“So that was a bad idea,” Lord Feldstal said a few minutes later after Nym had recovered. “It’s a good thing he didn’t gather enough arcana to actually cast a spell.”
“It’s like the arcana was alive and knew exactly where to attack him at to push through the hole in his matrix,” Doliar said. “I don’t think we’re going to find many answers there.”
“No… well, it’s not why our new friend was added to the Collective anyway. I’ve got to go take care of some business. Nym, please show Master Healer Doliar your full meditation technique for flexing small node clusters and answer any questions he has,” Lord Feldstal said.
Before Nym could answer, the nobleman was gone. Nym scratched the back of his head and said, “I guess I’m just here with you until he comes back.”
Doliar nodded. “Or until he sends someone to fetch you. Oh, let me just swap out this sensor before you get started.”
The healer was an excitable young man, maybe in his mid-twenties. He was quite handsome, slightly below average height and with a friendly smile. He worked eagerly and swiftly, then stepped back and said, “Okay, all ready. Just start at the beginning.”
So Nym did. He talked about the injury, and the advice he’d received at the start. He explained how he flexed different parts of his matrix, and the different ways he did that. The healer listened while watching various sensors as Nym demonstrated what he was talking about. He didn’t feel like he was doing a very good job, and he felt a pang of empathy for Yura, who’d tried to explain something that humans didn’t really have a lot of words to describe.
If that was a problem for Doliar, he didn’t show it. He just kept jotting down more notes, occasionally asking for clarification or a follow up question when he wanted to know something Nym had skipped over. A few times, he had Nym repeat a step when he wasn’t happy with the information he got from the sensors. Once they were done, he set aside the notes and started putting away the equipment.
“I have a theory,” he said as he worked. “And it’s just a theory, but I think that the reason you’re having troubles channeling arcana at the speeds you’re used to is because your soul well is distorted. Think of it like a water skin that you can squeeze to shoot water out. Except, now you’ve got stripes of different material in there, and it’s harder to put uniform pressure because some parts need to be squeezed harder than others. Does that make sense?”
“Not really, no,” Nym told him honestly.
The healer sighed and shook his head. “I could be wrong, and we’ll keep researching, but based on what my scans are showing me, you’ve got… three, I’d say, different types of nodes. It’s almost like they’re not just growing bigger, they’re getting stronger too. And as they get bigger, they’re pulling themselves out of place in your matrix. Once you get everything evened out, the problem might disappear completely.”
“That’ll be great if it does, but how long would that take? What’s the count on all these new node types?”
“Every matrix has one hundred nodes. In your case, you’ve got seventy-seven of what I’d describe as a typical node. Eighteen are advanced, stronger. Arcana is repelled harder from them. And the remaining five are completely different. They’re more than three times bigger, and the netting connected to them is starting to thicken to compensate for the extra dimensions.”
“So if I have to get every node to this stage three style to even things out, it’ll take me twenty times as long as it’s already been, which is about six weeks. That’ll take years!”
“Well… not to worry, I’m sure we’ll find a way to streamline the process. In fact, let me talk to you about the techniques we’ve been working on. Maybe it’ll help.”
Doliar proceeded to spend the next hour going over the fruits of several decades of research, which was a way to elongate the threads between the nodes that formed the net of the matrix. They had pretty well mastered that part. The problem they’d run into was that the threads just weren’t strong enough to force the nodes themselves to move to accommodate the new length.
Instead of having a fine net, the matrix looked more like a pot of noodle broth with evenly spaced chunks of meat floating in it. Eventually, after a week or two of inactivity, the net would shrink down and resume its former shape.
“But I’m thinking if we can combine these two things, your nodes should be able to grow faster. There’s some shredding in the net that makes up your matrix as the nodes grow. It’s repairing itself, but it’s not keeping up with the growth. If you elongate the net portion, I think it’ll let your nodes grow faster because they won’t have to fight against it. The slack will already be there,” Doliar said.
“That’s… maybe? I guess it’s worth a try, right?” Nym asked.
And so another two hours were spent on that. Doliar was a decent teacher, or maybe just well-practiced. Nym supposed every new member of the Collective learned this method, and someone had to show them how to do it. Either way, it wasn’t that hard to pick up, and Nym didn’t even have to cheat to do it.
Most of the time was spent stretching the net, then focusing on specific groups of nodes. Nym alternated back and forth between the two exercises, stopping occasionally for Doliar to do new scans. Once they were done, he started comparing the data.
“We might be on to something here!” he said. “Look, see, here’s your original scan when you first got here. And the one I just took looks like this.”
Nym stared at the two illusions the healer had crafted. “They look the same to me,” he said.
“What? No. In this one, the nodes are four percent bigger. That’s after ninety minutes of exercises. A little over five hours a day means you could double the size of your nodes in a week. If it scales like I’m hoping, we could call it two weeks per grouping. Twenty-five groups… let me think for a second.”
The healer’s face screwed up in concentration as he did the mental math. “One year,” he announced. “If this training regime works like I hope, in one year, a mage could triple the size of his nodes and my best estimates are showing a fifty percent increase in the size of the soul well. That’s almost enough by itself to meet our goal. And this is day one! Who knows what we’ll figure out in the coming weeks.”
Nym wasn’t as excited as Doliar was, but then again, he’d only been working on the problem for a few hours. The healer had probably been trying to solve it for years, and if he was understanding what little he’d learned about the Collective properly, the organization had existed for decades prior to Doliar’s involvement, originally headed up by Lord Feldstal’s father. The more he learned, the more he understood the motivation behind the experiments performed on Analia.
That wasn’t to say that he agreed with them or condoned them, just that he understood what the goal was. The spells that let a mage work on his own body to increase his abilities weren’t something that could be done to someone else, not normally at least. If Analia hadn’t been born with a large enough soul well to begin with, there would have been no way to ever progress to third circle and be able to start augmenting herself.
So her father had done it for her. It was extremely unethical, but it made sense. He’d had a brief window, and he’d wanted it for her, so he’d made the decision to risk her life. Still, the way he’d written about the experiments in his journals did not match the personality he’d displayed when he talked to Nym. It was enough to make Nym wonder which was the true Jaspar Feldstal, if either. It would not surprise him to learn that the man had no true personality and instead was a social chameleon, donning whatever mask he felt was most useful. Even in his own personal writings, knowing they’d be handed down to one of his children, he could be carefully crafting a persona to achieve some effect.
The experiments were interrupted by a knock on the lab’s door. “Safe to enter?” a voice called out from the hall. Nym frowned. He knew that voice from somewhere.
“One moment,” Doliar said while scrambling to remove some of the sensors he’d set up on a stand in front of the door. After he slid them out of the way, he grabbed the door knob and twisted. “Come on in now, but be careful not to bump into anything.
A young man entered the room and locked eyes with Nym. “Well, well, well. Good to see you again. Damn, you got tall!”
“Navarim? What are you doing here?” Nym asked. The mage from Zoskan’s guildhall looked just like he remembered, but this was the last place Nym expected to see him.
“I would think that’s obvious. I’m a member of the Collective. I managed to make a conduit to the third layer. That’s partially thanks to you. You were a real kick in the butt, you know? Some little kid was a stronger mage than me! But wouldn’t you know it, just an average sized soul well. A bit under average actually. I’m ranked nine. That was a bitter pill to swallow, but then one of my mentors introduced me to this group, and here I am.”
“Oh, that’s a good thing to study!” Doliar said. “I can’t believe we forgot to do a Helingar-Bistal Test on you. Here, go stand right here. Let me get the rest of these sensors out of the way and we’ll get that taken care of before you leave.”
Nym wasn’t sure he liked the idea of that. He already knew the number was abnormally high, and the Collective knew enough weird things about him as it was. Then again, he did have their leader under a geas that guaranteed his relative freedom. If there was ever a group that might be able to help him resolve some questions, it was this one.
The question was if he trusted them to know the truth. It would be easier to make that decision if he knew the truth first. It was probably too late on the soul well size test either way. Doliar didn’t seem like the kind of person to give up on it, so Nym decided to go with the truth.
“I did kind of have an unofficial one done once already, but we’re not sure the results are accurate,” Nym said.
“That’s fine. I’ll do another one right now and make sure you’ve got the right number. You can tell me how far off the old one was after.”
“If you’re sure,” Nym said. “You might need some more people. It took four mages to do it last time.”
Doliar laughed. “Hah, funny. I didn’t know you were an ascendant.”
Navarim wasn’t laughing though. He just looked at Nym thoughtfully, no doubt remembering Nym’s flight training. All he said was, “Should I go get a few more people?”
Doliar waved him off. “No offense to whoever performed Nym’s last test, but I think the two of us can handle it.”
“I really wouldn’t recommend it,” Nym warned him. The Earth Shapers had grumbled about the feedback for days.
“It’s fine. Just give me a second to set up and we’ll get it taken care of.”
Nym just sighed.
An hour later, four mages groaned and muttered to each other while Doliar cast pain blocker spells on them. After cautioning them to keep the incident quiet until any official announcements were made, he dismissed all of them except Navarim. “I’ll know better than to doubt you next time,” the healer told Nym.
It took Doliar far less time to do the calculations, even with him stopping several times to recheck things. Once he was done, he gave Nym a searching stare before redoing them a second time. “So,” he said, “before I tell you the results, what did the last test say?”
“Seventy-four,” Nym said.
Doliar nodded to himself as if that were the most normal and boring thing in the world. “Yep, I can see that. And that was before the matrix destabilization. Well, I did not get seventy-four,” he told Nym. “I got ninety-two.”
Nym’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you sure? That’s a lot different.”
“I’ve got a more accurate measure on your true age thanks to all the scans. I’m sure. I think we’re going to have to go talk to Lord Feldstal again before you leave.”
“So that was a bad idea,” Lord Feldstal said a few minutes later after Nym had recovered. “It’s a good thing he didn’t gather enough arcana to actually cast a spell.”
“It’s like the arcana was alive and knew exactly where to attack him at to push through the hole in his matrix,” Doliar said. “I don’t think we’re going to find many answers there.”
“No… well, it’s not why our new friend was added to the Collective anyway. I’ve got to go take care of some business. Nym, please show Master Healer Doliar your full meditation technique for flexing small node clusters and answer any questions he has,” Lord Feldstal said.
Before Nym could answer, the nobleman was gone. Nym scratched the back of his head and said, “I guess I’m just here with you until he comes back.”
Doliar nodded. “Or until he sends someone to fetch you. Oh, let me just swap out this sensor before you get started.”
The healer was an excitable young man, maybe in his mid-twenties. He was quite handsome, slightly below average height and with a friendly smile. He worked eagerly and swiftly, then stepped back and said, “Okay, all ready. Just start at the beginning.”
So Nym did. He talked about the injury, and the advice he’d received at the start. He explained how he flexed different parts of his matrix, and the different ways he did that. The healer listened while watching various sensors as Nym demonstrated what he was talking about. He didn’t feel like he was doing a very good job, and he felt a pang of empathy for Yura, who’d tried to explain something that humans didn’t really have a lot of words to describe.
If that was a problem for Doliar, he didn’t show it. He just kept jotting down more notes, occasionally asking for clarification or a follow up question when he wanted to know something Nym had skipped over. A few times, he had Nym repeat a step when he wasn’t happy with the information he got from the sensors. Once they were done, he set aside the notes and started putting away the equipment.
“I have a theory,” he said as he worked. “And it’s just a theory, but I think that the reason you’re having troubles channeling arcana at the speeds you’re used to is because your soul well is distorted. Think of it like a water skin that you can squeeze to shoot water out. Except, now you’ve got stripes of different material in there, and it’s harder to put uniform pressure because some parts need to be squeezed harder than others. Does that make sense?”
“Not really, no,” Nym told him honestly.
The healer sighed and shook his head. “I could be wrong, and we’ll keep researching, but based on what my scans are showing me, you’ve got… three, I’d say, different types of nodes. It’s almost like they’re not just growing bigger, they’re getting stronger too. And as they get bigger, they’re pulling themselves out of place in your matrix. Once you get everything evened out, the problem might disappear completely.”
“That’ll be great if it does, but how long would that take? What’s the count on all these new node types?”
“Every matrix has one hundred nodes. In your case, you’ve got seventy-seven of what I’d describe as a typical node. Eighteen are advanced, stronger. Arcana is repelled harder from them. And the remaining five are completely different. They’re more than three times bigger, and the netting connected to them is starting to thicken to compensate for the extra dimensions.”
“So if I have to get every node to this stage three style to even things out, it’ll take me twenty times as long as it’s already been, which is about six weeks. That’ll take years!”
“Well… not to worry, I’m sure we’ll find a way to streamline the process. In fact, let me talk to you about the techniques we’ve been working on. Maybe it’ll help.”
Doliar proceeded to spend the next hour going over the fruits of several decades of research, which was a way to elongate the threads between the nodes that formed the net of the matrix. They had pretty well mastered that part. The problem they’d run into was that the threads just weren’t strong enough to force the nodes themselves to move to accommodate the new length.
Instead of having a fine net, the matrix looked more like a pot of noodle broth with evenly spaced chunks of meat floating in it. Eventually, after a week or two of inactivity, the net would shrink down and resume its former shape.
“But I’m thinking if we can combine these two things, your nodes should be able to grow faster. There’s some shredding in the net that makes up your matrix as the nodes grow. It’s repairing itself, but it’s not keeping up with the growth. If you elongate the net portion, I think it’ll let your nodes grow faster because they won’t have to fight against it. The slack will already be there,” Doliar said.
“That’s… maybe? I guess it’s worth a try, right?” Nym asked.
And so another two hours were spent on that. Doliar was a decent teacher, or maybe just well-practiced. Nym supposed every new member of the Collective learned this method, and someone had to show them how to do it. Either way, it wasn’t that hard to pick up, and Nym didn’t even have to cheat to do it.
Most of the time was spent stretching the net, then focusing on specific groups of nodes. Nym alternated back and forth between the two exercises, stopping occasionally for Doliar to do new scans. Once they were done, he started comparing the data.
“We might be on to something here!” he said. “Look, see, here’s your original scan when you first got here. And the one I just took looks like this.”
Nym stared at the two illusions the healer had crafted. “They look the same to me,” he said.
“What? No. In this one, the nodes are four percent bigger. That’s after ninety minutes of exercises. A little over five hours a day means you could double the size of your nodes in a week. If it scales like I’m hoping, we could call it two weeks per grouping. Twenty-five groups… let me think for a second.”
The healer’s face screwed up in concentration as he did the mental math. “One year,” he announced. “If this training regime works like I hope, in one year, a mage could triple the size of his nodes and my best estimates are showing a fifty percent increase in the size of the soul well. That’s almost enough by itself to meet our goal. And this is day one! Who knows what we’ll figure out in the coming weeks.”
Nym wasn’t as excited as Doliar was, but then again, he’d only been working on the problem for a few hours. The healer had probably been trying to solve it for years, and if he was understanding what little he’d learned about the Collective properly, the organization had existed for decades prior to Doliar’s involvement, originally headed up by Lord Feldstal’s father. The more he learned, the more he understood the motivation behind the experiments performed on Analia.
That wasn’t to say that he agreed with them or condoned them, just that he understood what the goal was. The spells that let a mage work on his own body to increase his abilities weren’t something that could be done to someone else, not normally at least. If Analia hadn’t been born with a large enough soul well to begin with, there would have been no way to ever progress to third circle and be able to start augmenting herself.
So her father had done it for her. It was extremely unethical, but it made sense. He’d had a brief window, and he’d wanted it for her, so he’d made the decision to risk her life. Still, the way he’d written about the experiments in his journals did not match the personality he’d displayed when he talked to Nym. It was enough to make Nym wonder which was the true Jaspar Feldstal, if either. It would not surprise him to learn that the man had no true personality and instead was a social chameleon, donning whatever mask he felt was most useful. Even in his own personal writings, knowing they’d be handed down to one of his children, he could be carefully crafting a persona to achieve some effect.
The experiments were interrupted by a knock on the lab’s door. “Safe to enter?” a voice called out from the hall. Nym frowned. He knew that voice from somewhere.
“One moment,” Doliar said while scrambling to remove some of the sensors he’d set up on a stand in front of the door. After he slid them out of the way, he grabbed the door knob and twisted. “Come on in now, but be careful not to bump into anything.
A young man entered the room and locked eyes with Nym. “Well, well, well. Good to see you again. Damn, you got tall!”
“Navarim? What are you doing here?” Nym asked. The mage from Zoskan’s guildhall looked just like he remembered, but this was the last place Nym expected to see him.
“I would think that’s obvious. I’m a member of the Collective. I managed to make a conduit to the third layer. That’s partially thanks to you. You were a real kick in the butt, you know? Some little kid was a stronger mage than me! But wouldn’t you know it, just an average sized soul well. A bit under average actually. I’m ranked nine. That was a bitter pill to swallow, but then one of my mentors introduced me to this group, and here I am.”
“Oh, that’s a good thing to study!” Doliar said. “I can’t believe we forgot to do a Helingar-Bistal Test on you. Here, go stand right here. Let me get the rest of these sensors out of the way and we’ll get that taken care of before you leave.”
Nym wasn’t sure he liked the idea of that. He already knew the number was abnormally high, and the Collective knew enough weird things about him as it was. Then again, he did have their leader under a geas that guaranteed his relative freedom. If there was ever a group that might be able to help him resolve some questions, it was this one.
The question was if he trusted them to know the truth. It would be easier to make that decision if he knew the truth first. It was probably too late on the soul well size test either way. Doliar didn’t seem like the kind of person to give up on it, so Nym decided to go with the truth.
“I did kind of have an unofficial one done once already, but we’re not sure the results are accurate,” Nym said.
“That’s fine. I’ll do another one right now and make sure you’ve got the right number. You can tell me how far off the old one was after.”
“If you’re sure,” Nym said. “You might need some more people. It took four mages to do it last time.”
Doliar laughed. “Hah, funny. I didn’t know you were an ascendant.”
Navarim wasn’t laughing though. He just looked at Nym thoughtfully, no doubt remembering Nym’s flight training. All he said was, “Should I go get a few more people?”
Doliar waved him off. “No offense to whoever performed Nym’s last test, but I think the two of us can handle it.”
“I really wouldn’t recommend it,” Nym warned him. The Earth Shapers had grumbled about the feedback for days.
“It’s fine. Just give me a second to set up and we’ll get it taken care of.”
Nym just sighed.
An hour later, four mages groaned and muttered to each other while Doliar cast pain blocker spells on them. After cautioning them to keep the incident quiet until any official announcements were made, he dismissed all of them except Navarim. “I’ll know better than to doubt you next time,” the healer told Nym.
It took Doliar far less time to do the calculations, even with him stopping several times to recheck things. Once he was done, he gave Nym a searching stare before redoing them a second time. “So,” he said, “before I tell you the results, what did the last test say?”
“Seventy-four,” Nym said.
Doliar nodded to himself as if that were the most normal and boring thing in the world. “Yep, I can see that. And that was before the matrix destabilization. Well, I did not get seventy-four,” he told Nym. “I got ninety-two.”
Nym’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you sure? That’s a lot different.”
“I’ve got a more accurate measure on your true age thanks to all the scans. I’m sure. I think we’re going to have to go talk to Lord Feldstal again before you leave.”
