NOVEL SIMPLE Chapter 41: Powerleveling (Again)
I reached into the flames and tried to push aside the intent that was already there, but Bomira noticed my attempt and solidified her focus, shaking my mind’s influence from her spell.
My body, packed with magic as it was, handled the flame alright. I could tell that I was going to burn through some bodies, but that was alright so long as I got the progress I was looking for.
Before taking my new Intent Isolation Boon, I could take control of spells after they left the caster’s body so long as they were in my domain and weren’t too powerful. This was mostly because of a power disparity between myself and the caster: within my Occult Sovereignty, I had complete control.
The same was not true outside of it, but Intent Isolation wasn’t a domain Boon. Instead, this ability had shown me how to separate intent and spell without its assistance.
Creating threads of Mentum, I wrapped them around the stream of intent that was flying towards me, interlocking them around it to create a net-like structure that held up better against Bomira’s attempts to shatter it.
With my threads of Mentum surrounding the Conceptium within Bomira’s Elementix, I started to squeeze, pushing a new intent into the flames that the energy had taken the form of.
At first, it didn’t work, and my body slowly melted into the energy it was made of. It took a couple of deaths for me to get the Boon to work on the very tip of Bomira’s flamethrower, replacing some of the flame that slammed against me with steam.
Over time, I gained more and more ground, and soon I only felt hot steam against my body. I kept pushing, and the fire turned into droplets of water further and further away from my body. Soon, all I felt was a couple of droplets hitting my face from time to time and some warm wind, like a hot day at the beach.
“Like water, do ya?” Bomira called out, and suddenly her flamethrower transformed into a pressure washer, cutting a hole straight through my chest and shattering the bindings I had placed around her spell.
Sensing the new variation out, I could tell that the energy of this spell, and thus its intent, was much less chaotic than the fire from before. However, it moved much faster, rubbing up against my Mentum ropes and straining them, forcing me to figure out how to handle this element’s unique properties..
With a bit more experience now, I managed to recreate my bindings with only a single death, but this time she changed tactics as soon as her attacks were no longer hurting me, instead flash freezing into snowflakes before they reached me.
The water transformed all at once, causing a pillar of stone to smash into me, followed by a stream of rubble.
The intent for this variant of the spell was shakier and harder to grasp with my Mentum, forcing me to push more energy into the task and sharpen all of my willpower into a fine point, centered on the spell pummeling into me.
When that spell started turning to puffs of air, Bomira swapped to that element as well, and I was faced with yet another stream of pressure. My experience with water helped, but I was faced with a problem that the other elements hadn’t presented.
Just like with the others, the intent of this spell demanded that it was Air, and air couldn’t be grasped or held. Fire was too focused on destruction to present this demand, and both Water and Earth were too physical to do it, but this Air abjectly refused to allow my Mentum to touch it.
Faced with an issue I didn’t know how to face, I turned to old reliable: brute force.
I flooded my Mentum threads with Conceptium, insisting that the air was, in fact, dirt. The spell, and Bomira’s willpower behind it, vehemently fought against that idea, but I refused to accept the Air for what it was, and it slowly, reluctantly turned into a cloud of dust.
For the first time since we’d started, Bomira cut off the constant stream of energy to acknowledge me.
“Good. We should train together again some time. I’m leaving now.”
I gaped at the blunt mage, looked around for someone to talk to or something to do, then shrugged and portalled away.
Reappearing in my Repository room, I checked on my legend.
Ambrose
Ancient Seeker 5
Repository 4
Infomorph 5
Loci Server 7
Firewall 6
Multithreading 3
Mental Rapidity 2
Forbodum Manipulation 5
Esoteric Sight 7
Conceptual Control 7
Energetic Intent 6
Concept Mimicry 2
Intent Isolation 4
Available Boon (All Manipulation, Conceptium Dominion)
Occult Sovereignty 3
Encompassing Knowledge 6
Abstractive Influence 5
Physical Influence 3
Intelligent Influence 0
Kelemnion’s Gate 4
Library Pass 5
Librarian’s Favor 10
Omnipotent Reader 2
Command Whispers 0
Maddening Knowledge 0
Dark Whispers 2
Ancient Mutterings 3
Inspiration 3
Tutoring 0
Enhancements: Willpower x6, Reinforcement x1, Purity x1
Named Belongings: Antigo, Arachnomicon, Drachma’Uban, Fenrir, Caerbalope, Carnic
Like with the level 5 Boons I’d been offered before ascending to the specialization of Ancient Seeker, these ones were unusually potent and archetypal.
The first ability was All Manipulation. As it promised, it would teach me to manipulate anything using anything. Forbodum could be used to directly control Light, if I wanted.
The issue with All Manipulation was that I’d gone into understanding and controlling Conceptium that I could pretty much already do this. I mean, sure, it wasn’t the same as using raw Forbodum to make a river bend in the wrong direction, but I could still get a good amount of control by channeling some Mentum and intent into the problem.
Conceptium Dominion was much more attractive. It promised to do… everything. I’d create stronger Conceptium, have greater control over it, drain less mental energy by making it, and be able to stuff more of it into my magic.
The choice was easy.
With Intent Isolation at level 4, I figured that the last level would come on its own, so I decided it was time to get back to my original plan of leveling multiple Boons at once. The complete lack of communication with Bomira had prevented that, but I’d gotten some great defensive training in return, so I figured it had still been a good call.
The first thing I did was set up a few Multithreads. The first would push my domain as far into Yalten as possible– those jerks would suffer for attacking me– and the second would start to spread Conceptium around with Abstractive Influence, using both my Physical and Intelligent Influence abilities to fill my domain with a single idea: subservience. Specifically to me.
My goal for this was to gain even greater control over my realm. While it could already be considered absolute, my energy efficiency could always improve. If everything in my domain bent to my will more quickly, then my life would accordingly get easier.
Leaving my threads to their work, I started trying to work on Concept Mimicry. Like with Intent Isolation, recreating my own Conceptium was always less efficient, especially since I already knew what it did and a portion of it was likely scurrying around a rubber room in my Loci Server.
Interestingly, the Boon also allowed me to exactly recreate the intents that I had stored in said server, meaning that I could store a single intent for every variation of rune I made or spell I cast, then replicate that and make some slight modifications based on the specific situation.
Really this Boon was more useful than expected.
Trying to think of some productive way to use and level my abilities, I thought of creating a new set of floors for my dungeon. I would need tons of intent for that, and maybe I’d also get to use an entry in my legend that, for the most part, went completely unused.
It was time to build a library.
I didn’t want to fill multiple libraries with empty books, so I took a trip through Kelemnion, committing the texts of interesting books to memory. I ended up just slowly strolling through the place for a long time, using Multithreads to copy down every book around, thinking about how I’d set up the floors.
As libraries, the 25th through 32nd floors would be a place of learning and knowledge, somewhere physical might alone wouldn’t thrive.
Honestly, it was a pretty similar idea to the set before it, with the maze, though that had more to to with remembering where you came from and realizing that the space was noneuclidean than actually thinking. That meant making a series of puzzle floors, each based on a different theme.
My thought was that for each floor you went up, the library would get larger, and you’d need to find a number of books that correlated to that.
Each floor would have a certain theme, and the books you were looking for would all be completely unrelated to the theme. You’d have to take these misplaced books with you for the librarian to let you through. Of course, you could just fight the librarian on the first floor, then stroll through the rest of the floors unbothered, but that was why the last floor would have books relating to the boss’ weaknesses and how to defeat it. Of course, that information would need to change every time someone entered the floors, otherwise nobody would need to go through the puzzles. That meant that the boss would have to be able to be equipped with special gear or otherwise have its elemental weaknesses switched around.
Designing a creature that was specifically intended to be weaker towards something felt weird, but I also felt that this was the best possible way to reward actually doing the puzzles.
Another thing to consider was loot. My first floors had fruit made of precious things like gold and gems hanging from stone trees, and some of Uban’s body parts were made of those things as well.
Most of Fenrir’s floors were barren, but the boss had a tome full of inscriptions, as well as a pretty fancy robe.
…Okay, maybe that wasn’t quite enough. I’d have to go back and add more to those floors, as well.
I wasn’t really sure what to do for the maze floors, since they were kind of meant to be barren. Currently, the only reason to go there was if you really wanted rabbit pelts for some reason. I wanted to maintain the feeling of liminal space that it had, and emptiness had a lot to do with that.
The two options I saw were to either put something in the Caerbalopes or the air. Stuffing a Forbodum crystal into the skulls of the rabbits was an easy solution which I quickly implemented. Later, I’d be able to stuff other advanced energy crystals into my rabbits as well, but for now this would do. Once crafters discovered the value of the crystals, I was sure that they’d be chomping at the bit to get more.
My first thought for the Nailwolf floors was to put some sort of ore in the walls, but I felt like that just wasn’t enough to reward fighters for coming into my tower, since they’d either have to mine it themselves or bring a miner, which was easier said than done.
Eventually, I decided to make a few designs for enchanted pickaxes and leave them with some miner’s supplies– unburnt torches, crates, wheelbarrows and other stuff– trying to make it look like a miner had set up camp there before fleeing.
The enchanted pickaxes had basic Movement runes on them that would make them pick up rotational speed more quickly, but I also gave a few on the top floors a more complex series of runes that would project a line of energy in front of the pickaxe. Overall, it was nothing too complex, since all the logic was stuff I’d used in making my Enchanted Orbs.
For the ores, I decided that it would be a good opportunity to make some new magical ones. I’d learned how to do it with Conflict Tungsten, which was resistant to magic, but I figured having more options was never a bad thing.
For the first ore, I just put a large vein of iron in it and mixed it with an intent to burn. The Conceptium was roughly based on the fire spells I’d seen, especially Bomira’s flamethrower.
For the first floor, I only laced my iron pyrite knockoff into its stone, but as I went up I started putting more and more complex materials. Titanium with a protection intent, extra shiny platinum that did its best to look valuable, and so on. On the top floor, I even mixed in a single vein of diamonds that would be far more durable than it had any right to be, just as a reminder of a video game I played a lot as a kid.
With that done, I figured that I was pretty much done with providing loot. What was on offer now was good enough, especially when I had no current challengers.
That left the floors I’d be working on next. Of course, knowledge was its own reward, but some people were silly and didn’t think that was a good enough reward.
To entice mages, I would scatter some journals that detailed how to cast a variety of spells. With my access to Kelemnion, learning new spells wasn’t a hard thing to do, I just didn’t do it very often since I was plenty smart enough to come up with stuff on my own. My experimentation had borne much fruit, and I’d reached a point where I could somewhat accurately predict the results of my actions.
At the end of the day, spells were just energy and intent, and I was good at handling both of those things.
Still though, some people needed step-by-step instructions on how to handle magic. These people weren’t stupid, just less used to my unorthodox methodology. They needed structure, and there was nothing wrong with that, at least until you started trying to make your own spells. Then you needed to break out of the mold a bit.
Spell tomes wouldn’t be all that useful to more physically-aligned fighters, especially people who fell into the brute category– no think, just smash.
For those types of people, I decided that the final boss would hand out a small bag of valuables– at least, it would look like that. In reality, it would be a spatial bag containing piles of gems and minerals from the previous floors.
This would provide an extra incentive to wait to kill the final boss: if it only had one bag that it handed out at the end of every floor, then greedy people would need to go through the floors one by one to collect every possible item.
With my plans in place, I created a seam for each of the eight floors. Entering into the extradimensional space, I waved my hand and pushed the alternative reality into obeying my will, creating wide floors and cylindrical walls out of perfectly even stone. Within this space, I started making bookshelves.
I opted to make the shelves out of wood, giving it a darker hue to fit the ambiance I intended for the floors of this section of the dungeon to have.
Having created a place for them to go, I started making books en masse, pasting huge quantities of information from my Loci Server directly into their pages. Once the books were made, I sorted them by topic, and then alphabetically within those topics.
For the first floor of the dungeon, I decided that the theme of the books would have to be broad in scope, so I filled them with every “Introduction” or “Beginner’s” book that I could pull from my Repository. It would be just enough to get people interested in the library– there was knowledge on everything from fighting styles and spellcraft to inscriptions and history.
Having been copied into nonmagical books, the Forbidden Knowledge that I’d pulled from Kelemnion no longer gave off whispers. For the most part, that was a good thing, but I felt that just a little bit would help with ambiance, so I decided to imbue a bit extra Forbodum into all of them and use my Command Whispers Boon to coax some madness out of them. Not enough to actually hurt anyone, but enough to unnerve people.
To further push that idea, I spread Conceptium into the air, empowering it with both my Physical and Intelligent Influence, commanding the air to weaken all perceptive abilities used in the space and invoke a feeling of gloom.
Instantly, the room darkened slightly, and a blur of energy formed in front of my eyes, creating a magical fog effect.
With that, people’s darkvision abilities would be screwed up, meaning that any darkness I allowed would be true darkness. On other floors, they could use magical senses to find their way around, but this completely stopped that.
Speaking of, I should probably light up those other floors.
Pasting thousands of generic, inexpensive Light runes– the one that Kyle had shown off– I created a sort of skybox in my dungeon’s seams. In the Nailwolf floors I kept things dimmed just a bit, but there was light on every floor now. At least, everywhere except for here.
For this floor I wanted to do something a little bit different.
Along the walls, I placed a long series of torches, and placed candles on stands that lines where people would be walking through.
Lighting the torches and candles was a little bit weird, since I didn’t want them to burn out or get unlit by a random adventurer whenever I stopped paying attention, so I set some Wisps to the task of keeping the burnable objects going, resetting them and lighting them.
Forbodum wasn’t exactly suited to the task of creating fire, but if I looked at how fires were started: heat, oxygen, and fuel. The torches and candles would be the fuel, and heat was a pretty simple thing to create.
With that information– something that I doubt many people ever considered since the existence of oxygen seemed to be high-level knowledge, based on certain books I’d read from Kelemnion, meaning that the Fire Triangle could be considered the silliest piece of Forbidden Knowledge in the world– my Forbodum reluctantly agreed to create fire.
Once I’d taught my Wisps to do that, and created a few more to put the books back into their places if they were knocked away and no unfamiliar creatures were present, I called the basic setup of the room good.
The next step was to create a number of “topic” books. Each set of topics would need to contain eight books, and I wanted to make it so that there were enough that a party could run the dungeon over and over again but almost never get the same combination, so I decided to create eight different sets for each floor. These different sets would be completely unrelated to the other books in the dungeon, and would rotate through the first seven floors before being randomly picked, which was a task that a Wisp could easily handle for me.
Each book would have its own specific location that would be the same every time, but on the first floor that meant that you had a 1 in 448 chance of needing to go to the same place twice in a row. That chance increased by a very slight amount with each floor, since there were more books, but even at the seventh floor it was pretty low.
For the last floor, that was where the books on the boss’ weaknesses would be. I hadn’t made the boss yet, nor had I worked out exactly how I’d be giving it particular weaknesses, so I couldn’t work on those books yet. Still, I could work on the other seven floors for now.
I set up the remainder of the floors in a similar way to what I had for the first one, but adding more sections of bookshelves. After the second floor, where I put one section on each side, I decided that I’d place them in polygons, quickly working my way up to an octagon on the eighth floor.
A librarian’s desk was needed for each floor. On the first, I set it just in front of the exit, behind the first shelves. They were spaced out enough that you could easily see and walk between them, so the desk was visible from the room’s entrance.
The desk was set similarly on the second floor, but this time it was in a corridor formed between the two large groups of shelves. For the remainder of the floors, the desk was just put directly in the center of the polygons.
The next step I took was to assign each floor a different subject. As previously mentioned, the first floor would be for all the “For Dummies” books, full of books that were primed for the uninitiated of their subjects. As a natural progression of that, the second floor would contain mid-level books, and the third would contain higher-level ones.
The fourth floor would break the pattern, instead being a catalog of elements and their effects. Some of the books on the basic affinities belonged on the first floor, but the more complex and in-depth knowledge about the advanced ones would need to be earned. For similar reasons, a catalog of spells and runes would be held on the fifth floor.
Part of me wanted to separate spells and runes, putting the latter on the sixth floor instead, but that was only due to their rarity. I didn’t feel like keeping rare, life-altering information that should be used more commonly away from the people who could use it.
On the sixth floor, I’d store books relating to in-depth magical theory and secrets of the arcane crafts. This would provide an avenue to mastery that was unavailable to most, since the only ways to learn it were to find and convince a master to teach you, or find the knowledge elsewhere, like in a kingdom’s vaults or on another plane. While it still wouldn’t necessarily be easy to get the book, it wouldn’t require them to be a royal, an exceptional talent favored by a grandmaster, or have one of a select number of advanced elements.
The seventh floor was where I decided to spice things up a bit. On this floor, I put all of the books I could find about forgotten traditions, other realms, and powerful beings. Included in this was a list of all the gods I could find any text about, knowledge of ancient sacrifices and rituals, and even a little journal– just a couple of pages– about myself. After all, if you were talking about powerful beings, at this point I was starting to view spreading my influence over the entire world as a side quest.
The eighth floor took away the plate of food and poured hot sauce on the table. All of the most potent books that I’d found in Kelemnion– as judged by the quantity of Forbodum and hostility of its whispers– were stored here. Within the final floor of this segment of my dungeon, there would be journals of demons and necromancers, studies written by the most psychopathic creatures to ever live, and incomprehensible novels written by the beings of other realms.
With that managed, I moved on to the next phase of creating these floors, which was simply to make some books that didn’t fit with the rest.
I put some skin on and teleported to Kerenth, gaining access to the royal library at my request.
Just as I’d expected, there was plenty of fantasy, romance, and, interestingly, “sci-fi.” In this world, sci-fi had a lot less to do with technological advancement than progress in runecraft, which I felt was kind of funny. On Earth, comparing this world to the world that its sci-fi authors imagined would just be like comparing two different fantasy novels.
I ended up copying a lot of these sorts of books into my Loci Server, dividing them into categories by the subgenre. These would be the quest books that people had to look for.
After installing those and crossing that task off my mental checklist, I considered what else there was to do.