Chương 201: Chapter 318: Highs and Lows

William Oh once dated seventeen girls at the same time, but it turned out to be far too traumatic to continue… For them. Jason Salazar I'm so tired, Brianna thought, staring into the mirror. Her grandmother stared back at her, all steely hair and hide-covered bone. Overnight, she'd dealt with a mugging in Akul, a woman beating her husband in the Ring, and removing the corpse of a drunkard from the gutters of the Burned Stronghold. All that while she was asleep.

The experience wasn't vivid, since it was separated from her by her copies, but it seeped in from the sides, under and behind her thoughts, just outside her line of sight. Whenever she wasn't paying attention or directly thinking about things, her mind would begin to ruminate about someone or something she had never personally had any hand in. She could somewhat sort it out while she was awake, but while she slept…

These half-lived, bite-sized experiences were tumbling in by the hundreds, piling up like snowflakes compressing into a glacier and slowly eroding away her mind under the crush of ice. I am a bright young woman, and deserve to appear as such, she admonished her reflection. Jean gradually faded back to Brianna as she stowed her mental baggage. I think… I need a vacation, Brianna thought as she left the bathroom and returned to their bedroom. This latest emergency had nearly killed… everyone.

Her main body, all her girls in the post offices and bakeries, all the copies of herself she'd sent outside the Tower to rest. They had come that close. Will was sitting at a small desk, petting his crystal snake with his left hand while a pen did paperwork beside him, a floating bowl and spoon feeding him gruel.

Will was made for this, Brianna realized, leaning against the wall as she watched her boyfriend humming and tapping his feet cheerfully mere hours after fighting to the death and being horribly mutated by Miasma. Brianna was not made for this. The tremor in her hand still hadn't gone away. It's always going to be like this isn't it? Brianna thought, frowning. Will had… some kind of fate that drew people to him, and anyone trapped in that orbit would be also be drawn into his battles.

Sooner or later, their luck would run out. I like him a lot. Maybe even love him. But am I willing to die or go mad so we can be together for a short time? Am I willing to stay and have him watch it happen?

"Will." Brianna said from her spot against the wall.

"Hmmm?" Will asked, glancing up from his desk.

"We need to talk." William Oh"Am I a bad person?" Will asked aloud, staring at the grain in the bar.

"Or am I just ugly now?"

"Ugly, yes. But…" Travis waggled his hand.

"For a Lord, I'd say you're a pretty decent guy. What did she say verbatim?"

"That she wasn't strong enough to stay with me and she didn't want to die to grow my legend." Travis pursed his lips in thought.

"Just take it at face value, I'd say."

"But what does that even mean!?"

"You have noticed your life is kinda…hectic?" Travis asked. Will had noticed that. What was it Maribelle said Mother said?

'We'd likely been drawn into your legend, so she accelerated our plans to migrate to the ninth floor.' Brianna and the oldest dragon in the Tower had similar theories when it came to self-preservation, and he couldn't really blame them. His plan had almost gotten the entire Stronghold killed. Will's penchant for high-risk high-reward power plays didn't really fit government administration.

Apparently Bree's dissatisfaction had been growing for some time, gradually pushing her to distance herself from conflict, but that brush with death even when she'd been minding her own business had been the last straw. Will really, really wanted to beg and plead for Brianna to stay in the Burned Stronghold, but… If she died because he was being selfish, that would be even worse. If she died somewhere without him because he wasn't being selfish… I don't even know how to deal with that.

If Brianna wanted to fade happily into obscurity in some tiny bakery in a tiny village outside the Tower, then that was what she should be able to do. It just sucked that that life didn't cross paths with Will's.

"If you ever want some advice about girls, I'm-""You're dating an illusion." Will interrupted what was sure to be a massive load of hot garbage.

"An illusion created by someone else I'm dating. So not bad at all." Travis said, preening. Will stared at him for a long moment.

"No thanks, on the advice."

"It's like exchanging love letters!" Travis protested upon seeing Will's expression.

"love letters that you can…cuddle." If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Mmhmm.

"It's fine, it's fine." Will said, waving him off.

"You see-""I really don't want to talk about it." Will said, directing his gaze towards the illusionist. Travis paled for a moment, seemingly seeing something in Will's expression.

"As you say." Will felt hollow. Like someone had carved out every potential future he'd taken for granted with a hot knife. All that was left was…Being William Oh. Just carrying on until the end of the Coil killed him. I need a distraction, Will thought as he returned to his empty tower. Thankfully Will had the perfect distraction available to him: his own fucked-up body.

"The flipper is coming along nicely." Will mused aloud, twitching his flipper. The fingers of his right hand had elongated and fused together, while his elbow had developed a bit of a kink that made it extremely painful to fully extend his arm, leading him to walk around with it tucked against his chest. Like a flipper. Will took a measurement with Map every day. It was recovering, but it was going to take a few months, if not years.

Still, the bones were consistently shifting millimeters a week, slowly regaining their 'ideal' form that was stored in Aspect of the Immortal Serpent. The Class had also taken a beating from the Miasma Acclimation sickness, which was why it was taking so long to fix itself. There was a whole lot more going on with Will's body than just a flipper since he'd recklessly subjected himself to massive Miasma Acclimation sickness.

His sense of smell was off, one of his legs was longer than the other, His hips were off-kilter, one of his ribs had grown longer, which made a strange lump in his chest. He had scales on his neck, his jaw was constantly falling out of the socket, the roots of his hair had turned green and his tongue had grown a fork. This was to say nothing about all the minor discolorations across his skin. Will was sort of hoping the tongue thing would stay because it made him look like a sexy badass.

Brianna had refused to comment, and at this point, it no longer… Will retracted his thoughts like they'd touched a hot stove. Even with all that damage to his body… Will's Classless left hand was perfectly fine. No mutations, discoloration or strangeness of any kind. Will inspected the unblemished skin and smooth articulation of his completely Classless left hand, supposedly devoid of the typical protections from miasma sickness that a Class was supposed to provide. It was highly suspicious.

When he posed the question to Arkesh, the Immortal Serpent had considered it for a few minutes before giving him a crude metaphor about nailing a tarp to a roof that was already waterproof, compromising the original roof in the process. What secrets do you have? Will thought, peering at his left hand. After that, time seemed to blur. Will went up into his tower and was finally able to do the one thing he'd been putting off this entire time: Learning about magic. First, Will used Steve as a living practice dummy.

The living crystal was able to preserve miasmatic structures for several minutes at a time, giving Will plenty of time to lay them out just the way he wanted, tweaking them before trying them on himself. Thankfully Steve tended to lay still after a big meal. With the miasma weaver's upgrade to Titan's Grasp, Will was finally able to manipulate miasmatic structures detailed enough to use practically.

So for his first attempt at re-creating a Class, Will simply copied the simplest structure inherent to every Class: Resistance. Will created the interlocking chains of miasma and gently massaged them into his left hand. When he smashed his left hand with a hammer and it didn't hurt, he knew he'd gotten it right. The miasmatic structures unraveled rapidly, lacking some unknown method of keeping them self-sustaining, but he'd still recreated a tiny portion of a Class in his own Classless hand.

After that, Will recreated Strength, which was just a strand imbued in his muscles, tendons and bones. Kinesthetics, Acuity, and Focus weren't something he could recreate on his hand. Kinesthetics was distributed through his entire nervous system, Acuity was in the rear and sides of his brain, Focus was primarily in the front.

Despite not being able to recreate them, Will identified the miasmatic structure of these stats by using different Relics that only affected that one stat, equipping and removing them over and over, taking a sketch of his brain each time in order to track what changed. Even then it was very hard to isolate Focus specifically. The problem was, he was always using it. The miasma in his forebrain was always flickering and the harder Will thought, the more energetically it flickered.

The Burning Court set drove my Focus to zero, so I wonder. If I used it, I could get a picture of my brain with zero Focus. … that's a really bad idea innit? Will had managed to stop the hemorrhage of Charge by swapping his equipped Relics in a heartbeat, but if Will missed the timing because he was trying to get a good picture, then… The word of inversion took ten Charges. If Will didn't have the ten charges, then he couldn't remove the set. If his Focus was zero, he would never get those charges back, either.

Although… I suppose I could swap to the sickle, which would bring Focus back up to sixty, and get back the ten charge I would need in about a day and a half. That would allow me to remove one of the set pieces and it would go even faster from there. Come to think of it… Will brought up the map of his right hand. He filtered out Strength, Resistance, and Kinesthetics, leaving behind only a few structures. The palm and pads of his fingers had two effects: Aspect of the Immortal Serpent and Titans grasp.

Will isolated them from each other by trial and error until he was able to filter out those two Abilities as well, leaving a skeletal framework of Miasma that everything seemed to connect to, leading back towards his brain. Each finger had a round nodule right where a ring would sit. That… must be the dock where the effect of a ring is transferred upwards. Through extensive testing, Will was able to confirm that was indeed a ring slot.

It didn't matter which finger the ring was connected to, as the other nodules seemingly shrank, preventing them from interfering with each other. Will assumed it was because the channels going up the arm to the brain could only support one ring slot and one hand slot. Curious, Will traced the pathway from the other side of his brain, all the way down his left arm, to where the channels for his ring and hand slots simply ended. Could I recreate my ring slot? Will mused.

Despite his Phantom Hand giving him a pseudo-slot, that was all the result of an Ability, and not an actual slotted relic. Will worked perhaps a little more enthusiastically than he should've, creating a copy of his ring slot on his left hand and connecting it to the frayed, disused channel going up his left arm.

A small voice in the back of his head telling him that this was an extravagant way to kill himself went ignored for the sake of scientific discovery as Will equipped the entire Burning Court set, curse and all. Will tensed as the seven ghosts manifested, kneeling in front of him. He felt… pretty good, actually, like a thin thread of honeyed ambrosia was flowing into him. Best he'd felt in a while.

"Why…aren't you attacking me?" Will asked. He'd been hop- expecting them to attack him. The seven fae ghosts glanced at each other, seemingly just as confused as Will.

"Because…we love you." The centermost ghost said, a man wearing a long robe. An instant later, Will's homemade ring-slot frayed and the seven ghosts faded away.

"HAH!" Will gave a single cackle, collapsing back into his chair, limbs trembling as the realization of what he'd done caught up with him.

"I just tried to kill myself." He'd hid his intentions from himself, but in hindsight… that hadn't been reckless experimentation, that had been planned self-destruction. But the world wouldn't let him die until it had wrung him dry. Will had gotten lucky. Again. The curse had been a hack job that hadn't considered the target. It had simply inverted every effect of the set and added a clause that prevented the removal of the Relic. Normally that would've been more than enough…

but the deep-seated hatred the Burning Court had for William Oh specifically had been inverted as well, rendering the 'enmity' of the Burning Court meaningless. Will inverted the curse and removed the set, sitting back and stroking his chin while staring at the gaudy jewelry. Is there some way I could take advantage of this? Will manifested the Wand of the Undead Servant and twirled it in his fingers, picturing gilding and fire opal adorning the simple wand. I did want an upgrade for the wand.

I also wanted to know if a set can be modified by Sourdough. The butlers don't care if they die… And I don't care if anyone dies. This is a match made in heaven. Will had been holding out for an upgrade to his Phantom Hand that allowed him to tweak already-slotted Relics. That seemed like it might never happen. And with Will's new Ability to tweak the internal miasma structure of things directly… why not save the upgrade slot and just figure out how to modify slotted Relics on his own? …

Is this me trying to kill myself again? Will wondered for a moment, then shrugged, deciding he didn't really care.