Chương 403: (396) 6.10. Sleep Study

The explosion was so sudden and unexpected that Vin didn't even have time to react. He merely stood there, staring in shock at the dust cloud forming around Lumel's current position. Before he could run over and check to make sure she was alright, the entire world flashed purple, and Lumel appeared directly in front of him, completely unharmed from her dream version of a runic backlash.

"Vin! What brings you down here?"

"Oh… no reason," he said, clearing his throat and deciding it was probably best to just ignore what had just happened entirely.

"Out of curiosity, do you know where you are?" As he asked, he held off on casting Create Dream for just a moment. He wanted to know if the person he Dream Walked into would understand what was going on even before he changed anything. He thought that was the case from what he understood of the runic formations making up the spell, but he wasn't one-hundred-percent certain. Like he'd told her earlier, dream magic was tricky.

"The Underside?" Lumel replied, her smile wavering for a moment as her brow scrunched up, and she shook her head.

"Wait… this is a dream, isn't it? Woah, that is a jarring sensation. Did I just blow myself up?"

"So it does work like that," Vin said, happy to confirm his suspicions.

"And yes to both questions. I'm using Dream Walk right now. Pretty surreal, right?"

"This is my dream then?" Lumel asked, her frown deepening as she held out a hand and nothing happened.

"I sort of thought I'd be able to do whatever I wanted in here."

"Not really how Dream Walk works," Vin explained.

"From what I understand, people's dreams are chaotic and constantly fluctuating. Part of Dream Walk locks the dream down in place in order to let us converse, so we're not bouncing around from place to place. This way I could reach out to Spur or Myers from across all of Edregon, informing them of certain situations the moment they happen or asking for their advice on things. Some strange stuff can still happen naturally, like those runes you were working on detonating, but no major changes."

"Well that's a bit disappointing," Lumel sighed, before giving him a warm smile.

"Still, it's nice to have you visit me in my dreams. Want to try and see how Create Dream works now that you're here? I believe I was owed a library date."

"You'll get that one for free, that's too boring," Vin snorted, taking her hand and doing his best to reach out to his mana pool. Even after all the time he'd spent with Fred practicing and learning the more basic spells, pulling on his personal mana felt like he was painting with molasses instead of ink. Even so, the mana followed his commands and he whipped up the runic formation quickly enough.

The strange way time interacted with dreams certainly helped, as while it felt like it took him a few minutes to get the formation down, in the dream it was only a few seconds.

"Alright!" Vin said, finishing the spell and eagerly flooding it with his slow-moving mana.

"One library visit, coming up!" Vin's mana flooded through Create Dream, and the world shifted around them appropriately. Large shelves of books rapidly rose out of the ground, and the distant walls of the Underside too far to see shrunk inward, transforming the open cavern into an actual building. Colorful stained glass windows popped into existence, followed by a few tables and chairs.

Within five seconds, the familiar Underside had been transformed into a semi-close approximation of the floating library, and Vin looked around, feeling pretty proud of how close he'd gotten things. Right up until Lumel plucked a book off of one of the shelves and took a peek inside.

"It's your journal," she commented, flipping through the pages and admiring his many detailed sketches before putting the book back and selecting a different one, laughing as she opened that as well.

"They're all your journal!"

"I mean, I don't know what you were expecting. I would have had to have memorized every single book in the floating library in order to recreate them in here!" Even as Vin defended himself, he walked over to the railing and glanced down, blanching at the sight of an interior column of space that stretched on forever. Each of the library's towers were only supposed to be five or six stories tall, but Vin couldn't make out a top or bottom to this one.

"... Alright, maybe making dreams is a little bit harder than I originally thought it would be," he admitted.

"Still, the primary purpose of the spell is working correctly. So long as you wake up tomorrow and remember our conversation, it will have been worth the time spent learning it."

"Isn't that the second purpose?" Lumel asked, tucking one of the many copies of his journal under her arm as she walked over to peer down the infinite library with him.

"You still need to see if you can practice magic in here."

"Are you sure? I thought you wanted to go on a fun dream date together," Vin asked, gesturing around at the rather bland library. Upon closer examination, he realized the stained glass windows didn't even depict the usual intricate pictures of various classes like they did in the real world. His were just a bunch of colorful splotches that almost looked like something if one squinted.

"I'm happy to experiment more with Create Dream and see what the spell can really do." Stolen novel; please report.

"We'll have plenty of time to play with the spell later. Right now, I'm just as excited as you are to see if we can turn some of our sleep time into magic study," she admitted, giving him a shy grin.

"In fact, I didn't want to say anything just yet because I didn't want you to think I was acting clingy… But I sort of went over to chat with Fred and Fria the other day to ask about potentially going on my own dream journey in order to connect my mana pool to my subconscious. I thought, if you were already going to be practicing magic in your dreams, maybe you wouldn't mind an extra tagalong…?"

"Is that what you were doing after we finished rescuing the missing Earthers?" Vin asked, laughing as Lumel bushed and hung her head as he got it in one.

"Why not just come out and tell me?"

"I don't know… We already spend so much time with one another, I didn't want you to think I was trying to monopolize you even in your dreams," she admitted quietly, looking like she didn't know what to do with her hands.

"I know it's silly because we've been together for almost four months now and things have been wonderful. I guess I was just afraid this would be a step too far. I wasn't even going to ask, but now that I'm working on tier-4 and tier-5 spells, any number of hours I can shave off trying to crack the runic formations would be huge, so I decided it was worth the risk, but then I started getting worried and didn't want to say anything, and—" Vin silenced her with a kiss, before pulling her into a tight hug.

As he did so, Lumel sighed, relaxing against him as she pressed her head into his chest.

"... I let myself get sucked into another pointless anxiety spiral, didn't I?"

"Maybe a tiny one," Vin admitted, unable to stop himself from chuckling as Lumel groaned.

"Though I'm proud of you for coming out and asking me so quickly rather than keeping that all bottled up. I know expressing yourself is difficult after the upbringing you had. But you don't need to worry about that anymore. Me? The team? We're all happy to hear what you want to say."

"I know… logically, I understand that. I guess I just need to keep hearing it until my dumb emotional side figures it out as well." Stepping back, Lumel rubbed at her face for a few seconds, taking a deep breath and giving him a big smile.

"Okay! So, just to be clear. You're alright with letting me tag along to practice magic in this… dreamscape with you?"

"I'd be more than happy to have my primary magic buddy working beside me in my dreams as well," Vin said, matching her smile.

"Though are you sure you want to go through all that? My dream journey took me almost two solid weeks, and Fred said I was one of their faster ones. Not to mention unlike me, you actually have a spatial affinity. That's going to make learning how to use dream magic even harder, right?"

"I'm not going to be trying to give myself an additional dream affinity, I just need to finish the dream journey in order to connect my mana pool to my subconscious," she shrugged.

"If that requires learning a new low-tier spell or two, that's fine. I should be able to handle tier-0 or tier-1 spells from another affinity without too much of a struggle. In fact, I'm actually looking forward to picking up Dream Mark for myself. After a certain Explorer got himself kidnapped and thrown in prison for the better part of a week, I'd feel better having a way to reach out and get in touch with you if need be." It was Vin's turn to blush, and he chuckled as he scratched his head sheepishly.

"That's probably not a terrible idea. Alright, well now that we got all that out of the way, I suppose I should actually test out what working on magic within a dream feels like. We probably should have done that first."

"Better late than never," Lumel said, holding up his journal and shaking it at him.

"I'll entertain myself by reading through your notes, so no need to worry about me."

"Just don't say anything about my terrible handwriting!" Vin begged, before taking a seat at one of the tables and closing his eyes. Attempting to slip into Introspection within a dream was a strange experience. Rather than effortlessly entering his mana pool like usual, he almost had to push his way down, which tracked with the sensation he'd noticed already where his mana felt thicker than usual.

Once he was inside that black void, he looked around, realizing he didn't actually have any spells he was currently working on or formations memorized with Iron Mind. What to do, what to do… Vin ran down his current spell list, looking for inspiration as he tried to come up with something relatively simple to work on. In the end, it was actually Lumel's comment about being excited for Dream Mark so she could reach out if he went missing again that gave him an idea.

Running the thought through Spell Weaver, Vin grinned as the System gave him a confirmation that his idea for a new tier-1 spell would work. It might be a tad reckless… But Vin was going to create his very own soul spell. Already, Sense Soul had proven itself a remarkably useful spell. He was able to figure out where living people were located, and could even tweak it slightly in order to do things like detect those with zero magical attributes in their souls.

The tricky thing was that the spell didn't really work for finding a specific individual. Other than those with truly freaky souls, like the ranker king and the thousands of connecting strands reaching out of his soul toward the other rankers, most souls felt pretty much identical. Which led to Vin's current idea.

If he could create a version of Dream Mark that instead left a foreign, entirely harmless mark on a person's soul that would give Sense Soul a target to hone in on, he could theoretically scan an entire fragment and pick up that individual within seconds, without risking triggering his divine boon from too much magical feedback. Naturally, the thought of messing with anyone's soul was something Vin was entirely uncomfortable with, and for obvious reasons.

The only reason he was entertaining this idea in the first place was because his Spell Weaver title confirmed his idea should be able to work as intended. His potential spell wouldn't be changing or influencing the target's soul in any way, shape, or form. All it would do would leave a tiny bit of his own mana on the soul in question, allowing him to find it again later. It would be nothing like the soul brands that Golrim explained he'd used to connect himself to Curash back on their own world.

Moral quandaries out of the way and quickly overshadowed by the exciting thought of inventing new magic, Vin got to work. The runic formation for Dream Mark had already done most of the heavy lifting for him, and the spell he was aiming for would be a similar tier-1 spell. The new spell probably wouldn't take very long at all.