Chương 44: Re-Programming Reality

If she were to be asked, Scarlet would probably say it was accepting the second notification that really accelerated everything. [Primordial Psion protocol: Inactive energy detected] [Primordial Psion protocol: Subsume in entirety?] [Yes | No] Why not? [Yes] The most precious thing she had was Maus, and he was already under attack. The most this would do was expedite the inevitable. [Process in progress. Time remaining: 21: 14: 06: 20] Twenty one days! Scarlet lamented. Then the numbers shifted.

[Process in progress. Time remaining: 18: 12: 12: 32] What had started as a small sip of energy had somehow spiraled into the entire pool's psionics draining into her soul. Whether this would have been good or bad under different circumstances, Scarlet didn't know. Perhaps if she didn't have a bond and had intended to undergo a normal Alignment, having all this psionic energy flood into her would be a boon. However, it wasn't neutral energy. It was the energy of the pool.

It wanted to change things according to its own will. And there was a lot of it. Despite being able to tell that her own connection to psionics was purer, Scarlet was being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of energy flooding into her soul. She didn't know what to do. She couldn't stop the torrent. In the corner of her vision, the time until the assimilation process completed dipped lower and lower at an alarming rate. [Time remaining: 12: 13: 15: 23] [Time remaining: 06: 20: 11: 06] Volume mattered.

The amount of energy she absorbed determined how long it took her body to assimilate it. Quality mattered too. The same little sip she'd taken from the Historian had initially told her two hours. The same amount taken from the pool had been supposed to take over a hundred hours to consume, nearly a week. But that initial sample had given the protocol a blank slate, and it had taken eagerly. More and more energy poured into her.

More and more aggressively did it threaten to erode her, to steal pieces of her mind and add them to her body, to chip away at Maus until he was nothing more than energy meant to fuel her potential. To take from her. To rearrange her. To decide for her. And it hurt. Scarlet thought she might be screaming, but she couldn't be entirely sure. She was working very hard on maintaining a rational mind, but it was difficult.

Between assimilating the energy, fighting against the Alignment, and defending Maus, she couldn't even consider increasing her stats or properly attuning herself to the psionics. It wasn't like her body could absorb energy endlessly, could it? At some point, she had to be full. But psionics weren't like any other energy. They were an essence, the material form of information. It was why they laid the world bare the way they did.

She was essentially fighting against a cosmic editor trying to erase one thing and write in something else. If she couldn't stop the flood of energy, couldn't adequately defend everything while it was happening, then she would hold on, hold out, and play defense until she had a chance to strike. Eventually, the energy would be assimilated, and then she'd have a little breathing room. Right? She felt like a wounded animal, huddling around her mental stats and her bond with her pathetically crude control of psionics.

She was a brute against a fencer, a fighter against finesse. It was ugly, and she hated it. The pain and rage kept building as the numbers on the assimilation timer ticked down and down. [Time remaining: 95: 00: 47] The timer switched from days to hours. [... 00: 49: 29] Hours to minutes. [... 00: 51] Minutes to seconds. She felt overfilled. It was too much energy, too fast, and she'd been forced to undergo the process while fending off the remaining energy.

She could only struggle for so long, eventually it stopped being about will, and was simply a matter of capability. By the time it hit zero, only a couple, agonising minutes had passed, yet Scarlet was nearly spent. [... 0] There was a single moment of calm, then her mind exploded. The bath the night before was a gentle caress compared to this. Visions entered her mind like memories, or dreams. Three young vulpians entered the Pool. Two fighters and one with a mage build. She knew because the Pool knew.

Plucking the knowledge from the info-layer with enviable levels of literacy that Scarlet couldn't yet hope to match. In the first scene she watched almost detached as the two fighters walked out significantly less bulky, and with a new light in their eyes. The third went from looking quite waspish to leaving the pool fighting-fit. The second scene featured a large, green person with tusks growing from both upper and lower jaw. She knew It was an orc because the Pool knew.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. The orc stepped into the pool, toppled over, and screamed. When he eventually stepped out, he looked like a new person. Thick, rolling muscles trimmed down to more manageable mass. What had been gruff, stilted language became clearer, more legible. Then he left the pool, and the memory cut off. That's what this was. Memories she'd subsumed along with the Pool's energy. Just like with the Historian.

More visions flashed by; more vulpians, more changes, more adaptations. Slowly, Scarlet began to understand just how the Pools were able to 'Align' people. She would've laughed again if she could. The process was like programming. Soul programming. The question was how. She tried to actively sift through the memories, but it was like losing a word on the tip of your tongue. She knew she knew it, the information simply refused to be retrieved. Something instinctive within her told her she wasn't ready.

A natural safeguard protecting her fragile mind. Yet she was still fighting a losing battle. She dared to look at her interface, only to find that Maus's time for reconstitution had not just been reset, but pushed back further. Six days now. Then seven. Why was it so much more difficult to protect him than herself? Why was it still attacking her, hadn't she subsumed it? Every time she went through a memory, the pressure inside her decreased incrementally.

Every time she understood a new principle in the way the energy moved and flowed, the way it interacted with the world, it became easier to fend off. She needed more data, more visions. People came and went. Every time, they came away changed; aligned. The pool wasn't acting on intelligence or even instinct. It was more like natural programming. The energy was programmed for Alignment. The energy was programmed for so much more. Scarlet knew how to program.

Information systems were her bread, her butter, and the plate they were served on. This was just a different format. Right? Maybe… Maybe instead of fighting the energy, she could work with it? Drained from the Pool and divorced from whatever intent had controlled it before, it was her energy now. Instead of trying to be a firewall against what was essentially a psionic virus, she thought of ways to adjust the programming. It wasn't as though she was in her control centre.

She couldn't just open the back end of existence and tap away. She knew instinctively that she didn't have the power, control, or capacity to do something so radical. She could only make small edits. If only she had an interface, something to connect to the energy, an editing program, some form of— Wait. She did have an interface. The Historian had said it recorded progress, not necessarily created it, but it also facilitated self-development. It interfaced with the same thing the pool interfaced with.

It did literally what its name implied. The noise she made might have been a laugh if her throat wasn't so raw. Without even opening her status page, she mentally assigned 1 FS to Intelligence. Then she focused, on what was happening in her soul. The moment she diverted her attention, the psionic energy went to work at the bond again. Damn. She was forced to cut her observation early, and it had cost Maus time. Now her interface indicated it would take eight days until reconstitution. Double damn.

She really didn't want to use another FS, but between theoretical build optimisation, and Maus's existence, it wasn't even a debate. She spent another FS, then another, changing stats each time. Because she was protecting her bond, she was only partially able to capture the changes. But enough partials eventually gave her a fuller picture of the way her soul expanded, the way the Interface's interactions were represented in the information layer. So when her mental stats were attacked again, she changed tactics.

This was her energy now, it just needed adjusting. Once more she marveled at the difference in energy quality. Her natural energy was simply superior. She may not have the volume or strength needed to wield great power, but she promised herself she'd get there. For now, she'd rely on that inherent superiority of energy to make changes to what she could affect. It wasn't much, yet, but small changes could create enormous differences. Addressing her mental stats first, take became preserve.

She tried to add, but it was too far outside what the energy had already been programmed to do. Preserve was already in the 'programming'. She'd been able to work with the energy to change its function. Once preserve was in place she had some breathing room. Time to address her physical stats. She already had the energy, she just needed to convert it into stats. She had enough examples from the Pool. She started with Strength.

It hurt, it was negligible compared to the feeling of her soul being swiss-cheesed by a confused natural wonder. That wasn't to say it wasn't awful. In order for Strength to improve, muscle density had to improve. In order for muscle density to improve, protein needed to be assimilated and converted into muscle. The energy came from what she'd assimilated. Converting what was essentially raw potential into true stats, exactly as the Historian had hypothesized. The difficult part was surviving it.

The process wasn't gradual, and Scarlet had yet to learn any finesse. She felt as though everything in her body contracted all at once, only to release that contraction in the most painful relaxation of muscle imaginable. It was awful, but nowhere near as excruciating as assimilating the energy had been.

Vitality came next, and she couldn't even describe the sensation of her recovery ability, personal energy reserves, metabolism, cognitive processing, and even the elasticity and durability of her very soul being affected. She threw up what little remained of the breakfast brick while the rest rapidly digest and spread through her. For all her INT, Scarlet simply didn't have the processing power to care how she appeared. All her attention was on the process.

When it was done, Scarlet was literally a different person. It had cost her more than just some sanity, though. Twelve days. That's how long until her Bond reconstituted. The number itself was hazy, as though her Interface wasn't sure it should be there, and it wasn't actively ticking down either. He's not gone yet. She reminded herself. She could fix this. She would fix this. She had enough control now that she was no longer trapped in the pool.

With her body in 'alignment' the energy was no longer eroding the Bond, however damage had made the Bond unstable. If she left now, there was no guarantee Maus would reconstitute. Besides, unlike the Historian's healing weave that she'd managed to integrate completely, the energy of the Pool was much more potent. Subsumption gave her the memories and a fundamental understanding of the energy, but it was up to her to assimilate it. Otherwise there was no way the Historian wouldn't notice for weeks or months. [... Subsume in entirety…] her metaphorical testicles. Never again! At least not while she was so weak. Now she had volatile energy to tame, and a Maus to save before she could consider leaving the pool. She had an idea of how to do both. She just had no clue if it would work. Well, no use in second guessing. Scarlet took a deep breath and sunk into the information layer. For the first time she allowed herself to fully immerse in the energy.