All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 70: Clean Words

I supervised Beatrice as she spent several hours containing the fire elementals. It was fun to just hang out and clean together. Well, it was only sort of cleaning, more like fixing things. I had never been much of a handyman, but it was a lot more enjoyable than I would have ever thought. Perhaps I needed to expand my repertoire.

As we finished binding the last of the elementals, I noticed that Beatrice was starting to slow down. She was taking longer to speak, and her hands were much less precise. Then something clicked in my processor, and I realized this might be a symptom of humans getting tired. I didn't think we would be able to finish exploring this floor today.

We were so close to completing our task, though, so I figured I'd let her finish up. I saw her eyes starting to droop by the last circle and ended up mostly doing it by myself. I didn't mind too much as she had gotten quite proficient, and I hadn't had to help for quite a while.

After the entire set of cages had been re-ringed, Beatrice and I left to go back downstairs. I didn't mind returning to this floor. It was nice to go explore something new, but I didn't want to get into too many new areas without Beatrice. Even though I explored a lot of the main floor by myself, I since realized that I might be missing important context about the nature of the messes I was cleaning. So it was best to have Beatrice take care of any of these odd things while I was able to do some of the more regular cleaning. She was like the specialized task force of our janitorial duo.

It was still a bit odd to think of a human as more of my assistant, but it was something I was getting used to. Maybe it was rubbing off since she had an entirely too high opinion of me. Still, I didn't imagine that would ever change. Though with how things had been going, perhaps I should try harder to meet her expectations, for her safety as much as mine.

As I tucked Beatrice into her bed, I pondered this. Could I really become powerful and capable enough for humans to look up to me so? I wasn't sure if it was possible, but I would do my best. Looking at the already snoring form of Tony across the library, I figured it might not just be for Beatrice's sake that I needed to improve. It felt like a lot of the humans around here could really use some help.

While the humans slept, I considered going for another pass around the entire main floor, but my sensors told me it really wasn't necessary for at least another day. Sure I still could, but even that would only occupy me for a little bit. I would need something to do while they slept. Going back to the book that I had been looking at previously, I continued trying to decipher the characters. I thought I was getting pretty close. I realized there were actually only 26 characters. There just was some sort of special variation of each that went after the dot punctuation marker. And also sometimes randomly in a sentence. I had to figure out the logic, but I imagined I would.

---

Bee awakened slowly, snuggling deeper into the bed. It was comfortable, and while she was well-rested, that didn't mean she wanted the day to start just yet. She was unwilling to leave the warm comfort of her blanket cocoon for a few more minutes.

Eventually, she sighed and wriggled out from under the covers. She was becoming accustomed to being tucked in every night. It was something she hadn't felt since her mother had died. She lowered her feet to the floor and sat for a moment, reflecting.

Looking at the light coming through the windows, she saw that she'd only slept for a few hours. A higher-level person just needed less sleep. Especially since she had slept so well over in the little village a couple nights ago. So it was no surprise to see that Tony was still asleep. He might have been a hard-working farm lad who was used to getting up at the crack of dawn, but that didn't mean he needed any less sleep than the normal person at his level. Checking his status, Tony was still level 6. She was level 18. No! she was level 19 now, apparently.

Bee yawned. She must have missed the message because she was so tired. That last bit of suppression circle maintenance had been hard to get through. It wasn't super important as there was no skill choice or anything of the like. So it was really just a notification that she was one step closer to the next skill. Level 20 was tantalizingly close, but it wasn't that impressive. Well, it was at her age, but the rewards at level 20 weren't that impressive. It was just another skill. At 25, though, she could improve her class. And she would be lying to herself if she said she wasn't looking forward to improving Devotee.

As much as Bee had settled into the role of Void's Devotee, she was not exactly happy with it. Not that she wanted to leave Void, even if she could. No, it was mostly that the class didn't have too many benefits. Void didn't seem to get anything out of it either. There were no worship requirements for her, and as far as she could tell, her master didn't benefit from prayer in any way.

It didn't seem to get something when she cleaned alongside it, so if she could get a more useful class specialization, she would like to. Still, 25 was a large jump from 20, even more so than 20 was from 15. At least in terms of experience, it was.

Stretching, she adjusted her clothes slightly. It had been nice of Mary to send her off with some fresh ones. She had long since gotten used to wearing the same set of clothes for several days in a row, but a month in the same set stained with sweat and blood was a bit much. She'd have to prioritize finding some other clothes. Now that she remembered what a fresh set felt like, she didn't want to go back.

Looking around, she saw her master flipping through a book. It was a book that she was surprised to find it reading. It was her alphabet book, A is for Alchemy. It must be so boring if it was reading an alphabet book for children. Thinking about it, though, she realized there was very little for it to do overnight. It was too efficient at cleaning to let that occupy it the entire night, plus it had no demons to hunt at the moment. Between that and its unwillingness to go up or down the stairs without being carried, perhaps Void taking up some light reading made sense. Still, the whole stairs thing did seem very strange for something that she knew to be so strong. Maybe she could help. She wasn't much of a carpenter, but maybe Tony could assist too. If they found enough wood, perhaps they could build a ramp up some of these stairs.

Bee considered how useful that would be. If her master asked for it, she certainly wouldn't complain, but it didn't seem like it would reach the top priority on her list. Maybe once they contained all the possible dangers on the upper floors, they would have time. And there was also the Lieutenant to think of. Her head started to ache slightly at the reminder of her constantly growing pile of tasks.

She moved over to Void's side. Looking over it, she saw that it was in the 9th chapter, "I is for Intent ."That was a tricky chapter for her to understand. When she first heard about alchemy, it seemed like the recipe was the important part of getting the desired final result. The materials, the way they were mixed, the quantities, and so on. And it was, for the most part, but there was another factor as well. A very important one, if relatively minor in effect. That was the intent behind the item being created.

Just a random circle shape or a potion unwittingly made wouldn't likely have much magic energy. Whoever was laying out the materials needed to have a clear picture of what they wanted it to do. Her tracing of the circles of the fire elementals was effective because she wanted to contain them, but probably less effective than if she understood each room to the fullest extent and really understood how it would help keep them there. She wasn't sure how much of an impact that would make. But if she was someone who just randomly copied directions without having any intent, the magical properties of the materials would not be activated.

That was how she understood it. It was very likely something was wrong with her interpretation, though, especially with how well her potions had worked so far. But why was Void reading this? It didn't seem to realize that she was standing over it as it traced under each word with its little claw.

—

I had done it! Humans are actually quite clever, even in this bizarre place. The characters each represented a sound. And if you played those sounds out, they correlated with spoken words! How could I not have realized it earlier?

This was revolutionary. Of course, this book was full of mistakes too. I had extracted a set of rules for decoding that explained perhaps 70% of the symbols, but there were many that simply did not fit into the pattern. Many of these letters represented sounds that weren't in the words that I was pretty sure they were trying to say. And sometimes a letter was said one way and sometimes another. The whole thing was full of contradictions and really, really confusing, but I was 96% certain of my interpretation. With additional confirmation and something to check my work against, I could probably bring my 30% uncertainty down to 0.6% pretty easily. But already, I was right enough that I was getting close.

After I had that epiphany to convert each letter to a sound, I went through each chapter closely to map these relationships out. Once I did that, things really started to line up.

I had flipped through the whole book dozens of times at this point. I had it mostly scanned in my memory, but somehow, the physical presence of it allowed me to catch things that my compression algorithm had deemed unimportant and hadn't saved. At least, that's what I thought was happening, but it was quite weird. Something about having the original in front of me seemed to help me, but I couldn't exactly explain why.

Anyways, I was now working on deciphering the 9th chapter. I was having a lot of trouble understanding it. Not necessarily because the words were more confusing than the previous chapters, but the contents of the chapter didn't really make any sense. I had gone through and looked at a few of the other chapters, which explained a lot of why random salt circles were on the ground all throughout this castle. But why it mattered what you thought when you placed down salt circles was still beyond me.

I was considering skipping over this chapter and moving on to the next one. The reason I hadn't was that this seemed to focus on one of the confusing letters whose sounds didn't seem to always be the same thing. Right about when I had just given up on chapter 9, a shadow fell over the book.

This jolted me from my musings. I noticed Beatrice had woken up and came over to say hi. She was looking at the chapter as well.

Beatrice frowned at the page. "I found this chapter extremely confusing. I wish you were able to explain some of this to me. That would be really helpful." She said. Well, at least I wasn't the only one who was confused here. I was flattered that she thought I could explain it to her, but that was totally beyond me right now. She continued. "I mean, I understand the idea that you need to have the intent of doing something while you lay out your circles. But I don't understand why knowing more about the details of how the magic works to change the intent. So the particular part I'm stuck on is, does the intent guide the magic more efficiently somehow? Or does more knowledgeable intent just activate the magic held within the materials better?"

I just looked at her. Maybe if she kept asking questions, she would answer some more of mine. At least she was giving me data on what this text was trying to convey. I recorded her words to parse through further later. Though the fact that we were both confused didn't bode well.

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