Chapter 72 – Insanity of Time (SD) (Patreon)

「I bet that dhionne have anti-insanity modules in their brains. They can cheerily spend their long-ass lives living the same way every day. 」 Elrhain sighed. Whatever that brain module was, he and Agwyn obviously lacked it.

Each cycle was ten years. By the time Elrhain would be a teenager here, he would have lived twice as long as he had on Earth. Which is absolutely crazy.

Elrhain’s soul was human. Human souls weren’t meant to take that long to be bloody teenagers. The sense of urgency and the level of impatience he and Agwyn felt daily, despite literally having all the time in the world, was not something their family could comprehend.

Even the mere thought that he had to spend that much time from now on doing nothing but cultivating was enough for him to curl up and cry.

Worse yet, this was a world without trillions of hours of mindless entertainment they could stream on the internet or enjoy first-hand in the virtual world.

No comics, games, novels, movies, full dive virtual worlds, and book clubs to drink tea with friends. The withdrawal symptoms were fatal for modern souls, and the potent drugs were nowhere in sight.

That’s why he and Agwyn had been visiting every settlement they could for the last few months. Meeting new people, reading new scrolls. Anything to stave off the soul-numbing boredom.

But for how long? They had already visited all native Earthlochian settlements, and the only option left was the Out-tribal hamlets. That went about as well as no one expected.

Sure, he needed excitement. But he didn’t need it so bad as to become traumatized. He wasn’t at the point where he’d risk his life for one sniff of white powder.

Newer Earthlochian settlements were popping up with every group of incoming dhionne, but that would also end by the following season. He didn’t want to visit Out-tribals anymore either.

What were they going to do to pass the time after that? Just read in the archives? Play the same tag games and have similar conversations with the same people?

Elrhain wanted, no, needed change. It was the same for Agwyn. They had a list of Earth concepts they could rather easily adapt on Earthloch lands and a more challenging list of things they couldn’t.

If they got lost in that research, they could perhaps spend the next decade (in cycles, not years) with things to actually do. After that, what to do was a problem for a future, and hopefully better adapted Elrhain.

Yet as things stood now after today’s assaults, there was no way Elrhain’s family would allow them to ‘waste time’ doing stuff that was not cultivation.

It was funny, in a sense. The future was both certain and uncertain.

Uncertain because there were things Elrhain and Agwyn had decided, albeit vaguely, to do to pass their mindbogglingly long lifespans that they now couldn’t do. Certain, because with their current toddler bodies and low not-getting-instakill’ed abilities, the only thing they were allowed to do was cultivation.

The last few seasons were exciting. It felt like years, and it had been years in Earth terms since they moved to Lochuir from their home in the Siaglas Reanakty. But after these few years, things had settled into the ‘routine’ once again.

The advent of newness made three past cycles feel like a far distant mirage to their excitement-starved minds. This happened fast, turning their memories into an infinite fugue they neither could hear clearly nor wanted anymore. When they had done nothing but crawl and talk on a crib-like bed with only one window to look outside. Even as they learnt to walk and run, they were limited in that one Siaglas residence. Seeing the same scenery and feeling the same wind for thirty damn years.

That’s why when they learnt they would finally leave that well-intentioned prison for something new, something ‘not home,’ their emotions had gone haywire. Elrhain doubted if Agwyn would have ever confessed her love without that as a catalyst.

But just as rapidly the newness had come, it was turning into a routine.

They once more faced the problem. Day by day, the excitement fades away. Soon, everything would become familiar. And mundane. And they could not even leave the Siorrakty because of the collapse. Blessings for the clan it might be, but a new prison for the two all the same.

Actually, even doing research for the next decade-cycle wouldn’t solve this issue at its core. There was something wrong with Elrhain and Agwyn, both physiologically and emotionally. A curse that no other child suffered from. It was the disease of knowing that a better life existed far beyond their current reach. The effort it would take to reach it was daunting.

Yes, they could dive deep into the mysteries of manna to learn and discover things about magic no one else knew. Every day, it would be exciting. And if it was exciting every day, then it really wasn’t exciting, was it?

But at least there was hope. However complex and convoluted it was. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Elrhain then wondered if this Elven length of time the dhionne lived made most literary things in their culture prodigiously complex.

The Uorian language had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of characters. It had a unique symbol for every little thing in existence, like the ancient Egyptian or Chinese scripts but with more time to ferment.

The mundane version of the language was written as both an alphabet and a syllabary while also showing signs of an abugida. There were simultaneously tens and hundreds of synonyms of a word. In contrast, each word was also unique in its own way. Also, dhionne had more vocal organs inside their mouth and throat than humans. So their phonetic range out-numbered the human equivalent by orders of magnitudes.

The language was sing-songy. The grammatical rules were foreign and convoluted, stringing words together to make sentences by both rhythm and underlying syntactical guidelines. There was no romaji or pinyin, but there were combinations of symbols and syllabics that described each phonetic unit. Each combination was far more complex to write than a regular character of the Uorian alphabet slash syllabary slash abugida.

It took two to three hundred earth years for the average privileged dhionne on Earthloch to master it.

Elrhain and Agwyn did it in one-tenth the time.

It was a nightmare, but having thirty earth years with nothing else to do did the trick. They were already tired of languages, yet they had to learn more to do magic.

But the language of magic was different from the mundane one. The Runic Script consisted of complicated glyphs and simpler runes. Each glyph was a unique symbol that could be broken down into compound, complex and simple units, like Lego blocks. Like the Mandelbrot set where one could zoom indefinitely. But in the case of a single glyph, the fractals were finite, with each simplest rune being the basic building block. Nevertheless, the fiasco was degrees more intricate than the mundane written script.

There were an infinite number of these magical runic glyphs for the many fields of magic. Such as alchemy, rune-writing, sprite-telling, cultivation arts, shamanic rituals and so on so forth.

There were systematic ways of learning them. But at a glance, the systems of each field were mutually exclusive, unlike Earth, where chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics and all other sciences were irrevocably interconnected. The connection here was infinitesimal as far as the practitioners of Uorys Diosca were concerned.

Elrhain knew that wasn’t actually the case. Still, the rulers of this world deemed any exploration of such a subject unnecessary.

Long story short, magic was freaking dumb. And hard. And painful.

The shamans and mages of the old didn’t bother to simplify any of the concepts to make the entry bar lower. No “Mathematics for Today” booklets for kindergarteners.

For the local dhionne, it took months of contemplation and meditation to comprehend the meaning of the complex glyphs written in their cultivation scriptures. It depended on weird things such as sudden inspirations or epiphanies.

After that, they would cultivate non-stop, sitting there, doing nothing even if their annoyed spouses poked them with sticks.

So whether it was cultivation and magic or exploring the laws behind them, they were daunting tasks that would take hundreds of earth years of continuous effort.

With no entertainment acting as buffers, no breaks that actually counted? It was droll.

The effort, Elrhain could give. But living a perpetual ‘watching the paint dry’ life?

…. maybe if cultivation was as addictive as binge-watching romantic soap operas. Maybe if Elrhain were a mad scientist and not a boring, everyday one, he could grit his teeth and endeavour to become an oceanic or sky realmer as fast as possible. All the while unearthing one secret of manna after another.

But he wasn’t. He was just Elrhain, and he was bored out of his mind. He was a man of science whose life work was an accidental invention. He was an investor and a billionaire who lived life under every mindless luxury possible.

He was a good fella, according to his girlfriend. But in her words, ‘You ain’t no idol of perseverance.’

He ran away more than he charged ahead. And he could say that Agwyn and ninety percent of Earthlings living in big cities of the twenty-ninth century were the same. They followed the easy, proven way.

They were both curious beings, like everyone else. One hoping for adventure, another hoping to seek the unknown.

They both wanted to make the world a better place in their own image, again like everyone else. But they weren’t the type to risk their lives intentionally. Nor were they the type to sit on a magical glowing rock, meditating two-thirds of their time awake. Nor did they want to sit on a chair for the same amount of time, watching one magic tree sap react with another magic fishbone amidst hundreds of thousands of failures.

All of that was boring. They didn’t want boring.

It was much easier to adapt Earth technology here. He didn’t need to do the magic himself. He could show a direction and teach the theory. The mages and shamans could write up the glyphs, arrays and rituals to make blast furnaces and steam turbines.

Who knows? He might awaken to the joys of teaching. Another avenue to explore.

Elrhain had no concrete plans for the future. Only vague visions. He wanted to grow up as fast as possible, but time wouldn’t let him. He wanted to create a society where every dhionne could be, if not satisfied, then at least contented. Time wouldn’t let him.

If Elrhain was even ten cycles older with an Earthen cultivation base, none of this would’ve mattered. A mature body could do things to pass time that an underdeveloped toddler couldn’t. But he wasn’t an adult, not even a tween. He was weak and twiddly. And assassins after his life didn’t help ease any of that stress.

「The more you think about it, the more you will feel depressed.」 Agwyn snuggled up to him. She was the only person in the world who understood his dilemma of having both too much and too little time.

Hells, she was a genius in cultivation. But she, too, didn’t want to spend the next ten or twenty cycles of her life cultivating. The girl would literally implode because of inertia. And not being able to plasma gun the heads of folks out to murder her didn’t feel so good either.

「We had a shit day. Sleep. My mother, Earth mother, always told me to break problems down into small chunks and tackle them part by part. Right now, every issue feels overwhelming. 」 The girl let out another giant yawn. 「So let’s think about this tomorrow. We can decide on future goals and choices with clear heads. This time, on parchment. We’ll… make lists… and charts… and..」

Elrhain sensed her quiet breath. He took a few more seconds to steady his beating heart. Counting fish goblins jumping over Lontwood barriers helped.

The annoyance was still there. But it was manageable, no longer a swirl.

‘Yeah, I’m going about this like a fool.’ He admitted, then closed his eyes. Before long, only darkness remained.

The two children fell into a happier dreamland, their subconscious minds quietly but quickly sorting the turmoil into tranquillity. Without knowing that the next day, the world would force them into a choice neither of them were keen to follow.