Chương 58: Discovering the Web

Amidst the nearly dying, the Historian's shenanigans, and the saving of her best friend, who was now a part of her soul, Scarlet had almost forgotten that her strength lay not in her physical prowess, or even really her resilience, but in her acuity of mind. She'd had a subconscious fear that enchanting would be like everything else since the System arrived: unreasonably difficult and possibly traumatising.

That despite her advantages, learning this new discipline would be just as much a struggle as unarmed combat, or even basic literacy. She was delighted to be wrong.

"Fundamentally, enchantments are instructions you create using symbols," the Historian began.

"Each symbol has its own meaning. How an enchantment functions is determined by the symbol used, the strength and skill of the enchanter, and the medium they're working with. Some of the strongest enchanters don't even need a medium to inscribe a symbol." The Historian demonstrated this by manipulating mana in front of Scarlet, forming the shape of a flame. Then she felt a ripple in reality and watched as he 'pushed' until the symbol transformed into a literal flame.

It was weak, and it sputtered and died after only a few seconds. However, for a moment, it had been real. Scarlet blinked, blinked again, and finally looked at the Historian. At her expression, some of his ill humour faded away, replaced with self-satisfaction.

"Could you do that again?" she asked. Without responding, another flame symbol appeared in the air, this time much slower, and the moment he began to 'push,' Scarlet focused everything she could on what she was witnessing. She watched through the info-layer as the edit took place. No feedback. No rejection from the world. Just an instruction received and carried out. It was like the enchantment was bypassing whatever resistance she had faced while fighting the garachnics. But how? Why?

The moment the flame sputtered out, she requested he show her again.

"Fine, but only once more. We've a lot to cover, and not all day to do it," the Historian conceded, creating the symbol once more before activating it. She watched the power flow from his body, watched the way it was shaped, the way it transformed into something real. There. That was it. He wasn't brute-forcing change. He was creating a pathway for a desired outcome and allowing reality to fill it in.

Instead of trying to bend something into shape, the symbol provided a mould that could be filled, instructions that could be followed. Reality was stubborn and rigid, like a particularly petulant person. Could you force them to wave their arm? If you were stronger than them, sure. However, if they didn't naturally want to do it, you would be struggling against them the whole time. They might even fight back, and you could end up injured in the process.

The symbols worked by convincing that person their arm wanted to move. In fact, moving was the necessary action. The stronger you were, and the better the symbol, the more convincing you would be. At the Historian's level, there was no longer even a need to coax or convince. The symbol became an order, and reality followed suit. She'd been brute-forcing it all along, and she didn't need to. Why use a symbol when she had direct access to mana, psionic energy, and the info-layer?

She didn't need an 'interpreter' to deliver her instructions. She just needed to coax. For now. She was still too weak to make demands like the Historian, but she wouldn't always be. A notification told her both her INT and PER had gone up, but she couldn't pay it any mind, her thoughts racing as she considered the implications, the potential. Sure, she would still be stuck with small edits, but the risk of backlash would be negligible, and the potential for success would go up exponentially.

She wanted to try it out right now. However, the Historian was in full lecture mode. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"What I just did is commonly called 'free enchanting'. Inscribing an enchantment is much easier than free enchanting as you're not trying to make changes to the world, but only to the object you're working with. Because the scale is so much smaller, it requires far less Willpower.

"Depending on the medium and your intended goal, you'll find it easier or more difficult to enchant. For example." He pulled out a piece of silvery-blue wood that radiated mana like a beacon to her senses. She Inspected it. [Icewillow Branch – Tier 2: A trimming from a centennial icewillow. It has innate properties of water, nature, ice, and life mana.] The Historian then took out a beautiful wooden tool that Inspect told her was something called an 'inscriber'.

Its whole purpose was to facilitate enchanting by acting as a conduit between the enchanter and the medium they were working with. With deft, elegant movements, the branch was enchanted. Then he turned to the side and free enchanted something into the air in front of him. Simultaneously, both the branch and the free enchantment shot out a high-speed lance of ice. Looking through the info-layer, Scarlet was astounded by the difference in the amount of mana used and in the efficiency.

Free enchanting was difficult, mana-hungry, and impermanent. Once the energy was used, the effect dissipated. Whereas the willow branch had been permanently altered. She could see that as long as it was fed energy, it would continue to shoot ice lances, with no need for additional enchantment because their functions were inscribed into the material. When she thought about it, enchanting was almost a form of transmutation.

From a simple branch to an ice-gun, from a leather bag into a storage item, from a crystalline slate to a complex piece of technology. She was sure the principles were more complex than that, and that she was missing a great deal of nuance, but she would learn.

"Now let's look at the text," the Historian instructed. Scarlet, her mind still peering into the deeper layers of reality, turned her eyes to the data slate. Already attuned to this new level of the info-layer when she looked at the slate her mind completely bypassed the words in front of her. Instead, she became instantly absorbed in the inner workings of the slate itself. It wasn't particularly well protected, perhaps intentionally for this lesson.

However, the Historian could never have guessed just how much insight she'd be able to glean from the simple device. He could never have predicted just how much she'd see. When she looked at the slate, she saw not just the static inscribed symbols that that functioned on the basic enchanting principles.

Instead, she witnessed the complex interweaving between the symbols, their instructions, and the information carried both to and from the slate through streams of energy she couldn't believe she'd never noticed before. The slate itself was a remarkable symbiosis of constantly moving data. Mana powered tiny little symbols, so small she would not have been able to see them with her naked eye had she still been a baseline human.

Each interaction carried information that informed a separate interaction that carried more information, and so on in an interconnected pattern that worked together to create the 'brain' of the device in front of her. She was in awe, the same way she had been when she'd first seen a circuit board, when she'd first learned of the delicate interplay of energy, hardware, and information required to keep even the slowest dinosaur of a computer functional.

More impressive, though, wasn't the function of the device, or not that alone. It was what she saw when she looked beyond it. The data slate had a single, thick tendril of information travelling away from it, like a string of energy floating off into the cosmos. Only it didn't simply disappear into the distance. Instead, it was intercepted by another stream of data. That stream was connected to another, and another. She could see as signals travelled to and from the slate.

Wherever the signals intersected, the 'instructions' changed, carrying new instructions or information back and creating an intersecting network of information floating in an invisible layer of reality. A giant, interconnected 'web'. Its only purpose: to carry information and instructions from one place to another. She wondered if this was what it might look like if she could see the microwaves that made up Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth devices, only instead of a web of energy, they'd be waves bouncing through space.

Scarlet focused entirely on this web. Her mind flowed from connection point to connection point, following streams of energy as they connected from her data pad to some sort of artifact within the office that acted as a router. From that router she found a connection to the cleaning robot and the serving robot, as well as a few branches that seemed to flow towards the Historian. Though there might have been more, as she keenly felt an obscuration effect when she tried to probe.

Her mind then travelled outwards, following the streams of information to where they connected to other villas nearby, and some even further out. She reached the limits of her perception long before she found the limits of the network. What had her most excited, however, was that each branch, each stream of energy, was present in the info-layer. Something she'd previously only been able to see as background noise was suddenly coming into focus.

Instead of programming, and wave patterns, and the internet, it was enchanting and mana, and the web. Same principles, different execution, and underpinning both systems was psionic energy. The energy of information threaded through so subtly that she'd previously missed the entire, beautiful, energy web. Yet now that she was aware of it, she was almost perplexed she'd missed it in the first place.