After the End: Serenity

It was a good thing Serenity’s tent blocked the light completely. It gave him somewhere he could try things without being in the blinding light of the dungeon level. He didn’t get the sleep the others were getting, but at Tier Eight he could manage without sleep for a night. It wasn’t the best decision, especially long term, but one night could be managed.

Preventing the overwhelming light from blinding was both easier and harder than expected. At first, it was much harder. None of his initial ideas really worked; he simply couldn’t see using light, no matter how much he blocked it, because it was powerful enough that it simply burned his eye whenever he exposed it. It didn’t hurt, since there were no nerves there to sense it, but the continual healing was annoying.

It did let him use Eyeless Sight, but it still wasn’t a solution he liked. The continual healing was a mana drain, after all, and it was faster than his natural regeneration, even on the seventh floor of the dungeon. It wasn’t sustainable.

Serenity was very happy with what he achieved while working on the light problem, even if it didn’t solve the problem. He’d figured out how to easily filter out individual wavelengths, or at least small ranges; that seemed like a good first step, but all it did was confirm that there was just too much energy in the light. Even if he filtered out the entire region of visible light, it still burnt out his optical nerve. That naturally led to trying to filter out more wavelengths, along with being able to see them.

It might not have solved his problem, but he had figured out how to let himself see in both infrared and ultraviolet. Trying to see that wide a range all at the same time was weird; he didn’t know what to call the colors and they didn’t seem to make much sense, so for now he was having Aide filter them. If nothing else, he’d figured out another form of night vision.

He’d also figured out that the over-bright light was approximately but not exactly lined up with the visual portion of the spectrum. It went a little ways into both infrared and ultraviolet, but not far. It wasn’t going to cook anyone with heat or even give someone a sunburn.

The next thing he tried was polarization; that was supposed to be a good way to cut light intensity, especially with different angles of polarization, or something like that. Serenity tried several approaches before he decided that he must not understand light and polarization well enough. It was strange; he could manage the detection of light using his eyes as an example, but polarization completely escaped him. It was definitely something to look into when he got somewhere that he could research it.

Serenity took another look at the blindfold. It worked at what it was designed for: it stopped his eyes from being damaged. He couldn’t see through it with Eyeless Sight, but that was because it was outside his body. If it were somehow inside his body, he’d at least be able to use Eyeless Sight.

His eyelids weren’t good enough. Not only was it entirely too tempting to open his eyes - he could deal with that - but they didn’t block enough light on their own. It was far less of a mana drain, but it was still a mana drain.

On the other hand, weren’t there quite a few creatures that had secondary eyelids to protect their eyes against hazardous conditions? Serenity didn’t really need that since there was no real reason to make this a permanent change, but he could certainly temporarily alter his eyelids with a spell. No, better; he could use a rune. Specifically, he could use a Quickrune. That would be temporary yet last as long as he needed to; even better, he could “draw” the rune on his eyelids. Coordinating form and function was useful for Intent.

It took a few false tries, but what he’d figured out was enough; Serenity was able to alter his eyelids to block the necessary frequencies far more thoroughly while letting everything else through as though his eyelids were translucent. He wouldn’t be able to open his eyes as long as the rune was active; that was both easier and a good restriction to protect his eyes.

He even managed to finish about an hour and a half before everyone else was supposed to be up and moving. It wasn’t as big a success as he’d hoped for, since he still couldn’t see normally, but it was far better than using a blindfold. His MageSight was only slightly fuzzed by the spell, his Eyeless Sight worked fine, and he even had some of the infrared vision working. Ultraviolet didn’t seem as likely to be useful, so Aide was handling that.

Serenity? You should check your Status. Aide’s words interrupted Serenity’s moment of pleased accomplishment, but at least they didn’t interrupt anything important. An interruption while he was creating the rune could have had significantly worse consequences. Of course, Aide knew that.

Serenity pulled up his Status. He didn’t even get past the first few lines before he knew what Aide wanted him to see.