Douglas Miller
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MiP B2 Chapter 29: Research Progress
🕑 Added 2025-01-31 21:02:35 +0000 UTC<< First | < Previous | Next >
The next morning, Crown Mage Felton showed his growing impatience by packing up the whole camp with a wave of his hand and an outpouring of mana the moment everyone was out of their tents. He nodded to Esmorana as he telekinetically deposited her wind-driven passenger-carrier in front of her, with assorted baggage arranged beside it, ready for everyone to just pick up their stuff, take a seat, and fly.
With that done, he marched up to Carlos and gave the bare minimum bow to acknowledge a high lord's rank. "Lord Carlos, I will give you the service of handling Kindar's transportation to your next campsite, but I expect a greater focus on the project that I came here for today. You have now completed your Tier 8 unification and subsequent creation of new structures, and you assured me that this would finish the last of the capabilities you need. I hope to see more concrete results today."
Carlos nodded back while picking up his pack. "We'll give it our best effort, and yes, we have completed our preparations for that."
"Very good. Oh, and Lord Carlos? You should learn a flight spell soon, so you can dispense with using this wind-powered contraption."
Carlos laughed. "We'll take that under advisement. Now, I'll need you to get Kindar out of the danger zone before I pick up Purple, and then we can get going."
"On it. I'll see you again shortly."
___
Carlos chuckled quietly to himself as they set up camp in their latest spot. At first I thought that faster leveling was the main advantage of noble soul ranks, but now we're leveling slower than Ressara. Is that ironic? I think so, but I remember irony being something that people commonly get wrong. Anyway, she's catching up fast, despite us spending more time absorbing aether than she does - she can't do it in her sleep. We're still limiting ourselves to areas she can handle, but she's already caught up enough that we can leap from a Level 19 zone up to a Level 23 zone despite that. At the rate we're going, it will take us 5 days to reach the limit of this area's aether.
He looked around at their new surroundings. They were camping under the trees this time, not in a clearing, to make it harder for any hostile searchers to find them. It made for a lot more obstacles and underbrush, some of which was dangerous - or rather, had been dangerous before Purple established his dungeon domain over the area and took control of all the potentially harmful vegetation. Carlos took an especially close look at a scrubby bush that was covered in thorns 2 feet beside his tent; the thorns were all still there, but blunted.
"Hey, you ready for a day of in-depth analysis?"
Carlos looked up and saw Amber standing in the clearest break between trees nearby. She was fidgeting, half-turned away, looking over her shoulder at him, and a bit antsy on her feet. He smiled and straightened, quickly moving to join her. "Of course! We've finished making all our fancy tools for this, now let's go play with them!"
They quickly found Felton, who had set up shop in a 10-foot wide break in the underbrush, bounded by several trees and still thoroughly shaded by the forest canopy above. A pair of royal guard gauntlets almost shoved themselves into Carlos and Amber's hands the moment they arrived, and Felton clasped his hands and nodded to them. "A timely beginning, good. Lord Carlos and Lady Amber, let's get down to business. As we have already established that the sabotage separates itself out when the runes are expanded for easy inspection, I kept these in their normal mode for operation. You confirmed the presence of micro-scale attention diversion before; what more can you determine now?"
While Carlos immediately raised his gauntlet for close inspection, Amber hesitated and then asked a question first. "Did you succeed in learning to cast the analysis spell yourself, and what did it tell you?"
Felton pressed his lips together and shook his head. "I learned it, but it gained me nothing. It found exactly the same information as the sabotaged gauntlets themselves report."
Carlos raised an eyebrow at that. "Huh. Either the concealment is so good it simply outclasses the analyzer completely, which seems unlikely since we've still managed to sense it, or whoever designed this got clever."
Amber nodded. "Of the options I can think of, the only one that makes sense is that the concealment includes something customized to counter this specific analysis spell."
Felton added his agreement. "If so, that would be yet more evidence that the Enchanters Guild is responsible."
The improvised wilderness magic workshop lapsed into silence as Carlos and Amber focused intently on the intricate enchantments in the items they held, with Felton waiting for them to find something worth speaking about. Carlos closed his eyes to better focus on his mana sense. He could feel much smaller details in the enchantment than before, thanks in part to being higher level, but primarily to having more specialized sensory soul structures. Before, he'd had a single comprehensive mana sensor for sensing all forms of mana in any quantity. Now, he had split that capability 3 ways, specializing separately to sense liquid mana, gaseous aether, and solid essence. On top of that, he had split the capability further into separate soul structures for sensing bulk amounts on large scales versus sensing fine details on small scales, for a total of 6 soul structures devoted to sensing the various forms of mana.
The specialization for sensing fine details was particularly relevant for studying such a compact and complex enchantment, but separating the senses for essence and aether also made it a great deal easier to pick out the enchantment's structure from the background torrents of aether that he and Amber were constantly absorbing. Let's see, there's the analysis enchantment, and as expected, there's the attention diversion reacting to my inspection of it. It's trying to push my attention away from… Geeze, these filaments of essence are really fucking tiny! I actually can pick out two distinct threads of it there now, though.
Carlos chuckled to himself. Heh. The closer I look at that thread, the harder it tries to push my attention away from it, which my copy of Ressara's inverter turns into focusing on it even more. It's still like looking at a spiderweb, but the spiderweb is glowing neon green on a black background. Now, can I tease out any meaning from this…
He spent several minutes examining threads of essence and even identified a few keywords among the structure, but still had nothing useful when the effort started giving him a headache. He sat down and groaned, rubbing his forehead. "Ugh, this feels like trying to make up for the lack of a magnifying glass by looking so closely I go cross-eyed. No, wait, it's more like I have a magnifying glass, but I need a better one."
No one responded to Carlos's comment, so he just took a deep breath and shook himself. "I need a different approach. Hmm…" He lapsed into silence, thinking to himself. This would be a lot easier if I could get it to expand for display like the main enchantment does. Actually, could I do that? He carefully grasped the hidden enchantment and tried to press it against the main one, hoping to hold them together as he triggered the display feature. For a brief instant, it seemed like it might work, but then the filaments of essence started slipping. He gripped harder, but the threads he was hoping to examine slipped out of his grasp. He sighed and gave up. I need the improved essence manipulation soul structure I'm working on today, higher level, or both for that to work.
He looked over at Amber. She was doing something with Felton. The royal mage had cast a spell on the gauntlet, and Amber was examining how they interacted. With a closer look, Carlos quickly identified the spell as the same analysis spell that the enchantment duplicated.
After another minute, Amber smiled and made a quiet exclamation of triumph. "Gotcha! It's reacting to the Analyze spell by probing its structure, and when it touches certain key parts, it hooks into them and attaches some extra pieces that change how the spell works."
"Intriguing." Felton smiled. "That implies an extreme mastery of understanding of the spell by the saboteur."
Amber nodded, but then grimaced. "Yes, but I don't have a lead yet on how to remove the sabotage. That's your main goal for this, right?" Felton nodded, and Amber turned back to her gauntlet. "Then let's keep trying."
___
After a few more hours, Carlos called for a break. "We've managed to identify a few small parts of the sabotage, and I'm sure we can expand that with inferences from its structure and analyzing what would make sense for the finer details to be, but that will take time, and it will be easier with more power as we continue to advance. For now, I have a headache, and there's something else we should check on. You'll want to see it too."
"Oh?" Felton raised an eyebrow. "Very well. For now, I am satisfied with your progress. What do you speak that we should check?"
"You'll see." Carlos led them on a brief search for first Trinlen and then Esmorana and asked her, "Are we near the place where you rescued us?"
Esmorana smiled. "Near enough that a flight there would be swift. Why, do you want to revisit it?"
"Yes, with our mage companions, here."
___
Soon, they were looking out over an artificial clearing strewn with shards of shattered trees. Felton frowned as he inspected it up close, adding to his observations from their 2 flyovers before landing. "A battle occurred here not too long ago, certainly, but I don't see anything important to reexamine."
Carlos thinned his lips and shook his head. "Try casting a spell."
Felton raised an eyebrow, then shrugged and exerted his mana. "What the-?" A large broken log rose into the air, lifted by his mana, but slowly and with noticeable shakiness. "What… What is this?"
Carlos sighed. "The legacy of something I did during the battle. I'm glad to see it's recovering. I was afraid the damage I'd done might be permanent. Two weeks ago, your spell would have failed outright. All spells would have, and runic enchanted items as well." He levitated a coin unsteadily in front of himself, looked at it for a few seconds, then grabbed it out of the air and pocketed it again. "Not mystic abilities like Esmorana's wind control, though."
"Troubling." Felton tried a few more spells, then took to the air with the Flying spell he'd already cast beforehand and paid close attention to how steady and easily-controlled his flight was. There were a few barely noticeable wobbles, and his frown deepened at each one. "I have heard of such a thing before, but only after battles far greater than this one. You say you caused it?"
"Yes, and I intend to never do it again and to take the secret of how I did it to my grave. It is dangerous knowledge."
Carlos and Felton stared intensely at each other for several seconds before Felton finally nodded. "Good. See to it that you do." He cocked his head, and a thoughtful look came over him. "If you devise a countermeasure, however, sharing that would be welcome."
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Comments
Elaborate
I feel like Carlos is kinda adding Soul Structures for the sake of adding Soul Structures. Where will it be useful to detect Essence on large scales? I guess it could be used to find a stealthed army, but isn't that kind of niche use what you would build spells for? You could do that in 4 Soul Structures instead of 6: * Magic Sensor * Sensor filter (aether/mana/essence) *Sensor macro lens *Sensor micro lens You could even combo the filter and macro/micro structures to work with the mana manipulator, so you don't need six of those too.
Ben Bass
TYFTC! It is good to see they are making progress, and also that the area Carlos broke earlier is healing. I do wonder if there is a breaking point where the damage is too much and an area could be permentantly scarred.
M
First rule of war: NO BUG USING!!!
Hilton Janfield
This feels like they provided their own solution - if runic enchanted items don't function in the burnt out area, they stand a better chance of examining them!
Paul Foster
He's triggered a cpu burnout bug! As an esoteric cpu designer and computer science historian, this chapter has me tingling! What we're seeing here is exactly the behavior of a massively parallel cpu where a core has shorted: the chip eventually turns off the failed core and diverts requests to others, but in the mean time the behavior of the computing substrate shows through (explained below). If you've ever tried to make a computer out of something not designed to be one (gears, C++ templates, magic cards, light bulbs ...or rocks of silicon), this problem is shockingly familiar. There is always a substrate that isn't designed to be Turing complete, and computing machinery built on top to support the basic instructions. When you break the computing machinery layer, the substrate behavior is apparent. Most modern computers use digital amplifier transistors as their substrate, so they produce an endless string of 1s or 0s. But if you break a type-engine cpu (...cough *C++ templates* cough...), the basic types still function, while metaprograms fail. This world seems to have some sort of wish granting behavior as the substrate, where wishes are impressed by souls onto the various types of mana which fulfill them. Unlike modern computers, the substrate here seems to be exposed for people to make things on directly (ex soul structures and the like). Makes you wonder if someone might build an independent spell system on top of the substrate, although the current characters don't seem to be the type to do that.
viperfan7
Polymorphic code is fun
Connor Mcharg
It’s been outright stated that the incantation system is artificial (see: the wall of text that happened when Carlos first cast ´help´ - and for that matter, how he found that spell), but the mystic abilities have been much more freeform - basically wishes for abilities - which strongly suggests that they’re not running on some man-made system. Personally, I’d’ve been surprised if messing with incantations *could* accidentally affect non-incantation soul structures. …also, we’ve already seen proof that mystic abilities weren’t affected - Esmorana flew them back to base from the middle of the deadzone.
Markell
It’s interesting that mystic abilities aren’t affected. If I were to hazard a guess, maybe that means that the magic system is less like an “engine” and more like a server built on top of the natural mana formations, with the regional areas acting as clients? In which case the alternative would be to make a private server and build a fresh set of commands from the ground up. Of course, this also means that you’d be limited to Purples sphere of influence and the mana purple has stored but it also means you can build your own custom service that can be updated and patched on the fly such as fixes for negative values. Hell, you could even blacklist someone from the “server” and they’d be unable to use magic.
Markell
They need to use Purples dungeon style magic to turn the mana into primitive data sets that can be looked at without being a forced interaction.
viperfan7
I would LOVE to know what Felton was thinking when he learned about that little WMD
Maurice Brown
We should be friends!
BarGamer
Good thing it's not a bad sector. That means you can just run a defrag, or have Purple fix it.
Josh
> "Gotcha! It's reacting to the Analyze spell by probing its structure, and when it touches certain key parts, it hooks into them and attaches some extra pieces that change how the spell works." Oh holy !@#(*%. It's possible to *patch other people's spells as they're being cast*? That came up in speculation in some past comments, but now we see the answer. *Wow*. That has some huge and terrifying implications. (Also, reverse-engineering-resistant malware. Yikes. I really, really hope it has occurred to Carlos to make sure when delving deeper that it doesn't have *larger* countermeasures, like exploding if they get past the first-layer countermeasures. Or, slightly less violently, phoning home if the first layer is bypassed.) Among other things: - Self-perpetuating viruses/worms and similar catastrophes. Hook into any spell they detect and propagate themselves into anything *those* spells interact with. Given the degree to which magic is this world's physics, and the low-level magic system underneath, there's a very real possibility of a grey goo scenario. The thing Carlos showed Felten in this chapter is the very *least* of the things he should carefully never tell anyone, and should try to find countermeasures for. - Giving someone a spell that only works given specific conditions that you could control. (The magical equivalent of a proprietary program with a license server. An awful thing in our world; an awful-but-potentially-necessary thing in theirs.) Effectively, if they're an authorized caster, the spell-stub you gave them gets modified on the fly to contain the real spell. One legitimate reason to want this: giving a tentative ally a powerful spell that they cannot keep using if they turn against you. The difference between this and just casting the spell *for* them: they're the one supplying the mana for the spell. - Resource-stealing mechanisms. Hook into someone else's spell in order to make *their* mana drive *your* spell. In particular, turn their spell into something open-ended that lets you drain their mana... - Magical defense through detecting any spell being cast and using general-purpose techniques to cancel it. As far as I can tell, other than perhaps Ressara's attention-diversion-inversion soul structure (depending on how you look at it), we haven't seen any instances of real security-minded defense or offense. The world seems to be at roughly the security level of not even knowing what security *is* or why someone might want it (with the possible exception of Sandaras, and whoever put this bug into the enchantment). Imagine what happens if any spell cast in your vicinity gets automatically hooked to early-exit and do nothing. Or, a more sophisticated version: imagine if any spell cast in your vicinity gets automatically hooked to early-exit *unless it is signed via asymmetric cryptography using a specific private key that's embedded in one of your soul structures*. Now sign your allies' magical keys using your PKI, and they're the only ones that can cast spells anywhere near you.
Test Patron Plz Ignore
I've really enjoyed seeing Felton get fleshed out more fully, and I hope we get to see more Ressara soon!
Tryptic
I think it's funnier to imagine that normal spells use mana in the air, and cause no damage, so the only reason it happens after big battles is because someone accidentally cast a bugged spell or had a memory leak or something. It happened by chance due to the sheer number of spells people were casting under pressure.
NightKhaos
I think I understand how this chapter was so difficult for you Douglas. By showing this to Felton, and explaining that he will take the knowledge of how he did the damage to his grave, Felton who has been irritated about Carlos' lack of progress suddenly sees him at new light, and realises that Carlos has not been stonewalling him without cause. I'm going to hazard a guess that Felton may decide to be a little more forthcoming with Carlos around somethings going toward, and far more tolerant of his idiosyncratic behaviour. He may even specifically request he maintain an ongoing position within Carlos' "court". By showing Felton this, I think Carlos now has gained much favor with the crown, and again, Carlos is... just doing what he believes to be the right thing here. He isn't showing this to Felton to gain favour, which Felton will also come to realise... and this will ironically cause him to gain even more favour with the crown. All this is going to be extremely useful for what is coming, the attempts at retribution against House Carlos will find the Crown far more invested in House Carlos than they would expect of a brand new house, and that's on top of Carlos being far more capable than he ought to be. If I were Carlos my next not immediate priority after all the other stuff going on will be getting more understanding of Dungeon Cores, because the only sustainable way I see to maintain the fragile balance within the rules you've established of this universe is going to be to give the other houses access to dungeon core aether manipulation to allow safe rapid leveling of nobles... that is until a revolution occurs, which is all be inevitable at this point.
Connor Mcharg
…huh - I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before, but the mass-casting of who knows how many war-mages in battle *would* put a strain on the system that allowed them to cast, wouldn’t it? I’m so glad the creators of that system seem to have accounted for that.
D S
Thanks for the chapter!
Bloop
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