That little vacation had done wonders for Nym’s mental health, but now he was back in the box. Rizin had given him some valuable hints, and he was determined to milk them for all they were worth. First, he was planning to resume his attempts to crack the membrane to the seventh layer and withstand the arcana that blasted out of it.
Rizin said the problem was his own personal density was being spread too thin by splitting himself a dozen different ways, but hadn’t given him an answer on how to breach the membrane without doing that. Passing arcana back and forth as the different copies of himself worked in conjunction was how he’d amassed enough weight to crack the membrane in the first place.
Nym started by trying to create a sort of relay station that functioned as a stand-in for his copy. After all, it wasn’t that they were capable of making independent decisions that was necessary. It was just the ability to pass arcana around. If he could push the arcana into the relay, and make it send it to another one, and another, and another, it would functionally be the same.
That didn’t work. It took him a little while to realize the problem, but eventually he hit on the idea to include himself in the middle of the relay chain so he could examine the arcana as it bounced around and found that it degraded with each pass, both in density and in the speed at which it moved. Nym tried to patch that up, but couldn’t ever achieve the perfect efficiency his copies had managed.
When that experiment failed, he went back to using copies, only less of them. His hope was that he could find a balance between maintaining the needed density and having enough copies to pass the arcana around so that they could break the membrane. There didn’t seem to be a happy medium though, since the lowest number of Nyms it took to break through was six, and dividing his density six ways was just as bad as dividing it twelve.
Finally, he hit on a solution. Instead of multiple Nyms, or relay points passing arcana around, he built a sort of conduit that started and ended at himself. That idea took several iterations of refinement before he got it to start cracking the membrane, and it wasn’t until the conduit basically enveloped him completely that the membrane split open.
Arcana shot out, rolled across the conduit, and was blasted aside. Before Nym could process this, he fell into the crack and passed from the sixth layer into the seventh. It immediately sealed up behind him, and he found himself in a world of darkness. That wasn’t much of a change, really. The sixth layer was an empty white void, and the seventh was a black one.
The real difference was the amount of pressure he could feel against his conduit. It came at him from every direction now, like when he was deep underwater, except now he didn’t have spells to mitigate that. It came down to sheer grit and willpower to hold his conduit in place. Nym could feel the strain already, but it wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t continue.
Much like the sixth layer, he couldn’t really feel much of anything there. It was just a vast, empty nothingness. At least, the area he was in was. No matter how far he moved, nothing changed. That wasn’t really a problem though. Nym wasn’t there to sightsee. He was there to learn to harness a stronger form of arcana. It was all around him, pressing against his conduit, so he decided to just let a bit in.
Instantly, his soul well was flooded, and he had to scramble to try to close the conduit back up before he gave himself arcana poisoning. Nym wasn’t even sure how that would work, all things considered, but he had no doubt it would be unpleasant.
The arcana had so much force behind it that he couldn’t get the conduit to close again. The only thing he could do was cut it completely before his soul well overflowed, but the conduit was also the only thing holding the pressure back. Nym took a half-second to consider his options, then cut the conduit. He could always rebuild it if he needed to, but recovering from seventh layer arcana poisoning was sure to be complicated and painful.
As soon as the conduit broke apart, the arcana pressed on him directly. It squeezed him and pushed, and within seconds, Nym found himself flung back into the sixth layer. He flew backwards across the empty white background he’d become accustomed to until he could arrest his momentum. Then he teleported himself back to where he knew his box to be. It was funny, from the outside, even he couldn’t see it.
But he’d built it and designed its defenses himself. He knew how to slip past them. Soon enough, he was safely ensconced in his sanctum again, his soul well still full of seventh layer arcana. He had plans for that, but he was going to need a lot more, and a more reliable way of harvesting it.
* * *
“Experiment number fourteen,” Nym said. “Here we go.”
The conduit wrapped around him to create the weight needed, but was also spread out like a web, hopefully anchoring him to the layer of reality he was currently in. If all went according to plan, he’d dip a single piece into the rift and have arcana on tap.
The membrane split open, and Nym fell down into it. His supposedly anchoring conduit tendrils came in right behind him. “Damn it,” he muttered as he fell back into the inky blackness and the membrane sealed itself closed behind him.
* * *
“Number twenty-six,” Nym said.
This time he had split himself in two and they were running a conduit that connected them. The idea was that by having one Nym on either side, he could hold the membrane open. The cracks started to form, and Nym fell into it, as planned.
Then, with only one Nym left on the other side, or really, half a Nym as far as the membrane was concerned, it snapped closed again, severing the conduit, flooding him with arcana for a brief moment before he could break it off from his soul well, and then spitting him back out into the sixth layer.
“That didn’t work,” the other Nym said.
“So it would seem.”
* * *
“How many attempts have we made now?” Nym asked.
“I lost track. Don’t make me count them all up.”
“Any new ideas?”
“Nothing we’ve tried has worked. Go ask Rizin for help?”
“Do you think he would?”
Nym shrugged. “Maybe, if he wants something right now.”
“We do already have a way to stay in the seventh layer,” Nym said. “It was the first thing we tried, the conduit cocoon.”
“Yes, but when we tried to pull in arcana, the conduit broke.”
“I think the structure was too fragile for the environment.”
Nym considered that for a second. “Let’s say we’re right. We could alter the shape. Remember when we did the bubble thing when we were still trying to force the density requirement?”
That was a possibility. It would certainly be a lot easier to stabilize the conduit if it was one large piece, but without the movement of the arcana, Nym wasn’t sure it would actually split open the membrane. “Oh, what if we do a double conduit?”
“One in the bubble shape, and another that spins the arcana? You could discard the other one as soon as you’re through, then keep the bubble and reinforce it as needed.”
“Exactly. Should we try it?”
“I don’t see why not.”
* * *
Nym sat in the darkness of the seventh layer and considered how best to harvest arcana from it. He could reliably reach it now, but getting an appropriate amount of arcana through his bubble conduit without drawing in too much was still a problem. He wasn’t overly worried about that though, since it appeared to just be a simple problem of fine control.
With some practice, he thought he’d get better. What he really needed now was time to grow accustomed to existing in the seventh layer. It was a constant drain to withstand the pressure, and no matter how many different ways he tried to be clever about it, it really just came down to a simple question. Was he strong enough to hold against the pressure?
The answer to that was also simple. Yes, he was, for a while. Eventually he’d get tired and weaken, would lose focus, and then he’d be spit back out. But every time he went back in, he lasted longer. He was to the point where he was no longer worried about being ejected if his concentration slipped, though not to the point where he could just exist indefinitely.
His new idea for obtaining arcana was to expand the bubble into layers, to make a second conduit that would grow over top the one he was using to protect himself. Then, when that was fully sealed with a layer of arcana sandwiched between the two conduits, he’d simply break down the inner layer. Then he’d have a measured and contained amount of arcana to play with.
That worked alright, as far as things went, but it was also slow. It would be time consuming to get a usable amount, and it made it impossible for him to work any kind of magic that required more arcana than what he could hold in his soul well. Since he knew it was quite possible to cast seventh layer spells by continuously channeling arcana, he had to be doing something wrong.
Once again, his mind came back to the idea that he simply wasn’t strong enough, and that the only solution was to spend more time there, to train himself to withstand the pressure. There were probably a few new modifications he could make, small ones that relied on seventh layer arcana and could be done without massive amounts of it.
Those might help, but they wouldn’t solve the issue for him. Still, it gave him something to play with while he sat there and waited for the pressure to mount to the point where it became unbearable. Or, more realistically, he was waiting for the pressure to remain exactly the same and his own reserves to weaken.
Perhaps he’d work on adding new parallel processes to his mind. He was still short by a few if he wanted to be able to cast the god killer spell, and this was an opportunity to take a step towards fixing that. That would be a good use of his time and resources.
* * *
“I knew it,” Nym said, laughing to himself.
It really had been the simple, obvious solution. Time and effort spent to grow stronger, to grow accustomed to the reality of the seventh layer, that was all he really needed. The conduit was hardened around him now, projected from his soul well like a second skin. When he needed arcana, he weakened it just a bit and let a trickle absorb into him. When he had enough, he flexed the conduit back to its full strength. The more he needed, and the faster he needed it, the more he just relaxed that conduit-shaped muscle.
If there was ever a point in this whole experiment where he could say that he honestly felt like he’d advanced to the seventh layer, it was right now. He still couldn’t stay there indefinitely, but he could control the arcana he took from it completely. That opened up plenty of new ways for him to improve, possibly even enough to cast the god killer spell. Soon, he’d be able to move onto the next part: spying and waiting for the right moment to strike.
That little vacation had done wonders for Nym’s mental health, but now he was back in the box. Rizin had given him some valuable hints, and he was determined to milk them for all they were worth. First, he was planning to resume his attempts to crack the membrane to the seventh layer and withstand the arcana that blasted out of it.
Rizin said the problem was his own personal density was being spread too thin by splitting himself a dozen different ways, but hadn’t given him an answer on how to breach the membrane without doing that. Passing arcana back and forth as the different copies of himself worked in conjunction was how he’d amassed enough weight to crack the membrane in the first place.
Nym started by trying to create a sort of relay station that functioned as a stand-in for his copy. After all, it wasn’t that they were capable of making independent decisions that was necessary. It was just the ability to pass arcana around. If he could push the arcana into the relay, and make it send it to another one, and another, and another, it would functionally be the same.
That didn’t work. It took him a little while to realize the problem, but eventually he hit on the idea to include himself in the middle of the relay chain so he could examine the arcana as it bounced around and found that it degraded with each pass, both in density and in the speed at which it moved. Nym tried to patch that up, but couldn’t ever achieve the perfect efficiency his copies had managed.
When that experiment failed, he went back to using copies, only less of them. His hope was that he could find a balance between maintaining the needed density and having enough copies to pass the arcana around so that they could break the membrane. There didn’t seem to be a happy medium though, since the lowest number of Nyms it took to break through was six, and dividing his density six ways was just as bad as dividing it twelve.
Finally, he hit on a solution. Instead of multiple Nyms, or relay points passing arcana around, he built a sort of conduit that started and ended at himself. That idea took several iterations of refinement before he got it to start cracking the membrane, and it wasn’t until the conduit basically enveloped him completely that the membrane split open.
Arcana shot out, rolled across the conduit, and was blasted aside. Before Nym could process this, he fell into the crack and passed from the sixth layer into the seventh. It immediately sealed up behind him, and he found himself in a world of darkness. That wasn’t much of a change, really. The sixth layer was an empty white void, and the seventh was a black one.
The real difference was the amount of pressure he could feel against his conduit. It came at him from every direction now, like when he was deep underwater, except now he didn’t have spells to mitigate that. It came down to sheer grit and willpower to hold his conduit in place. Nym could feel the strain already, but it wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t continue.
Much like the sixth layer, he couldn’t really feel much of anything there. It was just a vast, empty nothingness. At least, the area he was in was. No matter how far he moved, nothing changed. That wasn’t really a problem though. Nym wasn’t there to sightsee. He was there to learn to harness a stronger form of arcana. It was all around him, pressing against his conduit, so he decided to just let a bit in.
Instantly, his soul well was flooded, and he had to scramble to try to close the conduit back up before he gave himself arcana poisoning. Nym wasn’t even sure how that would work, all things considered, but he had no doubt it would be unpleasant.
The arcana had so much force behind it that he couldn’t get the conduit to close again. The only thing he could do was cut it completely before his soul well overflowed, but the conduit was also the only thing holding the pressure back. Nym took a half-second to consider his options, then cut the conduit. He could always rebuild it if he needed to, but recovering from seventh layer arcana poisoning was sure to be complicated and painful.
As soon as the conduit broke apart, the arcana pressed on him directly. It squeezed him and pushed, and within seconds, Nym found himself flung back into the sixth layer. He flew backwards across the empty white background he’d become accustomed to until he could arrest his momentum. Then he teleported himself back to where he knew his box to be. It was funny, from the outside, even he couldn’t see it.
But he’d built it and designed its defenses himself. He knew how to slip past them. Soon enough, he was safely ensconced in his sanctum again, his soul well still full of seventh layer arcana. He had plans for that, but he was going to need a lot more, and a more reliable way of harvesting it.
* * *
“Experiment number fourteen,” Nym said. “Here we go.”
The conduit wrapped around him to create the weight needed, but was also spread out like a web, hopefully anchoring him to the layer of reality he was currently in. If all went according to plan, he’d dip a single piece into the rift and have arcana on tap.
The membrane split open, and Nym fell down into it. His supposedly anchoring conduit tendrils came in right behind him. “Damn it,” he muttered as he fell back into the inky blackness and the membrane sealed itself closed behind him.
* * *
“Number twenty-six,” Nym said.
This time he had split himself in two and they were running a conduit that connected them. The idea was that by having one Nym on either side, he could hold the membrane open. The cracks started to form, and Nym fell into it, as planned.
Then, with only one Nym left on the other side, or really, half a Nym as far as the membrane was concerned, it snapped closed again, severing the conduit, flooding him with arcana for a brief moment before he could break it off from his soul well, and then spitting him back out into the sixth layer.
“That didn’t work,” the other Nym said.
“So it would seem.”
* * *
“How many attempts have we made now?” Nym asked.
“I lost track. Don’t make me count them all up.”
“Any new ideas?”
“Nothing we’ve tried has worked. Go ask Rizin for help?”
“Do you think he would?”
Nym shrugged. “Maybe, if he wants something right now.”
“We do already have a way to stay in the seventh layer,” Nym said. “It was the first thing we tried, the conduit cocoon.”
“Yes, but when we tried to pull in arcana, the conduit broke.”
“I think the structure was too fragile for the environment.”
Nym considered that for a second. “Let’s say we’re right. We could alter the shape. Remember when we did the bubble thing when we were still trying to force the density requirement?”
That was a possibility. It would certainly be a lot easier to stabilize the conduit if it was one large piece, but without the movement of the arcana, Nym wasn’t sure it would actually split open the membrane. “Oh, what if we do a double conduit?”
“One in the bubble shape, and another that spins the arcana? You could discard the other one as soon as you’re through, then keep the bubble and reinforce it as needed.”
“Exactly. Should we try it?”
“I don’t see why not.”
* * *
Nym sat in the darkness of the seventh layer and considered how best to harvest arcana from it. He could reliably reach it now, but getting an appropriate amount of arcana through his bubble conduit without drawing in too much was still a problem. He wasn’t overly worried about that though, since it appeared to just be a simple problem of fine control.
With some practice, he thought he’d get better. What he really needed now was time to grow accustomed to existing in the seventh layer. It was a constant drain to withstand the pressure, and no matter how many different ways he tried to be clever about it, it really just came down to a simple question. Was he strong enough to hold against the pressure?
The answer to that was also simple. Yes, he was, for a while. Eventually he’d get tired and weaken, would lose focus, and then he’d be spit back out. But every time he went back in, he lasted longer. He was to the point where he was no longer worried about being ejected if his concentration slipped, though not to the point where he could just exist indefinitely.
His new idea for obtaining arcana was to expand the bubble into layers, to make a second conduit that would grow over top the one he was using to protect himself. Then, when that was fully sealed with a layer of arcana sandwiched between the two conduits, he’d simply break down the inner layer. Then he’d have a measured and contained amount of arcana to play with.
That worked alright, as far as things went, but it was also slow. It would be time consuming to get a usable amount, and it made it impossible for him to work any kind of magic that required more arcana than what he could hold in his soul well. Since he knew it was quite possible to cast seventh layer spells by continuously channeling arcana, he had to be doing something wrong.
Once again, his mind came back to the idea that he simply wasn’t strong enough, and that the only solution was to spend more time there, to train himself to withstand the pressure. There were probably a few new modifications he could make, small ones that relied on seventh layer arcana and could be done without massive amounts of it.
Those might help, but they wouldn’t solve the issue for him. Still, it gave him something to play with while he sat there and waited for the pressure to mount to the point where it became unbearable. Or, more realistically, he was waiting for the pressure to remain exactly the same and his own reserves to weaken.
Perhaps he’d work on adding new parallel processes to his mind. He was still short by a few if he wanted to be able to cast the god killer spell, and this was an opportunity to take a step towards fixing that. That would be a good use of his time and resources.
* * *
“I knew it,” Nym said, laughing to himself.
It really had been the simple, obvious solution. Time and effort spent to grow stronger, to grow accustomed to the reality of the seventh layer, that was all he really needed. The conduit was hardened around him now, projected from his soul well like a second skin. When he needed arcana, he weakened it just a bit and let a trickle absorb into him. When he had enough, he flexed the conduit back to its full strength. The more he needed, and the faster he needed it, the more he just relaxed that conduit-shaped muscle.
If there was ever a point in this whole experiment where he could say that he honestly felt like he’d advanced to the seventh layer, it was right now. He still couldn’t stay there indefinitely, but he could control the arcana he took from it completely. That opened up plenty of new ways for him to improve, possibly even enough to cast the god killer spell. Soon, he’d be able to move onto the next part: spying and waiting for the right moment to strike.
