Chapter 81 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 81: The Ship of Exile 15
The crowd erupted in a roar of cheering.
The young performers stepped onto the stage one by one from the wings. The third act had begun.
Lucita had never seen anything like it.
The spirit world was filled with countless mind-cocoons, which had always rested there quietly, undisturbing and undisturbed, like sleeping shells hardened over time.
Even as the interiors of those cocoons shifted and churned endlessly, everything remained tightly contained within each individual mind-body.
This world, as Lucita understood it, should have been eternally calm, eternally silent.
So why had there been such large-scale vibrations just now?
Lucita steadied herself against the wall, closed her eyes, sank into her center, and called upon her spiritual gift, reaching out from the surface world to sense the faint spiritual cosmos beneath.
She had not used her spiritual gift in a very long time.
Ever since she had been able to breach the walls between world layers, she had simply passed freely between them, directly perceiving the truths beneath the surface.
If a garden has already opened its gate for you, who would still bother climbing the wall to pluck the sparse wildflowers growing in its corners? A lamp placed before you leaves no reason to grope through the dark.
The gift born into her blood had been replaced, neglected, pushed to the back of her mind.
So when she tentatively extended her spiritual tendrils now, she was surprised to find how exquisitely sensitive her perception had become.
The spiritual cosmos she had once forgotten left her astonished.
Once, each mind-cocoon in the spirit world had been like a dead and silent planet, drifting through the boundless cosmos, containing all the secrets of a person's inner life, unknown to anyone else.
Each mind-cocoon was enclosed in a hard outer shell, wrapped around a swirling mass of fragmented consciousness and subconscious, sealed completely, capable of resisting external hypnosis and intrusion, drifting safely and stably through the spiritual universe.
To enter a person's mind, one needed sufficient spiritual force to penetrate the eggshell, then tear through the swirling chaos surrounding it, before finally reaching the true, clear, and fragile core of the mind within.
Just as Lucita herself had once done.
But now, if Lucita were to make a comparison, the cocoon shells had hatched.
The human mind-body was no longer a self-contained cocoon, enduring and defending against a predetermined fate. It had become a star radiating energy, beginning to exert influence upon the boundless spiritual cosmos.
Those secrets and emotions churned endlessly, spilling outward in long, powerful waves.
She was surrounded by countless luminous stars, countless rolling spiritual tides vibrating. And when resonance was achieved in a single instant, fierce light erupted, and in a moment engulfed Lucita’s small star-system.
"Freedom, freedom —"
Lucita pulled herself out of the spiritual mire in haste, opened her eyes, wiped her face, and found herself drenched in cold sweat.
Had this been the Lucita who had first arrived here, she would almost certainly have been lost in that merged torrent of spirit.
She braced herself against the wall, her gaze sweeping across the stage where the actors recited with passionate intensity, then scanning the crowd around her.
Through successive waves of dizziness, the clamor of human voices reached her ears, as though distorted.
No. It shouldn’t be like this.
Throughout her experience, a mind had only ever been a mind. Whether one compared it to a star system or a cocoon shell, at its core a mind was formless, enclosed, defensive.
Ordinary people could not enter their own spiritual world, let alone wield their mind-bodies the way a spiritual-gift bearer could to influence others.
In theory, therefore, as long as Lucita did not encounter another spiritual-type individual with hostile intent, she should have been absolutely safe within the spiritual cosmos, not susceptible to being swept up as she had just been by the unintentional will of a group of ordinary people.
Counting on her fingers, those in the world who could exert spiritual influence on her included spiritual-gift bearers such as the merfolk tribe, and also those among human mages who studied the branch of magic known as Research Magic, or Spirit Magic.
Whatever way she counted, it should not add up to a group of entirely ordinary humans.
—Wait!
Research magic…
Several relevant passages suddenly surfaced in her mind.
“It may be difficult to imagine, but it has been proven that the human mind possesses power, not in the vague rhetorical sense, but as something capable of producing physical effects, like wind or fire.
A great physician, let us call her the Nameless Doctor for now, discovered it, and classified it alongside Wind and Fire magic as a distinct school, calling it Spirit Magic.
To study this form of magic, there are no requirements for natural affinity with elemental forces. The only prerequisites are wisdom and inspiration.
Inspiration allows you to perceive and draw upon that power. Wisdom allows you to analyze and understand it.
Regrettably, a significant portion of the Nameless Doctor’s work was lost in the last catastrophe (this passage comes from an unknown era; the ‘last’ here refers to an equally unknown event), and no researcher since has possessed such genius. The study of Spirit Magic has stalled and stagnated.”
“The existence of spirit itself contains boundless power.
Through a degree of self-suggestion and training, one can materialize one’s own spiritual force and exert a certain influence upon the surrounding world.
If two spirits happen to resonate, then a form of hypnosis, instantaneous and requiring no external means, occurs.”
During her period of study at the Spring Tower, Lucita had read a great deal about Research Magic, but had never found any way into it.
The claim central to Spirit Magic, that "even ordinary minds possess power", was something she had investigated in the spirit world, studying many of the still and motionless cocoons. They had always remained still, showing no sign of activity, let alone any capacity to influence their spiritual surroundings.
But now, she thought she was beginning to dimly understand.
The third act's story was still unfolding on stage. It had reached the part where the pitiable protagonist faced fields that yielded nothing, swept by bitter winds and sorrowful rains.
The crowd gradually fell silent, broken only by the occasional sound of someone unable to hold back their tears.
Taking advantage of the lull, before emotion rose again to its peak, Lucita entered the spiritual cosmos once more.
Now the spirit world had grown calm again, as though the violent eruption moments ago had never happened at all.
At rest, the mind-cocoons looked as inward-turned as ever. Nothing seemed to suggest any outward leakage of spiritual waves.
But Lucita had already felt the energy bursting from the mind-bodies at their peak. Now she could perceive things she had missed before.
She drifted closer to one.
This was the mind of Charlotte, the flower shop owner.
Lucita’s spirit circled Charlotte’s mind-cocoon twice, making no attempt to intrude, only trying to sense the emotional ripples emanating from its surface.
Buried beneath layer upon layer of cocoon shell, these outward-leaking spiritual waves were far weaker than any deliberate spiritual projection. They fell so far below the threshold of detectable resonance that even Lucita, now highly sensitive to spirit-sensing, had overlooked them for too long.
But now, having endured the full blast of that spiritual explosion once, and having become familiar with its frequency, distinguishing these faint fluctuations became easier.
Her spiritual tendrils coiled along Charlotte’s leaking spirit. The vibrations traveled back up the tendrils and resonated with Lucita’s own mind-body. A faint yet unmistakable emotion slipped through Charlotte’s cocoon shell and was caught by Lucita: a tangled knot of surprise, anger, pain, and resignation.
Lucita knew that she needed only to follow this bridged channel and send back a returning impression, and she could have hypnotized Charlotte or struck at her. Or she could have done nothing at all, merely wandered through Charlotte’s mind-body, and come away knowing her thoughts without Charlotte ever suspecting a thing.
A direct channel into another person’s mind. Very few could resist such temptation.
Lucita was no stranger to such channels. Her eyes had seen too much truth; the ordinary curiosity about others’ inner lives had long since withered away.
But those early humans who created Spirit Magic, when they first established such a channel, could they have resisted the urge to excavate, to know, to reshape?
The historical records suggested that among the arcane arts, Spirit Magic, rare as it was, also carried a rather poor reputation. That was largely the reason.
It existed beyond the dimensions ordinary people, even ordinary mages, could comprehend: forbidden and overwhelming power. And precisely because of that, it was capable of far more. It was far more uncanny, far harder to fathom.
The unknown has always bred fear. And given the immense temptation to transgress every boundary, how many mages who practiced Spirit Magic still clung to their principles was difficult to say.
If the threshold for Spirit Magic had not been so forbiddingly high, and if so much of its lineage had not already been lost, it would likely have been added to the list of explicitly forbidden schools long ago, just as Ritual Magic had been.
Those Spirit Magic books sealed in the Spring Tower’s library had sat gathering dust for untold years, until Lucita picked them up and reconstructed their meaning from fragments and oblique references.
Seek. Perceive. Capture. Resonate.
The spiritual gift that was innate to other species. The Spirit Magic created by humans. On the surface, they were utterly different in origin. Yet here, within the spiritual cosmos, there was no visible difference at all.
"The foundational principle of Spirit Magic is spiritual resonance."
Humans, unlike merfolk, could not directly employ a spiritual gift to pierce another’s mind-body and capture spiritual waves. So they had devised another method.
The key was this: the spiritual waves leaking from every mind-body are different.
Immerse yourself. Analyze. Adjust. Align your own spiritual waves until they approach the target’s frequency, until the moment of resonance, when vibration suddenly intensifies and you can slip through the opening, breach the mind-body, and accomplish your purpose.
The violent spiritual eruption earlier had occurred because, in that moment, the spirits of the assembled people had achieved a massive collective resonance.
The same fury. The same longing. The same pain. Riding the crest of the song’s climax, like sunlight triggering an avalanche, they roared awake.
The spirit waves exploded.
That was the process by which Spirit Magic exerted its influence.
Such human ingenuity... truly the best example of necessity breeding invention.
Lucita let out a long sigh of wonder.
By now, the secrets of the spirit layer had all been fully perceived and understood by Lucita.
She stepped back into it.
The rules underpinning the structure of the entire spirit layer, previously hidden, surfaced one by one. The architecture of the world clarified before her eyes.
She reached out her hand to touch one of the rule-lines, and had just begun to lean in for a closer look when her hand was suddenly seized and pressed still by Gaia: "Don't. Lucita, these rules must not be disturbed."
Lucita looked up.
The hand of a god carried no physical sensation. She only felt as though a layer of damp mist had settled on the back of her hand, and all five fingers were held gently but immovably in place.
"I only wanted to look. I wouldn't have disturbed anything," Lucita said.
"I was too anxious. When I sensed your intrusion, I had to come and see. The architecture of these rules is deeply important to this world." Gaia said: "No intruder has entered this layer in tens of thousands of years."
Her expression was complex: "To have grasped the world's rules so quickly… only you."
To grasp the world's rules?
Lucita looked at the rule-lines crisscrossing the spirit layer, then stole a careful glance at Gaia’s face.
Authority over rules was the sole domain of the divine.
That domain was meant to be inviolable, forever sealed away from the creatures of this world.
And now…
She had violated a divine boundary and gained the possibility of contending for that authority, yet the god showed no anger.
Lucita did not lower her guard.
A god who expressed neither joy nor wrath might, in the very next moment, extinguish her life as gently as snuffing a flame.
Lucita quietly weighed her position.
The god perceived all that was true; she too perceived all that was true. The god governed the world's rules; and she had now breached and touched the rules of the spirit layer.
Perhaps she could now use the rules of the spirit layer as some small measure of resistance?
She watched Gaia with quiet vigilance, and then suddenly noticed something: Gaia's form had grown more indistinct than the last time they had met.
The discovery startled her.
She knew that ever since Gaia had become tainted with human nature, she had been moving toward exhaustion. But by the reckoning of divine time, the day of her decline should still be centuries away.
Yet now, less than half a year since their last meeting, her presence had visibly grown fainter.
Lucita had no way of knowing how much time remained before the god's end at this rate, but she knew it could not be long.
Why was this happening?
She thought it, and she asked it: "You don't look well."
“I am fine, child.” Strangely, Gaia did not admit it honestly as she had last time. Her words sounded almost like reassurance. Then she added, “You are well, child.”
If the first "I am fine" was a forced comfort to herself, the second "you are well" was a warmly approving praise.
Was she praising Lucita for knowing how to reassure herself?
Lucita didn't understand.
Gaia seemed to have come from nearby water. Her hair wound back toward the River Gloire, and even when she pressed her hand against Lucita’s, the air around her misted with moisture.
Having made what she felt was a necessary warning to Lucita, she did not wait for a response, and dissolved into the spirit layer, leaving behind only the crisscrossing rule-lines, cold and indifferent, stretching before Lucita’s eyes.
Lucita's questions went unanswered. She could only stare after the direction the god had vanished, helplessly worried for Gaia’s health, and utterly at a loss.
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