Chapter 52
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Late at night, Kyon crawled out of the bushes, stretched himself till his bones cracked, flexed his neck muscles and, first thing first, stumbled to the water spring to drink and get washed: he'd been dreaming about water in recent days and, given the latest events, in his nightmares. That time he huffed and puffed around the gap in the fence for about 10 minutes to make sure that if the lady emerged from the water, she'd be exclusively dead.
Now he was in almost perfect health: the new teeth have been grown, the bones are have healed, all internal injuries have been cured, he could be sent to war if the need arose.
Kyon had smartened himself more or less up and slipped into the bushes, closest to the mansion. It never hurts to observe and explore. Although Anna, Dina, and, even more so, Juno were still sleeping, he couldn't be too careful.
And indeed... When he saw a beefy guard stroll through the mansion, his happiness knew no bounds. If he'd been inside, they would have easily found him. And not seeing or hearing him, not at all... As far as he knew, the guard wasn't just taking a walk around the house, he was also scanning the area with pure force but, in his case, one shaggy and too tenacious slave could be noticed even through the wall!
{Yeah, caution is everything…} - the young scout thought with a sigh of relief.
Kyon spent the whole night in an ambush, watching the house. He found out that one of the guards quickly covered the entire perimeter every two hours, including the second floor, and returned to his post. Fortunately, the park wasn't involved.
The next night, Kyon updated his information with an accurate schedule of the rounds: the guard took on the inspection strictly on schedule, therefore, during the breaks, he could walk about wherever he wanted so he jumped at that opportunity.
Alright, outing number two, day number three, to be more precise, night number three. Kyon knew the mansion more or less well from the previous scouting, so he wasn't interested in the most part of it. But the rest he could and had to explore.
And again he was inside. First thing, the guy got into the bathroom and snatched a hairpin: it might always come in handy. By the measured breathing, he identified the room downstairs where the maids were sleeping. He decided to go upstairs and found there a series of doors, which could be opened only with the formation, behind some of them, he could also hear sniffing. One belonged to Marina: the young mistress lashed out in allocating a separate room for her new friend; while the other came from the nose of the little demoness.
While he was hanging around the doors to the women's bedrooms, wondering where to go further, he heard quiet steps downstairs. That time, the heart did a double somersault right into his stomach: the guard, for some reason, did not leave in two hours, but just in an hour! That's a fine kettle of fish: Kyon was sure that this time he would not be able to slip away unnoticed, scanning is a powerful thing, after all!
However, while his mind rushed around the skull box in panic and search for a way out, his keen hearing caught the sound of opening the toilet door. Kyon could hardly keep from moaning with relief: it was just a maid, who went out to do some "night" errands! His heart reluctantly returned to its rightful place but strictly warned him: another stress like that and it refused to work under such nervous conditions.
Kyon lurked: it was still too early to relax. Only when the bedroom door slammed behind the maid, he decided to step out of the shadows.
And the next moment he felt an indistinct soft poke in the back. His heart cursed and demanded resignation but when Kyon turned around and met face to face Lady Juno it stopped altogether.
Kyon's eyes hazed over. He felt a sense of futility growing inside... He'd just swapped one hell for another. Death herself had found him, there she was a little one, swinging and squinting blindly. Synergy immediately clicked him on the nose, forcing to belay the farewell to his life and use his brains: the girl was sleepy! Apparently, she'd just woken up at the call of nature and probably couldn't make head or tail of it, still half asleep!
Juno once again poked her nose, that time in his chest, where his heart wasn't beating anymore and had, apparently, brazenly left for the unconscious, she touchingly pawed her fists through her sleepy eyes, opened her eyelids, looked at the slave, rubbed her eyes again and when she looked again into the darkness before herself, the guy was gone. Puzzled, she shook her head and went downstairs to the restroom.
Kyon, in a split second, glided like a shadow into the nearest corner unlit by the moon, with a sinking heart counted the steps: a step, a step, a step... When, by his count, the girl was in the right room, he jumped out of the mansion balls to the wall and literally dived into the saving thickets of bushes. – {Did that really work!?}
Juno, emerging as a sleepy little bird from the toilet, froze for a moment in a stupor: what did she just see?! she flew upstairs, enraged like a fury, glancing around... {What nonsense... Am I imagining things.} - She agreed on that and carelessly returned to her room.
That's how the guy survived due to the impossibility of his existence.
Meeting with sleepy Miss Juno had notably messed up with his nerves. The dear little angel was for him a messenger of death and, at the same time, an object of his revenge but that time everything worked out alright. The guy, glancing around, whispered to the heavens a sincere "thank you", just in case there really was someone there.
The next night Kyon was very cautious. A miner only gets to make one mistake, after all... He was already lucky enough not to "blow up", he shouldn't meddle with fate anymore. Ideally, he should have stayed away from that damned (literally) mansion, but his only hope for salvation was there so he had no choice but to try and find at least something useful. Where do normal people keep everything useful? That's right, in a dusty storeroom.
The lock was simple, uncomplicated. All he needed was a couple of seconds and a bent hairpin, and the door opened with a quiet creak. Following his voice of reason and mild paranoia, Kyon carefully locked it up from the other side and only then looked around.
Inside, not unexpected, there was a working inventory - mops, rags, all sorts of useless tools... And a huge dusty (like everything there, anyway... what an irony, no one cleans up the storeroom of cleaners!) bookcase filled with little books of instructions for servants. Kyon, hungry for literature, eagerly attacked his prey and "swallowed" a good half of the books in just half an hour. He reached for another tome and... He was about to swear out loud: it happened to be a typical "switch", an opener!
A bookcase slid to the side with a quiet screech, opening the descent to some deep basement.
{A secret passage!} - Kyon quietly exclaimed, trying to believe his own eyes. He made sure that there was no activity outside and, gathering all his courage, went down the steps. There must be something valuable, that's for sure, they would not hide a usual room behind h the whole system, right?
The descent did not take too long: some ten meters down and Kyon could see rows of bookshelves lit by dusty crystals. There was no treasure, no money, no a "secret laboratory", a sheer disappointment for all sorts of plunderers and marauders. But definitely not for Kyon: {Books!}
With a frenzy, he ran through the section titles: history, alchemy, herbalism, commerce, enchantment, formacy, reference books, fiction, and so on, and so forth...
The guy was delighted. He grabbed the first available book on alchemy, flipped through it with pleasure, memorizing each line. Truth to be told, he did not find any particularly valuable or secret recipes there but, in fact, he never expected to find this much. The library, in principle, was not a family heritage. There were no cloudy stones with formations, no techniques or miracle recipes, only publicly available information, laws, patterns, concepts, principles, and canons. Also, detailed descriptions of herbs, animals, stones, metals, etc.
It was rather unusual to hide a dusty storehouse of books behind a bookshelf. Who could come up with that? Maybe, it was just a whim? Or did the owner of the mansion want to set a trap for his children? Like in forbidden (hidden) fruit is sweet.
Given his informational hunger and the absence of any other means of learning about the world, he had no reason to complain. He could at least learn some general concepts so that he didn't make a complete fool of himself if anything popped up. Kyon was staring greedily at the shelves marked "History"... {No... It definitely won't help me right now.}
His eyes lingered on the section of formacy. It was what Martin and Flitz did, what was valued in that world almost above all else. He got interested in this science when he was still in the mine because much interesting could be found among formations: a searching formation, a family formation, a passport formation, a subordinate formation, formations in cloudy stones, a sound transmitter formation and that's only what he'd come across personally, in general, it was an interesting and, most importantly, widely practiced science!
Once again he cast a longing look at the piles of other books, he'd made up his mind and nodded to his own thoughts: another day, it had to wait. He opened the first manuscript and plunged headlong into the world of formations.
The eyes of the young man were burning with interest and a thirst for knowledge. He took one book after another, studied it, memorized, pondered over, juxtaposed the information, looked past any falsehood or inaccuracy, figured out what still could be thought of... His head worked at 120%, Synergy was not idle, either. It obligingly warned the guy that the dawn was close; unfortunately, the reading session was over for the time being. With a sigh, Kyon put the opus aside ("The searching formation and the ways it should NOT be used" that one was impossible to put down!) And then he went upstairs. He had to tinker with "handle-opener" on the backside of the bookcase, he was lucky to find the necessary inconspicuous book pretty quick. The guy quietly left the mansion and went to have some rest in the bushes that became so dear to him.
During the next three days, he made nightly raids into the hidden basement library.
The science of formations turned out to be kind of the foundation of modern humanity and not only that. Slaves, servants, workers, family members, investigators, sect members, citizens! All of them have a formation where their rank in the hierarchy is displayed, their position, specialty, affiliation, age, sometimes location, the status of being alive / killed / poisoned / ill, their stage of development, sometimes even shopping in stores! Certain functions, such as being alive / dead, and location require a place to receive the information that will receive a signal created by a spatial attribute. There was an information center in the mine. Martin, for example, connected Kyon's formation to a mercury mirror. And as an option, it could be another person, a group of people of a certain status, position, etc. Each respected family must have a center that receives information about all family members. There they one can find out who is where, who's been killed, poisoned, who's raised the stage of development, everything in order to have a maximum of control.
The formation is essentially a passport with embedded information about a person.
Formations come in functions, for example, for analyzing air temperature, humidity, pressure, they can record sound, a visual image: kind of a bug, a camcorder, and a camera. That is why the framed photo in the Flitz office was so strange, it was created by a visual formation.
Formations can be defensive and attacking but these require some resources to create. Usually, it's money, sometimes key-spheres, some assets, sometimes something else.
Formations differ in quality. They are conditionally divided into "E", "D", "C", "B", "A", "S" ranks, where "S" is a brilliant piece of genius work done by a high-grade formacist. The higher is the rank of the formation, the more compact, uncomplicated, effective and clear it is. It wasn't the first time Kyon had heard about the rank system. It was used everywhere. If people were ranked by numbers: 1st rank, 2nd, 3rd and so on, then everything that was not connected with people was ranked by letters: "E", "D", "C", "B", "A", "S".
When applying a formation, a slot is created: the void inside of which the formation is placed. Its essence is not only in the content but also in protecting / hiding it from the spiritual feeling of others.
The very core of the formation gets often connected with something (info-center, an object, a person...), therefore it's often necessary to have a spatial attribute - to give an order at the distance, to find a person by a searching formation, to transmit sound information, etc. But the body of the formation itself mainly consists of pure force, the most basic element on the planet.
Formations can also be created without a spatial attribute, for example, it's possible to create a subordinate formation that responds to a specific voice and not to the superior formation, just as Flitz did with Kyon.
The guy happily noticed that the method of creating any formation closely resembled the method of writing the program code, and he used to be quite a computer whiz in his own world. Creating lines of code, endless optimization, setting any properties of the formation you need... He was again in his element.
With his programming skills, he could set absolutely any properties! The knowledge he got from the books had entirely revealed the essence of that bizarre magic. He needed to practice on someone, there was no other way. He'd love to experiment on Juno, but no luck yet...
Formations are a kind of bridge to the energy of the world. They assign to it certain properties, nature, and behavior, that's why the world, or rather the energy, gets to work according to your rules, according to the rules of the formation.
Kyon was right when he suggested that the local energy should have internal memory.
He was frustrated only by the fact that the more developed the patient was сompared to the formacist, the more energy the applied formation should contain. However, it pleased him to know that the more it was optimized, the more energy was needed for each code line, which means, the chance of success was increased. Optimization was his path.
A brilliant thought occurred to him, he should invent his own unique formation and not just to gain a skill or an illusional advantage in something but specifically for the sake of revenge on Lady Juno. The guy rubbed his hands in anticipation of his insidious plan. He was trembling with excitement, the fate itself had brought him to that library, no doubt! {Alright, you nasty girl, just you wait!}
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Late at night, Kyon crawled out of the bushes, stretched himself till his bones cracked, flexed his neck muscles and, first thing first, stumbled to the water spring to drink and get washed: he'd been dreaming about water in recent days and, given the latest events, in his nightmares. That time he huffed and puffed around the gap in the fence for about 10 minutes to make sure that if the lady emerged from the water, she'd be exclusively dead.
Now he was in almost perfect health: the new teeth have been grown, the bones are have healed, all internal injuries have been cured, he could be sent to war if the need arose.
Kyon had smartened himself more or less up and slipped into the bushes, closest to the mansion. It never hurts to observe and explore. Although Anna, Dina, and, even more so, Juno were still sleeping, he couldn't be too careful.
And indeed... When he saw a beefy guard stroll through the mansion, his happiness knew no bounds. If he'd been inside, they would have easily found him. And not seeing or hearing him, not at all... As far as he knew, the guard wasn't just taking a walk around the house, he was also scanning the area with pure force but, in his case, one shaggy and too tenacious slave could be noticed even through the wall!
{Yeah, caution is everything…} - the young scout thought with a sigh of relief.
Kyon spent the whole night in an ambush, watching the house. He found out that one of the guards quickly covered the entire perimeter every two hours, including the second floor, and returned to his post. Fortunately, the park wasn't involved.
The next night, Kyon updated his information with an accurate schedule of the rounds: the guard took on the inspection strictly on schedule, therefore, during the breaks, he could walk about wherever he wanted so he jumped at that opportunity.
Alright, outing number two, day number three, to be more precise, night number three. Kyon knew the mansion more or less well from the previous scouting, so he wasn't interested in the most part of it. But the rest he could and had to explore.
And again he was inside. First thing, the guy got into the bathroom and snatched a hairpin: it might always come in handy. By the measured breathing, he identified the room downstairs where the maids were sleeping. He decided to go upstairs and found there a series of doors, which could be opened only with the formation, behind some of them, he could also hear sniffing. One belonged to Marina: the young mistress lashed out in allocating a separate room for her new friend; while the other came from the nose of the little demoness.
While he was hanging around the doors to the women's bedrooms, wondering where to go further, he heard quiet steps downstairs. That time, the heart did a double somersault right into his stomach: the guard, for some reason, did not leave in two hours, but just in an hour! That's a fine kettle of fish: Kyon was sure that this time he would not be able to slip away unnoticed, scanning is a powerful thing, after all!
However, while his mind rushed around the skull box in panic and search for a way out, his keen hearing caught the sound of opening the toilet door. Kyon could hardly keep from moaning with relief: it was just a maid, who went out to do some "night" errands! His heart reluctantly returned to its rightful place but strictly warned him: another stress like that and it refused to work under such nervous conditions.
Kyon lurked: it was still too early to relax. Only when the bedroom door slammed behind the maid, he decided to step out of the shadows.
And the next moment he felt an indistinct soft poke in the back. His heart cursed and demanded resignation but when Kyon turned around and met face to face Lady Juno it stopped altogether.
Kyon's eyes hazed over. He felt a sense of futility growing inside... He'd just swapped one hell for another. Death herself had found him, there she was a little one, swinging and squinting blindly. Synergy immediately clicked him on the nose, forcing to belay the farewell to his life and use his brains: the girl was sleepy! Apparently, she'd just woken up at the call of nature and probably couldn't make head or tail of it, still half asleep!
Juno once again poked her nose, that time in his chest, where his heart wasn't beating anymore and had, apparently, brazenly left for the unconscious, she touchingly pawed her fists through her sleepy eyes, opened her eyelids, looked at the slave, rubbed her eyes again and when she looked again into the darkness before herself, the guy was gone. Puzzled, she shook her head and went downstairs to the restroom.
Kyon, in a split second, glided like a shadow into the nearest corner unlit by the moon, with a sinking heart counted the steps: a step, a step, a step... When, by his count, the girl was in the right room, he jumped out of the mansion balls to the wall and literally dived into the saving thickets of bushes. – {Did that really work!?}
Juno, emerging as a sleepy little bird from the toilet, froze for a moment in a stupor: what did she just see?! she flew upstairs, enraged like a fury, glancing around... {What nonsense... Am I imagining things.} - She agreed on that and carelessly returned to her room.
That's how the guy survived due to the impossibility of his existence.
Meeting with sleepy Miss Juno had notably messed up with his nerves. The dear little angel was for him a messenger of death and, at the same time, an object of his revenge but that time everything worked out alright. The guy, glancing around, whispered to the heavens a sincere "thank you", just in case there really was someone there.
The next night Kyon was very cautious. A miner only gets to make one mistake, after all... He was already lucky enough not to "blow up", he shouldn't meddle with fate anymore. Ideally, he should have stayed away from that damned (literally) mansion, but his only hope for salvation was there so he had no choice but to try and find at least something useful. Where do normal people keep everything useful? That's right, in a dusty storeroom.
The lock was simple, uncomplicated. All he needed was a couple of seconds and a bent hairpin, and the door opened with a quiet creak. Following his voice of reason and mild paranoia, Kyon carefully locked it up from the other side and only then looked around.
Inside, not unexpected, there was a working inventory - mops, rags, all sorts of useless tools... And a huge dusty (like everything there, anyway... what an irony, no one cleans up the storeroom of cleaners!) bookcase filled with little books of instructions for servants. Kyon, hungry for literature, eagerly attacked his prey and "swallowed" a good half of the books in just half an hour. He reached for another tome and... He was about to swear out loud: it happened to be a typical "switch", an opener!
A bookcase slid to the side with a quiet screech, opening the descent to some deep basement.
{A secret passage!} - Kyon quietly exclaimed, trying to believe his own eyes. He made sure that there was no activity outside and, gathering all his courage, went down the steps. There must be something valuable, that's for sure, they would not hide a usual room behind h the whole system, right?
The descent did not take too long: some ten meters down and Kyon could see rows of bookshelves lit by dusty crystals. There was no treasure, no money, no a "secret laboratory", a sheer disappointment for all sorts of plunderers and marauders. But definitely not for Kyon: {Books!}
With a frenzy, he ran through the section titles: history, alchemy, herbalism, commerce, enchantment, formacy, reference books, fiction, and so on, and so forth...
The guy was delighted. He grabbed the first available book on alchemy, flipped through it with pleasure, memorizing each line. Truth to be told, he did not find any particularly valuable or secret recipes there but, in fact, he never expected to find this much. The library, in principle, was not a family heritage. There were no cloudy stones with formations, no techniques or miracle recipes, only publicly available information, laws, patterns, concepts, principles, and canons. Also, detailed descriptions of herbs, animals, stones, metals, etc.
It was rather unusual to hide a dusty storehouse of books behind a bookshelf. Who could come up with that? Maybe, it was just a whim? Or did the owner of the mansion want to set a trap for his children? Like in forbidden (hidden) fruit is sweet.
Given his informational hunger and the absence of any other means of learning about the world, he had no reason to complain. He could at least learn some general concepts so that he didn't make a complete fool of himself if anything popped up. Kyon was staring greedily at the shelves marked "History"... {No... It definitely won't help me right now.}
His eyes lingered on the section of formacy. It was what Martin and Flitz did, what was valued in that world almost above all else. He got interested in this science when he was still in the mine because much interesting could be found among formations: a searching formation, a family formation, a passport formation, a subordinate formation, formations in cloudy stones, a sound transmitter formation and that's only what he'd come across personally, in general, it was an interesting and, most importantly, widely practiced science!
Once again he cast a longing look at the piles of other books, he'd made up his mind and nodded to his own thoughts: another day, it had to wait. He opened the first manuscript and plunged headlong into the world of formations.
The eyes of the young man were burning with interest and a thirst for knowledge. He took one book after another, studied it, memorized, pondered over, juxtaposed the information, looked past any falsehood or inaccuracy, figured out what still could be thought of... His head worked at 120%, Synergy was not idle, either. It obligingly warned the guy that the dawn was close; unfortunately, the reading session was over for the time being. With a sigh, Kyon put the opus aside ("The searching formation and the ways it should NOT be used" that one was impossible to put down!) And then he went upstairs. He had to tinker with "handle-opener" on the backside of the bookcase, he was lucky to find the necessary inconspicuous book pretty quick. The guy quietly left the mansion and went to have some rest in the bushes that became so dear to him.
During the next three days, he made nightly raids into the hidden basement library.
The science of formations turned out to be kind of the foundation of modern humanity and not only that. Slaves, servants, workers, family members, investigators, sect members, citizens! All of them have a formation where their rank in the hierarchy is displayed, their position, specialty, affiliation, age, sometimes location, the status of being alive / killed / poisoned / ill, their stage of development, sometimes even shopping in stores! Certain functions, such as being alive / dead, and location require a place to receive the information that will receive a signal created by a spatial attribute. There was an information center in the mine. Martin, for example, connected Kyon's formation to a mercury mirror. And as an option, it could be another person, a group of people of a certain status, position, etc. Each respected family must have a center that receives information about all family members. There they one can find out who is where, who's been killed, poisoned, who's raised the stage of development, everything in order to have a maximum of control.
The formation is essentially a passport with embedded information about a person.
Formations come in functions, for example, for analyzing air temperature, humidity, pressure, they can record sound, a visual image: kind of a bug, a camcorder, and a camera. That is why the framed photo in the Flitz office was so strange, it was created by a visual formation.
Formations can be defensive and attacking but these require some resources to create. Usually, it's money, sometimes key-spheres, some assets, sometimes something else.
Formations differ in quality. They are conditionally divided into "E", "D", "C", "B", "A", "S" ranks, where "S" is a brilliant piece of genius work done by a high-grade formacist. The higher is the rank of the formation, the more compact, uncomplicated, effective and clear it is. It wasn't the first time Kyon had heard about the rank system. It was used everywhere. If people were ranked by numbers: 1st rank, 2nd, 3rd and so on, then everything that was not connected with people was ranked by letters: "E", "D", "C", "B", "A", "S".
When applying a formation, a slot is created: the void inside of which the formation is placed. Its essence is not only in the content but also in protecting / hiding it from the spiritual feeling of others.
The very core of the formation gets often connected with something (info-center, an object, a person...), therefore it's often necessary to have a spatial attribute - to give an order at the distance, to find a person by a searching formation, to transmit sound information, etc. But the body of the formation itself mainly consists of pure force, the most basic element on the planet.
Formations can also be created without a spatial attribute, for example, it's possible to create a subordinate formation that responds to a specific voice and not to the superior formation, just as Flitz did with Kyon.
The guy happily noticed that the method of creating any formation closely resembled the method of writing the program code, and he used to be quite a computer whiz in his own world. Creating lines of code, endless optimization, setting any properties of the formation you need... He was again in his element.
With his programming skills, he could set absolutely any properties! The knowledge he got from the books had entirely revealed the essence of that bizarre magic. He needed to practice on someone, there was no other way. He'd love to experiment on Juno, but no luck yet...
Formations are a kind of bridge to the energy of the world. They assign to it certain properties, nature, and behavior, that's why the world, or rather the energy, gets to work according to your rules, according to the rules of the formation.
Kyon was right when he suggested that the local energy should have internal memory.
He was frustrated only by the fact that the more developed the patient was сompared to the formacist, the more energy the applied formation should contain. However, it pleased him to know that the more it was optimized, the more energy was needed for each code line, which means, the chance of success was increased. Optimization was his path.
A brilliant thought occurred to him, he should invent his own unique formation and not just to gain a skill or an illusional advantage in something but specifically for the sake of revenge on Lady Juno. The guy rubbed his hands in anticipation of his insidious plan. He was trembling with excitement, the fate itself had brought him to that library, no doubt! {Alright, you nasty girl, just you wait!}
Late at night, Kyon crawled out of the bushes, stretched himself till his bones cracked, flexed his neck muscles and, first thing first, stumbled to the water spring to drink and get washed: he'd been dreaming about water in recent days and, given the latest events, in his nightmares. That time he huffed and puffed around the gap in the fence for about 10 minutes to make sure that if the lady emerged from the water, she'd be exclusively dead.Now he was in almost perfect health: the new teeth have been grown, the bones are have healed, all internal injuries have been cured, he could be sent to war if the need arose.Kyon had smartened himself more or less up and slipped into the bushes, closest to the mansion. It never hurts to observe and explore. Although Anna, Dina, and, even more so, Juno were still sleeping, he couldn't be too careful.And indeed... When he saw a beefy guard stroll through the mansion, his happiness knew no bounds. If he'd been inside, they would have easily found him. And not seeing or hearing him, not at all... As far as he knew, the guard wasn't just taking a walk around the house, he was also scanning the area with pure force but, in his case, one shaggy and too tenacious slave could be noticed even through the wall!{Yeah, caution is everything} - the young scout thought with a sigh of relief.Kyon spent the whole night in an ambush, watching the house. He found out that one of the guards quickly covered the entire perimeter every two hours, including the second floor, and returned to his post. Fortunately, the park wasn't involved.The next night, Kyon updated his information with an accurate schedule of the rounds: the guard took on the inspection strictly on schedule, therefore, during the breaks, he could walk about wherever he wanted so he jumped at that opportunity.Alright, outing number two, day number three, to be more precise, night number three. Kyon knew the mansion more or less well from the previous scouting, so he wasn't interested in the most part of it. But the rest he could and had to explore.And again he was inside. First thing, the guy got into the bathroom and snatched a hairpin: it might always come in handy. By the measured breathing, he identified the room downstairs where the maids were sleeping. He decided to go upstairs and found there a series of doors, which could be opened only with the formation, behind some of them, he could also hear sniffing. One belonged to Marina: the young mistress lashed out in allocating a separate room for her new friend; while the other came from the nose of the little demoness.While he was hanging around the doors to the women's bedrooms, wondering where to go further, he heard quiet steps downstairs. That time, the heart did a double somersault right into his stomach: the guard, for some reason, did not leave in two hours, but just in an hour! That's a fine kettle of fish: Kyon was sure that this time he would not be able to slip away unnoticed, scanning is a powerful thing, after all!However, while his mind rushed around the skull box in panic and search for a way out, his keen hearing caught the sound of opening the toilet door. Kyon could hardly keep from moaning with relief: it was just a maid, who went out to do some "night" errands! His heart reluctantly returned to its rightful place but strictly warned him: another stress like that and it refused to work under such nervous conditions.Kyon lurked: it was still too early to relax. Only when the bedroom door slammed behind the maid, he decided to step out of the shadows.And the next moment he felt an indistinct soft poke in the back. His heart cursed and demanded resignation but when Kyon turned around and met face to face Lady Juno it stopped altogether.Kyon's eyes hazed over. He felt a sense of futility growing inside... He'd just swapped one hell for another. Death herself had found him, there she was a little one, swinging and squinting blindly. Synergy immediately clicked him on the nose, forcing to belay the farewell to his life and use his brains: the girl was sleepy! Apparently, she'd just woken up at the call of nature and probably couldn't make head or tail of it, still half asleep!Juno once again poked her nose, that time in his chest, where his heart wasn't beating anymore and had, apparently, brazenly left for the unconscious, she touchingly pawed her fists through her sleepy eyes, opened her eyelids, looked at the slave, rubbed her eyes again and when she looked again into the darkness before herself, the guy was gone. Puzzled, she shook her head and went downstairs to the restroom.Kyon, in a split second, glided like a shadow into the nearest corner unlit by the moon, with a sinking heart counted the steps: a step, a step, a step... When, by his count, the girl was in the right room, he jumped out of the mansion balls to the wall and literally dived into the saving thickets of bushes. {Did that really work!?}Juno, emerging as a sleepy little bird from the toilet, froze for a moment in a stupor: what did she just see?! she flew upstairs, enraged like a fury, glancing around... {What nonsense... Am I imagining things.} - She agreed on that and carelessly returned to her room.That's how the guy survived due to the impossibility of his existence.Meeting with sleepy Miss Juno had notably messed up with his nerves. The dear little angel was for him a messenger of death and, at the same time, an object of his revenge but that time everything worked out alright. The guy, glancing around, whispered to the heavens a sincere "thank you", just in case there really was someone there.The next night Kyon was very cautious. A miner only gets to make one mistake, after all... He was already lucky enough not to "blow up", he shouldn't meddle with fate anymore. Ideally, he should have stayed away from that damned literally mansion, but his only hope for salvation was there so he had no choice but to try and find at least something useful. Where do normal people keep everything useful? That's right, in a dusty storeroom.The lock was simple, uncomplicated. All he needed was a couple of seconds and a bent hairpin, and the door opened with a quiet creak. Following his voice of reason and mild paranoia, Kyon carefully locked it up from the other side and only then looked around.Inside, not unexpected, there was a working inventory - mops, rags, all sorts of useless tools... And a huge dusty like everything there, anyway... what an irony, no one cleans up the storeroom of cleaners! bookcase filled with little books of instructions for servants. Kyon, hungry for literature, eagerly attacked his prey and "swallowed" a good half of the books in just half an hour. He reached for another tome and... He was about to swear out loud: it happened to be a typical "switch", an opener!A bookcase slid to the side with a quiet screech, opening the descent to some deep basement.{A secret passage!} - Kyon quietly exclaimed, trying to believe his own eyes. He made sure that there was no activity outside and, gathering all his courage, went down the steps. There must be something valuable, that's for sure, they would not hide a usual room behind h the whole system, right?The descent did not take too long: some ten meters down and Kyon could see rows of bookshelves lit by dusty crystals. There was no treasure, no money, no a "secret laboratory", a sheer disappointment for all sorts of plunderers and marauders. But definitely not for Kyon: {Books!}With a frenzy, he ran through the section titles: history, alchemy, herbalism, commerce, enchantment, formacy, reference books, fiction, and so on, and so forth...The guy was delighted. He grabbed the first available book on alchemy, flipped through it with pleasure, memorizing each line. Truth to be told, he did not find any particularly valuable or secret recipes there but, in fact, he never expected to find this much. The library, in principle, was not a family heritage. There were no cloudy stones with formations, no techniques or miracle recipes, only publicly available information, laws, patterns, concepts, principles, and canons. Also, detailed descriptions of herbs, animals, stones, metals, etc.It was rather unusual to hide a dusty storehouse of books behind a bookshelf. Who could come up with that? Maybe, it was just a whim? Or did the owner of the mansion want to set a trap for his children? Like in forbidden hidden fruit is sweet.Given his informational hunger and the absence of any other means of learning about the world, he had no reason to complain. He could at least learn some general concepts so that he didn't make a complete fool of himself if anything popped up. Kyon was staring greedily at the shelves marked "History"... {No... It definitely won't help me right now.}His eyes lingered on the section of formacy. It was what Martin and Flitz did, what was valued in that world almost above all else. He got interested in this science when he was still in the mine because much interesting could be found among formations: a searching formation, a family formation, a passport formation, a subordinate formation, formations in cloudy stones, a sound transmitter formation and that's only what he'd come across personally, in general, it was an interesting and, most importantly, widely practiced science!Once again he cast a longing look at the piles of other books, he'd made up his mind and nodded to his own thoughts: another day, it had to wait. He opened the first manuscript and plunged headlong into the world of formations.The eyes of the young man were burning with interest and a thirst for knowledge. He took one book after another, studied it, memorized, pondered over, juxtaposed the information, looked past any falsehood or inaccuracy, figured out what still could be thought of... His head worked at 120%, Synergy was not idle, either. It obligingly warned the guy that the dawn was close; unfortunately, the reading session was over for the time being. With a sigh, Kyon put the opus aside "The searching formation and the ways it should NOT be used" that one was impossible to put down! And then he went upstairs. He had to tinker with "handle-opener" on the backside of the bookcase, he was lucky to find the necessary inconspicuous book pretty quick. The guy quietly left the mansion and went to have some rest in the bushes that became so dear to him.During the next three days, he made nightly raids into the hidden basement library.The science of formations turned out to be kind of the foundation of modern humanity and not only that. Slaves, servants, workers, family members, investigators, sect members, citizens! All of them have a formation where their rank in the hierarchy is displayed, their position, specialty, affiliation, age, sometimes location, the status of being alive / killed / poisoned / ill, their stage of development, sometimes even shopping in stores! Certain functions, such as being alive / dead, and location require a place to receive the information that will receive a signal created by a spatial attribute. There was an information center in the mine. Martin, for example, connected Kyon's formation to a mercury mirror. And as an option, it could be another person, a group of people of a certain status, position, etc. Each respected family must have a center that receives information about all family members. There they one can find out who is where, who's been killed, poisoned, who's raised the stage of development, everything in order to have a maximum of control.The formation is essentially a passport with embedded information about a person.Formations come in functions, for example, for analyzing air temperature, humidity, pressure, they can record sound, a visual image: kind of a bug, a camcorder, and a camera. That is why the framed photo in the Flitz office was so strange, it was created by a visual formation.Formations can be defensive and attacking but these require some resources to create. Usually, it's money, sometimes key-spheres, some assets, sometimes something else.Formations differ in quality. They are conditionally divided into "E", "D", "C", "B", "A", "S" ranks, where "S" is a brilliant piece of genius work done by a high-grade formacist. The higher is the rank of the formation, the more compact, uncomplicated, effective and clear it is. It wasn't the first time Kyon had heard about the rank system. It was used everywhere. If people were ranked by numbers: 1st rank, 2nd, 3rd and so on, then everything that was not connected with people was ranked by letters: "E", "D", "C", "B", "A", "S".When applying a formation, a slot is created: the void inside of which the formation is placed. Its essence is not only in the content but also in protecting / hiding it from the spiritual feeling of others.The very core of the formation gets often connected with something info-center, an object, a person..., therefore it's often necessary to have a spatial attribute - to give an order at the distance, to find a person by a searching formation, to transmit sound information, etc. But the body of the formation itself mainly consists of pure force, the most basic element on the planet.Formations can also be created without a spatial attribute, for example, it's possible to create a subordinate formation that responds to a specific voice and not to the superior formation, just as Flitz did with Kyon.The guy happily noticed that the method of creating any formation closely resembled the method of writing the program code, and he used to be quite a computer whiz in his own world. Creating lines of code, endless optimization, setting any properties of the formation you need... He was again in his element.With his programming skills, he could set absolutely any properties! The knowledge he got from the books had entirely revealed the essence of that bizarre magic. He needed to practice on someone, there was no other way. He'd love to experiment on Juno, but no luck yet...Formations are a kind of bridge to the energy of the world. They assign to it certain properties, nature, and behavior, that's why the world, or rather the energy, gets to work according to your rules, according to the rules of the formation.Kyon was right when he suggested that the local energy should have internal memory.He was frustrated only by the fact that the more developed the patient was ompared to the formacist, the more energy the applied formation should contain. However, it pleased him to know that the more it was optimized, the more energy was needed for each code line, which means, the chance of success was increased. Optimization was his path.A brilliant thought occurred to him, he should invent his own unique formation and not just to gain a skill or an illusional advantage in something but specifically for the sake of revenge on Lady Juno. The guy rubbed his hands in anticipation of his insidious plan. He was trembling with excitement, the fate itself had brought him to that library, no doubt! {Alright, you nasty girl, just you wait!}
