Chapter 97

My backpack was already filled nearly to the point of refusing another notebook.

I made it accept one anyway.

After shifting two bundles of clothing around the rigid collection of books beneath them, compressing everything that could safely be compressed, and relocating several pieces of travel equipment toward the outer compartments, enough room appeared for me to force the notebook into place without deforming its cover.

Perfect.

I closed the compartment, tested the resulting weight distribution across my back and wings, then returned my attention to the much less physical problem occupying the pages of another notebook still lying open beside me.

My Essence development priorities.

Those, unlike nearly everything else surrounding my departure from the Pulse Of Eternity, had barely changed.

My [Flow] Aspect remained at Tier 0.

So did my [Foundation] Aspect.

And now that I had finally isolated the missing principle behind the portions of [Serenity] I actually sought, forming the [Purpose] Aspect had joined them at the absolute forefront of my Path.

Three objectives.

All competing for the same miserably limited Essence development quota imposed by the disorder they were ultimately intended to solve.

That meant the dozens of other undertakings I had accumulated over the years would remain exactly where I had already left them.

Researching [Guided] subsumption.

Replacing my physiological [Cultivation] [Cycle] with the [Vitality] [Cultivation] [Cycle] I had contemplated since forming my [Vitality] Aspect.

The endless collection of Aspect syntheses, advancements, and strange conceptual directions scattered throughout my notebooks.

All postponed indefinitely.

Again.

To the point that postponing them was becoming a habit after years spent living under the exact same restriction.

The only real difference was that what once amounted to preserving my Essence development quota for the vague goal of someday solving my disorder had become considerably more concrete.

My [Flow] Aspect needed to advance.

My [Foundation] Aspect needed to advance.

My [Purpose] Aspect needed to be formed.

Then I needed enough [Comprehension] and [Mastery] over all three for their integration into an actual solution to become more than a theoretical means of catastrophically worsening my disorder.

Testing would follow.

Failures.

Corrections.

Integration.

More [Cultivation].

Very possibly further advancements if Tier 2 proved insufficient.

Years.

The scale of the undertaking hadn't diminished merely because I finally knew what the third component ought to be.

If anything, adding the concept of [Purpose] to my theoretical solution for solving my Essence overdevelopment had made the amount of work and development ahead of me even more tremendously large than before.

Not that this consequential increase was truly negative.

A vast problem whose pieces I could identify was infinitely more satisfying than a smaller one hidden behind ignorance.

I flipped back several pages to the calculations I had made concerning my usual sixteen-hour-period Essence development quota.

A quota that would naturally only increase as my Essence matured and my anti-overdevelopment Aspects advanced.

Eventually, my [Foundation] Aspect might increase what my Essence could safely sustain.

My [Flow] Aspect might let me better manage the instability produced by excessive development.

And whatever system I ultimately built around [Purpose] might make my recovery efficient enough to accelerate the whole [Cycle].

Eventually.

For now, however, my Essence development quota remained the same.

And every meaningful portion of it belonged to those three objectives.

Which meant that leaving the Pulse Of Eternity, abandoning my weekly assignments, and ceasing to organize nearly every waking period around the Pulse Tower had changed remarkably little about my actual [Cultivation].

That my entire immediate life was shifting while my Path barely did...

I found that almost [Worthy] of putting into a future chapter of "The Nascence Of Solaena".

When that thought crossed my mind, I closed the notebook.

In any event, my [Cultivation] routine required little redesign beyond making room for the conceptualization and eventual formation of my [Purpose] Aspect.

What changed, nevertheless, was everything surrounding it.

And that began with wrapping up my departure and packing my effects.

My notebooks.

My records.

My clothing.

My travel equipment.

And, following my latest victory over spatial limitations, one additional notebook.

All went inside the backpack Stavros had arranged three years ago for my original journey to the Everwell Sector, one that had long since proven capable of carrying quantities of material disproportionate to my size without hindering my flight overmuch.

Anything remaining either did not belong to me or did not matter enough to carry.

The harder part was dealing with the much less physical baggage I had accumulated.

Obligations, they were called.

Both for the worst and the best, Civilization had an aggravating habit of generating those whenever relationships became formal enough to matter.

Several [Contract]s required termination or adjustment.

Fortunately, I had long since learned to avoid arrangements whose exit conditions relied upon goodwill.

One recurring agreement concerning economic analysis ended through a clause specifically written for either party to terminate it with notice.

Another arrangement involving access to private commercial information could continue despite my relocation, so there was no reason to end it at all.

Other minor agreements were similarly dealt with according to whatever conditions I had previously accepted.

Simple.

Predictable.

Exactly what [Contract]s ought to be.

My investments presented even less difficulty.

Most required nothing from me.

That had been their entire [Purpose].

Those remained where they were unless [Guided] identified some independent reason to alter them.

Then came the letters.

One to someone who had repeatedly invited me to private gatherings.

Another to an Entity whose introductions had proven disproportionately useful.

Several to people with whom I had arrangements not formal enough to warrant [Contract]s but sufficiently valuable that disappearing without explanation would accomplish nothing beyond damaging the relationship.

One to a commercial archivist.

More to acquaintances whose relevance might increase rather than diminish once I relocated closer to Everwell Prime.

I was partway through writing one of those when [Guided] drew my attention back to how many of the names before me hadn't even existed within my social [Knowledge] a few months earlier.

That alone said quite a bit about what I had been doing with the idle time imposed upon me by my disorder.

I had always possessed idle time.

I simply refused to allow that imposed idleness to make the time useless.

When my Essence couldn't safely undergo more development...

I read things that only mattered to the endless accumulation of [Knowledge] for [Guided].

Researched subjects I already possessed enough of a [Foundation] in to safely deepen.

Tested existing [Comprehension]s through actual consequences rather than pursuing new ones.

Built relationships.

Made money.

Observed Civilization.

Did whatever else could improve my circumstances without consuming the resource that actually mattered.

Over the previous months, most of that idle time had gone toward building what could broadly be called my economic and social [Foundation].

Calling either developed was still very much a stretch of the objective [Truth], but what counted was that I was still improving both with every hour of idle time I spent on them.

My first economic experiments had consisted of risking quantities of credits whose loss wouldn't matter merely to discover whether reasoning derived from books survived contact with reality.

Sometimes it did.

Sometimes reality helpfully informed me that I had missed something.

My first social gatherings had gone much the same way.

I entered conversations at the wrong moment.

Misjudged when someone wanted an answer and when they merely wanted another Entity to acknowledge whatever they were saying.

Asked questions whose directness made someone defensive before I acquired the information I actually wanted.

Underestimated the value people placed on introductions.

Overestimated the value of being technically correct when the person listening to me possessed no reason to trust that correctness.

I made one investment that succeeded for reasons I hadn't predicted.

Made another whose underlying analysis remained mostly correct and still lost me credits because another participant altered their behavior sooner than I expected.

Entered arrangements that were profitable and nevertheless inefficient once I accounted for the time they consumed.

Established relationships that produced nothing useful for months despite initially looking promising.

Then watched relationships I had considered minor unexpectedly grant me access to people, records, and opportunities I hadn't even known existed.

Messy.

Imprecise.

Extremely useful.

Every mistake became something [Guided] retained.

Every conversation expanded the range of circumstances my existing [Comprehension] could recognize.

Every real consequence tested whether whatever I believed I understood remained applicable once other Essence Entities started acting according to their own interests.

My [Mastery] over those fields remained pathetic compared to my [Mastery] over flight, my own body, healing, and disciplines I had practiced for years.

But it was no longer purely theoretical.

I could already look back several months and recognize decisions my current self wouldn't make.

I could reread analyses I once considered sophisticated and immediately notice assumptions I had failed to challenge.

I could enter the sort of gathering that once demanded constant attention and let [Guided] handle most routine social conduct while I focused on whatever information, person, or opportunity had brought me there.

My [Comprehension] steadily expanded.

My [Mastery] steadily followed.

I looked back toward the unfinished letter.

Its recipient lived considerably closer to Everwell Prime than to the Pulse Tower.

So did two of the others I had already written.

That rather straightforwardly illustrated why I had chosen my next destination.

If I intended to continue refining both throughout the idle periods imposed upon me by my overdevelopment disorder...

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on NovelPhoenix. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Why do so here?

Everwell Prime existed.

Not merely the broad administrative territory whose boundaries expanded far enough outward that I had heard people disagree over which peripheral districts still deserved to be associated with it.

The center.

The districts surrounding the Everwell Realm Rift.

The place where wealth, institutions, organizations, specialists, academics, politicians, investors, and Essence Entities possessing centuries of extremely narrow expertise accumulated in quantities the outer reaches of the Sector simply couldn't reproduce.

I had been there before.

The Utopia festival had first carried me into it through the underground train network, and later assignments and personal endeavors had brought me through various parts of it.

But visiting somewhere because a particular objective happened to be located there was different from placing myself there deliberately.

Especially now.

I possessed credits.

Investments.

Relationships.

A modest reputation in a few circles.

People who would answer letters bearing my name.

Others who would introduce me to someone else if I gave them a sufficient reason.

A social skinweave specifically designed to turn my unusual appearance into an advantage among the wealthy and influential.

And perhaps most importantly...

An advantage I was long overdue in leveraging to further my Path.

I was a fairy.

A very young fairy.

I had spent most of my existence treating the latter fact as either irrelevant or an inconvenience.

Reality hadn't cared about my age when Volow collapsed.

Hunger hadn't.

Exhaustion hadn't.

The rust abominations hadn't.

My overdevelopment disorder had certainly never decided to remain dormant until I reached whatever age Civilization deemed appropriate for someone to start suffering from it.

From my perspective, my Path had begun before birth, and comparing my age to arbitrary developmental expectations rarely accomplished anything.

Civilization disagreed.

Civilization cared very much about age.

And the Fairy Court cared just as much.

Barely more than six years had passed since my birth.

Fairy adulthood, according to the Court, began at one's sixteenth year from birth.

I hadn't even made it halfway there.

To a species whose members naturally lived for centuries, I was still absurdly young, and the same general principle applied to most species whose expected lifespan extended far beyond a measly few decades.

Previously, I had mostly compensated for that.

People underestimated me.

Assumed I required authorization to do things I was perfectly capable of deciding for myself.

Questioned whether some older Entity had arranged whatever opportunity I happened to be pursuing.

Changed how they spoke once they learned my age.

Fairies were particularly prone to it.

Which, considered from another perspective...

Made my age useful.

The Fairy Court possessed entire systems intended to support young fairies.

Education.

Protection.

Lineage identification.

Mentorship.

Introductions.

Access to fairy-specific institutions and [Knowledge].

The preservation of relationships between generations.

Promising young fairies were actively tracked by the same networks that allowed the Court to know which of its members were politically, economically, academically, or otherwise relevant.

And due to my circumstances and ignorance at the time, I had spent years regarding all of that primarily as something to work around rather than leverage.

How inefficient.

If I asked an elderly fairy possessing a century of expertise to give an unknown adult access to their private collection of research notes, the rational answer would usually be no.

If I asked the same Entity while being barely six years old, after demonstrating enough ability to make the request itself interesting...

The answer might still be no.

Obviously.

But it was substantially less likely to be.

The same applied to requesting introductions.

Tutoring.

A conversation with an expert.

Access to some personal collection of [Knowledge] accumulated over centuries and never formally published because its owner had no incentive to disseminate it.

Old Path journals.

Failed experiments.

Records preserved by fairy families.

Private correspondence.

Narrow pieces of [Knowledge] that never reached public repositories because the Entity who acquired them simply kept them.

If I planned correctly, displayed my abilities at the correct moments, and found the intermediaries whose own interests aligned with helping a demonstrably abnormal fairy child...

My age could open doors that credits, credentials, and ordinary networking couldn't.

That was a resource.

One I now intended to use.

I only had to carefully engineer myself as a prodigious child who sought increasingly impressive adults to entertain her, while neither demonstrating too much without acquiring anything in exchange nor allowing other people's curiosity regarding [Guided] to become the primary reason they interacted with me.

Who mattered.

Who knew whom.

Which experts actually possessed something I wanted.

What those experts valued.

What made helping young fairies prestigious, satisfying, profitable, politically useful, or merely entertaining enough to justify their time.

All of that [Knowledge] would take time to unearth.

Conveniently, I had a lot of it to give.

Still...

I would not confuse any of this with my primary objective.

The development of my economic and social [Foundation] remained an optimization of my idle time.

Nothing more.

I wasn't heading toward Everwell Prime to become wealthy.

I wasn't going there to become popular.

I had no intention of spending the next several decades establishing myself as some permanent fixture of high society merely because I had finally become competent enough to participate in it.

If tomorrow advancing my [Flow] Aspect required every usable fraction of my attention, my economic experiments could disappear.

If conceptualizing [Purpose] demanded abandoning a promising social opportunity, the opportunity could wait.

If access to some magnificent private repository cost Essence development better invested in advancing my [Foundation] Aspect...

Then I didn't want access.

My anti-overdevelopment [Cultivation] came first.

Everything else existed to make the periods when I couldn't pursue it more useful.

With that settled for what had to have been the hundredth time, I finished the letter.

Then the next.

And the next.

I kept every message concise.

I was relocating.

Existing arrangements would either continue or terminate according to previously established conditions.

Correspondence could still reach me.

Future meetings could be arranged if our interests continued intersecting.

There was no reason to explain my overdevelopment disorder.

No need to announce that I had "left" the Pulse Of Eternity.

No grand declaration concerning the next phase of my Path.

They needed to know what had changed for them.

That was all.

The process consumed most of the remainder of the day.

By the time I finished, the room looked strangely different despite possessing almost exactly the same walls, surfaces, and furniture.

Nothing of mine remained.

That was probably why.

For however long I had occupied it, filled it with books, left notebooks scattered across convenient surfaces, and occasionally slept wherever [Guided] decided was sufficiently comfortable...

It had still only been a place I used.

Now it looked like one again.

I spent a few seconds ensuring I had forgotten nothing.

[Guided] agreed.

So I secured my nearly bursting backpack, adjusted my social skinweave around its straps...

And left.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

Flying toward Everwell Prime without taking the underground train network taught me—or perhaps merely reminded me—exactly how absurdly fast trains were.

Intellectually, I had already understood that.

A previous six-hour train journey had crossed the vast distance that would otherwise have demanded days at my idle flight speed.

That fact had entered my [Knowledge], been connected to transportation infrastructure, economics, [Flow], Civilization, and a dozen other subjects, then ceased being particularly remarkable.

Now, however, I was crossing that same vast distance myself.

That made the comparison considerably harder to ignore.

I flew.

And continued flying.

There was no reason to stop.

Not for food.

My physiological [Cultivation] [Cycle] was taking care of that.

Not for ordinary physical recovery.

Not after everything I had done to my body and the increasingly efficient [Vitality] already integrated throughout it.

And certainly not merely because other people normally divided journeys into neat periods of movement and rest.

I also wasn't performing exhaustion resistance [Cultivation].

I would have if my overdevelopment wasn't a thing.

I would have deliberately pushed until the [Clarity] of my thoughts blurred, my wings stiffened, my [Awareness] filled with black spots, and every instinct demanded sleep, then fought the deterioration with my [Will] for the sake of developing myself further.

Now?

That would simply consume Essence development better spent elsewhere.

So I flew efficiently instead.

As in, I didn't even require [Guided] to maintain the flight patterns years of practice had already turned into a [Foundation]al part of my being.

I varied the work between my wings before strain accumulated.

Adjusted velocity where air [Flow]s made additional acceleration inefficient.

Used passing traffic structures and predictable pressure changes rather than opposing them.

Whenever exhaustion rose beyond what the journey required, I stopped and took minor breaks.

The sheer difference between my sustained flight and the underground train network only grew more ridiculous with every passing hour.

Civilization had somehow built infrastructure that allowed ordinary beings with no extraordinary movement abilities whatsoever to cross in hours what took even me days.

And trains weren't even rare or reserved for the elites.

There were thousands, even tens of thousands of them.

More than enough for people to complain whenever one was delayed, despite the fact that they only paid a couple of credits to have days of travel cut to hours.

While mulling over that mind-blowing achievement of Civilization, the scenery beneath me gradually changed.

There was no grand boundary where ordinary peripheral districts ended and Everwell Prime began.

Infrastructure simply grew more elaborate.

Exterior surfaces became cleaner.

Traffic denser.

Aerial routes multiplied.

Buildings acquired architectural features whose [Purpose] wasn't immediately obvious until I examined them more closely and found secondary functions hidden behind aesthetics that would have been considered absurd luxury farther from the Prime Realm.

Public gardens stopped being occasional extravagances and began occupying rooftops, suspended platforms, bridges, and sections of towers large enough to qualify as districts on their own.

Advertisements grew larger and more intricate.

Private transportation became increasingly common.

Organizations whose names I recognized from hearing mentions of them throughout various gatherings appeared more frequently.

Then came organizations I knew only because they had participated in historical events important enough to enter the books I read.

Little by little, one of the cores of the Civilization I was born in unveiled itself before my eyes.

And so did everything I wanted from it.

I descended only when doing so served some purpose.

Once to acquire more accurate route information.

Once because an enormous construction operation had rendered an entire stretch of airspace restricted, and attempting to navigate through giant suspended machinery merely to save time seemed...

Antithetically inefficient.

Once because [Guided] identified a merchant who appeared to possess substantially better local traffic [Knowledge] than the map I had acquired.

Buying something gave me an easy reason to ask.

So I purchased a small packet of nutrient material I had absolutely no physiological need for and acquired significantly more accurate directions in the process.

The packet entered my backpack.

I would eventually find someone who needed to eat it.

Probably.

Otherwise, I had only wasted a few credits.

The information had still been worth more.

I continued onward.

By the fourth day, I had definitely crossed into what administratively qualified as Everwell Prime.

That did not mean I had reached anything I personally regarded as the center.

The distinction between Everwell Prime and its direct peripheral districts remained somewhat absurd from my perspective.

One district could contain a population larger than entire Sectors I had crossed—omitting the Violet Radiance Sector—towering buildings extending from the lower Strata surface to the ceiling, organizations managing quantities of resources I couldn't meaningfully visualize, and infrastructure whose most mundane components would have qualified as wonders in the Red Sand Sector...

And still be called peripheral because something more excessive existed closer to the Everwell Realm Rift.

It was absurd, if adequately useful as a geographical distinction.

As I continued toward my actual destination, however, the difference became harder to dismiss.

The towers did not necessarily become taller.

They were already constrained by the Strata itself.

Instead, they became broader.

Denser.

More intricate.

One structure occupied enough horizontal space that, from a distance, I initially mistook it for several towers built flush against one another.

Another consisted of enormous cylindrical sections woven around a central support through bridges, transparent corridors, gardens, exterior chambers, and things whose functions I couldn't identify.

Traffic moved in layers rather than roads.

Ground traffic.

Low-altitude flight.

Higher aerial corridors.

Cargo paths.

Private routes.

Rapid-transit channels whose users moved fast enough that entering one without an appropriate [Comprehension] of its conventions seemed like an excellent way to commence high-velocity impact resistance [Cultivation].

Lights mapped those [Flow]s across the city.

Platforms floated between towers.

Bridges crossed distances so large that entire buildings had been constructed upon them.

Everywhere I looked, Civilization had taken the ridiculous concentration of resources surrounding a Prime Realm and spent them on becoming even more complicated.

And somewhere amid all of that...

Was the place I had chosen to temporarily settle in.

[Guided] maintained the route.

I flew past a tower whose exterior appeared almost entirely transparent, revealing hundreds of occupied chambers stacked behind one another.

Another seemed to have been built from countless interconnected cylinders wrapped around an immense central shaft.

Farther away, something looked biological enough that I couldn't determine whether it had been constructed, cultivated, or both.

Then...

I saw my destination.

At first, I almost dismissed it as another architectural eccentricity.

It reached from the constructed ground toward the Strata ceiling like the towers surrounding it.

Its scale fit Everwell Prime perfectly.

Its structure didn't.

The neighboring towers were overwhelmingly built around floors.

Horizontal divisions.

Entrances at defined elevations.

Elevators.

Stairs.

Corridors that assumed someone existed upon one surface and needed some mechanism to reach another.

Even buildings heavily accommodating flying species retained those assumptions beneath the adaptations.

This one didn't.

Its exterior was open across nearly its entire height.

Not damaged.

Not unfinished.

Open by design.

Thousands of entrances dotted the structure from near ground level to so close to the upper Strata that their highest portions blurred into the metallic vastness overhead.

Balconies projected from every direction.

Small platforms extended from walls without stairs, ramps, or bridges connecting them to anything else.

Windows were entrances.

Roofs were plazas.

Entire chambers opened directly into immense vertical spaces where tiny figures moved freely between elevations without bothering to approach anything resembling a staircase.

Even stranger were the internal divisions.

There were floors.

Obviously.

Young fairies couldn't fly, and not every member of the species retained perfect flight capability throughout their existence.

But the floors didn't define the architecture.

Flight did.

Vertical distance appeared to have been treated the same way another architect might treat the distance across a room.

Dead space didn't exist merely because reaching it required leaving the ground.

Rooms occupied places that would have been absurdly inaccessible to a grounded species.

Gardens hung from structures with no obvious pedestrian access.

Open meeting areas floated between larger sections of the tower.

Some corridors ended in open air because continuing through the air was apparently the corridor.

My [Awareness] couldn't reach far enough inside from this distance to grasp even a meaningful fraction of it.

But it didn't need to.

The [Foundation]al assumption behind the entire structure was already obvious.

A specific morphology.

A specific trait.

Fairy morphology.

Winged—flight-enabled variant.

I slowed without stopping, my gaze traveling upward along a tower whose architects had apparently looked at gravity, recognized that the intended occupants didn't particularly care about it, and designed everything accordingly.

For the first time in my life...

I was looking at a ceiling-reaching tower built by design for fairies.