I’d freely admit to myself that I was not a good person. ‘Getting on top of this’, to me, meant hiding any evidence of my wrongdoing and faking her death. I could do it, even. I could make it look like she’d poisoned herself on alcohol in her throes of grief and died choking on her own vomit in her sleep.

That was, in fact, the entire plan. Until a guard stormed into the room, giving me precious little time to even move the unconscious body of the Reizenbrahm heir. The guard looked down at the prone form of Janina in shock, and leveled a glare at me. “What has happened?!” he demanded.

One death could be explained. Two at the same night, though? Reizenbrahm would know that something was up. He would smell my involvement and then it would be war.

Plan A was officially dead in the water.

“Call Reizenbrahm,” I told him. “Go straight to Reizenbrahm. Do not stop for anyone. Do not tell anyone about this. This is important.”

The guard, a young man in his early twenties or late teens, nodded frantically and left the room.

Great. Great. Fucking great.

I clawed at my scalp as I set my mind to working furiously.

None of this was my fault. That was good because it was true. Janina was the one who had motive to initiate any sort of hostile encounter, and I simply did not. Reizenbrahm would realize this.

I looked at the split-up diamond orb—the Focus that had been overcharged by Janina’s reckless spell use—and crouched over to pick up the two pieces to look at the glyphs I’d painstakingly carved on some of the facets. That was, admittedly, a mistake, pre-loading the Focus with spells. Certainly, I’d never expected anyone but myself to use it, and even then, not use the one spell that only someone with a minuscule amount of Power could use.

To Boost Power by Ten, you had to make sure that the product came out equal or lower than your Wisdom — impractical for almost anyone else but me, with my slightly above average Power and an incredible amount of Wisdom.

The reaction was odd, however. Sure, multiplying Janina’s already ludicrous amount of Power by ten would be enough Chaotic Immersion to actually kill a dozen people. In a sense, the Focus had done its job, the stored mind-veil fluid and the crystal itself taking the brunt of the Immersion, while her mind was hit with the rest.

Still too much for someone feeble-minded like her, a rigid bigot with a chip on her shoulder a mile long.

I knew of two ways to return from such a state: invest heavily in Wisdom or build a robust foundation for your mundane wisdom through self-reflection.

She wasn’t going to be doing much self-reflection in her state. I could try fashioning some phantasms of her past, described to me by Reizenbrahm himself, but it wouldn’t be the same. The demoness I’d met that day in the forest was uniquely suited to dealing with me, since we both had the same memories.

I couldn’t find Janina’s demonic version either. It was gone, like it had never even been here. I needed to read up on that phenomenon as soon as possible. It was a doorway to a whole new world of understanding, one that I could make heavy use of in my own pursuits. Most relevant to my own situation, I could somehow get it to fix her counterpart, for a lack of better words.

The only problem was that during Janina’s episode, the demon had been just as flighty and incomprehensible as her corporeal counterpart. It could be the same as dealing with a mental patient, and I wasn’t sure where I’d even start on getting its attention. If I knew its True Name, that would have been a good thread to start with, even if I had no idea what to do with that knowledge at the moment.

Brainstorming solutions could come later. Right now, I needed to get my story in order.

Reizenbrahm burst into the room, the guard following him closely. “Reza, what happened?” He crouched over his daughter and frantically felt for a pulse. He sighed in relief when he found it.

I looked up at the guard. “Leave,” I said to him.

He refused to move. Reizenbrahm looked up at him with a nod, and the guard finally left the room. I locked the door and gathered my thoughts one last time.

As I saw it, it was better to just say it straight without preambling and setting up the fact that she started it all. “Your daughter has fallen into madness.”

“What?” he gasped and stood up. “How? What happened?”

“She was grieving when she came to my room,” I said. That much was obvious from her entire look the moment she stumbled in through my door, reeking of alcohol. Cold-reading her into a mental breakdown had been the best way to disarm her, too, and had given me valuable information about what was bothering her. “Someone from the warfront, someone she was in love with, had died. She drowned her sorrows in alcohol and came to my room.” I closed my eyes. “I tried to de-escalate. I sobered her up with my magic so she would not have alcohol clouding her judgement, but instead, she caught sight of my staff.”

“H-how?!” he asked. “How would that have done anything? It’s a false Royal Treasure, not meant to do anything without—” He stopped and looked at me in shock. “What did you do?”

“My research,” I said curtly. “What I’ve tried to do from the get-go: transforming magic into a safe and reliable art. I made great strides doing that on the orb, and managed to encode spells into it, too. One such spell was too much for the instrument.” I pointed at the two broken pieces of diamonds on the floor. “So the backlash struck your daughter. She took the staff, mind you. She meant to kill me with it, too, because she thought I wasn’t doing enough on the warfront. I didn’t touch her. Not once.”

“Why did you keep it in your room?!” he roared. I sputtered indignantly, unsure of what even to say in the face of such shamelessness. He had told me to continue researching in my room, to shorten the timeline because he was starting to get impatient, and now he was going to blame me for his daughter’s entitlement?

My injured pride warred against the counsel of my Charm, to de-escalate the situation rather than fixate on who was to blame. My Charm won over, barely. “We could continue to argue over whoever is to blame, but your daughter needs your help! Let us look for a solution.”

Tension leaked out from his body, a tension I hadn’t even noticed until now due to its absence alone. He had been ready to set upon me, and probably rip me apart limb from limb. The realization itself made me break into a cold sweat, wondering if I could maybe have evoked a spell fast enough to deal with that. I’d put myself in far too much danger as of late, with far too little pay-off. “Solutions,” he whispered as he nodded. “Yes, solutions.”

We agreed to take her to the library for now. Reizenbrahm sent the guard away after making him swear an oath not to disclose what he’d seen today, and he carried her in a bridal carry while I brought the broken pieces of my Focus with me.

Moving Janina had been easy with my Sense Life spell allowing me to maneuver through the guard rotations without detection. Reizenbrahm was a man that valued his family’s security, that much was clear. We arrived at the basement library within minutes. I already felt wrong for not bringing Farhaan with me, but he was safer where he was — anywhere that wasn’t in the vicinity of a raving mad elite warrior.

Reizenbrahm gently put his daughter down the center of the room. “Solutions,” he prompted.

“She needs more Wisdom,” I said. “Is there any way that she might have unspent points?”

He looked at me like I was stupid. “Why would she hold onto unspent points?”

I decided to let that go, for the greater good. “Is there a way one could increase their Wisdom attribute without points or training?”

“There are… legends,” he said. “Stories from the Age of Madness, of kings and queens going to war to power their children, and their children doing the same. The leading theory on how they got stronger is… human sacrifice,.” hHe looked down in consternation. “Magic, of course, was a core component of this ritual. Are you aware of any such methods, to transfer attributes from one person to another using rituals?”

I looked through the starscape of spells quickly. Metamagic, of course, only had the three that I had found and bought. There wasn’t anything like system magic; if there was, I’d have made use of that long ago.

My mental catalogue of glyphs had more hints, however. This was my repository of symbols and glyphs that I’d learned and memorized from each stint through the veil in the starscape of spells. Most were rather meaningless, and only good for spell syntax and other such magic minutiae, but some were pregnant with meaning, lynchpins of spells.

One such that I found, and was now useful to me, was ‘Aspect, facet, emanation’ of the ‘intrinsic spark inherent in all animals’, or a soul for short.

Proving that a soul truly existed was low on my list of priorities. I knew that every person and animal emanated their own magic signature; surely, it must have sprouted from some form of supernatural root, and a soul was as good a guess as any.

Proving that attributes were indeed aspects, facets or emanations of this soul… magic involving the system had never been attempted before. If it had, no one had seen fit to share them from these elusive World Obelisks.

Like always, I was on my own.

“Reza?”

I put a pin on my train of thought and snapped back to reality. “My apologies: I’m thinking. Please be quiet.”

I needed magic that let me glimpse into the effect that the system had on the soul in order to prove that the ‘Aspect of the Soul’ glyph was at all useful.

I needed to use Sense Life in order to get a true read on my body, passively use Shift Signature in order to sense the presence of system magic better (because there was no way the system didn’t have some sort of arcane origin) and Manipulate Magic in order to do some… self-experimentation.

This cluster of spells could be most easily used with Ritualism, which would allow me to manifest the glyphs in the real world and gather power by pretending to be a witch from folklore.

I seriously needed to find an alternative to that.

Reizenbrahm gasped as I raised both my hands, almost automatically, while I manifested the ever-shifting glyphs, my digits strumming on invisible strings as they saw fit. He averted his gaze while I worked, the sigils flying overhead, morphing into different configurations in some incomprehensible pattern and for some underlying logic that I was currently too sane to understand fully.

“Double, double, toil and trouble,” I recited in English. If I needed to be strange and otherworldly for the Ritualism spell to gain in power, I might as well not outright admit that I was consorting with dark powers. “Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, in the cauldron boil and bake.”

The glyphs shone brighter. “Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog.” They pulsed, now, with an unlight that illuminated not the mundane world, but what lay beneath. In the darkened room, its otherworldy shine was more apparent than ever.

I continued reciting the song of the witches, waiting for the Ritual to reach its zenith while I considered the other avenue of finding a solution, consorting with Janina’s demon.

As far as I understood it, all human beings had the potential, if they pursued the path of magic, to one day shed their mortal form and adopt a higher existence, one more alien than anything a mortal mind could imagine, to become timeless. My otherworldly self, whose name I still didn’t dare mention for fear of the backlash it had caused me the first time around, said that the world she inhabited was so far removed from mine that time didn’t flow the same way there as it did here. They could traverse the dimension of time like normal people traversed the dimensions of space, and to them, all of time had already happened, or was yet to happen. And thus, their births were inevitable.

I visualized a network of threads to make it easier to understand the flow of time in the mortal world. An uncountable number of timelines, threads, that branched and branched to infinity itself, and every point in that thread was a present-time, although not mine. To a demon, they were all the present, they were all the ‘now’. In the demon realm, there was only a single point, not even a thread, not even a ball, nor anything that implied length, depth, or width. Just a single, one-dimensional point. That was their reality.

The result, obviously, was that a demon could occur in any given period of time that they so pleased. A distant, improbable version of Janina, one that had pursued magic so far as to reach this higher form, had come back to this particular point in the tapestry of threads, inexplicably attracted to this timeline’s Janina’s Chaotically Immersed mind.

Ostensibly, it was to do what mine had done: lead their counterpart towards greater power, in order to help themselves, such that the next time they ascended, they could become one, and be stronger for it.

There were holes in this theory, however. Any sort of demon manifested from a mortal magician should already be at the zenith of its power by sheer virtue of how their time worked. If Janina’s demon could come back and lead Janina towards greater power, greater even than where the demon was when she ascended, she could iterate on that process an infinite amount of times, and even with marginal returns, that should still put her at the level of an ‘archdemon’.

The very idea of improving one’s level as a demon also implied that every demon was at the peak of measurable power, all equal to each other at that. A hierarchy would be impossible based on that.

Unless that hierarchy was nonsense and I had been lied to. That wasn’t unlikely. Neither was the fact that the premise I’d based this theory on was also based on lies.

There was too much I didn’t know, too much lore that none of Reizenbrahm’s books could possibly touch on, to a reasonable extent at least.

I needed more hands-on knowledge. That meant experimentation. Right now, I had other matters to worry about.

The spell was ready. I unleashed the ritual and received a nigh-perfect sight of the magic that made up the system.

They were like balls of an unknown geometry, as fluid, evershifting and foreign as the glyphs. They sat attached to my body in fat globules, two of which were substantially larger than the rest. One was of subtlety and order, and the other of subtlety and speed, both concepts combined. The subtlety no doubt represented the mind, a soft and malleable little thing that, when paired with order, produced a mind that followed logic. When paired with speed, it created a mind that absorbed and processed all that it was fed at an accelerated rate.

Wisdom and Intelligence.

I tried to touch them, but I found that to be as productive as trying to capture air between my palms. The slight contact, however, did nothing to harm me. I upped the force of my contact, and the globules of attributes remained un until I was certain that anything I could bring to bear was nothing before the inviolable might of the ancient, incredibly potent magic that constituted the system.

I had proven that attributes were aspects of the soul, based on the fact that the very glyph constituting that combination of meaning had let me peer at the workings of attributes. Now, to test if I could interfere, and to find out exactly how.

000

To kill her or not to kill her, that was the only question that ran through Daiclovius Reizenbrahm's mind. Reza, the adept practitioner of that forbidden art, forbidden for a very good reason, had finally shown her claws and bared her fangs, towards one of his greatest joys, towards the very daughter that he had loved, raised and trained for all of thirty years.

It ached to see her unconscious, to hear her whispering nonsense, and to know that she had been taken by the madness that every law-abiding citizen of the world had learned to fear.

This was your doing, he thought to himself. You invited this into your house.

Yes. He couldn’t deny any of those accusations for they were utterly true. Daiclovius was an open minded person, a generous soul and one who’d never shied away from listening to anything that crossed his ears, to hear anyone out and to accept their knowledge and do with it as he would, whether it be internalize it or reject it, on his own terms. This tendency of his had seen his Wisdom soar over the years as he strengthened his mind through countless acts of self-doubt and learning. Where his colleagues in law had learned to close themselves off from the ideals of the law, instead following its letter and dispensing justice in such a fashion, Daiclovius prided himself on being fair, on being accommodating and listening to reason.

Some considered him lenient, others harsh. He was easy on crimes of necessity, and ruthless on harmful, spiteful crimes, no matter who committed them. It had seen him ostracized in high society plenty of times, whenever a rapist princeling of a provincial fiefdom was sentenced to public humiliation and prison time, or whenever a thief who had stolen bread from a greedy, price-hiking merchant was acquitted of all charges.

The law existed to impose order on an otherwise chaotic and anarchical society, but it was that very same law that could, with enough miscarriage of justice, see to the rise of such a society.

And here he now was, accepting the aid of someone touched by madness so he could see his own ambitions come to fruition, so he could rise and become the master of a new society, one that prided itself on fairness and justice. A minor act of evil, he’d thought. One that he could wash off from his conscience when he inevitably did good by society and put Reza down, or at the very least, banish her from his lands.

And now that hateful madwoman had struck back where he had least expected it.

Still, she continued to say the truth, somehow laying all the blame on his feet. He hated that, so very passionately.

The otherworldly sigils shone in the air, and this time, he gazed at them unflinchingly, not so he could copy their design and join in her madness, but to prove to himself that he was more powerful than that. Indeed, nothing bad happened. They were strange, incomprehensible and prone to slip away from his mind without concentrated focus. He didn’t try to push his luck by pondering them any deeper than that, sticking to the safe shallows of admiring them from a distance.

Reza could not die just yet, obviously. She needed to find a way to heal his daughter first, and then she could leave behind her obligations in death and Reizenbrahm could settle for living out the rest of his life in peaceful quiet, provided the Goldmen didn’t win the war.

Reza now looked at him with an intensity that disconcerted Daiclovius, causing him to worry that his treacherous intent was showing. “I have achieved some success,” she said. “Proving a concept. I will attempt something on you, something very minor, to see how the attributes can be manipulated.”

It had barely been five minutes, and she spoke of such things like affecting the inviolability of the system itself. Madness. Utter madness.

He felt a prick somewhere deep inside, a tiny, painless prick that still managed to send a shock of panic through him. Probably just his nerves, though it wasn’t like him to get so jumpy.

Reza sighed in satisfaction, but her expression slowly morphed into an uneasy scowl and a small frown. “Yes… it is possible. One can transfer attributes from one person to another. This requires that they die, though. It also…”

She said nothing afterwards. “It also what?” he demanded, coming closer to her.

“The conversion is highly inefficient. This is inescapable. Perhaps through further experimentation, I can refine the process, but right now, I… I will not mince words: your daughter needs thirteen hundred and fifty-seven people to gain just enough Wisdom to counteract her Chaotic Immersion. That is, twenty-four points of Wisdom.”

Daiclovius gasped. “What?” he whispered.

“This is if the average person has a Wisdom of one and a half, cited from Analagus’ Accounts on the Attributes of the Common Aellian,” she said. “No other source has contradicted this. Even if I end up refining the process as much as is feasible, that could still be hundreds of dead.”

Daiclovius felt a snap in his mind, two options manifesting before him. He didn’t hesitate to select the one that favored one life over hundreds, and it was this exact lack of hesitation that caused the snap. For precious seconds, he forgot to breathe, forgot to think even, in any sort of rational way. Only imagesflitted through his head, of his daughter as a child, of his family, of everyone that he loved, and Janina’s place in this world as his heir.

“Yes,” he said, though he still could not think. “That is fine.”

“Reizenbrahm,” she said, and then nothing else.

His jumbled thoughts came to a halt once he realized she would not continue speaking. “What?”

“The butcher’s bill is substantial,” she said. “How will you do it?”

Reluctance. Why was she of all people reluctant? She was insane!

“I, uh, I have a dungeon.” Reizenbrahm gestured at the floor. “And I’m a judge. I will bring those fated to die for their crimes here, and we can… get to work.”

“Reizenbrahm.”

“What?!” he roared. She stood stock still, though her frame was tense. It was unnatural, seeing her not carrying her child. It made her seem much smaller, so much more vulnerable. That aura of indomitable will that mothers tended to carry whenever they were with their children had left her, leaving behind just her natural-born steel.

“Your daughter,” she said, “came to me, intending to kill me, after stating her intentions several times. The first time we met, she tried to kill me.” She scoffed. “She tried to kill me. That bears repeating, because obviously you can’t appreciate the way that she has treated me, and now…” She chuckled. “Now you ask me to kill hundreds to save her?”

“I don’t ask,” he said.

“This was your fault,” she said. And she really believed it, if his Detect Lies skill was to be believed, which it always was. “You told me to continue my research in my room, to hasten our timeline because you grew impatient.”

“I did not ask you to bring that”—he pointed at the broken, enormous diamond on the floor—“thing with you.”

“Should I have accounted for your daughter entering my room to do heaven knows what with me, in front of my child, and steal my property in the midst of her grief? Should I also have accounted for what breakfast she had this morning?”

“This,” he breathed, “is not—” He stomped his foot on the floor so hard that the room shook. “—a discussion!”

After a tense few seconds, she looked down in acquiescence. “Do not be so impatient this time.”

Too easy. All too easy. Daiclovius didn’t trust this victory at all.

“Will you stay to help me?” he asked.

She scoffed again. “No one else can.” Truth, obviously.

“You did not answer my question,” he said. “Will you stay to help me?”

She scowled. “How else would I continue my research? Look around you! This is a treasure trove of—“

“You did not answer my question!” He felt his voice grow hoarser the more he roared. “Will you stay here to help me, yes or no?”

She gritted her teeth. “Yes.” Unwillingly. Her truth was tenuous, reluctant, and prone to change the minute he stopped laying his eyes on her.

“Reza of the Golden Lands, or of Filomena, or wherever you say you come from.” He walked closer to her. “You are charged with a crime against Aellia and her people.” He activated his Judgment skill. “My daughter Janina is evidence of your crime, of practicing madness.” The skill now took hold as the evidence checked out. “I have witnessed you with my own eyes, witnessed you commit this crime.”

Reza backed away. “You have benefitted from this. You are an accomplice!”

True, but it was not he that was being Judged. The Judgement was valid, finally giving him access to his Sentencing skill. “You are hereby sentenced to remain and be of help in the Reizenbrahm manor until…” ‘Until I release you’ would have been much more convenient for him, as that would give her precious little recourse while he prepared to dispose of her, but unfortunately, that wasn't really how a Sentencing worked. It needed to reflect justice in a certain sense. There was also the fact that holding her to unfair terms resembled slavery, something he did not abide by. “…you have helped my daughter recover her mind.”

The invisible shackles of his Sentencing now constricted her, ready to explode her heart in case she were to break free of them. The horror and shock in her eyes told him enough, that this was something even she could not escape.

And now for another lie. “You may leave afterward, or you may stay to finish what you started.”

Both paths were closed to her. Without a doubt, she would die for what she had done.