What was intent? Well, to put it simply, it's a focused decision to pursue an outcome. To be more specific, it was the internal desire settling into a clearly defined directive—an action you are ready to take. It was a kind of crystallized potential that was about to take form. But that didn’t really answer the question. I didn’t care about the definition of the word intent. I cared about what intent meant in a magical sense.From what I’d seen so far, intent held within Mana was more like a conceptual directive applied via instructive expression of meaning. For regular mages, I assumed that’s where the use of spell formulae came into play, but I wasn’t really a regular mage, so that shit didn’t apply to me. My method was a little more hands-on, you could say, but not the sort of hands-on that involved somatic or verbal components. No stupid hand wiggling or calling out the name of my spell, telling everyone around me exactly what I was casting. Thank you very much.
So, instead of doing a bunch of arcane nonsense, my go-to method was to hold an idea of what I wanted my Mana to do in my head. Then, I sort of pushed that idea into the Mana while it was within my aura or body. I say ‘sort of’ because I’d mostly been leaning on the [Verdant Corruption] Skill to achieve the outcomes I wanted. That wasn’t to say this was the most efficient method to add an intent to Mana, though.
Despite it being mostly a knowledge Skill, the word ‘mostly’ did a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. In order to add corruptive qualities to my Mana, I sort of just willed it to happen, and the Skill aligned it with that entire range of possibilities for me; the only thing I had to do manually was pick which possibility I wanted from that range. There was a reason I hadn’t even figured out how to implant the right intent into Nature Mana to manifest it as a plant until after the incident. Two days weren’t enough to learn how to use a whole brand-new complex magic system, big shocker.Anyway, that’s my excuse for why I was probably fucked. If ‘corruptive intent’ was a novice intent, and I didn’t even really understand how it worked. How was I supposed to create an intent that’s far more advanced? Not that I wasn’t going to try anyway. It just might take a little bit more effort than I had expected to kill this thing.Speaking of which, what the hell was the Maliform doing? Moments ago, it had been going after me with the single-minded frenzy of a half-starved dog chasing a piece of meat. Now it was walking towards me with a look on its face, like it knew something I didn’t, and it was waiting for me to figure it out. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have the processing power to spare on doing that, so instead, I asked one last question before I jacked up the time dilation in my simulator.“Any advice you can give on creating Nature Mana with the ‘Natural order’ intent?” I asked over the link with Autumn. I remained stock still, not even allowing my mouth to subvocalize the words like usual when speaking over the relay, just in case the dopple reacted.“Mana Alignment is always a very personal form of Mana Manipulation. The typical way this specific Alignment is done, and the way I find works best for me, involves invoking the equilibrium that holds Nature together from the perspective of where you fit into it. But really, it’s about figuring out what works for you specifically.”
I didn’t have time to think of a response as when it was twenty metres away the Maliform suddenly blurred into motion, no sound announcing the movement a smear across my vision was the only signal, my one good arm barely coming up in time to take a hit that sent me sliding across the room. Fuck okay, let’s get this done. The ooze was in the air, coming down in an arc towards me as I did something I’d never done before.
I kind of had a sense that I could do this if I really tried, but I never had a reason to until now. What I wanted to do and for the first time attempted was to split the processing power my mind was allocated into two, my Wit stat hopefully high enough that it managed to bridge the gap and allow both portions to still function at least a dozen times faster than my old self. Then one half of my mind could be sent into the simulation I’d created with time acceleration ramped up, while the other half stayed outside to protect my Core.
I felt a metaphysical pull on my mind as I started the separation, like I was stretching an elastic band apart, then there was a snap, and suddenly I was somewhere else. I found myself standing inside a completely blank space. The only other thing that existed was the copy of Maliform. It wasn’t like I was sitting in an all black void, though. Instead, it felt more like everything around me was undefined, like I was sitting in an endless stretch of open possibilities. Okay, it looks like I won the coin toss, or maybe I lost it? Which position would I even prefer to be in? Never mind, not the time to be debating semantics; that isn’t why I’m here. I need to finish this before I die or run out of Mana; fifty times real-time acceleration is expensive.
First, I needed to define my terms. The Natural Order referred to an organic, self-reinforcing system that maintained ongoing progression in the absence of external interference. Its structure included interdependent roles, such as predation, reproduction, death, and decomposition, through which energy and matter were continually cycled.
Can I just add all that to Nature Mana and call it a day? It can’t be that easy, can it?
I called a blob of Nature Mana into existence in front of me and did just that, I held all of those ideas together in my head and then tried to replicate how [Verdant Corruption] had my mind apply a concept to Mana. I felt it change, but didn’t know how, so I sent some of it into the copy of the Maliform. Nothing happened except for the Mana being absorbed by the creature.The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.I let out a sigh. It just couldn’t be that easy, could it? Might as well just start throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.I went over every conceptualization of ‘Natural Order’ that I could think of: evolutionary theory, balance held in equilibrium through selective pressure, emergent behaviour of ecosystems through no external influences, and that one thing Autumn mentioned I should try. What was that again?
Find where I fit into the equilibrium… Well, I don’t, do I? Because I’m not a plant, nor anything else organic, really.
Fuck this isn’t gonna work is it.
I couldn't even relate to my past self to fake some kind of ‘oh I’m not part of the food chain I’m above it' type answer. It’s like the human me died when she was hit by that truck, and something else crawled out.
Well that sucks for her doesn’t it.
What the fuck did I do then? I mean, I couldn’t just… I scribbled ‘dies immediately’ on the forehead of the Maliform and then sent the equivalent of an infinite sum of Mana into the text, which was basically what the simulator took as ‘Feed until something changes.’ The creature exploded.
I stood there for a moment wondering what the fuck had just happened. That wasn’t supposed to work, but something tugged at my mind, hard. It felt as if a friend had just pointed out I had been missing something incredibly obvious for a while now. Creating another one, I did the same thing but without writing anything on it; that time, nothing happened. So it wasn’t just that the creature had overloaded; it was as if the instruction I had written in Rootspeech was treated as raw commands from reality.
My mind at that moment connected two points I had completely overlooked. The system referred to Rootspeech characters as ‘Symbolic Representors’, and ritualism as ‘Symbolic Encoding’, which meant I could probably make a ritual that could do it for me. I didn’t need to manually add ‘The Natural Order’ intent to my own Mana. I just needed to create a ritual that could do it for me. I held out the palm of my simulated hand and started writing combinations of logograms on it, trying to figure out what worked.
There had been a few problems. For one, the less bound a ritual was, the more Mana it ended up taking. For example, just writing ‘dies immediately’ as a single logogram and having no circle around the ritual would have taken over a millennium of my natural Mana regeneration to actually activate it. That had been fixable—at least slightly—by breaking it into two simpler logograms, one for death and one for when that death happened, and by restricting the affected area of the ritual to a specific circle. This made it clear that simplifying the ritual and adding restrictions would lower the cost. A small amount of experimentation showed I could restrict it even more by having the circle be a polygon with the exact number of logograms inside equal to the number of sides on the polygon. There was also the fact that Nature Mana lent itself towards Nature-aligned rituals far more efficiently, but that wasn’t a problem given what I was trying to do.
So really, my problem was finding the minimum number of logograms that would form ‘The Natural Order’ intent within Mana in a ritual while leaving one slot for a ‘Convert’ symbol and one for a ‘Mana Intent’ symbol. A half dozen attempts later, I figured out a solution that only wasted half the Mana I put into it. A diamond with the logograms for ‘Convert’, ‘Mana Intent’, ‘Natural’, and ‘Equilibrium’ in each corner would cause all of the Nature Mana contained within an object it was placed on to convert into an intent of Mana that I was pretty sure was right.To test, I created a thorn filled with Nature Mana that had the ritual grown onto the surface during manifestation and threw it at the Maliform replica. It blew a hole through the creature, and the destroyed material no longer reformed with the original whole, which meant I was done. I lessened the barrier within my mind and pulled myself out of the simulation.
I found my outside self missing half my upper torso, including nearly half my head, sprawled on the floor, and about to run out of Mana. Geez, somebody didn’t do so well after I left.
“Just fucking hurry up and rejoin with me, you figured it out right? I definitely gave you enough time.” My other self shot back.Oooh, someone’s touchy today. Alright, well, you didn’t leave me enough Mana, unfortunately, so I’m going to have to do something we both hate.
“What? We should have enough, all we’re doing is adding intent, that can’t take that much… Oh no wait don’t you fucking da—” My other self had been cut off when I activated [Mana Conduit] for the first time, and we had both experienced what it felt like to replace our blood with lightning. The part of me that had been controlling our body seemed to have been hit harder than I was. It felt like their mind had almost completely gone blank, as if they had blacked out, and any resistance I’d felt from them had completely vanished. Probably because they’d had a closer link to our physical senses at the time. I, on the other hand, had felt like I’d almost entirely disassociated from our body up until that point and was just beginning to rejoin with it.
I used that dissociation as an advantage to ignore the pain while I began creating thorns of Mana within my aura to manifest into projectiles with the ritual carved on them. It took me a moment to find the Maliform; the fact that I was down to one eye was really a disadvantage. Luckily, it was in an easy-to-find spot, right next to Autumn. Wait shit.
I was regenerating Mana faster than I could spend it with [Mana Conduit] active, so I just began launching projectiles as quickly as my remote application circuits could create them. The sheer number overwhelmed the ooze before it could react, and it was torn to pieces by a shower of needles. My job was complete, Autumn was safe, and I could figure out what had happened later. I stopped holding the two parts of my mind apart from one another and allowed them to snap together. Blacking out with the other side of myself, the moment they had been brought back together.