Chapter 341: The Rules of the World

"I know. And that’s the best part, master."

I keep looking at Duvilin.

He stands near the wall with the same irritating calm as always, except there’s no summoning window beside him, no notification from Ocean’s Law, and no memory I can point to as the reason for his presence. The one I just consumed belonged to some dead cadet whose purpose and contents I can no longer remember.

By logic, Duvilin has nothing to do with it. At least, he shouldn’t.

"How did you end up here?"

His smile loses a little of its confidence and turns into something more thoughtful.

"I don’t know..."

"Your lack of memory never helps."

"I’m sorry about that, master."

He looks at his own hands, spreads his fingers, and closes them again.

"When you activated this mode, I felt something change. Like there was a door where none existed before."

"And you walked through it."

"Wouldn’t you, master?"

I probably would.

Another pulse hits my HUD.

[OXI: 4,620 / 5,000]

I curse under my breath and pull some OXI Candies from the inventory. If Overmemory means to tear fifty points out of me every few seconds, I won’t spend what little time I have interrogating someone who doesn’t understand how he got here either.

I toss a Candy into my mouth and start chewing.

[OXI: 4,620 → 4,820 / 5,000]

The sweet taste barely registers. That sourceless sadness still occupies some place inside me, heavy and hard to ignore, but the familiar OXI recovery starts running through my channels a few seconds later.

The Candies can buy time. But the OXI burn is too fast, and it would make this unsustainable.

I look back at Duvilin when something moves around him.

At first I think it’s his aura.

A thin blue line passes near his shoulder, crosses the room, and continues through the wall. Another descends from the ceiling in a soft curve before touching the edge of the table. There are more, now that I’m paying attention, faint enough to go unnoticed if the aura around my body hadn’t changed the way I see everything.

I narrow my eyes.

The room transforms, but not physically.

The bed still rests against the wall. Kraken stays in the same place. The window is still partly open, letting in the cold night air.

But I can see something underneath all of it.

The weight of the bed distributes through its structure before reaching the floor. One of the legs takes more pressure because the boards under it aren’t perfectly level. The wind coming through the window hits the curtain, loses force, splits around the furniture, and continues through the room in weak currents my eyes somehow manage to understand.

[OXI: 4,420 / 5,000]

I look at the chair.

There’s a concentration of tension near one of the joints, and, incredible as it sounds, somehow I know exactly how to break it.

The understanding arrives without numbers, warnings, or any help from Ocean’s Law. If I applied force to the upper part from the left side while the back leg stayed fixed to the floor, the impact would travel through the structure and end at that joint.

I keep looking at the chair.

"What is it, master?" Duvilin has noticed, and asks.

"I don’t know yet."

I walk to the chair and rest two fingers on the backrest.

The lines shift, and my understanding shifts with them.

I press lightly.

Nothing happens.

I lower my hand a few centimeters, change the angle, and apply force again.

A dry crack comes from the joint and the chair tilts.

I catch it before it falls.

Duvilin raises his eyebrows.

"Did you know it was damaged, master?"

"No."

I let go of the chair and examine the room again. Thousands of lines appear everywhere.

The world has always worked this way.

Forces cross everything. Weight follows direction. Heat spreads. Air moves around bodies. OXI runs through channels, runes, and objects, interacting with matter in ways I accepted my whole life without ever really seeing.

’I wonder if Rhayne sees the world like this...’

I notice Drifter Mode isn’t giving me new laws. It’s letting me see the ones that were always there, through the flow of OXI.

I pick up a small Shard and toss it up.

The instant it leaves my fingers, I understand the movement.

Rotation.

Initial force.

Air resistance.

The pull dragging it back down, making it land quickly in my hand.

I throw it again, studying the lines.

A narrow blue line seems to follow its trajectory, but that doesn’t feel like seeing the future. The Shard already received everything it needed to determine where it would end up.

I move my hand before it reaches the highest point.

I catch the Shard in my palm, no problem.

Then I throw it against the wall.

It hits the stone, ricochets toward the table, and starts spinning downward, still in the air.

I can’t say whether it was instinct or reading, but my fingers were already waiting.

I catch the Shard again.

Duvilin lets out a low laugh, almost held back.

I keep looking at the coin.

"I didn’t predict anything, so how?"

"So what did you do? I don’t understand, master. This seems easy to me."

Of course it does. Duvilin probably lives in this state all the time, which is why he drains my OXI like a madman.

"I think... I understand what’s happening."

I throw it again.

This time I change the angle just before releasing it. The trajectory shifts immediately, following the new force. The Shard hits the wall, showing completely different lines.

The present is telling me what comes next. It shows the consequence of the action, not a planned future.

Once enough variables have been set, the next moment stops being a mystery. It’s consequence.

I look at my own arm.

Moving it slowly reveals another web. The shoulder rotates, the muscles pull the bones, the force passes through the elbow and continues to the wrist. My posture compensates for shifts in weight before I consciously notice.

I throw a simple punch at the air.

I watch force get lost in an unnecessary tension in the shoulder and a small wrong shift in the foot’s support.

I try again.

I turn the hip first, ease the shoulder, and reposition the foot.

The second strike comes out cleaner and takes less effort.

Duvilin’s expression changes.

"You corrected the movement while doing it. You’re becoming a true Drifter."

"Now I... I can see where I was wasting force. It’s like I’m seeing lines..."

I open and close my fingers.

My Strength hasn’t increased.

Neither has Agility.

Nothing in the profile shows any physical improvement.

I can only use what I already have with a precision I never had.

I still don’t know whether that’s better or worse than a direct boost to attributes.

"And you didn’t see this before, master? Humans are pretty limited. You need to train more, master."

I raise an eyebrow at Duvilin, but my HUD pulses again.

[OXI: 3,870 / 5,000]

I toss two more Candies into my mouth.

A few moments later, the value starts rising, until Overmemory tears off another fifty.

I chew faster.

[OXI: 3,870 → 4,220 / 5,000]

Duvilin watches me with obvious amusement while I try to keep my OXI up.

"Very dignified, master."

"Shut up."

I swallow and finally look at him for real.

The humor drops out of my attention.

Everything in the room makes a little more sense now that I understand Overmemory.

Duvilin still makes no sense at all.

There are currents around him. OXI, certainly, a structure similar to the one I recognize in the manifestations of Overmemory I just came to understand. But the lines don’t obey the same relations I see around me when I look at my own body.

Some seem to be born inside him and vanish before reaching anything else. Others come toward me and become impossible to follow once they touch the aura around my body.

I focus harder.

The pattern grows more complex.

Duvilin’s outline looks almost overlaid, as if several structures occupied slight variations of the same space and agreed only on where the man should exist.

I stop.

Drifter Mode is showing me something, but I don’t understand enough yet to interpret it.

"You’re strange."

Duvilin brings a hand to his chest, as if being dramatic.

"That hurts, master."

"I’m serious. Everything else follows rules I can understand. You don’t."

The smile fades slowly.

This time he doesn’t answer with a joke.

I turn to the window.

That was a mistake.

The Academy opens up in front of me. For a fraction of a second, it’s beautiful. Then it becomes an absurd amount of information.

Hundreds of people cross courtyards and buildings. Each body carries weight, momentum, and OXI circulating through its own channels. Runes hidden inside the walls form other networks. Training fields pulse with small releases of energy. The wind hits towers, gets deflected between buildings, and breaks into smaller currents around trees and walkways.

Thousands of relations intersect, and my mind tries to understand them all.

I take a step back, already out of breath.

The patterns only start to disappear when I force my attention back to the room.

"What... was... that?"

Duvilin comes a little closer.

"What happened?"

"Too much information."

"Humans..."

"I already told you to shut up..."

I look outside again, without letting the perception spread.

Drifter Mode can reveal the structure of what I observe, but the act of observing is itself part of the problem. A chair is simple. A coin, even more so. A room already holds hundreds of interactions.

An Academy full of Divers is another thing entirely.

I’ll have to learn to choose where to look.

The thought lifts my eyes upward.

The ocean sky stretches over Azure Prime.

I shouldn’t have done that. The regret comes in the same instant.

Even keeping the focus limited, the first glimpse of the forces sustaining that impossible mass above Thirstfall makes everything in the room look childish.

Pressure over pressure.

Currents larger than entire districts cross one another far above. Forces I don’t know mix with others I can’t even imagine possible. OXI runs through the suspended water in structures so large my perception finds no beginning or end. The largest creatures living up there light up like small stars, so bright I can barely understand what they are.

Then, for a brief instant, I catch something.

I think there’s something deeper still.

A pattern beneath the ocean.

Something holding it up.

Something under tension.

Then the whole image sinks into complexity and stops making sense.

I look away.

Maybe one day Drifter Mode could show me why that ocean stays above us.

And, if I survive long enough, maybe it could also show me why it will fall.

Another pulse crosses the HUD.

[OXI: 3,188 / 5,000]

The Candies are slowing the drop, but Overmemory is still winning.

I’d already learned enough for a first test, and I deactivate the skill with a simple thought.

The blue aura starts to recede.

The lines around the furniture weaken and disappear. The floor goes back to being wood instead of a distribution of forces. The air turns invisible. The chair stays just a broken chair.

Within a few seconds, the world feels strangely incomplete.

I spent little time in Drifter Mode, but going back to normal perception feels almost like closing one eye.

[OVERMEMORY — DRIFTER MODE DEACTIVATED.]

The OXI consumption stops.

I examine the room.

Then Duvilin. He’s still there, standing in the same place.

Duvilin also looks at himself, raising his hands and turning them before facing me with an expression that makes it clear he noticed exactly the same problem.

"You’re not disappearing."

"Seems not."

"I turned off the mode."

"Yeah..."

"And you’re still here."

He thinks for a few seconds.

"Apparently."

I sigh and sit back down on the bed.

The emotional void left by the consumed memory is still inside me, quieter now, but still present. I know something was removed forever, while the skill I bought with that loss just showed me a version of the world I barely know how to interpret.

’Am I going to have to go through this every time I activate this mode?...’

Tomorrow’s dungeon is starting to look like a secondary problem.

I pick up another Candy out of habit, look at it, and don’t eat it, just return it to the inventory.

"Let’s start from the beginning. When did you notice something had changed?"

Duvilin doesn’t answer right away. He’s gone strangely still. At any moment before, he’d be heading out the door, wanting to discover the world outside.

His eyes are no longer on me. They’re looking at some point past my shoulder, though there’s nothing there but the wall.

"Duvilin."

He blinks.

"When you reached Reef."

My attention sharpens.

"My evolution to Rank C?"

He nods slowly.

"It wasn’t immediate. At first it felt like noise. Something at the edges of my thoughts that wasn’t there before. When Overmemory appeared..."

His voice dies.

I wait.

The usual smile is gone.

There’s something in his expression I’ve never seen. Confusion, no doubt, but there’s something else underneath. A discomfort that doesn’t match the man who followed me calmly through situations that would make most Divers turn around.

"What happened?"

He looks at me.

"I remembered something."

I straighten my posture.

"From your life?"

Duvilin shakes his head.

That freezes my soul; a shiver runs down my spine.

He walks slowly to the chair I damaged, notices its state, and gives up on sitting. He stays beside the window.

"It doesn’t feel like a memory of mine, master. I’d know how to recognize my own memories. Right? I’d know what belonged to me."

My attention is completely on him now.

"What did you remember?"

Duvilin looks at the ocean sky and stays silent for a few seconds.

The moment stretches until I stop thinking about the dungeon, the factory, and even that strange void Overmemory left inside my head.

When he finally turns to me, the man who normally has a remark ready for any situation looks like he’s trying to decide where a story should begin.

He pulls a second, working chair closer, sits across from me, and rests his forearms on his knees.

"It’s about the world..."