centuries ago, it was far more common to awaken one’s essence and begin cultivating as a magian or tamer. And yet, despite the number of cultivators decreasing, the average level has risen dramatically. We think there are multiple reasons for this, but there’s one big one: as our policies have become further entrenched, people have been able to rel...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Two

Now, we can all agree to be mature adults and not make any obvious jokes, right? Right. Wood essence! It’s a complex and powerful type of essence, which covers a variety of spells from plant manipulation, to healing magic, to imposing several types of status effects. It’s actually called wood in reference to wuxing, where it’s more accurately translated as ‘vitality’, or something along those lines. There have also been names suggested like ‘nature’, ‘life’, and ‘druggist�...

The Third Step: Chapter Forty-Nine

“So, you do not wish to join the Sekhem Court. Yet you have nearly killed one of our best young masters, caused large amounts of property damage, and forced yourself into a meeting without even bothering to show a modicum of respect,” Prince Dhruv said, looking at the fox with a level gaze that barely concealed the fury underneath. “In the name of the Sealed Primes, please tell me why we should not simply kill you here, or better yet, turn you into one of my children?” 

I s...

The Third Step: Chapter Forty-Eight

Eugene watched as the diminutive fox boy teleported into the ballroom, a storm of emotions on his face. Two of the Khet vampire guards raced in after him, using their legacy-empowered bodies to keep up, though not by much. He let out a sigh and stepped forward, even as the other, lesser servants began to scatter. They could sense the tension in the air, like rats fleeing a sinking ship. But he had a job to do. 

“I’m sorry sir, but Prince Dhruv rejected your request. You are not...

The Third Step: Chapter Forty-Seven

Power. 

The Sekhem Court respected power above all else. This wasn’t entirely the law of the jungle, but the concept of might makes right was ingrained into the vampiric culture of the region. 

These guards were vampires, each of them with massively empowered bodies. I was guessing that meant they weren’t actually Sekhem vampires, but rather, Khet vampires. Those tended to have massive amounts of strength, speed, and self-empowering spells. Both of them were peak thi...

The Third Step: Chapter Forty-Six

At this point in my life, I’d been to several ports in other countries: Crysite, Delitone, Dragontooth, Fitiavanna, and Obsidian Forest. Each one of them was unique and different, and caused me to wonder what other people saw as strange when they visited one of Mossford’s ports. The port to this region of Tianzhu was quite similar in its differences.

The first impression I got as I approached was of sand. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Heat and sticky ocean moisture was my first im...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-One

A curious quirk found in every system of governance is that it’s susceptible to mass manipulation from a person possessed of presence and a powerful platform. You can find it all across history, both ancient and modern: the fall of the Roman Republic. The Greenlord Alliance overthrowing the Valley of Doom Obsidian King. The Sasanian Empire collapsing into the Rashidun Caliphate. We’ve done what we can to limit this with sharp limitations in terms, abolishment of large privatized firms, se...

The Bloody Conqueror

Avartagh lounged about, watching his army as they re-organized. Taking this castle was a major coup for their conquering. It wasn’t the hardest battle Avartagh had fought – that would have been killing Thornfront’s Occultist, a strange creature known as the Deerling. But it had perhaps been the most profitable, as this little castle had been the source of the nation’s gold reserves. Fighting a war without the gold to manage all of the tens of thousands of wards and enchantments was li...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty

Ice, ice, children! A popular song from before magic came back, as well as the topic of our particular conversation today. Some essence types lean more heavily toward a pneuma focused build, like combat, while others lean more heavily toward anima and spellcasting as a whole. Ice definitely falls into that latter category. Its physical powers aren’t anything to write home about, though it can work as a secondary element, but it’s got a huge number of spells. They range from battlefield co...

PSTH: Chapter Nineteen

Any species with essence possesses an innate power that operates with no need for external power. We call these ‘gifts’, though other names have been used: talents, legacies, species’ attributes, and more. Whatever you call them, there is an interesting difference between biological creatures with essence, like awakened humans or essence beasts, and creatures made entirely of essence, like Primals. Most Primals of the same species tend to have the same gift: cloudingos all have the flig...

The Third Step: Chapter Forty-Five

After arriving back on the boat and showing them what I’d gotten, life quickly fell into a somewhat familiar routine. Orykson analyzed the spear ghostgift I’d gotten, and stated that while it wasn’t a replacement for the true Bone Spear spell, it should expand the combat power of Pinpoint Boneshard spell substantially. 

He’d also explained what the enchantments on the spear were, and why they felt so weird – they were a true channeling enchantment. Plenty of enchantments ...