Chương 11: Chapter 10 – On the energies of emptiness

Over the next day, I finally found free time to read the book I stole. The Energies of Emptiness promised either a highly theoretical work about nothing, or a book where I could find something about the immaterial cloudy shits I was apparently producing now through the aura of instability. The leather binding was normal, but the text looked like it had been printed onto the pages by magic.

It must have been a spell of one or both of the mages, where they somehow magically got a vision of this book, and used another spell to print it into paper. One of them must have had some pretty crazy research or divination spells. In either case, it was legible, though it wasn't the easiest of reads. The start was good. The fundamental thesis held that everything we observe springs from a single source of universal energy, the divine order, as he called it.

He reasoned that God, lesser gods, angels, demons, the entirety of the Void, humans, animals, all creation we see, all evolution are the same grander paradigm. That matched my experience. A fallen angel was an angel, just getting the power out of the Void rather than Heaven. A demon princess got divine powers through worship of her demons and followers, rather than through God and the worship of Him. Two sides of the same coin, still. The same fundamental principle.

I mostly skimmed through those parts, as I understood these principles intuitively, and because the passages were too general. No answers awaited me there. But then he went on to describe the other energies of existence, of which he identified three more: entropy, chaos, and the eldritch. Entropy was essentially the antithesis to the divine order, an energy that fundamentally eroded and unmade the creation of the energy of the divine order.

The author spent about a chapter lamenting about the theoretical impossibility of capturing this energy, where any jar he could try to put it into would necessarily be founded upon the energy of the order, so the very energy that anything made of entropy eroded and destroyed. And the next chapter explored self-repairing jars that could over-repair the captured entropy… if he found a way to capture any in the first place. A fun exercise, but the immaterial clouds weren't destroying anything.

The eldritch, he described as a strange anomaly, where it, on the one hand, followed largely the structure of the divine order, but on the other hand, did so in a wholly incompatible way. At least this one could be studied, since the results of that foundation were observable with the naked eye, or with any scanning spell. One just had to catch an eldritch horror. This was a lot more plausible, that I somehow unlocked some eldritch bullshit by getting blown up by kaiju powder.

The last one had the least next on it, chaos. Most of it were discussions on how to study or explore an energy foundation which's very foundation was irregularity and instability. How does one find a pattern in something that is defined by not having a pattern? Entertaining, and instability sounded like something that fit into the chaos realm. Just that the section about chaos was two hundred pages of highly technical academic writing about magic. That was going to take a while to get through.

I did find the article the original note in the first laboratory referred to, but it was torn out of context and wholly meaningless. I still had a good time chewing through the text. If there was one thing I could infer from it, it was that the author had been an absolute monster of a mage. I really wasn't much of a scholar, so for me to understand a book written about fundamental energies of existence, it had to be written by someone who really understood it. The ambush came on Friday morning, during breakfast.

Manuel and Nadia sat next to me, Kara across from me.

"Who's your plus one?" he asked.

"Her name's Ophelia," I said while biting into a piece of bread.

"She's my girlfriend." Manuel raised an eyebrow.

"You have a girlfriend? Since when?"

"A while." The lie came out smooth. He knew I wasn't texting or calling with anyone throughout the evenings, but hopefully, he was going to have enough decency to not mention it.

"She's been busy with work, so I haven't mentioned her." The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"What does she do?" Nadia asked. As if I knew. What did Ophelia actually do? Most likely nothing. As far as I understood the high vampire family finances, they had a massive fund that one of them managed, and the rest did fuck all.

"Finance," I said. Vague enough to be difficult to disprove.

"She works on Wall Street."

"Cool," Kara said, more invested in her scrambled eggs than in my love life.

"Show us a picture," Nadia tried.

"You'll see her live tomorrow." I continued with the breakfast. Torres sat next to Kara.

"Heard you've got the plus one. We need her full name for the guest list." Well, let's see how good the records of the KSF were.

"Ophelia Laen'Ash, with an apostrophe before the second A." Torres typed it into his phone.

"Got it. Ceremony's at seven. Don't be late." With the ceremony coming tomorrow, Cross went easy on us. Light drills, early dismissals, and the whole afternoon off. I used it to drive into the city. Ophelia wanted the full boyfriend experience. That meant I had to bring her a gift. And it couldn't be something from a thrift store, because she wouldn't let me hear the end of it. But what did a man buy for a woman who'd been living with infinite resources for centuries?

The store I picked sat on Walnut Street, one of those places with two security guards at the door and prices that made wallets weep on principle. I checked my balance on my phone. Eighty thousand dollars and some change. Ha, so my promotion came with a bump in pay. The corporate must have been short on people to give me money without making a scene about it. Or the new department management paid me back what the old management never would. I walked in.

The salesman, a thin man in a tailored suit who looked at me with natural suspicion, forced out a smile.

"Welcome to our humble store. What do you desire?"

"I need a bracelet, made of white gold, with a large crystal, ideally red." His demeanor shifted. My demands were specific enough to suggest I was actually going to buy something.

"For someone special?"

"My girlfriend, so a woman my age." Visually, I didn't add. He led me to a display case full of glittering pieces. Most were too gaudy, too obvious. Whatever I got her needed to be subtle to fit among her existing jewelry.

"This one." I pointed at a thin white gold chain with a red crystal pendant of a decent size. The crystal caught the light in a way that reminded me of blood.

"Excellent choice. The crystal is of the highest purity." As if I knew what that meant. Okay, I knew it meant it was expensive, but that wasn't an issue right now.

"Pack it, please. I'll take it." He blinked at the interruption, then recovered.

"Of course, sir. Would you like it wrapped as a gift?"

"The box will suffice." I paid a couple thousand dollars. I didn't even know if that was a lot or not. With the box in my pocket, I got into my car, and headed for the cemetery. No matter how cute the bracelet, it wasn't going to make an impression on Ophelia. I had to make it personal. The graveyard I picked lay on the outskirts of the city, old and overgrown. I parked by the entrance and walked among the graves until I found a quiet stone bench, well away from the groundskeeper's shed.

Afternoon sun filtered through bare branches, dragging long shadows across the plots. I sat down and opened the box. Then I closed my eyes and reached for the power of the System. Basic soul manipulation. When I'd picked the skill, I meant it for one soul transfer from a gem to a new body. But I've used it second time this week already, so I was probably doing something wrong. This wasn't the type of power one was supposed to be using frequently. I reached out for the lingering souls.

Graveyards collected plenty of them. Most souls passed into the Void when the body gave out, but some stuck around, unable or unwilling to leave. They didn't keep well. What drifted through the spiritual layer of an old cemetery was mostly a slurry of decayed soul-energy, memories worn down to static with nothing but an echo of the people they once were. The soul fragments pulled to me, and I directed them into the crystal. I made sure to not catch any soul that felt at least half-complete.

I really needed just the scraps. Still, plenty of tiny soul fragments drifted to me, and I channeled them into the crystal. And I sealed them inside. The crystal now shone with a faint, eerie inner light, like a candle behind frosted glass. That was going to stand out in her jewelry collection, no matter what she had in it. I hit a barbershop on the way back. Nothing fancy, just an actual haircut and a proper shave, and I made sure no aftershave or cologne touched me Ophelia didn't prohibit that randomly.

She was going to drink me, and so she didn't want chemicals sprayed all over her chicken salad. The barber was an old Italian guy who didn't ask questions, which I appreciated more than the haircut. Then Saturday evening arrived, and it was time to collect my temporary girlfriend. I put on my best suit. I still wasn't sure why this particular charcoal suit I'd bought with Cassandra in Rome had cost over ten thousand euros, but it had, so it would have to do.

Using my phone's front camera for a mirror, I fixed my tie. Black wasn't the right color for the occasion, but it was the only tie color I owned. The result made me look like a man pretending to be respectable. Good enough. Manuel walked past my open door, then doubled back.

"Damn, O'Connor. You clean up nice."

"Thanks."

"Is your girl meeting you there?"

"I'm picking her up in Manhattan." He whistled.

"Manhattan girlfriend. That's fancy." He had no idea. I grabbed my jacket, put the velvet box into a pocket, and headed out. Weekend traffic made the drive shorter than usual. A tiny kaiju alert rung up as I drove, from a township about fifteen-miles away. Nope, I wasn't ruining my suit straight before the event. Someone else had to deal with this.

I pulled up to Ophelia's building at six thirty-two, right as the sun dipped below the horizon, and spent a few seconds behind the wheel questioning what the hell I was doing. My mighty i30 looked completely out of place, about ten years older than the next oldest car in the row, and it would have looked poor even new. I got out, and walked to the reception as if the place belonged to me. The doorman's gaze darted between me and the car. His brain failed to interpret what he was seeing.

"Welcome, sir. Who are you visiting?"

"I'm here to pick up Ophelia." I walked past him without slowing down. He got the point, and only slightly bowed. The ride up took forever. Sixty-three floors. I watched the numbers climb and tried very hard not to think about the terms and conditions. The doors opened onto a private landing with a single door. I walked up and knocked. The locks clicked open on their own.

"Come on in," Ophelia called from somewhere deep inside.