Chương 25: Looming Danger

The white corridor between floors was quiet. I sat down against the wall and looked at my attribute screen properly for the first time since the penalty lifted. [ATTRIBUTES] [Strength: 34] [Agility: 31] [Vitality: 55] [Intelligence: 104] [Wisdom: 19] [Perception: 16] [Affinity: 101] [Unspent Points: 79] Mimir floated out of the inventory without being summoned, which I had not known was possible, and drifted in a slow circle around my head at approximately eye level.

"What is this place," it asked.

"Between floors," I said.

"It smells like nothing."

"It is nothing," I said.

"That is the point." Mimir pulsed once and continued its circuit. The blue-white light it produced was steady enough that it cast actual shadow on the white walls around us, which the corridor's ambient light had never done before. I pulled the red spellbook from my inventory. I had grabbed it from the secondary archive alcove before the statues animated, one of three texts I had managed to pocket before the engagement started, and had not had time to open it since.

The cover was red, a deep rust colour, and the title was in the arcane notation script that Arcane Notation Literacy handled without difficulty. It was a focused text. Not a general collection like the floor three grimoires. This one was dedicated to a single category of spell mechanics, incantation-based amplification, which was distinct from the channel-and-discharge approach I had been using.

Incantation worked through structured language rather than raw mana output, and the efficiency ratio it offered was considerably better than brute-force channelling at the cost of requiring the caster to have the text memorised or available. I read the first applicable section and said the incantation aloud once, quietly, to confirm the pronunciation against the notation. Something happened to my skill points. [Skill Points: 5 doubled to 10 via Incantation of Expansion.] [Incantation of Expansion: One-time use. Consumed.] I looked at the ten skill points and thought about where to put them.

"You are ignoring me," Mimir said.

"I am reading," I said.

"You rescued me from a collapsing basement," Mimir said, "and now you are ignoring me."

"Come on I am much more interesting then this…. Text by mortals!"

"I rescued a chained light source from a collapsing basement," I said.

"I am still evaluating whether you are what you say you are."

"I am a god," Mimir said, immediately.

"You were attached to a ceiling," I said. Mimir pulsed in a way I was beginning to read as irritation and continued its circuit. I looked at the attribute points and thought about the wisdom number. Nineteen. It was the lowest attribute on the sheet after Perception, and I had been treating it as low priority because the immediate combat returns from Intelligence and Affinity were more visible.

But wisdom governed spell compatibility, the degree to which an incantation-based technique interfaced with the mage class framework, and with ten skill points and a spellbook that used incantation mechanics, the nineteen was starting to look like a gap rather than a deliberate choice. I put twenty points into Wisdom. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. [Wisdom Updated: 19 to 39.] The effect was not immediate the way health or mana ceiling changes were immediate. It was more like a clarification, a sharpening of something that had been slightly out of focus. The mana threads I had been seeing since the meditation in the lower chamber, the faint outlines around my Arcane Bursts and Spellfist contacts, became more defined. Not dramatically. Enough to notice.

I allocated thirty more points to Intelligence and twenty to Affinity, which brought both to numbers I was more comfortable with heading toward floor fifteen. [Intelligence Updated: 104 to 134.] [Affinity Updated: 101 to 121.] Nine points remaining. I put five into Perception, because the Pathfinder trait's read quality scaled with it and I wanted more resolution on the upper floor entity types, and held four. Mimir stopped circling.

"You just did something," it said.

"Allocated attributes," I said.

"I could see it," Mimir said.

"The threads changed." I looked at it.

"What threads."

"The ones around you," Mimir said.

"They are always there. Yours are more active than anything I have seen in a very long time, and I have been in that basement for what I estimate is several thousand years." I set the red spellbook down.

"You can see mana threads," I said.

"I am made of them," Mimir said, which was either a profound statement about its nature or something it had said enough times that it no longer thought about what it meant. I turned and looked back at the gate I had come through. With the Wisdom allocation running and the Intelligence higher than it had been, the gate looked different. Not structurally different. The same stone arch, the same weight and solidity.

But the surface of it had something on it that I had not seen on the lower floors and had not seen on this gate before, letters and marks running along the frame in a script that Arcane Notation Literacy was processing but returning incomplete translations for. The script was old. Older than the archive texts. Older than anything I had encountered in the tower by a margin I could not estimate precisely but could feel in the way the notation resisted easy parsing.

"What are you looking at," Mimir asked.

"The gate," I said.

"There is script on it."

"There is script on everything," Mimir said.

"You just could not see it before." I looked at it for another few seconds. The partial translation my Literacy skill was returning suggested something about passage and record and a word that might have been name or might have been mark, the notation was ambiguous at this age. I filed it and stood up. Then I tried something I had been considering since the meditation, since I had seen the threads and felt the core adjacent to my chest respond to the mana circulation.

I looked at the Regressor title in my display and tried to push mana through it the way I had pushed mana into the staff for Channel Investment. The title flared. Not visibly. In the Pathfinder trait, in the thread-read that the Wisdom allocation had sharpened, the Regressor title lit up with a density that matched the gate script, and for approximately two seconds I could see the threads that connected to it, extending outward in directions that did not correspond to the spatial geometry of the corridor.

They extended backward. Into previous runs. Then my eyes started bleeding. It was not painful exactly, more than pressure, a rapid heat that started at the back of the eye sockets and arrived at the surface before I had registered the heat behind it, and I pulled the mana back immediately and pressed the back of my hand to my face and found it wet. Mimir dropped from its circuit altitude to approximately face level.

"Are you hurt," it said, with less divine authority and more something else. I wiped the blood away. My vision was intact. The bleeding had stopped when I pulled the mana back.

"Fine," I said. I looked at my hand. The blood was the same colour it usually was.

'Too much, too fast,' I thought. The Regressor title was not a passive like Pathfinder. It was something else, something that the thread-read had shown me connected to the full scope of fifty-two thousand runs, and pushing raw mana through that connection at current skill levels was the equivalent of running full Channel Investment output through a focus that was not rated for it. I would need to approach it differently. Later.

I picked up the spellbook and put it back in inventory and started walking toward the floor ten gate.

"Hey," Mimir said, falling into orbit around my left shoulder.

"Are you not going to ask."

"Ask what," I said.

"What I am," it said.

"Who I am. You put me in your bag and carried me out of a collapsing building and you have not asked a single question about me." I walked.

"Most beings ask," Mimir said.

"It is the first thing. What are you. What are you doing here. How did you end up chained to a ceiling. Normal questions."

"I know what you told me you are," I said.

"I do not have enough information to evaluate it yet."

"And I do not care…"

"I am a god," Mimir said.

"You said that," I said.

"Then take account for it!" I reached the floor ten gate and pressed my palm to it. Mimir hovered at my shoulder and I thought, briefly, about the companions I had accumulated in previous runs. Two of them, across fifty-two thousand loops. Both gone before floor twenty, both in ways I had not been able to prevent and had spent significant processing on afterward, and had eventually filed under the category of things this tower took rather than things I could protect. I had learned not to get attached.

The lesson had been specific and thorough and I had not forgotten it.

"Come on," I said, and pushed the gate open. Mimir followed, still talking, and I walked into floor ten and did not think about the memory that had surfaced and went back down when I pushed it, the way things did when you had enough practice making them. The gate closed behind us both.