Chương 95: It’s a Platonic Ideal kind of thing

Talks about languages and their supposed purely aesthetic functions shifted to discussions about wild elvish theories about new worlds supposedly not really existing, and those turned into talks about everything and nothing, but with magic. Anything El'el said baited someone into asking more questions, and with every explanation people got only more invested in what basically was the elvish theory of everything. Or maybe it wasn't elvish, but just common knowledge. He didn't ask.

Sure, both Mary and Lily knew some of that stuff already, but clearly not everything, judging by how engaged Mary looked. At least Lily was still too uncomfortable to speak without prompting, being mostly too withdrawn and brooding about her own thing. She wasn't a panicky mess anymore, but for some reason a few reassuring talks didn't seem to fix all of her problems. She was better, but still too stressed to really do anything but quietly sit near him, feeling somehow comforted by the act. He didn't mind.

Dennis was feeling comforted that he wasn't the only one who still grew bored listening to what was essentially a physics lecture, but larpy. And okay, yeah, Lily wasn't exactly bored so much as she simply didn't show any interest in the conversation, clearly still busy digesting the fact that no one was trying to kill her for being an 'evil mind-controller', but not showing any interest was basically the same thing as being bored in his book so he would count it for the purposes of feeling camaraderie.

Apparently, having a few points in Soul didn't spontaneously make him develop an interest in random stuff. Well, it did, but those new interests of his were pretty basic. Things like enjoying when people around him smiled, or the comfort of a nice pillow. The warmth of the sun. The taste of food. Small things. Honestly, he could've enjoyed them even without the Soul, but now he could want them for their own sake, when before it was just a flavor of background noise on his quest for greatness.

Developing an actual interest in a whole-ass topic was a bit outside of that realm. Either the Soul stat wasn't up to the task, or it just didn't happen yet because he needed to climb some sort of 'ranked competitive' ladder of interests to work his way up to more complex ones, he didn't know. Even if they were talking about magic, which should have been interesting for the average nerd, he just… He never cared about actual physics, or history, or astronomy. Or anything else, really.

So what if it had the word 'magical' attached to it? It was still just… knowledge about stuff that wasn't speedstering, or heroing. He already knew how to get more speedstery–just put more points into his skill, duh–and the hero thing was a topic way away from whatever magic trivia El'el was spouting. Still, he didn't exactly have a choice but to listen. They were stuck in the back of a moving truck. And no one conveniently almost died to ping his skill and save him from his misery.

"Divinity is everywhere, and in everything, but it does not have a form of its own," El'el continued her lecture, clearly growing into the role. She even started to sound like his history teacher, and Dennis had a strong suspicion that she was parroting some old elvish natural sciences teacher who bored her to tears a few thousand years ago, because she was clearly enjoying perpetuating the cycle of violence.

"It wouldn't be wrong to say that existence itself is divinity. But despite being the fundamental block from which everything else emerges, you cannot see it in its raw form since, forgive me for repeating myself, it does not have a raw form."

"Wait, so all of your sciences are based on an omnipresent, all-powerful, invisible substance that no one had actually seen exist?" Jack grumbled somewhat skeptically while watching the road. He glanced at Evan, looking a bit mischievous.

"Dude, they invented dark matter, but for everything, and called their physics solved. Our scientists are going to have an aneurysm when they find out."

"If any survived," Evan muttered, thoughtful.

"It reminds me more of ether, but combined with religious belief? All-powerful ether?" El'el's eye twitched.

"This religious belief can zap your ass by summoning lightning from its fingertips if you don't shut up, mister scientist," Mary defended the elf's honor, gripping her staff as a threat. Dennis was pretty sure she would've waved it theatrically but there was too little space in the car.

"It's EXP, of course it exists. Or are you guys so far up your denialous asses that you think exp doesn't exist?!" She turned to El'el.

"Ellie, don't listen to them, both of them are jerks who love to argue for the sake of it. I guess they just don't want to learn more about…" She narrowed her eyes, and spoke mockingly." Divine all-powerful magic. That's fine, I'm cool with becoming the only real wizard while they are looking for sulfur to make gunpowder and cry over it. Please continue." The elf cleared her throat, clearly a bit bummed that her divine teachings were received with a bit of skepticism from the skeptics.

From her point of view, it was probably the same as modern humans trying to teach an enclosed tribe about electromagnetism and being mocked for not understanding the spirits.

"R-right," El'el nodded to herself.

"Divinity doesn't have a form of its own, so it naturally seeks one–""Of course," Jack muttered. Dennis heard the swoosh of the staff cutting through the air and a dull smack.

"–which creates the next basic building block of the universe. Which is observable," El'el said somewhat dryly.

"A Concept. Or, as you know them, a Skill. That process is known as Skill Emergence."

"Isn't that a bit backwards?" Daniel asked with genuine curiosity.

"Skills seem to be made by people, or environment, I guess. You're saying that there's basically this divine formless soup, and it just makes skills on its own?" This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"The environment plays a role, of course," El'el said, nodding in a smug teacher who was happy for their students asking good questions kind of way.

"But everything is Divinity, just shaped in different forms, so technically it's still Divinity creating new forms for itself. Theoretically, if nothing existed at all, Divinity would still create a Concept on its own to embody. It is actually theorised that it did. It's known as the Original Skill, the first thing to ever exist. It is theorised that the Original Skill was all-powerful, and all-encompassing, just like Divinity itself."

"Was?" Mark asked from the driver's seat, apparently listening.

"It broke down at the moment of its creation, splitting into six primordial Concepts. Five of them you know as stats. We don't know what the sixth one is. But it has to exist to follow the rule of threes." Jack eyed Mary's staff, and wisely didn't say anything about the rule of threes. Or at least that was Dennis' guess.

"Just so I get this right," Evan muttered.

"Skills are basically tangible ideas, powered by exp. And they could be anything, right?"

"Yes," she nodded.

"More or less."

"There are limits?"

"Only in a way that some never existed and don't exist yet."

"I see," he said quietly, scratching his chin.

"So, under your cosmology, the first things to exist after this 'divinity' were the skills? What about matter? Physical things? Are you saying that the Mind stat existed before there was life that had a mind? How does that even make sense?"

"There is life that has a mind because Mind stat exists," El'el said like she was explaining something to a child, shrugging.

"I do not understand where your confusion comes from. There is no 'matter' or 'physical things'. Only Concepts, born from Divinity."

"I am not a Concept," Evan pointed out.

"You are made of Concepts. Stats. Your Skills. They are you."

"I am made of atoms."

"You are made of Constitution. You move through Dexterity. You affect the world through Strength. I don't– You are, of course, a unique being, but your uniqueness is a gestalt of Concepts. The way they are reflected for you, and interact with each other, is what makes you… well, you. Everything that exists is just the way Concepts express themselves and interact with each other." El'el looked away.

"I did not expect this to be such a controversial idea for you. It's common sense." Dennis wasn't sure whether he was sold on it. While it sounded a bit wild, he couldn't deny that stuff like quantum physics or the theory of relativity was in a lot of ways crazier and harder to believe than El'el's relatively simple explanation of the world. He glanced at Lily, to see if she had any opinion, and surprisingly she looked quite invested in the topic. She noticed his gaze, and looked down, a bit sad.

"I don't like that it means we are our skills," she said to him quietly, almost whispering.

"You know, with what mine is…" Okay, she was still bothered by her own stuff, it just so happened that El'el's speech touched that nerve.

"I think having a skill is like… having a hand?" He shared his own thoughts with her, whispering back.

"You can say that my hand is an intrinsic part of me, but you can't say that I am my hand. You don't like your skill?" Lily brooded harder, covering the car in her brooding magic vibes.

"I like it a lot," she admitted quietly.

"I don't like that I like it. And it's scary. But, you know, after being in the Echo… I think I believe Ellie." Dennis nodded, a bit lost in his mind. The Echo was a strong freaking argument in support of El'el's brand of bullshit. He clearly remembered twigs that couldn't be snapped unless he told them that they could be 'snappable', or burn unless he infused them with the meaning of the word 'burn'. With the Concept, now that he knew the word.

Dust that held no meaning just stopped existing, and the void aura ate exp–ate Divinity–reducing the stats of everything it touched until things just stopped existing altogether. Was the real world the same, but 'realer'? In the Echo, Skill places and meaningful things provided a measure of resistance against the void aura. The 'real' world was chock-full of 'real' things. The air, the sun, the ground under his feet. Everything around him held so much more 'Divinity' that there was no decay at all.

Was that what was happening? If he were to go into space, would he just disappear at some point? Yes. Thanks, Kriya. What an amazing way to randomly eat half his mana unprompted. What an amazing skill. Was there a reason why it decided to prompt in here? The skill worked as a crossroads sign. Dennis kinda doubted that he was at a crossroads of going into space or not. Probably. Hopefully. He eyed the sky in suspicion. Right?

"I can see how it's hard to believe that something existed without this 'divinity', if you believe that everything that exists is made up from tangible ideas," Evan said thoughtfully, looking up at the sky." And you have ample proof. Obviously. I'll need some time to make up a counterargument. But just from the first glance, it seems iffy on continuity. Under your worldview, the idea of fire would've existed before an actual fire appeared as a tangible thing? The Concept, I mean.

And then, fueled with exp, it would have made fire exist?" El'el nodded.

"But where would the Concept of fire come from? It doesn't make sense for a thing just to appear spontaneously."

"Where do your laws of physics come from?" El'el asked, a bit tired.

"Your world is far from the first technologically advanced one to appear. The natives sing of continuity like it's the Holy Grail, while simultaneously swearing that the world operates on principles that simply exist for no cause or reason."

"You know what the Holy Grail is?" Jack asked, frowning.

"Isn't it–"" Holy Grail is a known concept," the elf said calmly.

"Fucking hell," someone muttered quietly. Dennis leaned back, only half-listening to the conversation. While it wasn't evening quite yet, the sun was on its way down and it was getting slightly chilly. Maybe a bit too chilly for just a shirt. The truck was moving for a while already, and even with Mark being the slowest driver in existence–probably wary of stumbling into another dungeon–they still crossed quite a distance. Dennis was starting to see signs of habitation. They weren't obvious.

But more and more often he could see abandoned cars moved to the side of the road, or stumps from chopped down trees. Stores looted way more meticulously than before, practically completely emptied, at least from what he could see. Fewer monsters. Not that he saw any monsters before that, they seemed to somehow sense him and scram before he had the chance, but there were fewer signs of monsters.

For one, Mark didn't make weird turns as frequently, which probably meant that he stopped avoiding monster dens or something. Dennis would need to ask him about those. Clearing out the whole city from monster dens felt like a nice evening activity, properly heroic and all that. Accompanied by the sounds of someone's quiet existential breakdown, they approached the city.