F/D Chapter 39 - Mental Mechanics (Revised) (Patreon)

Fate/Defiance

Chapter 39 - Mental Mechanics

The final phase was the phlegm–brain phase.

People mostly thought of phlegm as something base and unpleasant. A catch-all for things such as slime, sickness, and pus. But conceptually, it was far more than that. 

Phlegm was cooling; it was clarity—it was breath, moderation, and restraint. It was what represented the brain.

Asclepius had made his recommendation plainly to Icarus: to select and choose a single seat of the mind to dominate the other. Heart or brain. 

…And he wasn’t wrong. It was without a doubt the correct and straightforward decision.

A divided authority was inefficient. Two commanders issuing conflicting orders would paralyze any body, no matter how strong or efficient. 

But that didn’t mean Asclepius was completely right either.

Icarus had followed his advice to the letter. So far he had balanced the humors, stabilized their excesses, and elevated each of them to a level able to compensate for the strain his extra mind imposed on his body.

Now, thanks to this, his body no longer tore itself apart under his minds’ contradiction.

Yet even so, Icarus wasn’t satisfied.

He didn’t want a subordinate mind—some glorified archive meant to offload memory and calculation while the other remained the true seat of self. 

It was like adding in a top GPU to a base computer. That wasn’t his goal. What he wanted was something else entirely. He wanted two computers in perfect sync.

Not a situation where one plus one equals two. But a paradox where one plus one created something two could never be alone!

He didn’t want to have to compromise; he wanted it all!

In the natural world, certainty was comforting. A single cause created a single effect. One commander, one order. One question, one answer. 

His body obeyed because it knew who to obey. But he wasn’t bound by the rules of the natural world—he had magic! He could make the rules optional! The natural world was not even really natural anyways.

Perhaps if he was someone like… Daedalus or Circe, prominent geniuses of this era—he would have to settle for this. Settle for a subordinate mind supporting the other.

But he was Icarus, and more importantly, a transmigrator! Who said if and then—one and zero—were the only possible options!

He was from the modern era, born in the age of information. The amount of collective knowledge and ideas he knew—even only in concept—was something that they could never compare to in a dozen lifetimes.

They were a single ship adrift at sea, paddling on their lonesome to a distant shore. And he… well, he was born on the other shore!

He had lived during the internet, during Google and Wikipedia! He stood on the shoulders of giants. Giants that personally spoon-fed him whenever his tummy even tickled! 

He could compare ideas and take reference from them at a scale unknown to any other mortal alive. There was simply no comparison.

So, that’s what he decided to do.

His current situation brought his thoughts to the building block of technology—of computers, or more precisely, of coding!

Binary.

1 and 0.

Every piece of software was built on it. Every webpage, every article, every video, and every game was built on an ever-expanding and complex application of the numbers one and zero.

True or false, yes or no.

…But who said it had to stay that way?

Although not commercially available, or even fully developed—the next stage of computer development had long been underway back in his old life.

It was something that would unilaterally crush the capabilities of every computer and calculator that came before. The quantum computer.

Something that applied quantum physics in order to warp one and zero into a third measure.

One and zero. Both, at the same time—yet, not. A state where the answer was not decided until it was forced to be.

Instead of collapsing immediately into certainty, the system was allowed to exist as a possibility, holding multiple solutions at once while exploring them simultaneously. 

Only when observation demanded a result did the answer appear. That was the key.

He would make the heart and the brain no different, an unobservable anomaly that worked simultaneously. A possibility frozen in state.

This—this was something Asclepius, the future god of medicine, and son of Apollo—could never have thought of. Probably.

It was an out-of-context solution known only to Icarus. Someone who was born and raised in a humanity that had grown into its own. A species and collective culture that had stared into the unknown and refused to look away. A species that had taken ambiguity, probability, and contradiction—and turned them into tools.

Humanity would not advance by choosing certainty—but by asking what if instead of what is. Refusing to collapse the possible is what denies the impossible. This is why a future humanity could accomplish what no other could, and become separate from the world itself!

They were not born to stay on this earth for eternity—no, they were born to inherit the stars!

Icarus huffed as he got a bit too into his head. But a part of him did truly believe that; too bad he would never live to see it.

Regardless, the heart and the brain did not need a hierarchy. They did not need a designated leader. What they needed was a superposition.

And superposition required ignorance. It was the foundation of the paradox. As long as he knew which seat of the mind was dominant, the World would know as well. 

Knowledge was observation, and observation forced choice. Heart or brain, one would inevitably be crowned the ruler once certainty answered the question.

So, Icarus did the only possible thing that made sense to him: he hid the answer from himself.

ᨳ✶ଓ

The next ritual was performed in silence.

From within his workshop, he produced a clear vial containing a colorless concoction—the liquid was strangely still, refusing to flow even when swirled. It was also reflective.

It had taken weeks to perfect, with dozens of failed prototypes. The final product was the result of a year of countless different experiments and revisions applied from his workshop. He was also greatly aided by his apprenticeships under Chiron and Asclepius.

His workshop replicated the Greek Texture, and that included every aspect of it. His floor was the world itself, and similar to the Ancient Mesopotamian Texture seen in the Seventh Singularity of the Grand Order—if you dig deep enough, you can eventually physically reach the underworld.

Therefore, by digging beneath his workshop’s floor and slowly creating a false version of the ‘underworld,’ he could replicate and apply the effects of items and locations within.

Unfortunately, it seemed their efficiency relied heavily on how accurate they were to the true underworld, which was a more than fair compromise. It was even helpful in the end, as he didn’t want to truly gain a complete true-to-form version of what he sought.

The Lethe.

One of the five rivers of the underworld. More specifically, the River of Forgetfulness. In myth, or likely in truth in his case, the shades of the dead were only able to be reincarnated after they drank from the Lethe. The waters would wash away all their memories in preparation for the next life.

Icarus, of course, did not want to reincarnate again, or become a potential vegetable. So, his degraded version was just fine—and along with much trial and error, it had been crafted into a potent potion.

The final mixture mimicked the function of forgetting, but not the act itself. Not erasure, but obfuscation. 

Lethe, which literally meant forgetting, was more than just the concealment of being or the forgetting of being. It was the very concealment of concealment.

The potion did not merely remove memory—it displaced certainty. It clouded the internal narrative that allowed the self to say this thought came from here. Heart and brain continued to function perfectly, but the awareness of which one led was severed.

A higher form of self-hypnosis used in order to create a designated cognitive blindfold.

Exactly what he needed. With his decision already made, Icarus began to chant Divine Words, igniting his circuits along the potion’s vial to further specify its purpose—then he drank.

The effect was immediate. The moment the concoction made contact with his tongue, it was already fully digested. The potion targeted the Phlegm both in his general body and in his brain.

People with an excess of Phlegm were known to be low-spirited, and quite forgetful. However, the nature of phlegm ultimately had no effect on the character of the soul. Icarus’ mind was also far from normal.

His thoughts did not slow after the potion took effect. Instead, they sharpened. Yet at the same time, his internal sense or feeling towards his mind vanished. Decisions suddenly formed fully realized, and he could not trace their origins. 

Instinct weirdly felt reasoned and reason unexpectedly felt intuitive. The war for dominance over his heart and brain was no longer observable.

Even to himself.

His mind had reached an unobservable “quantum state.” But… not entirely. It wasn’t perfect. Just because he forgot and ignored his state of mind—didn’t mean others did.

An outside party could force his mind outside of its state through observation, which would have drastic side effects on his body.

It was unacceptable. However, for now… it was fine. Tsk.

Although, Icarus would definitely address it in his final ritual.

ᨳ✶ଓ

His workshop was dirty.

Literally.

Icarus stood at the edge of the latest excavation beneath his workshop, gazing down into the artificial chasm he had carved into his “Greek Texture.” He could feel the subtle temperature difference below: it was cold—not just in temperature, but in presence. 

Light hitting below dimmed unnaturally, and not because it was blocked, but because it was unwelcome.

How fascinating, Icarus thought in wonder.

But he still had work to do. He needed to make the final preparations for his last ritual, and for that he had to continue his efforts on “completing” the underworld.

His efforts had been tedious so far. It was plainly difficult to do. Because while the underworld was present below ground, it wasn’t necessarily linear.

The river Styx was said to border the underworld. The world above and below was divided by a river. This didn’t really seem strange, until you really thought about it.

Because… how?

Was it a thin ocean physically dividing the land and underworld, acting as a small underground layer of water needed to transition into death? But then, how did Charon ferry those across it in the afterlife? 

Was it a theme park waterfall slide or something!?

Or did it have a mysterious aspect that shifted positions between up and down into left and right? Did the underworld exist as a separate axis of existence while somehow remaining within the same textured layer?

Or maybe the existence of the Goddess Styx was capable of transforming the river into a metaphysical boundary through an authority?

He had no idea. But did it matter in the end? He could do what every magic-inclined genius did—bullshit it into working by cheating reality.

Magic was the creation of miracles after all. So what if it didn’t make sense? It didn’t have to in the first place. He could just find a workaround.

For this, Icarus’ plan relied on the aspect of his magic that he had improved the most on: reflection.

He had progressed far from just crafting a mirrored arm guard. Even his efforts on creating his workshop involved reflecting concepts into chains to pair with one another.

His plan involved making a huge mirror that would act as the river Styx, a glass boundary between the world and underworld—by tying the concept of reflection between mirrors and water.

He could turn this thin mirror “Styx” into a strange mirror that also applied aspects of water such as waves and motion. This would allow him to not only warp the underworld’s position, but also its linearity and dimensions.

He could even create a separate mirror linked to the “Styx” and use it to access and alter the underworld while not physically digging under his workshop floor.

This would allow him to improve and use his false underworld without it being to the detriment of his floor, which represented the regular world.

It was a fix that killed multiple birds with one magic mirror.

So, that’s what he did.

He created the mirror using Isinglass, just like how he had been taught by his father long ago. But it was much improved, as his methods in making it had already far surpassed his father’s.

He used fish blessed by the sea god to not only give it an immense reflective purity, but also aspects of water and rivers.

This allowed him to further create more Isinglass by filling a layer beneath his workshop with water that merged with the Isinglass itself, expanding it as if filling a water basin.

It wasn’t just a gelatin-based glass, but also a glass-based water. It was as much glass as it was water—this allowed him to create more glass, by adding more water.

A physical impossibility.

“…So cool.” Icarus couldn’t help but mutter in giddiness as he watched the droplet cause a faint wave that traveled along the length of glass.

Seeing a layer of glass expand by adding droplets of water fascinated him in ways he could not describe.

It eventually filled a layer beneath his workshop floor, and settled, solidifying into both an underwater reservoir and a thin pane of isinglass.

Then he slowly covered it up, renovating the floor back into its original state as he filled in a bunch of dug-up pits. It was also fascinating to see the dirt not envelop the “water” but instead rest over it.

Finally, he created a separate mirror, one tied to the first that would allow him to see the underworld unobstructed. This was due to how it linked and reflected the world beneath the floor, which gave him full access to modify it as he pleased.

A magical “streaming” mirror. It brought Icarus great joy to see his workshop visibly improve with his efforts.

Icarus smirked as he started to perform his final task.

He grabbed the edge of the mirror “Styx” and felt a small liquid wave sprout at the touch of his thumb—before, with a flick of his wrist, Icarus physically broke off a piece of the mirror!

He brought the small shard to his gleaming eyes and grinned like a loon. Then, with a small vial held at his side, he tipped the broken shard towards it, watching as it slowly dripped into the vial in a liquid form.

He couldn’t help but shake his head in disbelief as he watched, regardless of the fact that he was the one who devised and implemented the very means to make it possible.

“…So, so cool.”

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Author’s Notes

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Chapter 39, reworked and revised! ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧

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