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CH 93: Sand
🕑 Added 2025-02-17 15:00:04 +0000 UTCReid moved from sitting to lying flat on the bedroll with his eyes closed, as instructed. Unlike his friends, Reid wasn't supposed to take notes - but rather feel himself as thoroughly as possible throughout the lesson. A far distance away, Lycra was excitedly telling Win about something he'd created. Win was shouting encouragement back at him. Reid tuned them out as Nyx spoke.
"You think of your stats in an... oversimplified manner. You see power as physical strength, constitution as physical toughness, perception as the performance of your senses. All of that is fundamentally incomplete."
"Your stats are each deeper than you realize. Take power, for instance. You've been raising power focused on your physicality, and that's gotten you to the limit of what you can accomplish on physical growth alone. But power isn't only physicality - it's potency. Potency of your body, yes, but also of your mana capacity. It is explosive might and explosive magicality. The description in your stats actually does a decent job of telling you what you're dealing with."
Power: 62.5
A reflection of the pure potency of an individual. Power improves raw brawn, explosive might, and overall mana capacity. Raw brawn is recommended for porters, masons, enforcers, and knights. Explosive might is recommended for brutes and berserkers. Mana capacity is recommended for warmages, sage-wizards, and alchemists. May those of high power defend all from calamity.
"All of your efforts so far have focused on the knight and brute part of that description. That is not an issue now - but you are going to want mana capacity and current capacity for when you get to a higher grade. Now - your application of energy and power and growth aren't wrong or bad, so much as they're limited by your understanding of the universe. You'd get some of this in post-tutorial lessons, but there are aspects of each one of your stats that are metaphysical in nature."
"Your sea of rage, as you think of it, is one of those aspects. You've been able to use that to pull explosive power into yourself and fight with it - which is really just using mana like steroids. When you pull power into yourself to fuel your muscles or your whole body, you are always pulling from the sea of rage. But - you have also surrendered to the sea of rage. You let that metaspace overtake you, and that meant that just a fragment of the whole you was driving your actions, while the rest of you was more or less dormant. I suggest not doing that again - it's not good practice, and you already have some... anger issues."
Reid resisted the urge to argue her point.
"You also already experienced the drawback of pulling too much energy too quickly, and suffered the fatigue and bodily damage that pushing that much power through yourself actually does. It's something any brute or berserker is familiar with. Your growth of regular strength has come from focusing on improving your physical body, like your muscles. There are shared ideas between everyday strength and explosive strength, in that both use your physical body as a medium to convey that power. One makes your body stronger regularly, and the other pulls from the metaphysical - your mana - to artificially strengthen you."
"So, what's missing from that equation? Metaphysical power itself. Picture a venn diagram. One circle is physical strength, and the other is metaphysical power. Where they overlap, you have the explosive rage you've used - where metaphysical power impacts your physical body. Now, fill in the blank. If you can train your physical body to increase your physical strength, then you can also...?"
The truth felt so close and real and full of possibility that Reid's mouth watered. He swallowed before answering. "I can train the metaphysical power and grow that, too?"
"Exactly. Each of the 5 basic stats have a metaphysical component you can grow - in addition to the normal ones you've been trying to improve. And I'm not just talking about forcing growth through energy expenditure. You used to go to the gym. Played sports. Exercise exists for the physical and the metaphysical."
Reid pictured himself lifting imaginary weights. "How does that work?"
"It's a bit different for each stat. Let's talk about the one you know best - power. When you're in your berserker state, in your sea of rage - you've done two things. You let yourself sit under the waves, and you pulled yourself up out of them and took some control over the area - like playing with the features you found there or moving around rocks."
"What you haven't attempted is making new things inside that space. Imagine and slowly will into existence a sandy beach, grain by grain, and you'll have metaphysical power gains as surely as doing crunches would build up the muscles in your core."
"I had no idea I had that much control over the sea of rage."
"While I greatly enjoy your name for it, know that the nebulous academic term is metaspace. You know your metaspace for power, and you'll get one for each of the other stats, eventually. All of your metaspaces together will come to f-..."
Nyx's voice went immediately hoarse, and disappeared for nearly a minute. She was coughing when he heard her again.
"Well, all-god's eggs that sucked. I hit a restriction, so we won't be able to cover what I was going to say - but we'll get back around to it - if we live long enough. Anyway, you have multiple metaspaces, and each one we're going to work on helps a stat or is connected to another specific part of you. Even when you don't actively improve the metaspace itself, improving your stats in any form gives the space more potential. Now, I want you to know what metaspace improvement feels like. Go into your sea of rage metaspace and keep listening to me."
"I thought I was supposed to balance things out - shouldn't I start with a low stat?"
"This is a time-consuming, tough process. You might go a while without seeing any results, especially in the spaces you still need to put into form. So it's going to be easier once you experience this kind of metaphysical growth for the first time, and you know this metaspace the best."
Reid pushed down into himself and focused until he - the metaphysical he - was floating above the mostly-calm, familiar waters.
"Hey, if this is a metaphysical space and all that, why is the water my anger, and how did I re-experience a memory there?" Reid called out.
"Nope. Not touching that one. Far too advanced."
Her voice, which Reid was used to hearing in a specific 'location', instead came from beside him. He turned towards it, and startled.
Nyx floated next to him.
Her form was a mixture of inky black and varying shades of silver. She had a face with human eyes - and attributes he would expect from a deep sea octopus. Her head was elongated and sloped back farther than a person's would. Her skin was an odd, muted silver color, and seemed to shift as she moved. A mouth that was more of a circle than a line opened when she spoke, but there was nothing but darkness within. She had no nose. Instead of hair, a few thick tentacles writhed and stretched on the back of her skull. Her neck was short, and led down to a body that was completely indistinct below the beginnings of two shoulders. Reid stared impolitely.
"Oh, sweet corathinzie! I was hoping that might work. Hi."
A tentacle on the back of her head rose and wriggled. Reid waved a hand and stumbled out a sentence.
"Is this what you really look like?"
"Almost entirely - or, well I did when I had a body. Metaphysical selves can differ a bit from physical ones. Look at your arms. Touch your face."
Reid did, and was surprised to see he was no longer a shade of purple-pink. His thin arms were back to the musculature he'd gotten used to post-system, and his frame was as wide as it was supposed to be. All the changes from the bodywork Nyx had him do were gone. He looked back at Nyx, and she smiled. Or Reid thought it was a smile. Her mouth was still impossibly black. Her indistinct lower section fluttered a bit.
"If I'm me - why is your body fuzzy like that? That can't be what you actually look like, right?"
"Restrictions. Keep growing in power, and I'll get my hands back. But this is cool already. I've gotten to 'see' you quite a bit. This is me!" Nyx did a twirl, and her tentacles reached out like a flowing dress. "Now, down to business. I want you to hold out your hand, and imagine you're holding a grain of sand."
After a bit more back and forth on the assignment, Reid did as he was told. He imagined sand in his hand.
He kept imagining it for what felt like minutes, then his mind started to wander to more specific images. He thought about the sandy beach at Sanctuary, then further back. They'd gone out to the coastal beaches once as a family when Sara was still young. It was a trip Susan's parents sent them on, and Reid remembered hauling the bucket full of plastic toys down close to the water for her to play with.
Then he remembered Sara crying because another young girl had come over to play, and took a shovel out of the bucket to use. Sara hadn't wanted to share, and Reid sat with her, waves tickling against his toes, as he explained how she could better express herself. He recalled talking her through sharing and why it was nice for people to do it - the felon, teaching his daughter how to be good and just.
He recalled the warmth later, when Susan hugged him from behind, kissed him on the cheek and neck, and told him he was a good dad. He felt the tears in his eyes, the light of the sun on his skin, and the sand between his toes as if he were in the moment. It was such a strong memory, so vivid and close, and he longed to keep it with him, just a bit longer.
The pain threatened to stop that.
A feeling grew, like tiny shocks to his entire physical and metaphysical body. With it came an immense headache, then a sensation like something was digging into his abdomen with an ice cream scoop. He pushed back against the pain - and every sensation. It was his goddamn memory, and whatever was happening, it was his to re-experience for as long as he damn well pleased. The serenity was his to hold.
He felt his physical body vibrate while his metaphysical eyes stayed clamped shut. The headache pounded against him like an army trying to break down a wall. It threated to pull his focus off of the beach.
Reid held on.
He was there, drying Sara's eyes.
His stomach threatened to pull itself straight out of his body and nearly caused him to vomit.
He was there, watching his daughter take his advice to go make a friend.
His brain felt sore under the mental assault, like all it wanted to do was rest.
But he was there, and Susan was kissing his neck.
It was his memory.
His beach.
Every inch of it.
Massive amounts of energy drained from Reid's mana pool - then something else was pulled and pushed as the odd icecream-scoop feeling intensified. The scooped stuff felt like the muddy bed of a river, and it was getting dredged up and excavated in bulk as if Reid were trying to make the space ready for cruise ships to dock there.
He opened his metaphysical eyes to witness half a beach worth of sand pop into existence in front of him. Energy, pulled from his internal pool, swirled and congealed with the second, mud-like substance and condensed into a billion tiny fragments of that one, singular, solid memory. He looked left, and more of the beach's sand popped into view with further pulls on his energy. He looked right, and the same phenomenon filled his vision with newly created, sandy shores. It kept going until Reid felt as if there were no more energy and mud to pull. He closed his eyes, then re-opened them. The sand was still there - topped by a plastic bucket full of colorful toys. It seemed to hold steady in the air - then crashed down into the water.
"Holy shit, Reid!" Nyx shouted and spun in excitement amidst the noise of tons of falling sand. "That's incredible! Beyond genius level stuff! Prodigious! This should go down in the historybooks! It's the most productive fuckup I've ever seen!"
Reid was incensed. The pain and discomfort were both still there, and now he was out of that serene memory. "Fuckup? You told me to picture sand?! I made sand!"
The noise of it all had started to lessen, and the sand built itself into a somewhat proper beach within his metaspace.
"No - I told you to make one grain of sand. One, in your palm. I wanted you to get used to things without further messing up your stats. But you blew all of my expectations for you clear out of this world. Out of this galaxy. I can't express how ridiculous what you just did is. Your mana pool is fucking huge. We need to hustle with the rest now."
Reid felt a chill go up his spine. He tried to pull up his full information, but Nyx interrupted him with a stern tone.
"Hang on... from here on out, I want you to only look at a single stat at a time for the rest of your training. No peeking at the others until I let you. Now, here's power."
The information appeared, and his eyes went wide.
Power: 62.5 -> 112.5
There it was, in all its glory and implication. The other piece to the equation of the cap on Reid's stats, enforced by control.
The hill he encountered with physical strengthening had only ever been half of his maximum, with the other hidden behind this metaphysical wall.
The new points - all fifty he'd gained in a single action - wouldn't make him physically stronger; he knew that instinctively. But the power stat was never only about physical strength - it was also a representation of his mana capacity. He felt within himself, to where his mana pool lay. It had been made bigger after Nyx's work to wake him, but what he encountered now felt absolutely cavernous - as if the mud he pulled with energy before had been the result of him digging into the sides of the walls to make the space multiple times larger than before.
Reid's stomach rumbled deep and low in the real world, and he pulled himself out to find his lips were chapped and parched, and his body had been covered in blankets. He propped himself up on an elbow, and saw Lycra and Win rush towards him. Nyx made a throat-clearing noise.
"Also - you should probably know making that beach took you three days."
