A Jaded Life

Sadly, just detecting that torch in the night didn’t help me much. At a vague guess, there were some twenty kilometres between my tower and that torch, so while I could observe it easily, thanks to the Oculus, doing anything about the torch was an entirely different challenge. For a few minutes, I used the Oculus to scan the area around the torch and noticed a few more flickers of light against some of the walls, most likely caused by other torches, only that those were mostly hidden from my sight by buildings and other obstacles. But their presence and number told me that this likely wasn’t the work of one person but that there were multiple people over there, setting up torches to provide light in the night.

There might be people around the area, keeping a night watch, but just as it had been difficult to find objects on the moon, it was difficult to spot anyone in that area. There were a lot of objects cluttering the environment, so nothing stood out when looking at it with low magnification but if I increased the magnification, allowing me to distinguish what was a crate and what might be a person, I couldn’t search a large enough area. Thus, I didn’t spend too much time looking around the area, instead, I decided I would take another look around the time dawn would break, hopefully, the people living there would extinguish their torches in the morning, giving me a glance at their appearance. Not that I’d be able to tell all that much from purely visual information, but it was better than nothing.

For now, I decided to expand the tower a little, giving me permanent cover for my throne before turning my mind, and the Oculus, to other things.

By the time dawn rolled around, I was even more fascinated with the Oculus and its sheer utility. Sure, it suffered from some drawbacks but those were fairly minor and mostly in the realm of it being too powerful and giving me access to too much information, to the point that I couldn’t process it all. The limitation was on the user, not on the tool. The Oculus allowed me to view a huge area of land, up to the horizon, with clarity as if I were right next to the observed object. The downside of that focus was a narrowing of my point of view, just as I had stumbled across earlier when observing the moon.

Regardless of those limitations, I had managed to discover a few Undead shambling around in the nearby city and even in a few towns further in the plains, in addition to some Shattered scattered around the area. There was no indication of the intelligence or hive-thinking we had observed in Shattered before, but without stimulus, that was only a casual observation, not something I was willing to rely on.

Furthermore, I had stumbled across something incredibly strange. When studying the city, I came across a few signs and made note of them. There was only one problem, the signs disagreed with one another.

One sign, partially broken, announced that one was approaching the r Force Acad, the lettering making me complete it to mean the Air Force Academy, an institution located in Colorado Springs. A few other signs confirmed that the city we had settled above used to be Colorado Springs, though there were a few other signs that welcomed visitors to Denver, Colorado, and I could even see one giving directions to parking at Denver International Airport.

While I wasn’t the greatest geography buff, even I was aware that there were some hundred kilometres between Colorado Springs and Denver, but somehow, these kilometres were gone. Whether the towns and roads in that area were gone or shifted somewhere else, I had no idea but this was getting seriously weird. Hopefully, the torch-setting survivors I had discovered had more information on this phenomenon, though I doubted I’d be able to make much sense of it.

As I was thinking about those people, I focused the Oculus back on the area where I had seen the torches, hoping to discover the people who had put them up, now that the sun was rising.

Watching the area was fairly boring and I noticed my mind drifting off a little, at least until I noticed movement near my field of vision. Soon, I recognised that the faint light I could barely make out thanks to the rising sun was vanishing, one spot at a time, and I focused the Oculus on that one visible torch, waiting for it to be extinguished, too.

When that finally happened, it was incredibly unspectacular, just a guy carrying an old bucket, taking the torch off the simple mounting and stuffing it into the bucket. Given that there was no steam rising from the bucket, I could only guess that it wasn’t filled with water but likely sand, or maybe they had some sort of enchantment on that bucket to extinguish fires. Otherwise, the guy looked incredibly mundane, wearing a mix of rough, likely handmade, clothes and fraying clothes from before the change. Additionally, there was a simple blade fastened to his belt, a machete of some sort, but, again, it didn’t look terribly special. Just some ordinary guy who was forced to adapt to the insanity that was the change.

His behaviour didn’t indicate any real combat experience, nor did I recognise his actions as truly vigilant. He was looking around, sure, but he didn’t look up, nor did he demonstrate any real situational awareness. All in all, he looked somewhat lost but, evidenced by the fact that he was still alive, it looked like things were working out for him. Or he had some help around, maybe magically hidden, I doubted I’d be able to pierce magical concealment at this distance. Something I might want to test with Lia at some point, so I knew how the Oculus interacted with magical concealment.

Knowing that there were people in that area, I did my best to find their fields, hoping that they were smart enough to set up a stable food supply. Otherwise, it would be incredibly difficult to trade my services as a teacher and magical craftsperson for food, meaning we would be completely reliant on Luna and her experiments with magically grown food.

It wasn’t that I distrusted Luna but I was aware that our experiments were just that, experiments, not something we could rely on constantly. Sure, they worked most of the time and, by now, I was somewhat confident that she’d be able to reproduce her successes, but I preferred to have alternative measures in place, just in case.

Scanning the fields around the area wasn’t an easy thing to do. While the tower was built elevated in comparison to the city, there were a lot of buildings between the Oculus and what I wanted to see, leaving me with little to go on. Additionally, I wasn’t certain if some particular patch of greenery was purposely planted or simply wild growth, leaving me uncertain if these people had set up farms or if they simply subsisted on supplies recovered from before the change, supplies that would eventually run out.

However, given that my previous scans had shown at least one place that looked like a military base, which might have a large store of non-perishable rations, I had no idea if these people had recovered them. Maybe I should go with the others to loot the base, even if there were no rations, there might be other things. Similarly, the Air Force Academy might have something useful, though given that it was a lot closer to the survivors I had spotted, it was also more likely to have been looted already.

Either way, it looked like there was quite a lot to explore in the area, to say nothing of that strange sensation I had felt when past the large mountain above the city. Scanning that mountain with the Oculus hadn’t yielded any results, nothing stood out at the surface. Just countless pines, a few animals moving about, nothing that explained the strange sensation. So, most likely, the sensation either came from the town or from some underground location. Whatever the case, it was worth investigating at some point. For now, I merely kept it in mind and focused my interest on the places I could see in town, spots where we might be able to gather worthwhile supplies or, possibly even more important, information.

Sure, the change had invalidated a lot of knowledge about our world but I had some hopes that it wasn’t so much a complete change to the fundamental forces that held our world together but that the Astral River was simply added on top of things. Or maybe they worked in parallel, I wasn’t sure. But whatever the case, a better understanding of the way physics used to work might allow me to understand magic better, too.

And if not, I was fairly certain that I might be able to find books on humans and human nature, something along the lines of psychology. I had read some of those before, trying to understand myself and my interactions with other people, but maybe I would be able to understand them better now. Either way, having access to more information was seldom a bad thing.