{Edited} The Chaotic Traveler - Chapter 5 (Patreon)

AN: Edited chapters do not count toward monthly quota's

Not beta read yet.

Chapter 5: Will Over Mind

Following the books, and with the help of the Wit-Sharpening potions, Jin quickly entered a meditative trance while focusing on his desire to enter his mind.

Almost instinctively, Jin felt his Mana respond and spread up to his brain before the sensation of his physical body faded away.

One moment he was sitting in the chair in his room at the Leaky Cauldron, and the next he was floating in a dark void.

‘Well, that’s interesting.’ Jin flexed his spectral fingers experimentally as he examined his mental avatar, noting that it was a smoky replica of his physical body.

The book he read had said that practitioners could spend years wandering in the darkness of their minds before they found their metaphorical core. A process that often deterred most from pursuing the art, as it took tremendous patience.

Yet the moment he appeared in the void, Jin felt an immediate pull, almost like a fishing line, guiding him through the darkness.

‘It doesn’t feel all that different from how I was before I had a body.’ Jin couldn’t help but ponder as he followed the pull, only to pierce an invisible barrier and have the darkness washed away.

His mental form solidified, and Jin suddenly found himself standing atop a floating stone, no larger than a boulder, at the center of an asteroid belt of shattered debris, circling the boulder he stood on in rotating orbits.

‘Freaky.’ Jin tried to get his balance atop the rotating boulder. ‘Is this the center of my mind?’

The asteroid belt surrounded him on all sides, like a windstorm of debris.

'The gravitational pull is coming from this boulder.' Jin looked at the boulder he stood on and immediately felt like he was staring into a mirror. 'This is me.'

The central boulder was him.

It was his ego, his mind, all that made up who he was at that very moment in time.

'It's not much.' Jin mused as he realized he could take only a few steps in any direction before reaching the boulder's edge. 'Then again, I'm only a day old.'

Turning to observe his surrounding space, an expansive dome lit by unseen light, Jin studied the asteroid belt of debris. ‘These are… memories.’

Jin wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did.

A mix of stone, wood, and metal moved at varying speeds throughout the dome. Yet the floating shards seemed to stay in orbit, held by the gravity of the central boulder.

'This is a bit depressing.’ Jin admitted. Logically, he knew his mind was fractured. ‘Zelretch said he saved what he could after the accident, but I didn’t think it would be like this.’

Jin couldn't even count the number in orbit. Still, he was interested to note that various shards lit up depending on what he was thinking.

'They're stuck in orbit; is that why I'm not feeling pain now?' Jin thought back to what Healer Thorn had said about Occlumency. 'When I got the Occlumens perk, it gave me this gravity, almost as a passive benefit.'

He knelt and placed his palms against the boulder. ‘It’s holding everything together from deteriorating further, but this isn’t a solution.’

Jin closed his eyes and thought about the first Triwizard task, wanting to see whatever his memory shards could provide; however, he wasn't ready for what came next.

Immediately, three pieces of debris of varying sizes came barreling toward him.

"Shit!" Jin dove out of the way as the three stones zoomed by the central boulder. The first two shot past him like bullets from a gun and back out into orbit, but the third slammed into his boulder and bounced off, causing blooming pain to shoot through Jin's head, threatening to snap his newfound connection to his mind.

“Fuck.” Jin growled and held his head for a few moments until the pain faded. “That’s pretty similar to what I felt back in the warehouse when I was trying to think.”

‘That’s going to need dealing with.’ Sitting up, he continued his original thought. ‘The pieces must have been floating through the darkness outside my core before I got the Occlumens perk. I don't want to think about what would have happened if I didn't take it.'

How long would he have been forced to live with a shattered mind? Would he have been forced to find a Mind Healer?

Shaking that off, Jin focused on the content of the books he had just read.

The books weren’t some secret tomes, nor did they describe a step-by-step process to achieve success; they were basic books, but they spoke of many facets of occlumency, from mental defenses to organizing memories, clearing the mind to focus on a task, and even restraining emotions.

There might have been more, but that was what Jin had read so far.

Occlumency didn’t make a practitioner smarter or increase intelligence. It simply allowed for an organized and controlled mind, letting the user recall information and focus entirely on what they wished.

One had to call on things manually, yet the book also spoke of ways to 'program' unconscious actions. However, it did not provide instructions on how to do so.

What it did provide was a simple philosophy of a commonly accepted rule.

Will over mind.

‘Start small.’ Jin centered himself and slowly called on a much simpler memory. ‘The Leaky Cauldron.’

At his call, a smaller stone and two shards broke out of orbit and launched his way, yet Jin followed the philosophy and imposed his will on the stone. 'Slow down.'

He was the captain of his mind, and he had to impose it firmly to make it respond.

Or at least that was the plan.

“Shit!” Jin dove out of the way as one shard slowed and the other two kept going. A groan left his lips at another impact. “That’s going to take some practice.”

He pushed himself up with a growl and got back into it, and four tries later, he managed it.

Gradually, the shards lost speed on their journey until they gently hovered before him.

Reaching out to the larger stone, Jin's mind flashed to a memory from the third Harry Potter movie, when Harry visited the Leaky Cauldron.

He saw the scene where Harry met the Minister, who warned him about Sirius Black, like a flash of lightning before his eyes. 'I know Kung Fu.’ 

Jin shook his head.

It wasn't so much him seeing a memory as him remembering his perspective on it. 'I guess that's why Pensieves are so valuable.'

Looking at the smaller shards, Jin reached out and caught snippets of information rather than clear memories; bits of characters and chatter from the books, movies, or perhaps fanon. 'So, the smaller shards provide information rather than memory scenes?'

Jin frowned at the asteroid belt, seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of similar small information shards. 'It’s too messy; it’s better to stick things together and declutter.’

Jin focused his will, and over a few minutes, the Leaky Cauldron information shards slowly fused into the larger memory shard, becoming a larger, whole stone floating in the air.

His mind pulsed from the effort, but he pushed through until it was complete. ‘One down.’

Running a hand over the stone, Jin smiled as he shifted the information into an easily accessible form. ‘Should make organizing easier this way, not that it was easy to do.’

Jin knew his physical body was sweating.

That single piece of work felt like a few sets of mental push-ups, yet the result felt like recycling a small broken building block into a new construction project. ‘One piece at a time, I’ll clear it all up and absorb all that my old self left over.’

From there, Jin called on one piece of information at a time, letting whatever stones and shards it connected to fuse into singular larger pieces before fusing those pieces with the original Leaky Cauldron piece to create a larger stone, growing the information within the stone that he could access.

‘I’ll make all the general information related to this world accumulate in one larger stone and divide it into files.’ Stones and shards left orbit one by one to answer his call.

The broader the subject, the more stones responded at once, forcing Jin to play dodgeball with his memory fragments and slowing him as he had to specify his intent.

It was a grueling effort.

Each hit to Jin's central boulder sent spikes of agony through his head, and each memory fusing was a punch in the gut of effort.

Hours passed in a blur, but through it all, Jin refused to give in, stubborn and determined to be better than he was before. 'I have magic now, and by god, I'm not going to be a little bitch about some pain.'

Before Jin knew it, his vision blurred as the Wit-Sharpening potion's effects faded, his extreme focus falling apart like sand through a sieve. 'My buzz is gone.’ He held his spectral head with both hands. ‘It feels like someone's hitting my head with a sledgehammer.'

His mental world faded as Jin fell back into the void, dropping down and back into his body like a rubber band stretched to its limit, snapping back hard.

A gasp of heated air left his lips, the room swaying around him and making him nauseous.

“Row.”

Jin blinked a few times and found Shadow staring at him, gnawing on his hand to get his attention. "Did I knock you over, girl?"

He reached down to pet her in a daze, feeling like his head was full of cotton and his body drained of energy.

It wasn't just a mental drain but something more.

There was a burning in Jin's chest that was foreign to him, yet he recognized it was the place his wand and the House Elf adoption pulled from. ‘Is this what Mana exhaustion feels like?’

It was then that Jin realized that Occlumency was as much a mental art as it was a magical one. ‘Each moment I spend in my mind is costing me Mana; I’m going to have to watch out for that.’

Shadow seemed to accept his pampering and quieted down.

When Jin finally returned to himself, he idly looked at his watch and was surprised by the time. ‘What the hell?’

Only two hours had passed since he started, including the time he spent in a daze. ‘The potion was only supposed to last an hour, but I’m sure I spent at least a few hours in my mind.’

Jin tried to think about the exact time he spent, but the pounding in his head had yet to subside. ‘Does time move faster in my mental world? That could be useful, but without that potion, I doubt I could manage what I did.’

While using the Wit-Sharpening Potion, Jin felt his focus sharpen, pushing away all other thoughts so he could concentrate on his task. Yet the second it was gone, he felt drained and empty, unable to realize how much the work was costing him.

Rubbing his brow to ease the pain, Jin sat up and thought through things as his energy recovered. 'I can work with this. Use a potion, declutter my mind, and recover. The more I fix, the more streamlined my mind should become.'

Another aspect occurred to him then. ‘And if it’s draining my Mana to do all this, I can try and focus on it to work on Mana control. But, for now, I could use a distraction.’

Pulling up some music the multiversal vampire had thoughtfully downloaded on his watch, Jin grabbed an entry-level book on Charms and let his mind zone out.

0000

The first week passed in a blur.

Whenever Jin wasn't sleeping or eating, he took a potion, entered his mind, worked on gathering all the Harry Potter world memories into a collective, and then zoned out reading books until he felt recovered enough to restart the process.

Each day, more shards were absorbed, clearing the gutters of his mind and letting his thoughts flow free, allowing him to last longer in each mental trance and recover quicker.

And all the while, each new book he read was added to his mind.

Jin took special care to keep what he was learning separate from the general world-knowledge boulder, combining each new book into its own dedicated boulder.

The exact time ratio between the real world and his mental one was hard to pin down, but Jin was sure it was increasing as he cleared more of the asteroid belt. It started at around 1:2 and slowly increased to 1:3 by the end of the first week, the equivalent of just over two weeks of mental time in total.

From what Jin could tell, most things he subconsciously experienced didn’t really enter his mental world. He knew those subconscious memories had to be somewhere, but as far as he could tell, he couldn’t access them.

The memory fragments he did see were things he had consciously perceived at some point in time in his past life.

Conscious memories he hadn't properly digested entered his mind as clutter, but once he digested them, they automatically flowed into his central boulder, which was slowly growing as the core of his mental world, representing the growth and development of his ego.

By the end of that first week, in real time, Jin’s mental avatar stood before a massive boulder, easily twice the size of his center. 'This should be everything for this world.'

Jin’s calls for more fragments related to the Harry Potter universe went unanswered. 'Not as much as I thought there would be.'

An asteroid belt of debris still hung out there, though a fourth of it had been taken up by Harry Potter knowledge.

The shards he got were puzzle pieces rather than entire sequences. Most of it was fractured information.

He had a lot of little details, like one out of every four sentences in a movie scene, or fragments unrelated to the other sources, like those from fanfiction, which only caused more issues because it became hard to distinguish fact from fiction.

Touching the {HP-Boulder}, as Jin called it, brought up a mental catalog of subjects he could reference.

It didn't make him eidetic, but it let him search for what he needed with the equivalent of an interactive search engine. 'Less like the internet, and more like a Windows folder search engine.’

It was best to say Jin had partial meta knowledge of the world from his original sources, but that didn't make those memories a fact in the world he existed in.

As his first day’s adventure showed him, he would have to live and learn to distinguish between what was authentic and what was fake.

Idly rotating the floating boulder, Jin tried to think of what to do with it. ‘I could combine it with my central ego, but I’d rather not throw all this clutter into my budding identity. That seems like an easy way to develop a split personality.’

The books he was learning from had warned of past examples where users of Occlumency corrupted themselves, and Jin had no desire to be anything but the person he was becoming.

Calling on the gravity his natural Occlumens perk supplied him with, something Jin had been experimenting with throughout his time, he pushed the boulder away to let it float nearby, orbiting his central boulder like a moon rather than asteroids farther away.

Once it settled, Jin felt something snap into reality in his mind, like an anchor stabilizing the fragile walls of his mind. 'So, the books were right. The mind is initially fluid, making it difficult to self-regulate and vulnerable to external influence. But once I begin shaping it into an image, it firms up like hardened clay, making it difficult to change and easier to protect.'

Jin mused. ‘I’m practically a blank slate without eighteen years of memories to make this so much more of a pain in the ass.’

It wasn’t only memories that cluttered one’s mind, but trauma, fears, negative manifestations of the darkest corners of one's mind, emotions, and more.

Occlumency was spoken of as much a spiritual journey as a mental discipline, but Jin was a fresh slate.

‘There are no strings on me.’ Jin chuckled at the tune, idly letting himself float above his central boulder with a relaxed smile.

With but a thought, a refreshing breeze blew through his mind, feeling real on the skin of his mental avatar as Jin took it all in. ‘That feels good.’

What did a healthy mind even feel like to someone who woke up with a shattered one? Jin didn't have an answer, but he felt like he would move beyond an ordinary mind by the time he finished putting the pieces back together.

‘Now that that’s set, I can finally start going over these.’ Jin stretched out a hand and called for a separate boulder containing the accumulated memories of the Charms books he had been reading without truly understanding over the last week. ‘I’m glad that trick worked.’

One of the Occlumency books described a method for absorbing content while reading, then comprehending it later within the mental world.

It was said to be an advanced technique, but it came naturally to Jin. 'Occlumens perk for the win. Well, that and magical drugs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the magical world was secretly controlled by shadowy figures who were natural-born Occlumens.’

The idea struck Jin as highly likely; the sheer benefit mental art practitioners had in a world with readily available information, low risk, and long lifespans was terrifying.

‘Conspiracy theories aside, it’s time to put my Charms learning curve to the test.’ Briefly looking out at the vast open space of floating debris under the soft glow of his inner world, Jin closed his eyes as he accessed the memories.

He wasn’t done with healing and organizing his mind, not by a long shot, but with the stabilization of a part of his mind finished, his mental time ratio sped up to 1:4, with a clarity that he hadn't realized he had been missing.

The remaining memory fragments weren't going anywhere, and he could take his time organizing them by which world they came from.

As much as he might want to speed through it, fusing each fragment was a painful exercise that ate into his already limited timeline.

 He only had three weeks left.

Chapter End.