Wish upon the Stars (Original Superhero cultivation sci fi litrpg)

[Malcolm Tent]

Today was my first day of class. Again. Introduction to Divination Principles with Professor Allegra Saunders was the secondary recommendation from Elonwy. I was still kind of on the fence about the first one, but I trusted my friend not to steer me wrong, so I packed up and headed for my first class (after stocking my scrolls for the day).

Unlike Prof Hawkins, Professor Saunders was NOT understated in terms of her living situation. In fact, even from the outside her house was a sprawling palatial estate that dwarfed most of the ones I'd ever seen. When I arrived at the gate, there was an attendant waiting for me there, ready to escort me off to the side entrance where the class was supposed to enter.

"You were expected," said the servant who met me at the gate. "Please, come this way. Lady Allegra has been eagerly awaiting your presence."

I blinked at that, for several reasons, but tagged along as the gaunt man in the robe led me around the side of the house. "So…what do you mean expected?" I asked slowly. "Like, she knew I was coming because I signed up? Because if this is another 'only one person in the class' situation I'm going to be so pissed."

He laughed at that. "Of course not. The lady deals in fate. In chance and happenstance. Some beings hold greater sway in the rivers of time than others, and those stones, when dropped into the current, produce ripples that even the most amateurish diviners can perceive. With our Lady's skill, your nature was as a sun in an empty sky, obvious and shining with a light that could not be denied."

That brought me up short. "Wait, you mean she can tell I have fate manipulation abilities?" I asked in surprise. My class in Doom Sovereign had been the Fate Walker, and even beyond that, I had always had an…interesting destiny. Even for an Ascendant I attracted strange and unique events at a rate that beggared belief. From conversations with my family and even other candidates, my advancement had been far faster than it should have been, and I had experienced far more than most.

For a while I had assumed that was because I was descended from three different gods, but comments had been made in the past that even for a divine descendant, my luck was a little bit absurd when it came to running into strange things.

Part of what had drawn me to this particular class was the knowledge that while it was time related, it would presumably allow me to learn to access the abilities of someone like Azazel more accurately. My first minister was a big fan of divination, and giving him access to an actual teacher who could show him how it worked would make that even more useful.

When we arrived at the closed door in question, the hooded man knocked heavily on the door in a strange, staggered pattern. The door opened and a dark haired girl with pale skin and black painted lips glared at him. "Oh for- Dylan, what the hell did I tell you about the whole 'mysterious envoy' persona. You look ridiculous. Did you give this one the child of destiny speech? I told you to stop doing that."

I froze. Oh. Apparently I had been overthinking things.

Dylan, aka robe boy, pouted at the girl. "Sally!" he hissed in embarrassment. "Don't ruin my reputation in front of the seekers of knowledge. The Lady is expecting this one in particular. Beyond that, my own senses foretold his arrival. The fate of this one is particularly puissant."

"No, she isn't," Sally snapped. "She said she forgot to send directions to the side door to one of the kids and that they would probably show up at the front gate. That's not PROPHECY, it's forgetfulness. And you don't HAVE senses. You've had to borrow credits from me six different times because you lost all yours in the gambling competitions. You are the least prescient human being I've ever met. I'm including Lyle in that assessment, and the other day, he walked into a HOLE because he got distracted by a butterfly."

She turned to shoot me an apologetic grimace. "Look, ignore everything this idiot said to you. He takes this nonsense way too seriously. The Prof is actually a pretty perceptive lady, but she tends to hyperfocus on the future and fail to notice the obvious. My brother has picked up ALL her bad habits and none of her good ones."

"Sally, knock it off!" Dylan whined. "You're making me sound bad to the new kid!"

She jerked her chin at me. "Come on in, class hasn't started yet. Prof said we'd be starting late today, and she's pretty reliable about that kind of stuff." Letting me in, she led me down the hall towards the front of the house. I was pretty sure. Given the obvious spatial warping it was hard to get a bead on where I was.

"Look, contrary to what he said, this isn't some hyper mystical mumbo jumbo. I know divination sounds mysterious, but really it's just like statistics. But backwards. And some of it you do without any information to go off of. The Prof is a good teacher, and if you have a knack for this stuff you'll pick it up lickety split."

"What about the whole fate thing?" I asked as we walked. "He said that some people have stronger fates. Is that real?"

"Oh sure," she nodded. "But singularities are rare as hen's teeth. The Prof says she hasn't had one in her class in a few millennia. The chances of you being one are pretty damned slim. Just…don't worry about Dylan. He's harmless. Focus on learning more about the class and making the most of your time. The Prof knows how to educate people according to their talents, so the better you do the more you actually learn."

That sounded fair enough, so I decided to just wait and talk to her about it in person. Making a bunch of half assed guesses wasn't likely to be helpful to me long term. This was a school, I was obviously here to get knowledge from experts, not to try to come up with my own solutions to problems that had already been studied.

We walked down a long, thin hallway with nothing on the walls except candles. I was pretty sure it was some kind of servant's corridor. After a few turns, we came to a large lecture hall type chamber with descending tiered seating. The hall was set up in sort of a cone, with the thinnest point being a rounded alcove with a single large table set into the floor. The top of the table was some kind of dark granite, the base was wood, and a long figure stood at the side, a placid smile on her mostly blank face.

"Welcome," she said, in a voice that didn't go above a whisper but rode the acoustics of the room to sound like it was coming from right behind my ear. To Introduction to Divination Principles. I am Allegra Saunders, and I believe you've already introduced yourself, Mr. Wyndham."

Sally sighed. "He didn't, Prof. You skipped that part."

The detached woman blinked. "Ah, my mistake. How rude of me. You may proceed, of course, I didn't mean to cut you off."

"I'm…uh, Shane Wyndham," I said slowly. "But I got by Solomon."

She nodded happily. "Of course you do. Please, come sit down, I saved you a spot by the front. You won't have to run as far when the incident occurs."

I glanced at Sally, who winced and shrugged. She did NOT, tellingly, say anything about not worrying about the proclamation. Lovely. I followed the gaze of Professor Saunders down to the front of the room and sat. I was watched by about a dozen people, mostly older. Unlike my initial class, this one was much more crowded, with plenty of people hoping to learn about divination. I could see Dylan the robe guy in the back, sulking, and Sally sat next to him, much to his annoyance. When I took my seat, I smiled up at Professor Saunders, and she nodded blithely before returning her serene gaze to the class.

"Time," she said in a smooth, empty voice. "Is a river. But not a linear one. It's more circular. Like a three dimensional river. In a ring shape. But twisted. Like an upside down eight. Because it starts before it ends, and vice versa. Everything that can happen has already happened, or won't ever happen, and if you can't tell the difference between the two, then nothing you do will ever matter. Except when it does."

I frowned at her. That was…deeply unhelpful. Elonwy had said this teacher was good at what she did. I had to assume I was missing something. Her eyes fixed on me. "You can see the infinite possibilities, can you not?"

"I can," I nodded. "At least sometimes. I have a special ability that opens up that sense. I can prune the potential outcomes. Or at least that's what I was told it's called."

She grimaced. "Sloppy," she said sourly. "Destroying timelines to focus your potential outcomes. As I said, time is a river. Rather than divert the flow, it is wiser to simply swim. Utilize your ability." She gestured for me to come up and stand beside her. "Today, we perform a small exercise." She drew out a coin. "I will flip this coin. I want you to prune the timelines where it lands on tails. Remember. Only heads. Anything else is unacceptable."

I took a deep breath, then nodded. She flipped. I reached for Limbo, incarnating my demon, and the world bloomed into an endless web of possibilities. There were quite a few nearby, but most of them were some offshoot where the coin didn't land or something else happened alongside the flip. In terms of potential outcomes for the toss, there were only a few. I lashed out, shattering a few timelines, focusing the outcome to land on heads. The last viable timeline nearby was locked in, heads was assured, and then, inside that timeline, Professor Saunders winked at me. I saw her do…something, and she reached OUT of the timeline she was in and plucked the coin from another, the motion overlapping with her coin flip as it landed…on tails.

Gaping at her, I stared down at the coin. I saw what she meant. She was saying the same thing as Professor Hawkins, about time being four dimensional. She'd moved between the timestreams seamlessly and then come back, even sidestepping the effects of Limbo entirely.

She passed me the coin, gesturing for me to sit down. I did, still staring at the golden disc as if it help the answers to the universe. Which, to be fair, it very well might. "Time," she repeated. "Is a river. Move within its flow, reverse it, swim upstream. But it doesn't stop. Not really. Not on a grand scale. Which means no matter what your opponent does, you always have a way to move. Always have another path. That is the truth of divination. For it is in divination that we illuminate our truest path. And there is ALWAYS a path to take."

Her voice was no longer serene or flat, now it was sharp, and her eyes glittered like dark chips of obsidian, sharpened to a monomolecular edge. "Welcome to Introduction to Divination Principles. Today, you enter a whole new world." I swallowed hard as I took in the excited gleam in the eyes of the other students. I wasn't the only newbie, from what I could tell, but even the students I knew had been here a while seemed excited. Now I got what Elonwy had meant about Saunders being a good teacher. I had a feeling I'd be learning a lot here.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

Another two weeks passed without much incident. Train, class, train, sleep (with some time for stockpiling scrolls in between). With the demons out doing jobs, I managed to pull in some credits, but it wasn't nearly enough. I was focused mostly on the midterms for income, and I only had a month left to train. Still, I'd made some serious progress, as evidenced by the object currently sitting in front of me.

"So, this is a manifestation of a demon?" Callie asked from where she lay on the table in my conference room. "It looks kind of messy."

"It's…sort of a halfway point," I admitted. I'm trying to recreate Overlay in this form. Once that's done, I can use Brad to insert the timepiece in Owen and anchor him to it the same way I did with Phil and the candle. It's ALMOST done. I just need to have Dantalion scan it to verify."

Overlay was…simplistic. It was a fairly barebones design for a demon, as far as I could tell, albeit surprisingly economical. There were actually a few attributes present. Mostly time, but not just that. One that I was pretty sure was information, one that I suspected was fate (which WAS a different thing), a few more basic ones like light for the representation.

It was fascinating to study it, because I hadn't actually MADE Overlay the way I made a lot of my demons. The DS Mastery skill had essentially designed the subskill spontaneously. It made me so curious about the system as a whole. Where did skills come from? I knew some of them, like my Goetia Staff Art, were created by people and then sort of natural disseminated, but something like DS Mastery, which was only possibly by mashing together the accumulated knowledge of a bunch of die hard players, didn't seem like it had existed before.

Regardless, Overlay wasn't complicated, but it was efficient. Or he was. It was strange to think of the subskill as a person while constructing the timepiece that represented him. I glanced over it. "Twelve movements," I said slowly as I studied it. "Decent balance of attributes."

"Don't you want more time?" Callie asked with interest. "You've got a natural affinity for it now, right?"

"Yes, but that's not how it works," I told her as I studied the device. "Balance is important for function. Attributes are complicated, but also very simple. They do something. You can bully them into doing other things with form, but they mainly serve a specific purpose. In order to make the most of them, you need other attributes to shape that purpose alongside the form. Mythcrafting techniques from just one attribute produces extremely basic techniques."

And that was another tough part of this whole thing. Overlay had been a skill originally, which meant it was constructed from stats. Stats were more stable and discrete portions of mythology, but they were rigid. Remaking the demon into a timepiece was giving me far more flexibility, but it was forcing me to adapt my mythcrafting to fit into the niche of skillmaking. Which I suspect was the whole point of the exercise Professor Hawkins gave me. Showing me how to mythcraft from the ground up, as it were.

My construct wasn't made of stats, but I had to study and learn from the stat aspects of skill construction to make the elements of the timepiece, and that was showing me a bit about how the system combined its mythology. It was making my individual movements more refined and stable as I internalized their construction.

I passed it to Dantalion. "So…what do you think?" I asked the older demon. "Take your time."

He nodded solemnly, picking up the timepiece. Slowly, he lifted it to his eye and began to study it. "I've been keeping up with your lessons of course, my lord," he said as he eyed the timepiece. "And making generous use of the Pillar of Goetia to simulate research. I've needed to confirm quite a few things for myself in realtime, and of course, I'm nowhere close to proficient, but I have at least as firm a grasp on this subject as yourself."

"I figured," I laughed. "I also figure that you're being humble. You probably have a much firmer grasp on this stuff than me. And I don't mind that. After all, your knowledge is my knowledge. Once I incarnate you, everything you've learned will become my own knowledge."

He laughed, not even bothering to look up at me. "This looks functional. And more importantly, it looks ACCURATE."

I shrugged. "It wasn't that hard. I mean, yeah, learning to replicate a skill with mythcrafting was tougher than I expected, but it's kind of basic, and Overlay was the MOST basic subskill I had access to. I've got a long way to go."

"True," Dantalion admitted as he set the timepiece down. "But I think you're underestimating exactly how big an accomplishment this is. While you may be thinking this is a pathetic pace, your only real point of reference for beginner Mythcrafting is Professor Hawkins. What might seem trivial to him is fiendishly complicated to others. Based on context clues, I suspect that this level of progress would take a normal person YEARS of effort."

I blinked at that. "Huh. Not sure how. Constructing the mechanism elements was a bit annoying, but it wasn't that hard. It's all just visualization at the base of it. Anyone can do that. Learning to layer those visualizations on top of each other was tough, but Piece of Mind made it a lot simpler to keep up once I got the hang of it."

"Because visualizations are the area of Mythcrafting where your talent shines the most," he said patiently. "You remember that even your advisor called you a savant. A natural, as it were. The fact that you've continued to improve at this speed proves his words correct. It is also worth noting that he hasn't actually said anything negative about your progress in at least a week, which for someone like him, is its own form of praise."

I…hadn't actually noticed that. He was right though. The Professor hadn't made a single snide crack about my work ethic or productivity in several days. Compared to his previous annoyingly critical manner, it was basically doing a congratulatory dance in my honor, not that I was stupid enough to say that to him. I probably should have noticed that myself, actually, but I'd been so caught up in work and training I hadn't even given it a second thought.

"Alright," I sighed. "If it's ready, we should call Brad in. Are you sure this is going to work? It's not…exactly the same."

He waggled a hand. "It's conceptual, so it should. We can conceive of it working, so there's no reason to expect it won't. Besides, the item in question isn't overly complicated. It's not exactly replacing his current structure, more sort of…melding with it. Then we can remove it when needed for upgrades and it'll act as a sort of talisman. You know this. You came up with the plan."

"Yeah," I grinned. "But it sounds so much more convincing coming from you. It's the extra years. They add gravitas."

He laughed at that, and I sent one of the passing demons to call for Owen and Brad. It didn't take them long to arrive, and as soon as they did, the two of them all but lungs across the table to examine the timepiece. I rolled my eyes, snatching them up. "Stop that, you two," I snapped. "You're grown…demons. Act like it."

Brad and Owen had taken to spending time together, presumably because they were the youngest of my demons, at least in terms of experience and physicality. Brad was proving to be a bad influence on Owen, but honestly I didn't dislike it. The kid might not be any chronologically younger than me, but he seemed so…green. It was nice to see him making friends, and to see Brad bonding with someone.

"Is that it?" he said eagerly, staring at the device in my hands. It was honestly kind of fascinating to look at. Inside the Domain, mental constructs could function to their fullest. Each of the unique elements of the timepiece were a strange, shimmering substance composed of raw attributes. Some of them were interesting colors, and some of them couldn't really be described by a term that pedestrian, but they were all breathtaking to behold.

I nodded, tossing it in the air and catching it. "Of course," I nodded cheerfully. "Take a look. See what you feel."

I tossed him the timepiece, made based on his own construction. My initial schematics had required quite a bit of referencing of the book in the library that represented Owen, and despite being one of the first, trying to unravel the whole thing had been fiendishly difficult. But given the transition, the two items should be VERY similar, if distinct, and since the book WAS Owen for all intents and purposes, the timepiece…

"It feels like me," he said in awe. "I mean. Not me. Because it's a watch. But it is me. It's gorgeous. I feel like it's ticking along to the beat of my heart."

I glanced at Brad. "Heartbeat, huh? Can you use that?"

He squinted between us. "I mean…probably. Where the hole opens is sort of academic. But if he can feel that, then moving it should create a pit where that sensation used to be. I'm not exactly positive how this whole thing works, I'm sort of going off instinct here." He reached out and snatched the timepiece from Owen, who let out a whimper and reached for it.

Brad, not even bothering to ask if it was time, shot his hand forward clutching the watch. Before my eyes, a hole opened in the air over Owen's chest, and Brad shoved his closed fist and the watch both into the gap, before immediately removing his hand. Once it was out, the hold snapped shut with a pop, vanishing as if it had never existed. We all froze, staring at Owen. He stared back, looking shocked, but not hurt or uncertain about anything.

Watching his face closely, Brad nodded slowly, then his hand shot back out and the hold opened. He withdrew the timepiece, then turned and handed it to me.

I took it carefully, staring down at it in awe. It looked…better. Different. Like someone had overhauled it and adjust all the pieces to be just a bit more perfect. Gears were slimmer, movements smoother, it just looked like it was made by a better artificer. More than that though, it felt alive. I could feel the pulse of a pounding heart through the gears, like a being breathed alongside the mechanism, a physical vessel of life contained in a watch.

Turning, I passed it to Dantalion, being very careful not to damage or jar it. He studied it for about a minute before handing it back, and Brad placed it back inside of Owen's chest. "This bears further study," Dantalion said solemnly. "Something…changed. That might seem like a good thing, but it means we don't have enough of a grasp on the mechanics of this process. The Domain altered the timepiece to fit your intent."

I grimaced. "Which means it was a failure. That's not systematic. The Professor is going to be so disappointed. It's fine. I have three chances to get this done. And the changes will help us refine the process, right?"

"They will," he confirmed. "By studying the before and after, we can learn what differences we overlooked between the initial input and the final product. I imagine this experience will advance our Mythcrafting capabilities by quite a bit. Obviously, we won't be tampering with the device until we fully understand its creation and the logic behind it, but until we've completed the analysis, we can learn much from it in preparation for working on the next one."

I nodded. "Sounds good. Well then, if we're done here let's break for the night. Tomorrow, we can get started on studying Limbo." Hopefully my Divination classes would be helpful in deciphering those abilities.