AN: Happy Independence Day, and happy 250th birthday of our country!
I hope this chapter finds you all well, and I hope all of you have an exciting day! Let's try and not make this the last day that some of you guys have 10 fingers and toes.
Some healthy guidelines for the day: Definitely don't bring out the Planet Cracker 6000, because you definitely shouldn't get a good video of it, and you absolutely mustn't encourage your 50 other neighbors to do the same thing because that would totally overwhelm surveillance.
Also, definitely DON'T go pointing any malicious devices (lasers, spray paint, combustibles, etc) at any Flock cameras around your neighborhoods and definitely DO NOT harm the metal poles.. That would definitely be a bad thing to do when there's already so much going on and would be extremely expensive for Flock Safety. And MAKE SURE that you keep any bluetooth or wireless enabled device, including a car, phone, earbuds, smart watch, etc on your person around these cameras so that they can track your digital signature. After all, they just want to look out for your safety around every street corner and place of dwelling. To make sure you don't do these things, deflock . org has a great map that can help you make sure you AREN'T accidentally harming cameras in your area, showing you where you're definitely the safest and within their view.
Anyway, Happy 4th! May the Lord preserve the soul of this nation's people.
October 28th, 629
It was nice, for once, being handed something rather than having to figure it all out by myself.
The Church’s material on Invocations was thorough. They had been gifted the technology by the remnant survivors of the Pillars of Creation. In exchange for sanctuary, they handed over almost everything they knew, holding very little back.
Anything else they left out was either a specific Invocation that happened to be a clan secret, or something that could be derived by the Church’s summoners rather easily. Invocations were the invention of, intellectually, a mass of ordinary people. Put it under the scrutiny of summoners, and it wouldn’t last long.
The Pope held up his end of our deal with greater detail than I thought he would. I had expected him to give me surface level research and texts regarding the technology. Instead I received the comprehensive study conducted by the Church as well as the raw knowledge that came directly from the Pillars. He then went on to give me well over a thousand individual Invocations, most of them basic, some of them much more advanced. There was even something called a Signature Invocation, which usually meant it was a clan or family secret and the most advanced kind of Invocation the Pillars held.
This was all to say that I wouldn’t have to figure out how Invocations worked. It was all already explained to me in the material I received.
According to it, Invocations were fairly similar to enchantments. I had already seen the process once before when Umara received hers. An Invocation was given to someone by merging Crystals with the flesh. In the case of the Pillars, they used natural Crystals of varying types, some coming from mining, others coming from flora and fauna. They didn’t have access to my manufacturing method that allowed one to turn White Crystals into Elemental, Vigor, or Psyka Crystals. They also didn’t have White Crystals since they lacked the ability that the Church held to purify them.
A Crystal was usually melted down and infused into the skin. Through a process involving Aura and previously alchemized solutions, the Crystals fused with the body and formed a connection with the person receiving them. The installation process, at least with our magic, was easy. Those at the Pillars didn’t have the same luxuries we did, however, and so it was a fair bit more dangerous, even if refined.
In order to be created, an Invocation had to be designed with both purpose and its materials in mind. On some level, most Invocations were custom made for each individual person since the materials and desired functions involved were usually different. There were some sources of Crystals that led to standardized Invocations, but most people didn’t have the luxury of accessing those. If they did, it was usually because the source was fairly plentiful, which also usually meant it was weaker.
The design of the Invocation was almost as important as how it was enchanted. The design usually functioned using the body as the foundation. The body wasn’t flat like paper so designs used the topography of the skin, as well as the muscles, bones, and organs. This led to the Pillars developing a fairly detailed model of the body to be used for their Invocation tech.
In their words, they followed meridians and pressure points. This was also how Umara’s Invocation was laid down, except hers used her spine and reproductive organs as the foundation. Based on models and drawings created by both the Pillars and Church, it seemed the favorite “mounting points” on which an Invocation was laid usually passed through major blood vessels, organs, or nerve centers. The spine was especially popular, being the principal mounting point in the one Signature Invocation I was given access too, though the brain was almost always avoided.
Biology was an important factor in Invocation design, but that was because it had to establish a connection with the body to be used by the recipient. While function was also popularly tied into the mounting point an Invocation went through, it also wasn’t an inherent requirement.
There were some Invocations where biology had no weight except in its connection to the body. These were Invocations where the “enchantment” provided to the material was the sole provider of its function.
And that’s where things got a bit interesting. The Church called them enchantments because that was the closest similarity they had to what the Pillars created. It was an inappropriate reference, though. They weren’t enchantments because those could only be created by Warlocks, not summoners and especially not ordinary people at the Pillars. The Church knew this, of course, as spoken of by some of the authors of the material I was reading.
As for what they were, well, they simply were Invocations. In another way to put it, as said by a Church researcher, they were like enchantments that were laid down with Aura, not magic.
And that’s where the difficulty arose. In initial attempts to lay down Invocations, the Church ran into issues because Invocations required “raw Aura.” This was a difficulty because almost all Magi utilized their Aura with techniques or abilities instead of by its pure self. In the Pillars, it was the opposite. They all utilized Aura in its most raw form, and were externally granted the capacity to control magic through their Invocation.
The two parties had opposite problems, but the Church was able to rectify their weaknesses, which led to another field of research being created in order to study Aura in its purest form, primarily by trying to get more ordinary people to develop it. This was something that Aki, when she was initially with the Church after being saved from the fall of the Pillars, helped with.
Either way, it represented a great opportunity for me.
Even the Church’s studies concluded that summoners had the best success when it came to creating, manipulating, and developing Invocations. Their intelligence paired with, ironically, their overall weakness meant that they were most suited.
From then on, one just needed to learn the language of Auric enchanting.
This was where things got a bit convenient.
More recent studies by the Church and its volunteers from the Pillars showed that the pure Crystals, whether Elemental or White produced through synthesis, were the absolute best materials to work with. Natural Crystals had their little quirks and impurities. Their only benefit was in their inherent traits or magic. A Crystal that came from an animal with great bodily resilience was obviously good for someone who wanted that trait. However, assuming that one could replicate that ability, the synthetic pure Crystals were the best for sheer power and ability.
This was an invention unique to our continent, and the Church was still experimenting with it. However, they had ultimately concluded that with natural Crystals, there was a low ceiling to the level of complexity and versatility one could achieve. With Pure Crystals, those limits, at least for now, didn’t exist.
With the recent disastrous wave of Iron Legion’s retreat and the Scourge's surge, I knew the Church was doing everything they could to arm more people with these Invocations. A lot of the material I was given had been made in the past few years, the cutting edge. I could tell they were rushing to realize its potential.
Potential that I could fulfill myself.
With all the material in front of me, I was quick to begin work. I had a virtually unlimited amount of Crystals that I could use for experimentation. Moreover, I had a particularly unique advantage when it came to testing.
The Church had found that testing out Invocations was extremely difficult, though not impossible, to do without installing it on someone. One could form a connection with an Invocation placed upon artificial or non-living items and attempt to exercise its abilities, but that method, though refined by the Pillars, was extraordinarily weak. It was slightly better with summoners around, but there was a reason why those summoners were already beginning to make new and improved Invocations despite how long the Pillars had developed the technology.
It was a glaring weakness that the Church still attempted to rectify so that development could be conducted without human trials, without inhibition.
I believed I had the answer to that weakness.
I spent the first week of my time in the workshop simply getting used to the details of Invocations. I scanned through and learned every ounce of material I had been sent, absorbing every detail of what the Pillars and the Church had. After that I moved on to the experimental.
I rebuilt existing Invocations. I played around with their abilities, discovering how weak the process was. Then I developed some of my own Invocations, using pure Crystals and theory to take certain abilities down to their weakest and most basic forms. I found the rock bottom of Invocations, the most basic of basics. The theory could be pretty accurate, reducing the need for experimentation to know its effects, but it was still imperfect, especially as complexity grew.
Then, during my second week, I moved on to developing my answer for the experimentation weakness.
Quantum Psionics and its Living Arrays.
The greatness of these magical techniques was that their information could morph, change, and react after they had been formed. They were artificially intelligent, magically intelligent, and I wanted to use this for Invocations.
Not only did I want to use this incredible ability to create an Invocation more complex and versatile than anything ever created before, but I wanted to use those techniques to make experimentation possible without humans. I wanted to receive nearly perfect and accurate results through simulation.
In theory it seemed possible. Normal Invocations couldn’t do anything by themselves. Other people had to “use” them externally with their Aura, but because there was no connection to the body, using them that way with any great effect was nearly impossible. It was like trying to use a detached limb by thinking to it. It was only through muddied and crude techniques that they were able to get something out of them, using those reactions to test theories.
But with an Invocation that could interact with external systems, I’d be able to fix that. I’d be able to generate abilities and test them. That, in itself though, was a major problem.
I realized quickly that I was touching upon another realm of creation. I started finding similarities in Invocations to other abilities that I had developed, as well as ways to combine this theoretical tech with others that I had come across.
Auric enchanting was an incredible system with its own downsides. It demanded that someone figure out how to create an ability using nothing but a Crystal of magical power in front of them and their own comprehensions about Aura and the universe. It was, in a way, extremely similar to how a summoner developed enchantments despite not being the one to lay it down. It was a detached and external understanding of the universe, a science, except Auric enchanting handed out the one way to get rid of that detachment.
This introduced a slew of new possibilities.
Invocations still utilized the magical energies. The Crystals they used still held either Vigor, Mana, or Psyka. This was true even for the pure White Crystals, which held Magika. Invocations were just a way to give an ordinary person the ability to control one or more of those magics.
When put like that, it seemed like there were no limits to the possibilities, which was how I saw it despite the downsides to Invocations. But if that tech could be wielded without having to attach it to your body, or if you could give yourself an Invocation capable of changing and redesigning itself, were there truly any more downsides?
Auric enchanting and Invocations to grant control over any magic without the limits of a Crest or class.
Quantum Psionics to grant artificial magical intelligence that could be wielded by my Psykic techniques.
An anomaly at the heart of the island I currently sat on, one capable of transmuting Vigor into Mana, an unprecedented ability.
Enchanting itself, the ability to manipulate magic using artificial tools.
If I combined and took these abilities to their extreme, would there be any magic I could not wield? Would there be anything I could not do with my mind alone?
What kind of Invocation could I grant myself? What kind of abilities could I give it? Taking it far enough into complexity, what could I make myself capable of?
I struggled to imagine where the limits were, but I also knew there was no better way to find them than to try putting it into action.
Absorbing the information I was given was the easy part. The hard part was the only thing that’d bring me great value, which was making that breakthrough in experimentation and simulation technology.
So during my second week, I worked on figuring out the nuances of Auric enchanting.
It wasn’t like regular enchanting where one attached a coded set of Mana to an object and powered it with a White Crystal. Auric enchanting required one to code a physical Crystal with their Aura, then attach it to someone by giving them enough of a physical connection to it such that their Aura took to it like it would a limb. There was a certain amount of neural attachment as well, which I played around with as it could be applicable to Graves’ prosthetic project.
Either way, like warlocks had to learn the language of enchanting so that they could code their magic, Auric enchanting utilized its own completely separate language, one that was, from one perspective, three times as complex as enchanting.
After all, where warlocks only had to learn the language of Mana, Auric enchanters had to learn a language that encompassed all magic. It was comprehensive, and while both the Pillars and Church had made strides in decoding that language like humanity had done for enchanting, it was far from complete.
In a way though, engaging in Auric enchanting was not unlike wielding normal magic, or for me, wielding my Psyka. Putting aside how esoteric Aura could be, there was great familiarity in the complexity of it when trying to code a Crystal.
It was like trying to attach your intentions to the Crystal. There was no physical indicator that what you were doing had any effect. Instead, the changes left their consequences in the feeling that your soul had when laying them down. After that, it demanded that you maintain a mental image of it.
With this mental image, you would repeatedly train the Crystal until its magic molded to your Aura, no longer encountering resistance. It was how natural Crystals gained their quirks as well. One that was within an animal would mimic the animal’s capabilities and magic through its life and repetition.
The Pillars had figured out ways to enable a visualization of the process, though. Dedicated Auric enchanters would train an Auric technique that could display an image of the Auric structure of a Crystal. Through this, they could study natural Crystals and refine their own craft.
This was also why Summoners took to the craft so quickly. For many of them, it came as easily as breathing. Although the actual coding process demanded control over Aura, assuming Aura being equal, it ultimately came down to control over the mind. Who better than a summoner for such tasks?
And what better mind for visualization and detail than one shaped into a Mind Palace?
I was a fish in water with Auric enchanting. It was even easier than developing enchantments. The only downside was that the nature of Psykic Invocations hadn’t been explored nearly as heavily as Mana or Vigor. I was left to discover another realm for myself, but the Church had still left a strong foundation, and since I didn’t have to start from scratch, it was only a matter of time until I reached for the depths I wanted.
Even then, such discoveries weren’t required for what I ultimately achieved.
As I had expected, my ideas bore fruit. It was at the end of the second week that I finally formed a proof of concept.
An Invocation that could simulate other Invocations, using Quantum Psionics as its intelligent backbone instead of a person, with an enchanted base to mount it and supply it power.
And it was with this breakthrough that I began preparing myself to receive my Crown.