Chapter 240: Idle Time, Barely Idling
Peace.
It was, in a lot of ways, a rather strange thing to adjust to after coming back from the fae realm.
Day after day, Mercury would wake up. And there would be nothing.
No threat to his life. No new event to attend to. No schemes being played to sabotage him. He just got to sleep, and experience a little bit of sunlight whenever he chose to. He'd go downstairs, have breakfast, and then do… nothing particularly special, really.
Oh, well, that may be underselling it. He did a lot of different things. Magic, first and foremost. It was kind of fun, after all. Mercury loved magic, he loved making things from it. Shadow kind of lended itself to that, amusingly.
Ice was nice and all, but it wasn't exactly suited for weaving. That particular skill was one that came a little easier to Mercury now, given his experience with weaving dreams and his own
Frozen water didn't like to bend, or make flexible strings. It was rigid and brittle. In a lot of ways, it was closer to metal than fibre. Ice was, after all, a rock. As silly as that sounded, Mercury remembered that bit from highschool geology.
Compared to that, shadows were quite malleable once he knew how to ask them to be. It was a little funny, communicating with them, but he also understood them rather well. Better than he did water, even, according to his abilities. He could ask them to raise up, to become three dimensional, to warp and twist, or to form threads.
And that is exactly what he did.
When he wanted to lay down, he wove hammocks of magical darkness, and occasionally, he even tried making his prostheses from it. He also tried doing the same with ice, making sure to practice that bit of magic, too, even if it felt a lot more clumsy due to his lacking skill and the unsuitable material.
But that was fine too. Mercury was in no hurry to be perfect. There were too many projects to tackle for that. Luckily for him, there was a lot of him to go around and practice.
And, as much as he liked lazing about, sleeping too much did get boring, especially when he wasn't really tired. These days, he slept a few hours every few days, when he felt his minds were exhausted enough. And since there was no real reason not to, he usually kept his mind split, practicing different things.
The variety was fun. He tried making one prosthesis from shadow and another from ice, which went about as poorly as he would have imagined it to go, being complex to manage, and hard to do. But that was the fun of it.
He failed. Over and over, he failed at a lot of things. He practiced his forging with Yasashiku, and he made a lot of mistakes. Wasted energy in swings, hits that were off-center, quenching and tempering too long or too short, wrongly timing his swings, and so many more. He messed up his prostheses, his woven shadow hammock ripped and left him flailing to get his legs under him before he hit the floor, and sometimes he'd get a little too liberal with his use of
And that, too, was just okay. Every time he failed, Mercury just got back up and tried again. He carved dozens, hundreds of runes, buying another book from his shop, for 5000 Gold, that contained a bunch more runes for him to learn. He had the money, after all, so he saw no reason not to spend it.
Really, the most awkward bit of time was when Zyl had to go back to his mansion in Unbar for a page or two, dealing with some general politicking. It meant that Mercury was temporarily in charge of the garden, which was a daunting prospect. No matter what, he couldn't ruin all the work his boyfriend had put into it.
So, he got help!
"You want me to prune this?" Yvette asked, brushing the tip of her sword against an errant leaf.
"Yes," Mercury nodded readily. "You're the most skilled Swordswoman I know."
She gave him a small smile. "That's far from being a good gardener, you know?"
That much he did know. However, the only actual gardener he knew was Kim, who was part of Mercury's dream world and could decidedly not exist outside of that quite yet. Maybe Arber counted, too, but they were also difficult to get into this world. So Mercury had to turn to… local help.
"I understand," he nodded. "So, can you do it or not?"
Yvette looked at the plant, then sighed. "Yes," she said. "I can. But I don't know how well."
"Oh, worst case I'll just blame you and Zyl will sort it out," Mercury said calmly.
"... This shall be my most perfect work yet."
Mercury smiled. "I am glad we came to such a clear understanding. Now, then. Show me."
And Yvette did just that. The tension she'd felt from Zyl's name slowly drained from her shoulders as she drew her sword. Her wings unfolded behind her back, and she took a deep breath. Then, her sword moved.
It wasn't fast. In fact, Mercury would describe the motion as slow. Like a paintbrush going through a swamp. But it was, at the same time, inevitable. When her sword came into contact with the plant fibre, it did not slow down. It didn't even hesitate.
Cells were separated from one another, cleanly split in a perfect cut as a single leaf and its stem fell to the ground. Yvette breathed out. "Which one next?"
Mercury listened to
That particular piece of clothing serves him well these days. The smoky tendrils could almost be used like hands, especially for lighter things, letting him split his mind and telekinesis further. It was a lot more… broad, he supposed, than his
Which made it great at swallowing up nails or other workpiece he made with Yasashiku, storing them temporarily to be deposited later, but also made it a great cleaning tool. If he wiped it over dirty dishes and willed it to absorb only the dirt, that's exactly what it did, letting him easily dispose of the waste.
And, of course, it was also good at telling an overqualified swordswoman where to cut the plants. Yvette sighed a little, but did as asked, going through the leaves bit by bit until Lucia showed up.
"Mercury," she greeted the mopaaw. "You asked my help?"
"Yes!" he said. "Thank you. Yvette and I are taking care of Zyl's garden for a little while."
"I can see that," she noted. "It is a lovely project. To see him take to gardening was surprising, but Iris and I have spent many a pleasant evening here."
"Then you'll surely be happy to know that you can now contribute to it! You see, we're producing some plant waste, and instead of composting it all, we were curious if you could burn some of it for ash for fertilizer?" he asked.
Lucia's face fell just a little. "You called me here. To be your incinerator?"
"That's exactly right," Mercury said with a smile.
The priestess stared at him. "Well, the good news is that I am angry enough to light this whole place on fire right now, so I shouldn't have too much trouble doing your little task."
Iris patted her head a little. "There there," she said. "Nothing humiliating about helping out our friends. I quite like gardening. Does that make me inferior in any way?"
"... No," Lucia admitted begrudgingly.
"See!" the ex-assassin clapped her hands excitedly. "Now, I'll start gathering debris, and you prepare yourself for a big fire. The hotter the better!"
"Yes, love," Lucia said with a small sigh, getting ready to do the task she'd been assigned.
Mercury was just a little curious. What was hotter? Zyl's dragonfire or Lucia's rage?
A small smile found its way to his lips. What a silly thought. They were probably just hot in different ways. Well. Mercury knew he personally found Zyl hotter, but that was for an entirely different set of reasons…
"Where do I cut next?" Yvette asked.
The question tore Mercury from his thought, and he listened to the world again, pointing to another bit of the garden with his raiment. "There," he said.
Again, her sword moved in that slow but inevitable way, slicing cleanly through.
"How are you doing that?" Mercury asked.
"Hmmm?" she hummed curiously, moving her sword again. "Doing what?"
"The slow cuts."
"Oh," she said, then gave a small laugh. "It's a technique for practice. All about controlling your pull and edge alignment. And a little bit of aura, of course."
Iris snickered at that. "A little bit of aura, she says. As if it were that easy. If you wanna learn swordsmanship, Mercury, don't start with that."
Huh. What a curious question. Did he want to start learning swordsmanship? Well, maybe not swords. But he did have a cool thing going on with his javelins, and being able to wield twenty of them, if he added aura to the mix…
Yvette looked at him. "Oh no. I know that look in your eyes. No. Absolutely not."
"C'mon Yvette," Mercury chirped. "Just a little bit. A few rounds of sparring. Just-"
"No. I candidly refuse. If you want to learn, just watch closely," she said, rolling her eyes just a little.
Usually, Mercury didn't do that. By now, his gaze could feel like a rather severe weight for people who were not used to it. There were lighter versions of perceiving someone than witnessing them, after all. Most of the time, he just looked at them like a regular human. Sure, he might also see people's auras and perceive their shadows, might have a sense for the water content and airflow through their bodies, might have some idea of their body temperature… but he didn't see them.
Mercury took his ability to look through people, down into their truths, very seriously. It was to the point that he had developed a sense of when someone looked at him, something he thought quite a few people in the higher levels shared. But, well, since Yvette specifically invited him to, he didn't feel there was much need to hesitate.
He sunk into ihn'ar, lazily breaking the veil of gold and iridescence. By now, he had done it so often it came easily, and he slid down that slope of perception so quickly that he felt something click into place. A little space for his mindset to sit.
Every time he used that strange ability to perceive of his, that little space grew more vast. He was building a network of understandings and knowledge - but he was also brushing up against the bounds of it. Mercury was starting to feel his understanding knock on the next veil he had to break. A shapeless, invisible wall at the very edge of his mind. Minds? Whatever.
He thought that part was most likely linked to his personal
Finding a veil was half of breaking through it. Mercury had found it, but now he needed to break it. That mostly meant identifying what it was about, then pushing through. Like how the golden veil had been about whether things were reasonable, and the iridescent one about whether they were real.
But, right now, that was not the focus. Right now, he was meant to watch Yvette swing her sword. So, he turned his eyes on her.
She paused. Glanced behind herself, at his eyes. He wasn't
With another deep breath, she set her posture again and swung her sword. It moved glacially slow, now, even slower than before. Yet, when Mercury listened very, very closely, he heard a faint ringing sound. A tiny noise, somewhere between a hiss and a struck bell.
He looked closer.
The air was being cut. It didn't move out of the way as it did with most small things, but instead, Yvette was applying a faint pull, and a tiny string of aura, and the air split. Just drifted to the side, cut in half, before reforming. A tiny, near-perfect vacuum trailed behind her blade.
It came upon the plant and they came apart almost by themselves. Mercury tried to understand what was at play, but there were a hundred factors all at once. The way Yvette moved her body, the muscles involved, the way her elegant sword had been made, the way mana and stamina moved, and the way she applied Skills to the slash.
All of it was fascinating. And all of it was almost entirely impossible to recreate for him.
He didn't have muscles that worked the same way. Maybe with
A moment later, the cut was done, and then she made another, and another, and another. It became almost a game that they repeated, moving from plant to plant. Occasionally Iris would sweep by, grabbing the plant matter and tossing it into the incinerator Lucia was running.
"This is surprisingly fun," she mumbled, begrudgingly.
"Just don't burn down the bits of the garden we wanna keep," Mercury chided.
"I would nev- oh, right, oops. Yes. I shall be more vigilant," she corrected herself with a small cough, stomping out some fires in the nearby grass. The day went on some more after that.
- - -
When afternoon rolled around, Mercury came to Yasashiku's smithy. The Cloudmatter Shawl was shining with a faint yellow radiance, as if having absorbed some flame.
"You look a little singed, Starlight-kun," the old man said with his arms crossed.
Mercury looked at him, opened his mouth, and coughed up a cloud of ash. "Phaaaaaaaawk."
At that, the old man nodded approvingly. "To acquaint oneself with fire is an amicable pursuit, my student," he said. "But do beware of the dangers."
"Lucia set on me fire," Mercury said, after coughing up some more ash.
"I see," his teacher said, nodding sagely. "A much less amicable pursuit."
Another moment of Mercury staring passed silently, before the old man coughed awkwardly. "Well?" he asked. "Why did she set you on fire?"
"For telling her to watch her flames," Mercury said.
"That does seem like it would do it. Well," Yasashiku patted his leather apron. "Nothing to do about it. You're rather resilient, so I'm sure you'll be fine. Back to work!"
Mercury stared for a moment, then gave a long sigh that swiftly broke into an ashen cough. "Fine," he said, stepping up to the forge. "Fine, let's do this."
And they did. First, they sourced some metal, taking scraps, putting them in a box and forging them together with heavy hammer strikes, until they were left with a homogenous blank. For once, it was bigger than anything Mercury had worked before.
He'd made nails, small ones, big ones, everything in between. This was not that. It was not that at all. "What are we making?" he asked.
"Patience," Yasashiku instructed. "Let it appear in the work."
Mercury rolled his eyes. "Fine, I'll give it time. Just let me know where to hit."
At that, his teacher smirked, just a little. "No," he said.
"No?" Mercury asked. "Then, what should I do…?"
With raised eyebrows, Yasashiku smirked, underneath that crow-mask of his. "Listen to the metal. Hear what it wants to be," he said.
"I have literally no idea what that means," Mercury said.
The old man nodded. "All things we learn are things we did not know before. You learnt to use a hammer. Now you learn to listen to metal. This piece?" He gestured at it with a lazy motion. "It screams what it wants to be. Any novice could tell. Forge it."
Mercury looked at his teacher, putting on the mysterious act again, then gave a sigh. "Fine," he said, bringing down his mind as a hammer onto the elongated block of metal. There was a ringing sound, and it deformed.
"Wrong," Yasashiku commented.
The mopaaw struck again, varying his angle and direction. "Wrong."
He struck one more time, changing things around. "Wrong."
Mercury frowned. He was definitely missing something, but figuring out what it was that he was missing would take a lot of time. He racked his brain, and hit the block again, trying to "listen". "Right," Yasashiku commented.
Huh. Had there been something different this time? Mercury thought about it, then hit the block again, trying to reproduce it. "Wrong," the old man commented. He pulled out a chair, sitting down and watching the mopaaw at work, striking the metal on the anvil. "Wrong. Wrong. Wrong again," he said.
On and on that little game of theirs went.
A dozen wrong hits came before a single time that Mercury was deemed to have done things "correctly". Each hit, he spent a moment thinking it over. The way it sounded, the way it felt. In a lot of ways, those were linked. The movement of the metal caused the sound.
Hitting a softer part would create a dull sound. Hitting a harder part would be louder, creating more ringing. But those weren't what he had to listen out for. What did it mean for metal to "want" to be something?
It didn't really make sense at all. Metal had no desire, no wishes. A piece of steel could just as well become a knife as it could become a hammer. There were differences in thickness, in shape, in what kind of steel you would use for different parts… but at the end of the day, it was just metal.
A malleable lattice of atoms, loosely bonded together due to the way electrons interacted between them. One that could bend and shift and solidify all over again. Mercury gave a soft sigh. That wasn't the right track, not this time.
Thinking of the atomic composition was still a little bit too complex, even for him. Four zeyjn,
What did Yasashiku think metal was?
No. That was the wrong question again. He struck the workpiece. "Wrong."
Like clockwork, the answer came after his strike. And like clockwork, his strikes fell, hammer beat by hammer beat. He looked at the meal, saw it shift and reform. Listened to it, felt the sensation of it against the hammer of his mind. It wanted to be something? He had to coax that out of it?
"Wrong."
Mercury placed the piece back in the forge, reheating it for a little while, then continued his work on it. "Wrong. Wrong. Wrong." Strike by strike, he let the hammer fall. An hour ticked by, and he'd had to reset twice over, forging it into a blank once more.
Yasashiku just watched, arms crossed, only speaking when a step was in the right or wrong direction. It was exhausting, but Mercury still listened.
He struck the metal. "Right." He furrowed his brow. Yeah, that one had felt right. He hit it again. "Wrong."
Damn it.
Mercury frowned, but kept working. This time, he thought about things before strikes. Instead of comparing previous moments, he looked at the piece, the sum of everything ever done to it, and thought about where it should end up. What was he making? What was it destined for?
He hit the piece, and it felt wrong. Yasashiku's voice didn't come after that. Mercury looked at the old man, and found him with his eyebrows raised. "Focus," he said. "Listen to it."
Another hammerblow. A little bit of slag fell to the side, off of the hot metal. It changed its shape a bit, but it was wrong. Mercury followed his intuition and hit a little differently the next time. No, it wasn't his intuition at all. It was his
The second strike felt right. The material crunched under the blow, deforming and changing shape, and it was correct. He heard it, and felt it. That it was correct.
Instead of one in twelve, his success rate went up. One in about seven hits was right. After another reset, he got it down to one in three.
Nighttime came around. Hours had passed, and Yasashiku, eventually, held a hand over the workpiece. He smiled, faintly. "You're getting it."
Mercury nodded a little.
"But that's no excuse for bothering others. Smithing is noisy. We're calling it a day."
"I can work inside little Pandora-" Mercury tried to protest, but Yasashiku cut him off.
"We're calling it a day," the old man said. "Don't seek enlightenment in frenzied bursts. Learning is slow and steady. You will learn more tomorrow, and the day after. Put it down, let it settle."
At that, the mopaaw bristled just a bit. He hated putting things down when they were this close to finished. And he could work it out. He didn't even need to sleep anymore. So why did he have to stop now?
Then, the old man grabbed the glowing hot piece of metal with his hand, and took it off the anvil. "Put it down," he repeated. "And you'll gain more from it than one burst of growth."
Mercury paused, considered it, then sighed. "Fine," he said. "Fine." In a lot of ways, he was an expert in how he learned. He had so many Skills dedicated to understanding things, and with each piece of knowledge he comprehended, it got a little easier. But that did not mean he was perfect.
And while indulging himself here would be fun, he did decide to drop it. There was, however, the hunger to know more inside him. The veil he had yet to break, the metal he had yet to understand, the idea to get along with fire…
Fire.
Slowly, a smile spread across Mercury's lips. He knew what he'd spend the night with.