PART 1/2
Once the three guards quieted down, I got back into my ditative state and tried to focus. It wasn’t exactly easy to do so, with the anticipation of finally Upgrading my Spells so close on the horizon, but I needed to focus on my current choices before I went to give myself even more.
Choose one Talent to obtain:
Cumulative Catastrophe
Type: Passive
—
Each string of attacks you make will be recurred through ti, stacking fractions of power with every strike. Whenever you damage another being, increase all future damage and other nurical effects dealt to that being by 1% additively. If 6 seconds pass without you damaging that being, reset this boost for that being.
Spatial Flux
Type: Activated
—
Instantly teleports you to the exact position you were at one hour ago.
This Talent can only be activated once per day.
Future Sight
Type: Passive
—
You are always aware of what will happen to you one second from now. This manifests as a constant vision in your mind. It predicts the exact future, and can be changed only through actions taken due to the knowledge gained by this Talent.
Choose one Upgrade for Ti Loop:
Persistent Loop
—
When you activate Ti Loop, you may choose any Status Effects from among the ones you have to retain at their current ti remaining, discarding all others. For all Status Effects you retain with this Upgrade, multiply their durations by Ti Loop’s Rank, divided by 4 (multiplier of 5).
Recycled Loop
—
At midnight, when your uses of Ti Loop refresh, for each use of Ti Loop you have leftover from the previous day, discard it and increase a random Stat by 1.
You may only gain a maximum number of Stats from this Upgrade equal to your Ti Loop Rank divided by 2, rounded down (10 Stats), before you must Level up to reset the maximum.
Inclusive Loop
—
While activating Ti Loop, you may now choose a number of additional beings equal to your Ti Loop Rank divided by 10, rounded down (2 beings), that you are touching to keep their mories alongside you in the new tiline, however their Statuses are reset as normal.
One Talent and one Ti Loop Upgrade. From what I’d heard Poppins and Jannin talking about, it seed like Persistent Loop was out for the Upgrade. Even if they weren’t impossible to get, trying to pick up enough Enchanted items to make it work just didn’t seem feasible. And my future Spell Choices seed to disagree with the idea, anyway, according to Index. Even if I could use it now on what I had, using the bonuses to stack up on Expedite and Regenerate stacks, jumping through all those hoops to increase my Health and Dexterity with those abilities seed a little bit silly, when I could just take Recycled Loop if I wanted to make those numbers bigger.
So that left with two options for the Upgrade. Recycled Loop and Inclusive Loop. Out of the two, I was having trouble choosing just one. I completely understood the nurical supremacy of Recycled Loop—that many extra Stats would get out of hand extrely quickly.
One of the main limiting factors on these types of effects—giving additional Stats per Level—was the linear nature of power gained from Stats. For example, for a person at Level 0, still with a 10 in Endurance, increasing their Endurance by a further 10 would make it 20, doubling their Health and the boost they got to their physical toughness. So for them, an additional 10 Endurance was absolutely massive.
However, if soone had a 100 in Endurance, increasing it by 10 more would only bring their it to 110, so a ten percent increase. That was nice, sure, but not nearly as impactful as it would be for the Level 0. So these abilities like Recursive Growth and Recycled Loop were predicated on the fact that, as one got stronger and attained more Stats, getting those additional boosts wouldn’t be nearly as impactful as before. Even the rate at which they grew in the number of Stats they gave you would eventually be outpaced by the nature of linear progression.
But that was where my Talent, Exponential Reclamation, ca in. That turned the power scaling from linear to its nasake—exponential. With just that single change, the entire rule of power scaling getting less and less impactful was thrown out the window. No matter how much Conjuration I had, be it 10 or 100 or 1000, it would always increase my Mana/Minute by at least one percent. So it effectively completely broke the intended impact of sothing like Recycled Loop.
That was one of the big things that drew to it. It wasn’t just that the Upgrade had a lot of raw power to it—which it did—but it was also that I had the perfect synergy to exploit those extra Stats. Of course I’d want to take the Upgrade.
But then there was the Inclusive Loop. On a raw power level, I honestly didn’t think it shaped up. It was great, yeah, but Recycled Loop held much more long-term power. However, there was more to this decision than just raw power.
First off, the Upgrade could be used in so really clever ways. It required to be touching a person when I activated Ti Loop, but they didn’t have to be anywhere near at the ti I returned to. If I could find the correct people, I could enact massive, country-spanning plans without needing to take the ti to personally catch anyone up to speed. And as Ti Loop went back further and further, the area these people could span upon returning got wider and wider since it allowed for longer travel tis.
It also helped in smaller situations, allowing Erani and Ainash to keep inford on everything that happened in the future, aning we wouldn’t need to be an interdiary in informing them. That was all generally convenient and would certainly help in plenty of situations.
But again, it wasn’t really why I wanted the Upgrade. The power was cool, and it could probably even help save our lives once or twice. But…
Okay, I just felt lonely. Sotis it felt like the weight of everyone’s lives was on my shoulders. Because sotis, I was literally the only person alive with the information necessary to save people. And that weight was crushing. If I’d been able to give other people the ability to keep their mories in situations like the initial invasion of Carth, maybe I could’ve convinced people to evacuate the city before the Supre Hellion attacked. When it was just , I could barely even save myself. But if I could give, say, a few guards the knowledge necessary to realize they needed to get everyone out of there, then so many lives would’ve been saved.
How could I pass sothing like that up? It felt like I basically didn’t have a choice to begin with.
“Well…” Index said, “it might be worse than you realize.”
If you’re just going to tell sothing like “it doesn’t keep you, specifically, alive, so therefore it isn’t worth anything,” I want you to know it won’t do anything to convince . Don’t you rember what I said about Spatial Flux?
“No, no, I’m not going to say that. Well, I an, I believe it, but I an the goals you’re talking about here. It’s not quite as good at saving people as you seem to think.”
How?
“Well, that ‘touching you’ condition is pretty restrictive. In your hypothetical with the Carth invasion, your death was a surprise. Nobody was touching you when it happened. So you would fully not be able to use the Upgrade in that situation. Or, really, any other where you’re surprised. How many tis has a person been touching you when you died?”
Okay, sure. So it won’t work specifically in that circumstance. But if I feel like there’s danger coming, what’s to stop from grabbing soone’s arm just to make sure? And I get multiple loops now, anyway, so I would only be surprised the first ti. In my second and third loops, I’d know I need to get people to rember.
“Yeah, that brings to my second point. They aren’t going to be told in bright flashing letters anywhere, ‘those visions you just had are from the future, they are real premonitions, they will actually happen if you do nothing to prevent them.’ Yes, it would work with soone who already knows—and believes—you can go back in ti. So Erani and Ainash, pretty much. But there’s a solid chance that anyone else will just brush that off as a random hallucination. Or worse, they’ll think they’re being attacked by so sort of illusion magic, and will actively run off or fight if you try to talk to them.”
...Hm. I guess you do make a good point there. It’d only really guaranteed work on soone who’s already in the loop about my Class. So random guard probably wouldn’t believe that they had a genuine vision of the future, especially when they don’t have anything in their Status to say it was. But, okay, listen. It isn’t really about that. I just want to be able to bring people back with . For soone other than myself to keep their mories.
“And who’s to say you can’t do that without this Upgrade?”
I blinked. What?
“Did you already forget? Ainash kept her mories when the Bond Ranked up.”
I sighed. Okay, yeah, I guess that’s true, but it’s not consistent. We’ve already proven that you basically can’t control Bond Ranks. It happens automatically, and trying to force it will only decrease the likelihood of it happening.
“Hm…what can I say…” Index humd for a mont, seemingly trying to figure out how to word what it wanted to tell and get around whatever limitations it had. “You’re not thinking big enough. You’ve got this ntal link between you and Ainash, right? That ntal link could originally transmit one thing: emotions. That was when she was a Nymph. When she beca a Dryad, she beca able to transmit emotions as well as thoughts. Now you two can talk with each other through it. And then, she beca a Draconiad, and beca able to transmit not only thoughts and emotions, but also complex sentint asurent. A collection of your current opinions and feelings about each other, as well mories of each other. Now, you cannot currently see those mories. Only the interdiary of the Bond can. But hypothetically, you might be able to imagine a world where…”
She’ll be able to transmit entire mories through the Bond? I thought for a mont, shocked. So I guess I could co back in ti and instantly give her all of my mories from the future. And then she could give those to Erani, aning all three of us are instantly caught up, every ti.
“Yes. In a hypothetical scenario where that pattern continues. Hypothetically.” I could tell Index was really working hard to avoid whatever censors disallowed it to tell things like this. But the revelation changed everything.
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