Epilogue & Addendums (Patreon)

Epilogue

For a colder country, Loyata was unbelievably hot. Ydaz was surely hotter, but the presence of humidity made the lower temperatures more appalling than the scorching desert. At least horses were faster than camels.

“Ah, it would seem your missive was not a lie. You can color me surprised.” A voice whispered from the shadows of the trees.

“Hiding won’t do you any good when I know your exact position.” The man dismounted the horse calmly, the ambush did not scare him in the slightest.

“Well, pardon me for taking precautions.” From the shadows, a man materialized. It wasn’t like he had been hiding in the darkness of the thick canopies, but rather – and quite literally – appeared out of the very shadows.

“At least you are aware of my might.” The other man walked away from his horse and approached the forest, his face hidden by a hood.

“But yes,” the shadowy and suspicious man bowed. “But you would do well in remembering that your power has been severely diminished.”

“My might is still as deadly.” The hooded man added.

“Power takes many shapes. Strength. Knowledge. Money. Authority.” Even if the shadowy man was in front of him, he could feel as if the voices came from every other place. “I don’t doubt the former, but you no longer possess the two latter, Hassan-al-Sadina. Or I should say, Hassan Asina?”

Hassan scowled at the mention of his disown. The wound was recent, and it had been salted enough already.

“But you still have one thing of those.”

“Knowledge.”

“Indeed.” The shadowy man smiled; his teeth rooted in yellow. “You’ve been stolen, we can understand that. Whilst our branch may not be as powerful as the ones in Ydaz, I can assure you that we are more extensive. And such knowledge would be crucial.”

“So you accept?” Hassan spoke harshly.

“That was never in doubt.” The assassin held his hands high up. “Is this how you do it in Ydaz? Sorry, I’m not from the frontier, I don’t really know about customs and such.”

The man was crazy, Hassan could tell it from his mannerisms alone. But intellect and insanity usually went hand in hand, her mother was a good example of that. Yet with that handicap, he could tell the assassin was powerful. Maybe it would be a challenge to him, perhaps a lost arm, but he was sure he could defeat it. The other five assassins hidden in the trees? Not so much.

Running away was not a coward’s solution, but one of the shrewd.

Surviving was but a usage of intelligence.

“Yes, or no.” Hassan reiterated. “I want a straight answer.”

“Yes.” The old assassin approached him slowly. “Your cooperation and knowledge will surely bring a shift to the current, stale paradigm.” And he offered him a hand.

Hassan looked at the hand with hate. But it was hate that was fueling him at the moment. Hate was but the most powerful of tools. The final offset of weakness and strength.

“You better make good use of it.” And the sultanzade accepted the handshake, agreeing to the transaction.

Addendum: Nurture

You already knew about Nurture, after all, it is one of the most common power systems of the Existence, though it tends to go by another name. Only Divinity and Destiny are more common, but that’s cheating considering their mixture is on level with Primordials.

Be as it may be, you could say Nurture’s prevalence is inversely proportional to its power. I would consider Nurture to be one of the least powerful power systems out there. To do things that would be considered basic in other systems, Nurture requires a lot of backlogged power.

This backlogging of power tends to be a common phenomenon with end-neutral power systems like Nurture. After all, the power is never really used. The presence of accumulated power is what makes the power in the first place. And even in end-neutral power systems, Nurture already ranks lower. You can’t even compare it with Grace.

Nurture isn’t end-neutral? You are wrong there. Yes, most vitality comes from other people, the imperials of Ydaz called this extraction “reaping”, but that doesn't make it end-positive. There is no gain of power, the balance hasn’t shifted. One person has lost maximum power and the other has gained it. On the shape of vitality, of course.

Nurture has many aspects and can be a complex power system, but alone isn’t that expansive. The advantage of Nurture is its ability to merge with other power systems to create new ones. Or mixtures depending on planets and Creation.

You could classify Nurture in three aspects: reaping, inner infusion, and outer infusion.

Let’s begin with the simplest one: reaping. The influence of agriculture is obvious, as Nurture is one of the most primal and older power systems, found by sapient beings far before others, it makes sense that more simple concepts like agriculture are what defines it. Reaping makes reference to the act of taking foreign maximum vitality and adding it to one’s reserves.

The process isn’t as simple as it seems, whilst automatic, the body can only handle so much foreign power, meaning a cultivator (what the people in Khaffat call the Nurture practitioners) will only be able to reap so many times a day. The average amount of reapings one can sustain is around two, though the record is held by one Aaliyah-al-Ydaz with ten reapings per day. This is just not a planetary record, but an Existential one.

And as you may have guessed, reaping is usually performed through coitus. It’s not necessary to do so, but it facilitates things. If one were to, I don’t know, exchange vitality with a non-sapient living organism, it would be possible to do so without the will of the other part. Not that there’s consent needed for reaping, Nurture is not Grace after all. And even then, such an act could not be considered reaping at that point, but something else entirely.

Reaping on humans is highly ineffective (the whole power system overall is), meaning that only 1% of the objective’s vitality is seized. This results in a normal non-Nurtured person taking a hundred days to duplicate their original vitality whilst performing sexual activities only once per day. It should be noted that absorbing vitality from a person with less than 10% of their original vitality will not only harm their health but also likely make the reaping fail because at that point they threaten their existence. Cultivators are encouraged to not reap more than ten times the same objective, that is if they have less than 90% original vitality, of course.

Yes, reaping is the simplest of the three main aspects of Nurture, but the other two are rather influenced by other power systems, or in this case, vital arts.

I’ll keep the infusions short for now.

Inner infusion makes reference to the reinforcing aspect of the user. Making oneself stronger, faster, tougher, et cetera. The one that piques my interest more is “charm”. Whilst it may seem too magical for a common reinforcement of the body, a person has many ways to become “charming” with small shifts. Whether it may be increasing in size by a few centimeters, changing the jawline, or secreting pheromones, there are a lot of ways to charm people. Though I won’t deny there’s a non-corporeal aspect to charm. There’s also no known immunity to it, every being in Existence should be affected by it, even Incarnations, to a point.

One interesting fact about inner infusion that saves Nurture from being an awful power system, is that the accumulated power makes the body overall better at everything. When infusing, you shift your body’s parameters to become better at something else. You could think of it as changing your body to be adapted and evolved to run if you changed your inner infusion to “speed”.

This means, however, that the more vitality you have, not only the more impactful this infusion will be, but the less the other parameters will be lowered. In other words, if you accumulate enough vitality, your body will reach a point that when infused, every parameter will increase. Even if you infused yourself for “strength”, your body could be tougher than bark and your characteristics more charming than any goddess just passively.

I reserve the right to explain outer infusion, for now. You’ll see it in a bit.

Addendum: Education

One of the most amusing times of my life was when people doubted my first edicts. They did not care that I had murdered my family and taken over the country, that was almost a daily occurrence on Khaffat, let alone Ydaz. No, they were indignant over my reforms on education.

Those ones being the nobles, of course.

In the short term, education to the masses would have meant a loss of taxation as no unpaid children could work. In the long term, that meant more skilled workers who would require higher salaries and a possible coup d’etat of educated masses.

A peasant revolt is, of course, impossible in Ydaz. I would not deny it in the north or the west, but in the infertile desert, the peasantry required the imperial’s lifeblood (literally) to eat. And the first thing people worry about is their stomach. If those are empty, no ideology will sway them.

It didn’t take long for the opposition to see the light when combined with my isolationist edicts. There were too many wars back then and Ydaz was destabilized, but as the country progressed technologically more, it became obvious that keeping the borders closed would be better.

The last barrier then, was the clergy.

The rise of education would not only mean that temples would need to be repurposed into centers of education, but that the already weakening church would become second place in favor of the rising scholars of the universities. But at the same time, the clergy could not refuse the divine mandate of the Heavenly Descendant of Sulnaya. That is to say, me.

Now every bordering country, and even those beyond the seas, want a piece of ydazi brain. We are the cradle of knowledge and progress, and I intend to keep it that way.

There are only two things that make Ydaz the powerhouse that is: Me and education.

Excerpt of The Rise of Education by Aaliyah Asina. Re-edited by Aaliyah-al-Ydaz, Sultanah of Ydaz, Emir of Asina, Ruler of the Qiraji, and Heavenly Descendant, may her reign be eternal.