Soul and Meaning

The next day, Zach and Naha got to work. Everyone else had isolated themselves across the ship, as much as they could at least. They were all digesting the theories and revelations that they had heard the day before. And they were all trying to squeeze some last-minute benefits before their arrival. They all knew that there was a fight ahead of them, they could feel it in their bones. They were all getting ready in their own ways.

Naha and Zach focused on their Skills. They had spent the last day just talking, going over everything that had happened to them in their lives and trying to figure out if what Ryun theorized was the truth. If madness really wasn’t what they all thought it was.

If what they had postulated was correct, then skills were a way of aligning a person’s focuses to their Soul’s meaning. In both Zach’s and Naha’s case, they had a single focus aside from Skills. They had two paths ahead of them now. One was to pick up Cultivation Paths again, and then finish their Skills as they advanced on those Paths, slowly aligning them to fit with their Class by using their last anchors to affix them properly. The issue with that was that they were both far along their Skill journey, with Naha only having two more Skill evolutions left before she reached the peak of Skills. Any Path that she picked now, even if it was closely related to her Class, would never be fully aligned. Not with just two anchors remaining.

That meant doing what Maleatus had done, pushing Class to its peak and then getting a Class that was tailored for the person’s meaning.

What they were now debating was if she should save the two anchors or evolve them. They didn’t have the time for her to Advance her Class properly, not before the battle. Her current choices weren’t that appealing to her, most were related to Dome and Grand Spirits achievements she had gained recently.

“None of them feel like me,” Naha said.

“I understand,” Zach said. A focus was meant to resonate with you, it was a tool to bring out your inner desire. Most people would never reach high enough for it to matter to them. But for people like them, who wanted to push beyond, to craft Ways and see what existed beyond, they had to think about more than just power. “But pushing your Skills to the end now…”

Naha looked resolved. “It is a Focus, I’m certain that pushing it to the end will count as a great achievement. But beyond even that, it will make my Image more powerful. I already know what my meaning is, I’ve always known. I just didn’t understand.”

“You’ve added Fear to your Skills,” Zach said, not really knowing what point he had. He understood in the abstract what she was doing, but her meaning was not his, he didn’t know it.

“Trust me,” she glanced at him with a small smile.

Zach met her gaze, then nodded. “Always.”

He stepped away, walking to the other side of the docking area, leaving her in the shadows. Her Image rose around her, a shroud of darkness that deepened every shadow around her. Soon enough, the Shadow completely engulfed her in a sphere of darkness, hiding her from sight. He saw things in the Shadows, felt things reaching out to his mind, but nothing manifested in the Shadows. Whatever fears her Shadow attempted to draw from him, it failed. His Mind was immune to such things. He didn’t even feel her anymore, the Shadow kept her isolated perfectly, preventing her willpower from leaking out.

He turned and focused inward, pulling his sheets and looking through everything.

A Skill anchor was a piece of oneself, a piece of the Soul locked into a place as a pillar to hold the power of the Skill, but also prevent that part of the Soul from changing. Wardens used to make complicated anchors by pouring emotion and desire into words, chants that they used as a way to prevent their anchors from being corrupted.

Now, what Ryun suggested implied that one could also use them as a way to alter, or perhaps bend, a Focus to align better with the meaning of a Soul. Zach wondered how Ryun imagined that going. He did know that an anchor didn’t need to be something that was a natural and current part of one’s Soul. They were chosen, they had the free will to choose who they wanted to be. Zach could evolve a skill and anchor anything really, and his Soul would alter to fit that anchor. Though, from the Warden texts he read in the past, he knew that that could lead to corruption of anchors.

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So, it had to be a balance then. If the goal was to harmonize the balance between Focuses and Soul’s meaning, then one shouldn’t make drastic changes, but smaller ones that were closer in line with what the Soul already was.

He glanced at his Class, Ryun’s words echoing in his mind. He was right, the Lord of Aspects was a Class about ruling the Aspects, a focus dedicated to mastery. Yes, Knowledge was part of that, but it wasn’t everything.

He closed his eyes, and reached with that ephemeral sense that allowed him to perceive the Soul. He had been at a crossroads, unsure what the meaning of his Soul was. Knowledge was part of it, that much was certain, learning too, teaching as well, yet he knew that there were things that he was missing.

His anchors then, they provided an insight into who he was. He closed his eyes as his Blade arm shifted into its Knowledge Form. It granted him abilities regarding information and Knowledge in general, though it had its limits. It gave him instinctive ability to process information around him as a baseline, but actual complete Knowledge was limited to only what was currently stored in the Repository of Knowledge in the Ethereal Realm. One of the abilities that his Knowledge Blade gave him was the ability to access the information recorded in the Repository within the Castle of Knowledge from wherever he was through a meditative trance.

It took time, which was why he had stored as much information as he could in his Band of Memory's Hall for easier access. The main issue with that was that the knowledge stored in the Repository was mostly tied to Spirits and the Ethereal, with some knowledge traded by people coming in from the Real Realm. It had a great breadth of knowledge about Aspects as Spirits understood them, but it was lacking. Zach was planning on remedying that eventually. The Spirits still lived and served in the Castle, which was now his.

Still, it did also allow him an instinctual ability to understand and process information the basest form of Knowledge. Now, he turned his attention to his own Soul, to his anchors. His memory of what to him was a distant past was faint. He remembered everything, but it was as through a fog, a memory of a childhood long since passed. He needed to dwell deep into his own mind, to understand the Anchors that he had made before.

His blade did the work, Knowledge grabbed the errant threads of memory and wove information into his mind.

I want to protect those that I care about, those that I love, always.

I will never stop trying to be better. I will always move forward. I will fail, but I will never stop trying to do good.

I will never break. I need to learn.

Then there were those for which he didn’t remember the exact wordings, those that were small, pieces that augmented the whole, but his Knowledge blade was connected to him through the soul weapon, and like the Repository in the Ethereal, his Body, his Power, and his Soul, were all part of the domain that his Blade of Knowledge could access.

Exact words didn’t matter now, they were not what he had sealed, the wordings weren’t exact enough. They gave room for the anchors to breathe, to become something more. The ideas behind his anchors came into being as the Aspect of Knowledge learned about them. The desire to protect those that were close to him, those that he loved. Next came the idea of the sword, flashes of a young man practicing with a wooden blade and loving every moment of it. That surprised him, he had forgotten it. But he felt just how right that was. He glanced down at his arm, the blade that shone with power. The love of the blade.

A flash of a man walking forward, always, never stopping but always trying to make things better than they were. To inject some small measure of good in a world that was far too often balancing on the edge of collapse.

The idea behind his Soul’s meaning started to take shape, the narrative that drove his existence. To protect, one had to have knowledge, and at the core of knowledge was learning. The Sword, the Aspects, it didn’t matter what it was, he wanted to learn it. To know it all. That was his decree, the narrative of his Soul, the meaning.

To Learn All, And Share

The pursuit of Knowledge through learning, to teach what he knew. To ensure survival of Knowledge.

That felt right to him, though he knew that he was missing something, pieces were snapping into place, but it wasn’t what he was looking for. Just…

Ah… Zach thought to himself. The Knowledge was there, it was always there. Who he was. The Framework was a learning tool itself, a ladder where every step was made to teach one something. Cultivation about ones Body and Soul, Class about the connections between the world and the person, Skill to teach one how to be more, how to be real, to shape the world with one’s existence, leave a mark.

But just because the learning tool was there, it didn’t mean that one couldn’t learn without it. That one couldn’t achieve the same effects some other way. He sunk into his Band of Memory’s Hall, scoured through the pieces of information that he had stored there.

Flashes of Spirits upgrading their bodies through consumption of Aspects. A Classer coming into the Castle seeking a way to improve his body as Cultivators do without walking down a Path, he had grafted Spirits into his flesh, created a facsimile of a True Body without the Cultivation Path. He gained a Perk for it. The Crucibles.

Of course.

The Perks gained through advancement were training wheels. They weren’t required.

Zach pulled himself back and he knew himself, or at least a small part of what the idea that pushed his being forward was. He came out of his trance, and knew himself as He Who Seeks To Learn.