The Gamer Chapter 1411 – Thorough Grinding 4 – Understanding or not Understanding How This Worked (Patreon)

John sat at a table in the deep recesses of the mansion. Because this was the first time Magoi had created this estate, there were parts of it that he didn’t know and any house of sufficient size had corners that were tugged away. Whether that was by design or purely because they were only reached via routes that were otherwise inefficient was often difficult to predict.

A house was much like a city in that regard. In an apartment, one knew every corner. From the deliberately placed selection of figures to the dust bunnies under the couch, nothing was a surprise. When things expanded to a house, one sometimes found themselves wondering when they had last wandered to a certain spot, although the answer typically lay within the past week. It was like a small village, where everyone knew everyone, and thus not talking to one neighbour for a couple of days was odd.

Once one reached an estate of this size, built for more than 20 people, there were the equivalents of untread side streets around. Small chambers became the figurative shops that one had seen several times through their life but never actually bothered to enter. How did a dollar meat store stay out of the eyes of the health officials? A mystery one was just a bit too shy to solve. After all, why stray to it when the butcher was in the local mall, right next to the supermarket, the clothes store, and the games shop? All of that connected conveniently via the main road.

Bathrooms and kitchens took the place of the stores, hallways that of the roads. No one wanted the room at the end of the fork in the hallway, furthest away from everything. Therefore, it was the perfect place for John to have some peace and quiet, and put together the models before him.

At first glance, it looked like it belonged in a chemistry or biology lab. Fashioned from plastic balls and tubes, holding onto a metal framework for stability, it could have been a model of an atom or a DNA-strand. Matter of fact, John was using exactly those kinds of kits for this task. However, the shape of what he was building had too many parts for an atom and did not have the correct shape for DNA. It could have been a peculiar molecule. Perhaps that was true, in a way John did not know about. Magic was strange, after all. The best he knew was that magic existed in, or was, the void in atoms. The place that electrons and protons did not occupy.

Granted, his understanding of physics had not advanced beyond a high school level, so who knew what modern physicists had figured out regarding subatomic particles. His learning was in philosophy and politics, in administration, the arts of love and diplomacy. With his Intellect, acquiring the book smarts of the mundane sciences would be an easy task. To truly comprehend and engage with it, he lacked the time.

Similar was true for the knowledge he was currently utilizing. Of the two models before him, one described a sphere. The paths the plastic tubes and balls took to connect to clusters were predictable, well-ordered. He had known exactly what he had needed to do to form it. He knew it and yet he didn’t. The knowledge was in his mind, his muscles remembered, despite him never having made the model before.

Because it was all granted by a Skill: Artificial Spirit. When he had gained it, with it had come the rudimentary knowledge of how it worked. When he had gained the ability to Create the cores, that had deepened further. As the Skill Levels came in, it had deepened further. With each reset, it had deepened further.

John knew many things he had no right to. He understood the basics of Fateweaving and Protected Spaces, having not visited a single class on the matter, purely because he had unlocked the Skills. He was uncertain if he could teach it. Mostly, he was certain he could not. How did one teach to acquire a craft that one had just been handed? He could list facts and figures, not how to comprehend them best or the practical motions one would go through to train them. For very few things, he knew the official lingo. He just knew that they existed and he only ever knew as much as the Skill required. It was all very specific or not specific at all. Patchy in the oddest and yet absolutely reasonable way. Like a computer that could give 15’000 digits of pi and yet had no idea whether one should or should not add a pinch of salt to baked goods.

The second model was complicated and John inspected it after every attempt. There was a chaos to it, that on broader inspection became a fractal jungle of patterns repeating in smaller and larger versions. The intervals were random at this scale. How far out would he have to step to discover the repeating factor?

This was the model of the central magical matrix of a Metracana. This was his current Class Challenge, for both Golemcrafter and Metracana Master: to create a model of both the core of an Artificial Spirit and a Metracana and see what made them different. In the entire world, he was the best equipped for that. He was the only person, perhaps in history, with a direct mental connection to not just one but six Metracanas. Five of them were not of the original stock, the only five on the planet that weren’t. For this purpose, this did not matter.

Metra and Momo sat in chairs, remaining close by as he carefully inspected the magic pulsing through them by means of mental reach, touch and tools. One sat, eyes closed, meditating, the other was engrossed by whatever trashy Isekai novel she had found this week. In Momo’s words, she loved the genre not because it was filled with good stories, but because most of them were so utterly insane that they broke her expected story structures. Sure, they did it through ass-pulls and Deus Ex Machina, plot holes and worse, but at least they surprised her.

John would ask for recommendations another time; for the moment he was dedicated to this. Whenever his inspections of the two of them laid bare a commonality, he put it into the model. It was slow and sometimes aggravating work. Not all equivalencies he found were due to them being part of the core of their artificial souls.

Every finding, he noted down in a word file on a laptop. Every work step, he put in chronological order. Whenever he undid something, reckoning its existence was a coincidence rather than part of the structure he was trying to map out, he also made note of it. There was a chance he was wrong in thinking he was being wrong. Only later checking with a third or fourth of his maids would be able to prove that.

John stepped back for a moment, straightened his back, and looked at the shape before him. Viewed from a straightforward angle, it had a vague resemblance to a circle with a single line crossing through it from top to bottom. ‘Circles and lines, it always comes back to that, huh?’ he thought and tapped the shape with his finger.

The plastic vibrated. Ever so slightly, in a way that mundane senses couldn’t have picked up. There was power to the shape itself and it drew from the magic that he exuded passively – the mana regeneration that went wasted and the many Perks that created effects in his vicinity.

Regular plastic was a terrible conductor when it came to magic, and without the intent and skill to enchant, it was lost as quickly as it passed into it. Still, it was there and it had grown more intense since he started working on it yesterday.

It was the afternoon of the second ‘day’. Right after the Raid, he had started on this. Elsewhere, his doubles were having the fun he needed to keep the lewd levelling up. His split mind managed to ignore such carnal distractions. Similarly, he felt no interest towards the two naked women he was using for this research.

Nothing about their nubile bodies was tempting. The way they snuck glances at him as he worked. The little cute blush or self-aware grin he got when he caught them in admiring stares. Their perky breasts and shapely thighs. Those wide hips and the bubble butts flattened on the seats of their chairs.

‘…Okay, I’m always somewhat distracted by how good they look,’ John admitted happily to himself. There was no shame in loving to look at attractive women. There was shame in letting that get in the way of doing what he should be doing or doing it knowing that the women in question didn’t want to be looked at. Neither applied here.

To prove that, he turned his gaze back to the project. “Making progress?” Momo asked, since there was an evident lull. She asked every time there was a gap for her. She was as interested in the outcome as he was. Who wouldn’t like to know the structure of one’s soul?

“I think so,” John told her and smiled. “It’s not too often that I get to do something like this. You know, I kind of resent the part of my power that just gives me knowledge. It robs me of the satisfaction of discovery.” He identified a singular segment in the form that ruined a previously unseen symmetry. First he wrote down its position, identified carefully via a system of names and numbers that he had to come up with for this project. Then he removed it. “So this is exciting.”

“The grass is always greener on the other side, huh?” Metra weighed in. “We are envious of those that know more than us and lament when we can no longer achieve the sense of discovery that infatuated us with the things we do every day.”

“Oh hey, wise Metra is back,” Momo said. “How have you been?”

Metra rolled her eyes. “There’s no fucking difference between angry and calm me, I just put in fancier fucking words, you pedantic sassy failure of a maid.”

“Hey!”

“Oh, you care about being a failure of a maid?”

“I… n-no?” Momo stammered and hid her face between the back and cover of her e-reader.

Metra took her verbal victory with a triumphant giggle and turned back to John. Just in time to hear the Gamer’s question for her. “Do you feel that way about what you do? That you no longer have a sense of discovery at all?”

“Nah,” Metra denied leisurely. “Violence isn’t capable of boring me, I think. I’ve never not smiled when fighting. The rage and the pace of combat, asserting physical supremacy or escaping desperate situations, I love all of it. I fucking love war.”

“Find what you love and let it kill you, they say,” John hummed.

“What a weak mindset,” Metra sneered. “Find what you love and survive everything to experience more of it.”

“Huh, I do like that more. Thank you, wise Metra.” John put a hand on her chest, for purely scientific purposes. Smirking, the First of Wrath leaned back, closed her eyes, and withheld any comment regarding his squeezing of her nipples. After that very academic touch, he scanned her magical network once again.

She was an open book to him, written in a language he had only begun to comprehend. The letters were all there, but his capacity to follow them was limited. Worse, he was looking for ever smaller details in the script. When he found one, he moved to the model and found the ideal socket to replicate it.

“What will you do once you have it figured out?” Momo asked, lowering her e-reader. “Publish it?”

“Probably,” the Gamer responded and looked up and down the construct. It started at the height of his hips and ended at his neckline and he wasn’t even sure it had reached its ultimate form yet. ‘I might need more frame extensions,’ he thought before continuing. “I don’t know what the harm could be. For the average person, even an Artificial Spirit is an unlikely acquisition.”

“Acquisition…” Momo mumbled.

“Does that offend you?” the Gamer asked.

“No, I don’t have that same feeling of kinship towards Artificial Spirits as you do towards other humans,” the fairy maid explained. “Kinda hard when 99% of my ‘kin’ comes in the form of intelligent shoes or self-driving cars. An Artificial Spirit is a magically intelligent program.” She looked at the representation of the central functions of a core. “Mine has just expanded to a degree that I can learn and self-actualize. Seems like that’s the border between sentience and sapience.”

“I wonder if it’s that clear-cut,” John hummed. “Then again, what does ‘learning’ and ‘self-actualize’ mean?”

“Sapience is a thick concept.”

“That’s a new term.” John gave Momo an interested glance. “Explain that one to me.”

“Its words whose meaning is broader than any definition can properly encompass. You know, the whole ‘what is understood as a chair versus what is a chair by definition’? Basically that. The thick concept of a chair is the blurry stuff sane people agree on.”

“Hm, worthwhile to have a specific term for it,” John said and grabbed a Maybel measurement tool. With a gesture, he made Momo stand up and raise her hands over her head. The tool was sensitive beyond reason and managed to pick up even the most miniscule changes in the mana pathways that flowed through the animated, inorganic materials of Momo’s body. John needed that to get a better understanding of the density of the structures he was sensing. “Anyway, if I publish it someone might be able to do something with it.”

“Not worried that it might blow back in your face?” Metra asked.

“If someone has the ability to create Metracanas, they’re already an immense obstacle,” John responded. “Although it might be best to keep it under wraps until our global hegemony is established… don’t want the Nazis to get a boost in their research because of me. Whatever they’re up to these days.”

“Ever found out why a few of their ships were going back and forth between their coast and Africa?” Momo asked.

John shook his head. “Could be for any reason, including simple power projection. Not like Africa is far away from the east coast of South America.”

The problem with the Purest Front was that they were pragmatic. Yes, they believed in the ideological Ubermensch that rose out of Aryan blood (whatever that exactly meant), but they were not so entirely overwhelmed by their monopolizing worldview that they did not make allies. They stuck to an idealistic doctrine of Hitler’s, where every ethnicity on the globe would be confined to their own nation, all in fealty to the master race.

It was always interesting how ideologues could take something good and twist it into a terrible tyranny. The nation state was a cultural invention of priceless value, stabler than the feudal realms of yore. To take the reasonable demand for a nation to serve its people and turn that into racial purity rubbed John the wrong way twice over. For one, sometimes foreigners were needed to keep a nation running. Ancient Greek city states reportedly had a habit of inviting foreigners to take a look at their laws, to identify what was unreasonable with unbiased eyes. There was a limit to that, of course. Just because foreigners should not be treated with disrespect did not mean that the nation should just let in everyone who came around or listen to what anyone from abroad had to say.

Second, particularly as an American, John found it odd to tie membership to a nation to a race rather than a culture. The line of reasoning that someone of a particular descent could not integrate into any given nation seemed to be utter bollocks. Sure, there were people that did not integrate into the places they settled down in, but that was not for genetic reasons.

“Funnily enough, we have trade partners in the area that are more closely aligned with them than us,” John said in a tone that was entirely devoid of amusement. “For all I know the Purest Front is just making up for the Abyss Auction’s refusal to continue the slave trade via direct delivery. I doubt they have a moral commitment against forced labour.”

“It’s annoying me that we don’t know…” Momo mumbled.

“It’s lucky that we learned of it at all.”

The boats in question had travelled via Mobile Barrier – impossible to trace by all means other than stumbling across them via your own Mobile Barrier. That was not what had happened. Fusion’s navy was not yet ready to patrol waters that far out. Instead, it had been that an ambassador to the west African guilds had happened to be in that port city at the time of the boat’s landing. Possessing some foresight and curiosity, he had proceeded to disguise himself and get one of the sailors to chat in a talk, involving alcohol. That had earned them the intel that this was only the latest in a series of trips. Just a regular sailor, there had been nothing more to squeeze out of him.

“I guess so,” Momo sighed and remained still, as he scanned her.