The instant Xavier activated the spell pattern for Neural Editing, an image formed before his eyes. A three-dimensional depiction of the different neural pathways in his brain. The image was small, roughly the size of his brain, but at this size even with his vision he wasn’t able to see it in the detail he needed.
He was easily able to manipulate the image, however. He’d not only watched Roln do this a few thousand times, he’d experienced it. Experiencing memories, he had found, could give one the ability to embed what they’d experienced into their muscle memory. It was something he and the others had benefitted from greatly—and it also benefited every single person that had been trained under his rule.
It was an incredibly powerful way to uplift the skills and prowess of others.
It was also an incredibly powerful way to steal the abilities from others. Xavier hadn’t quite imagined stealing Roln’s abilities. The mental construct had never given access to his memories in this way before, and Xavier supposed he hadn’t given access this time either—Xavier had taken it.
Either way, what he was doing felt foreign and strange and yet at the same time completely natural.
The only problem was, all the memories he’d experienced had been of Roln using Neural Editing on his own brain. Xavier had searched and searched, hoping to find a memory of when Roln had been the mental construct he was now—or, at least, the one he was before he’d been damaged—so he could experience an example of his own brain’s neural pathways being edited, but no matter how many doors he entered, Xavier wasn’t able to find one.
He had to make do with what he had.
Xavier used the same technique Roln had used when studying the neural pathways. He created a room inside his mind and expanded the brain map until it reached the very edges of that room, then he shrunk his mental construct until it was small enough to touch the individual neurons and fly down the different pathways. He couldn’t say this was actually what his neural network looked like, but the spell’s approximation would give him everything he needed to perform his current task.
Xavier flew down the different pathways. Whenever he was close to a neuron, which was always as every inch of the brain map was incredibly dense, he could feel what that pathway represented.
Here was his ability to hold something in his hand, and when he dug deeper, here was his ability to specifically hold a stylus, a sword, a bow, a staff, a scythe. These abilities, habits, pathways—whatever one wanted to call them—were thoroughly interconnected, to such a degree that unpicking one might damage another, and trying to strengthen one aspect might inadvertently strengthen the same aspect in another pathway, having unintended and indeed unwished for consequences.
Roln had lived so long and performed this task so much that he’d become a genius at it. That was why he was so easily able to make effective changes to Xavier’s neural pathways.
Xavier felt apprehensive as he sensed more of the different pathways and what their connections did and meant, feeling just how dangerous it would be to mess with these in the wrong way. He couldn’t simply delete this pathway here if he wanted to get rid of a bad habit, as that pathway had a lot of other things connected to it.
It was all far more complicated than it seemed.
As Xavier flew from one end to the other of his brain map, feeling every neuron he could, he fell into a sort of trance, and was slowly beginning to get a feel for how it all worked.
For how he worked.
There were so many things in here. So many little habits that he hadn’t truly been aware of, no matter how present he thought he was in everyday moments. This was like looking at his personality, his life, from an objective perspective and under a microscope.
He was surprised to discover how much of his life was simply habit. Well-worn paths, tread over and over. He wondered… at what point was it actually him making decisions, versus his wiring taking over? Were they one in the same, or was it more complicated than that?
Did he even have free will at all?
Xavier pushed those kinds of thoughts out of his mind. The old free will versus determinism debate didn’t feel helpful to him. As he searched through the brain map, he came across a knot of pathways that felt different to the others. They were less active and felt as though they’d been suppressed, as though his mind was protecting him from them. At first, he thought that these must be Roln—the mental construct’s imprinted mind. He’d been about to further investigate when he hesitated.
There simply weren’t enough of these pathways for them to be a billions of years old dead Wanderer’s mind, and all the memories that mind contained. This…
This must be something else.
Xavier reached out, touching a hand to the knot of memories somewhere around the edges. He flinched as he did this, as though the action had somehow caused physical pain—and it had. There was a sharp stab in his stomach, and his chest felt suddenly tight. The feeling was strange, and yet there was something familiar about it. He felt a memory coming up, trying to burst forth into the centre of his mind—his main consciousness. He materialised into that centre room and narrowed his eyes.
The memory wasn’t Roln’s.
It’s mine.
With the mastery over his own mind that he possessed, he stopped the memory from fully happening, but he couldn’t stop himself from seeing a still image of its beginning.
Xavier sitting in his room, no more than five years old, alone with a book. His mother pushing his door open, her face red and twisted.
Just the sight of that made his chest constrict tighter and his breath come faster.
He pulled away from the memory, pushing it back down, deep into his subconscious. Whatever that was, it wasn’t something he wished to deal with.
Not today. Maybe not ever.
His deep past wasn’t something he wanted to mess with.
Xavier returned to the brain map and kept exploring it until he came upon the true knot of neural pathways he’d been looking for. They were far denser than the ones surrounding them. They looked and felt entirely different to all the ones around them.
Finally, here we are.
Xavier got to work. The moment he delved deeper into these neural pathways he could feel the trauma that had tainted them. Could feel the pain that suffused every single one of them. They were suppressed in a far stronger way than his own old and forgotten parts of his brain had been, but at the same time these wounds were more raw.
They’re still bleeding.
The torture the mental construct had experienced at the hands of the memory mages had contaminated everything that made Roln Roln.
Xavier got to work. It was incredibly hard, complex work, unpicking the trauma from the different pathways. There were many times when he wished he could copy-paste the neural network and work on the pathways in isolation. He even wished that he could summon the Spirit of Time and get more than one go at doing this—but that wasn’t how that worked. When he observed an unfolding, he wasn’t able to experience what happened inside their mind, only what happened inside their body. And so, it would be a complete waste of time.
Xavier made more than one mistake along the way, but bit by bit, he was able to unpick the trauma, essentially healing the different pathways as he went. It took an exceedingly long time, even as he became more and more proficient at it. The brain had an insane number of different connections, interacting with them all, and doing such surgical work—the explosion outside grew and grew. Time passed for him and him alone, and then only in his mind, and as he kept himself in a flow state while performing this task that time seemed to compress.
But it still felt like an eternity passed before his task had finally been completed.
And I still don’t even know if this will work.
By the time he was done, he’d learnt a hell of a lot about how to edit his brain, though he hadn’t yet put that into practice as all he’d been working on was the patch of his brain map that concerned the mental construct.
That particular part of his brain map was still differentiated from the rest of his mind. When he’d tried to integrate it into his main consciousness, his mind had suppressed it, turning the memories into that long, bloody hallway. Though Xavier had unpicked and removed the blood, he hadn’t stopped that part of his mind from being differentiated—it was still just a hallway that he could walk through.
Except now, without all that pain getting in the way, he could better navigate that hallway.
When he stood in the doorway he could feel the memories he needed, and where they were. All the contamination was gone. It was now similar to when he broke into the mind of another Denizen—he could feel his way around their memories, merely thinking about what he wanted to find would then direct him toward it.
Standing in that doorway, thinking about what he wanted, he could sense the right door. He could even bring that door forward, so it was right next to him.
The information behind that door… that’s what’s going to allow me to save the innocents from that A Grade’s self-destruct.
Xavier stepped over the threshold, into the hallway, and right up to the door. He reached for the handle, then stopped himself from turning it.
Was this truly why he had spent so much time on this? An eternity had gone by, just him alone in his mind, wandering these halls and then editing his brain… all to save a few innocents?
Yes, as long as it didn’t put him or his people at risk, he would do most anything he could to save those who deserved being saved, but he knew there was something else at work as well. He looked back through the doorway and into the corner of the room where Roln had once huddled.
Roln was the reason he’d gone to all this effort, not just those innocents.
What he needed might very well be right there behind that door, and he was going to go after it, but there was something he needed to do first.
He needed to bring Roln back.
From all the memories he’d experienced, all the things the man had known… Xavier had quickly discovered that he’d taken the mental construct for granted. He now had absolutely unrestricted access to the mental construct’s memories, to the point where he could look to see what actually was on the 1,000th floor of the Tower of Champions—for he knew that Roln had that information—but perhaps Roln had had a real reason for not sharing that particular information with him.
Perhaps even the System had been right in restricting such things from him, too.
Xavier’s pride, his arrogance, made him think that he knew what was best for him. That he knew what the right choices he needed to make were. That he knew what information he needed, and that he could be trusted with knowing it.
Yet was that really true?
If he could be trusted to know everything, or almost everything there was to know, would having that information help him?
Had Empress Larona been right when she’d told him it was a curse?
There was a reason, after all, that he hadn’t touched his own knotted memories.
Maybe there were some things he didn’t need to know.
Xavier might feel as though he was a pioneer, discovering so many things, having so many breakthroughs, and fighting for the ultimate survival of everything, but he knew he was standing on the shoulders of all the giants that had come before him.
Giants like Roln.
I’ll step through this door, learn what I need. Then, I’m going to bring him back.