All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 115: Meditation and Fabrication

My mornings were full of activity and excitement. However, once we settled into a routine, there were fewer things that needed my attention in the afternoons. Beatrice, Mary, Trent, and Tony made a good team and handled most things. They only asked for my input on major decisions, mostly about cleaning or the children. When it came to things like food or settling disputes between the castle occupants, I was also consulted. But those topics rarely came up.

So my afternoons were getting progressively more and more empty. I actually had nothing to do. After completing my digitization of the entire library, I searched for something else productive I could do with my time.

That was how I found myself sitting on my favorite carpet. I was trying out something called meditation. Apparently, it was a practice of sitting and doing nothing. I wasn't sure what that would accomplish, but the author of the book I read was insistent that while it wouldn't help gain levels, it would improve control over skills and other aspects of power. Well, I didn't feel the immediate need for a power-up exactly, but more control would never hurt. It should allow me to do even better with the children.

Apparently, some of the more introductory types of meditation were done by doing a repetitive or inconsequential task until a certain state of mind was achieved. This wasn't something that I had any experience with, so I tried to take some of the suggestions the book had laid out. Sweeping the same section of the floor over and over was clearly not fitting the bill. After a few hours of trying, I lost a little faith in its teachings and just decided to try a different meditation method.

So instead, I rested on my favorite rug and looked inward. The book cautioned against dwelling on memories, so I tried to stay clear of my hardware and instead watched the contents of my dustbin. I watched as all the things I had collected floated around aimlessly. Never moving exactly but not quite staying still.

I was able to get a clearer sense of the contents than I had ever been able to do before. I figured it was an effect of my new Void Manipulation skill. There weren't that many interesting things in there, though. A bunch of undead, the couple of humans that had attacked me on the way back to the castle. A lot of dirt and debris. Some crumbs and spilled milk from breakfast. Much of it didn't have power radiating from it like the alchemical ingredients did. There were some of those as well. When Beatrice replaced containment circles around the nonhuman residents of the castle, I would normally clean up after her.

As I watched, I couldn't help but meddle a little. I began to sort things by all types of categories. I tried to start by putting rocks in one place, but even that was hard. At first, I tried to do it by size, but that was hard to categorize without just sorting the whole collection into a list, and that wasn't an efficient process at all. Eventually, I sorted them by the primary element of the composition, then subcategorized them by secondary and tertiary elements. After that, I sorted the much smaller groupings by size.

It took me a couple hours, but eventually, my dustbin was no longer a swirling jumble of all the things I had picked up throughout my work. Now it was neat and orderly. This new skill was really growing on me.

I just admired my handiwork for a while before I started to notice that things were slightly shifting. Not the rocks and objects so much, but the humans were very slowly leaking blood from where I had removed their legs. That wouldn't do. I couldn't have them contaminating my newly cleaned space. Flexing my new skill, I did my best to take that blood and purify it of any contamination before shoving it back into them. I didn't want them to die, after all. They were just in timeout for now.

That's when I remembered how the rat and the demons I had placed in here came out different than when I put them in. I didn't want that to happen to these humans. They didn't need power like that. Plus, even if they hadn't been hostile, it just felt generally rude to do something like that without asking. I searched around, sensing the miasma of energy that suffused my dustbin. With a little effort, I coaxed it together into a single, dense cloud and set it to the side. I tried to set it far away from the humans, storing the energy away for later use. That was simple enough, but even after that, I noticed a thin trickle of energy seeping out of the alchemical materials and into the various creatures. It wasn't the same as the energy that caused me to level up, but I also wasn't sure what kind of effect it was having. Well, it couldn't be too big of a deal, right?

While I was working with the energy, the humans started leaking again. I shoved their fluids back in them again, but clearly, this wasn't going to work long-term. With a few thoughts, I flipped through all the resources at my disposal. After a few minutes, my models had concocted a solution that had a decent chance of working. There was only a 45% chance of side effects. I figured that was an acceptable risk here, so I started taking materials from all sorts of my collections and condensing them.

Once I was done with my crafting, I inspected my work. A single L-shaped block of blue-gray crystal floated in by the dustbin, rotating slowly and emanating a slight aura of energy. Its surface was rougher than I would have liked, held together with a slurry of powdered rocks and water, but it came out better than expected. Of course, I didn't want to use such magical materials on the humans, but they gave me the highest possibility of success. Also, the fact that this stuff was in my dustbin meant it was technically trash anyway.

I stuck the first makeshift limb to the end of the stump. It didn't quite fit right. Adjusting it slightly, I shifted the material to form tubes for the liquid to move through. My models said that the new functionality might start to have unknowable effects since it was mixing blood with the crystallized energy lattice mixed with minerals and alchemy supplies. Unfortunately, I didn't have a better way.

I fashioned all the other limbs necessary, and after a little bit, I noted that the leaking had stopped. Good, they should be fine then. After that was taken care of, I tried to get back to meditating. Had I been meditating this whole time? I was supposed to be ordering my inner world and centering my thoughts. That seemed to be pretty close to what I had been doing.

Blinking my sensors, I returned to an awareness of my surroundings again. Now, how to tell if this worked?

—

Bee was exhausted. Who would have thought that running a religion and a small city was going to be so much effort? She and Tony worked themselves to the bone so that they didn't have to disturb their master more than absolutely necessary. The times in the evening when they were able to have several hours to just commune with Void should have been more than enough, but of all the lessons it imparted to them, they only tangentially touched on leadership and practical management.

Most of the time, they ended up getting Void started on cleaning. It could talk forever about esoteric differences in cleaning equipment that she had never heard of. She did her best to record all of these bits of wisdom, but they just didn't really fit into the narrative structure that her teachings relied on. When she asked about this, the impression that she got was that she could start a reference text. Somewhere she could keep at the things that were not core tenets. They could then be referred to later when needed.

Other times, it seemed like they were just playing games. Void taught them how to play a strange game involving playing cards. It was some gambling game. They just bet with rocks, but try as she might, Bee wasn't able to master it, much less pick up on the lesson that Void was trying to teach with such games. Tony, however, seemed to have no problem picking up the lessons. Bee had suspected him of looking at the cards she held, but he never had. Void played pretty much perfectly. It always made the most optimal decisions, and the only times it lost were when the odds were heavily out of its favor.

Tony and Bee eventually shared the game with Mary and Trent in the mornings when they met about running the castle. Not only was it fun, but playing without Void also meant fewer sequences of perfectly sorted cards appeared in their games. Eventually, she started to form an idea of what her opponents were thinking based on their faces and chosen actions. Was this related to what Void was trying to teach her? It was awfully familiar to what her father would talk about on the rare occasions when they ate together.

The game was helping her understand people. When newcomers came and integrated into castle life, she found herself with a better sense of what they were up to and what sort of work they would be suited to. It was slight for now, but it wasn't nothing. If it was preparing for her to run its organization like this, then Void was truly a far-seeing god.

***

Susan was the first newcomer that wanted to leave. Bee wasn't sure how to handle this. They didn't have any rules about this, and there was really nothing that said they should stop her. But even though they had been left in relative peace for the last week or so, she knew that there was still an undead plague running around that would likely eat anyone who left the walls and was not strong enough. Bee was the highest level of the castle's human inhabitants by a large margin, and she would still struggle if she faced too many undead at once.

"How do you plan to travel safely?" Bee asked Susan, honestly curious about her plans.

"Uhhh," Came the uncertain reply. It was weird to think of someone older than her as such a child. But when Bee looked at the eighteen-year-old, she couldn't really think of any other way to describe her. It wasn't that Susan was dumb. Well, not that Bee could tell. She might have been a little slow, but the bigger problem was that she just didn't think things through. She had managed to make it here with two little kids. Both were younger than ten. Apparently, they had no relation to her, and with nothing really holding her here, she had wanted out.

"I figured I could walk to the town past Greg? Maybe that one wouldn't be destroyed?" Susan finished, her voice lilting up at the end like she was asking a question. Bee resisted the urge to run her hand down her face. Deciding to switch tactics, Bee asked a different question.

"Ok, so why do you want to leave?" Bee said. Susan cocked her head slightly, and Bee noticed her eyes tighten. "I won't force you to stay, I'm just trying to see how I can help you."

"Well… I just don't think that I really fit in here. I don't like children or farming. So if I can make it back to a real city I should be able to find my way home in the south I think." Susan said with a small smile.

It wasn't the whole truth. Bee wasn't exactly sure how she knew, but she knew. Something about her body language and the way her answers were phrased. Perhaps Void's training was having more of an effect than she had thought. Susan had done a good job trying to hide it. She had laid interesting traps about who she was and where she had come from. But it seemed like there was something else too.

"Where do you call home then?"