Chapter 112: First Self-Made Spell

For a split second, he felt himself become… insubstantial. Not quite real. And then he was five feet ahead, having crossed the distance without actually walking it. Like reality had skipped frames of his movement.

Finn stumbled, catching himself against the wall as his heart lurched, pounding heavily from shock.

“What the hell?!”

He panted and stared at where he’d been standing just a second ago then at where he was now.

How did it even happen…? He thought, bewildered.

He pushed off the wall and tried to recreate it by thinking about lag, about frame drops, about glitching forward. He took a step forward and then…

Nothing. Just a normal step.

He tried again.

And again.

And again.

Five more attempts. But they were all failures.

Finn stopped, breathing harder than the physical exertion warranted. His mind raced, analyzing what had been different that first time.

I wasn’t trying to make it happen, he realized.

I was just thinking about the concept while moving. I was… I don’t know, frustrated? Wishing I could skip past the problem?

He tried again, but this time he didn’t force it. He just thought about the feeling of lag, the visual of a character’s position — his position — desyncing from reality.

He visualized himself five feet forward. Then took a step with the intention of being there as if it were a natural thing to the world. As if his next step was naturally meant to take him there…

His body pixelated for an instant leaving afterimages trailing behind him, and suddenly he was across the room.

It worked.

But disorientation pounded his head immediately like he’d been physically knocked on the head. His sense of balance tilted sideways and he had to grab the bedpost to keep from falling. The room spun for three seconds before his equilibrium recovered.

“Okay,” Finn muttered. “So that’s a real downside.”

He squatted to ground as he waited for the dizziness to fully pass, then tried again. This time prepared for the disorientation, he managed to stay upright when the glitch completed.

Then tried again. Again. And again. And again.

Each attempt taught him something new. The mental image needed to be clear, where he wanted to end up, the feeling of skipping the space between. The intention had to be firm, an expectation rather than hope. And then the actual step forward, was the actualizing agent, the anchor that gave the fragment something concrete to latch onto.

After an hour, he could do it reliably maybe half the time. After two hours, three out of five attempts succeeded.

Finn sat down, sweating buckets from overexertion and headache from the repeated disorientation. In fact, the whole thing had left him feeling nauseous.

But he’d done it. He had created an actual, reproducible effect with his fragment.

This is a spell, he thought with something like awe. A real spell!

He brought up his Soul Register, curious if it would show anything:

[SOUL REGISTER]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[FRAGMENT MANIFESTATION DETECTED]

Classification: Lesser Spell (Nascent)

Designation: Unnamed

Type: Spatial Deviation / Movement Error

Stability: 62%

Refinement Level: Crude

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Finn stared at the text. The Soul Register had catalogued it. Recognized it as a spell, even if crude and unstable.

Designation: Unnamed. He hummed.

He’d need to give it a name. That was the final step to make it a spell. Giving it an incantation that would trigger the effect. Something short. Something that captured what it did.

His mind went back to gaming terminology.

Frame skip? Lag? Desync?

“Desync,” he muttered. It fit. The spell made his position desynchronize from where reality expected him to be.

“Or maybe Frame Skip?”

That captured the feeling of skipping frames, jumping ahead without traversing the space between.

He’d figure that out later. Right now, his head had stopped spinning and he was rearing to go again.

This time he wanted to try creating another spell. One that he’d thought of during the time he was practicing the first spell.

Finn stood and walked to the door then locked it.

He put his hand on the handle and let out a light breath.

Just like a game, he wanted to disregard the lock mechanism — or more aptly, he wanted the effect to be similar to a game’s mechanics where the key wasn’t really what opened the door, but rather the ’status’ as locked or unlocked.

It was an obscure, or even nonsensical type of spell, but it had come to Finn’s mind earlier. He had been thinking of utility spells and came up with this. The ability to ’decieve’ the state of any door he came up to. To change its ’status’ just like a game.

Finn had considered whether this was changing a fundamental law of reality, bordering on Edict, or even Declaration level of fragment use, rather than a spell.

But he remembered that the differing factor between each grade of fragment power usage was ’broadness’. Affecting many variables.

This was limited.

His Error fragment was only affecting the status of a single block of metal inside the door — the latch. That was all.

He did say creativity was what separated fragment users of the same level. Finn chuckled.

Before even trying it, he was nearly certain it would work.

And after a few seconds of actualizing the effect with his fragment and soul, the handle felt different under his fingers. Not physically, though. It was still the same temperature, same texture. But now, there that sense of wrongness to it — particularly the metal latch that was secured into the doorframe. It was like it couldn’t quite decide what state it was supposed to be.

Finn turned the handle.

It opened smoothly. despite the latch clearly being engaged. The lock mechanism had ’glitched’ like it phased through the doorframe or something.

He closed the door, and instead of hitting against the doorframe, it locked.

Finn stopped his use of his fragment and tried the handle this time, and it held firm, properly locked.

Then he touched it again, focused on that same feeling of invalid function, and turned.

It opened.

A grin spread across his face.

That had worked on the first try, without hours of practice or repeated failures…

Why?

He leaned against the door, thinking. What was the difference between the two spells. [Desync] or [Skip] or whatever he’d eventually call it, that had taken hours to master, and this door lock spell that had worked immediately?

Because I understood the method, Finn concluded.

The first spell taught me the pattern. Intent plus mental image plus physical action. Once I knew that formula, applying it to a different effect was… not easy, but possible.

It was like learning to ride a bike. The first time was hard and required repeated failures. But once you understood balance, once your body knew the fundamental skill, you could apply it to different bikes in different situations.

His fragment was the same. Now that he knew how to consciously direct it, creating new applications was just a matter of understanding what effect he wanted and focusing the pattern correctly.

Finn brought up his Soul Register again:

[SOUL REGISTER]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[FRAGMENT MANIFESTATION DETECTED]

Classification: Lesser Spell (Nascent)

Designation: Unnamed

Type: Function Negation / Logic Error

Stability: 78%

Refinement Level: Crude

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

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