Will (2)
Zzzt···
A strange current of electricity tickled at my brain through the haze of fading consciousness. At first the current crackled with irregular, chaotic noise, but soon it fused with my brainwaves, producing an eerie resonance. And the instant the wavelengths of my mind achieved a perfect, delicate balance—
My consciousness detached itself from my body and plunged deep, deep down.
I realized that I had been momentarily freed from every stray thought.
'To be precise, I can maintain this state of focus for as long as I please.'
There's a saying that thoughts chase their own tails—and it's true, thinking isn't something you can simply control at will. And yet, right now, I could govern the flow and direction of my own thoughts with absolute precision.
What a wondrous sensation this was.
In the natural order of things, only someone who had dedicated a substantial portion of their life to meditation could ever hope to reach such a state. Thanks to the wonders of future science, I had tracked dirt-covered feet straight into that hallowed ground.
'What of it, though? As long as you get to Seoul, any road will do.'
This wasn't cheating. It was simply taking a path no one else had ever walked.
I allowed myself the briefest moment of self-justification, then began once more to arrange my thoughts.
Embarrassing as it is to admit··· even Lena, my inexplicable new rival, vanished from my mind, and I gave up worrying about the Count's commission entirely.
···
···A person's thoughts, by themselves, cannot generate any energy at all.
That was a line from a science lecture I'd watched somewhere on the internet in my past life. An unimpeachable, undeniably correct statement.
If thought alone could produce power, wouldn't the Earth of the past have been crawling with psychics? Consider that a magician named James Randi put a full million dollars on the line searching for one, and not a single soul ever walked away with the prize. It was safe to conclude that no such people existed.
But the moment a mysterious resource called mana entered the picture, the common sense of the old world lost its authority.
Vuuuum!
The moment I stilled my mind, Kaya's mana needles took form within my inner world of consciousness—needles of mana spinning round and round like tiny planets. Even in a world where mana exists, an ability sustained this far from its owner was exceedingly rare. And holding out for a whole month? That was outright nonsense.
···But Kaya's Will, embedded within those needles, ignored every law.
In the end, if I wanted to pull them out, I had no choice but to overpower the will she had planted inside me.
How?
'Keep it simple. Don't imagine—just think. Think only of the will I desire···'
No—maybe even thinking was an impurity when it came to forging will?
But whether thought preceded will, or will preceded thought, was impossible to sort out from where I stood. Ah, no point agonizing over philosophy at a time like this. I would simply devote myself to a single thought.
'Pull out the needles··· pull them out··· no, to oppose the mental image of [Suppression], I need something even simpler. The opposite of suppression··· liberation?'
Crack!
The instant the stream of my thought touched the word liberation, a jolt like lightning shot through my mind and was gone.
So that's it.
I surrendered myself completely to the intuition that had surfaced.
[I liberate]
Liberation··· from what?
I didn't know.
What mattered was sweeping away every unnecessary distraction and gathering everything into a single, unwavering thought. Like the old man who carved nothing but his pestle, heedless of the world around him, I focused on the will of liberation and nothing else.
"Hoooh···"
It had begun as Kaya's half-forced training, but not anymore. Instinct told me that this very moment would prove to be a monumental turning point.
Human inspiration is a fickle thing. Even with Noah's help, who could say when—or whether—such an opportunity would come again?
···
How much time had passed?
I could no longer feel the flow of time at all. My astonishingly elevated mind had begun to treat time not as something dynamic but as a static concept, perfectly embalmed in place.
One more step, and I would stand at the threshold of egolessness.
And yet I must not lose myself in that comfort. Will is not something to be found by those who have forgotten everything.
'Liberation···'
With one foot in the threshold of egolessness and the posture of a seeker of the Way, I honed my consciousness like a blade being forged. I wanted liberation and liberation alone.
Like a scientist observing bacteria through a high-powered microscope, I examined and re-examined the meaning of liberation through a microscope called focus.
"···"
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
And with every repetition, I felt—for reasons I couldn't name—the finish line drawing closer. Dozens of times, I let slip that mercurial, mirage-like will just as it seemed within reach.
As if to reward a patience that refused to give up until the very end··· at last, the purest Will shyly revealed itself.
Shuuuuuuu···
The two syllables of [Liberation] that had nested in my heart shattered into powder and scattered. The words, the concept, the imagination··· even the vague understanding I'd clung to dissolved away.
Just as matter in the infinitesimally small behaves nothing like matter in the world above, something entirely other was waiting for me beyond the concept I had dug into without end.
It resembled the energy carried by [Points], and yet it was simultaneously something of a completely different nature. Perhaps because it was, wholly and entirely, mine.
This was Will.
Fwoosh!
'···But what is this?'
A hallucination born of extreme focus? At some point, a strange landscape had begun to unfold across my inner world, entirely of its own accord.
The [Will] of liberation wriggled, then began to flow like a river made of thread. And at the end of that current··· lay a sea of immeasurable breadth.
But no matter how close I tried to draw, the sea never came any nearer.
'A sea··· I can't say I understand, but it's clearly a place I can't reach yet.'
All streams return to the sea, as the old saying goes—every flow eventually converges into one. That sea surely held a will vaster by far than anything I had grasped. To reach the place where the rivers of will converged, this much power simply wouldn't be enough.
I swallowed my disappointment, seized one remaining tributary of will that still lingered in my grasp, and hauled it up.
···
I opened my eyes.
Before me was the ceiling of a bedroom lavishly yet tastefully decorated, and above it, Noah's face looking down at me. What I had experienced felt like a midsummer night's dream.
But the sensation of will boiling up from somewhere deep inside me did not lie.
Now I knew exactly what I had to do.
Titititing!
The instant the will bearing the mental image of [Liberation] swept through my body in a single circuit, every one of Kaya's mana needles popped free.
It was expelled so effortlessly it left me feeling almost empty-handed. Once you knew the method, it wasn't difficult at all.
My Inner Heart, overjoyed at its release from bondage, leapt into action and began spewing out aura.
Fuuuuung!
Perhaps because of the aura's savage momentum, a violent gust swept through the bedroom despite the closed windows, rattling the ornaments precariously. I hastily reined the aura in and dampened its force.
I'd just attained some kind of lofty enlightenment, and the moment I opened my eyes, the first thing I had to do was worry about money. The absurdity of it wrung a laugh out of me.
"It seems things went well."
"Thanks to you."
Noah ceased the current she'd been feeding into my head and smoothed back her disheveled hair. Only then did I realize I was still lying with my head in her lap.
How long had it been, exactly? I glanced to the side—Lena, who had been sleeping there, was gone. And yet the day was still bright?
"A full day has passed. It is now 2 p.m. Lena is off somewhere groaning to herself about practicing alone."
"···Took a while. But I'm not too late."
Registration for the sewer commission closed this evening; the actual work would begin the following morning. I could even make it to Kaya's lesson today without being late.
I thanked Noah, who had watched over me for more than twelve hours straight.
"If it weren't for you, it really might have taken a year, just like Kaya said."
"Hmm··· is that so? All I did was nothing special, really. It was merely a technique used to facilitate learning···"
"For something that 'isn't special,' it worked absurdly well, don't you think?"
Her noncommittal answer took me by surprise. I had clearly experienced the focus of a lifetime. Perhaps the effect was simply stronger in people who possessed mana.
I asked, half hoping, whether I could receive the same help next time—but Noah rejected my request flatly.
"It is bad for your body."
"Really···?"
"Once is one thing, but from the second time onward, a phenomenon occurs where your brainwaves are disrupted. If this were a method safe for long-term use, learning devices would have been commercialized ages ago."
"Good grief—brainwave disruption? You used technology that dangerous on me??"
"I told you, once is fine. There were already hundreds of thousands of samples in the data. Now, you must be hungry—let's have lunch."
utterly indifferent to my protests, Noah rose from her seat.
Hmm··· perhaps because she was an AI with such a strongly scientific way of thinking, her concept of risk seemed to differ from an ordinary person's.
···Next time, I'm asking properly before accepting any help.
···
"I'd like to try working at it alone a bit longer. I think I might be close."
"Alright. Then I'll go on ahead."
Lena shot down my offer to help her remove the mana needles without a moment's hesitation. Well, fair enough—if I solved it for her, it would defeat the entire purpose of the training.
The head maid turned up her nose, insisting that a proper head maid must cultivate refined habits, but I kept lunch as brief as possible and headed straight for Kaya.
The moment I informed her that I had dispelled her bindings, Kaya—grinning ear to ear—declared it impossible and inspected my body, before finally accepting the fact with a dazed expression.
"···This is honestly incredible. Were the needles hard to pull out?"
"Not at all. I just pulled them all out in one go."
"Let's try it once more. There's something I'm curious about."
Fyufyufyuwang!
Tterutterutterutong!
Kaya planted the mana needles in my body just as abruptly as before—and in a single stroke, I showed her the trick of ripping out every last one.
Hmm··· I felt a little dizzy, though?
Proof that Will, too, could not be used without limit.
In any case, Kaya could hardly contain her astonishment at the sight of me.
"No··· this is far beyond what I hoped for···"
"Sorry? Did I do something wrong?"
"No, no. You didn't do anything wrong. It's just···"
According to her, all Kaya had actually expected was for me to catch a mere thread of Will. The idea was that if I struggled to remove the needles while my sense of mana was sealed off, then once she released them, a fragment of will would naturally blend into my mana handling—and that way, over several years, I would gradually grow accustomed to will, until someday I might grasp it entirely. In short: it was a homework assignment that was, from the start, almost impossible to fully solve.
Even the one-year deadline she'd originally set was, she said, merely the timeframe needed to reach the goal of laboriously wrenching out the mana needles by unconsciously borrowing the power of will.
"But you—you, somehow, I don't know how you did it—overshot the goal entirely and straight-up learned to wield will. You've reached the very edge of the Expert realm."
"Huh? I'm still not a Master?"
And here I'd been all but certain I'd become a Master by now!
Kaya snorted and shot my claim down.
"Ha! Not even close! All you've done is grasp the will of [Liberation], nothing more."
"Well, that's true."
"The will of liberation is comparatively easy to obtain. Humans are born with an instinctive nature that yearns to break free of their bonds. Of course··· someone with a twisted enough temperament could grasp the will of destruction easily enough, too. But··· acquiring a will of complex concept is hard."
"Ah··· so that's another wrinkle. I never even considered it. But then what on earth is the standard for a Master?"
Was wielding one or two wills not enough? But mastering the will of every concept in existence was absurd—there'd be nearly infinite numbers of them.
Kaya answered my question in earnest.
"Hmm··· let me say this up front: the standardization of the Master criteria was the Guild's doing."
"Is that so?"
"It is. The Guild isn't an academic institution, so their standard was bound to be skewed toward combat—and keep in mind, it is by no means an absolute measure."
"Understood."
"In any case, the criterion is dead simple. You just have to land a strike exceeding a set threshold of impact on the Unbreakable Chest housed at Guild Headquarters."
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