Book 3, Chapter 67

Consciousness came back to him slowly. It took him a few moments to realize that it was voices that had finally woken him, though his head was still too fuzzy to translate the sounds into words. There were two people, probably, and that was as precise as he cared to be at that moment.

Sorin was lying on a couch in his room, one foot propped up on the arm and the other resting on the floor. He had an arm thrown over his eyes to block out the sunlight, not that it helped with Observer feeding sensory stimulus directly into his brain.

Should have taken the time to have a meal before I crashed, he thought as he licked parched, dry lips. How long have I been down?

He’d spent the better part of a week in isolation, experimenting and refining the techniques Samael had written down. There were some pretty obvious omissions, either problems that Samael had considered so trivial that he hadn’t bothered writing down the solutions or pieces he’d left out on purpose to make it harder for anyone trying to follow in his footsteps.

Some of those issues had been easy to solve. Others hadn’t. Sorin had lost thirty hours relearning stabilization frameworks with an outside source of anima that didn’t behave the way his own did. Even now, he wasn’t confident the work-arounds he’d come up with would hold up to anything more complex than a D-rank soulprint.

That was the major hurdle in using tower anima—well, that and obtaining any in the first place—and Samael hadn’t bothered to write a single word about it that Sorin could find. If there was anything in there, the code or cipher he’d used was so clever that Sorin hadn’t even recognized its existence. He didn’t think that was the case, but by all accounts, Samael had been an S-rank paranoid bastard, so it wouldn’t surprise him if he was wrong.

“He’ll be up when he’s up,” Yoru said from the other room.

“We’re running out of time. He needs to be up now,” someone else said. Sorin couldn’t quite put a face to the voice, but he was pretty sure the visitor was part of Galdred’s circle.

Sorin didn’t have an internal clock, but there was a soulprint for that. It was only F-rank, so it also wouldn’t impact him much if he did add it to his build. Not needing any sort of internal timing ability, he’d never bothered to seek one out, and its nature precluded free casting it since he’d have to maintain it forever in order for it to function.

As a matter of convenience, however, he was starting to regret not taking it. It wasn’t like they didn’t have the money to afford it. There was even a way to boost it up to D-rank and transform it into something that helped with rhythm and timing in battle, though he was far past the skill level where it would have been useful to him personally.

He prodded his wandering thoughts back on topic as he sat up. The first priority was sustenance. Then he’d get caught up on what had happened over the last however-long he’d been sequestered in his improvised workshop. Finally, he’d unveil the fruits of his labor.

The little bell was sitting on a side table next to the couch. There was a very thin, almost invisible, layer of dust on it, maybe two or three days’ worth, which served as a reasonable enough guess for how long he’d been asleep.

Surprising. I didn’t think I needed that much. Must be the soul damage finally catching up with me, he decided.

A quick look inward confirmed that his soulspace was healing nicely. If he waited another week, he’d be fully recovered, but it sounded like there was no time for that. He stood up, slipped the modified soulprint into his dimensional storage ring, and strode across the room. Throwing open the door, he found four people standing there.

Yoru and the man he was arguing with were closest to him. Azlo sat against the wall to Sorin’s right, his shield leaned up next to him and what looked like a sword with a cheese grater for a blade balanced on one knee. Sorin took a moment to imagine that striking a void creature and peeling off curls of black.

Huh. Might work, but he’d have to be extremely precise. Even a fraction of an inch too deep, and it’d just congeal back into solid void behind the strike. The dragging motion instead of a slice would be difficult to pull off unless the target was focused on someone else at the time. I wonder who thought this up.

The other two people were Galdred’s. Birran stood in the background, arms crossed and silent, while his companion paused mid-sentence to look at Sorin. “Finally!” the man said, throwing his hands up. “Please tell me you’ve got some good news for us.”

“I need a privy, and then I’m going to the kitchen,” Sorin informed him. “I’ll be up to talking in half an hour, but yes, I’ve made a breakthrough.”

That got everyone’s attention. The man started to talk again, no doubt planning to bombard Sorin with questions, but Birran placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. With an annoyed huff, the man subsided.

Galdred, or rather Zindra, had insisted on relocating from the house Nemari had rented. It was too small now, for one thing, and also slightly broken. Sorin wasn’t sure how much they’d reimbursed the owner for that, but Nemari had assured him she’d handled it.

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They were now located in a manor, small by high family standards at perhaps four thousand square feet with eight bedrooms. That was more than enough room for a dozen climbers to use as a base, even if it was less than many of them were used to. They’d kept their complaints quiet enough that Sorin had only heard a handful, and that was good enough for him.

The manor boasted indoor plumbing and enchantments to heat water. That was luxury enough for Sorin, never mind its size. Nobody who climbed could afford to be shy about answering the call of nature, but they all appreciated privacy, safety, and cleanliness when it was an option.

His business finished, he wandered into the kitchen while scratching at the beard growing in on his cheeks. A charcuterie board was waiting for him, freshly assembled and set aside from a second board everyone else was eating from. Four more climbers had joined the two who’d been outside Sorin’s room, bringing the total number of people in the kitchen up to nine.

So impatient, he thought with a smile. I know you only made this to hurry me up.

“Thanks,” he said aloud, though he wasn’t exactly sure who had prepared his meal. Selecting a few slices of meat and cheese and piling them onto a cracker base, he popped the whole thing into his mouth and chewed.

With a dramatic flourish, he produced the Pressure Resistance bell from his storage and set it on the table for them to study. Anima surged through the auras of every person there as they examined it in various ways, but no one spoke for several seconds while they studied it.

Finally, Yoru broke the silence. “Okay, I give up. This just looks like a normal E-rank Pressure Resistance soulprint to me, except it’s glowing on the inside.”

“Yeah. It’s actually not supposed to glow. I can’t figure out how to properly seal the modification, but I know it’s possible. That means it’s got a shelf life before it destabilizes and is ruined.”

“How long?” Azlo asked. “And what does the modification do?”

“A month, maybe. I don’t know. This is all new to me. As for what it does, well...” Sorin took a moment to organize his thoughts. “In theory, it makes you more resistant to the void’s erosion of your anima and soulspace. I haven’t tested this yet, obviously, but I think it’ll work.”

“Holy hell, you actually did it,” Zindra said. She held a fork with a cube of meat skewered on the tines halfway to her mouth, now frozen in place and forgotten. “I didn’t think... How sure are you?”

“I’m completely sure that it does what I built it to do. I just don’t know if that will include void-stuff. Pressure Resistance works by strengthening the body under the specific circumstance of having a ton of extra weight pressing down on you. I used that as a base and inverted it to resist anima intrusions instead of physical weight.”

“Why would that work on voidlings?” Azlo asked. “They’re not made of anima.”

“That’s the theoretical part,” Sorin explained. “See, the thing is that I think they are anima constructs. You know how we all have our own unique anima? If I fill an external reservoir, no one can use that anima but me? But the tower also has anima, and that’s inside all of us in the form of soulprints, right?

“I think that the void entities are the same thing as the tower, just from outside it. The things we’re fighting are their versions of monsters, but not under the tower’s control. They’re constructs that those entities inject into the tower, what it calls our realities. They’re eating the tower’s anima, and we’re just kind of in the way. Eating us is collateral damage.”

“That sounds mildly blasphemous when you put it that way,” Birran pointed out. “I’d be careful who you share this theory of yours with.”

Sorin brushed off the concern. “I’m not too worried about their opinions. Anyway, what I did here was make it so that if you absorb this soulprint, your soulspace fights back against exterior anima pressing against it. If I’m right, this is going to have two effects. First, it’s going to make it harder for voidlings to scrape anima from you. It won’t make you immune, but it’s a step in that direction.

“There’s a drawback, though. That’s the second effect. I couldn’t make the ability selective like the tower did when it gave me Void Resistance. The version I built is a blanket defense against all exterior anima. If it works the way I think it will, it’s going to make it harder for the tower itself to inject anima into you when you kill a monster.”

Sorin was not surprised to see the excitement flatten out at the end of his explanation. Gaining the anima needed to go from one floor to the next was already the most time-consuming part of climbing. A soulprint that made that even more difficult was an unwelcome handicap. They were all rank 24 already, but they’d need to kill more monsters to recover the strength the void took from them after the battle.

“Could we convert this into some kind of item?” Yoru asked. “That would make it far more practical. We could manufacture a few dozen of them, use them on Floors 24 and 25, and stow them away after we finished.”

“I already considered that. There’s no way for me personally to do that, but I’m not ruling it out as a possibility. I don’t think it will work until I can figure out how to stabilize the soulprint, and the only way I’ve figured out to make that happen is to absorb the damn thing and let your soulspace handle it for you. That’s not going to work for a crafter, for obvious reasons.”

“Pressure Resistance is E-rank,” Zindra said thoughtfully as she regarded the glowing bell and absently started chewing on the meat she’d been about to bite into the whole conversation. “What rank is this version?”

“D. If I had more time to refine the process, I might be able to keep it at E, but it won’t change how effective it is, just how much soulspace it takes up.”

“And how much damage we inflict on ourselves ripping it back out later,” she said.

Sorin nodded. “And that.”

“How long will it take to make more?”

“Maybe half an hour for each one,” Sorin guessed. “It depends on the tower, really. It’s only willing to give me so much of its anima to use. I hit the wall a few times when I was experimenting and drawing too heavily on it. There doesn’t seem to be an absolute limit. It’s just whatever the tower feels like at the moment. Knowing what I’m using its anima for, it might let me make fifty of them in a row. Or it might only give me enough to do three or four. There’s no way to tell until I try.”

Zindra pushed her chair back and stood up. She scooped up the bell in one hand and absorbed the soulprint. “You’d better get to work then. The ruin team is due back in two days, and we’ve got fifty-five climbers and growing to outfit with one of these. I’ll test this to confirm its efficacy while you gather the materials you need.”