Chapter 8-227: A Trip through Hyperborea (1/2)

I murmured the Salute to Aethra, my Magical Day staying constant even as what constituted Dusk Renewal swung about wildly. Maybe it would shift when I actually reached the continent, but either the continent was rotating or the ‘sun’ was spinning around it, none of which were apparent from outside the space. I could only surmise the Sun wasn’t really here, and the space was simply manufacturing it, or importing the light for the space.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! And ding!, just to be contrary...

The magic spiraling through my entire body, lighting up every cell with control and awareness I didn’t have a moment ago, basically gave away the whole secret, but sure, let the alchemical distillations forming in my blood be a big surprise.

I left off painting off the stars here into my Visual File, and reading the magical signatures of the creatures embedded into and affected by them. Maybe they were a way home to the original dimension, maybe not...

Warshaper/2. Such a vital Class, I suppose. +4 to Strength and Constitution, due to being able to maximize use of every cell when exerting yourself, and control your physiology. If I were a warrior, I’d be ecstatic.

Purchased Feat was taken from Alchemist, which was probably the major qualifier to all of this with my Alchemical alterations of my organs. Blood Healing, 5 Health/round, rounds per day equal to Alchemist plus Warshaper Levels, i.e., six.

As opposed to getting something useful, like Healing Reserve, which was twice as fast and unlimited.

Purchased Mastery was... Ki Feats/3: Blood and Spirit: For each Ki point invested, +1 to Fast Healing and Cure effects. I could currently invest... three.

Which I proceeded to do, because I had the excess ki to do so, and my Blood Healing improved to 8 points a round, for 9 rounds a day.

Still worse than Healing Reserve, but it automatically activated if I was unconscious, so there was that.

And there was naturally the expected triumphant sound of Elf/3.

+2 to Intellect. +1 to Wizard/4 (12).

Another space opened up in my brain outside my skull, aired itself out, and gave me the thumbs up to start handling a heavy processing load. And another 12 Pool points, too.

Well, another +1 to Casting Level and some more Pool room couldn’t be a bad thing. I just sighed, and eyed the expanse open in my head.

-Sama, I’m putting up my Map. If you and Briggs could add in before it goes public?-

-Sure!- Sama /replied cordially, and our Visual Files did a mutual data-dance on the /tellepathic level, Lived-lines met cordially, sat down, and rendered into real-space details.

Well, she had certainly been more places here than I had, which happily disguised the fact that all the details weren’t time-based, so nobody would know it was me.

I caught the humorous edges around locations where a lot of Imprusar churches and temples had been mysteriously burned down, and members of their clergy gone abruptly missing. Sama didn’t like Imprusar.

Briggs looked to have wandered up and down the East Coast, Greenland, and Iceland, getting involved in things certain deceased creatures didn’t want him to. His career wasn’t exactly public or private, and I could probably look it up online... but it would be more fun to have him talk about it.

Still, The Map was up, painting itself in swathes of incredible accuracy everywhere we had been.

++Allegiance Announcement: Ladies and Gentlemen, The Map is now going up. Allegiance Magic is at work. If you could look at The Map, and remember where your life has taken you.++

Startled eyes turned on The Map rising up in the locus of the Allegiance and Sama’s Markspace, and almost instantly, it began to fill in.

The most detailed area was centered around Detroit, but there were tens of thousands of people in my Allegiance now, and people came from all over. The Map almost exploded with instant threads along roads and rails, the home towns of people, where they had gone to school, every place they had lived and moved and vacationed, growing and filling in with rapid detail.

There were more than enough Vassals to fill in tons of everywhere, especially the Clergy, who had traveled to fill in my stolen childhood home in France, covering up my lack of knowledge there fairly nicely.

Libraim thought it had mapped the civilized world? It didn’t come close to the immediate thoroughness and detail of this.

With some effort, different memories could be timed, and you could see a place held in joint memory at different points in time, and literally sit there and watch a place evolve. Some people were doing that now, gawking as suddenly their own memories of their past became a playback of all the changes that had gone on around them that they had never really paid attention to.

Stores and shops opening and closing, homes changing colors, trees growing, yards morphing, neighborhoods expanding, or falling into nothing.

Then Sama’s older Marks began to hit, some of them older dwarves and other races, joining in at first reluctantly, and then sighing as the maps of their lives extended out behind them, rich and thick with emotions, many of them extending across the seas to the Old World.

To the darkness in the past that had taken so many.