System Programmer - 40 Energy State

‘The omnipresent energy in our world is divided into eight types: the neutral type and the seven elemental types. Those consists of fire, earth, water, air, lightning, light and darkness. Every type of magic in our world is based upon one or multiple of those types of energy. Neutral energy can be used as a placeholder in case a certain type of energy is not available, but its effects are limited. When establishing one’s soul world, you should start by understanding which type of energy suits you the best and build something based on it…’

This is a passage about energy Joshua read in a book. This theory was commonly agreed upon, both old Easa & modern day’s Cestor used it as a base for handling energy and developing their soul world.

And it was completely wrong.

Joshua’s soul had been deemed to have an affinity for lightning. Therefore, most of his world consisted of either lightning or neutral energy. However, over the course of his experiments, Joshua had found a few contradictions regarding this statement. The first one appeared pretty early on when Catherine gave him some of her water energy to help establish his world. He just drank the water and it somehow produced lightning for him. He was pretty ignorant about the matter back then, but in retrospect, it was pretty odd. When he started using runes, it became more apparent. For example, if he had no fire energy inside his world, how did he manage to use the little fire rune? The obvious answer would be: well the rune creates fire energy as long as you put neutral energy in it! However, as Joshua found out, this was a half-truth. Seeing the interior of the rune in action, it was clear what was really going on.

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In reality, there was only one type of energy. To be more precise, a single particle of energy could take on different states, but it was possible for this state to change. Let’s keep the fire rune as an example: when Joshua inserted energy in a neutral state into it, he saw those particles being turned into the fire state. The rune then released the newly made fire energy to create flames.

“Sweetie, I’m going test a few things out. It’s probably best if you leave for now. I don’t want to make your head explode like mine almost did,” he told Catherine.

“Very well, it’s getting pretty late anyway. Unlike you, I need to rest. Just promise me to be careful…. Please, remove that insane grin you have right now,” she replied, smiling.

“Don’t worry. My goal is creation, not destruction. While demolishing stuff is inevitable along the way, I don’t want to make a habit out of it.”

Catherine nodded and vanished, leaving Joshua to freely do what he wanted.

Joshua considered his options for a moment and established a plan. His research toward runes had let to a rather fascinating discovery. There was no way around it, if he wanted to reform his soul world from scratch, he had to get a better understanding of energy particles. Luckily, he had every tool in his possession to do that.

It had become a routine by now, but he once more entered his lab. He didn’t like to go to war on an empty stomach, so he summoned a cup of coffee as well as a box of cookies. He took one with his right hand as he began to operate the computer with his left. A few seconds later, the design of the fire rune was visible on the screen. Since Luna had registered the functioning of every rune, a new option was available, allowing him to see the recording of the rune in action.

It was time to revise his rune library. Back when he developed the physical training rune, he had used basic runes as the lowest level of input. Since more advanced runes were composed of several simple ones, creating complex runes via Luna was relatively easy. He could go a step further now: by dividing the basic runes into their different parts, he had access to more ‘low-level’ functionalities, which meant more simple commands that were closer to the raw data. For example, the fire rune was divided into three parts: absorbing energy, turning it into the fire state, and releasing the energy within to produce a flame. Joshua isolated the different parts and registered them as functions in the system. Next, he edited the rune’s drawing function. The previous version drew the rune in one go, he replaced it to call each part one after another to complete the fire rune. Once done, he tested it out. This is the kind of change programmers love and managers wonder what the point is. The end result is the same, but the method behind it is much more beautiful.

Of course, he had another reason to do this. What if he switched the parts around a bit? He tried a few different combinations, but as he expected, most didn’t work. Similar to a circuit, a rune needed an entry point and an exit, if he put the ‘convert to fire state’ part first nothing happened. The only success consisted of linking the ‘absorb energy’ and the ‘release energy’ part. As one might expect, however, this wasn’t very useful since it just absorbed energy on one side and released it on the other. Still, it wasn’t a complete waste, Joshua could probably use this to develop a more efficient form of energy circuits with a bit of time. For the time being, it wouldn’t help him out much, so he moved on to the next rune.

He decided to stick to basic runes for now and took out the basic lightning rune. After breaking it apart, he ended with three parts, just like the fire rune: ‘Absorb’, ‘Turn to lightning state’ and ‘Release’. Two of those were exactly the same as the fire rune, which didn’t surprise him. Joshua then rapidly took a look at the other basic elementary runes. As he expected, the only different part was the middle one, turning the energy into a particular state. He took a bite out of a cookie and smiled. This whole system was perfectly logical and he started to think about plausible applications.

A few hours later, he finished updating the rune library. Every rune was now programmed to be built using it’s lowest known components. Proud of himself, he wondered what the others were doing but then realized it was the middle of the night. Nevermind then, he would just continue his research. He looked at the ice Catherine had filled the cracks of his world with, fixing those shouldn’t be too hard.

Thanks to the basic elementary runes, he now had seven energy state transformers. Each one took neutral energy and turned it into a specific element. However, he had no rune that turned energy back to its neutral state. Joshua scratched his head for a moment and decided to make one, it was the biggest short term gain he could think of. Developing such a transformer wasn’t too difficult: he started by taking the ‘neutral to fire’ one and made some modifications to it to inverse the process. It took him a few tries but he soon ended up with a ‘fire to neutral’ transformer. Happy with the result, he proceeded to make one for every type of element. Next, he moved on to the aborb function. Normally, the energy inserted into a rune was of the neutral kind. With a few tweaks, he created a version for each state as well.

Once that was done, it was time to fix his world. When he first arrived in this world, Catherine had performed a test and determined he had an affinity for lightning energy. While he now knew that wasn’t entirely correct, he could still assume a soul had better compatibility for a certain state of energy. At least he hoped so, he didn’t want his world to explode a second time. He was starting to get a better idea of what had happened to him. When he understood the state of an energy particle could change, part of his world accidentally turned from lightning into something else. It was only when Catherine froze the cracks that it calmed down. Therefore, to repair his world, he could theoretically use the ice Catherine had provided him and turn it lightning state to reform the broken parts. For that, he designed a new 4-part rune: ‘Absorb Water’ -> ‘Turn Water to Neutral’ -> ‘Turn Neutral to Lightning’ -> ‘Release’.

He approached the first ice block and activated the new rune on it. A pleased expression appeared in his eyes as the ice was slowly absorbed by the rune and ejected as lightning on the other side, which he immediately molded to reform the missing pieces of his world. To his delight, the process completed without any complication. Good! He could easily fix his world now. He ran over to the next block but as he was about to activate the rune again, an idea passed through his mind.

‘Can I do even better?’ he thought.

He rushed back to his lab began to create another rune. His idea was simple: he was wondering if he could create a part that would turn water directly into lightning, that way he would only need a three-part rune to complete the conversion process instead of four! This may sound silly but Joshua was a programmer to the core. He wanted his creation to be optimized as much as possible.

To create the new component, he took the existing one as a base, except he replaced the part where water was turned into a neutral state by lightning parts. It wasn’t too difficult and took him about 20 minutes to complete. This was something new, so he was very careful with it and tested it out in his lab before attacking the big ice blocks. He turned some energy into the water state and filled it all in a water bottle. Next, he carefully had the new rune absorb the water; hoping lightning would come out of it. However, things didn’t go as planned. Instead of lightning particles, water drops exited the rune and were floating around the area. Furthermore, the water drops were all emanating small electricity sparks. He carefully grabbed one particle and examined its state. His eyes went wide as the particle was simultaneously both in the lightning and water state.