MAGUS INFINITE

From the moment I had entered the loop, I had been asking myself very important questions that challenged the core of my identity and who I chose to be... In any normal situation, these would be questions that would take me decades to answer, as I would have to fight through fear, ego, pride, and the various mental limitations that I had consciously or unconsciously acquired over my life.

Dying so many times had stripped me of my ego and pride, and what remained was just my flawless self, looking back at me, and it was this self that I asked... What is the script that resonates with me?

The obvious answers came first, and I threw them all away. Sharpness, that was the Conclave’s weapon, and even if many mages would choose the sharpness of the sword, that was not for me... it was a small part of what I know myself to be.

Hardness, weight, containment, link, trigger, flow... and hundreds of other occultic scripts I was slowly mastering, all of them true, all of them useful, none of them mine. They were words I had learned to say in someone else’s language, and even though they had taken me to the threshold, I could not cross with them, or I suspect that my path would be severed.

Seed’s walls glowed around me, thousands of years of clean, patient work, and they were beautiful, but they were not the answer either. His scripts were shaped like him... dark, enduring, built by a thing that had spent an age holding still. If I wrote his words, I would climb his ladder, and his ladder ended where he was... a big shark in a tiny cage.

Seed, whether he liked it or not, was a slave to the Sovereign of the Stars, and his path was not enough to save me.

”Elric.” The fox’s voice was tight. ”Whatever you are doing, you have to hurry it up.”

”I know.”

”It’s got its whole arm through.”

I forced myself not to open my eyes, and I whispered, ”I know.”

∞

With the appearance of the Hollow Room and other strange enclosures in my soul, I knew that what the mages knew as the full depth of the soul was limited; there were still a lot of mysteries buried in the soul, and I forced my consciousness to enter that place beneath my Anima Depth, finding the silence inside of me.

It was in this silence that I realized the truth: I had been asking the wrong question since the first day I picked up a bone spike and started scratching lines on a floor.

I had been asking: what script should I write? In the beginning, that was enough, but now, the question I should be asking is: what am I?

This was the real question that Seed’s walls had been telling me the whole time, and it was written in eight thousand years of quiet handwriting. Every script on them was a sentence about him. You could read the man out of them, the patience, and his exactness.

He had not chosen those scripts. He had been them, and the language had simply agreed.

The language of magic answers... Speak with it, not at it.

∞

I looked at my hands, and the spell that I always held unconsciously vanished, and the room began to glow as the lightning under my skin could no longer be hidden.

There was a sound of shock from the demon, but I was no longer looking at it, but staring at the channels pulsing underneath my skin, carrying my vast Anima.

Outside this room, the darkness choked everything about me, even the glow of my lightning, and this had made me forget that this part of me was what made me unique.

I brought both of my palms close together and manifested glowing silver threads. My eyes brightened as the shape of who I was began to emerge from my heart.

I had used a stylus for my first engraving, and in this place I had used a bone needle, but all of these were tools that came from outside me, and they were not how I saw magic.

The loop had forced me to let go of my staff until my body became lightning instead, and I could wield my powers without a focus since I was now the staff... no other mage could do that at my level, and that was who I am.

[ Anima Depth: 89 (Adept) — Crystallization: 92% → 93% ]

I brought one of the threads to my eye, and I forced it to straighten, even using Lightning Edict to compel it, and then from the rest of my fingers, I began to conjure more threads, and then I wove them together until they took the shape of a stylus.

It glowed bright before slowly dimming until it took the shape of a silver pen. I held lightning in my hand as my pen, and it felt... right.

[ Anima Depth: 89 (Adept) — Crystallization: 93% → 94% ]

However, the constraint remained: this pen was made from lightning, and when I poured Anima into it, the entirety of my Anima was swallowed by the pen, causing it to brighten, and if I wanted this pen to be the tool I write my Inscription with, then it needed to channel my Anima through it.

This was the first problem that held me back, and yet the solution was always staring me in the face, hidden under my skin... and the answer was my channels.

An Acolyte had seven primary channels, an Adept had fourteen, an Arcanist had twenty-eight, although from the Adept Tier, Resonance made it possible to awaken many secondary channels, but the Primary channels were fixed and could not be expanded... I had ten thousand and eight primary channels, and for some reason, I kept treating my spells and the way I approached problems with the mentality of a mage who is held back by their channels.

I was pouring Anima into my lightning pen with about fifty channels, since these were about the number of channels on my palm, but I was still thinking too small.

If fifty channels were not enough to push my Anima through the pen, what about a hundred... a thousand, hell, even ten thousand!

I smiled as threads of light began to break out of my skin and connect to the silver pen. There was a reason I had chosen Threadwork as one of my first spells; it reminded me of home, it was something you used to connect and bind, and with a thread, even clothes that would have been discarded had uses again.

A single tear came from my eyes as the tip of the pen began to glow with the light of Anima.

I began to reduce the amount of channels I was spending to send Anima into the pen, until I was using only a single channel, but it did not matter... the way I saw my magic had changed, and my threads were made to connect... the pen was crafted from my threads, and it could connect the Anima that flowed in my channels to the tip of the pen, since that was the purpose of my magic.

Not even thinking about it, I made an Inscription in the air, one that I had never seen before, but born from all the inspiration I had gained.

Join.

The Inscription hung in the air, burning with a pale glow, and I dropped my hand.

[ Inscription: 89 → 90 ] [Adept → Arcanist. ]