Chapter 103

For the whole month following my [Clarity] Aspect advancement and [Purpose] Aspect formation, as my Essence remained unfit for serious [Cultivation] efforts, I had to develop something else.

So I spent the month deepening my economic and social [Foundation].

Nine gatherings.

Three archives.

Two private collections whose owners had finally decided my curiosity outweighed the inconvenience of letting me inside.

More visits to Edmundo and other members of his circle than I bothered counting.

Several periods spent within Lylily Tower's social confluence locations, where I maintained relationships that would otherwise have slowly degraded from useful acquaintances into Entities I vaguely remembered meeting once.

Erisel introduced me to someone involved in educational financing.

I returned two books to Soraila and left with four.

The mother of the twins informed me, without remotely pretending the information was unrelated to my interests anymore, that her companion's diplomatic assignment had expanded.

One of the tower keepers developed the unfortunate habit of answering my questions about infrastructure because doing so apparently required less effort than watching me obtain the same answers from maintenance.

My investments changed.

Some upward.

Some downward.

I adjusted two.

Exited one.

Entered three more.

Read.

Listened.

Asked.

Remembered.

And my Essence development remained practically null throughout all of it.

By the end of the month, something I had already understood conceptually had settled deeply enough that I stopped questioning whether my growing economic and social [Foundation] distracted from my actual [Purpose].

It didn't.

The rationale was absolute.

I intended to spend months upon months dedicating nearly every safe portion of my Essence development toward [Flow], [Foundation], and [Purpose].

Months where other Aspects would receive no deliberate [Cultivation].

Months where the development of my [Faith] would remain dormant.

Months where interesting [Cultivation] endeavors unrelated to my highest priority continued being relegated behind three concepts I had already decided would require years of my [Focus] to develop to the degree I wanted.

Accordingly, if I already "invested" my entire Essence development capital, then I might as well "invest" whatever else could profit most from the passage of that time.

Tangibly, that meant...

I needed to invest my financial capital.

My social capital.

My [Knowledge] capital.

All to get more access.

More practical experience.

More names I could contact.

More people willing to answer when I did.

And, potentially, something I had no present use for or [Awareness] of that could one day become disproportionately valuable merely because [Guided] never forgot I came to possess it.

My Essence overdevelopment disorder could constrain my Essence development, but it did not get to decide that the rest of my existence stopped developing alongside it.

Once that [Truth] became obvious enough, I stopped wasting contemplation on it.

As a result, once my safety margin recovered, I resumed my Essence development with all the [Clarity] I could ever need to see this endeavor through.

My [Flow] Aspect.

My [Foundation] Aspect.

My [Purpose] Aspect.

Apart from these three Aspects...

Essence-wise, nothing else mattered.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

Soon after I resumed my [Cultivation] routine, it immediately became its own target.

Not that this was anything new.

That happened so often that I had stopped finding the recursion [Insight]ful.

The sole somewhat interesting variance this time was that the [Cultivation] routine I intended to refine through another [Cultivation] routine encompassed three Aspects.

So I examined how it [Flow]ed.

Which [Cultivation] naturally led into another.

Which order created unnecessary interference.

Where intensive [Flow] [Cultivation] made subsequent [Foundation] [Cultivation] work easier.

Where it did the opposite.

When beginning with [Purpose] [Cultivation] gave everything afterward a cleaner direction.

When doing so merely consumed my [Focus] before I possessed enough new experience for the contemplation to produce anything worthwhile.

Meanwhile...

My [Purpose] Aspect supplied both subtle and firm criteria for what development I was seeking.

My [Flow] Aspect increasingly helped me understand how one [Exertion] led into the next.

And my [Foundation] Aspect preserved what remained useful after repeated testing.

As for my [Cultivation] Aspect...

It asked the same question it always had.

How did I make the next attempt better?

So I changed things.

Repeated them.

Changed them again.

Discarded several alterations that objectively worked but cost more heterogeneous Essence development than their benefits justified.

Kept others.

Then stopped touching portions that had become good enough that spending further [Cultivation] time optimizing them would itself become inefficient...

For now.

In the meantime, everything outside the confines of my Essence development continued moving.

After months of archives, newspapers, conversations, investments, private records, and questioning anyone who tolerated me long enough, Everwell Prime had finally stopped looking like an incomprehensible concentration of everything Civilization could do at once.

Not completely.

That would have been absurd.

But within two narrow fields...

I was beginning to see the broad structure.

Commercial financial records.

And the logistical systems underlying procurement and supply.

Two fields that were conveniently extremely related yet very different.

Credit [Flow]s revealed what an organization claimed mattered.

Procurement—supply [Flow]s—revealed what physically had to happen for those claims to survive contact with reality.

A business could report rising revenue while transport costs quietly consumed the improvement.

A supplier could appear profitable while accumulating inventory nobody wanted.

A logistics organization could lose credits deliberately because securing one route mattered more than present returns.

An apparently expensive contract could be cheap once the cost of replacing the relationship entered the calculation.

And those were exactly the kinds of fields [Guided] was best at parsing through and together.

Standardized records.

Repeated structures.

Historical comparisons.

Thousands of similar documents, sometimes differing only in details that nevertheless mattered enormously.

Past events whose consequences could be compared against present circumstances.

The longer I studied them, the more useful every previous document became.

I was not yet anywhere near qualifying myself as an economic expert.

Not remotely.

Everwell Prime contained Entities who had spent several times my lifespan studying subsections of commercial finance narrow enough that I still needed [Guided] to remember their names.

But compared to several months earlier...

I was no longer merely reading numbers.

I increasingly knew where to look.

That proved enough to...

Open doors.

Small ones.

Which suited me perfectly.

Large organizations possessed analysts.

Departments.

Advisers.

Layers of people whose [Purpose] included preventing random six-year-old fairies from wandering into private records merely because they asked nicely.

Struggling organizations, however...

Possessed problems.

Struggling organizations with problems proved much friendlier.

One freight intermediary let me examine several months of records after I pointed out that three publicly visible price changes made one of their stated assumptions impossible.

A tiny supplier of specialized chemical research consumables allowed me access to purchasing histories in exchange for identifying why its margins had deteriorated despite stable listed prices.

A small commercial information service gave me partial internal records because I had already reconstructed enough of its business from public sources to make refusing mostly ceremonial.

Others refused.

Which also proved useful in its own way.

For those that opened their figurative doors to me, though, the arrangements gradually settled into something reciprocal.

They showed me what public records didn't.

Explained why certain figures existed.

Corrected assumptions I had drawn from incomplete [Knowledge].

Let me observe decisions before their consequences became historical facts buried inside some archive.

Occasionally, they even gave me problems whose answers they already knew merely to see whether I could reach them independently.

In exchange...

I gave them what I possessed.

Which was becoming increasingly difficult to summarize.

[Guided] remembered the newspaper report from eleven years ago.

The transport dispute from three months ago.

The distasteful news column about an adversarial figurehead everyone had seemingly forgotten.

The financial statement from a company that no longer existed.

The timings of every change in Everwell Realm traffic.

The supplier that had raised prices in one neighboring peripheral district while lowering them in another.

The historical example where a superficially identical decision had failed because one assumption differed.

I didn't possess decades of professional intuition.

I possessed something else.

Extremely dense [Comprehension] supported by far more [Knowledge] than anyone looking at my age expected me to possess.

Sometimes it was enough.

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Sometimes it wasn't.

And like that, another month passed.

Then another.

Until my external agent's record stopped looking offensively clean.

I lost credits on a position whose underlying analysis remained correct until one major participant accepted losses for considerably longer than any economically straightforward model justified.

A business followed one of my recommendations and received a worse result than the theoretical projection for an alternative I had dismissed.

Another ignored me.

They turned out to have been right.

One company I expected to expand instead spent months preserving an inefficient operation because its owner cared more about retaining workers who had followed him for decades than maximizing returns.

I had accounted for loyalty, but as it turned out...

Insufficiently.

A supplier sacrificed an entire profitable line to maintain a relationship with an organization whose future relevance remained speculative.

The speculation paid off.

I had considered it too uncertain.

A coalition altered its behavior after noticing that others expected it to behave rationally.

Very rude.

Another decision only made sense after I learned that one participant intended to remain in the same commercial field for at least the next sixty-four years and therefore considered a four-year loss acceptable.

My perspective had been too short.

That one represented a particularly useful failure.

After that...

Failure.

Failure.

Partial success.

Success for the wrong reason.

Correct conclusion.

Incorrect reasoning.

Incorrect conclusion.

Useful reasoning anyway.

[Guided] remembered everything and elevated my hindsight to levels I didn't dare think others might even believe possible without a dedicated [Hindsight] Aspect.

For me, a mistake revealed swiftly turned into [Guided] suffocating me beneath all the thoughts, reasoning, and [Knowledge] I had possessed at the time, enabling me to clearly see how I could—and should—have avoided making that mistake or series of mistakes in the first place.

With my Origin Aspect assisting me so, I [Truth]fully had no reason to become attached to whether one prediction I made succeeded or not.

All I wanted at the end was the incumbent [Comprehension].

It was simply a shame that reality correcting me was one of the more efficient ways to acquire it.

If anything, the failures made some people more willing to continue working with me.

My first several successes had apparently made them suspicious that I was hiding more experience than my records suggested.

Being wrong fixed that.

I found that...

Perplexing at first.

But I assumed it was simply how minds driven by a very different [Ambition] from mine thought.

Then more months passed.

My [Cultivation] advanced.

Slowly.

My credits advanced less slowly.

My relationships multiplied in directions I had not planned.

My [Knowledge] of Everwell Prime became increasingly inconvenient—closing in on impossible—to organize without [Guided].

My external [Foundation] deepened.

And somewhere among all those developments...

My [Secrecy] Aspect revealed itself in unexpected ways.

I first thought about it while reviewing the consequences of a pricing recommendation I had made several weeks earlier.

The recommendation itself had been simple.

One small supplier altered a contract.

That changed what a freight intermediary expected.

The intermediary adjusted one route.

Another company noticed the route change and renegotiated something unrelated to me.

Someone else reacted to that.

Then another.

By the time the consequences reached one of the commercial circles I occasionally visited, I overheard people discussing the resulting shift as though it had originated from the freight intermediary.

Another blamed the supplier.

A third considered both symptoms of a broader market adjustment.

No one mentioned me.

Which was reasonable...

Because I had never even interacted with most of them.

Still...

Part of what they were discussing had begun with something I did.

I followed the [Flow] backward through [Guided].

Then another.

Then several more.

An introduction I had made months earlier.

A record I pointed someone toward.

A question whose answer changed another person's assumption.

A minor investment.

A recommendation ignored at first, remembered later, then applied after circumstances changed.

My actions, my [Exertion]s, existed.

Their consequences existed.

Yet finding me inside those consequences was increasingly difficult.

Not because I had hidden myself.

I was extremely visible.

I attended gatherings.

Visited offices.

Asked questions.

Signed [Contract]s.

Invested under my own identity.

Anyone sufficiently interested could find out about the young fairy named Solaena.

What was difficult was identifying where I had actually acted.

Because...

There was no single place.

One suggestion became another Entity's decision.

That decision became someone else's information.

The information became a contract.

The contract changed a price.

The price changed another decision.

By then...

What part of this change still belonged to me?

The beginning?

Somewhere throughout?

Nowhere relevant anymore?

My [Secrecy] Aspect reacted to that bizarre [Flow] of unwitting changes I could put my existence at the origin of, yet have strictly no connection with.

When this [Insight] emerged in the [Clarity] of my mind, I stopped reviewing the records.

Until now, and for years, much of my [Comprehension] of [Secrecy] had rested upon the [Foundation] left behind by my [Darkness] Aspect.

Hide.

Conceal.

Suppress traces.

Control information.

Prevent others from perceiving me.

All still valuable applications, as I was still far from capable enough to leave behind my best combat strategy of either circling around my opponents or simply never being seen by them until I plunged one of my needle swords into one of their vitals.

But simultaneously, all were applications bound to become increasingly inadequate relative to the direction I eventually wanted my [Secrecy] Aspect to go.

Which presently was [Nonexistence].

I still had no idea what exact Second Order Aspect would bridge my [Secrecy] Aspect toward a concept so absurdly distant, but whatever this [Flow] that rendered my implication [Void] for anyone looking into it was about...

It felt much closer.

It wasn't just a [Secrecy] that was only about hiding all the [Exertion]s I undertook, from my physical ones to my more intellectual ones, like lying...

It was also a [Secrecy] that pertained to hiding how much of an outcome could be traced back to me in the first place.

It wouldn't erase the consequences.

It wouldn't be about making me pretend I hadn't acted.

It would simply make the relationship between my existence and those consequences increasingly difficult to establish.

A pretty much [Ideal] [Secrecy] for the day I became visible in too many places, when my influence [Flow]ed through too many people, and too many decisions contained some tiny piece of something I had said, noticed, connected, or enabled.

Trying to identify exactly where my action ended and everyone else's began was already becoming difficult even for me without [Guided].

For anyone observing from outside?

Worse.

Feeling my Essence [Flow]s grow agitated, I nearly sighed.

It was only the [Truth] that more than three years had passed since I synthesized my [Darkness] Aspect into my [Secrecy] Aspect without advancing it by a single Tier that made this advancement reasonable in an inexorable way.

Ending what had been intended as a [Foundation] [Cultivation] session, I moved somewhere less public and spent the following hours observing my [Secrecy] Aspect expand, parsing various Essence [Flow]s in an attempt to get an early start on the [Foundation] of my [Essence] [Flow] [Cultivation].

As for the changes...

They were not what I would once have expected.

I did not suddenly become dramatically harder to see.

No miraculous veil of [Secrecy] appeared or was broken.

My ability to suppress obvious physical traces improved somewhat.

Useful.

Not the important part.

What changed most clearly was my grasp of the relationships between information.

Between an [Exertion] and the trace it produced.

Between one trace and another.

Between several visible consequences and the possibility that they shared the same origin.

My Tier 0 [Secrecy] Aspect had mostly helped me deny information.

My advancing [Secrecy] Aspect, on the other hand, seemed increasingly capable of obscuring connections between pieces of information that remained individually visible.

Not perfectly.

Not even impressively yet.

But enough for the direction—less toward hiding more about what I knew or what I did, and more toward hiding how much of something had ever involved me at all—to become clear.

That was much closer to the future I wanted.

Aspect Advanced: [Secrecy] (Tier 0) ➞ [Secrecy] (Tier 1)

Like that, my [Secrecy] Aspect advancement settled.

I inspected the result, shortly followed by my overdevelopment safety margin.

Another week's worth of non-Essence development time.

Wonderful.

So I would spend the week improving my economic and social [Foundation].

What else?

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

Another month disappeared into records, gatherings, [Cultivation], several small commercial arrangements, and one spectacularly incorrect prediction concerning demand for a category of special Everwell Realm renewing-derived biological material whose purchasers apparently knew something the public did not.

I found out eventually.

If a bit too late.

The following month brought fewer mistakes of that exact kind.

More of others.

One relationship turned into three.

Three produced an invitation.

An invitation produced access to another archive.

The archive contained records that corrected a conclusion I had been using for months, believing it to be final.

I corrected it.

A minor company I had helped barely avoided bankruptcy.

Another didn't.

My [Cultivation] routine changed too many times to count.

My [Purpose] Aspect became more intuitive to apply.

My [Foundation] Aspect became increasingly irritating to define precisely because more and more of my life qualified for consideration.

My [Flow] Aspect slowly enabled me to recognize [Flow] almost everywhere and remained much harder to manipulate in the one place that ultimately mattered.

My Essence...

Progress.

Slow.

Continuous.

Then one of my commercial relationships invited me somewhere strange.

The Entity responsible was strange too.

Orris possessed a long, ribbon-like body suspended inside a floating sphere of transparent liquid, with eight thin manipulators extending through sealed openings to interact with the dry world outside.

The first time we met, I had spent several seconds deciding whether looking directly through their body while speaking counted as impolite.

[Guided] eventually decided it didn't.

Months later, I mostly forgot the sphere existed.

Their business was less unusual.

A small commercial clearing and procurement organization connecting several specialized suppliers too insignificant to maintain large negotiation departments of their own.

Profitable when managed well.

But presently under considerable pressure from a coalition of minor competitors attempting to absorb enough of Orris' company's clients that accepting a takeover would eventually become preferable to slow collapse.

I had become involved because the situation touched both of my economic specializations almost offensively well.

Financial records.

Procurement.

The coalition's approach initially looked straightforward.

So I looked deeper.

Three months of perusing records and books on how such takeovers could be organized later, I found the first contradiction.

Two weeks after that, Orris found the second.

Together, along with people possessing vastly more practical experience than me, we reconstructed enough of the coalition's actual strategy to stop treating its individual actions as unrelated annoyances.

Orris changed several [Contract]s.

Abandoned one client I initially thought worth keeping.

Preserved another I considered inefficient until they explained why I was wrong.

Redirected procurement.

Accepted one short-term loss.

Then waited.

And in the end, while the coalition did not collapse, neither did Orris' company.

That counted as success.

Several months after our first serious exchange, I arrived at their office expecting another review of procurement figures.

Instead, the main display was empty.

"No records today."

I looked around.

"Did you lose them?"

"No."

"Then why?"

Several of their manipulators curled in what I had learned was amusement.

"I have an invitation for you."

"To what?"

"An Academy."

"The sort I normally refuse, you mean?" I answered, [Guided] already readying various diplomatic responses.

"Probably. Though this one should be a bit different compared to the ones you should have already received."

"Everyone says that about the thing they want me to accept."

"Which is why I haven't enrolled you."

Well, compared to others who thought they knew better than me due to my unfortunate public age, it was a good start.

Orris shifted within the floating sphere.

"It's an Academy dedicated almost exclusively to commercial finance, economic analysis, accounting, institutional capital management, and the disciplines surrounding them. Future analysts. Fund managers. Financial administrators. Economic advisers. People who eventually become expensive enough that organizations stop calling them employees."

"And you're suggesting I attend...

Classes?"

"I know you better than that," they said. "Or at least enough to know you'd disappear the moment your [Cultivation] became more important. And that's why...

You won't enroll."

One manipulator reached out of their sphere to grab a long, giant-sized letter, laying it down right before me.

It was...

A formal invitation.

Of sorts.

Not about admission.

About a guest evaluation.

With words like potential honorary association thrown in.

"You demonstrate what you can do. They get to examine the strange six-year-old fairy I've apparently been talking about too often. If enough of the faculty find you interesting, you may receive guest access to portions of the Academy library, permission to attend selected lectures at your whim, and introductions to professors willing to exchange [Knowledge] with you."

Orris completed the hazy picture for me.

"What do they get in return for that?" I inquired, failing to come up with anything tangible they could get out of it.

"Besides entertainment? Prestige if you become important later. Something unusual to present to students now. Potential research material depending on what you're willing to share from your Origin Aspect. And several professors enjoy finding people who make their students feel inadequate."

Finding the explanation reasonable, I reread the letter to confirm the absence of any discrepancies.

No mandatory attendance.

No long-term commitment.

No restriction preventing me from leaving.

No immediate cost beyond time.

Potential access to an Academy library specialized around fields I had already decided were worth developing.

Professors.

Students who would eventually occupy commercial institutions throughout Everwell Prime and beyond.

Organizations recruiting through the Academy.

Introductions.

Relationships.

Expert [Knowledge].

Practical testing.

Reputation.

All...

Conveniently wrapped up into one pretty package.

This wasn't merely an economic opportunity.

It wasn't merely a social one either.

It blurred the distinction between both main portions of my external [Foundation].

[Knowledge] could become competence.

Competence could become recognition.

Recognition could produce relationships.

Relationships could produce access.

Access could expose better [Knowledge].

And somewhere along that [Flow], the small circles I presently moved through could stop being the largest circles in which my name possessed meaning.

I had already seen how that happened.

One invitation.

Then another.

One useful person introducing another.

Eventually, without any single moment where the change became obvious, an Entity stopped being someone who merely knew a few merchants...

And began belonging to the networks where those merchants sought introductions.

High society, it was called.

Something people romanticized considerably.

Wealth.

Influence.

Prestige.

Recognition.

Private gatherings.

The ability to speak with Entities others struggled to even approach or glimpse.

For all that it appeared ostensibly true that all those were available in abundance within "high society", however, those who romanticized it so often noticed the rewards much more readily than the...

"Price" it came with.

Visibility.

Obligations.

Reciprocity.

Relationships requiring maintenance long after their immediate [Purpose] disappeared.

Expectations accumulating merely because one had accepted yesterday's invitation, making tomorrow's refusal meaningful.

For that was my current [Comprehension] of high society according to all the tens of thousands of newspapers and records I had yet read that evidently connected to it.

It was a structure existing on the same [Foundation] as Civilization's ever-expanding web of interests, capable of consuming someone who entered it without enough [Ambition] to justify maintaining their place within it.

Conveniently...

I possessed [Ambition] to spare.

More importantly, I had no intention of allowing the structure to decide my [Purpose] for me.

I looked up from the invitation.

"Put my name forward."