Zanma considered the Hadou Armature Method the true foundation stone of his inheritance. This unassuming stack of ceramic slips held his entire pathway all the way up until the next major breakthrough, the Second Phase Transition. Where he stood, First Phase Class 1, he was still at the foot of the mountain. His foundation was stable, but that was all, he didn’t have the room to stick his head out among fellow First Phase true evolvers. All this — Phases and Classes — was the recognition of the world, the Soltern megastructure itself. It was proof that you have become something more than human, and a measure of how far you had ascended. Breakthroughs merited “Reclassification,” ascendance from Class 1 to 2 and then 3, and true, massive advancements, qualitative leaps in what you were and what you could do, those merited Phase Transition. It was therefore not unheard of for someone to sit at Class 3 and continue pushing linearly, but eventually, they would hit a point where they had gone so far that the only way to advance further would be extreme enough to cause Phase Transition. Grand Perfection. Half-Step. Borderline. Countless colloquial names for the same thing.

  Zanma had sat at “Zero Phase Grand Perfection” for over a year.

  And now, he was taking his first real steps into First Phase Class 1.

  The Hadou Armature Method broke down each Class of First Phase into three Stages, for a total of nine steps, with smaller advancements in between that acted as connective tissue.

  And thus, with the first stage of its evolutionary pathway, the Schizoid Stage, the Hadou Armature Method returned to the linchpin of all psionic practice: The Psychoid. In some esoteric traditions, the Sea of Consciousness, and in others, the Upper Dantian.

  The Psychoid was a small sphere overlapping part of the head, a space where mental energy and the physical world overlap. It permitted a psion’s consciousness to, in a limited fashion, reside in a higher dimension, and in turn allowed him to draw psionic energy and even knowledge from that higher dimension. The psychoid was at once a vessel and a gate. It was the soul itself, for which mankind had bitterly struggled for countless ages in the megastructure’s infancy, and the struggle had continued for countless years more before the majority of mankind could be considered ensouled. The optimistic estimate for the War of Heroic Sublimation stood at a hundred thousand years, though other estimates ranged as high as a million. At this point, the overwhelming majority of mankind could be considered ensouled, but only a minority had the strength to draw psionic force from higher dimensions and the anatomical features needed to amplify and externalize it; those were the two prerequisites to wield “psionic potential.”

  The key of the Schizoid Stage shared its basis with most other psionic evolutionary methods: Mental construct formation. In this process, the practitioner would give form to a persistent, mentally visualized representation to the psychoid. In so doing, he would gain greater control over his own psychoid; over both his psionics and his own mind. Zanma’s version, like many others, had two parts: Outer Fortress and Inner Sanctum. Outer Fortress would entail defining the boundaries and characteristics of his mental construct, and Inner Sanctum would then fill it in with the true core of the Schizoid Stage, the eponymous Schizoid. The Schizoid Inner Sanctum further separated puppetmasters from all other psionic disciplines; it was a divisionary mechanism, a means by which a puppetmaster could truly multitask, splitting his attention multiple ways, gaining the ability to “pay attention to multiple things at once.” Merely the Schizoid Stage wouldn’t permit for perfect, total focus on multiple things, but it was already an enormous jump. It was a natural requirement for any puppetmaster, even those who only used one puppet. Each psion was different, and thus each had to build his own mental construct; no matter how much guidance you received, the end result still heavily depended on your own comprehension and efforts. Zanma counted himself fortunate for having had Taisei’s expert and aged eye to guide him and conceive of a Schizoid Pattern for him, that of the Flywheel Gearbox; it couldn’t be considered an outright blueprint, but rather an equation that Zanma had to complete himself.

  In order to complete the Schizoid Stage, Zanma’s Flywheel Gearbox would have to achieve Four Degrees of Division.

  Not only would this enormously improve his mental faculties, but the stacking of psionic momentum to release later, that trick — his way of getting around his lacking burst output — would become something he could just do on the spot. That was the reason for the name “Flywheel Gearbox” — its fundamental structure was designed to incorporate three flywheels at the Schizoid Stage, with capacity for more later down the line. In fact, the pattern’s design as a whole was modular in the extreme, leaving plenty of space not only for modification, but for access. It was “incomplete by design.” Complete, self-contained patterns offered minimal extra power while drastically sacrificing modularity. This was often by design, to prevent disciples from abandoning the teacher or the sect once they got what they wanted. In worse cases, such patterns were distributed in easily accessible manuals to entrap practitioners into coming to the distributor for the next steps, the alternative being to struggle ahead blindly or even abolish their cultivation in that method and start over from the start of First Phase.

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  In summary, the Schizoid Stage entailed constructing the Outer Fortress, which Zanma naturally envisioned as a vast and unending puppetry workshop, and of then building the Flywheel Gearbox within that mental workshop. At Four Degrees of Division, the stage could be considered complete, but he planned to push for at least five before he moved on.

  Beyond the Schizoid Stage awaited the Hyperschizoid Stage, the completion of which would allow him to split his threads and thus directly multiply his raw power, and would perfect his mental splitting to allow him to truly “perfectly focus on multiple things at once.”

  The White Serpent lurched slightly as its foot found purchase on a submerged stone. Zanma's attention flickered back to his threads, making minute adjustments, then returned to his review. Further beyond still, at the apex of First Phase Class 1, awaited the Relay Stage, returning to a focus on mental construct formation, this time a framework for managing and denoising the sensory information from numerous sources, be they many puppets or the modules of a large puppet. This sensory limitation was one of the reasons Zanma couldn’t bring out the White Serpent’s full power as he was now; even if he somehow had the thread count, he couldn’t handle the sensory overload. Completion would naturally vastly increase how complex and thus powerful his puppets could become.

  The Hadou Armature Method continued in this manner for six more stages through Class 2 and Class 3, and surely to the breakthrough of the Second Phase Transition. Spindle Stage. Armature Stage. Thread Recombination. Concepts he didn’t even have the foundation to begin comprehending. The manual openly refused to show him the third stage of Class 2, let alone any of the stages for Class 3, lest he try flying before he had grown wings. There were methods to override the restriction, but he had no desire to do so, trusting his master’s judgment.

  Beyond the evolutionary pathway itself, the Hadou Armature Method held another treasure: blueprints for puppets surpassing anything he had ever built or used. The Hadou Frame. It was this design that had driven him to get so lost in his work as to carelessly work with TPR with only Locke’s Salt as his protection.

  It was to the Hollow Man as a grown adult was to a child, as an evolver was to one of the unevolved. Compared to any given puppet of its class, a Hadou Frame was, simply put, superior in every way, while retaining the extreme modularity that had made the Hollow Man such a widespread foundational design. After all, it was built directly on the Hollow Man’s design foundation. Even the most unique and iconic puppets of legend had the Hollow Man somewhere in their design lineage. All else being equal, with no equipment on either puppet, a Hadou Frame was larger, faster, more durable, and could squeeze out more power for the same amount of effort on the puppetmaster’s end. The price, naturally, came in as a cruel mistress, demanding over 50% more overall material investment for this roughly 30% performance increase.

  Zanma could only carry so many puppets, even within the White Serpent’s spacious spatial fold storage device, and more importantly, he could only operate so many puppets at a time, although that limitation would not remain quite so severe as it was now.

  Speaking of the Hollow Men, Zanma had also taken with him a number of secondary, not quite as remarkable manuals.

  First, "Ten Thousand Hollow Men," a foundational and extremely widespread treatise on “hollow-type” puppet designs; there were as many variations of this single manual as there were stars, supposedly. Usually variations had different numbered titles. Seven Hollow Men, Thirty-Six Hollow Men, One-hundred and Eight Hollow Men, and so on.

  Second, "Megalith Paradigm," pertaining to the surprisingly subtle art of optimizing huge, monolithic slabs of armor, maximizing their defensive and offensive benefits while minimizing their deleterious effect on a puppet’s mobility. Besides shape optimization, the paradigm also entailed methods of fusing multiple layers of armor into a coherent block and incorporating complex internal structures to enhance material durability. Naturally, he had referred to this manual extensively in his time designing the Wurger and working with TPR.

  Third came "Triskelion Aperturia," authored by Taisei himself in his youth, which focused on the grouping of sensors and weapons systems into clusters of three in such a way as to bring out a greater performance than the single modules ever could.

  Next, "De Re Automata: Bestia Bestiorum, et Anthropobestia," and "De Re Automata: Chimeria," both treatises on biomimetic puppet design, specifically those imitating animals and on seamlessly blending their features together. The human body section was noticeably tacked-on, not in terms of lackluster quality, but in the sense it was clear the author had realized humans could also be considered animals after finishing the main body of the work. A chapter near the end of Bestia Bestiorum explored the beginning stages of chimerization and the difficulty of marrying the anatomies of different beasts in a seamless manner, pointing towards the Chimeria volume if one wanted to know more. Zanma felt that he had yet to extract even one-fifth of the treasures these two manuals held.

  And lastly, "Spear the Gungnir." An unknown puppetmaster’s treatise on piercing weapons, especially those that don’t rely on the puppet’s physical strength — pilebunkers and plasma stakes. It contained a section on “preparing the anvil,” creating weaknesses in the enemy’s defense to set up a decisive strike. It also covered the use of ranged weapons like particle accelerators, lasers, and low-velocity plasma casters to herd targets to where you need them to be — this is referred to as “curtain fire” or “a hell of bullets.” The treatise at large focused on methods of removing the mutable factor of combat skill from the equation. The strange name stuck out, so much so that the author had at some point amended the treatise with a rebuke towards complainers stating that they could name their own manuals whatever boring thing they wanted.

  It still felt a bit unreal, even now, that he had been simply allowed to take this many manuals, just because he asked.

  Read ahead on ! Five advance chapters now available! More to come!

  Please consider rating and reviewing. It really does help a great deal.