《The Colour Chronicles》Chapter 31 - Peace of Mind
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A painting? That means Kiera knows? Well fuck, I guess they’ll exterminate me again, in the name of God or whatever. This won’t help in completing my so called mission, and I won’t see April, Julie, Vince, Kate, Eve, Natasha or Ray ever again. If they even were here.
“What a coincidence, the witness turned out to be a master painter, and perfectly captured the moment. Makes sense...” Jessie says skeptically.
Kiera laughs, “It’s called practice, I’d say the witness was a bit obsessed with making people believe them. The whole reason the story is so detailed is because they wrote it down themselves as well. To make sure it’s readable it was written again with time, and I think they switched to digital now.”
“So that witness has been alive for 300+ years?” Jessie points out.
“Nah, their descendents, my teacher is one of them. That made him interested in teaching history, so I guess it worked for something,” Kiera says.
“So, where’s that painting? I’m curious to see how a so called demon looks,” Sophie asks.
“My teacher has it at his home, I can ask him to make a picture tomorrow. That is, if you’re still interested in it,” Kiera smiles, she’s staring at me. Can she not be so creepy?
“Then, did you see it? Did it include horns? Or at least black blood?” Jessie jokes.
“I did, but no such things. The only part that wasn’t normal was the glowing eyes. Her skin was pale too, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary. Also, the ‘odd’ eye colour, it became normal after that. It’s still rare, like it’s less than one in ten thousand. For scale, one in ten thousand is 0.01%. So it would be less than ten million people alive right now,” Kiera explains.
“Blue eyes isn’t really odd though? I mean last time I had biology lessons it told me 17% of the world has blue eyes,” Sophie points out.
“It’s not normal blue, it’s azure blue. For now it’s unknown how it started, since the demon didn’t have any kids to pass it on. So maybe it’s a coincidence and someone else had the mutation. Ironically, my teacher has the azure eyes,” Kiera says. She didn’t mention me?
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“Eh, I don’t know all the blue shades. Hold on, I’ll search a picture on my phone.” Jessie grabs her phone, doing whatever magic they use on a phone.
It’s quiet for a moment while Jessie does her magic. After that moment she stares dumbfounded, looking up at me. She holds her phone next to my face, switching in between them.
“That’s amazing, I didn’t realize she has such a rare eye colour. I mean, I did think it looked different, but that it’s just blue,” Jessie says.
A noise comes from Sophie, she isn’t the one creating the noise though. She grabs her phone and holds it against her ear. “Hello?”
Who’s she talking to? Jessie and Kiera aren’t responding, instead they are staying quiet, or whispering to each other.
“Ah, yes. That’s fine, you should see us right away,” Sophie says. “Alright, see you soon.” She puts her phone on the table, as if she didn’t just talk to no one. The others don’t seem to care either, so I guess it’s normal?
“Anyway, what were we talking about?” Sophie asks.
“Short memory problems?” Jessie laughs.
“Don’t judge me for that!” Sophie laughs.
“I mean, we will judge you. That’s what we’re here for,” Kiera adds
They keep mindlessly talking about uninteresting things, I don’t understand them anyway. It’s boring again, what am I supposed to do so that I won’t get bored? Sleep it is, I’m going to be asleep for most of my life this way.
Maybe I can go to my soul space, but I don’t know how that looks to outsiders. I don’t want to stand out more while Kiera is creepily smiling at me. There’s no way she doesn’t know, so why is she playing around like that?
Tomorrow the rest would know too, and at that point the whole world might know. What would happen then? I can’t fight back, I’d be punished for it. Would they kill me? And if they did, would I get punished for it too? That would be horrible, returning to the point before they kill me just to die again and again. I don’t want to. I don’t want to die. There’s nothing I can do here, they found out not because of my mistake.
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I can’t be punished for that, it’s unfair. The so called system should protect me from this, how else am I supposed to do those missions? This whole thing is unfair, why should I do this?
It’s hard to sleep like this, I can’t help but panic every moment I don’t distract myself.
My skin is feeling hot, I’m definitely sweating. Combined with that I’m getting nauseous. Who knew this would feel so terrible. I want to get out of here, any possible way. You know what, dying sounds perfect. If I don’t get punished for that, or else it’s terrible.
Now I’m chilly, I think I’m trembling. My hands and feet are freezing, and that while I’m still feeling like I’m sweating. It’s weird, I never felt like this before. Even though part of me is sweating, the cold feeling is worse. I want to jump in a fire, but I think that won’t work.
I try moving my hands towards the sweating part of my body. Sadly I found out it doesn’t make the cold part warm, it makes the warm part cold. At the same time, while my coldness is expanding, I’m still feeling sweaty at the now cold part.
Do they know how I’m reacting to them? That might be a give away… A chill moves my body, what a terrible thought. Not like everything here isn’t terrible.
Please, I just want to run away. I don’t want any of this, please let me go. Before I start crying, I don’t want to get punished for anything.
This feeling of not being able to do anything, it’s terrifying. I can’t do this, I can’t do anything.
I just need one person, one person that can help me finish my missions. A person where I can feel safe… So that even though I can’t do anything, it won’t be a problem. If I have to nothing to do, I don’t need to do stuff.
Sadly I have no one here. No one who understands. But no one can understand, I can only ignore everyone. Ignoring is hard, I just want to be able to distance myself from all this, so I won’t get bored again by staring into nothing and not listening to people.
Maybe not caring about what people think, and what they are doing. If I don’t care, it won’t hurt me, right? But how would I stop caring? This is hard, I… I just can’t. I yawn, I guess it is tiring. Maybe I can finally escape this place.
I wake up in my bed. I guess ‘dad’ brought me home. It’s still night, that’s what happens when you sleep at day time. Okay, no more sleeping to escape, being awake at night is terrible. Let’s go back to my soul space, at least it’s day there.
Still the same as always, no matter how much time passes by. I guess it’s some stability in my life, some sort of back up plan. It would be better if there were people I trust here, but this place, I control every corner of it. There can’t be any monsters here, it’s a safe place. My own little safe place.
I didn’t realise how much this place would mean to me before all this happened, I guess I’m glad I made it with April, it’s great memories. And since there’s souls around, I can still see them I guess.
Now I wonder where they are, their souls are still here and well. No broken souls, so I guess they’re still alive. The story said both April and I disappeared, did the rest stay or not? If not, would they be here?
Would searching for them be communicating? When can I start talking again? It would be nice if I can talk after finishing my mission, since then I can do what I want again. Hopefully…
Spending time here is so easy, I just need a way to know if it’s morning yet. Or maybe I don’t and I can stay here forever.
What would make this place better? Just reading might get boring. Maybe I need to go outside and find things that would fit here.
Oh well, that’s all for later. For now, let’s read some fun books.
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Sword System Academia
2/17 NOTICE: I'm putting this on hiatus, possibly permanently. I didn't want to spam with an "update chapter", so hopefully here and in the story blurb will get enough eyeballs. There are a couple reasons for ending SSA for now. 1) I wrote the next chapter but wasn't happy with it. I've been less and less satisfied with SSA's quality the more I thought about it. Part of the reason is... 2) I am seriously thinking about trying to publish some novels to help pay the bills, since I don't have my other source of income anymore. I have never asked for anything from SSA readers, no money, not even a review or rating. SSA is written for fun to amuse myself, primarily, and I would kind of feel bad actually charging someone money for something as unserious as that. I don't think it is good enough to ask anything in return. To use an analogy from music, SSA is more like a jam session with a bunch of friends. You're just chiling and having fun playing some music. I mean, if you are Mozart or even Eminem, your jam session is good enough to sell, but for an amateur beginner like myself, haha, no. If I want to publish something, I feel like I need to go the proper route of practice and rehearsals, which might be more similar to a classical concert performance. With SSA, I work from worldbuilding notes and a loose outline, but what you are essentially getting is the first draft with lots of so-called pantsing. Pushing out a web novel like this also means it is very difficult to go back and improve things without breaking everything else downstream. I wanted to try this "jamming" approach, as it was a good way to teach me about another aspect of writing, but to move forward, I think I need to hone my "classical" techniques, which emphasize rewriting, or at least, revising outlines. 3) While I intend to try to make $$$, my actual current goal is to "get gud". I've spent a lot of time recently trying to understand the self-publishing industry, and I'm pretty sure I can make some money by using short-term strategies with my current amateur skill level. But I've seen too many authors come and go/burnout, and really, the only way that I think I can enjoy writing and still make money on a long-term basis is to become a better writer. And the next step for me, which I haven't done much before, is to spend more time on rewriting and outlines. That is pretty much antithetical to the way SSA is developing. I've always been kind of 20/80 plotting/pantsing, but I want to spend a lot more time outlining before I even start writing. SSA jam sessions don't really fit my goal anymore. If you're curious about what's next, read on... Among other regrets, I regret not finishing SSA. It's the first story I've dropped, but then again, it's the first web novel I've attempted, so I suppose that's not a surprise. I don't think traditional web novel formats suit me that well. The whole SSA story I had loosely planned (beyond a first book or major arc) is way too large as well. Big story = good for neverending webnovel with Patreons, bad for penniless and fickle writer like me. I am currently outlining a complete trilogy to another story in great detail. I want the story to end concisely, and I also want the chance to really spend a lot of time on the full outline to spot pacing problems, character issues, lost themes, and so on. I'll still share this story on RR. What I intend to do is finish book 1, flash-publish the whole thing here for a few weeks, then publish on the big Zon. Repeat for books 2 and 3. The upcoming story will be about crafting heroes. The backdrop is an isekai-like setting, where elves will summon humans to their world as heroes, but the whole hero crafting business is still in its infancy. The elven mage researchers are figuring out how to imbue heroes with power, while the heroes are trying to figure out how to use the powers that they gain. Humans are the best hero templates because they are blank and have no intrinsic magic. Or at least that what the elves thought. The human MC has his own secrets... There will be some similarities with litrpgs, but I would call it more a progression fantasy or gamelit story. For example, the stats are very low, at least initially. Say we have a stat called Str. Going from Str = 1 to Str = 2 is a huge deal. Also, going from Dex = 0 to Dex = 1 is an even bigger deal. I guess you could call it a "low-stat litrpg", haha. Also, the heroes won't be gaining stats simply by killing things or leveling up. You can't increase stats arbitrarily, either. There will be rules to how stats can increase, and how they work with each other. The elven mages will be figuring out these rules in order to craft stronger and stronger heroes. 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I took parts from different genres I enjoyed and twisted them into my own creation. There will be an explicit system, both of the litrpg kind and the hard(ish) magic kind, but it is embedded within an academic structure that will develop over the course of the story. This is my attempt to design a unique type of system, the System Academia.
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