Three weeks was a long time to be alone with your thoughts.
Well.. Half those thoughts weren't technically mine.
Ever since I unlocked Mirror'sCouncil the other "me's" have not shut up. It was like peering into other people's conversation every once in a while! They weren't even useful, they were just spewing bullshit!
Hiroto, I think you left your oven on.
I don't have an oven, dipshit!
Oh yeah.
At least they tried to be useful I guess.
The one that hummed children's songs could fuck off directly.
He was begging to be let out everyday.
Was there a restriction stopping these guys from being useful?
Moving on.
I'd shattered another cup this morning, bringing my total to 4. The medical professionals had promised my depth perception would "resolve naturally." Which was either a lie or evidence that I was slow.
I looked at the cup on the ground, or what was left of it.
I liked that cup too. It was cheap and it made my coffee taste better.. Probably.
I'd reached for it with my hand and misjudged the space. Then I basically slapped the shit out of the cup when I was trying to sip some tea. Fun.
Then my Keen Eye showed the trajectory of the falling cup, and then how useless it was to stop it. Thanks Oculist.
I swept up the pieces and tossed them in the "broken shard" box. Damn, it was really getting full. Maybe one day I'd get famous and sell these back for more money.
The apartment was on the south side of Crass City– the same city I'd been in the whole time– in a building that smelled permanently of bread from the bakery below. The smell was probably the best thing about the place, since I always forgot to eat.
The apartment itself was small. One room that served as a bedroom, office, and the place where I stared at walls and talked to myselves. A bathroom I shared with two other tenants, and a desk that was probably used as a cutting board. Why were there sword marks on the table?
I sat at the cutti- desk and pulled out a bunch of case files Helena had sent a few days ago.
They were relatively easy jobs, I'd been doing a lot of those over the past weeks.
The kind of work that wouldn't require me to dig out my own eyeball.
I SHOULD have opened them.
But then I instead started to read about the other continents, just as I had been doing for the past weeks. Man, I love procrastinating, Helena sure didn't though.
I had started researching after my first week of bedrest.
I started to go out to the library in the Merchant District, to a bookshop two streets over that had a very nice section on essence theory.
What I'd discovered was quite embarrassing to say the least.
I didn;t know shit about the world I was living in.
The setting had changed so drastically, and it had only ever encompassed Blackwood in the game, granted Blackwood was a huge city.
I knew things like where to buy food, how to avoid the constabulary, where Melissa usually frequented so I could avoid her. Survival knowledge.
I learned the name of the planet, which was Arinia. Which was inhabited by 5 very different continents. The ocean to the east is called the Meridian Ocean.
I'd been living here for like two months now and I knew nothing about the geography.
So I'd started learning from the beginning.
The planet was Arinia. Created– allegedly, though apparently this was a fact most cultures agreed on– by a being called The One Who Is. Who had, according to every text I'd read, looked at nothing and said "Eh.. I could do better," and then proceeded to make everything.
Quite an overachiever If I had to say, much like myself.
This dude created an energy system, Essence. The fabric of reality. The thing that made my magic work, and the reason for the existence of Stygian Cores.
I lived on Valkris, the central continent. The most diverse, and politically complex.
There were four other continents that I had no idea about, no mention in the game.
Four.
Four entire landmasses with their own cultures and histories and versions of essence that had diverged so far from the standard system, they barely resembled each other anymore.
We had actually run into a practitioner of unorthodox essence, yeah the Riftwalker.
Essence wasn't technically the only system.
I'd known this vaguely through the news, travelers, and occasional file references. But I hadn't really understood the scope.
Fifty million years of geography, isolation, and war had taken the same original energy and bent it into different shapes.
Although everyone that had a core had a path, not everyone wielded essence in the way I normally do.
On Keth-Amara– the northern continent across the Pale Strait, the one with weather that could literally kill you– the essence basically gone inward. They didn't absorb ambient essence and process it like me. They excavated the essence that was stored in their bodies. Marrow Force, they called it. They turned their own biology into damn weapons. They consumed their own life force for power.
The eastern continents were far more elusive– Solmere had practitioners who could talk to Spirits. Beings of living essence that had developed personality, and life.
Scattered around each continent were practitioners of conviction and oaths– a system used by knight orders.
The Shattered Reach, a near uninhabitable continent due to the rampant amount of monsters, and terrible climate. Had Void Current, though the texts didn't explain it well.
There were even ninjas and samurai who used shit straight out of N**uto!
I'd filled six pages of notes. Drew maps. Cross-referenced dates.
I learned that I'd been living on one of five continents, using one of dozens of energy systems, aware of approximately NONE of the world I'd been dropped into.