Delta crashed into my life like a wrecking ball out of nowhere, but I couldn't picture being without her now. I finally had someone to banter with, someone to bounce my insane or silly or creative ideas off of. Two heads were definitely better than one.

For the first week when she was gone, I was briefly worried that I had created something unique and monstrous, once again, and that she would end up eating people's souls... but in fact it was the opposite. I succeeded in saving her, succeeded in defeating her infection and found out that she wasn't that monstrous or unique - there were far more horrific, eldritch things common to the Astral Ocean, countless denizens of which were formed from mana imprints, spells and abominations that refused to die.

As Delta levelled up, her intelligence and Infoscope skill had skyrocketed far beyond what I was capable of alone. Having an absolute affinity with her primary spell, by basically being the said spell, gave her a spectacular bonus.

I glanced at her data chart once again, feeling a small pang of jealousy.

Name: Delta Alana Skyisle Age: 1 month Species: Homomagicus [+ 4 in base Agility & Dexterity] Affinity: Infoscope [Affiliated skill bonus] Specialization: Soul hunter [+ Soul Devourer skill] Level: 4 Experience: 1021/1250 Health: 4/4 Stamina: 4/4 Mana: 4/4 Mana regen: 4 m/hr Strength: 0 Agility: 0 [+4] Dexterity: 0 [+4] Vitality: 1 Charisma: 0 Magic: 1 Luck: 0 Intelligence: 214 Wisdom: 0 Soul: 73 Skills: [Infoscope LV 140] [x2] [Soul-Devourer LV 4] [Info-tether LV 44] [_______________] Vows: Sacrifice of: [Destruction]

She had inherited my intelligence and had added all of the points from four level ups bringing up her total to 214! I shook my head, realizing that I would never catch up to her at this rate. My contribution to her growth was modifying her Infoscope, which had brought its Level up to 140. The growth of her core skill was absurd. Thanks to the bonus at Level 4 her Infoscope was now LV 280. She was an Information gathering construct far beyond anything that existed in Skyisle village!

My own stats now sat at:

Name: Dante Alan Skyisle Age: 1 month [since birth] Species & Subtype: male - human - newborn Level: 7 Experience: 2414/3200 Health: 7/7 Stamina: 7/7 Mana: 7/7 Mana regen: 7 m/hr Strength: 1 Agility: 1 Dexterity: 1 Vitality: 4 Charisma: 1 Magic: 2 Luck: 1 Intelligence: 190 Wisdom: 1 Soul: 74 Skills: [ Modify - Create - Life LV 86 ] [ Mindspace LV 52 ] [ Universal Comprehension LV 1 ] [ Info-tether LV 26 ] [ Soul Devourer LV 1 ] [ Observe mana LV 7 ] [_________________] Vows: [Sacrifice of: Destruction, Infoscope & Transient Soul] Affliction: [Soul Hunter's Kiss]

When we finished watching my slightly degraded memory of the "Mirror for a Hero" film, we returned to our discussion about stats.

"What would happen to me if I don't invest points into anything right now?" I asked. "Can you see if there are negative consequences in pushing everything into Intelligence?"

"Simply put, without any investments of points, you would grow up as a normal Skyisle child," Delta replied. "From what I observed, children in Skyisle do not unlock the System at all until they are between eleven and fourteen. They don't have points assigned into anything. They are ALL Level zero... and have no modifications, no skills or spells hanging on them."

"I see," I nodded. "So why was I born small and weak?"

"It happened because you were screwing around with my body's chromosomes and DNA - it drastically delayed the body's natural growth. It had nothing to do with putting points into Intelligence, because the Investiture points have zero affect on the body - they change the soul!"

I winced at the words "my body".

"Don't make that face, I don't hold it against you - you didn't know any better," she commented.

I nodded, not quite believing her. Delta ignored my sour face and brought other screens closer to us.

"Magic!" She pointed at the fractal for [Magic] on the screen. "From what I've gathered at higher tiers it will likely grant skills that: affect magic regen and improve mana storage amount. Evidence of this are LV 20 Skyisle adults like our mom, people who are able to cast spells which use a thousand mana at a time."

"Interesting," I muttered. "Where is mana stored on a human being?"

"It's not stored in you or on you." Delta laughed. "You know that I don't have any organs or cells, right? I'm a spell that's casting spells."

"So... spells hold spells?"

"Yes. Magic supports magic," she affirmed.

"This is some circular bullshit. How do people use magic?"

"Think of Penning Traps, a magnetron, by American physicist Hans Georg Dehmelt." Delta made a box with her hands. "It holds charged particles using a combination of magnetic fields. The device creates the confinement field, as material structures are unable to hold charged particles. The charge would simply dissipate in a material enclosure. It is the same with mana!"

"I see," I considered her explanation. It made sense. Why didn't I think of high vacuum magnetron trap!

"Also, people don't use magic, just like they don't use radiation. Souls on the other hand..." She twiddled her thumbs and smirked.

"Alright, let's not jump to souls yet," I said. "What's luck?"

"Subconscious probability calculation! Precognitive powers!" Delta spun the fractal for [Luck] around. "Put all of your points into luck and win big at your local casino. Flip a coin a thousand times and always feel what the outcome will be. Evade punches, dodge physical attacks, energy blasts and arrows. Avoid places where explosions will happen!"

I smiled at her jovial mood. "What about manipulating probability on purpose by calculating the future behavior of very large groups of people?"

"Psychohistory isn't an option on this menu of delights!" She shot back. "Stop trying to make Asimov's Foundation happen, you nerd!"

"Bah," I waved her away.

"Intelligence!" Delta declared, moving onto the next screen. "It can do anything. Knowledge is power! Except, this [Intelligence] does not define how much we know - it's more like the read only memory of the Soul, used to compute spells. See this bit here? It's our computational processor, a superstructure cluster, a permanent spell formation affixed to the soul."

I already knew fairly well what Intelligence did.

"Wisdom?" I looked at the next screen.

"Buy some wisdom!" Delta announced. "Impress your friends by solving puzzles, riddles, crosswords and the like. Win at arguments, forever. Be the wisest person in any room. Find clues like Sherlock Holmes and solve murder mysteries on a train better than anyone."

"Stop marketing wisdom to me and explain how it works," I commented on her wisecracking.

"Yes, yes. I know how much you hate puzzles. It's a permanently affixed spell, a pocket detective that's finding answers in the Astral Ocean and whispering it into your head."

"That's it?" I asked.

"That's it." Delta shrugged. "The Astral Ocean is packed full of dead, long lost, irrelevant and relevant information. Wisdom sifts it for you and pulls the answers out like a subconscious search-doggo."

"What if we made a conscious search engine?" I mulled. "A self-aware search spell that will..."

Delta pointed at herself, wiggling her eyebrows.

"Right," I said. "Question?"

"Uh-huh?"

"Do we have wisdom in us? Because I feel like neither of us is irrational or unwise. Is there a hidden value there like intelligence and soul?"

"There is. It's around 69 from what I can see. If either of us invests sufficient points into wisdom, it will be revealed."

"Gotcha," I said. "Anything else of interest about Wisdom?"

"Actually, yes." Delta said. "Anything interacting with the Astral is bound to attract the sharks living there. Do you know how the high level Phantom-Squid found you? She's likely been stalking you for a while, Dante. She must have smelled or spotted your Modify harpoon when you were just 56 days old, at the moment when you unknowingly pulled Y chromosome data out of the Astral to change my body into that of a boy."

"Damn it," I frowned deeply. "So, it was my fault that the Phantom attacked our mom? I thought that it was after my Infoscope!"

"You weren't scanning the Astral with the Infoscope, Dante. [Modify] is a Wisdom-based skill, especially when you want to modify something the information to which you do not fully posses." Delta noted.

"I see," I sighed. The use of Wisdom-based skills was a dangerous game! Getting answers, fishing for information in the Astral came with a price.

"Now, what can you tell me about souls?" I asked.

"Last but not least is the soul!" Delta showed me an absurdly complex fractal blur that made my eyes water. "All of these permanently affixed spells attach to it on these appendages. Are you crying? You are crying."

"Not on purpose. Observing this... is painful."

"It's a little bit complex, yes." Delta waved a hand and folded a thousand extra layers away from the screen. "Better?"

"Yes." I blinked.

"Each level up expands the soul," Delta said pointing at the screen. "You get points which basically tells you how much your soul has grown by. Invested points order certain outer segments, parts of the soul to... specialize. Once specialization is achieved, skills are unlocked, building channels to hold them. As the skills grow, they slowly change your physical body. It's a long and complex process. For example - shoving 100 points into Strength would make your soul specialize in "Strength", but they wouldn't make your body immediately more muscular. You'd have to train, gain skills and level them up to improve your musculature."

"Hrm. So, what happens when points are invested in Soul?" I asked.

"I estimate that the investment of points into Soul will be able to unlock skills that reinforce, protect or repair the soul itself against Phantom-caused damage," Delta replied. "I'm certain that mom has such. The infection barely affected her soul."

When I stared at the screen that defined the soul next to Delta, I saw a hollow superstructure woven from a million tiny threads extending out of its center there. It looked like a colorful star.

"That looks like... you.” I assessed the visual presented to me. “Like your threads but without sharp knife-like edges. Like the Infoscope's core, but smaller and weaker. No shell forged from magic."

"It does, doesn't it?" Delta smiled softly. "A soul on its own is defenseless, easily broken. From what I can see souls are essentially almost like self-aware spells. They control all of the magic. They think and create. They live and fade to almost nothing as information in them degrades or becomes damaged. They can shed parts and lose memories. They can build defenses around them. Made of flesh or... magic, in my case."

"Wait, wait, wait..." I looked at her. "But then..."

"Remember how you thought that you were a parasite, Dante? The truth is that souls are akin to sparks, stars in the darkness of the Astral depths. On closer inspection people are metaphorically akin to mollusks. Your meaty body is the shell that protects your soul from other horrible, no good creatures of the Astral Ocean like the Soul Hunter Squid that's stalking our house like a hungry shark."

I blinked. "This is some heavy stuff."

"The Astral Ocean is full of nasties, my friend." She mulled. "It's a soul-eat-soul world out there."

"Well, let's not get eaten," I said. "We can eventually hang all of these on ourselves as spells, yes?"

"As skills, if we can get enough mana, yes. A ‘skill’ is essentially a soul-tether that’s holding a permanently affixed spell." Delta affirmed. "Also, we'll have to work on optimizing them. Optimization requires more Intelligence."

"Right," I agreed. "This whole base setup is kind of crap. I'm really not a big fan of the whole 'subconscious answers' from the Astral thing."

"It makes sense for an end user with no understanding of Omnicode or spell visualization," Delta commented.

"Do you think that the System was designed?" I asked.

"It is possible that parts of it were designed," Delta shrugged. "The System activates with a mathematical answer on humans. I have no idea how it works for bugs or animals, but I doubt that it's math. It's also possible that many of the subconscious-style Astral-scouting skills evolved as various magical defenses used by souls over billions of years."

After some more speculation that went into all sorts of ridiculous theorizing, we went back to figuring out the wards.

With me at 190 and her at 214 Intelligence we were slowly but surely cracking the problem of figuring out how to fix the arcane and mostly broken runework system beneath the house.

Delta had discovered that the entire ward was built from bottom up over hundreds of years, with weaker and less complex bits added on top as local civilization decayed. We had agreed that the decay of Skyisle was most likely caused by the inability of people to level up past LV 20. It required extremely high level skills to repair high level artifacts like the obelisk. Skills that the locals had no longer possessed.

The oldest part of the ward was a 1214 year old basalt obelisk covered in faded gold runes. The obelisk's interior parts, its Astral Engine, consisted of rune-covered carbonado, commonly known as black diamond, one of the toughest forms of natural diamonds. Because of how tough it was, the Astral Engine still functioned after 12 centuries. Delta was certain that the carbonado snowflake-like structures within the obelisk were forged by spells, not naturally formed. The System labelled them as “rune hexagrams”.

The base of the obelisk was surrounded with 12 hexagonal mana-storing runestones, filled with carbonado-reinforced hexagrams. Ten of them were cracked and broken. Two were still functional, but not linked to anything. I knew that natural carbonado exhibited strong luminescence induced by nitrogen and vacancies existing in its crystal lattice. The two functional carbonado batteries were aglow with stored magic in Delta’s point of view.

Going further up - all around the yard and the house sat a network of 600 to 200-year-old [transposition stones], or transistor-stones as I liked to call them. These had no carbonado in them. All of the old T-stones were cracked and broken, and the newest additions that were around 120 years old were relying on weak-ass batteries brought from the windmills.

Delta and I had high-fived each other when we realized that we finally found a source of power - all we had to do was modify the broken connections leading from the two carbonado battery runestones to the house. Each arcane mana battery contained one hundred thousand mana in it.

"Can mana be taken from the house ward and used to empower me?" I asked.

"No," Delta shook her head. "The mana gathered by the house is not aligned to your soul. It's impure and wildly fluctuating. It'll be the same as pumping electricity through your body. Don't even think about putting it in yourself. First, it'll tear your channels to shreds. Second, your organs will catch fire from within. Boom! Spontaneous combustion!" She made a mushroom cloud shape with her hands.

"Maybe we could build a stabilizer, a converter of some sort?"

"I don't even know where to start on such an thing," she shook her head. "It wouldn't be wise to pump more magic through your body than your soul can hold. Your mana storage container field and channels are very fragile. It won't take much to rupture them."

"Then how did the Vow shove twelve thousand mana into me?" I asked.

"It didn't. It was held by something external... before you used it. Not sure what. I wasn't paying enough attention at the time, preoccupied with thoughts of eating your soul. Maybe the Omniscience held it momentarily, since the Vow was to a god..." Delta shrugged.

We moved onto the issue of Modifying the burned out ley lines, to get power from the batteries to the house once again.

After a long discussion, Delta and I decided to design an improved version of the [Info-Tether] called the [Spell-Transit-Tether] which would allow me to cast Modify directly through her.

Because the house ward treated Delta as family, she was able to thoroughly examine the anti-spying runes all over the house. Learning how they worked would someday allow us to create a shield-skill that would protect her from the deadly dismantling effect of the anti-spying magic.

We had a lot of work ahead of us and we weren't lazy.

Hours turned into days, days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months as we repaired the ancient house ward bit by bit, acquiring aid from our dad wherever heavy lifting, digging or breaking down of crawlspace was required.

Progress was happening across all of our projects and I dearly hoped that the lack of action from the Holy Order of Equality would continue.

[Kliss Eliza Cessna - Equality Acolyte, the 3rd Overseer of Skyisle]

For the past week, I’ve been the new Overseer of Skyisle village and I already started to hate this place with a burning passion. It seemed that the previous Overseer did a poor job of accounting and keeping track of things.

I tiredly rubbed my temples, hating myself and contemplated why I even took this stupid job in the middle of nowhere.

It was money… a half-decent salary for someone my age, the kind of money that could buy me quality artifacts like the Imperial magitek [Armacus 88] tool currently on my wrist. Such a device would definitely substitute for missing out on four years of levelling up when I got back to Cessna.

I thought back of the walled town with its beautiful, wide avenues, lovely cafes, decadent parties, palatial buildings covered in Imperial banners and white, sky-piercing hex-beacon towers. I had forsaken it all for being an Overseer of this dump.

Skyisle was located next to a major fault in the mountains known as the magogenic zone 18 according to the academy maps. It was a tiny-ass village in a mountain valley. I didn’t understand why the people living here didn’t just move somewhere else. Anywhere else! You’d have to be an absolute idiot to live in a place where you couldn't move past Level 20. If it was up to me I’d force all of these idiots to relocate to Agamemnon, but alas the Imperial Administration wanted to keep a presence in this blighted land, near zone 18.

It took me the entire morning going through all of the papers to figure out why the Empire even bothered to keep this place. It seemed that all of Skyisle functioned only for one purpose - to take care of my needs.

I was the most important person in the village and as Overseer I had the right to execute anyone who disobeyed me. My job was to enforce the Laws of Equality in the village and also to observe zone 18 as best as I could, keeping track of any changes. Apparently the fault was growing, but very incrementally and slowly. The Empire wanted to make sure it didn't spillover to a big, important trade-route city like Agamemnon. The previous Overseer did a horrible job of it, barely keeping entries in the logbook. Apparently he got so bored and annoyed with the locals, that he quit after three years, not even finishing his term!

The people of Skyisle didn’t respect Equality. The Imperial presence was fairly new to this village. The locals still believed that they were living under the Nation of Ishikaria, constantly praising their barbaric goddess Ishira. I’ve listened to the villagers talk using my [Long Ear] skill. Even after 7 years of our rule, it was still “Ishira watch over you” and “Ishira bless you”.

I’ve angrily flipped through the book of records, trying to check if the information matched the copy that my predecessor kept. Thankfully I didn’t have to look through the book manually, as the armacus on my wrist had the [documents-comparison] spell. It was one of the many obscure runespell tools used by Overseers for administrative work. Without it I would have frankly fallen asleep, since I had to check seven years of records, not trusting the diligence of my predecessors.

As I flipped through the pages tapping at it with the armacus, the ring suddenly pinged, a spark falling on a word. I glanced at the line in the Overseer's copy and then at the line that was filled in by the local midwife.

The Overseer’s log read:

____________________________________

117 Longwoods Road:

Spivuss 6th: Record of conception.

[Identification preformed by Midwife Tamara Agatha Skyisle]

[_________ Alana Skyisle - girl]

____________________________________

While the Skyisle book of records read:

____________________________________

117 Longwoods Road:

Spivuss 6th: Record of conception.

[Identification preformed by Midwife Tamara Agatha Skyisle]

[_________ Alan Skyisle - boy ]

____________________________________

“Aha! Finally! Some action,” I looked between the two lines. Someone was screwing with me. Either the incompetent Overseer made a mistake five months ago… or… I squinted at the child's name from the Skyisle book.

The “a” in Alana was erased and there were barely visible scratches on the gender line. The word “girl” was scratched out with a coin and replaced with “boy”!

I flipped through the Skyisle book of records, searching for the record of birth. Here we go!

_________________________________________

117 Longwoods Road:

Ottamuss 15th: Record of birth.

[Dante Alan Skyisle - boy]

Birth aided by: Midwife Tamara Agatha Skyisle

No known issues.

_________________________________________

“No issues, huh? Midwife… Tamara Agatha Skyisle has some explaining to do!” I muttered darkly.

I made sure that my armacus was fully charged, put on my armor and then left the musty office to get my answers.