The Astral Phantom creature continued to circle my tree, bumping into the barrier created by the Astral Engine obelisk with its jaggedly, clawed, semi-transparent tentacles. Thankfully, it was a rather stupid beast and so it simply repeated the same attacks, grabbing the shield in the same place over and over.

I woke up fully, paused [Chrysalis] and peered at the ghostly creature with my Astral eye-stalks that have grown on my Astral tree. The world was no longer a warped 360 degree view. Thanks to these eye-stalks I could now observe perspective properly. The Phantom was about 30 times my size.

I needed to get stronger faster, I needed to level up. I checked my Soul-Song chart and discovered that I had gained exactly 10 experience points from sitting on my ass and being an Astral Tree.

Kopusha's memories told me that the Soul-Song skill provided detailed information about skills. I dove back into my menu, ignoring the Astral Phantom clawing at the shield near me.

[Expand skills!] I declared mentally.

The menu suddenly updated itself.

Skills:	[Soul-Song LV 0] [ON] [Raising Spell efficiency by 0.1%] [Providing detailed Soul-Stats] [Translating the Soul-Song's Language]
	[Chrysalis LV 0] [PAUSED] [Forming Astral tree 69% complete] [Forging Avatar] [32% complete]
	-

"Oh wow, fantastic." I thought sarcastically "Whole 0.1%."

I considered how my [ON] skills were on... and why my mana wasn't going down at all and realized that the various branches of my tree were vibrating in repeating, musical resonance patterns, all while pulling energy directly from the obelisk.

Kopusha's memories told me that I could unslot any skill from my soul, but it would reset its value to zero as the channel lost its form. Also, I could turn off an active skill without losing it.

Translating the language, eh?

I decided to turn the [Soul-Song] [OFF] to see what would happen.

[Deactivate Soul-Song!] I thought.

Pffff. Don't threaten me with a good time, Soul-Song. I'll do what I want.

The ability to contemplate and comprehend incomprehensible-seeming things was fun for me. Some people found happiness in family, friends, relationships, sports, food, wealth and so forth. I found happiness in the beauty of thought itself, in cracking, figuring things out with my mathematical knowledge.

Using my imagination, my Besm-6 supercomputer and fractal mathematics provided to me by brilliant Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot I could mathematically figure out how almost any chaotically-seeming system was formed. For example, I could explain why something as microscopic as a 20 nanometer bacteriophage virus and something as gargantuan as the 30'000 kilometer-wide storm on planet Saturn both had a very specific hexagon-shape.

[Yes, Deactivate the Soul-Song!] I thought with determination.

Half of my branches suddenly stopped vibrating, stopped humming.

The word [Soul Song LV 0] that I was staring at, suddenly shifted around, rearranged itself to:

The skill menu flickered too, words warping into incomprehensible gibberish.

	-

Hmmm...

Kopusha's memory suggested that this was simply the original, arcane language of the Soul-Song, stolen from the sky-gods a thousand millennia ago by Mage Morningstar.

Interesting. The legend of the Morningstar seemed akin to that of ancient Greek Prometheus from my Earth.

Kopusha also recalled that the Alanian Academics did not interact with this arcane language because it was too complex, chaotic and confoundingly difficult to work with. Instead they designed beautiful, geometric, hexagrammatic musical patterns. For example, the Spell-Song like the "The Awakening of our Anima" consisted of a hundred hexagrams or a hundred musical stanzas flowing from one to the other.

An interesting point of note was that all of the Alanian Spell-Songs relied on drawing power from nearby Astral Engines. Since I was sitting right on top of an Astral Engine my mana use was zero.

I squinted at the gibberish words in the menu. They weren't like anything I knew, didn't seem to have a pattern to them that I could figure out instantly.

I started to sing the "The Awakening of our Anima" again. When I finished the last stanza, something clicked within me again.

Well, that was easy!

[Да,] I thought in Russian to test whether the Soul-Song understood any language. It did.

A strange feeling overwhelmed my small, tree-shaped body along with a strange, ethereal music.

Ah! Kopusha recognized it as the "Song of Uplift".

The song stretched on, sounding like it was nearby and distant at the same time. It rang like a keypad password door beep in the Virology lab and also like Orthodox church bells. The music was memorable, refreshing, nostalgic and rewarding at the same time.

It suddenly felt like blinding bliss was emanating from within me, like stabbing all-consuming pain ignited all over. An indeterminate, entirely new sensation that I couldn't quite comprehend came over me and my consciousness folded in on itself.

---

 

The Soul-Song resonated.

I woke up, blinking my eye-stalks. The grotesque squid-whale was still there, still clawing at the shield.

I had no idea how much time had passed.

The alien sensation had long faded. I summoned up my Soul-Song once again.

Name:	[Evaluation error]
Age:	[Computational error]
Species & Subtype:	Untethered Soul [+1 agility/dexterity]
Affinity:	Astral Phantom [Various stat bonuses from subsumed soul-shards and affiliated affliction] Spark of the Morningstar [+ 3 skill channels] [+ Soul Song skill] Dryad [+Chrysalis skill]
Level:	1
Experience:	5/200
Health:	1/1
Stamina:	1/1
Mana:	1/1
Mana regen:	1 m/hr
Strength:	0
Agility:	0 [+1]
Dexterity:	0 [+1]
Vitality:	0 [+2]
Charisma:	0
Magic:	0 [+2]
Foresight:	0
Intelligence:	0 [+2]
Wisdom:	0 [+2]
Soul:	1 [+2] [-2]
Skills:	[Soul Song LV 1]
	[Chrysalis LV 1]
	-
Affliction:	[Soul decay: - 2]
Investiture points:	5

Excellent! The soul decay had gone down from the level up. I had five points to spend. I considered putting them into Intelligence, but then again there was an Astral Phantom right in front of my face and I already considered myself intelligent.

The Astral Engine I was sitting on was ancient. The shield could fail, the battery beneath me was already leaking mana rapidly into the Astral Ocean. I felt that what I needed wasn't simply better mental processing, it was... Foresight.

"You better be right, inner me, lets gamble," I sighed and dragged the [5] into [Foresight].

Nothing changed.

I wasn't sure what to expect anyway. I didn't know what Foresight was in terms of the Soul-Song or what it even improved. No memories of lectures on Foresight emerged from within me either as I contemplated the concept. I didn't become invisible to the ghostly whale either.

Oh well.

I looked again at the Phantom. I wondered what kind of a creature it was exactly. Did it have a name or...?

I tried to sift the degraded memories of Kopusha for answers.

The answer that came back was entirely unexpected. It wasn't a name for a phantom, no, it was much better. A Song-Spell called [Identify] resurfaced in my mind. Kopusha had used it countless times to identify something while designing her own Song-Spell compositions. It was the ultimate tool, an Acolyte's Song-Scope which could be used to derive information from just about anything, depending on how high level it was.

I tried to recall this [Identify-Song] fully, hummed it to myself.

The song was an appeal to the sky-rings of Lunaria for knowledge, to Mage Morningstar and to the collective wisdom that the founder of Alanian Academia had bestowed upon all of her children's children. The stanzas focused on the search for intelligence, the quest and thirst for knowledge like a magnifying glass, like a beam of light that scorched the earth. It was a hymn to cleverness and curiosity that drove civilization onwards, of asking questions about everything, including the universe itself. Of peering at the stars in the sky and wondering why, of collecting the knowledge and encoding it across the great Citadel cities of Alania and their Librariums, of building knowledge on top of knowledge to construct soul-powered artifacts and other incredible things.

The voice of the Soul-Song resonated in my mind.

Hang on... if I knew four Song-Spells... Why weren't they listed in the my menu?

My menu flickered again.

Ah, here we go. Kopusha's memories whispered that all of the Song-Spells listed were the level of the [Soul-Song] skill. Interesting.

I quickly hummed the base tones for [Identify], staring at the Phantom in front of me with my eye-stalks.

Riiiiight.

I hummed [Identify] again and looked at the decayed obelisk above me.

Uh-huh.

I aimed [Identify] at the nearest hollow corpse.

I moved it onto another female-looking body.

Then another...

I kept identifying the bodies. Entire families, men, women and children had died here all at once, their twisted up bodies now fused into the gray, crusty ground.

According to the last names most of them were born in Skyisle. A few were born in Tricameron. A few more were born in Agamemnon.

So... this was Astral Ocean right below the town of Skyisle. A lot of people had died here when Tricameron was atomized! But how did they all die?

I attempted to juxtapose the rough map of the terrain from Kopusha's head. The town of Skyisle was a fair distance away from the Citadel of Tricameron river delta, high up in a little valley between the glacier-covered peaks.

Hmmm... Did the radioactive cloud from the fallout spread out all the way to the mountains?

No... that didn't make sense... the bodies in front of me were bent unnaturally, broken, crushed.

Of course...

A glacier avalanche had likely killed them all, as a massive earthquake was triggered by thermonuclear destruction of Tricameron that shook up the mountains for many kilometers all around.

Something within me snapped. What was done here was monstrous, truly abhorrent, unbelievable.
Kopusha wanted to make the Seditionists and their vile gods pay for what they've done to. I pushed her desires away, I wasn't Kopusha and had no way to get revenge.

Identifying all of the bodies in line of sight had brought my experience all the way up to 186/200. It wasn't enough to level up again! Argh.

I pondered about what else I could identify.

The Soul-Song menu itself... the language of the sky-gods!
That's what I could identify next!

I pulled the [Soul-Song] skill out of my menu. The letters turned into gibberish again. My four spells vanished.

Could I turn a Soul-Song into a skill? I didn't see why not. I hummed it again, attempting to insert it into an empty space.

It worked!

Identify itself looked like

I hummed the Song of Identification and aimed my mind at the > floating bit within the word.

It expanded itself into:

≯̺̬͉̀̈́͗́

Next, I attempted to identify the ○ bit.
It expanded into:

`̸̧̛̩̦͓́̚͝͝○

Bit by bit I memorized a new, expanded version of [Identify]:

The more symbols I identified, the longer the information chain became, seemingly stretching out into depths of itself with increasing, looping detail.

I couldn't believe it! The true language of the Soul-Song was akin to a matryoshka! It contained a variety of symbols within symbols. But, why was it so complex? There was a definite mystery here waiting to be solved!

Thankfully, I had the skills to do it.

The scientific method, aka science of examining patterns is a methodology that can be used to determine the nature of reality - any reality, be it life around you or conceptual reality such as one in a computer simulation. Any system, be it one created via evolution or human hands can be broken down with math, understood and taken advantage of. No matter how seemingly visually complex something is - it all relied on repeating information to function.

Thanks to my excellent understanding of trigonometry and fractal mathmatics, I could focus on the System language quite well, noting the patterns within it. There was beauty to the original language of the Soul-Song, deep complexity beyond human language akin to mathematical formulae. Each notch of it was able to expand outward, flowing like a four-dimensional puzzle in my mind. I dove deeper into [Identify] using the Song of Identification, trying to understand and memorize every bit of it.

I didn't know how long it took because time was somehow messed up, wrong in the Astral Ocean, but I worked at it diligently.

It could have taken me a month or a few centuries to arrive at the answer and memorize all of the little bits to develop an equation that would organize [Identify] into a coherent arrangement of functional mathematical formulas.

The key to constructing a proper Mandelbrot-style fractal was a formula that eventually creates a visual graph with an infinitely complicated boundary that reveals progressively ever-finer recursive detail at increasing magnifications.

The Mandelbrot set, first drawn in 1978 by Robert W. Brooks and Peter Matelski, eventually become quite popular outside of academic circles due to its unique aesthetic appearance. It was the first example of how insanely complex, infinite structures could form from application of simple rules.

I had a print of the first Mandelbrot set hanging on the wall of my office in Aralsk-7 as a reminder that everything everywhere could be graphed, defined with math and fractal geometry. In my opinion, it was the best human invention that dealt with math that expressed beauty through pattern visualization.

Eventually, after memorizing a hundred different iterations of [Identify], I used my knowledge of mathematical formulae mentally to combine all of them into a dandelion-like information superstructure.

Since I worked with viruses for half of my life, I imagined it looking akin to a RNA virus from the Coronaviridae family, with its numerous envelope proteins extending outwards from a central core, where each data-strand of [Identify] was a different protein envelope.

Time flew by as I slowly memorized and assembled the full version of [Identify] with all of its long, complex variety of info-strands.

Occasionally, I pushed mana into the spell to visualize how it changed as I graphed and memorized it better and better. It was a simple way of observing it live without having a computer monitor or a printer.

. . .

 

The hungry phantom whale came and went. I was a very tasty snack it could not reach, taunting it behind the barrier... visible, but inaccessible.

When the ghostly abomination returned again, I aimed the newfangled fractal version of [Identify] at it.

I sang the Awakening song and slotted the [Soul-Song] back in.

HA! I did it! I actually made a spell-skill that was ABOVE my level!

Because I knew fractal mathematics, I did something that the Alanian academics had never achieved!

I mentally formed the [Identify] spell by pushing mana into it from my branches via the channel going from my soul.

Power rushed through me from the Astral Engine and the spell ignited with brilliant shimmers as it filled up with mana.

I saw the fractal structure for [Identify] manifest in front of me with my eye-stalk eyes. I felt incredibly proud of myself. I made something completely new, my own little, fractal, silver-blue star that lit up the otherwise incredibly dreary, gray corpse-world of the Astral Ocean.

Identify was no longer a Song-Spell! Now it was a purely-visual fractal-shaped spell of my own design!

I let the spell go, releasing it in the direction of the Phantom whale. A shimmering silver line flew towards the ghost and returned back to me in at incredible speed which my eye-stalks could barely track.

Yes! My machinations really made the spell better, more high-level!

[Yes,] I replied, giddily sinking into the blissfulness-infused dream.