Chapter 40
Soul
After deciding on her course, Mary had quickly set about creating what should have been her next set of runes, and yet to her total surprise, the two weeks that followed that decision had proved to be an unexpected exercise in frustration for the reincarnator.
For the first time in her new life, Mary found herself stymied during the process of creating runes.
This had at first shocked her; after all, over the first few months of her life, she had formed dozens of new runes, and while most of them were simply renewals of a rune that she had already obtained. She had created a handful of one-off runes that she had not properly visited since their creation.
She had also created the very first versions of the runes, which she was continually updating; therefore, the princess believed that she had gained some experience in initiating new runic concepts.
Yet, after the last two weeks, it had turned out that the world was less than concerned with the opinion of Princess Mary of Midgard, no matter what her system-acknowledged status might have said about the matter.
Looking back, until she set about the newest task of forming a [Soul] rune, all of her previous attempts at creating a brand-new rune had seen significant, often immediate progress toward success.
But in her pursuit of a [Soul] rune, and this was, in the princess’s opinion, to her great misfortune, such success had not been her experience thus far.
As she considered the last two weeks again, Mary was reluctantly forced to admit, if only privately to herself, that considering her general situation and the fate awaiting her, Mary had lived something of a charmed life, at least regarding her pursuit of magic.
After all, hadn’t Sylvia once told her that the mages of this world, the relatively few genuine, learned, and scholarly individuals of Terra, were allegedly experts not only in magical theory but also in what Mary presumed to be rune creation specifically?
Mary had been told that those people could take years to create a specific rune, and that was even with the assistance of whatever tools had been developed specifically to aid them in such a task.
When the princess was first told the amount of time it could take people to form new runic concepts, she had, after experiencing the process of rune creation herself, assumed that such failures in rune creation were specifically for complex runes with many additional, perhaps even conflicting, modifiers.
This conclusion made sense to the princess because it was the same example that Sylvia had given her when discussing the existence of modifiers.
Mary ultimately chose not to investigate adding any modifiers to her spellcraft due to the potential length of time required to see results, despite the existence of such modifiers and the capabilities they might grant to her magic.
Despite the potential usefulness of modifiers, Mary was already feeling the pressure of her impending enslavement and could not justify wasting time on something that might not yield a return on her investment.
With all of this in mind, she had not attempted to create any such complex runes, not even as a basic investigation into what could be achieved with modifiers.
In the end, the reincarnator had inherited the obsessive nature of Alexander, and once he had set out to try something, he did it. That same nature made committing to something that she highly suspected would take a massive amount of time intellectually difficult, at least for the time being.
After all, at the back of the princess's mind is the fact that she is very much on a time crunch; she needs immediate progress, she needs to get stronger, and she needs to acquire more knowledge of magic.
If she doesn't, then slavery will be her fate, and that is something that Mary will fight against, to the death if necessary.
Of course, this doesn’t mean she avoided reading about runic modifiers.
This was because she now had permanent access to many of Elizabeth's books about magic and even more specifically those that focused on the runes themselves.
Over the months since she started scanning duplicates of those magic books into her library, Mary had successfully read a dozen books. This was primarily due to the dedicated work of merely a single second mind, who had practically camped in the library twenty-four seven.
Granted, those books were not as high-quality as their physical world versions, and this had turned out to mean that the written text was itself difficult to read.
Difficult, but not impossible.
This had slowed down her progress in reading through the books that she scanned into the library; the backlog that they now had was significant, and yet according to Sylvia, there were still thousands of books left in her mother’s collection.
Reading those books in her mental library was slower than the real world; that was true, but the second mind could essentially camp in the library, whereas Mary still needed to sleep, eat and do other things.
Both spells were already demonstrating their significant value.
After all, the dozen books that she had read in her mental library were on top of the six others that she had physically read with the help of Sylvia, most of whom were books of magic as well.
Although the maid had begun to bring along some shorter texts detailing some of the modern politics of the Midgard kingdom as well.
So, Mary was starting to understand the major players in the kingdom, most of which were naturally comprised of nobles.
All of this was to say that the prior two months between the creation of her library and book scanner had been good for her, at least regarding magical knowledge.
However, the last two weeks following those two months have been different, putting all of that progress into a strange place.
One of the ideas raised within the simulator was that until additional passive magics were created, the princess had some spare mana that could be used for other purposes.
In this case, additional second minds.
It had been trivial, of course, to set up those extra second minds, and in the past two weeks they had quite literally tripled the amount of magical knowledge that the princess had managed to accumulate.
With four minds almost permanently on book-reading duty, she was almost making a dent in the intake of her library.
Even though many of the books that the princess now remembers reading had covered rune creation to varying degrees, only some of the topics of those books mentioned to an extent the inclusion of modifiers into the rune creation process.
Thus, she had previously associated the failure with such modifiers.
Those books, which at the time Mary had partially ignored, had indicated that the creation of all runes, and not just the complex runes that had multiple modifiers, theoretically had a failure chance included.
This had not been her experience, and to her regret the princess had, perhaps unconsciously, dismissed the claims to the contrary.
In any event, Mary was not merely a reincarnator with a significant advantage in knowledge, but she was also a world-acknowledged hero; she had mistakenly believed that the same rules did not apply to her.
Which had led the princess to now, two full weeks into attempting and failing to create a [Soul] rune. After all of those failures, Mary had finally been forced to admit that either, unknown to the princess, her status as a [Hero] was really pulling a great deal of weight during her pursuit of magic.
Or Alexander's knowledge had been truly exceptional in how much it had assisted her thus far.
Perhaps it was even a mixture of both.
{This wool gathering isn’t helping at all. In the end, Alexander didn’t believe in the existence of something as ethereal as a soul until definite proof had been smacked straight into his face.}
One of Mary's second minds chastised the original, having become increasingly annoyed by her physical selves bemoaning their current failures.
{Whether Alexander believed in the existence of a soul or not is irrelevant; we believe in it firmly now.}
One of the other second minds responded coldly.
Mary grimaced at the coldness of the second mind; all five of them, the four second minds and the physical Mary, felt like they had wasted the last two weeks. Worse, it was time that they absolutely could not waste.
And as a result, despite technically being the same person, their opinion had become split on whether they should simply cut their losses and instead start figuring out magical biology.
Their knowledge and opinions might have made creating a [Soul] rune difficult for them, but the last two weeks had not changed their opinion on the matter of biology any differently; all of the Marys were certain that they would see almost immediate progress if they tried to create a [Biology] rune.
{Yes, but what if we start forgetting what Alexander knew? Then a [Biology] rune would be rendered worthless to us; it is his knowledge that such magic would rely upon, not ours.}
“And I agreed with that sentiment. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be meditating right now trying to create this damned rune again now, would I?”
Mary mentally snapped back at the second mind's continued interruptions.
For a moment, there was quiet in the depths of her mind when one of the second minds interrupted the silence again, albeit with a hesitant tone.
{What if we’re thinking about this too rationally?}
One of the second minds asked, causing all of the Marys present, physically or virtually, to stop and turn their bewildered eyes towards the second mind.
{If there is one problem we have, rationality isn’t one of them.}
One of the others answered derisively; in her opinion, Mary was liable to be the only entirely rational actor on this entire planet.
Mary twitched, once again frustrated at the full-blown argument that was no doubt about to begin within her mind.
“We don’t have any better ideas. Let her speak.”
The physical princess snapped again, her temper now truly frayed after two weeks of failures and arguments, a situation that even her maid had begun to notice.
Although considering the capabilities that Sylvia had demonstrated, the maid had no doubt noticed that something was wrong with her princess far sooner than that.
Distantly, Mary felt the emotions from her four virtual doppelgangers: from one, a frustrated apology; from another, she could feel appreciation.
From the last two interactions, which were increasingly causing her concern, Mary felt nothing but apathy.
Once again Mary found herself wondering what was going on with her second mind spell. Weren't they intended to be copies of her?
{Sorry.}
The frustrated one uttered apologetically.
{All of us have been frustrated.}
The other assured her with a perhaps unsurprising degree of understanding; they were, after all, the same person in the end.
{We’ve been thinking about the soul in a rational way, but the reality is that we don’t know anything about it.}
She began, her explanation almost visibly building steam as she continued.
{What is a soul? Ultimately, the answers we have regarding the soul are all materialistic guesses rather than statements of fact. We might have taken to calling it the seat of consciousness, or the container of memories.}
Mary felt as if she had been struck by thunder at the specific term that the second mind had used; the princess had not considered that she was being too materialistic in her interpretation of what a soul was.
Immediately, she concentrated more on what the second mind was saying, forcing the others to allow her to continue uninterrupted.
{We have been claiming that it is the place where our self truly exists. We also consider it the source of the magical energy that we have begun to use, but these are all things that we suspect to be true of the soul and yet have no confirmation.}
Mary nodded thoughtfully; what the second mind was saying did make a certain degree of sense.
{To make a long explanation short, we’ve been basing our ideas on fictional knowledge of the soul. Magic fantasies, video games, fantasy books. Over the last few weeks, we’ve considered all the ideas from Earth about the soul that we could think of. But nothing religious. However, we’ve avoided religion all together, whether those religions are sourced from reality or fiction.}
The reincarnator had not considered that she was taking what was ultimately a materialistic view of the soul; distantly, she felt a similar feeling, a similar realisation of their mistake, from the other previously frustrated second minds.
{But the soul is inherently not materialistic. Probably.}
The second mind finished her otherwise confident theory crafting doubtfully.
But it was enough for Mary.
Above all else, the second mind's perspective resonated with Mary as authentic.
They had been attempting to assign values to the soul that they could only guess at. Previously, when they had created their runes, they had at least some degree of correct, confirmed knowledge to assign to a runes concept.
They even knew that the level of a rune was associated with how much knowledge, that is, correct information, the creator knew concerning the concept they were attempting to encapsulate.
From the understanding that the princess had gained, runes, or runic concepts, were essentially the caster's knowledge of a concept made real through the will of magic.
So then, what did they know for certain about the soul?
The truth was that they knew very little.
Certainly, they formed guesses and conclusions based on half-hearted observations, many of which they derived from the countless authors of Earth. But those authors, baring the religious ones, were mostly fictional assumptions, not genuine factual accounts of what a soul was.
Perhaps if they were to strip away all the guesses they had been throwing at the [Soul] rune during the creation process and merely use what they knew for certain, they could create a truly basic [Soul] rune.
If such a theory regarding runecraft were correct, then attempting to create a rune without the correct knowledge would either result in failure or, if the practitioner were lucky, lead to a decrease in the level at which the rune forms.
That was something that they would have to consider further later, if this idea worked at all.
So then, with all that said, what did the princess know for certain about the soul?
She could only say for sure that the soul existed.
Mary twitched in frustration at that conclusion; she had so many ideas about what a soul could be, and perhaps some of those ideas would eventually lead to a higher-level [Soul] rune.
But if such a notion was holding her back and wasting her time, then she would discard it without hesitation.
It is fortunate, Mary thought to herself, that she had read her mother’s books on rune creation and knew for certain that merely knowing a concept existed would allow for the most basic level of rune to be formed.
The princess took a moment to reminisce about that particular memory; it had been a magic history book that had revealed that truth to her, and perhaps it was this knowledge that the second mind had relied upon during her explanation.
In the same way that the earliest mages, in a historically recorded moment, had formed a [Basic] level [Fire] rune simply by knowing that both magic and fire existed.
She could form a [Soul] rune, and hope that it would be capable of what she desired to achieve.
The recovery of Alexander's memories, to be properly stored in her own mental records.