Chapter 45
No Celebration
Mary, as has become common in recent months, finds herself waking calmly. The young princess allows herself to smile at her progress, knowing that for Alexander, this experience would have been highly familiar; during his life, he had used sleep learning for many years to accelerate his education.
It went without saying, but Mary had strived to copy that capability as best as she could; there were simply too many potential benefits to be gained for her to not do so.
For a moment, Mary allowed herself to reminisce on the progress that she had made. It had been several months ago now that the princess had achieved several significant breakthroughs in not merely the runes that she had access to but her spellcraft in general.
And, as a result, she had gained near total control of her sleep cycle.
The nightmares that had plagued her almost nightly since the day of her birth were finally banished, not by her psyche calming down or a change in circumstances, but by the progress that she had made in her magical spellcraft.
There were, however, some notable differences between what Alexander would have expected from such a sleep learning session and the magic-enabled night study session that she was now capable of experiencing. For starters, while Alexander had the advantage of mind partitions and thought acceleration, those were still things that Mary was working on; instead, she had been forced to resign herself to an increasingly vast troop of second minds that had taken up residence in her mind scape.
It was something that she, and as a result Alexander, had never truly considered, but a layman might have thought that thought partitioning and the creation of second minds were the same thing. This was not the case, as Mary had discovered; her own increasing experience with second minds, and Alexander's long experience with thought partitioning, had long since caused her to conclude that anybody who thought such a thing was wrong.
Mary now understood that it was a matter of control.
Her second minds might have ultimately been Mary Midgard, but they were independent, outside of her immediate control. Furthermore, she had to actively reach out and access what they were working on or what they remembered, and they had to do the same with her.
On the other hand, Alexander’s mind partitions had been under his total conscious control; due to his cyberware, he simply had the means of thinking in dozens or even hundreds of different directions without any real detriment.
Although, it was something that could be made better or worse with access to better cyberware and external tools.
In the end, both methods were useful, and Mary continued to attempt to gain access to some form of mind partition, but it was slow going, requiring a degree of magical logic that she still hadn’t figured out.
Nonetheless, with her consciousness now fully awake and her idle thoughts finally starting to fade, the princess finds herself sighing in relief at the reduced pressure on her brain.
Something that she was beginning to realise was that her body and mind were not yet fully adapted to the sensation of lucid dreaming, and due to the different methods that her two lives had used, the feeling of the sleep-learning method she was using was notably different from what Alexander had experienced.
Perhaps she should have expected that.
After all, the method that she was using now stemmed from magic instead of technology. And she lacks the external tools that Alexander had used, such as the full-dive pod.
Not doubt it was a tool that was much more important to safe sleep learning than she or Alexander had previously realised.
But Mary knew that she shouldn't complain; the spell that she had painstakingly created had ultimately succeeded in its intended purpose.
For the now one-year-old princess, the most significant consequence of her sleep learning spell was not the increase in her learning speed, which was incredibly useful, but rather that the spell had prevented her unconscious mind from torturing her during sleep.
It might have been heresy for the old university student, for Alexander, who had been obsessed with bettering himself. But after months of nightly torment from her mind, Mary had no choice but to disagree.
That she could once again learn in her sleep, as Alexander had done, was to the current princess an ancillary benefit; perhaps that would change in time as she forgot the sensation of waking in terror, but for the time being the physical Mary fully believed that the real benefit was the calming of her mind.
The second minds, those lucky mental iterations of herself who only got to experience her nightmares retroactively, tended to disagree with her current opinion. But she found herself not caring about what they thought on this matter.
To the physical Mary, not having regular night terrors remained the reincarnator's preference, and she imagined that this truth would not be changing any time soon.
Mary grimaced at the thought; truthfully, she knew that her opinion would change in time, and privately she could not help but resent the future version of herself that would forget how awful the night terrors had been.
But she knew that at some point in the future, when she matured further and her mind finally stopped tormenting her, she would appreciate the extra hours of studying and magical development more than a calm mind. Or perhaps that time would come when the time crunch against her enemies really started to kick in and her enslavement began to truly loom over her.
Perhaps then she will appreciate the extra hours of studying and magical development more than not having night terrors.
But that time was not today.
{Are you going to properly wake up and stop wool gathering yet?}
One of the second minds asked, causing the princess to frown and turn her sight inward once again.
Briefly, Mary wearily considered the number of second minds that she had created.
It was ultimately for safety's sake that all of the instances of the spell that were currently active were being personally maintained by her physical self instead of offloading to one of the second minds, as she had done with some other spells.
This habit was causing problems, but dare she risk giving further independence to the already independently minded second minds?
Mary’s frown deepened as she considered the spells further; the aspiring mage was becoming increasingly certain that holding what were now twelve identical spells in place was becoming actively dangerous. She could swear that her mind was becoming slower and more sluggish and that that decrease in her mental capacity coincided with the increase in the number of spells that she was maintaining.
At first, it had seemed like a wonderful achievement, being able to safely and permanently maintain a dozen second minds; certainly, Sylvia had seemed to think so. Mary had worked very hard to maximise the efficiency of her spell work, and the activation of so many second-mind spells was a direct result of that success.
Even the often-pessimistic princess could not help but think that her progress with magic had been outstanding, but the sluggishness of her mind had convinced Mary that she was finally reaching the limit of what she could do personally.
Part of her success, she knew, had been due to the growth of her personal mana reserves, and the growth of that ethereal reserve was only natural. After all, she had been constantly stressing her mana reserves, almost constantly staying at the very limit of her passive regeneration and always exhausting and regenerating her reserves.
It had been intentional, of course.
Part of her plan even.
She had seen so much success in this facet of her training that even her extremely talented, supposedly prodigal maid had told the princess that her growth in mana reserves was outrageous.
It was only natural, really; Mary had little better to do, and so she constantly kept ahead of her mana regeneration by creating new instances of her second mind; this action not only further increased the speed of her mana growth by stressing her reserves but also continually enhanced the rate at which she could learn magic.
This had, of course, the knock-on effect of further increasing her spell efficiency, as more minds were present to help develop the spell logic that she was utilising, and perhaps more importantly, the increase in minds available for work had accelerated her study of Elizabeth's magic books.
The result of this prosperous educational loop had ultimately been a genuine leap in the level of, amongst other things, her [Ambient Mana] rune, from the second level she had started with to the third level she was now enjoying.
As that rune ultimately allowed her to create less expensive spells, the level upgrade had influenced all of her magic work.
Mary allowed herself to smirk at the memory of that day. It had been a great day for the princess; the princess had long realised that Sylvia was often performative, although she had also long since understood that it was largely for Mary's benefit. But the leap in the [Ambient Mana] rune level was a development that had genuinely, truly shocked Sylvia: to see a rune go from the basic level of one all the way to a solid three in the space of a year.
After all, as the maid had revealed to her, the third runic level is the general tier where true mages begin; the two levels before that are incredibly common – most people who try to create runes can initialise a level two rune of some sort.
So, the maid was happy to reveal that it is significant that the princess has taken such an important, even pivotal, rune as [Ambient Mana] to level three. From what Mary could understand, it was somewhat similar to reaching the entry level of a university.
Put another way, creating your own level three rune was one of the primary requirements for entry into a mage guild, at least unless you had a sponsor.
Thought of like that, for a one-year-old to technically be at the university level, at the level of guild entry, and for a fundamental magical concept, was quite absurd.
A large part of Mary loved it, truly.
Nonetheless, all of these successes had led the princess to this moment, and after months of dedicated effort, she was truly starting to feel the strain internally. Perhaps that strain was affecting her thoughts, or even her soul; nevertheless, she was beginning to have serious doubts about further increasing the number of second-mind instances.
Indeed, if Mary was being totally honest with herself, she was actively considering a reduction of second-mind instances. At least until she no longer felt their weight on her personal thoughts.
Part of the princess was truly worried that it would be detrimental to her health.
The princess sighs again, this time with bone-deep wariness, and after a few moments longer wallowing in the complications that seemed to be so endemic in her life, Mary slowly shakes her head to dismiss her melancholy.
She has done enough worrying about the future for a lifetime already, and she was only a year-old today. Part of her was certain that things would only get worse from here.
Instead, the infant throws the cover off her still tiny body and stands; in her mind, she, with sarcastic disbelief, notes how she towers grandly over the lip of her bed, and immediately she begins to make her way towards the room’s vanity.
Mary, as a former man, was still not entirely certain what the vanity was used for; she had asked Sylvia, but the battle maniac had reminded Mary that her appearance, indeed the appearance of all women of her bloodline, was perfect without effort, causing none of the women in her family to bother with such things.
Mary instead intended to use the mirror.
Mary frowned as she considered the vanity before her; even with Alexander’s memory of vanities and the knowledge that his mother had used one too, the young girl was still baffled by the existence of this piece of furniture.
Its presence in the room of a one-year-old, to Mary, seemed to be performative.
Despite Mary's tiny stride, and even when coupled together with the objectively outrageous size of her royal chambers, the young princess finds herself arriving quickly at her target, the deliberate and steady steps having caused no tripping during the arduous journey.
The princess sarcastically considered the achievement of staying upright, but that was the reality for a one-year-old child.
Mary gazes into the mirror of her vanity, taking in the sight of herself.
The reincarnator had known, of course, what she had looked like for months, but she still could not help but stare at the growth that she had undergone.
“Today,” Mary states out loud, her cute voice echoing clearly with a degree of bitterness, “is my first birthday.”
In the last months, she had tried to exercise her voice as much as possible, and as such had moved much of her conversations with Sylvia, her potentially loyal maid, into the physical world instead of relying on her telepathic spells.
Only things that absolutely could not be verbalised were still said using the magic, something which the maid had eventually joined in with when she had finally given in and learnt the relevant runes from her princess.
This naturally had the benefit of acclimatising the princess to speaking physically, something that was a very important skill.
But more important for Mary was ensuring that she wasn’t rendered mute by the continued isolation that she was still being subjected to.
Mary frowned intently, staring at her reflection as she considered the matter further. Given that such an outcome was supposedly one of her isolation’s goals, being rendered mute remained a very real possibility, one that she would have to fight against.
The princess shakes her head, dismissing the train of thought, and instead focuses on her reflection in the mirror; she had grown, which was to be expected.
The degree of growth, Mary reminded herself, was unexpected.
Reflected in the mirror was a cute, almost doll-like child. Every time Mary looked in the mirror, the princess found herself understanding why Sylvia seemed so intent on hugging her whenever the maid could get away with it.
Her hair, a familiar shimmering gold inherited no doubt from her mother, was already far longer than it ought to be. And yet, her features were not those of a one-year-old.
The degree of growth the princess saw on Earth would have been regarded as obscene, proof that some rich weirdo was up to no good and had paid for very expensive and potentially illegal genetic modifications.
It goes without saying that Alexander, for many obvious reasons, would have hesitated to ever call a one-year-old girl beautiful, but as she stared intently at the mirror, Mary could only concede that this really was the case.
She was tall for an infant; that was the first thing that Mary always noticed when she inspected herself. It was difficult to estimate, and she had not yet gone out of her way to create a magic that would measure her height precisely, but on this day, the first day of her second year on Terra.
Mary would have guessed that she was over half-again as tall as a child of her age should be.
The reincarnator shook her head again this time in abject bafflement.
If her guesstimations were correct, then that would put her at roughly a metre tall, an absurd height for one so young, and her exploration into biomancy showed her that this early growth spurt was even still ongoing.
It was just last week that she had finally cracked some of the more advanced applications that she had theorised for what she had taken to calling biomancy, an ambitious name to be sure, but Mary was increasingly certain that she would eventually live up to it.
In the end there was still much work to do with that spell suite, and she was still working on some way to properly parse the data that it provided her with into what could be called proper understandable metrics.
Like, for instance, showing her height in rational measurements.
Nonetheless, one of the many things she had been doing with it was checking what was really going on with her body, and while there was a great deal that she still couldn’t understand about that, the previous months of data collection and analysis had shown their worth.
Providing something close to a timeline of her internals.
With months of historical data in hand, she had found that nothing was beginning to change internally yet; this meant that her growth spurt was likely to continue for a while longer, and so as far as the princess was concerned, it was reasonable to assume that she still had at least a few centimetres to go before things normalised for a time.
Mary shook her head again, still mystified by her growth. On Earth, the general height of young children had not changed much over the years, despite the existence of increasingly extensive genetic augmentation, as well as access to better food and healthcare.
And yet, the princess had checked with Sylvia; while her growth was well above average, it had turned out that babies on Terra simply grew much faster than those on Earth.
Apparently, Mary thought to herself with an unseemly amount of sarcasm that mana could do truly wonderful things to a person’s appearance, even more so than gene-crafting could.
The most confusing and obscene thing of all that Mary had learnt was something that Sylvia had outright told her from personal experience. It wasn’t every day that you learned that your maid had first battled and killed a monster when she was five years old.
Before the princess could once again wallow in her confusion at that particular factoid any further, the door to her room slammed open.
Mary did not jolt in surprise; such a thing had happened many times before at this point, as Sylvia visited her often and did not know how to knock, but this time the visit was notably different.
This is because the door that was opened was the rarely used hallway door, rather than the door to the attached room that Sylvia used.