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Chapter 319 Notes of a Scholar
🕑 Added 2023-09-17 20:33:29 +0000 UTCAuthor's note:
HERE IT IS!
Damn, this chapter was annoying to write. I just couldn't figure out how to get it right between all the studying and stuff. At least it does what I want, now. I think. More about that 'studying and stuff' in an announcement soon, probably tomorrow. The important bit: I'm back to Owl and there's another chapter coming tomorrow.
For now, enjoy the chapter!
Cheers!
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We spent most of the next day reading more of the diary. Or well, I did. Catori had some things to sort out with the dwarves and moved out of Nymph’s grove into the guardhouse right next to it or something. I didn’t pay too much attention. Jamie’s adventures were too interesting.
After getting their vis enrichment, they set out on a long and arduous expedition to look for larger aura nodes. Things were going pretty well with their powerful body but of course, they weren’t travelling alone. A bunch of people came along and noticed the strange behaviour of Jamie. There was a confrontation a few weeks in which left half the group dead at Jamie’s hands. The remainder either fled or surrendered.
The diary was filled with entries about self-doubt and regrets after that. The king had financed their expedition after all, so they were probably getting on his bad side by killing several of his trusted people. I was surprised to find very little qualms about having had to kill people. I was still hesitant unless I had a good reason. Okay, no. Jamie had a good reason. They were attacked and felt threatened. Without wings to fly away on, killing in self-defence was the only real option other than imprisonment. I mentally congratulated their decision-making and moved on.
The remainders of the expedition finally found what they were looking for. Besides Jamie, there was the student of another thaumaturge, one that had been killed by them. The others were one scout, two carriers, and a squire whose knight had managed to escape.
Jamie and the other thaumaturge were ecstatic when they finally found a medium vis node. I wondered how it had taken them almost two months to get there but maybe things were different back then?
Jamie immediately started to carefully absorb more vis from the node and the other thaumaturge, going by the name of Sevin, worked on setting up a sort of scanner. Jamie did not understand how it worked but they got results. It sounded a bit like an early version of a Thaumometre. They had a set of glass and crystals lined up in a strange pattern and looking from different angles gave a ‘grouping’ of aspects. Where those groupings overlapped, the aspects were from whatever they were looking at while anything else was from the environment or people that walked into the testing area. It was quite interesting but more in a historical fashion. I had much better ways to observe aspects with [Owl Senses].
It took Jamie only a week to find they could no longer draw any more. I knew they had reached medium vis enrichment but for them, it was much less clear what was happening. Even if Jamie was a golem, a creature of magic, their senses weren’t particularly detailed when it came to vis. Which is why they were using the proto-Thaumometre in the first place.
I skimmed through the next few weeks after the group decided to pack up and move on. They kept travelling through the lands, sometimes stopping in cities or villages but mostly trying to stay away from anyone related to the kingdom. There were some scuffles with soldiers and even an assassin sent after them and they lost some people but managed to escape.
Overall, I was starting to see a trend towards viciousness in Jamie’s diary entries. They not only were able to kill without remorse, there was also less and less regard for their assistants. Violence became a near daily occurrence and Jamie started treating the carriers almost as if they were slaves. It got even worse when they were ambushed near a village and the little travel group decided to raze it to the ground as some kind of twisted symbol. The villagers had not even been involved in the ambush.
Though the other side seemed not much better, the kingdom’s soldiers were described by Jamie, who was being hunted by them. It took them half a year of running and hiding before they figured out there were three groups after them. The king, the first prince, and some kind of duke or something. All of them wanted to have Jamie for some reason. It took some careful reading between the lines to figure it out: When the expedition broke into conflict, the people Jamie killed were retainers of the duke, including his second son, so the duke wanted revenge. The thaumaturge they killed was employed by the king, who wanted to pass justice. The prince was a little less obvious but he was probably trying to butter up his father. Or plan a coup. Even chance.
This manhunt continued for almost three years in which Jamie killed each and every member of the original position, either directly or as sacrifice to buy time. The only other survivor was the thaumaturge apprentice who hung on Jamie’s lips like cloth on a line. The two managed to talk some of their attackers to go against their orders and help them out, with proper bribes, of course. That only extended the chase and complicated the politics of the situation. At one point, Jamie ran into a field of corpses where separate groups from the king and duke had run into each other.
I kept skimming with a shake of my head, looking for a change of pace. Jamie was still looking for a larger aura node to grow more powerful and eventually, finally, after almost four years of bloodshed, they found one. This time, they were not careful. Jamie simply ripped the vis into their body, absorbing all they could get. The next four days were written in Ordugh. Jamie had been too distracted to keep up their diligence and Sevin, the thaumaturgic apprentice took over. From him, I learned the aspects of the node: Lucrum, Metallum, and Terra. But mostly lucrum. Which was greed. Desire. Avarice. The apprentice was scared.
When Jamie took back over writing, things were barely comprehensible. I managed to figure out that Sevin was alive and that there was some major battle but Jamie won. Over the course of a few weeks, more battles followed, probably. The only hint was that Jamie talked about taking precious materials and rations from dead soldiers. Someone had to have killed them.
Things got progressively worse until Sevin took over again. He took more meticulous notes, a hint of fear in his descriptions of Jamie. Brutal descriptions of their actions were the norm with a few thaumaturgical observations in between. The enemies they were finding had their armours and weapons infused with magic that absorbed projectiles, weakened armour, and drained energy. After using his proto-thaumometre, he found they were infused with lucrum. Somehow, the way they wove the aspect into their equipment repeatedly broke it down into its components fames and humanum, before recombining them. That way, more of these aspects were drained from anything they came in contact with, be it humans or precious materials.
Then, very suddenly, the diary simply cut off. There were still a few dozen empty pages but nobody had ever written anything on them. I blinked at the interruption and retreaded the last few entries. The only guess I could make was that Jamie and Sevin got captured or killed. Or worse.
I turned my attention to the pages written in Ordugh that had been below the diary. They were made of a much finer paper but the writing was the messy penmanship of a researcher. Scattered thoughts, random circling of some parts, heavy underlining, or crossing something out so badly there was only a black splotch of ink left. It only took a few minutes for me to find that it was an attempt at deciphering the English entries in the diary. And whoever had done it had succeeded. After that, things got much more legible. Quite easily explained by the first line:
If you are reading this then I am likely dead. These notes display my path to deciphering a completely foreign language. I struggled four years but I finally succeeded. The most important parts necessary to understand the diary of Jamie are what you are holding in hand. Keep in mind that you will still have to learn the language so find a secure place before you continue your work.
The following pages will outline why I did this work. I hope someone will one day find it and my efforts will come to fruition.
My name is… irrelevant, really. I am a scholar of thaumaturgy. Our kingdom has fallen to taint after the advent of order made many of our thaumaturges progress faster than they could do safely. I have hidden myself with some provisions in this last vestige, a safe room in my basement. Once my food runs out, I have a vial of nightshade extract to ease my end.
My King believed this diary would help in finding a solution since the soldiers chasing after Jamie were some of the first to gain access to these new floating texts. We do not know how they appeared or why but we believe it had something to do with what happened around this needlessly greedy chase. Jamie is believed dead, though no body was found. The area where they were last seen was impassably tainted.
The corruption has now spread. The only solution we could find was to carve out the land. It would not save the kingdom, but at least prevent the taint from spreading worldwide. Grand arcane devices were produced en masse and used to destroy as much of the land as we could. We were glad to find the world was an empty shell. Had we not found the gap, we might have failed. Now, I lay here, ready to pass on in the hopes someone, one day, might recover these pages. Whoever you are, this knowledge is now yours. All I ask is that you make use of it.
I took a slow breath as I stepped away from the papers. The implications here were… somewhat scary. The conflict around Jamie and their knowledge had escalated for no apparent reason and then the system appeared right when something caused the taint that would destroy this unnamed kingdom. I poked Catori but she seemed busy. I decided to let her know later and move on with the scholar’s work.
He went on to outline the arcane devices they used to separate the land. The primary tool was what they called an Arcane Bore. A device that amped up the effects of an excavation focus to, quite literally, bore large tunnels wherever you pointed it. Someone managed to make it cut slices of ground instead of tunnels, much improving the process. There was a discussion of a floatation device to be built into the land they cut free to have the taint stay separated from the planet. When they found the planet was hollowed out, the idea was scrapped and sadly there were no details on it in the notes.
I took a look at the numbers provided of how thick the planet’s surviving crust was and compared them to what I learned from the Crimson Church. Something was not adding up. At the current speed, it would not have taken eight millennia to destroy this much of the planet. It would have taken much longer. At least four or five times, in fact. Which meant the node was slowing down in its destruction? Could that be true?
Most of the planet was likely destroyed in the initial blast, if what happened at the goblin village was any indicator of how hungry nodes worked. In fact, this scholar confirmed just that. The only issue was the speed. I took out some paper and started scribbling away. This was going to be important for the meeting. I should get a basic theory in place and run the numbers a few times… Maybe we had more time than we thought.
