Author's note

Thank you to new subscriber Jachin Nelson for joining over on Subscribe star.

Also, I am struggling a little at the moment to find an artist to actually draw up the artworks for this story. I have just about spent all the donation money just getting a picture of Aerien right. I finally have something workable, but now I'm sorta toying around with just posting a contest for the contract which will mean I can't actually show anyone the picture until the contest is done.

The major problem I'm facing is that, for some reason, these fiverr artists are really bad at following instructions. I've tried with almost every point on the pricing spectrum from 20$ to 100$, and no matter where on the list I go they deliver something very different from what I asked for, and even add some things I specifically told them not to do. It's like pulling teeth trying to get them to do the simplest of things. So, I'm just thinking now of saving up some more donation money in order to hold a contest to see who can draw Aerien the best, adding a specific set of instructions that will include her holding a weapon that I have not even given the slightest mention of in the story up until now, a little custom piece that I am quite certain only maybe one or two of you who are into the medeval community and historical weapons have even heard of the thing I'm basing it off of. So, there's no possible way anyone would be able to cheat and get a head start on this thing before I announce it.

I'm still trying to work out the details on it, but it would be fantastic if we could get an actual fan of the series to be the one to do the art. It's not going to be limited to just you guys, I'm going to make the actual announcement over on the Scribble Hub forums, but I really hope some of you join once I get that started.

Aerien’s POV

This is the moment of truth, time to find out if the formula Rolwen and I came up with works. The plan is, Gaerien will sprinkle in the absolute smallest spell crystals she can possibly create. Meanwhile, both representations of my own spirit will work together to imprint a simple spell into as many of those crystals as possible. All it says is “If Chakra capacity < (total contained mana in spell crystals / spell types) -2, destroy 0.01% of spell crystals in chakra. Check once per femptosecond.”

This is the first building block in a set of 3 spells that will be placed on every single one of these spell crystals in order to turn them into the spell equivalent of cells. This one is being applied first because it is the kill function. The function that will prevent the number of crystal cells from getting out of hand. Basically, if any time it detects that the number of spell crystals for the spell has been exceeded, it will destroy a portion of them every femptosecond until it has reduced down to the proper amount. It also holds the second effect of actually activating every femptosecond in order to perform the check. This works in conjunction with the one spell actually inscribed on the spirit of my younger half.

“Supply power to any activated spell within chakra system.” That’s all there is to it. This spell is inscribed on the heaven’s chakra. This one was chosen because it was going to be part of any spell I was going to make anyway, and it was bare-bones enough to expand upon later and go any direction I wanted it to. These two spells in conjunction would mean that the spell crystals that actually take this function will be recieving a low-grade stream of energy at a constant rate, and that constant rate will be just enough to keep it from being swept away by the energy flow through my spirit.

The only thing that could possibly go wrong is that the spell, once first triggered, triggers repeatedly before the function even activates, wiping out all the crystals near instantaneously. However, whether or not the spell can be repeat activated in that way depends entirely on what my expectations are. All I have to do is not expect it to do that, and it won’t. Besides, given a choice between loosing all the spell crystals and the spell crystals growing out of control, the former is definitely the better alternative. It is a fail-safe method. In other words, if it does fail it fails in the safest way possible.

“By the way,” Gaerien says, “if I’m supposed to be creating dust-size crystals that are too small to even see easily, how will we know if this is working?”

“The spell formation on the Heaven’s Chakra ought to power visibly as it becomes active.” I told her. “Alright, are we ready?” I asked, looking between Gaerien and my younger projection. They both appeared to be nearly the same age now. Gaerien had continued to appear younger in her projected form, but not by much. Most of the difference was made by the fact that my younger manifestation had been aging quite rapidly and now looked to be around 7 or 8 with a corresponding increase in her maturity. Talk about kids growing up fast.

My younger self wordlessly stepped to the opposite side of her pale blue spirit manifestation from me, and held her hands up to the heaven’s chakra hovering over the blue ghost’s head. I mimicked her motions, getting into position. Now we were both waiting on Gaerien. She sighed and levitated up above the chakra and held out her hand. “Alright, I’m going to begin.” She said, and then got a look of focus on her face.

There was no feeling of any mana or power of any sort. It was fair to assume the crystals she was producing were vanishing and being swept away quite rapidly. This is why I was going to need both my projections to bounce this signal back and forth between us in order to get any of these fast moving crystals to possibly take the spell. It certainly didn’t help that the kill spell was the most complicated of the three spells. Ideally, it ought to be divided into 2 smaller spells, a check and a kill function. However, it was just too risky to split the two of them up. If any crystal took the check function which preserved the crystal and let it take power from the inscribed spell, but it did not actually take the kill function, then this would lead to the worst case scenario where these crystal cells could grow out of control.

The three of us simply stood like that for a while, each of us focusing our energy through this heaven’s chakra. There was no such thing as physical exhaustion for us, both sides of my spirit were being powered by the infinite energy flowing through this space while Gaerien was able to freely leech energy off of me. All three of us had an infinite supply of power to pump into this. However, this did not mean we would not be subject to mental fatigue and this was starting to get tiresome, especially for my child side. She moaned in frustration and annoyance as we just continued this on and on.

“Keep focused!” Gaerien growled at her. “I would rather not be in here helping with this just to waste my time because you’re getting distracted.”

“I’m sorry.” My child side mumbled. “Is it working at all though?”

“I think so.” I said. “It’s extremely pale, but the inscribed spell has become just a little opaque where it was completely clear when we started this.”

“That’s really not all that pronounced an effect.” Gaerien said.

“Well, we don’t really need a lot, we’ve probably got enough with this.” I said as I lowered my hands together with my child side who had quite the look of relief on her face. Gaerien looked fairly skeptical about this whole thing, but she did not look too upset as she also dropped her arm.

“So, does that mean we’re done?” She asks.

“Well, assuming nothing goes wrong.” I comment. "If it fails, we will have to make some adjustments and start over again from the beginning. But, yes, for this attempt at least that’s all we will need from you.”

“You are talking like you EXPECT it to fail. You KNOW that almost guarantees it will, right?” Gaerien comments.

“Yeah, you mentioned before that’s how it works.” I answered. “From how you describe it though, expectation is only a stop-gap. It can still succeed despite expectations it will fail if the formula is perfect.” The chances are almost nill that something as complicated as I’m going for will actually BE perfect on the first attempt though.

“Well, how will we be able to tell when it fails then?” Gaerien asks. “I think you need to start considering why it’s going to fail and what you need to correct for it to work next time now.”

“Well, unfortunately, it is the first step that is the easiest to mess up but we will not know whether it worked or not until after we add the third spell.” I said. “And besides that, even if we DID get a pleasant surprise and this wound up working, we would have to destroy all the crystals ourselves anyway. This is not meant to be the final version. It’s just a test for proof of concept. The only reason we’re experimenting like this is because, unlike with the previous approach, we actually CAN afford to experiment.”

“Ah, whatever.” Gaerien groans. “I guess I will at least watch what happens here out of curiosity.”

“Sure thing.” I give my sister a nod. “Well, here it goes.” I nod again to my younger side and we both hold up our hands again to add the next layer to the spells.

This time, the spell effect is “Check if spell crystal total volume or energy contained in all spell crystals is < 80% chakra capacity. If yes, activate growth protocol. Check ten times per second.” We both focused on adding this spell function. In this case it wasn’t such a big deal if some of the crystals didn’t take it. It would just mean some spell crystals would sit around doing absolutely nothing. We focused for a while adding this function for what we guessed to be around as long as the previous spell. In the meantime, the energy supplying inscription became slightly more cloudy.

Alright, finally it’s time for the final spell formation. The growth protocol. “Growth protocol: Generate one crystal that contains all the same spell formations as this one.”

As we focused on adding the last one, the inscribed energy-supplying spell finally started showing an easily visible change. It began to whiten like frost was creeping in from the edges of each character in the inscription.

“Wow!” My child side said. “That means it’s working!” She immediately dropped her hands and danced around in celebration as she realized this. I also gave up, it looks like the duplication rate had probably outstripped anything we were doing by adding it to any still incomplete crystals.

“I still don’t see anything in there.” Gaerien comments.

“You won’t for a while.” I said. “You did a really good job making them small, you might even have gotten down to the exact kind of scale I was wanting from the beginning, actual cell-sized crystals. If so, then it will be quite a while before we can actually see anything at all. We might have to wait for a full day or two.”

“So, you are saying this will grow on it’s own?” Gaerien asks.

“Yes, that’s the idea.”

“No way!” Gaerien slowly stood as she stared at me agape. “Ok, I really hadn’t been keeping up with any of the nonsense you and Rolwen were talking about before, but now I want to know all about it. Are you ACTUALLY saying that this spell you just created will cultivate FOR you!?”

“Well, it’s more like it cultures, but I guess you could say that.” I gave a bit of a lame joke as a response referencing the cellular growth pattern these crystals would have.

“Seriously, what’s up with these Earth approaches to cultivation! Earth was supposed to be a world where cultivation has been sealed for millennia, but you don’t only have the incredibly powerful cultivation created on Earth, but now you’ve gone ahead and invented YOUR OWN dual cultivation that works perfectly in complement to it and it even cultivates spell crystals FOR YOU!? Seriously! Do you have ANY IDEA how powerful that is!? You don’t, do you!? That’s the only reason you can even dream of such an insane concept!” Gaerien was pacing around in agitation now. “Ok… Ok, well… I guess this still works out fine. I’ve still got my own method that works for me. You can go ahead and break any rules of common sense you want. Ok, so it’s not going to be for a couple days that we see anything significant? In that case, I’m going back. Can you give me the gate?”

With her request, I had the blue giant that was my own spirit manifestation bring it’s other hand down toward us. This entire time, we had all been standing on top of one of it’s hands, the child side’s manifestation included. The opposite hand was now lining up along side it, and a moment later a golden flame sprouted in the middle of it’s palm.

“Thanks, just let me know how this works out. We’ll talk about how this works later.” Gaerien comments and then jumps through the flaming gate back to her own spirit realm.

-

Terlu’s POV

Over the past week, Terlu had learned a lot from the group down here in this underground pocket. Chief among these things he had learned is that, while they all looked like kids, they were actually fully grown. It seemed they were other members of this “nogoth” his mother had always called him. Apparently, nogoths stopped aging when they appeared to be about 10 years old by comparison to humans. This meant that these nogoth, him included, were not quite the same species as elves.

When he had learned this, he asked Úrdes, his rather tyrannical mentor, about whether or not this meant his mother was really his mother. [Of course you numb brain!] She scoffed at him in response. [“nogoth” are born when an elf woman has a child with a “edan” man. Of course, there’s no proud elf woman who would willingly have a child with a “edan,” so it’s a punishment for “nandor.” The “nandor” men are brought down here for us to handle, while “nandor” women are forced to be dirtied by an “edan di'thang” until she has his “nogoth” child.]

Aside from how thoroughly shocking this information was, it turned his stomach even more as he managed to make sense of the words she’d used he previously did not know. He could not figure out what these “edan” were, but from the way she’d used the term “di'thang,” the same word they used to refer to Sam and the other children in his cell with him. He had his suspicions before, but now he was absolutely certain. “Di’thang” meant slave. So, an elf woman who committed the crime of being a “nandor,” which more questioning with Úrdes revealed meant “coward,” was to be forced to have sex with an “edan” slave until she was pregnant with a “nogoth,” which seem to be their name for the cross-breed between the two races. It seems though this punishment is for more than just the violation and humiliation of it, “nogoth” are actually considered the absolute most prized slaves that can be owned in this underground world.

Yes, that’s right, all “nogoth” are slaves. They are an entire race bread and raised to be slaves. Due to the powerful magic “nogoth” possess, they are highly prized and considered incredibly valuable. This information caused a lot of things to come together for him all of a sudden. This was the reason why he was treated so well, but also kept in a cell all his life. He’d thought it just had something to do with his mother at first, but now it’s quite clear. It’s because he was being raised to be a high-class slave to likely be owned by some noble in the future. But, it seemed the high-class part meant he was actually high-class enough to own slaves himself despite being a slave. That would be the rest of the children in there with him.

What is all of this anyway? Were they wanting to test him to see how he’d handle being given power over others? It seems it was his lack of cruelty toward his slaves that got them upset somehow so now the rest of the “nogoth” slaves are supposed to straighten him out.

This whole experience was not just Úrdes teaching him the common sense of this world though, that only came as a consequence of his incessant questioning, which was thankfully met with only derisive remarks about his intelligence before she went on to explain it to him. Seems him being a stupid slave was not acceptable and not something that fit in with the supposed “high-class” status he was supposed to have. So, she answered all of his questions. The key part of his lessons down here though was that he had to learn this powerful magic the “nogoth” were known for.

This magic was entirely concerned with manipulating the earth. It seems the “nogoth” possess two entirely separate ways to manipulate the earth due to their hybrid nature. They can use the bloodline magic of their “edan” lineage which is less powerful but more controlled, and then there is the magic of the elven side which seems to be more powerful but also wild and destructive. It didn’t completely make sense to him elves would have the wild and destructive magic, but it seems that’s just the way it is.

Learning to control the elven magic was far easier and more intuitive than the “edan” magic. The “edan” magic required him to sit and meditate for hours, where as the elven magic could just be used by channeling a destructive urge and breathing in the malevolent energies around him. The more he heard about this elven magic, the more he was really forced to wonder about his image on what elves were.

After a week of training, he reached a point where he could make a rock wall in front of him crack by looking at it like he wanted to put his fist through it. It wasn’t that dramatic, but Úrdes called him an insanely powerful monster for being able to do even that at his age and immediately started calling him way too dangerous to train any more. After that, she ran away saying she was going to talk to the priestesses and tell them he had to be handled by the Nirodgir from now on. She had been avoiding him ever since, which left him stuck down here in this little “nogoth” area. She must have told the others about him as well, because since then they have all been keeping their distance from him.

Subscriber's comment of the chapter

"Terlu's getting more interesting suddenly (yay some info)."

                                                                                            -Asekhan

Author's note 2

I ran into a little bit of an incident while ordering food at Taco Bell the other day. It was rather frustrating and revealed to me just how poorly educated some people in the general public are in terms of infection control. Considering the concern over the virus right now, I felt this is something I could use as a teachable moment for all my readers here.

So, I was on my way to work. This means I was dressed in my full scrubs and had my nursing staff badge on and everything. It was pretty plain to see I was a healthcare worker just looking at me. I drove up to the drivethrough and I asked the teller to change her gloves before she took my card. The teller agreed, but while she was off changing her gloves the manager came to the window and started yelling at me.

She was saying things about how her teller stayed in this one little area near the window, kept her workspace clean, and changed her gloves every hour, so she does not see how I should be feeling so insecure because they are taking all these precautions and if I'm so worried I should go home and stay home. This is almost face-palm inducing, because if she changes her gloves every hour, that means she's still handling my card with the same gloves she used to handle the payment of the guy who came before me, and who knows how many people before that. That's still a prime vector for passing on pathogens.

Our argument went on from there, but in the end I had to get to work and the teller had already changed her gloves while the manager wasn't looking. Afterward, I called the local health authority to investigate this Taco Bell location for this behavior. The point I want to get across to all of you is that infection control means changing your gloves between each patient (in my case) or customer in the case of these other establishments. I know it lowers your efficiency and all that, but in the medical setting we have a lot of people to attend to as well. I feel very rushed every time I'm on shift, but I still have to observe proper infection control standards because, if I don't, people die. Well, now the entire populous is in that same boat. It's more so for me, but people can die now from these tellers not observing proper hand sanitation safety as well.

What I think can be done is that shopping centers ought to hire more tellers and these fast-food places ought to have 2 people at the window switching off each customer while the other changes their gloves. That's how you make proper infection control possible. After all, we are facing a job shortage problem right now. I'm certain these people out of work would appreciate having the jobs, and the public will understand this is all being done to keep them safe from the virus. The only people who seem not to like it are the businesses who will have to pay a little more hiring more staff, but so far as I see it that's a sacrifice that needs to be made in order to keep the public safe from a pandemic threat.