Chapter 343

Myriad sighed in Ben’s head as he worked. Ben asked as he laid the finishing touches on the item he’d been working on, laying back and pinching the bridge of his nose to try and deal with the ever-present headache that had come with his minds splitting.

He thought back as he sat back up, lifting the item to admire it in detail.

It was fairly heavy by virtue of exactly what it was, dozens and dozens of thin layers of crystal sheets, each of them having dense layers of enchantments on them that were connected through thin moribusial threads to link up the various spell effects placed on each one. The edges of each sheet were carefully blended together to make it a solid object without disturbing the magic bound within, with the only thing left to do being playtesting.

Ben attached the entire block to the underside of a bigger quartz slab that had already been designed with different enchantments, as well as marked areas for running one’s mana through, and watched as it lit up, the game he’d made seeming to function perfectly as he tested it.

It was an extension of replicating pong for Thera to try all of those months ago that he’d kept working on, making more and more games as he went with each one needing different levels of complexity. There were other simple ones that could be made by adding the enchantment to a sheet of crystal like snake or brickbreaker or different endless runners, but the more complex he wanted to go the more problems there were to sort out until he didn’t have the space on a single crystal. He’d dealt with the scaling issue at first by layering and connecting quartz sheets to keep any one from becoming too big to fit everything, but eventually that stopped working too, otherwise the stack would grow unreasonably tall and unwieldy.

From there, there was only one thing he could do. Optimize everything. His goal was to make it in a way that a standard unawakened enchanter could, meaning no building them in a way that required multiple minds like blending enchantments and no large varieties of them either since the number of connect holders was still small. It was an incredibly interesting, stimulating problem for him that made it all the harder to keep from putting every mind in his head to it, but in the end he could say he was satisfied as he’d successfully made a 2D platformer.

“Man I am so freaking good at what I do,” He muttered to himself as he played through the levels, his headache forgotten with his sheer joy. “And this is just for when I’m trying to do something I could reasonably make money off of. What could I manage when I actually put my all into it? Something to think on for if I ever take summoned enchanter, the name would at least hint I’d get good experience from making things from my old world, right?”

“What are you talking about Myriad? I slept without going to your realm not too long ago.”

“Hey, it’s fading on its own.”

“Fine fine, you win. I can’t right now and you know it, but I promise to tonight, okay?”

After making breakfast for Thera and Sonya, Thera walked up to him, placing her hands on his cheeks as she ran a variety of spells through him and looked at him with concern.

“You didn’t sleep last night.”

“Ah, yeah I got a little too invested finishing my last project, but it’s done and I already promised Myriad I’d sleep tonight too so no need to worry.”

“Alright, and the headache?”

“Still there but getting better. I’ll live.”

She bit her lip as she looked at him, deep in thought and far from comfortable that he was still feeling the after-effects from leveling parallel thought.

“Maybe we should visit Vividus,” She eventually told him. “We could bring my dad to make sure she doesn’t try anything funny while she has a look at you so it would probably be fine.”

“Don’t worry too much,” He told her as he leaned in to kiss her goodbye. “If it hasn’t gone away in a couple more weeks then we can start off with visiting Lux instead. I was already told it’s likely just my body needing time to adjust to the massive change and in the grand scheme of things it hasn’t been that long.”

“Mmh, I don’t know…”

“Even if I’m not one hundred percent, it has been getting better so there is progress. Instead of worrying about that, swing by the shop when you’re done later. I’m going to need to test something but there’s a non-zero chance it tries to kill me.”

He’d meant it mostly as a joke, no matter how accurate the statement was, but it left Thera burying her head in his chest. “How can you be so unbelievably stressful?”

“Part of my appeal. I won’t do any of the dangerous bits till you get there and honestly I might not even be able to get to that point by the time you’re done, I still have a lot of work on it to do.”

“Fine, fine, just don’t go getting yourself killed while I’m not around to patch you up.”

After unintentionally yet successfully adding a new point of stress to Thera’s day, they both parted ways, each off to their various tasks.

Ben’s first stop was popping by the adventurer’s guild, meeting Ceselee and handing over all of the information he needed to for the patent of his latest game, but from there it was back to the shop where he was invested in finishing up a month-long project.

He’d learned a lot while making an arm for Kelf and he needed to see just what he could do with it to meet his future goals. From there it had been days of working on designs, creating and experimenting with different composite materials with his magic, and finally constructing the various parts, making what felt like miles of artificial muscle fibres, composite bones and a skin substitute, with it finally being time to put it all together.

The ambidexterity that had long since merged into his crafting skill was showing its continued value as he cut materials with one hand, casting his magic with the other as half the minds in his head focused on putting everything together and constructing the enchantments for it.

It was proving to be long, grueling work, but it at least had the benefit of not needing to replicate any organs within it, meaning he could use the space for other redundancies or to lighten it overall.

It was when it was done, the form resembling that of a stone ape before him, that he let himself sit back and rest, none of his minds doing anything but meditating as time passed till he eventually heard the door open.

When he’d turned to it, he’d originally just been expecting Thera, but received a pleasant surprise in the form of who was with her.

“Falk, good to finally have you back. They kept you for the long end of things, huh?”

“It was busier than expected. More important than that boy, how long has it been since you’ve been asleep?”

“What? I missed last night, why?”

“You look like crap, and I’ve seen you go a lot longer without rest to be looking that bad with only missing a single night.”

“Damn, there goes my hopes of a touching reunion between teacher and apprentice,” Ben muttered as Thera spoke up for him.

“He’s already promised to get some proper rest tonight uncle, don’t worry.”

“Mmh, if you say so,” Falk eventually gave in as his focus shifted to what Ben had been making. “So why don’t you catch me up on whatever chain of events led you to making whatever that thing is?”

“Oh, this?” Ben asked, happy to change the subject and more than happy to talk about what he’d just worked so hard on. “You’re looking at my first attempt to build a body that can house a soul. Actually, perfect timing. In case anything goes wrong we should probably go to the training grounds before I shove a soul crystal into it, think you can carry it for me Falk? It’s gonna be heavy.”

“Why would you make something you can’t carry yourself?”

“I can, but I’m just so tired,” Ben said, shooting his teacher a pitiable look to try and get out of dealing with the weight of his own creation as Falk eventually gave in, unable to deny his own curiosity on just how well it would work out.

Leaving the shop closed, they carried it out to the empty fields beside the town that people were allowed to use for training the more dangerous aspects of their skills, picking an area far from anyone else practicing in the land as they sat the body on the ground, both Thera and Falk standing at the ready as Ben went to its back.

“Now, before anything starts I’m just going to beg you guys to try and not destroy this if anything goes wrong, pretty please?”

“We’ll see how it goes,” Thera told him, her staff at the ready as Falk just shrugged.

He said to himself as a final thought before inserting the soul crystal and running back safely behind his two companions, as they all watched and waited for anything to happen.

They stood in cautious silence, all of them waiting for something, but as the seconds ticked by without a change, Ben couldn’t help but wonder if he’d done something wrong, if he’d messed up in the design of the body or enchantments on it in some obvious way that was keeping it from doing what he knew it should have, with that fear changing to elation as he watched a single finger twitch.

It was a slight movement, so subtle he would have thought he’d been seeing things if it hadn’t continued, with other parts beginning to twitch and spasm as well as the minutes ticked by, with exactly what was happening slowly dawning on him.

“Rise my creation, rise!” He yelled out, getting far too into it as Thera looked back at him in concern.

“I knew there was something wrong with your head.”

“Hey, let me be excited about this, look at how freaking good I did!”

“But can it even hear you?” Falk asked, less concerned about Ben’s enthusiasm than he was about the practical aspect of trying to give it an order.

“What? Of course it can hear me, it…” He trailed off as realization dawned on him. He hadn’t figured out and designed anyway to let the body perceive the world. He hadn’t even considered it. He knew ghosts were able to comprehend their environments through the mana in their souls and he’d spent the entire time he was designing it thinking of it as just that, a soul.

With that realization, he slumped to the ground, all but crushed by his feelings of defeat and the daunting task that still lay ahead of him.

“Oh my fucking god I need to make this thing sensory organs. How am I even supposed to do that? Where would I begin? Wait, does this mean I need to make some sort of artificial brain to process information? How? Ah god, I thought I was halfway done but I still have so much freaking work left and don’t even know where to start! Ugh and then there’s eyes specifically! Eyes are going to be so hard! Maybe I could do something with a high-level clairvoyance enchantment but that’s a whole other issue and…”

He continued on for a while, talking to himself as he was lost in his own world of ideas, feeling crushed as the scale of how much farther he was from where he thought really kicked in as he eventually got up to take the soul crystal out of the now flailing machine, unable to even orient itself since he hadn’t considered the need to give it a sense of touch to do such a thing.

“Alright, next time I’m scaling this down. I didn’t really need to make a full-sized one to begin with anyway, I can try and make smaller ones that should function at only a foot or maybe half a foot tall. Wait, but I can worry about all of that later, since this was a bust I need to put the rest of today to my other project.”

At the words ‘other project’ Falk couldn’t help but perk up. “You’ve been working on this for a while now boy, what could be so important to actually pull your mind off it?”

Despite his current failure weighing on his mind, Ben couldn’t keep himself from grinning at the question. “Just gotta see if an idea bore fruit.”