Chương 9: Omnimancer 9: Iridescent

In hindsight, Jax ought to have guessed the insane wizardry the Tier III School of Time he'd just unlocked would buy him. To say nothing of its unlock bonus which made all negative ailments last half as long and doubled all positive effects durations. Yet, while [Haste], which made him faster, and [Slow], which slowed down a particular target of his choice all sounded incredibly useful, their multi-million point cost and ludicrously long chants kept Jax from pulling the trigger on those.

Conspicuously absent were any spells that stopped time entirely or slowed things around him. Possibly multischool spells for a school he'd yet to unlock? Or perhaps a spell shard he'd have to add to the School of Time? But did he need to have the corresponding School beforehand to use a Spell shard if he found one out in the wild? Or could one use lone spells without their corresponding Schools as-is? Questions with no answers... for now.

Regardless, [Voidstep] alone made the splurge worth it, despite the chant length. He wasn't at all sure he'd have saved as many as he had without it. In fact, the Spatiotemporal school—a Tier VI school since it combined two Tier III schools—had so many spells that seemed absurdly powerful, if only they didn't cost so much. It was a significant part of the over-five-million he'd spent in all, leaving him with just under 19 million left.

Which sounded like a lot until one considered the point costs of the multi-school spells. Or the fact that there were more Schools and Spell Shards. To say nothing of the other multischool spells he'd yet to discover. His wallet wasn't the only thing burning, either. The temperature had climbed the lower he'd gone in altitude, and was now pleasantly warm. In a suit designed to survive Antarctic winters in stride, he might as well have locked himself in a sauna.

Jax had wiped himself down as best he could, but he still reeked of seawater—a not subtle smell that of course transferred to all of his clothes. Still better than the stench of weeks-old sweat, though… Tearing off his gloves, goggles, and mask, he unzipped the suit, wiped the sweat off his brow, and stuffed the suit in his inventory without even fully removing it.

The same went for his crampons, boots, and socks, which he removed before walking over to the lake to dip his feet in the lake's refreshingly cold waters. A handy ability, considering it would've taken over five minutes just to remove all of that manually. The moment he got to the lake's edge, he froze. Not because of the proud beard, which was very much intentional, at least until he'd been yanked by the teddies. The UV protection it offered was pretty unbelievable. Made his sunscreen go further too.

Plus, who could deny the sheer badass factor of a full survivalist beard? Jax almost got lost in admiring it. Almost. The pair of iridescent, constantly color-shifting rainbow eyes stole his attention. He hadn't had a proper chance to take them in when Nimashi had first mentioned them, so he spent a full five minutes just sitting there on the edge of that lake, contemplating this alteration. He decided, in the end, that as cool as it would be, this was not the result of some world-hopping-induced mutation.

No, the much more likely explanation was that his Gift had somehow done this to him. Or maybe one of the schools he'd picked up along the way? He hadn't really thought to check over how he looked since arriving here. His first thoughts were along the lines of, Woah, that's pretty cool. His second was'oh shit, people are gonna stare…' and the third was outright panic. Unless everyone else also had rainbow eyes? That was a possibility, right? Another world and all that? Except none of the villagers had rainbow eyes.

Fuck. Jax paced around the shore. Oh the points he'd give for a pair of colored contacts. Nevermind that most contacts tended to be single-use and were uncomfortable as fuck. He stopped in his tracks. Hang on. Points? Maybe he didn't need contacts at all! Maybe he had something better? Jax opened his Status Screen and scrolled down to the Auxiliary Spells at the bottom.

This understated section had given him [Threat Radar], [Minimap], [Weakpoint Detection] and other cheap spells that had all combined to give him a massive passive awareness boost. The list was massive, too, and chock full of useless crap the teddies had bequeathed him, like [Moisturized Skin] and [Woodland Scent] —there were a full dozen options for scent—as well as a bunch of others Jax wouldn't ever waste his points on, no matter how cheap. Seriously, what were those two thinking?

Why would you need magic when perfume and cologne would do the job just fine? After searching the whole thing, Jax finally found what he was looking for. [Eye Color — Black] Costing a paltry 5, 000, he bought it right away and chanted the short spell. It was like someone had dropped black dye into his eyes… his whole eye, that was.

"Oh fuck!" he yelled, backpedaling as his entire eye became an inky black. He furiously scrolled through the list again and realized his mistake. He'd stopped too early. Because right below the [Eye Color] spells were [Pupil Color], [Sclera Color], and [Iris Color] options. He chose the right one this time and was relieved when his eyes returned to the normal white and black he'd been born with. Jax groaned sitting back, his heart pounding madly away in his chest.

Between the poor sleep of last night, Nimashi, and the harrowing events of the morning, this jumpscare was the last thing he needed. To rectify that situation, he stripped and dove into the icy water, reveling in the shock to his body. Mildly uncomfortable at first, delightfully refreshing after. He swam a brief circuit around the lake before getting out, completely refreshed. Were there any pleasures in life as rewarding as the simple ones? Jax thought not. As good as it felt, Jax knew the feeling wouldn't last.

He really could go for a hot shower and a solid twelve hours of rest on a nice, comfy bed. The bed, at least, he had some faith in. The shower would depend on the level of the locals' advancement. They had to at least have hot tubs, right? As he put his base layers back on, Jax's eyes wandered to the mountain range in the distance. Even from here, he could see the city that dominated the nearby snowcapped peak, its impressive walls visible even this far off.

The mountains surrounding it each had to be at least ten thousand feet high, and the city itself was perched on top of one that was even higher. The fact that Jax could see it at all from the middle of a forest said a lot about its grandeur. Its huge walls encircled what looked like a massive crater, indicating the mountain used to be a volcano. Roads wound up the mountain in tight switchbacks, and he could spot the tiny movement of wagons and travelers slowly making their way upward.

Back on Earth, summiting a fourteener—a fourteen-thousand-foot peak—was something only fit hikers bragged about doing. Here? Apparently it was just part of daily life. Jax still couldn't believe people actually lived up there, and a lot of them too, going by the size of those walls.

"What adventures am I gonna find up there?" he muttered, feeling a grin creeping onto his face. He honestly couldn't wait to find out. Before he headed off to confront civilization, though, he had a few things to deal with first. Namely, the roiling mess of emotions that still hadn't left him since the chaos at that village earlier in the day. Jax soon found himself wandering barefoot along the coast, content to just breathe the thick air.

It had rained recently, and the forest was thick with the scent of pine and wet earth. Birds yapped away and the whole place smelled clean—purified—like all the impurities had been washed away. Jax had always loved hiking in the rain. There was something meditative about the experience. The freshness that always came after was just icing on the cake. The tension in his chest faded away, and for once, he didn't pay the slightest attention to where he was going. He could just fly his way out, after all.

Or glance at his handy compass. The compass surprised him, though. He'd been flying north all this time, not west like he'd thought. It seemed Mount Luxspire wasn't quite in the same orientation as it had been on Earth. Which made perfect sense, now that he thought about it. It was only when he stopped to stare up at one of the impressive trees that his thoughts rushed back into his head, and he realized he'd been avoiding them. Avoiding what really weighed on him. He'd done some good back there. Real good.

He'd truly helped those people. Saved them. And damn, that had felt incredible—better than anything he could remember in a long time. The rush still made his head swim. But he couldn't ignore the other side of it, either—the fact that things had come way too close to disaster. If he'd messed up even a little, those monsters would've wiped the village out completely. And even with his help, people had died. But hey, he was only human, right? Well, maybe not so much anymore. His mistakes definitely hadn't helped.

A few bad calls, a few moments of hesitation… they'd all cost lives. He'd been beating himself up about it ever since. If only he'd paid more attention, if only he'd stuck around to ensure all the injured were healed. But those looks they'd given him afterward still stung. Were they about to thank him? Or lynch him? Jax wasn't invincible, no matter how much his newfound powers made him feel like it. That Vitality stat said it all. Any one of those creatures could've ended him in a single hit.

He had to be more careful going forward, and not just for himself. [Ember Rain] had nearly torched the forest, and few things gutted Jax more than wanton destruction of nature. The trees, the animals, the life—all of it had nearly burned because of him. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Yeah, this magic gave him power, but the old saying held as true as ever. Great power really did come with a ridiculous amount of responsibility.

Responsibility Jax wasn't sure he was entirely ready to shoulder. He'd have to be damn careful about when and where he used those wide-area spells from now on. If he ever burned down a forest because of his own stupidity… he wasn't sure he'd be able to live that down. He'd cursed people for less in the past. The thought scared him almost as much as those monsters had. Jax replayed the battle in his mind—scene after scene, moment after moment—thinking about everything he could've done differently.

How he could've minimized the danger to the villagers or risked himself less. And he definitely needed the latter. Right now, he was, if not quite a glass cannon, then definitely a wooden one. One of the System messages he'd had on the way down said that his Vitality had been boosted over the normal 75 humans normally had, and he also had the 25% Vitality boost from the School of Life, which made him roughly twice as durable and strong as an average human.

On Earth, that would've made him quite capable, but against magic? Unfortunately, none of the Schools or spells he had access to right now yielded anything like magical armor or shields. Not even the School of Force, which was why he hadn't yet bought it. Yet more things to investigate once he got to civilization. As for the villagers, he felt like he'd acted to the best of his ability, given the circumstances. Only arriving earlier would've helped them out more. That, and one other thing kept bothering him.

Magical chants. He'd worried before that they might become a problem someday, and those worries had proven right. Not only did they telegraph his intentions, but they also took several seconds to perform. That was nothing in daily life, but in the middle of a fight? It might as well have been an eternity. That was where his discovery about weaker spells, amplified through [Lux Compressor], came in handy.

Those turned out to be not only more efficient than stronger ones, but their chants were shorter, too, and boosting them didn't lengthen the incantation. Even with that, though, Jax wasn't satisfied. Any chanting at all meant his enemies could guess what was coming next. Was there a way around that? He'd wondered before but never seriously explored it. Acting on a whim, he began chanting a spell. Each syllable seemed to light up something inside him, energizing various parts of his body.

Not his physical body—the energy centers that allowed him to channel magic. It was like every sound triggered a chain reaction deep within, which each subsequent syllable built off of. Enhancing and compounding until it reached the appropriate limb—or in some cases his entire body—thereby connecting his Lux reservoir to the outside world, forming the spell he wished to cast. Magic, then, was the act of shaping that Lux energy—changing the unrefined fuel into something usable.

Like electricity into light or gasoline into a controlled detonation in an engine. If he could somehow direct that flow without speaking, he could forego casting entirely. And that was worth working towards. Jax spent the next half hour experimenting, firing off various spells one after another, trying to understand what made them tick. He had little to show for his effort by the end of the session, though he felt like he was on the right track.

It felt as though every time he chanted, his body wanted to move in a certain way. He couldn't explain why, but it felt… instinctual. After plenty of awkward flailing and trial and error, he found that moving his arms in a specific way sparked a faint echo of the same sensation he got from chanting. Almost unnoticeable, and the actions activated only a fraction of the magical 'circuit', but it was something. Something, however, wasn't enough, and another half hour got him no further.

While he felt he'd made progress, it wasn't the breakthrough he'd hoped for. For now, the brevity of [Arc], especially when chanted fast, would have to do. And maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. He'd just gained a whole arsenal of powers and had no idea how best to use them. Was he even casting [Arc] the right way? What about the other spells? Which combinations used the least Lux for the most output? Were there hidden synergies between schools he hadn't discovered yet? All he had were questions.

He felt like a kindergartner who'd been handed a nuclear reactor without any instruction manuals on how to use it. To say he was out of his depth would be the understatement of the century. That didn't faze Jax nearly as much as it ought to have, though. He was more than accustomed to putting one foot in front of another, no matter how arduous the climb, persisting long after most mortals would've collapsed. This would be no different.

It might take years and an obscene amount of effort, but he'd get there eventually. Success was just a function of sweat and time, after all, and Jax had both in spades. Cracking his neck, Jax looked up at the distant peak. It was time to move on. To finally enter civilization. After being so long away, he was actually looking forward to people again. What sort of culture existed up there on that snowy peak? What kind of people were they? How advanced?

He felt a bit like Shackleton, or any of those early Antarctic explorers venturing into the unknown for the first time. Not nearly the same, of course—Wakanya already had humans, thank god. He'd been half-worried they'd all be some kind of weird aliens, or worse. That would've been… lonely. Jax thought back to Nimashi. Was that how the old serpent felt, cooped up in his dingy cavern, protecting his hoard of copper? At least he had others of his kind. Friends.

Did his horned serpent buddies—or Water Panthers, as he insisted—have get-togethers? He wondered what that might look like, but soon shook off the thought. The first order of business was clothes. His 8, 000-meter climbing suit stuck out like a sore thumb even on Earth. If you saw someone hiking with an oxygen mask and full expedition gear, you'd think they'd lost it. Up there? He'd look completely insane. Even his jet-black form-fitting synthetic base layers screamed "outsider."

He'd have to find local clothing, then figure out the language. A glance at his interface showed over a hundred languages in this world. A daunting task to figure out the right one, to be sure, but he had an idea of how to approach it. He'd already succeeded with Namashi, after all. Jax's stomach growled, interrupting his thoughts. He pulled up his inventory and glanced at the [Divine Stew] the teddies had given him as part of the 'So you don't die' survival package, but dismissed the thought.

He was hungry, not starving, and food that temporarily reduced incoming damage and boosted attack power and movement speed by 20% was too precious to waste, no matter how good it tasted. Instead, he pulled out a bottle of water from his inventory and chugged half of it in one go. If everything went according to plan, he'd be eating in a restaurant soon. His first proper meal in weeks, and his first on this new world, Stew excluded. That thought alone made him grin.

Few motivators in life were stronger than good food. As it so happened, one of those was the need for sleep, and it took all of Jax's willpower to keep his eyes from drooping shut. More than once, he'd almost dropped out of the sky having nearly fallen asleep. As he'd learned, drunk driving had nothing on drunk flying… The food would still be there for him… right after a little nap. Jax finally embraced defeat in his losing battle against his eyelids, drifting off into the blissful land of slumber.

Jax awoke to a star studded sky, but the warm, gentle breeze told him something was off. That was just the first of many oddities. He sat barefoot, for one, on a tiny island barely the size of a basketball court. Moonlight lit the grass that covered it, despite there being no moon in this world's night's sky. The peaceful haze that weighed down on his mind like a warm blanket told him he was dreaming, but if it was a dream, it was the most lucid of any he'd ever had.

The stress, perhaps, or the exhaustion of recent days? When he looked out, he realized the island was in the middle of a vast lake—a lake that felt awfully familiar, as though connected to him somehow. This… is my Lux reservoir, isn't it? It looked about half full, which made sense, and if he looked closely, he could even see the water level rising slowly as he rested. All one million points of it that he'd purchased. Enough to power even the hungriest of his spells.

The lake itself glowed like the crystals of the cavern from earlier, its liquid Lux shining with a soothing radiance. Well, this is nice, he thought. He didn't know what the point of this space was—or even if it even had one—but being able to see his Lux like this was... nice. Peaceful. Calming. Jax stared out over the pool, allowing his thoughts to wander. He'd been through so much in just the past few days—hell, the past two months, really. Just getting to Everest had been a journey.

Trekking to Base Camp, climbing different peaks each and every day for acclimatization. Then came the rotations, going up and down and up and down the mountain, all to get his body used to the altitude. And then, he was at the top. The summit of the tallest peak in the world. Just like that. Well, not just like that. Everest wasn't some one-off climb. This was the culmination of something big. Something he'd worked towards for a decade and a half.

Years ago, he'd decided to follow in Reina's footsteps to climb the tallest mountain on every continent. Seven climbs around the planet, and he'd finally done them all. Finished the journey that Reina never had. He often wondered what he would do afterward. Whether he'd get that same rush from climbing other peaks. If only he'd known what awaited him on that summit…

Maybe it was the effect of this strange place, but as Jax idly tossed pebbles into the lake, he realized it wasn't fear that filled him, or even anxiety about leaving his old life behind. It was excitement. The same thrill that drove him to climb drove him now. What's up there? What's the view like? What new wonders will I get to explore? The very thought made his heart flutter. That was, he knew, who he was. An adventurer in the truest sense, much to the distress of his parents.

Hope they're not worrying too hard, Jax thought, though he knew they would be. He only wished he could tell everyone he was fine. That he was living a wondrous life in some other world, even if it was somewhat dangerous. It was one of the few regrets he had. That, and confirming Marcus had made it down alright. Jax had a feeling he had, though. The guy was a born fighter. If only he could tell him everything he'd seen… Eldritch gods… who would've thought?

Just when Jax thought he'd had accepted his end, he was given a completely new life to live and a new world to travel. One that seemed to be a mountaineer's dream, no less. Could there be anything more perfect?

"Man," he muttered.

"The teddies were right." He had been a wage slave, even if he hadn't realized it at the time. He'd worked with smart people and solved interesting problems, but at the end of the day, he was just another cog in a corporate machine that didn't give a damn. All the work he did would be gone and forgotten in a few years anyway. What was the point? He'd always felt there had to be more to life than that. As it turned out, there was. So much more.

The dream began to lose its vividness, and Jax recognized this experience was coming to an end. Yet somewhere in that haze before he drifted back to unconscious came a spark of a thought. Something that had been itching at the back of his head, buried deep within his subconscious. In this place, with this altered state… With the last of his remaining focus, Jax turned his eyes to the far bank, where his Lux lapped against a forested shore. Where a trickle of it was absorbed into the soil, never to return. Stolen.

The very thought angered him. He reached out, but not with his body or his mind. Somehow, something told him this was not the sort of power that anything physical could affect. No, he reached out with his soul, clamping down hard on his Lux. A dam broke. Secrets of the world flooded into Jax's head, drowning him in a firehose of information, rewriting gaps in his knowledge of how Lux worked, fixing mistakes in his understanding. Nothing on a conscious level, and certainly nothing he'd be able to articulate.

But Lux was everywhere. Lux infused everything, and now, it was as though a veil had lifted. He understood the concept on a deep, instinctual level he never before had. Felt it fill his bones and course through his blood. Jax fell flat against the grass, heart pumping so hard it threatened to explode out of his chest as his brain flooded with pleasure on a level he hadn't known possible.

"Holy shit!" he panted, sweating from every pore in his body. It should've been painful. It should've been uncomfortable. It wasn't. It was the exact opposite. Euphoric. Orgasmic. Except a hundred times better. The new ideas comingled with his pre-existing understanding of Space, forming even more connections in a chain reaction. A virtuous cycle of awareness and possibilities. He understood now that Lux desired to flow from dense to sparse, that his body was a dense ocean indeed.

But this knowledge alone was useless without any ability to do anything about it. The School of Life provided the key. The life force that bled into the Lux in his body, making it his and his alone. His to control. The wave of energy finally passed, leaving him exhausted. Jax drifted off into dreamland, content in the knowledge that the leakage that had annoyed him so much would never bother him again.

Blissfully unaware that the world had sought to steal his magic, or that for the first time in history, it had failed. That countless creatures of the forest that remained awake, cowering in terror at the Divine-class Soulfire leaking from him in thick, oppressive waves, finally rested. That somewhere far away, blaring alarms Luxor had set went suddenly silent, never to alert their master about this rapidly growing anomaly again.

Though only half-conscious and mostly by accident, Jax had just performed the greatest miracle the world had ever seen.