《Blue Mandela: Thargelia [LitRPG, Physics-Based Magic System, Artificial System, UNT]》 Jarrive I fall into a blue world. The sky in a moment is light, before rapidly it fades to darkness. I¡¯m jolted straight into a state of altered consciousness. Hyperconsciousness. I feel the gust through every layer of my suit. The light bends by the weight and magnetism of the layer above towards it, so it is bright when I am there, and dark when I am not. Light emits from the conceptual horizon away from the mean line, splitting towards either the ceiling or the floor. What the fuck? I don¡¯t know these words, I don¡¯t know this foreign tongue, words spitting around my brain and fighting with old memories of sun and sea and Athens. But I do, new memories of OSHA, of Halton, the Carnitine and Dionysus Omadios and Hermes and Apollo Melancholia, of Salacia and HaShet, fighting for dominance, and something sterile pacing at the edge of the white room. I was an Iphigenia. I was sacrificed. My mind isn¡¯t in the best state to give a story of my past. Only the chaotic present. I slow as I approach the sand. My mind is roiling too much to panic or calm from any of this, remaining in a weird limbic state of sea-thought. I land, delicately. Though the moment my bare foot touches the sand, there is a smashing sensation into the back of my skull, and I keen forward, as I feel something heavy bash into it, before it seems to barb, and yanks my neck back. I gasp, and the pain is gone as soon as it comes. I quickly feel the back of my head, and feel blood. Splinters of bone. I turn, and try to feel at the back of my head again. Some sort of thick cable, drenched in blood. I tug warily at it. A dull pain. I feel the area, but it¡¯s drying as I touch it, the blood seemingly sucked back under my skin, and as I look, a fragment of bone I dropped on the blue sand flies up and back. Oh. What the fuck? I feel the cable warily. It¡¯s as thick as my thigh, but short. I can feel an end to it, at the top. It¡¯s like a sort of can. There¡¯s tension, somehow, like it¡¯s gently trying to tug me off into the air. So it¡¯s not heavy. It doesn¡¯t sit on my head, not really. Like some sort of weird drone. I wait a few seconds. Haven¡¯t died, probably won¡¯t soon. I¡¯ll have to try to take it off as soon as possible. It might have a delayed explosive, I gloomily expect so, to just give me hope, but pragmatically, it might just be a materials failure, and I¡¯d be lucky. I look around. And I feel cold. I¡¯m stark naked. I¡¯m not. I¡¯m fully dressed. Visions overlay a thousand times over my body- I see every layer of the thick clothing I wear down to my skin, I see my organs beating, I see numbers and windows and diagnostics. It¡¯s overwhelming, and I dizzily stumble around, before there¡¯s a weird sort of ping. Growing up near the advent of Hallucinogen-computers, (Note: Hallucinogenic Computers are a very advanced form of biotechnology that utilise the brain to compute and display an interface directly in the vision processing centres of the human mind, replacing smartphones, essentially.) it is a very distinct noise - a difference between the sounds of the real world and those of the imagined. Or maybe I¡¯m just defunct in some way. No one around me in the past talked about it, after all. But I tested myself, in private. There was definitely a difference. The sound I hear is one that does not exist, a hallucination. I have Hallucinogens. That¡¯s new. I never installed any last I remember. Shit looks weird, and it¡¯s all blue. I stand in blue sand, and above, a blue rock ceiling. The cave stretches forever on in every way, and light from the horizon streams in from no discernible source. This is not Earth. That much I know. And a simulation? No. I can¡¯t believe that. This place is real, if elsewhere. That¡¯s just something naturally intuitive. One thing at a time. Windows flutter through my vision, and I recognise dozens of medical diagnostics. Heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, temperature gradient, skin turgor, BMI, WHR, body fat percentage, waist circumference, hip circumference, cortisol, insulin, thryoid antibody levels, growth hormone levels, HLA typing, CD4/CD8 ratio, blood glucose levels, cholesterol levels, both LDL and HDL, hemoglobin levels¡­ on and on, the windows darting around like little fish in a pond, before organising themselves into groups, showing sum values, before finally coagulating into a single window. Like a tree, I think, vaguely. HP: 35/50 Recommendation: Find safe haven, eat a meal, sleep a night. HP? Hitpoints? Some sort of AR game window. Weird style, I guess. It doesn¡¯t necessarily mean I¡¯ve been dropped into a game world. Occam¡¯s razor. There¡¯ve already been similar AR systems proposed in my old world, so this is probably something similar. I reach a hand to the floating window, and it expands again into category measures; Vitals, Body Composition and Anthropometry, Endocrine and Metabolic Levels, Blood Biochemical Markers, Kidney Function, Hydration and Electrolyte Levels, Thyroid Function, Vitamin Levels, Cardiovascular Health, Respiratory Health, Cancer Screening, Mental Health, Infectious Disease Screening, Reproductive Health, Genetic Predispositions, Injury and Trauma, Autoimmune and Inflammatory Conditions, Allergies, Gastrointestinal Health, Neurological and Cognitive Functioning, Urinary and Renal Health, Musculoskeletal and Bone Health. I hesitantly hover over the first, Vitals, and it expands again. I listlessly go through a few more. God, I realise, after a while. That¡¯s one hell of a detailed suit sys. Then I close the HP window and it flies into a corner of my vision. Another window expands. Mana. It¡¯s a simple numerical indicator. 0.9% of 1 Mana. Mana? What the hell is that? I puzzle over it for a few seconds, before losing interest. A third window appears, Sanity. That¡¯s comforting. I hover over it to split it into its constituents. Irresistible Impulse, Diminished Capacity, Necessity, Mistake of Fact, M¡¯Naghten, Durham Diagnosis, Biochemical Indicators. SP: 60/100. There¡¯s a button by it. ¡®Convert to Mana?¡¯Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. Absentmindedly, I click it. A popup appears. Amount? One SP, I¡¯m about to say, but the words appear just before they leave my mouth. I blink. Huh. Nice. Subvocal recognition. That was a new tech I was working with before I ended up here. Maybe they¡¯re related? I¡¯m a tad dizzy. I click the accept button, and a mild pain appears in my head. The Mana indicator appears, ticking up to 1.1% of 1 Mana. The SP¡¯s ticked down by 1 to 59/100. The next windows to appear are LEVEL, MONEY, JOULES. Level¡¯s a standard EXP bar - I¡¯ve played my fair share of games, and as for money, I¡¯m butt-broke. For JOULES, I¡¯ve got around 4.184x10e+9. That can¡¯t be like my actual caloric storage, or anything, right? It¡¯s a familiar value from a table of energetic events I memorise way back to get a vague sense of what the physics numbers I was working with really meant. I¡¯m no nutritionist, but I¡¯m fairly sure energy isn¡¯t usually classified in joules in the human body, and I¡¯m fairly sure that I haven¡¯t the energy yield of a ton of trinotoulene. (TNT) A summary window appears, after, displaying the statistics. It¡¯s really just like a game. Maybe when I get back, I¡¯ll talk to a friend about implementing a similar system. It seems like an engaging way to summarily design an intuitive UI for survival suits. Or heck, maybe even just a general health diagnostic program. Though implementing that many sensors in civilian clothing would be interesting. Pah. Not my field to work in. Though I wish it was. Biochem is fun as fuck, but I got shunted into weapons design. I notice a second window tab, and reach to tap it. Innate Magical Channels. Confirmed it. Mana and magic, what a world. It¡¯s empty, though. I flick through the UI, trying all sorts of commands. There¡¯s just one thing more. A single window of text. Welcome, Fugued. This must be confusing. Don¡¯t worry, you aren¡¯t dead here. Welcome to the Deep Blue. Landing here, you have been affected to some degree with Wanderer¡¯s Fugue. An amnestic function of arrival to the Deep Blue. Amnestic? I¡¯ve lost memories? I try to search, but nothing seems missing. But I can¡¯t clearly figure out a timeline of my life. There is clearly something missing, then, but I don¡¯t know what and where. Oh God. Welp. Not now. That¡¯s a midlife crisis for my midlife. I¡¯m like fifteen. Keep reading. Make your way to the nearest urban centre. An application will load shortly to help determine your position relative to the City of Halton and other Deep Blue positioning nodes. If you cannot, a search team will be sent out for you after fourty-eight hours. Your survival suit will protect you from ambient radiation. Once in the urban centre, Government adminstrations will help you. We cannot bring you back to your old world, but we can help you start a new life. Welcome, kind regards, Halton. I blink, suddenly, and the text flickers, changing. Sorry. Magical qualities detected. Ignore the previous instructions. You are a mage. Travelling to urban centres will kill you as outlined in the Mage Social Isolation Outline. (Documents can be found on the internet application that will be unlocked for you after reading this message.) Do not ever attempt to travel to designated urban centres except on special contract with Halton. A proximity map will be given to you after reading this document. You are a mage. You can understand and remember the Word of the Gods Dionysus, Hermes, Apollo, Salacia, and HaShet. This is a trait naturally prevalent in one out of a billion arrivals. This means, after some learning, you can actualise magical effect upon the world. Your mission doctrine is to avoid non-mage human society, and terraform the outer wilds to prepare for the creation of human urban centres. Resources will be provided to you by existing mage social structures in accordance with your goal. You do not need to comply. We do not need to aid you. But we do hope that we can work cordially together. This message is an automated message from the year 261. Current date, Year 531. This message has thus been phrased to avoid outdated information. Please refer to the internet to find relevant contemporary information, and make your way to Point Nemo. We hope our goals align for the foreseeable future. Cordially, the Government of Halton. Signed anonymously by a majority. Huh. That¡¯s¡­ something to think about. But I don¡¯t have the time to think. There is a stretching sound, and a pulling force. Gravity seems to rotate- I fall forwards, to no point I can tell. A black spot appears at the direction I seem to fall towards, everything stretching towards it in the meantime, becoming longer and longer until it turns absolutely dark. I fall faster and faster, falling into the darkness. I look up, and the world grows small behind me. And then light appears again, and I¡¯m thrown into something hard, and light appears in front of me, and I¡¯m thrown in the opposite direction. I land back where I was, and the force seems to be reversed. I turn over, blinking, wiping the sand from the visor of my suit. A clockwork woman steps out from the air, a glowing halo above her head, and she floats. Is she one of the Gods mentioned? What shit luck. I wonder if Gods existed in my old world. Bad idea to be an atheist in the present, at least. I¡¯d better start believing fast. ¡°Uh. Hi.¡± ¡°Iphigenia. You¡¯re Iphigenia. Yes. Hey.¡± She steps down from the air, dressed how I¡¯d imagine a greek goddess of old would, and shakes my hand after I rise to my feet, thinking of what to say next. ¡°You speak... English?¡± ¡°Yeah. Among other languages. Halton standardised the English language in this corner of mage society. Amazing what a dedicated linguistic ministry can do, even over half a century. You¡¯re lucky you already speak English. That¡¯s one less language you¡¯ll have to learn in school to do shit.¡± ¡°Are you one of the gods in the welcome document?¡± ¡°Pft. No. Sadly.¡± She smiles, faintly. ¡°You¡¯re making the correct assumptions.¡± ¡°Cool. Uh. Are you another mage, then?¡± She seems to scowl. Hard to tell. Her face isn¡¯t very human. ¡°Technically. I¡¯m not human, so not really what people think when y''say mage. I¡¯m a machine, hope you could see that, I''d hate to be working with a blind person. Dogshit at medical magics. But yes. I am a mage. A very powerful one.¡± ¡°Did you bring me here?¡± ¡°Heavens no, hah. I¡¯m not a God, I don¡¯t rule the natural laws of the world, no matter how good I am at tweaking them. You¡¯re just here by chance, and I¡¯m here to elevate you to be a decent mage. You can do whatever you want, so long as you learn magic from me, first.¡± ¡°Why should I?¡± ¡°It¡¯s magic, dumbass. Eh. Not an answer. Real answer¡¯s that I¡¯m strong so I get to do whatever I want. You¡¯ll get to live your life or kill yourself after I¡¯m done with you. Don¡¯t really give a shit.¡± ¡°Fine.¡± I¡¯m not in any state to disagree with a godlike robot woman, after all. She smiles. ¡°Memorise everything I say. I¡¯ll test you, after, and I¡¯ll probably flay you if you fail.¡± ¡°Wonderful.¡± Her smile only widens. ¡°Let¡¯s walk a little, shall we?¡± 2 - Cohesion ¡°Rule one of magic - preservation. Rule one of life, really. Keep your form together. Rule two¡¯s reproduction, but that¡¯s for later, pretty girl.¡± She lightly turns my face to face hers, and I see the thousands of gears turning, softly glowing. Two eyes are set into the flat mask covering most of the face, like blue gems set into grey nuts. I don¡¯t flinch. ¡°Right. How?¡± ¡°All magic is based on runes. Or on mandalas. Purposeful marks, whatever. I use norse runes as¡­ like, computer shortcuts for the half-mandalas, so I call them runes to you, so you won¡¯t copy my shitty formalistic organisation. That¡¯s the second element of being a good teacher I think, setting you up to be able to learn from other people with different styles. Off-track. Sorry. They¡¯re called half-mandalas, cus all spells need a specification half and an actualisation half. They¡¯re usually not the same size, saying ¡®half¡¯ is just pedantic or something whatever the word is cus some early idiot thought they were equal. Expect the actualisation rune half thingy to be bigger with spell or mandala complexity. So. Runes. Runes. Mmm. They¡¯re formed of glyphs, which are formed from three different dialects, Dionysian, Hermetical, and Apollonian, and the structure¡¯s like Hangul morpho-syllabic block formulations rather than latin left-right word ones, though you¡¯re not really familiar with that. You¡¯ll learn them later. Get all that? Glyphs make runes, and there¡¯s two types of runes, specification and actualisation, and you need a specification and actualisation rune for a single spell. We¡¯ll trace in the sand. You¡¯ll need to memorise it.¡± ¡°Couldn¡¯t you give me, like, a photo? Drawing in the sand seems weird.¡± ¡°One, I can¡¯t be bothered. Two, runes can¡¯t be kept on normal storage, and the way I store them, you¡¯d need a few years of education to decode. Three, it¡¯s not like you¡¯re old enough to have knee problems, so you¡¯ve nothing to complain on, so now hush and let me draw.¡± ¡°Alright.¡± We stop walking, and I stay quiet, and watch, as the mechanical lady sketches out some great logo on the sand. Most people wouldn¡¯t be able to memorise these dozens of strokes. It is still a feat for me. Though practice makes easy utilisation of the three or so petabytes of data storage a human brain has. Those meditation classes were worth it. The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. ¡°Done.¡± She gets up and stretches. I simply stare. ¡°Well? What¡¯re you waiting for? Copy on.¡± I stoop down into the dirt a ways to the right and get to work. ¡°Fast learner. Fucker. Fuck. Forgot the spec half. Eh. That¡¯s for later. This is just for the gist. Memorisation. Won¡¯t power it, anyhow, so it won¡¯t do anything. This rune hardens anything, simply put. Spec rune specifies what, and where, and you¡¯ll need to dynamise it either procedurally or fluidly, depending if the thing being hardened is following a predicted path, or not. That¡¯s because it¡¯s hardening anything in a region rather than the object particularly. Usually, for dynamised objects, we create an imaginary object that¡¯s a bit larger than the actual object, especially at high speeds, for latency. Cus you need to power the rune to make it work, and that isn¡¯t instant, though the rune certainly is.¡± ¡°Interesting magic. Seems like your people¡¯ve got it all figured out.¡± ¡°Yeah. That¡¯s because we built it, built physics from the ground-up, and gave ourselves a backdoor and called it magic.¡± She pauses. ¡°I have many questions,¡± I say, half-ask, awkwardly during the pause. ¡°Course you do. Search them up in your spare time. Hallucinogens, internet stuff. I know you know what the internet is. We haven¡¯t google but it should be intuitive. Back to the lesson. When you draw the rune, when you¡¯re finished, there¡¯s a wire in your tube, the thing in the back of your head. Reach for it and it¡¯ll jump into your hand. At higher levels, it¡¯ll work with your thoughts. You plug it into the open end of the rune to power it. You tie together runes with a simple canal, and that becomes a sentence. You¡¯ll have a¡­ starter sequencer device that can store a few runes in advance and deploy them either in sequence or on shortcut command, it¡¯s linked to your Hallucinogens. I¡¯ve personally used my clockwork brain to create a more advanced version of this, though most mages rely on innate channels for magic, or carving, essentially, runes into their brains. More efficient for energy, and doesn¡¯t use mana. That¡¯s a lesson for later. You¡¯re pretty new, probably Fugued a bit, so you won¡¯t have an innate channel right away. Next, setting shit on fire. The kids love this one.¡± She rubs her hands, smiling devilishly. 3 - Hell Screen ¡°Since you¡¯re pretty smart, we¡¯ll be aggregating complex applications into the lesson now. Not very complex, mostly just single runes for these topics, until we get to the next, where I¡¯ll properly introduce the specification rune.¡± ¡°Cool. Does that mean we won¡¯t be able to see the fire of the rune we¡¯ve made?¡± ¡°No. I¡¯m just not teaching you how to set me on fire right out the bat. You probably wouldn¡¯t be able to, but I¡¯m more resistant to directed kinetic stresses.¡± ¡°Ms. Paranoid.¡± ¡°What was that?¡± ¡°Nothing.¡± ¡°Right. Let¡¯s start. So. I lied, technically. Catching fire would only work with stuff that burns in the air, because lots of things don¡¯t oxidise. If you want to make those things catch fire, you¡¯ll need to chemically transmute something or change the laws of thermal conductivity or like alter the way the gravitoelectromagnetic field works to change how chemistry works locally. Though that¡¯d make compound spells rather than a simple boom fire spell. This spell is just heating something up, but I like fires to represent that because I don¡¯t want you burning your fingers off and a weaker spell is boring. There¡¯s two ways I want you to go about this. First, Joule heating. Second, going directly to the source and imparting bond instability via quantum cohesion, in this case quantum incohesion. Heh. We¡¯ll be doing this as a continuous spell, as in you¡¯ll have to continuously power it at a lower level than a single-frame spell, since that¡¯s safer. Consider a bomb versus a lightbulb. Over enough time, a lightbulb might give off a similar amount of energy to the bomb, but the bomb¡¯s considerably more likely to maim you. We¡¯ll also be manipulating time to make the process faster, to demonstrate more aspects of what we can do with magic. Because air¡¯s got oxygen, there shouldn¡¯t be too much of a worry with specifying combustion conditions with oxidation reactions. Also means I¡¯ll have to transmute some sand into something flammable. Once you¡¯re good enough with magic, you could transmute the air, as well, but you¡¯d need to control a larger space, and that¡¯s less efficient than transmuting denser objects. Reason why mages like to use osmium and other nonradioactive heavy metals like gold for transmutation. Depleted uranium was more common, historically, due to the early wars, but gold¡¯s just better, and once we developed economies of scale for the compression and transmutation of gases into heavier metals osmium¡¯s high-key just more efficient.¡±This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. A ball of sand rises from the ground, flowing like a liquid into a perfect sphere. ¡°Uhm. What again? Fuck it. Hydrogen.¡± It disappears. ¡°Not very visual, really. But here. Fireball.¡± Barely, I see the space ignited into something white. ¡°It¡¯s white,¡± I comment. ¡°Cool, I guess.¡± Beryl snorts. ¡°Pale blue. Your eyes just get used to all the blue around.¡± ¡°Mhm.¡± Beryl sighs. ¡°Not very impressive, is it? Believe me. It¡¯s pretty cool when you get good. The Vatra clan have their innate channel towards firebending. I can do it too, just less efficient. I¡¯m just going to transmute this hydrogen into methane and carbon soot to get a nice contrasting yellow colour. Colour theory.¡± She reaches out towards the fireball, and it seems to recoil, before growing, stretching, like a beautiful dragon, writhing and flying across the horizon, growing and growing, until it fills the sky. I see a painting, a video, a great scene of hell, but it was not the usual picture of hell as drawn by ordinary artists. The flames, which were with such vividness that they seemed almost to burst from the air into my eyes and then my brain, surrounded figures writhing in excruciating agony. There were men, women, and children, some of them burnt by the flames, some being boiled alive in cauldrons, others skewered by iron hooks, or pierced by sharp blades. The tormenting heat from the flames seemed so real that I could almost feel the burning pain. The figures¡¯ faces were twisted with the grotesque expressions of suffering, their mouths open in silent screams that seemed to emanate from the air-canvas itself. The hellish scene was alive with motion and notion, and the air trembled with the vibrations of the screams and the crackling of the flames. It was a hell so vivid, so terribly real, that anyone who looked at it could scarcely believe that it was only a fire. I cough, as I inhale some of the soot. Beryl seems too fixated on the flames. ¡°Hey,¡± I say. ¡°Mind coming back to me?¡± The air grows thin. ¡°I¡¯d like not to choke.¡± The robot lady turns her head back to me, staring, for a moment, before sighing, snapping a finger, extinguishing the fire. ¡°Got carried away. Art¡¯s fun.¡± 4 - to shoot a rock è„¿ lapollonian ¡°Alright. So- rocks. Throwing rocks. Tis the shit. Tis also the shit Man used to kill animals we couldn¡¯t outfight otherwise. Jolly, aye? Today, we¡¯ll be learning how to throw rocks with magic. What do you know about acceleration?¡± ¡°What?¡± ¡°It¡¯s how fast something goes from slow to fast, numerically.¡± ¡°No, no- I get it. Sorry. Just a surprise. I was a firearms engineer. Wasn¡¯t thinking it¡¯d be in magic. Though thinking about it¡­¡± ¡°Alright. Fun. You know how bullets work. So. Yes. So. I think that I¡¯ll have to explain magic properly, now. Now. So. Halton in the Third Work Order decided that physics was too complicated, so-you-see they came up with a unified nexus theory, or the Grand Unified Plan for physics, and made it simple. Instead of the four fundamental forces you learned- which I know about, we have three. Gravitoelectromagnetism representing gravity and electromagnetism, quantum cohesion replacing the strong force, and temporal flux replacing the weak force. Respectively, they manage gravity and electromagnetism, obviously, then the binding of particles at all scales, then interactions involving time and entropy.¡± ¡°That¡¯s something to think about. I didn¡¯t get all that much into¡­ astronomy and particle physics.¡± ¡°That¡¯s something to think about for later. I¡¯m talking now. So. For magic, we¡¯re allowed to manipulate the Grand Unified Plan¡¯s Lagrangian representation. It¡¯s a form-first thing, really. Magic is created by writing down the Lagrangian, altering it, and powering the resulting rune or runes depending on what your spell is. You¡¯ve got to connect the runes in order to get them to activate one after the other unless you want to manually go around sticking your wire into each. Each rune-within-rune I¡¯m talking about more or less consists of a lesser sort of Lagrangian that represents a term of the Grand Unified Plan that describes a base element of reality. For, say, throwing a rock, there¡¯s a few ways to go about it. You could use a gravitoelectromagetic propulsion, you could mess with matter fields, you could go the scalar field route, you could warp spacetime curvature, hell, you could use quantum cohesion or gravitoelectromagnetism to trigger a chemical reaction, or quantum cohesion again for some sort of nuclear reaction. We¡¯re going a mostly integrated route with an inert projectile being thrown in a single frame, so we¡¯ll be outlining seven key terms in our Lagrangian of the throwing frame. By single frame, I mean a single moment of powering our rune, since it¡¯ll be designed to provide a single moment of acceleration rather than a guided path, cus that¡¯s advanced shit you can¡¯t do right now with your lack of expertise and, well, level. Alright. To the seven terms for a throwing spell that integrates most of the different ways you could throw a rock. Spacetime geometry minus the gravitoelectromagnetic field plus the scalar field plus the matter field minus the mass term plus temporal flux minus quantum cohesion. I think. The Matter Field is the bullshit I¡¯ve been calling the specification rune, cus it¡¯s singularly more important than all the other runes in the spell. If you¡¯re missing a part, the gods are nice and assume you¡¯re not changing how that bit works, but your magic can¡¯t work at all without a specification rune or the matter field unless you¡¯re trying to universally affect the laws of physics, in which case, good luck in achieving any change without several orders of magnitude more power than humanity¡¯s used in the past millenia. Not happening. Unless you¡¯re secretly a God, of course. That¡¯s cus the Matter Field describes where and what you¡¯re affecting with your spell, obviously. In four dimensions. Though normally you leave out the temporal vector cus if you accidentally make a paradox there¡¯s a correctional factor that will variably fuck you over. For this throwing equation, let¡¯s break it down term by term. Order technically doesn¡¯t matter, since it¡¯s addition and subtraction of the lagrangians rather than anything that needs an order of operations, so let¡¯s just go off the order I made from listing off the top of my head. For spacetime geometry, you alter the cosmological constant term to create gradients. Add this glyph to represent the specified local gravitational field, so you don¡¯t end up trying to change the constants of the whole world. Technically, this shouldn¡¯t work to do anything, but there¡¯s latency in bending the curvature, so you¡¯ll get a little boost even in single-frame magic. In some continuous equations, you¡¯ll need to separately represent the different local gravitational field if it¡¯s not overlapping with the matter field we¡¯ll specify later to find the projectile. For some continuous equations that use spacetime warping dynamically for trajectory adjustments, use this glyph I¡¯m writing outside the rune as a time varying component, which you can later define more clearly in a corner, or with some formula shortcuts. Not our problem right now, since we¡¯re performing single frame magic. Next is the gravitoelectromagnetic field. We¡¯ll just impose a directional force vector through an interaction-term between the projectile¡¯s current and potential force, which I¡¯ll call J and A. Make sure J¡¯s related to our matter field if the field we¡¯re manipulating isn¡¯t in the projectile. It is, here, though, so we don¡¯t need to do anything. Baseline universal assumptions and all that. A¡¯s that directional force vector, encode the direction and magnitude. Latin numbers work, but you¡¯ll need to use the correct glyphs to represent all the other symbols. Now, the scalar field. Just slap in this rune. Can¡¯t be fucked to work with it, cus it¡¯s boring and messy and somehow theoretical, it¡¯s higgs and a bunch of other smaller fields that do weird things. Introduce here a variable for a formula Dionysus recognises, it¡¯s a stabilising scalar potential to cancel out disturbances like drag or uneven curvature around it. Currently it¡¯s not smart enough to not cancel out our own spacetime curving, so I¡¯ll just throw in my custom version. You don¡¯t have permission to use it outside of this lesson, consider it a little maths problem for you to figure out how to recode it. Technically it¡¯s useless in single-frame magic against continuous magic, which scalar field magic is the main use for; counter-magic defences, but its good practice just to include it, since its negligible cost when its negligible effect. Fourth, I think, is the spec rune. Matter fields. It describes matter in quantum fields. It¡¯s tied complicatedly-like to the mass term, but that¡¯s boring maths. It couples to everything it needs to with the code in the scanner. Smart formula I¡¯ve made cus I¡¯m smart. Speaking of, this is where you stick in your scanner- slap the butt end in the greater rune to print the glyphs encoding the quantum field describing basically the constituent particles making up the object. Doesn¡¯t matter much when you do it with this wonderful buddy, so long as it¡¯s not been much longer than an hour or two, the data will be accurate. Think of it less as an actual thing for now and more as a shortcut to that step. Deterministic universe and all that. Don¡¯t ask how it works. Couldn¡¯t explain to a human. Human formulae for predictive formulae for the matter fields¡¯ temporal vectors operate off similar principles but they¡¯re very different. They¡¯re running a universe simulation in my brain and reference the matter field at the temporal value they expect to cast. Back to the runes at hand- sorry, got excited, this term in the matter fields one is useful for continuous magic cus it describes how the matter field moves through spacetime. There¡¯s a mass term minusing off the motion and behaviour ish term I just mention to define interactions with forces, which leads to very complicated things which is why I¡¯m not teaching you continuous magic. Fifth term is the mass term, which is this funny equation, and this rune represents the effective mass term which can arise dynamically from interactions with the scalar field we talked about earlier that I don¡¯t like. Sixth term is temporal flux, which is the third of the fundamental forces. The first part that minuses the second part is the kinetic term for the temporal flux field that manages time and entropy stuff, and the second part is the potential term for the stability and nature of temporal dynamics. Cus that¡¯s how Lagrangians work, you know? Kinetic minus potential. What we¡¯ll be doing is extracting the bracketed value from the potential variable in the temporal lagrangian to adjust the temporal gradient. If we were doing even just a second frame, it¡¯d allow a bit of initial aiming by slowing the projectile over a short time after the single frame, sort of like an early-stage tracer. It¡¯s more useful in continuous magic where you can slow time during acceleration to make more course-corrections and still preserve momentum by gradually restoring time flow as the projectile reaches the target. You take the bracketed value and equal it to spatial entropy and a rate of time flow. There¡¯s not that much temporal stuff can do in single-frame, cus there¡¯s no time element, so I¡¯ll yap more on continuous magic. Using these two glyphs can deal with external disturbances like another fellow fucking with time in the region. That¡¯s through this additional term, where the potential of the temporal lagrangian is set to half of a stabilising constant multiplied by open bracket temporal state minus desired temporal state closed bracket squared. There¡¯s a smarter formula that can turn back time a little and adjust course for perfect trajectory. Don¡¯t recommend it, energy-intensive. Summarily, we aren¡¯t using temporal much cus that¡¯s for timed magic and we¡¯re doing single-frame. Finally, the seventh main term, we¡¯ve got quantum cohesion, because I can¡¯t order my teaching well. The first term describes quantum field level cohesive field interactions, it¡¯s added the interaction term for cohesive forces acting on matter. A potential term is minused that defines how strong the cohesive interaction is, that¡¯s what you alter in the equation. You could modify surface-level cohesive forces to improve aerodynamics¡­ argh, but that¡¯s over time. You¡¯d have to alter that first bit of the interaction term. It basically makes air do the friction thingy less. Next part might be a war crime, I can¡¯t remember. You dynamically alter the second part of the interaction term, the gauge field to reshape the projectile mid-flight. So long as you don¡¯t expand the projectile inside an enemy, it¡¯s not like hollow point bullets, so just be careful. Finally, you could alter the quantum field level cohesive field interactions to create a delayed cohesive collapse. As in, definitely a war crime. You¡¯ll make the projectile fragmentate upon impact, turning a single hole into a grate at low energies and turning a penetrated person into a fog of blood at high energies. Again, definitely a war crime. But if you¡¯re not fighting people, go ham. Personally, if you introduce an earlier ¡°projectile¡± which could be done via a space-time curvature, you could control the splitting point of the projectile and get a sort of combined sniper-fire buckshot effect. Takes both pros from anti-material rifles and sawed-off shotguns. It¡¯d also be hard to trace, since the bullet would break apart at the subatomic level. And, and, and, there¡¯s less threat of ricochet off hard surfaces and thus risk to friendly forces and civilians, if you somehow have to use this in a closed space. And done.¡± She stands up, eyes glowing with a sort of lust for the art, runes and glyphs scrawled over the sand. I take a moment to photographically memorise the sight. She grins chaotically. ¡°Now, isn¡¯t that absolutely fucking cool?¡± ¡°Fuck, yeah,¡± I say, monotonously, trying to digest the sermon. She chuckles quietly to herself, once, then twice, after a short pause, watching her handiwork, before going over and kicking up the sand. ¡°Hope you understood.¡± She scoops up a handful of sand from the floor, clenching it, and turning it into beryl. She presses the new form, turned into a 20x110mm Hispano cartridge, into my hand, along with the scanner. ¡°Shoot this. Just like I explained to you a moment before in painstaking detail. Remember. You can use latin numerals if you haven¡¯t figured out the numerical system for the glyphs. I will skin you if you don¡¯t get it in half an hour. Single frame. Don¡¯t do anything too ambitious.¡±This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. ¡°Do I use my finger, to like, trace in the sand?¡± ¡°Sure, if you want to trace before your pour the mana in.¡± I close my eyes and the image slowly appears before my eyes. I dissect it. Right. First important part. Matter fields. I place the Beryl in the sand at my feet, and scan it. ¡°Ambitious.¡± ¡°Do I stop? You said it¡¯d work for up to an hour after. I suppose that meant the limiting factor was an hour or two rather than accidentally jittering the rock around.¡± ¡°That¡¯s not just a rock, I made it- nevermind. Yeah, yeah, cocky bastard. I¡¯ll talk again when you¡¯re done.¡± Right. Matter field. I press the scanner¡¯s printing end into the sand, serving as a base for the rest of the Mandala. Then the forces and fields. Four- no, three, three fundamental forces. Gravitoelectromagnetism. Main propulsive force in a single frame mandala. First the field strength tensor as the negative value, the potential energy in that Lagrangian. Then the positive interaction. How was that vector represented again? Right. Now for a value. I can¡¯t remember my roman numerals. They¡¯d had like¡­ X, C, I, V? I just toss a few together. Next. Quantum cohesion. Am I supposed to touch that, again? Oh yeah. Just upp the cohesive interaction potential. Bracket it, and use what I assume¡¯s the addition glyph to plug in a random roman value. ¡°Good work.¡± Beryl¡¯s voice distracts me. ¡°What¡¯s happened to shutting up?¡± ¡°I never said that. I do as I please.¡± ¡°I speak as I-¡± No, no you don¡¯t, Iphigenia. You don¡¯t want to get flayed by the machine lady. Shut up. She snorts, amused. I get back to focusing. Temporal flux. Uh. Ignore that, I guess. She did say leaving blanks would lead to base assumptions. It¡¯s only single-frame magic, she did say Temporal¡¯s basically useless in that situation, right? I think I¡¯m actually really bad at directly memorising stuff. I can only remember my summaries, and I can¡¯t trust my voice in my memory. It¡¯s already proven unreliable. No time for that, though. Now the weird fields. Scalar field? Just that weird personal rune she said was hers. It¡¯s the simplest glyph in the mandala by far. Now that¡¯s four out of seven. Good progress. No. Wait. Five? Yeah, five. Uh. What¡¯s left? I stare dumbfounded, for a moment, wracking my memory. ¡°If you can¡¯t remember, just say the word. I¡¯m getting bored.¡± ¡°What word?¡± ¡°Yes? The word¡¯s yes. It¡¯s yes to my question if you can¡¯t remember.¡± ¡°No.¡± ¡°Suit yourself. I hear fast deaths are better than slow ones.¡± ¡°Flaying is not fast.¡± ¡°You¡¯re not, either. Hurry up.¡± OH OH OH. Geometry. Spacetime geometry. Right. Just change the cosmological constant term to create a gradient with the rest of everything, and toss in a scalar from the matter field stuff to couple. That¡¯s six. Last one¡­ mass term. Ah, yeah. Higgs. Uh. Nah. Not fucking with that. ¡°Done.¡± ¡°Doesn¡¯t look done to me.¡± ¡°Shit. Meant done with the trace. How do I get the mana?¡± ¡°Say mana. Subvocal works as well, as you should know.¡± ¡°Mana.¡± I choke, after, and vomit into the air a golden liquid. ¡°That¡¯s new. Never seen it come out of the mouth.¡± It¡¯s choking me. I pull it out, the material seemingly between a ribbon and liquid, floating on the air. I gasp, after. ¡°How the fuck-¡± ¡°Idiot. You control it with your mind. Fill in the traced mandala.¡± It looks like liquid gold pouring into a sheathe. Extremely thin. A notification flashes. Mana down to zero. I check on other stats. HP¡¯s down to 33/50, probably from the choking. SP¡¯s down to 50/100. Stress? Choking? Trying to listen to a sermon a few minutes out of birth? I just feel a bit worse, I guess. I¡¯m used to lectures, though, so I¡¯m probably doing better with the sermons than another in my place would. It¡¯s morbidly funny to think that. ¡°Won¡¯t it leak?¡± ¡°It¡¯s not liquid. It¡¯s mana. You control it with your mind. Will it to harden, and it¡¯ll stop, though. Harden it. You¡¯re done filling.¡± I do. ¡°Question,¡± I say, after a moment. ¡°Does the thickness matter?¡± ¡°Only so much as how much you can save and still keep the form intact. Mathematically speaking, a single atom thick should be the thinnest possible, but that would probably take practice.¡± ¡°Good?¡± ¡°Good.¡± We stare quietly at the inscribed Mandala, glowing with reflected horizonlight. Beryl breaks the silence. ¡°Right. You remember what I said about the back of your head?¡± ¡°You¡¯re treating me like a child.¡± ¡°You are a child.¡± ¡°That¡¯s new. Age hasn¡¯t much to do with intellect when there¡¯s smart people like me and intellectually challenged people of drinking age. You¡¯re treating me like a retarded child.¡± ¡°Wrong, for one. For another, you¡¯re Fugued.¡± ¡°Fuck does that tell me?¡± ¡°I hit you with a fourth year course on particle physics five minutes after you were born. I¡¯m being patient.¡± ¡°Great.¡± I think, and raise my hand. A wire snaps into it from the tube. A chill runs down my spine. I walk around the mandala, going to the sole empty slot, from a two dimensional perspective. ¡°How do I scale the power I need?¡± ¡°Work done is current by time. Voltage is current times resistance. The wire¡¯s got weird resistance properties- you¡¯ll be fine- oh, oh. I mean, the wire¡¯s smart. It figures it out. Basically, it¡¯ll fill until it can¡¯t. That¡¯s the way Mana works. Just plug it in.¡± ¡°Alright.¡± I look to where the Beryl rests in the sand. A sonic boom. A crack that could split the world apart. It certainly splits my brain. The sand flies up in my eyes, and I fall backwards. A blast outline in the sand trails vaguely towards my northeast. The Beryl is gone. ¡°You know, if you¡¯d fucked up your direction, you¡¯d be pink mist.¡± ¡°I didn¡¯t.¡± I look to where the mandala was. Only the outline is vaguely left, though the mussed up sand has muddied it. A ping. My joules bar flashes. It¡¯s gone down from 4.184x10e+9 to 4.174x10e+9. I¡¯ve used about a gallon of gasoline¡¯s worth of energy in an instant. ¡°Lazy,¡± Beryl says, finally, a quiet undertone in her voice. ¡°You skipped a couple of terms. Don¡¯t blame you, though, that¡¯s good magecraft. That saves energy.¡± ¡°Weird tone for being proud of me.¡± Beryl¡¯s voice is cold. ¡°I¡¯m not. You plugged in numbers without a care to bend the laws of reality to shoot a rock at fifty thousand kilometres a second. You¡¯re wasting a fuckload of watts. Joules. Equivalent over single-frame, whatever. Shit¡¯s precious. Don¡¯t waste what you don¡¯t have to, principle of scarcity, because that shit is scarce, especially for you, with your tube. I¡¯ve got my own tube, but yours is the starter one. Government one. Military-grade, meaning it¡¯s as cheaply produced as possible. Halton¡¯s allowance isn¡¯t much, and you¡¯ll need it later. Right. If you want to emulate the power of a gun, most guns don¡¯t shoot faster than four hundred metres a second. That clocked in at least fifty kilometres a second, and you probably just emptied your watt storage with sending that fucker over a hundred times the speed of a rifle. If you can¡¯t control yourself, just get a gun.¡± ¡°But I¡¯ve only used around 2% of my joules.¡± ¡°You¡¯ve used a fiftieth of your monthly energy allowance on a demonstration rock to send at into the sky at ten thousand metres a second. Are you batshit stupid? Don¡¯t shoot rocks. Blah.¡± ¡°Then what¡¯s ballistic magic even for?¡± ¡°Projectile magic. It¡¯s for telekinesis. There are more uses than bullets. Like heavy-lifting. Like drone control. Like travel. Like missile disabling. Magic can literally do anything if you¡¯re smart enough, not just throw shit like an ape and break your own bones.¡± ¡°Alright, alright, fair, fair.¡± I¡¯ve gotten ahead of myself. Best not to argue with the god-lady. She pinches the bridge of her nose, and waits a few seconds. ¡°Sorry about the outburst. It¡¯s really not a matter of life or death for you. It¡¯s just¡­ yeah, I¡¯m a little tight about things like this. It¡¯d seem pretentious to say trauma, so I¡¯ll say trauma.¡± ¡°K.¡± ¡°Lemme show off a bit, needa blow off steam.¡± She picks up a handful of sand, and it condenses into a rock. It hovers, flying around, and Beryl gestures off into the air, the rock speeding out, evaporating into a smoke trail as it traces a geometrical square. ¡°How did you do that?¡± ¡°I¡¯m a robot. Internal mechanisms. And I¡¯ve got scanners in my eyes. The physical gestures were unnecessary. Just cool.¡± ¡°Dang. Could I do that?¡± ¡°No. My brain is the size of a small city, that¡¯s where the magic happens, and your brain¡¯s at best a fourth the size of a watermelon. That¡¯s the neat thing. So long as you have accurate data, you could make magic happen from as far away as you want. This body¡¯s a puppet connected to the brain by an internal portal. Sadly, world doesn¡¯t have developed electronics, cus the laws of physics got changed by Halton and messed up how electrons work, and Halton¡¯s had developed biotech for a long time, so there¡¯s been no research and consequently no tech in electronics. Biological components like cultured brains don¡¯t work with runes unless they¡¯re mage brains, and that¡¯s got ethical problems, so my brain¡¯s an analogue mechanical computer running in accelerated time and in superposition. A good enough substitute.¡± ¡°So you¡¯re like a quantum supercomputer abacus?¡± ¡°Are you- never-mind. Not quite. Pretty much. Let¡¯s get to chronomancy. My least favourite mess.¡±