Chapter 19: Puzzles

Trint began with a comforting slip of his concentration into his Spiritual view.He felt a warm embrace encouraging him to stay here. He took time to examine and map out what he was seeing. He had done this before but not to this extent or with the entirety of his focus.He found he could move his Spirit body independent of his physical body.

As his body was sitting in a cave of sorts, eyes closed and breath slowing, his spiritual eyes were opening and adjusting to the sight of his Spirit.He began poking and prodding the circuits as he thought of them.They were like electrical lines running jaggedly through his spirit.He focused on one area in his hand, and his vision zoomed in.He saw that, like blood vessels or roots, the circuits branched off into smaller and smaller channels.But along the connections that branched, there were nodes.Similar to junctions, they often forked in multiple directions.He took his focus back to his chest.The area around the center of his chest, not over his physical heart but the exact center under his sternum, is where he found the core.It was the brightest and most concentrated place of Spirit in his body.

As he touched his Spirit core, as he decided to call it, a part of it glommed onto his finger. Like a bunch of microscopic bugs that scurried in the dark, they left the core and formed a chain to his finger.They glowed brighter when they were concentrated. As he pulled his finger further away from his core, the short connected line started a new circuit.It was like a magnetic rope, clicking in to place where other unseen magnets snapped into place.

He tried to return the circuit and power back to his core. It stayed connected to his finger and the connections it had already made. He tried willing it to stop, and it refused to release. Next, he tried touching other places on the grid of circuitry. As he placed his charged finger upon the circuit in his left bicep, the circuit snapped into place. Now the newly formed circuit lit up like the rest of the grid.

He pulled his finger back a couple of inches, and a new circuit branched from the spot he touched to the end of his finger.He felt like a child playing connect the dots.But he also knew that this could be important.So he started to think before he joined things randomly.An image came to mind.It was like he was sketching on a napkin stacking three-dimensional shapes and forming a wire grid inside the body.It wasn’t something he’d seen before.But in his mind, the circuits became an interconnected map of his Spirit system.

He took the new circuit from his last node on this biceps and started to create his mentally drafted design. He drew a line from the second connection, a spot on his core.The circuitry expanded like his finger was printing out more circuits. When they connected to the core, the new line lit up extremely bright as if more water had flooded a formerly dry river.

“Wow, that felt good,” Trint said, speaking out loud for the first time in a while. ‘I should probably be quiet, but seriously that was weird, and I felt I should do that again. I have to see how long this can go. I’ll start with the outline or grid and see if it works better than the current layout.’ Trint thought.

For what felt like a couple of hours of constant focus, Trint connected more circuits in his Spirit.After completing the original plan for the connection, he was surprised when there was a significant flood in the entire circuit system—starting from the core to every connected spot, like a pulse radiating out from the center.Trint felt like he was being shocked electrically, but the currents of electricity were more like the high of a drug. Similar to when he received Exp towards leveling.

‘If a little works, then a lot must be better. Right?’ Trint thought to himself.He was almost euphoric from his recent success and the system reinforcement.Since that worked so well, he wondered what else he could do. He’d already been at this for a while.He didn’t feel hungry, and Pneuma said time worked differently when he was in spiritual mediation and focus.He began studying the flow of the circuits again.Now that all the connections were made, he had a new matrix looking like his spirit was an internal scaffolding made of circuits.He had done what he felt was right, and the results seemed to be encouraged by the system of pleasure and the increasing power he felt.

After a few more hours of examination, he felt he saw some patterns in the chaos. Not just random connections. He could zoom in and view the connections and circuits closely, so he decided to try to zoom out. His view went from the point of view originating from his eyes to that of a third person, out-of-body view. He was looking at his spirit body from behind and slightly above. It was surprisingly not disorienting, but it revealed some things he’d missed.

His brain and head were not as densely connected as the rest of his body.So he went to work there.Again after a significant number of connections were made, he received more feedback, and energy currents flooded him.He continued viewing the internal structure of connections.From a view about 15 feet from his form, he saw that the circuits were lined up in a way that formed repeating shapes.His vision had been of cubes and triangles, but he saw many more hexagons and a few pentagons.And those were highlighted with stronger currents flowing through them, as evidenced by the glow and pulse of energy that passed through. A blue character or rune was barely visible when viewed from afar and focusing on the shape.”

‘Are those significant?’ He continued to explore and consider it.He tried to zoom even further back.When he got to about 50 feet, the glow and circuits blurred his vision of any detail.He tried to focus on the detail while being so far away and willed the glow not to wash out his view.After some concentration, he could see through the light and focus on the details within more clearly.He saw more characters on highlighted shapes.He started moving around in a circle from his form.

Trint allowed his spirit vision to relax.For the first time, he looked around, away from focusing on his spiritual body.He had previously noticed the internal glow was radiated out from him, and the white space he seemed to be in was saturated with the same luminance.He had assumed this was like an empty sterile space. Now looking around, he saw a grid around him. Around a hundred feet in every direction around him, there was a grid; made up of interconnected honeycombs or hexagons. The grid also surrounded him in an approximation of a sphere.The lines or circuits of the grid were thin like spider webs but precise, and all were lightly glowing.After he allowed his view to focus and move toward one of the honeycombs, he saw a very faint blue character in the center of each hexagon.He turned back and forth from the hexagon to view his spirit body. He started looking for the character from the outer honeycombs in his view of his body.

After a lot of searching, zooming in and out, he saw that some matched. The internal shape in his body had counterparts on the outside grid. But they didn’t seem to be in a precise order. He had to decide if each shape should have a specific connection or if it was arbitrary.

Something began to resonate subconsciously for Trint. Not like anything he’d felt before. He could sense something but didn’t understand it. It almost felt like something was hinting toward the next step for him. His new intuition grew in intensity. It was like being able to smell the color seven suddenly. It made no logical sense, but he was deciphering something he felt he knew on a deep level but couldn’t mentally understand.

He started mapping out the characters and making a mental diagram of all the connections.One hundred ten hexagons and 12 pentagons formed an approximation of a sphere.He realized that the pentagons’ five sides each had a hexagon.Those hexagons touching a pentagon didn’t contain any characters.They felt empty. Like a void was drawing everything in. So twelve sets. One for each pentagon.He counted 12 pentagons with five sides each.So 60 of the hexagons were in 12 groups of 5.If Trint had taken more advanced math, he might have recognized the approximation of a sphere as a chamfered truncated icosahedron.

Once he saw that pattern repeated consistently, he moved on to find any others.There were only another 50 hexagons.They each had unique characters, and none repeated.After a lot of mapping and consideration, he decided to attempt connecting the characters on the sphere outside to some nodes and intersections on the inside of his Spirit body. He repeated the process he had done before.Becoming engrossed in this next step, he lost all awareness of time.