Dennis Michaels, Ph.D. and demigod, held his head in his hands, elbows resting on the table in front of him. The mortals who’d come up with this soulgem construct in the distant pass had been brilliant. It quantified one’s affinity to the various concepts that defined the universe, and the techniques one used to harness and express those affinities. With it, one knew exactly where one stood on the wheel of life.

And that’s where everything went sideways. Because the soulgem was lodged in a person’s soul, it was intricately entangled with their beliefs. At least three different cultures had worked out cultivation systems that allowed individuals to advance their unity with the cosmos. Those three systems fundamentally disagreed on what should have been self-evident truths. And yet, all three systems worked, despite having contradictory tenets.

It got worse. A large part of the human population, possibly due to their shorter lifespans, had seen their cultivation system devolve into a focus on affinities and techniques to the exclusion of actual cultivation. Whole nations were effectively crippled, their growth stunted by their belief system. There was no way the mortal races could band together and defend themselves against the forces the other demigods were arraying against them if they remained like this.

And so, it fell to Dennis to rejig the system to allow people to advance again. In the seventy years since he’d realized the extent of the problem, he’d been working with the soul mages who maintained the soulgem construct to improve it and remove the bottlenecks.

Yet, no one on Medim understood the way the universe interacted with the world. It was commonly held that a person could have a maximum of ten active and ten passive techniques (untrue, and even the differentiation between the two was artificial), that affinities dictated the strength of their associated techniques (true, as far as it went, but incomplete), that those affinities were set in stone and not subject to change (untrue), and that mana was the way techniques were powered (true, but such a tiny fragment of the truth).

It was almost as if the god of knowledge and the goddess of magic had had a spat, and, as a result, much of what people knew of magic was wrong. But that didn’t explain how the three contradictory schools of thought on cultivation that Dennis had so far discovered all worked. The truth seemed to be mutable based on the strength of one’s belief – if a belief was strong enough and widespread enough, it became the truth, for the believers.

How was he going to reconcile all this into a soulgem construct that would let mortals defend themselves before they were overrun by undead or eldritch horrors, or crushed under the rule of the dragons or subjugated by one of the warlords assembling hordes? None of this was covered in his extensive anthropological education. He was working blind and with a tight deadline.