The Allbright System - A Sci-Fi Progression LitRPG Story

Let us begin, as we always do, with the admission that keeps our field humble:

We do not know what an Inheritance is.

Do not mistake my opening for despair, for we know a great deal about them.

We know there are twelve—thirteen, if we count the unlucky few who never see the other side of their Awakening.

We know their occurrence rates across four centuries of census.

We know their Polarity pairings, their cannibalization behaviours, their colour signatures through a Gate.

And we know when they are assigned.

This is, perhaps, the most remarkable thing we believe to know.

The Inheritance is not given at Awakening. Not at Integration. Not at the first breath.

It is set the moment the Soul returns, cleansed, from the Maelstrom—before the person it will belong to exists in any form whatsoever. Before conception. Before their parents have met.

The Soul comes back already carrying its Inheritance, the way a coin comes from the mint already carrying its face.

At birth, the Soul attaches to the body—and the person, unknowing, is already spoken for.

Most carry it to the grave without ever once touching it.

A lens, ground, polished and fitted, through which no light is ever shone.

Which brings us to the question that has consumed this symposium for four hundred and twelve consecutive years: Why?

The Paths, as best we can determine, are the fundamental laws of the Void and of Reality itself—the deep grammar of what is possible.

The Inheritance is the lens through which a given Soul is permitted to read them.

Two Psykers on the same Path, bearing different Inheritances, are not using the same Power differently—not fundamentally, at least. Their Intent and Will might be directly aligned, with the only difference being the lens they’re channeled through.

They are, in some sense that our understanding gestures at but cannot fully hold, using wholly different Powers that merely appear to share a name, when one observes their outcomes side by side.

Which raises an uncomfortable structural question: Can a law truly be called a law, when it is inherently mutable by the one interpreting it?

This line of thinking leads us to some of the major questions of our field:

Why should the laws require lenses at all? And why should a Soul be fitted with one before it is even a person? Or be fitted with one at all?

On this, we have differing schools of thought.

Let me be even-handed in my disservice to all of them.

The Multiplicity school holds that the Inheritances are simply the natural facets of each law—twelve ways any law can be read, the way a single word carries different meanings in different mouths.

It's elegant. Tidy, even. And it explains, in my estimation, nothing about why the assignment happens in the Maelstrom, of all places.

The Sacrosanct schoolholds that the Inheritances are components of a design—that their distribution is not statistical noise but architecture. The eerie stability of the occurrence rates troubles me too.

But a design requires a designer, and on that subject the Sacrosanct school falls conspicuously silent.

The Factional school draws the analogy to our own Galactic War: The Inheritances as banners of the Void's own denizens—twelve ideals whose rivalries we perceive only as colours bleeding through our Gates.

Every Soul returning from the Maelstrom is, in this telling, conscripted. Stamped with an allegiance to a conflict it will never see, on behalf of a party it will never meet.

I personally find this school the most disquieting of them all—and for precisely that reason, I give it the greatest weight in my own deliberations.

Call it a scholar's failing, if you like.

But I have found, across a long career, that comfort has rarely been a property of true things.

The ideas that unsettle and disquiet us most are seldom wrong merely because we wish them to be. And so I have made it my practice to weigh the least comforting explanations the highest—not because discomfort proves truth, but because our instinct to look away from them proves nothing at all…

And yet there are smaller camps still.

The Resonance school proposes the Inheritance is not assigned but acquired—the Maelstrom's cleansing not a washing but a tempering. Your Inheritance is a scar.

A record of something that happened to you before you were.

And the Mirror school, smallest of all, holds that the Inheritance is what the Soul is—the twelve kinds of things a Soul can fundamentallybe, and that everything else we call a person is merely weather moving across that fixed terrain.

Every one of these schools is a theory about intent, constructed by creatures who cannot verify that intent even exists.

We are reading the face of the coin and arguing about the mind of the mint…

The only honest sentence in our entire field remains the one I began with:

We do not know what an Inheritance is.

We know only that, before any of us drew breath, it was decided that we would be permitted to see through them.

Enjoy the symposium.”

[Shortened Excerpt from "On the Question of the Lens" — Opening Address by Professor Emerita Savenna Ilyth-Kor, 412th Symposium on Void-Theoretical Studies, Intoresta Academic Institute, PFC 914]