Having a plan come together was deeply satisfying. It wasn’t just the satisfaction of solving a problem, there was a sense of achievement that went deeper. I was changing things in the world, I was altering the course of history, if only in a fairly minor sense, and knowing that made me proud. Now, I only needed to make sure that the alteration I was performing improved the course of history, not made it worse.

The people here needed the wake-up call, or they would hit a wall and hit that wall hard. Likely hard enough to shatter their group and kill most, if not all, of them once winter hit. Unless they started to draconically ration their supplies, watching some of their people starve while hoarding enough to keep a few of them alive, they would run out as things were right now. At that point, their only chance of survival was based on fortuitous fate, that some other group just happened to stumble across them with enough supplies to keep them going. The chances of that were minuscule at best, to the point that I was almost willing to call it impossible. I had heard it said that sometimes, people needed to be cruel in order to be kind. Hopefully, this was one such time, as I didn’t want to harm the people who had hosted us for almost a month, even if we had only used our own supplies and the magic Luna and I had woven over their fields made up for what little we took.

Finding the right Shattered for my plan had been a stroke of luck. The thing was just above level fifty, one of the most powerful of them all, and fairly isolated near the outskirts of town. Not in an area with a lot of Undead, giving me more than enough time and privacy to slowly layer the command program I had come up with into its mind until I was finally done.

The program itself was a thing of beauty, incredibly complex with multiple stages that were supposed to follow one after the other, once certain conditions were met. Testing the individual parts had been a massive pain, but a necessary one, hoping that a highly complex program such as this worked without extensive testing was foolish, let alone trust it to work perfectly as planned. To make sure things went within the necessary parameters, I added multiple checks that would only allow the program to continue if they were met.

As contraditionary as it sounded, I had taken great care to make sure the assault on the locals I had kicked off wouldn’t harm them. Only wake them up and force them to take charge of their own fate. Painful, maybe, but ultimately not harmful, or so I hoped.

Watching the program start was interesting in and of itself. It was strange to watch the Shattered move with a sense of purpose it normally lacked and even stranger to know that I had given it that purpose. Normally, these creatures were simple, locked in fairly straight-forward operations with only minimal deviation until disturbed in their routine. But now, with me adding commands into their minds, or maybe calling it a processor or programming would be more apt, they regained something beyond that simplemindedness. Once again, I began to wonder if there was a way to rebuild them. If the memories of who they used to be were contained somewhere within their bodies, stored in their brains in some inactive fashion, would it be possible to use those memories as the core for a program, one much more complex than what I had cludged together?

Or would it be possible to at least get to the point where I could create a program that would make them into permanently beneficial creatures, helping humanity in some strange, domesticated way? A part of me shuddered at the mere thought, images of Shattered pulling plows or picking cotton were far too visceral to be considered palatable, but the idea was there, somewhere in my mind. It felt wrong, but at the same time, the possibilities were endlessly fascinating. It made me wonder what was a mind, where was the boundary between the purely physical mind, what was stored in the skull and spine of a person, and the emergent property of it, the spiritual component. To say nothing of the soul, as that was yet another part of the conglomerate that made a person into who they were.

It was a difficult question but also one I needed to solve. What made a person into who they were? It couldn’t be purely physical, or my whole quest to revive Sigmir would be impossible, something I wasn’t willing to consider but also something that wasn’t indicated by what I knew at this point. No, there had to be a way to bring Sigmir, my Sigmir, back to me, even without having her body, and thus the physical parts of who she used to be, available. This meant, logically, that there were non-physical parts that could be regained in some way, something that should be possible for the Shattered, too. And yet, I was uncertain whether there was a way to bring these people back. Maybe there was, but I doubted I’d find it before things were too far gone. I couldn’t let myself get dragged into speculation about possibilities, what might be was only important if you worked to get to the point where the possibility became reality. As I was doing for Sigmir, if others wanted to get to the point where they could bring their loved ones back, more power to them, at least once I had the power I needed.

And I was well on my way to gain that power. Creating the program for the Shattered had been a fascinating experience in and of itself, giving me quite a few insights about those mysteries about the mind, though I doubted I reached any truly deep secrets just yet. I was getting closer and studying how the program played out was a step on that path, which is why I sneakily watched my chosen Shattered, just as I had observed the countless tests I had performed to get to this point.

To see how the different conditions activated, to keep count of the Undead it brought under its control in a fashion I still didn’t fully understand, I learned a lot even if I didn’t gain a single skill point by observing. Maybe if I started to use my observation but for now, as I remained passive, I didn’t get anything.

Well, nothing but a lot of ideas. Some of which I even started putting into practise, especially one I hadn’t really considered yet. I had always thought of Concealment as something I did to myself, I made myself harder to see, prevented scents and sounds from escaping my vicinity and so on. It was always based on my own location and the physical world around me.

The idea, as I had been studying a Shattered moving according to my program, was to take the fight to the enemy, so to speak. If I could prevent an enemy from noticing what little evidence of my presence remained in the physical world, thanks to my current concealment, I would be even harder to find. I remembered the idea of the SEP Field in the old Hitchhiker novel, or the Notice-me-not in that wizard series, if I could make either of them into a reality, even if only targeted at distinct targets, it would be quite interesting.

I did a few experiments with the idea, though a modified version of it. When I noticed that there were a few Shattered near the programmed Shattered, I decided to experiment on them and gave them each a command to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, or in this case, the Shattered prowling through their area. I had no idea if they would have paid attention, their behaviour in groups remained somewhat unpredictable to me, but from what I could observe, they didn’t even notice my Shattered.

It gave me some extra breathing room, allowing me to push the locals into extra training as the challenge I had organised for them started to move towards them. Luna helped a great deal with that, even if she didn’t know why I was pushing her to help the locals with some extra magic lessons and some minor blessings from Hecate to help them understand. She didn’t ask and I didn’t tell, just like Lia didn’t ask why I was having her go over the lessons she had given the locals again, or why I was explaining to them the best ways to set up guard posts, how to patrol and make sure nobody snuck up on your camp. Again. They were learning, but I could feel that they didn’t take things as seriously as they should.

That is, until one of the patrols I had convinced them to make came back with results. Suddenly, everyone was a lot more… motivated. Or maybe agitated. Or both.