The Allbright System - A Sci-Fi Progression LitRPG Story

To begin with, I must confess something that might be considered improper for the opening of an academic paper: I am almost certain that I do not understand what I am about to explain.

I have spent fifty-four years studying Psychic phenomena, forty-one within Precognition specifically.

I have co-authored the UHF's standard Psyker classification taxonomy and interviewed over six hundred active-duty Precognition Psykers across nine Inheritances.

And I am telling you, plainly, that the Veritas Short-Term Precognition interaction does not make sense.

It functions. It is reproducible. And it should not work.

Let me begin with what does make sense:

Most Inheritance and Path combinations follow an internally consistent logic.

A Perditio Precog activates [Glimpse] and sees the future filtered through destruction—aim a weapon, peer forward, and the Void shows you where to shoot for maximum devastation.

The Path provides temporal perception; the Inheritance provides the filter. Simple.

An Aurae Precog sees several futures simultaneously, each tinted in a different Inheritance's colour: A Perditio-hued future shows destruction. A Nihilus-hued future shows entropy. A Veritas-hued future among the set indicates the most likely outcome—but even that is merely probability, not certainty.

The Aurae Precog must choose which to act on, with incomplete information.

Not simple, but understandable.

A Mutatio Precog never sees the True future at all.

They see an alternate one—a future that should not exist, accompanied by the exact action required to force it into being. They are shown how to change the ordained outcome without ever knowing what it even was. They break a future they have never witnessed and replace it with one that should not exist.

Strange, but the logic traces from premise to conclusion.

Now. Veritas…

The Veritas [Glimpse] reveals one future—the True future, as the Void perceives it.

Not probability. Not weighted outcomes. One pre-ordained, inevitable future.

This is because the Void does not contain Time. It does not experience causality.

Everything that will happen has, from the Void's perspective, already happened.

A Veritas Precog is not predicting, but merely observing something that, to the Void, has already occurred.

This is strange, but not where things break.

The part that breaks is what happens when a sufficiently experienced Veritas Precog learns to game the very universe—or universes, in this case—itself.

Documented in roughly one out of every twelve to fifteen practitioners, the technique operates as follows: The Psyker commits to an action with genuine, complete intent—bringing themselves to approximately ninety-nine percent completion.

At that threshold, they activate [Glimpse].

The Void, perceiving an action that has already been completed from its timeless perspective, shows the True future resulting from it. The Psyker then exits the [Glimpse], pulls back that final one percent, and aborts—using the knowledge gained to redirect entirely.

The True future they just witnessed immediately ceases to be true.

This should not work for obvious reasons.

The Void has no Time: It has already seen everything, including the Psyker's decision to abort. The [Glimpse] should have shown the future in which they pull back, not the future in which they follow through.

A timeless plane that can be surprised by a change of mind is a contradiction so fundamental it should collapse our entire framework for understanding Void phenomena.

And yet the technique works.

Repeatedly. Demonstrably. Under every controlled condition required for scientific proof.

What is verifiable, however, is why so few Psykers ever manage it.

The [Glimpse] must activate at a point where the action is so close to completion that reversing it is nearly impossible.

I use an analogy with my students to illustrate it: Imagine standing on one leg, transferring your weight to the other. By the time ninety-nine percent has shifted—just before the foot touches ground—you decide to reverse. To stay on the original leg.

Try it.

You will discover it is functionally impossible for most people.

Momentum, committed musculature, the sheer physics of what you have already set in motion—all of it fights the reversal.

And that is a simple physical action on a single axis.

Now apply that requirement to a combat action under fire, involving Psychic energy manipulation and Gate control, where the margin between "committed enough to fool the Void" and "committed enough that you cannot pull back" is measured in fractions of intent we lack the very language to even describe.

The Psyker must genuinely intend to complete the action—not merely pretend or perform to want to, but genuinely decide to do it, with every fiber of their being—and then, at the last possible instant, simply… decide not to, instead. Somehow.

I began by confessing I do not understand what I have spent fifty-four years studying.

I will end by suggesting that perhaps that is the point.

The Void does not operate on principles that beings bound to causality can fully comprehend.

The Veritas Precognition interaction is not a puzzle waiting to be solved.

It is a reminder that our framework has edges—and that some of the most powerful phenomena in our universe exist precisely there, in the space between what should not be possible and what demonstrably is.

[Shortened Excerpt from "On the Paradox of Veritas Precognition" — The Journal of Psychic Studies, Vol. 89, Intoresta Academic Institute, PFC 928]