After I spent a whole week dedicating myself to the passive [Insight]-seeking [Cultivation] of my soon-to-be-formed [Purity] and [Inspiration] Aspects, all the conditions were finally gathered.
Those were my first thoughts upon waking up on that said day.
My second thoughts were that if I were to be idle like that for another week, it was fully conceivable that the last signs of my overdevelopment disorder would fade, effectively interrupting whatever potential anti-overdevelopment [Cultivation] I could be doing.
During this last week, [Guided] hadn't even allowed me to spend my energy in any form other than the creation and maintenance of the [Cultivation] [Cycle] I used to substitute all the physiological needs I could.
Not that I refuted the need for such an extensive overdevelopment excess buffer when it came to repeating the equivalent of what happened during the formation of my [Ambition] Aspect.
It was simply frustrating to go through endless [Insight]-seeking [Cultivation] without being able to manifest them into existence.
There were certainly some comprehensive and cumulative benefits to recording my every [Insight] and building up on them without manifesting them...
But even accounting for rare or unique cases, I failed to imagine doing so being comparatively more efficient than simply implementing those [Insight]s and seeing where they led in practice.
In any event, in the end, after I explicitly reduced my daily Essence development quota to what little I could lessen it to by entirely discontinuing any non-essential active [Cultivation]s, I was finally ready.
My mind made, and with [Guided]'s approval, I changed my bodysuit and took off, in mere moments escaping the metallic walls of the spire concealing the unused storeroom-turned-private quarters.
A flight lasting five minutes was all that was needed for me to arrive within the infirmary area, where an unused bed in a private ward was already reserved for me in case I accidentally shattered my memories or something.
Making my presence known upon arriving, I went through the process of admitting myself in, then conveniently only had to wait a quarter of an hour for Lorekeeper Avenorium to show himself, sixteen minutes following which I swiftly invited him to follow me inside the private ward I prepared.
"I haven't forgotten or omitted anything, have I?" I asked once we reached the ward, already emptying my backpack to find my "Origin Memories Project" notebook, while he had yet to close the door.
"What do you think?" he answered with unneeded sophistry, nearly causing me to roll my eyes.
"Well, this is my personal experiment, not a sanctioned Seeker research project or whatever. That means I'm the prime authority over it. So, if I say it's good, it's the equivalent of staking my Seeker rank on it," I unfolded my own sophism.
"However, if this experiment is to be done under the purview of a Seeker as exalted as a Lorekeeper, then I think there is a reasonable argument to be made about part of the responsibility engaged being partly on the side of-"
"Alright," he cut me off with a smile showing all his dangerously sharp teeth, "As an aside before we get to it, have I already told you that you would do marvelously as a contract writer once you reach Everwell?"
Upon hearing him say something like that, I recollected all the people who once mentioned contract making and contract writing to me, but, miraculously...
Neither I nor [Guided] found Lorekeeper Avenorium as yet part of this broadening list he would now become an official member of.
"No, but many have previously attempted to warp my Path towards such an activity under the pretext of my being extremely well-spoken, so I am definitely planning on learning about this field once I get to the Everwell Sector."
"Perfect. Lots of coins to be made there. Not that you're interested in that. But again..."
While Lorekeeper Avenorium rambled on, I started paging through my notebook to get to the tangible experimental methods I designed.
There were as many as four, all intended to create or recreate my memories of how I formed my Origin Aspect.
"...I'm sure you would also do well as a banker if push comes to shove. But anyway, are those your experiment records? What are you going to do with everything you've written in your fairy-sized books once you leave? Sounds like a massive and very fascinating headache I hadn't thought about."
"Burned, archived, or transcribed into giant-sized books, I don't care," I told him truthfully without looking up, having no reason to lie or dissimulate my thoughts on the topic.
"It's not like my Origin Aspect can forget them, so writing things up is mostly for my comfort and efficiency when it comes to research, which it is unable to do on its own."
"Your Origin Aspect truly sounds like a marvelous research assistant," he admitted. "Not that I would be willing to pay the cost of my entire Essence being dedicated to a single Aspect for it."
"On that subject, did you know it's highly likely that before the Calamity, there existed Aspects and technologies capable of accomplishing exactly that? Truly makes you wonder, doesn't it?"
"Sure does," I replied, more [Focus]ed on preparing for my imminent memory-creation [Will] manifestation than on listening to his diffuse [Knowledge] meandering.
"Oh, right. How long do you expect your first attempt to go for?"
His sudden asking of a question relevant to our presence here was all the signal I needed to mark his [Focus] as having shifted and finally intersecting with mine.
"I would put my every attempt at being at most a quarter of an hour long each. If any lasts longer than that, something probably went wrong," I answered him with my best approximation.
"Not wrong, in an experimental setting where you don't know the answer, nothing is wrong, simply unpredicted," he corrected, finical as ever, "And considering what you're attempting to do, isn't the unpredicted to be anticipated?"
"I'd prefer to keep the surprises to a minimum."
"A sentiment shared by every experimenter before surprises unavoidably arise." He chuckled.
"Anyhow, when are you going to start? Shared responsibilities imply shared authority, and if you continue dawdling, I'll have to start exercising my limited authority to help myself on your records to satiate my growing interest in the [Knowledge] they may contain."
"I'm all ready," I declared.
Turning the pages of my notebook served no purpose at that point.
I knew exactly what this first attempt of my first method consisted of.
Leaving my notebook as in, I beat my wings once, sending me off in a smooth parabolic trajectory towards the bed located at the center of the back wall.
Landing weightlessly, I briskly lay down to assume my most comfortable position.
Four methods.
Three intended for the recreation of lost memories through the three factors of disjointed neurons, forgotten communion-based sensations, and [Guided] immersion.
One stupid enough to aspire for the hopeless creation of memories that had never been, or the equivalent of scrying into my past.
For this first attempt, I was evidently going for the most logical approach of [Will]ing all my brain's neurons associated with fragments of what it was like back when I formed my Origin Aspect to fire at once.
It was merely my first attempt at this method, though, so I wasn't anticipating any sort of immediate success.
My continued failures over the last month had already deluded me of the notion of immediate success when it came to the discovery of an [Exertion] part of my [Ideal] [Guided] Essence [Cultivation].
"Commencing," I announced, so that Lorekeeper Avenorium knew to begin with his [Assessment] aimed at both keeping track of my biological and Essence wellbeing, the latter of which he could only achieve through me opening my Essence to him.
Step by step, I flowed into the deepest [Harmony] [Cultivation] I could manage.
My heartbeat slowed.
My physiological [Cultivation] accordingly dulled.
My thoughts stopped fuzzing about, gradually merging into a continuous flux.
When I reached the threshold right before naturally slipping into communion, I steadied myself.
First method.
Disjointed neurons hypothesis.
First attempt.
Proof of concept.
I [Will]ed all of my brain's neurons connected with any manner of remnants related to what it was like when I formed [Guided] to fire at once.
As this was only a tentative attempt, I only invested a tenth of my energy into manifesting my [Will].
Nonetheless, for all of a second, an undercurrent of warmth and cold coursed through my mind, which not even my [Harmony] Aspect succeeded at grasping before it vanished like it never existed.
Something... happened.
Something definitely happened.
"Disjointed neurons hypothesis, first attempt, one tenth energy invested, partial success," I reported.
"No physiological or Essence-based anomalies that my [Assessment] picked up," Lorekeeper Avenorium completed.
"Proceeding with total memory stimulation, no energy limits, up to triggering [Ambition]."
No answer.
Irrelevant.
I [Will]ed with all my available energy for all my fragmented memories linked with the formation and emergence of my Origin Aspect to be restored to a state I could access.
It didn't matter if they were incomprehensible to my present mind.
I just wanted access to them.
One tenth.
Two tenths.
A third.
Half.
Three-quarters.
In a matter of minutes, everything I had to give flowed into this potentially pointless endeavor, all while chaotic and abstract concepts of warmth and cold came to me as if I had always known them to be such.
There was no rhyme or logic for my mind to make sense of.
I could only accept such concepts for what they were, relying on my [Harmony] Aspect to preempt any of the endless contradictions my unformed mind's understanding of reality had with my current one.
One moment, my mind filled with warmth of such intensity and comfort that it threatened to take my consciousness under.
Another, an all-devouring cold began as if looming over my very Essence, causing me to react in ways I had never conceived, ways incompatible with my present self.
There was nothing I or [Guided] could do but weather through this otherworldly reliving of events that once were but weren't anymore.
When the manifestation of my [Will] ended up taking away the last drop of my energy, and without anything indicating to me that this was a very bad idea to pursue this further...
I ignited my [Will] with the spark of my [Ambition] to overcome the theoretically impossible issue that was Essence overdevelopment.
Unlike the first time I leveraged my [Ambition]s to push me beyond my limits, however, this time, I did so with the Aspect fully formed and stabilized, and with a [Will] Aspect similarly stabilized while also having advanced to Tier 3.
Tier 3.
From the sixteen or so hours of [Will] healing I performed since I got my Essence overdevelopment disorder back under control, my Tier 3 [Will] Aspect had not derogated to the rule of doubling its relative effectiveness with every Tier advancement.
While that, of course, reopened the blazing inferno that was my curiosity about what Tiers even were, how they worked, and how they came to be, I had long received confirmation that such pointed interrogations about the very foundation of Essence belonged to a research field on a similar level to the likes of Essence evolution.
Fields beyond my reach.
For now.
At once, like an incandescent conflagration suddenly lighting the entirety of my Essence, all that defined me was uplifted.
My [Focus] sharpened.
My [Awareness] discerned more.
My [Insight] and [Harmony] worked in perfect unison to deal with the surge of unfathomable memories.
My [Will] ceased to demand energy to continue being manifested, in place demanding me to bear a burden proportional to the heights my [Ambition] aimed to reach.
That's what made it exponential.
Because my [Ambition] was never to settle for the bare minimum.
I did not sacrifice a whole week of Essence development to satisfy myself with the bare minimum.
The warmth filled my mind with extraordinary [Clarity].
It couldn't be qualified as just a proto-sensation anymore.
It wasn't warmth that I was remembering.
It was [Warmth].
An all-encompassing [Warmth] that meant so much more than what it first appeared as.
Life.
Survival.
Growth.
Safety.
Then came its opposite.
The [Cold].
Death.
Danger.
Cold.
Unavoidable.
So cold.
Then [Warmth].
Followed by [Cold] again.
An endless [Cycle].
The environment in which... I was nurtured?
The memories of strange sensations I was reliving through felt so utterly foreign that even [Harmony] failed to grasp the most peculiar and unusual ones, forcing me to accept them as is.
How did I end up forming the [Guided] Aspect while experiencing reality through such a bizarre perspective, one reduced to an alternation between [Warmth] and [Cold]?
Was it really about what the theory of Origin Perspective had tried to make me believe? That the difficulty of forming an Aspect fluctuated enormously depending on one's perspective, thus making it one of the main factors behind Aspect formation difficulty?
No.
The jumbled memories and the exponentially growing burden of my [Ambition] were causing me to lose my [Focus] and come to hasty conclusions.
[Truth]fully, there was nothing.
Only an endless [Cycle] of alternating [Warmth] and [Cold].
Not a single fragment of memory directly associated with anything relevant to [Guided] or a proto version of it whatsoever.
Yet.
I pushed further, unconcerned with my mind or [Harmony] being overwhelmed by how many memories I was unearthing and recreating.
I thought things couldn't grow weirder.
I thought a perspective could only derive so much from the one I held.
I thought that even with an incomprehensible [Perception] of reality, nothing was irreconcilable.
It was my past self's perspective, after all.
I was proven wrong.
A wrongness that took the form of a whisper.
The first whisper.
A whisper that accompanied my first shift, at the inception of my endless quest for [Warmth] when the [Cold] unavoidably came to loom over existence.
A whisper that transcended language and sensation.
A whisper so utterly unintelligible and incoherent, yet so paradoxically familiar.
When I manifested the memories of this whisper, I simply lost the ability to forget it.
It was there.
It existed.
Except it did not.
It wasn't [Warmth].
It wasn't [Cold].
It wasn't a sound.
It wasn't a sensation.
It... simply was.
A whisper that somehow existed as part of the foundation of how my endless quest for [Warmth] came to begin.
Ostensibly, the first proto-manifestation of [Guided] before I formed it as my Origin Aspect.
What caused this whisper?
How did I understand it?
Why did it happen?
I dug deeper, [Will]ed my neurons to bond and fire until hundreds of whispers resurfaced...
Until they gradually took the familiar form of [Guided]...
But [Ambition] by itself could not unendingly drive my Essence past its limits.
There came a point when I had to decide whether to stop where I was and only incur moderate consequences...
Or draw ever deeper until a couple of days of unconsciousness became the only viable conclusion.
My reason won.
I wasn't getting to the bottom of this today.
Not with this second attempt.
A lead this certainly was, but not one necessitating giving myself up for it.
Dialing back my [Ambition], it felt like a pulse of pure relief coursed through my body as the burden lifted and the strain vanished, leaving me with only the aftermath to deal with.
"Disjointed neurons hypothesis, second attempt, total energy invested, [Ambition] threshold crossed, partial success with notable findings," I said, employing my [Awareness] to start beholding the extent of the damage my [Ambition] caused to me.
Conveniently, I had a Lorekeeper, known for his [Assessment] Aspect and [Knowledge], right next to me, so I turned to him with evident intent.
"You’ve pushed your body far past its safe limit," he started.
"Pushing your body so caused many of your small blood vessels to rupture. The bleeding from your ears, eyes, and nose is only superficial, though."
"On top of that, your muscles have sustained widespread micro-tearing from extreme over[Exertion]. You’d be better off addressing that before your biology does it for you through unnecessary natural healing."
"Your Essence hasn’t shown any overt signs of disorder beyond increasing evidence of overdevelopment, though I did notice several anomalous reactions taking place."
"Mind filling me in on what caused them? Or would you prefer to be left alone to organize your thoughts first?"
"Is that a trap question about making assumptions without bases?" I countered, already accelerating my [Cultivation] to its relaxed limits to start recovering energy to deal with the consequences of my own actions.
[Will] healing myself being such a rare occurrence these days, I rightfully treated it with all the [Focus] it deserved.
"Could be," Lorekeeper Avenorium said with the most exaggeratedly guilty tone I ever heard employ.
The [Ideal] answer to satisfy both his curiosity and Seeker procedures being what it was, I took a slow breath and, with the bit of energy my accelerated [Cultivation] had already restored, [Will]ed my memories of the first whisper into being.
"Move," I uttered straight at his face.
He stilled instantly.
"That... felt extremely bizarre," he asserted, his yellow-green eyes locked in on mine. "Is that something you found in your earliest memories?"
"Found isn't quite the adequate word," I corrected him in the same way he did for me.
“I forced the phenomena called memories to occur by reconstituting whatever fragments of them my neurons retained."
"Once I gained access to them like any other memories, I then had to reinterpret them by harmonizing them with my current perspective."
"It was during that process that this strange whisper manifested in my mind. It currently appears to be a plausible origin point for [Guided]."
"I still lack any actual evidence, however. The connections are entirely circumstantial.”
"Well, that's as good a starting point as any," he reasoned, "And a truly fascinating one at that. Do keep me apprised of when you intend to schedule your ensuing session. It would be my pleasure to assist such an inquisitive young spirit in the pursuit of such ethereal [Knowledge] in pursuit of [Truth]."
His intentions of satisfying his own curiosity clear as the sky of the Red Sand Realm, I answered in kind.
"Of course, your eminence, Lorekeeper Avenorium. Your benevolence truly fills my heart with everlasting admiration for your unparalleled generosity."
So long as he helped me, really, words and gestures were the cheapest of leverage to bring to the negotiation table.
"Well said." He nodded, a big smile gracing his muscled, green face. "As a last aside, have you visited the [Mystery] Aspect section yet?"
I shook my head.
"It may be of some interest to your venture," he added, not sharing further detail on why I ought to visit that section of the sanctuary.
"Do not fall for the [Eldritch] and [Paradox] fallacies, though. Too many good Seekers reached for those before their minds were ready and paid the price. I wouldn't want you to follow in their footsteps."
Leaving those cryptic words behind, the Lorekeeper I was arguably closest to turned and departed the private ward, quietly closing the door behind him.
No farewell.
No pointless questions.
No attempt to impose a research methodology.
No unsolicited advice.
Just a single, cryptic recommendation regarding an Aspect line research, delivered without explanation and left for me to decipher on my own.
I watched the closed door for a moment before returning my [Focus] and [Awareness] inward.
There was a reason Seeker Lorekeepers stood alongside Sentinel Knights in prestige, local ranks they may be.