“Anything interesting that I should expect?” I asked.

“Not just interesting. Concerning. Worrying. Problematic. Dangerous. Exhilarating. Terrifying. Also, it relates to something important you’ve missed.”

I raised an eyebrow at her chatter.

“Tell me, my clever friend.” Delta’s face suddenly flickered to a shrewd grin. “How exactly were you able to make yourself into a boy?”

I looked back at her, trying to decipher her expression. She knew something. Her smile likely meant she had discovered something important that I had missed. “I’ve modified… your body bit by bit, starting with the Chromosomes,” I said.

“As intelligent as you are, modifying an X to Y seems a bit far-fetched, no? Considering that there was no Y present. Changing a girl to a boy it would require the introduction of a ton of different factors, dna codes, organs and calculations that the base material simply didn’t have.” She said.

I thought about her declaration. Damn it. She was right. I was so buried in my other research I had completely disregarded this important factor. Where the hell had I gotten the necessary data to make the Y chromosome from? I looked at her expecting an explanation.

“I was able to identify the deep.” She added, her eyes suddenly resembling two dark spirals. “The place where the Phantasm-Squid came from. Do you know how Modify works? How is it able to help you Modify anything? It’s pulling information out of the deep. You’ll see what I mean.”

“Gotcha. Okay, Level Up while I take a look.”

“Have fun.” She flickered, pretending to yawn.

As Delta closed her eyes, I turned to Bessie to review the memory of my soul-sister’s adventures in the deep.

_________________________________________________________

I was seeing what Delta had seen, albeit in a much more limited fashion because my human mind could not possibly process the maddeningly detailed information pouring from the LV 126 Infoscope.

What I witnessed while she chased bees in the forest was quite concerning - everything in Skyisle valley was indeed level 20. Everything... except for things like the Phantasm-Squid that stalked the ward of our house.

Delta was curious. After she made quick work of the queen bee, she decided to dip her Infoscope into the waves of magic that permeated the forest to see exactly what the Phantasm was vanishing into.

Delta’s all-seeing eye, her tendril of information gathering, dove into the wave of magical resonance and emerged out the other side into… elsewhere...

She witnessed an entire ocean of magic beneath the nature of linear reality. It went down a thousand levels deep and possibly even further. She was right, there were a lot of things down there - strange, alien phantoms woven from magic itself.

Ghost-like, bewildering creatures of all sorts of shapes and sizes lived right beneath Skyisle. Thankfully, it looked like most of them were unable to breach the barrier into our world.

What I was seeing along with Delta was a truly alien place filled with alien things, a twisted, multi-dimensional magical landscape with its own hills and valleys, trees, rivers, lakes and peaks. Those were just human words - I simply didn’t possess the language skills to even begin to describe what these valleys and trees were exactly, what shapes they took and how with every deeper level they became more incomprehensible and discordant.

Simply put, the roots that formed the reality of this world, atoms and base objects had their ghostly copies in the ocean of magic and the deeper Delta peered, the more twisted and confounding they looked. From what Delta understood, interpreted and simplified for me was that the deep contained an echo of everything that had ever lived… imprinted within it.

I tried to understand what I saw. Was this the magisphere of this world? I had referenced the name from the concept of the “Noosphere”, a philosophical idea developed and popularized by Soviet biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. Dr. Vernadsky defined the noosphere as the planetary "sphere of reason", geological layers of memory of humanity.

In this case, the older the echo of a magical creature had been, the deeper it sank into the layers of the magisphere, slowly becoming something different, abominable, alien.

The Universal Translator labelled it as "The Astral Ocean" for me.

I knew why. The skill was using information from my head for its translations. The Astral planes were conceptual planes of existence postulated by medieval esoteric philosophers of earth who believed them to be populated by angels, spirits or other immaterial beings.

The things within the Astral Ocean were indeed immaterial - they simply lacked atoms. They were woven from prismatic, transparent ghostly forms. Some of the Astral life looked quite benign, like twisted brambles of dead trees and empty shells from various creatures piled into ghostly mountains a million kilometers tall. Others… were alive, moving. They looked quite dangerous, like ancient, distorted squids made entirely from raggedy, vast tendrils and jagged teeth. These creatures were Soul Hunters… monsters like the Phantasm-Squid.

From what Delta was able to identify - they were ancient magical imprints, animate survivors of distant millennia long passed, ideas that refused to die, driven by their remnant urge to fight, devour, dominate and consume. They stalked the alien labyrinthine landscape of dead memories deep beneath the physical world, searching for ghostly prey.

The strongest of them had the power or skills to find their way into the physical world.

Delta had observed all of this and immediately pulled her Infoscope tendril back, shaking in terror of what she saw. I too, felt the dread of the phantom-life along with her. These things had no mercy, no human mind, only the desire to live, to breed and to kill! Many of them were several hundred Levels in power as defined by the System! Some of the Astral-phantoms looked like they were made from amalgamations of… people that had perished long ago in some ancient war. A merger of an entire army of men, fused together into a multi-limbed monstrosity fruitlessly trying to carry on their mutual mission.

Life, it seemed, didn’t end after death in Novazem.

It looked like souls, memories didn't simply perish in this world, they simply sank into the Astral-ocean currents, eventually fossilizing together into ghostly mountains. Some of them became part of one of these monstrosities if they were determined enough to live on!

I thought about the other thing Delta said and looked at her detailed scan of my [Modify] skill. In her latest scan, Modify looked like a fractal harpoon… a weapon that searched and retrieved information!

I suddenly understood how Modify worked. How it literally helped me to “modify anything”.

It was true that I knew a lot about genetics and chromosomes, but it certainly wasn’t enough to make a proper 100% correct male human. Modify was reaching out into the depths of the Astral Ocean and dragging the necessary bits, echoes of information out of it! It subconsciously gave me the necessary knowledge to make the Y chromosome along with the other parts, probably basing it on some long-dead man who had perished in Skyisle long, long ago.

Holy crap!

I finally looked away from Bessie’s screen. I was so absorbed by learning about the Astral Ocean I didn’t notice how much time had passed. It was time to eat and then nap.

Delta woke up after only a day.

“You are out a lot less than I was when it comes to levelling up,” I noted. “I guess being a homomagicus has its advantages.”

“It does. I’m not made of meats. I'm more like a little spark. As I am 100% made of magic I can change a lot faster, but someone can smother or extinguish me very easily since I’ve got no physical parts.” She nodded. “Now, how did you enjoy my show?”

“I saw it. The deep,” I told her with a shudder. “The Astral Ocean beneath the world. Soul-hunters, phantoms that refuse to be forgotten. Great and terrible magical power and memory of everything imprinted onto the back of the fabric of the world.”

“Now you understand what’s waiting for me out there?” She asked.

“I do.”

Delta reached out to me and I hugged her.

She buried her face onto my shoulder, sniffing into my embrace. She was almost akin to a human girl in that instance, a girl that was profoundly frightened of the nightmarish, impossible things of the deep.

“The call of the deep was just a lure that the Astral Ocean denizens use to catch young souls,” she whispered. “I understand it now. I... had almost fallen for it. Had I fully gone down there, I likely would have never returned. I feel so… stupid.”

“We’ll find a way to fight the Astral-Phantoms,” I assured her. “Will the defense runes of this home protect us? The runes in the field were able to keep the Phantasm-Squid away.”

“Yes. This house is a safe harbor for us. The ancient defense magic will protect us. The people that built this house knew what they were doing,” Delta said. “From what information I had scraped about this building, the Architect of this home - Miller Alan Skyisle was around level 100 and the people who had set up the arcane defense runestones beneath the house thousands of years prior were likely around level 700.”

“Damn!" I swore. “But what’s the reason for this overall level decay? Why is everything here only level twenty now?”

“I do not know,” Delta answered. “I believe that once I level myself up more I might be able to discover the answer.”

“Can you extrapolate the decay speed based on the age and level of the phantoms you’ve seen? Is it getting worse?” I asked. “Will everyone be unable to get past Level 0 someday?”

“From what I already identified the decrease in Level Limit is very gradual and it’s slowing down. If the curve doesn’t shift around, in another 60.24 years everyone won’t be able to Level Up past Level 19.”

“Okay... We have some time to solve this then.” I sighed. “I like Skyisle. I don’t want everyone here to become skill-less in a few thousand years. That would make it exactly like my Earth and while it wasn’t entirely awful… magic does solve a lot of major human-development problems such as pollution and waste.”

“We have plenty of time, indeed. Lets just hope the locals won’t try to oppose us.” She folded and unfolded her arm into sharp, silver blades.

“The Order of Equality?” I asked.

“That’s it. I reviewed your memories of our parents' conversation. It seems that we might have… a big problem with the local church,” Delta noted. “Dad is putting his hopes into the power and authority of Great-Aunt Delta, the almighty Wizard of Oz. Too bad that she’s just an Identify spell and a cluster of bees wearing a suit.”

“Since we can't leave the house due to our Phantom stalker... We’ll just need to convince the representative of this Holy Order that our Great-aunt Delta is a power to be reckoned with.” I assured her.

“Do you have a plan, brother?”

“Not yet… but now that you’re inside the house you can help me scan the wards. If we can figure out how the ward works we can use it to repel any unwanted intruders.” I winked at her.

“I don’t think that repelling an entire Order of humans will solve this long-term issue,” she mulled. “Your stats are wildly off from any other newborn. Even ten-year-old kids in this village are basically LV 0.”

“For long term plans… I’m acquainted with cold war information-warfare.” I added. “Both of us are in fact, judging by how well you’ve fooled our parents by pretending to be a figure of authority. We can try out some good old Soviet psyops war tricks to put a foot in the metaphorical door of anyone trying to take us down. I think that we should work on giving Great-Aunt Delta... a voice of her own.”