Tsaimath

Chapter 1074

While every day since the change was one showing people that the world wasn’t as it had been before, winter might be the time that drove that idea home the strongest. People were confined indoors, especially when the world showed everyone that it wasn’t just humans who could drive climate change and the world was covered in snow, and that confinement drove introspection, conversation and conflict. And boredom, which might be the worst of all. 

It got to the point that I made th...

Chapter 1073

Amusingly, the aftermath of the search for two children, too caught up with the power they had gained thanks to their magic, was just as exhausting as the search itself had been. Just a very different kind of exhausting, where the search had been slightly exhausting physically and a little worse when it came to magical and mental exhaustion, the aftermath was a thing of emotions, which could be incredibly exhausting in its own right, even if there shouldn’t be any real investment on my part...

Chapter 1072

It was fascinating. As I was reaching through the Astral River to find the two kids who were channelling Lightning together, I noticed something else, a strange sensation through the feedback. It was vague, incredibly so, but intense at the same time, as if I was seeing the sun through thick, tinted glass, only discernable because it was so incredibly powerful. If I had to put a word to it, I would have called it desperation, or maybe terror, two emotions I had become somewhat familiar with, ...

Chapter 1071

“Luna, do you know where Liam and Sandy are?” I immediately asked, ignoring the not-so-small voice somewhere in the back of my mind that was intensely curious about my daughter’s latest experiment. From the look of the clearing, she was using the area as a personal training ground, trying things out that needed soil and light instead of the unforgiving rock of the tower. But, for now, my curiosity had to wait, while we were looking for those two stupid kids. 

“The kids?” ...

Chapter 1070

As it turned out, Maggy’s explanation didn’t shed any real light on the matter of levels, if anything, it made the entire thing even more convoluted and incomprehensible. Mainly because there didn’t seem to be any connection between the things she received EXP for, mainly centred around organisation and information, and the things I received EXP for. The only similarity between my teaching and the things she described was that a certain level of information exchange was involved but if ...

Chapter 1069

“Jade?” Maggy’s voice interrupted my musings as I sat in the middle of the shrine, contemplating the progress my students had made since they started their work. It was quite impressive, all of them had made some progress, though the exact amount varied greatly. Maggy and Leonard, the most powerful of them all, had amusingly made the least amount of progress. In Maggy’s case, it was because her class wasn’t focused on magic, it used magic as a supplemental art, allowing her to accom...

Chapter 1068

After yet another session of testing the prisoners, I had to let out a soft sigh. This wasn’t working as well as I had hoped it would. Sure, I was steadily getting better at reading the prisoners’ minds but I was still far from getting to a point where I could scan their minds at will. At the moment, the best I could do was try to prod them into recalling a memory and essentially watch the memory as they recalled it, though there were a lot of limitations to the trick. The biggest was tha...

Chapter 1067

Obviously, I couldn’t spend all my time teaching my students. Well, I probably could, but there were things in the area I wanted to explore and understand, which meant I had to investigate. That, in turn, meant I had to use my scrying constructs and the Oculus to gather information or I had to physically go to whatever curiosity I was investigating and check it out. The obvious advantage of the constructs was that there was no danger. Nothing local would be able to harm me if I wasn’t the...

Chapter 1066

Did stupidity warrant capital punishment?

It was a fairly ridiculous question on its face, one that screamed for context, though even with context, it didn’t make all that much sense when the values of the old world were applied to it. There, stupidity was essentially part of daily life and the stakes had generally been a lot lower, at least in the Western world. People rarely had to starve to death and mistakes could, most of the time, be rectified or insured against, making personal...

Chapter 1065

As it turned out, negotiations were not the only thing Maggy was quite good at. After coming to an agreement in regards to the magic lessons, I decided to set up an actual small annexe, something bigger than the simple cottage I had prepared for Jack and his Search Group One and as I was working my, literal, magic, I got to talk to my prospective students for a bit, one of whom was Maggy.

Contrary to expectations, Maggy hadn’t just joined their group as a negotiator, leader and the po...

Chapter 1064

After finishing up the lesson I had been giving to Daniel, I moved towards the doors, taking up my position in the middle of the room and conjuring up a seat for myself. Not quite my full throne but something good enough to give me a comfortable position to speak to these visitors from a position of strength. If they wanted to sit, they could make their own seats, something Daniel actually tried, albeit a bit behind me. It didn’t quite work, mostly because the stone of the tower was still i...

Chapter 1063

Watching Daniel work with the first few exercises I had come up with to help him with his Earth Magic was quite fascinating. He had been able to figure out some Fire and Water Magic on his own, and I kept working with him on those elements, but his instinctive reaction to reach for Earth Magic was what made me push him in this direction. And, from what I could tell, it looked as if the idea was correct, he was getting the point of the exercises fairly quickly and advancing through them at a s...

Chapter 1062

Daniel was a fascinating student. He lacked any distinct elemental affinity, his soul incredibly balanced and in harmony with itself but, as if to make up for that lack of elemental affinity, his general magical talent was through the roof, far beyond what his intelligence should have allowed him. And that was not to call him stupid, far from it. While I wasn’t sure what his original intelligence score had been, or how exactly the attribute influenced worked in regards to, well, the way one...

Interlude: Whispers in the Dark

“Maggy, there’s somebody here to see you,” one of the guys who had been helping the legacy commonly known as Maggy get their community up and running called out, pulling her attention away from the lists she had been pouring over in an attempt to improve their current food situation. Not that the supplies they had would run out soon, unless something seriously went wrong they should have enough to get over the winter with a bit to spare, but if she had learned one thing since the world ...

Chapter 1061

Idiots… While I was certain that there were many other, yes similar or synonymous, words to describe these people adequately, idiots would have to do for now. Morons, mentally challenged or the fairly old-fashioned retarded could also be used but two of those were something I didn’t want to use due to their other connotations. Ultimately, it didn’t really matter what word or words were used in the description, as long as their terminal, almost suicidal, lack of planning, prudence and ge...

Chapter 1060

After sending off the fivesome to make themselves comfortable in their new accommodations, I decided to start checking out the group we had captured. There was quite a bit I wanted to know before focusing my efforts on teaching Daniel how to do magic so I had to start somewhere. Especially as I wanted to see how much I could push my Mind Magic into the territory of mind reading, as depicted in popular fiction. I doubted I’d ever be able to simply scan somebody’s memories as if I was readi...

Chapter 1059

“So, Jack, what can you tell me about the local survivors? Hopefully, there are some, even with the oddity of the city,” I paused, realising that Jack and his merry band might actually know what happened here during the change, how two cities that should be some hundred-odd kilometres away from one another came to be in roughly the same place. And, maybe more importantly, what else had changed with the cities? Was it only the buildings that were moved, the man-made structures and such, or...

Chapter 1058

After putting the nice people who had decided to visit us into our holding cells, I had to decide what to do with them. Normally, I would readily use them as test subjects, or even kill them outright after making sure that their actions had been what they appeared to be, but in our current situation, I wasn’t confident that it would be the best step.

Sure, it would deal with them, meaning they wouldn’t be able to attack us again, but at the same time, there might be others like them...

Chapter 1057

Picking alchemical gunk out of Silva’s fur and helping her wash up afterwards provided an adequate method of keeping my hands, and parts of my mind, busy and occupied while we talked about my experience crossing the second divide. Given that it would come up fairly soon for the others, with different magnitudes of ‘soon’, I felt letting them know in advance how the process had played out for me was a good thing, especially once I began to include descriptions of the way I had seen cross...

Chapter 1056

Mind over Matter was an interesting ability. Its most basic and obvious function was to give me telekinetic control over anything within a metre of myself, though the acceleration I could impart was fairly limited. It was difficult to estimate, but after a few simple experiments, I thought it was roughly one and a half times as strong as gravity. Meaning I could lift things at about half the speed they would have when falling down, as I needed to overcome gravity’s pull first. That part was...

Chapter 1055

With my mind back in my body, I began to take stock of what had changed with me, as I was now becoming cognisant of the fact that the shattering sensation I had experienced was the breaking of the divide. I had overcome the challenge but I had not yet reached my destination, my mountain, but I would. For a moment, I could easily see Sigmir before me, sitting comfortably and inviting me to rest my head in her lap, to make myself comfortable as she welcomed me home but, sadly, no matter how muc...

Chapter 1054

As with so many things, drawing upon the draconic power deep within me to challenge the second divide started slowly. At first, I could barely feel anything, only my finely honed senses to recognise arcane phenomena and Astral Power allowed me to sense any change at all but with each passing minute, the effect became more pronounced. With each beat of my heart, I could feel the blood rush through my body, carrying with it such mundane, but utterly necessary, resources like oxygen and energy b...

Chapter 1053

The way back to the surface took, amusingly, a lot longer than the way down. Sure, on the way down there had been numerous foes waiting for us to appear and fight us to the death but on the way up, there were even more rooms, waiting for us to check them out. One of the things to check out was the strange standing ring, though nothing we did seemed to have any effect on it at all. To all appearances, it was completely inert, though incredibly hard, possibly impervious to all sorts of magic. O...

Interlude: Shining Beacon on a Hill

“Jonas, Murray, what do you two think about those three? And their tower?” Jack asked his two comrades, uncertain if he should include their other two team members. Usually, he would have asked Sam for her opinion, as he greatly respected the woman’s toughness and incredible brilliance, to say nothing about her other wonderful attributes, but this once, he wasn’t sure if he could trust her to be objective. Both she and Daniel had been drawn in far too quickly for comfort, the lure of ...

Chapter 1052

With the guy’s body pinned to the floor, the fight should have been over. Sure, he was still able to wave his arms and attack with the device on his right arm but really, with the massive hole in his guts, he should have different things to consider. That was made doubly true when one of Luna’s vines came down and thoroughly mangled that arm, leaving him fairly harmless.

However, contrary to expectations, the fight wasn’t over. Just the fight with the guy. With Silva moving back a...

Chapter 1051

There were many ways with which one could begin an interaction. There were the simple, nonverbal ones, without the need to share a language. A friendly smile, a polite nod or even something more elaborate, like a salute or bow, depending on the circumstances and cultures involved. Sure, they could be misunderstood but generally, they would roughly communicate what one wanted to convey. And then there were the many verbal ways to greet another, from the simplest ‘Hi’, to more formulaic gre...

Chapter 1050

By the end of the chaotic melee, I was utterly drained. Losing track of one’s allies, and having to constantly move, dodge and weave to avoid getting shot, stabbed or punched was incredibly stressful, to say nothing of the need to strike back and make sure that it wasn’t my family that was doing the dying but the other guys.

Only after the numbers had greatly lightened, I could start to make sense of things again and what I perceived at that point was not pleasant. Lia and Silva wer...

Chapter 1049

There were more of the snakeheads. A lot more.

The further we intruded into the massive mountain complex, the more snakeheads we encountered. Curiously, they were doing something fairly similar to us, clearing and searching the base. From the way we encountered them, I was fairly certain that they had started somewhere far below us, roughly in the direction I could still feel that weird sensation that had originally pointed me towards the mountain, and sent out groups to secure the prim...

Chapter 1048

There was an aura of menace around the two snakeheads, one that only grew more pronounced when they barked out a word in an unknown language before pointing the two metallic staves they carried at us. Even without the sudden appearance of a glow around the tip of their staves, I could recognise the gesture as one of malice and immediately conjured up a barrier of Ice, unwilling to let whatever they were trying to do hit us.

And it was a good thing I did. There was an electric buzzing fo...

Chapter 1047

Looking around the tunnel leading deeper into the mountain, I needed a moment to figure out why our surroundings looked so strange to me. It should have occurred to me that it wasn’t so much a strange appearance but rather the lack of one that was throwing me off. The tunnel looked plain, with solid concrete walls, coloured lines on the ground to give directions to those knowing how to read them and an endless row of yellow lightbulbs set in steel cages to illuminate this example of utility...