Chapter 115: Meditation and Fabrication

Chapter 115: Meditation and Fabrication

My mornings were full of activity and excitement. However, once we settled into a routine, there were fewer things that needed my attention in the afternoons. Beatrice, Mary, Trent, and Tony made a good team and handled most things. They only asked for my input on major decisions, mostly about cleaning or the children. When it came to things like food or settling disputes between the castle occupants, I was also consulted. But those topics rarely came up.

So my afternoons were getting progressively more and more empty. I actually had nothing to do. After completing my digitization of the entire library, I searched for something else productive I could do with my time.

That was how I found myself sitting on my favorite carpet. I was trying out something called meditation. Apparently, it was a practice of sitting and doing nothing. I wasn't sure what that would accomplish, but the author of the book I read was insistent that while it wouldn't help gain levels, it would improve control over skills and other aspects of power. Well, I didn't feel the immediate need for a power-up exactly, but more control would never hurt. It should allow me to do even better with the children.

Apparently, some of the more introductory types of meditation were done by doing a repetitive or inconsequential task until a certain state of mind was achieved. This wasn't something that I had any experience with, so I tried to take some of the suggestions the book had laid out. Sweeping the same section of the floor over and over was clearly not fitting the bill. After a few hours of trying, I lost a little faith in its teachings and just decided to try a different meditation method.

So instead, I rested on my favorite rug and looked inward. The book cautioned against dwelling on memories, so I tried to stay clear of my hardware and instead watched the contents of my dustbin. I watched as all the things I had collected floated around aimlessly. Never moving exactly but not quite staying still.

I was able to get a clearer sense of the contents than I had ever been able to do before. I figured it was an effect of my new Void Manipulation skill. There weren't that many interesting things in there, though. A bunch of undead, the couple of humans that had attacked me on the way back to the castle. A lot of dirt and debris. Some crumbs and spilled milk from breakfast. Much of it didn't have power radiating from it like the alchemical ingredients did. There were some of those as well. When Beatrice replaced containment circles around the nonhuman residents of the castle, I would normally clean up after her.

As I watched, I couldn't help but meddle a little. I began to sort things by all types of categories. I tried to start by putting rocks in one place, but even that was hard. At first, I tried to do it by size, but that was hard to categorize without just sorting the whole collection into a list, and that wasn't an efficient process at all. Eventually, I sorted them by the primary element of the composition, then subcategorized them by secondary and tertiary elements. After that, I sorted the much smaller groupings by size.

It took me a couple hours, but eventually, my dustbin was no longer a swirling jumble of all the things I had picked up throughout my work. Now it was neat and orderly. This new skill was really growing on me.

Tony and Bee eventually shared the game with Mary and Trent in the mornings when they met about running the castle. Not only was it fun, but playing without Void also meant fewer sequences of perfectly sorted cards appeared in their games. Eventually, she started to form an idea of what her opponents were thinking based on their faces and chosen actions. Was this related to what Void was trying to teach her? It was awfully familiar to what her father would talk about on the rare occasions when they ate together.

The game was helping her understand people. When newcomers came and integrated into castle life, she found herself with a better sense of what they were up to and what sort of work they would be suited to. It was slight for now, but it wasn't nothing. If it was preparing for her to run its organization like this, then Void was truly a far-seeing god.

***

Susan was the first newcomer that wanted to leave. Bee wasn't sure how to handle this. They didn't have any rules about this, and there was really nothing that said they should stop her. But even though they had been left in relative peace for the last week or so, she knew that there was still an undead plague running around that would likely eat anyone who left the walls and was not strong enough. Bee was the highest level of the castle's human inhabitants by a large margin, and she would still struggle if she faced too many undead at once.

"How do you plan to travel safely?" Bee asked Susan, honestly curious about her plans.

"Uhhh," Came the uncertain reply. It was weird to think of someone older than her as such a child. But when Bee looked at the eighteen-year-old, she couldn't really think of any other way to describe her. It wasn't that Susan was dumb. Well, not that Bee could tell. She might have been a little slow, but the bigger problem was that she just didn't think things through. She had managed to make it here with two little kids. Both were younger than ten. Apparently, they had no relation to her, and with nothing really holding her here, she had wanted out.

"I figured I could walk to the town past Greg? Maybe that one wouldn't be destroyed?" Susan finished, her voice lilting up at the end like she was asking a question. Bee resisted the urge to run her hand down her face. Deciding to switch tactics, Bee asked a different question.

"Ok, so why do you want to leave?" Bee said. Susan cocked her head slightly, and Bee noticed her eyes tighten. "I won't force you to stay, I'm just trying to see how I can help you."

"Well... I just don't think that I really fit in here. I don't like children or farming. So if I can make it back to a real city I should be able to find my way home in the south I think." Susan said with a small smile.

It wasn't the whole truth. Bee wasn't exactly sure how she knew, but she knew. Something about her body language and the way her answers were phrased. Perhaps Void's training was having more of an effect than she had thought. Susan had done a good job trying to hide it. She had laid interesting traps about who she was and where she had come from. But it seemed like there was something else too.

"Where do you call home then?"