A Concept of Apathy

Chapter 14

“You’re so much worse than evil, you’re inefficient!”
– Gadden, Bard of Wrong Times and Right Places

I grimaced, blocking the hit from Mister Sharp’s pole arm. I still had to do it with my sword and not my cane in fear of the cane being damaged. In theory I would be able to go and fix that later today, but later was not now.
I had to block at an awkward angle with the blade across my body, but I had an easier way to reposition nowadays. I had worked an enchantment into the cane that tripled the distance I moved with every step if I so chose. It was a weird experience, but one I had gotten used to and it was evidently even weirder to watch.
I took the step through Mister Sharp, which I could only sometimes do. I hadn’t figured out exactly why, but I could not always step through things. Solid things like walls pretty much always did not work unless there was a door right next to me. I figured it was something like I had to be able to get to the location in three steps or I could not “walk” there.
I spun back to face him, which only got me the butt of the pole arm in my stomach. It was a hard blow, knocking the air out of me. I weakly tried to raise my sword, but he blew through my weak guard and gently placed the blade against my neck.
It pulled away swiftly enough, and I panted trying to recover a semblance of breath. Mister Sharp was patient, which I always found a weird quality for his concept, and eventually I stood back up from the bent over state I was in. I was likely resting more heavily on my cane, but who was to tell?
The end of the sparring sessions tended to be roughest as I tired and Mister Sharp most definitely did not. And he didn’t take bruises, which I was not permitted to heal in between bouts unless I was unable to continue. I had broken a few bones as well, but those were much less of a pain than they were in most other worlds I had been in.
“You need to get better at that mid fight. I’ve seen you use it normally while walking around, but you are still slow at recovering from it in the middle of a fight.”
“I’m noting.” I said, already pulling at concepts to start healing myself. That would have been the last round of the day, which meant next was to go in, drink some water, and go up to Mister Reclamation.
“I have some drills you could do, if you so wish, Young Master.”
“Any advice is welcome as always.”
The drills were simple enough, pretty much reacting instantly as soon as I came out of the steps. We had a scarecrow that was in disuse at large because of Mister Sharp always being in the garden. It was used as a dummy I could step around, and I added it onto the number of things I needed to do at the start of every day.
“Thank you.” I told him, making to head indoors.
“Any time Young Master.” He answered, already making his way to the back of the house. The garden into the hill was done, but my father had done some sort of magic and determined that we could dig a well closer to the house. It would be about twenty feet from the side of the house, and Mister Sharp once again was being used as the labor to get it done.
I went into the house, taking off my shoes by the door. My practice sword also got leaned against the wall next to my shoes. I made my way into the kitchen, where Madam Lie had already set out a glass with ice in it. The glasses were never completely identical, but they were fairly identical which was already impressive for the time. Well, that and the fact they were made out of glass which was expensive.
I had learned that one of the few mass produced magic items was a freezer. They were still expensive, but there was a huge market for it and multiple patents out for it. Not that the one we used was one of those, as my father had made it himself. Either way, it still let people keep food for much longer which made harvests have to be far less consistent for everyone to live.
And arguably more importantly it let Madam Lie put ice in my water.
“Thank you.” I told her, sitting down to start sipping at it.
“Of course.” She told me, sweeping the floor. “How did it go?” She asked like she hadn’t watched the entire thing. I had found that Madam Lie did not see the world like most other concepts, as her form was a lie. Evidently she had multiple eyes on her body, granting her a 360 degree view. She evidently had a form she could take that gave her even more vision, but did not use it often. She told me that was because using the “lie” of being human was too useful, which I had no idea what to make of.
“I still haven’t managed to ‘kill’ him, but I’m getting better. I have more tricks as well, although applying them remains hard.”
“I’m sure you’ll get somewhere if you keep walking down that path.” I narrowed my eyes at her, which she pretended like she couldn’t see. That pun was intentional, I just knew it was.
“I hope so. Do you have any measure on how good he is?”
“Not really. He is likely rather good, but to say he is in the top ten percent would be a lie.”
“Really?” I said, surprised.
“Really. Some people can get really good at fighting with weapons.”
“Huh.” I wondered if Kaeo would ever get to the top few percent when she woke up. Which she would. I would drag a cleric here if I had to, although I doubted that would be necessary. Clerics, it seemed, wherever they were from were typically kind people. Well, not the very old ones but that was typically because they had seen things.
I finished my drink, giving a small wave to Madam Lie which she returned without turning around. I started up the stairs, which took significantly less effort with the new enchantment. I didn’t even worry about drawing power as it drew from me and not the forest. My father was right, as he typically was with magic, of me not even feeling the drain of power. Evidently I could get away with being terribly mana inefficient and not notice, but he said if I ever took up that practice we would have words.
I glanced at Kaeo’s door for perhaps a moment too long before heading into my room. Mister Reclamation was standing there as he always was when preparing for a lesson, leaning forwards on one arm looking down at papers he held in his other hand. He looked up at me, and I thought for a bit he might see the world like Madam Lie but evidently he did have to look at things like most people did.
“Ah, good. Are you ready?” He started asking that somewhat recently as sometimes came up to my room to grab something or put something away rather than start the lesson.
“Yep.” I said, pulling out my chair and sitting down.
“What do you know of Nil’cron?”
“It is the home of neutrality in the mountains, effectively in the middle of the three continental powers. If a criminal runs in, then no one will chase them, and the entire city is in perpetual anarchy with only a small portion of the city being held under safety.”
“Indeed. Today we talk about why it is like that.” He took a second to rearrange some of the papers he had been reading, then started to pace. “Nil’cron is the oldest city in the world, and although we do not know why it was founded where it is, we do know why it remains. It is set next to no natural water source, but there was a large working done to transport the melting snow from the mountains to a reservoir. That reservoir is outside the city, brought in through pipes and canals.”
“Why is it brought in instead of the water being taken straight to the city?”
“Because the city itself is a working. It is the largest magical working in the world, and has some magic that is distinctly gnomish. The city cannot be destroyed, as any part that is destroyed is almost instantly reverted. Each building is a part of a larger working to keep something bound. But before we get to that, let me cover the city in a bit more detail. The city descends far into the ground, not so far as the lowest dwarven cities but much lower than any other cities. Well, besides perhaps the gnomes but it is hard to know what they have. It has a total of forty-nine floors, each of which is nearly a hundred feet tall. If you want to travel between floors, it will only feel like you are walking up a flight of stairs to a second floor of a building and not the mammoth of a construction it is. The heat from the bottom of the city is taken and converted into magical energy, and the walls of the bottom of the city that were once just normal rock are kept the same by the large working. It is one of the few places that does not get effected by erosion as it is kept the same. It also does not get flooded, although study has not shown why yet. The entire city is also in perpetual gang warfare. As one might imagine, the worst criminals go there and they are not always prone to peace. Each death also fulls the working as the soul, mind, body, and blood is swiftly taken.” Yeah, that didn’t sound sketchy at all. I also didn’t like how mater a fact he was saying all of this, although I was not sure how I would like him to say it.
“The deeper you go down, the more narrow the city gets, as it is shaped like a giant nail. The city also keeps the nearest 777 feet perfectly intact like it does the city. This is all a… prison to something. It is called the sleeping god, and we don’t know much about them.”
“I see. So why am I learning about it?”
“It is the meeting place where most wars get resolved when truce is made.”
He was right, there were a lot of instances of them happening, and the names slowly got mixed together as he continued.

***

I threw on my cloak, following my father out the door. Madam Lie would be accompanying us, keeping us cloaked the entire time. Not to say we would be out of perception, as there would be a lot of magic thrown around. Well, perhaps not thrown, but binded. It had taken the previous three days of work, but today was the day.
I had learned about magical ratios, which could work kind of like gears. They could be used to go faster, or slower, both of which had different purposes. You could rotate a large gear rather slowly to get a smaller one to spin rather fast if you did it right, and it was the principle my father used to power most of his workings with his rather meager amount of mana.
I was using it here because I would be binding a rather powerful concept, which would be too much for me to grab. We had done the math, and with my rate of draw it would take me roughly thirty months of uninterrupted work to get there, which of course means it would be interrupted work due to sleep and other bodily functions. That was a problem, as all of your draw snapped back to zero the moment you stopped pulling.
So we set up ratios, which would let me speed up my draw. It would be like me taking a string and instead be me pulling it using a really fast gear pulling on it. It would feel draining, but based on the math once again it would be under a millionth of my total mana. That was so insignificant I doubted I would even feel it, human brains just didn’t let you feel numbers that small.
My father called over Thanny, who seemed to always ignore Madam Lie. I honestly wasn’t sure if he could even see her, but it didn’t matter. We all got on Thanny’s back, which felt kind of like riding an elephant, if an elephant’s back was longer and more like a horse’s. Madam Lie, for lack of a better word teleported onto Thanny’s back which I knew was impossible. I had done the math to prove it.
Although, I was also unsure if Madam Lie was actually physical, she might have just been made up of light or information or something else like that. I had noted that wherever she walked, grass would not bend. I was put on Thanny, and off we went.
It took us a bit of a ride, as we went down the river. It had been hard to get somewhere flat enough to set up the magic circles, but we found somewhere that was close enough and good old terraforming got us the rest of the way. It had to be by the river as the goal was to make any damage my cane might take, whether that be the ravages of time or the scoring of a blade, be done to the water on the river rather than my cane.
My father had a large tarp made for the purpose of putting the magical ratios on, and I saw it in the distance as we rode down hills to it. Thanny was by far the fastest “horse” I had ever ridden on, and so we were there in a flash. I was feeling nervous, as in theory if this went wrong it would likely instantly destroy my cane and make the water explode out at several hundreds of miles per hour. I got off of Thanny, my father evidently sensing my nervousness and putting a hand on my shoulder.
“It’ll go fine. I checked over all of your math, and you didn’t even make one mistake. You didn’t make a mistake when setting up the magical reagents either, nothing will go wrong.” The utter calm in his voice made me feel more calm as well.
“Thank you.” I said, walking over. I went over the entire thing with a critical eye one last time. My father had put a working on it to make sure it wouldn’t change, and everything looked fine.
I walked over to the center, placing my cane which stood perfectly straight up. I had my own circle I would be in, which was on the opposite side that the river was on. In theory, all I had to do was sit there and start drawing on mana into the rock set there that would start a transfer into the system. It had to be done that way as the rock would keep the level of mana perfectly even, which was hard to do with the feeble human mind.
I took a deep breath in, and with one last glance at my father who nodded and Madam Lie who gave me two thumbs up I started. It was fast, taking only a minute and a bit, but it felt like an eternity to me. I forced myself to remain calm, watching the entire thing with a critical eye. As the system was filled with mana, the individual parts started to glow. It was mostly blues, but there was green near the staff and purples near me. For reasons I did not know, magic seemed to flow in ways like a color wheel. You could have a red next to a purple, but not a red next to a blue.
I watched it all happen, the magic start making winds around the staff and the surface of the normally calm river start churning. None of the magical reagents could change places once powered, or at least the physical force required to move them was so great it was effectively impossible.
The magic finished, the reagents having color drained out of them and I walked over to my staff. I picked it up, and grabbed my knife out of my sheath. I tried to score the wood, and nothing happened. I looked up, smiling a wide grin and gave a nod.
He grinned back. This was the actual first working I had done that would be, under the technical definition, a major working.

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