Chương 65: Chapter 62: Mutually Assured Trust

"I get that you're pressed for time," Nolotl said as the abjurer sat in her usual and pristine armchair, "but could I get a spell or something to practice in the meanwhile? I sort of finished learning all the ones I had at hand on abjuration and akyromancy." The diviner hadn't expected that the total celestial alignment would be powerful enough to give him near-complete mastery of Mage Armor, but it was a plain fact that he now could summon the full armor. Is it because it's only a first-tier spell?

I was using Ode to Healing Silence with relative ease during the alignment a loop ago, so perhaps that was also increased mastery.

"I don't have anything like that at hand, especially when I don't know your capabilities," Beta gave the same explanation as the previous loops." Ode to Silence, Mage Armor, and Intellect Fortress, those are my competencies," he informed her.

"Those aren't many competencies," she refuted.

"I did also have to learn the principles of akyromancy and abjuration from zero, and akyromancy still remains a colossal unknown, so this is both an equilibrium of foundations and praxis." Though he had to admit that in retrospect, his progress was dull. Three spells and all around a virtual second-tier of casting difficulty wasn't much progress at all, especially considering that four months had gone by since he started.

Though if we add Healing Word, my practice with the Simulacrum spell, and all that time I had to waste building mines, it starts to sound better, he tried to justify himself. Still, this only shows that I'm not capable of managing an enhanced ambush by myself just yet and I won't allow Enala to die out of principle, so this begets to ponder new options. His current options were to spend the end of the loop at the Void Tower, which he would be doing for the foreseeable future, or trying to dismantle the ambush.

His hope was that in the future he could do so with trivial ease, but currently his best bet was to bring someone with him. Only that doesn't work with the enhanced ambush. The only person I can bring easily is Azi, and as strong as she is, she won't be of much help when overwhelmed by numbers. Ah… I hate Cahtul and everything it stands for. I only need to keep trying, and one day, there will no longer be such nation to hinder me. Will you have the future for that?

Out of the whispers so far, this was the Ehecatl's most backhanded comment up to date. Nolotl could feel the venom pouring out of it. It didn't just make reference to Beta's recent betrayal, but also the inescapable fact of his enslavement. Yes, Enantyum can kill me at any moment, and I might not be in his best graces at this moment, but it won't do me any good to simply sulk. So heed my words, nocturnal wind, I will keep my head up high and look at the future with hope regardless of how grim it might be.

For in that case, I will at least have vivacity pumping in my veins. The Ehecatl failed to respond to respond, the speech of hope having soured the conversation for the liking of its calamitous kind.

"Equilibrium of foundation and praxis?" Beta reiterated his previous words, which snapped Nolotl out of his thoughts. It was true that gnosiamancers thought faster than most, but this had been the greatest dissonance of the flow of time he had yet to experience with his focus accelerating his thoughts more than reality elapsed.

"Yes," he nodded.

"What about it?"

"So you aren't here just to learn spells and have some guidance on them?"

"Oh," the diviner realized the nature of her confusion.

"I have yet to explain to you this coil that I have this Boon called Lesser Alignment Assimilation that allows me to do exactly what the name says, so I'm learning and practicing akyromancy and abjuration to increase my assimilation."

"So both knowledge and execution help?" She inquired, finally removing her gaze from the illusory book she picked up. Nolotl nodded at the question.

"Then you have something here to entertain yourself with," Beta pointed at the pile of obscuramancy books.

"I must admit that I didn't think about it," the akyromancer squinted at him.

"Don't look at me like that. My lessons on abjuration lasted only a handful of days and then I spent many weeks learning two spells, so I'm on a spell-learning mentality right now." The Empyrean of Void chose to ignore him and simply went back to her book. As for Nolotl, he picked up the book—though academic paper would have been more accurate of a description—with the simplest title and started investigating on obscuramancy at the same time as her.

Loops with Beta were always silent and perhaps a bit boring, but they were far from uncomfortable. For better or worse, Nolotl enjoyed reading in silent company for hours on end. It was easy to understand where Beta had come with the idea of sending information back in time with the loop as Nolotl read the books in obscuramancy. The discipline was usually tied to protecting people, but the title itself said it all: it was about obscuring information.

What the previous iteration of Beta had allegedly done was send the information of her single loop into the Void and then compressed that information by using limited key structures of reality itself to then be decrypted and unfurled into more complex information. Now, the Void couldn't inherit the information of a previous time as it would have never existed, so shoving raw information and retrieving it was simply impossible. It would disappear with the next loop. That was the reason for this roundabout method.

Beta had created an algorithm that used constants like pi or the natural logarithm in mathematics to create addresses for the information to unfurl. But such values were limited in the amount of information they could handle without a sizeable overhead of data to process it. That was the intention of compressing the information.

"The mote is a spell with the lone algorithm, then the compressed information are raw addresses, and the information itself doesn't exist anywhere, instead searching it for existing stuff in the Void," Nolotl told himself aloud after finishing that book on encryption and compression.

"There's more nuance," Beta put down her own book.

"I'm still not sure how I might have done this, but from what I've seen in the vestige, I didn't simply use constants, but things I can properly address that contain more information."

"How so?" The diviner inquired, thoroughly impressed and captivated by this information.

"The entropy of the information is too high, and we want to reduce it as much as possible. Addresses are single bits that evolve into proper thoughts, and for that I suppose I used my Inner Abyss."

"Your Boon?" The answer surprised him. The akyromancer nodded.

"It's existing information in the Void that has addresses, in a way that is inexistent and doesn't hold much weight or cost. I address items in some sort of mnemonic vocabulary for far swifter and optimal use of addressing… If I truly have done this myself, I cannot even begin to comprehend how many headaches I had in the process."

"Wait, so like, you put a value into an item stored in your Inner Abyss and then that item will always have a complex but defined meaning?" Beta nodded at his words.

"This could be done too with a single irrational number like pi… but I guess it heavily cuts down the overhead and the computation needed for the indexing of the data if you can directly address existing materials. How… queer. And also disappointed. Why didn't you notify me of any of this? I could've helped."

"That question doesn't mean anything to me, Nolotl," she stated as a matter of fact. And it was.

"Yeah, sorry…" He softly bit his lower lip.

"Not even my status as a Gnosiamancer helps me with keeping track of this coiling time. Everything becomes a mess and hard to account for really fast." Beta nodded but without meaning it much.

"I cannot say why I would have decided not to inform you, but if that's the case… I probably trusted you as much as you trust me now. Trust the whole concept of me," she added at the end for clarification. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Nolotl bit down his lip even harder than before.

That will need to be healed with a word, he sighed at his contemplation, realizing that he would need to use his lone restoration to fix the wound he inflicted upon himself.

"A massive shame that I couldn't get you to trust me, but I promise you that I will do my best to remedy that." The claire-obscure woman nodded again, but this time it felt that there was more interest in the gesture.

"We will know once I decompress the vestige. But… I would like to eat first."

"Ah, yes," he nodded back.

"You looked like you were eating before welcoming me." Beta tilted her head in confusion, not sure how the gnosiamancer might know that, so Nolotl lazily pointed at her robe that was full of crumbs, even if their source was nowhere to be seen at the workshop or at the bedroom. Without much thought, she dusted them off, throwing them to the ground. The dirtiness didn't bother her much because she would inevitably cast Selective Destruction at some point and clean the whole workshop in one swoop.

Without adding another word, the woman summoned a whole cucumber and she seemed to directly take a bite out of it.

"Ey, ey, ey!" Nolotl shouted in alarm.

"Stop that!"

"What? I'm hungry."

"Yeah? So take more ingredients and a pan."

"Why, though?" The terian's outburst and response surprised him.

"Isn't it clear?" he smiled softly and veritably.

"I'm going to cook today's supper." As always, Beta liked her first homemade meal. And I'm beginning to think she hasn't sacrificed her skin tone or her cheeks and it's simply that her eating habits are poor. Nolotl already knew that fact, but it was that threat of munching a whole cucumber that hammered the nail. At least she eats healthy? The diviner found some solace at that, though not much.

The abjurer-diviner duo spent the following days reading books as they had to process books that the previous Beta read over the span of a whole month in handful of days. The abjurer spent the time reading divinations whilst the diviner spent the time reading abjurations. Truly a match made in cosmos. Now, maybe the lack of spells meant the lack of big assimilation notifications, but Nolotl could live with his dopamine decanting slowly.

Especially because knowledge in and of itself was a reward for a gnosiamancer like him. Information theory wasn't a new subject for him due to his studies, but obscuramancy touched closer the entropic aspect of information with its obfuscation and compression nature. Perhaps that knowledge wasn't as spectacular as the abjuration that he now kept up at all times as Beta seemed to enjoy a lot her share of his resistance Boon, but this knowledge on obscuramancy could prove far more valuable than any abjuration.

For it might be the key to transpose information between the loops with no cost. Just like he was a true looper instead of a meager Interlooper for no added cost. The rewards reaped the last week were rather plentiful in retrospect: Information Alignment increased by 0. 0003%. Void assimilation progressed by 1%. Level progressed by 1%.

Gnosiamancers both leveled up and progressed on their Alignment by accruing and understanding knowledge, so even if his assimilation was a bit lacking, he was progressing ridiculously fast in his true calling. Mostly because the discipline he had been studying had been so closely knit to Information. A single 1% of progress in a week means a level in little more than a year and a half. The timeline might seem slow, but considering his last level before the time loop took three years, it was ridiculously fast.

It was commonly accepted that experience required for leveling up tripled with each subsequent level, at least for Information as it was the slowest leveling Alignment in terms of raw experience. Time remained the actual slowest leveling Alignment, but that was by virtue of chronomancers obtaining a decent share of their experience by simply living. And that took time, even if there was no effort involved. This meant that his current Gnosiamancer level 6 took 729 times more experience than level 1.

A ludicrous amount, yes, but at the same time, he was a child when he was level one. He was learning basic arithmetic by then and now he was dealing with complex compression algorithms by using a whole aspect of reality as its proxy. The difference in the difficulty of the tasks was incommensurable. The problem wasn't the present but the future as he would be required to resolve more complex problems and cast increasingly difficult spells to get only a fraction of a percentage.

It was a fact that leveling a whole level with a single spell wouldn't ever repeat again. Well, unless he decided to abandon everything and focus all his efforts on casting a ninth-tier spell. But that would be a waste of time and also leave his foundations in shambles. There was a proper order of things for a reason. Arcane assimilation progressed by 1%. First time that one of these random assimilation notifications feels somewhat valid. The somewhat in that sentence was doing a lot of heavy-lifting.

But as always, Nolotl welcomed the free advancement.

"I think I'm ready to tackle the vestige again," Beta put down her book, giving it one last cursory glance.

"Well, you're welcome to try." It would be a lie to say that Nolotl wasn't reticent to let Beta get so close to him and, in a way, access his mind, but he had extended a similar offer when he had petitioned her to let him access her mind with Lesser Read Thoughts. Now, Nolotl Xocoyotzin was hypocritical, but he did his best to avoid such acts, and despite the akyromancer having betrayed him last loop, he wanted to attribute that to a lack of communication skills rather than malice.

The Empyrean of Void placed her hands back on the terian's forehead and she began examining Nolotl's mind. Or more concretely, the compromised liminality of his mind. Beta wasn't a gnosiamancer, and it showed. She wasn't connected to the Cognition, so her movements were silent yet paradoxically loud. Detectable. She also had no finesse as this was basically her first experience, but Nolotl could feel the tendrils of her being caressing the mote of void that lingered in his mind.

Like lockpicks, the vacuous tendrils in the cyan Cognition started prodding the vestige of compressed information. This was as much as decoding a cypher as cracking a vault open. But Beta didn't seem to have much difficulty as she was the vault's creator, only that the endeavor took some time. The pale and sweat-spreading woman didn't need to speak for the diviner to know that the vault had sprung open. There was a lot of information inside it, the act of opening it being akin to decompression.

However, none that was directly understandable for Nolotl. With care, Beta removed the open box of inexistence from his mind to cradle it on her palms. Nolotl waited patiently as the akyromancer did her job.

"The compression algorithms certainly need some work," she commented without removing her eyes from her hands. There was nothing in them; at least in the Physicality.

"It seems my understanding of thoughts was a bit… lacking. This vestige contains information, but it's laid plain like a book would be and it's hard to assimilate."

"Well, that only means that next time you need more experience with how minds work," Nolotl responded with a soft smile.

"Y-you… you would do that?" Beta seemed veritably bewildered by the implicit offer.

"I've seen what I've done to you and you've told me as much, yet you would offer me a second chance?"

"A third chance, a fourth, and more if they are needed," he stated resolutely, a regal imperiousness in his tone.

"You've seen the recent hiccup, and I trust you to be better than that." Trust, the backdoor of the weak.

"You shouldn't trust me after that," her tone and words indicated only a statement, not an advice or remorse. Nolotl couldn't help but chuckle at that.

"What's so funny about it?"

"Nothing, nothing," he continued chuckling. Not that I can tell her that an eldritch parasite in my mind has agreed with her. That's more than enough to tell that she's in the wrong here. Nolotl wasn't being contrarian, but agreeing with a creature like the Ehecatl should seldom be done.

"The question is, do you want to use the capabilities that I offer you? Do you want to place the same value on trust as you do on those capabilities?" Beta didn't react violently nor immediately, instead she sat placidly on a stool thinking about her answer. As she tapped her palm with a finger, Nolotl knew that she was seriously pondering it. Extending trust. Had she done that before? He asked himself. She trusted that the time loop existed, but had she trusted me as a person?

It was hard to know when the woman failed to express herself.

"I want to clarify some things that I've found in this future information," she counteroffered.

"Sure, go for the jugular," he shrugged and clasped his hands behind his back. Nolotl extended the trust by pouring a trickle of mana in his bindings. Unnoticeable and invisible.

"It didn't seem like you shared much information with me, but from the looks of it, my previous iteration was aware that you had already interacted with her before that. That can be seen in the books you have summoned related to the ritual rather than obscuramancy." Nolotl nodded at that explanation. It was obvious for both, but some things needed to be put into words. Especially things as important as these.

"How many times have you interacted with me then? Has there been any that I wasn't aware of?"

"Three times and only the first I didn't communicate about the returning capabilities, not that you seemed especially interested on it even if I were to mention it."

"So I only lost one iteration?" He nodded again.

"The one you died by failing the ritual."

"And I haven't told you anything about it?" She tensed ever-so-slightly.

"Unfortunately, only the fact that it's a ninth-tier one."

"I see…" Beta relaxed and caressed her palm instead of tapping on it.

"Then my answer would be yes. I can show you trust and help you with your assimilation endeavor in the concession that you help me with the ritual by letting me send information back in time alongside you."

"I would like to add one more clause to that."

"Do tell," she nodded in agreement, or at least ponderation.

"I'd like this information compression method to be streamlined into a spell in the case I want to use it myself for other people."

"Hmm, that will prove to be a bit difficult considering the spell won't be able to use Inner Abyss as a proxy," she explained.

"It will need a substantial rewrite."

"Weren't you already working on optimizing it?" He added with a soft and amused expression. Bemusedly, Beta looked at him. As always, it was hard to get a read on her. Perhaps there was a tinge of annoyance, but he couldn't ascertain it with complete confidence. Amused and bemused, the gazes were exchanged.

"I will take on the offer," the Empyrean of Void spoke with a resolute tone. It couldn't be called emotion what there was in her voice, but there was—with utmost assurance—confidence in her voice. Ehecatl, I call this mutually assured trust, the diviner mocked the cosmic entity after his bet had succeeded, quietly letting the mana inside his tattoos drain.