Molting the Mortal Coil

Sage had earned quite a lot from the Soul Taming Abode. There was so much he wasn’t even sure how to go about sorting through them. Sending his consciousness into his Storage Ring he looked at the pile of beds, cabinets, dressers, desks and chairs. It looked like he’d tried to pack a moving van with how haphazardly it was all placed. When he compared the ring now to what it had been when he first got it, he chuckled. The previous owner had treated it like a well organized storehouse with perfectly organized shelves and cabinets. Everything sorted by profession and with hallways between them like this was a room in reality. Sage on the other hand knew it was a space with no air, gravity, and as he learned, no time. It was like a perfect stasis, things only moved if he willed them to and only his consciousness had to move around here like a ghost. The hallways were convenient for sorting things but they weren’t necessary.

After he’d ended up smashing most of the cabinets and shelves he only replaced a few of them. Since then he’d actually just taken the piles of materials for each profession and carefully lined them up in a vertical stack. He could go anywhere in here, he didn’t have to walk around on the ground like in the real world. The ceiling was twenty feet high, and without gravity he didn’t have to put items on shelves to keep them from falling into a pile. He grouped the items together and then let them float in the air like an invisible cubby box. Then with a few inches separation he’d place the next group of items. The goal was to waste the least amount of space while still having easy access. If he knew where something was he could instantly grab it out of the storage ring but with how much stuff was in here, it was of course near impossible to memorize where everything was. That meant he had to have a good sorting system.

It’s a shame I can’t bring anything in here to sort items for me…

At this point he suddenly had an idea, maybe even more of an epiphany as he was suddenly inspired. He may not be able to sort his Storage Ring easily, but the thought of sorting made him think of his programming days and he immediately smacked his own forehead. What a fool I’ve been. When I first started learning about arrays I used Algebra to improve it, why didn’t I ever think of using more?

Perhaps it was the new insight brought about to him by his new body, but he suddenly realized that he’d been wasting the last couple decades by not applying the teachings of his prior life. He’d been inspired by trying new things, but as soon as he fell into a familiar schedule and life he had buried his head into the sand and gave up trying to innovate. I tried to hide my deficiency by learning new professions, then when that didn’t work I put everything into trying to reach Rank 3. What the hell was I thinking?

“Eh, it’s not actually a loss. Reaching Rank 3 let me join the expedition and gain all these rewards.”

It took talking to himself out loud to clear his frustration. A few moments later he returned to his organization. The piles of stuff that had looked like a refuge heap were carefully sorted out in stacks that rose to the ceiling. He wanted to leave the majority of the room in the center open for placing new things he acquired while treasure hunting. He was also quite pleased with using array formations as wallpaper for quick reference. Knowing of the usual human tendency to use the floor most normally and taking in mind the dimensions of the space, Sage started his reorganization.

While the vertical stacks of materials were useful the problem was access. He could line a wall or make rows like before, but it would still only allow access to one item deep. He could have two items back to back and access them from either side of a row like a bookcase. Leaving huge pathways to access things was just too wasteful. Sage came up with another idea. There was no gravity, but people still liked to feel upright so he kept that in mind as he came up with his next idea. In order to search quickly he’d need enough room for the ghost like body of his consciousness to have room to look. Even if he was technically incorporeal here, it was really weird to smash his face through things to see what was behind and under them. With this in mind, he stacked his items like he was building a tube.

The materials would be placed like walls, making a box like a telephone booth where he could spin around and reach out, with every item within arms reach and in plain view. He’d make one ‘vertical closet’ for each general type of material and stack it high. Since there was no gravity he even started them at the ceiling and let them extend down. It took a bit of space from his array formation ceiling mural, but not much. Instead he had a half-dozen vertical closets that he merely had to fly up into and he could grab whatever he needed. From afar they even started to look sort of like honeycomb up on the ceiling. Laughing again, Sage went up and rearranged them again. A honeycomb pattern was more efficient! A hexagon was closer to a circle then a square, just like his own body. He could keep from wasting space in the corners of each cell and since they still stacked perfectly he would waste no space between the cells. The first row would have a few half-hexagonal spaces going to waste where they pressed up against the wall, but since he knew of this weakness he left those sides open and placed storage cabinets in them.

Now, when he looked up towards the ceiling there was a honeycomb formation of materials. He isolated them to one corner of the ceiling for now as there was only a dozen different vertical closets making up the cells of this honeycomb storage. Each was only a couple feet tall, so at the moment he just had to float up and stick his head into the 360 degree storage closets. The idea was that over time they would extend downwards to contain more, or he could add more cells to contain different types of materials he found.

The rest of the ceiling became the new location of his array formations. The room was a hundred feet long, a hundred feet wide, and twenty feet tall. That meant the floor and ceiling were the largest areas and being on the ceiling meant he could toss things onto the floor and have his diagrams go unobstructed. Even with his honeycomb storage on the ceiling the area was still five times larger than one of the walls, he planned to restrict the storage to about a fifth of the area, or twenty feet. He arranged it so the cells would be five feet wide in total and so that gave him four rows of leeway. Sage wasn’t actually all that well versed in the math of packing density, he certainly hadn’t magically solved any NP-complete problems. It was more that he only needed a circular space and honeycombs wasted space on the edges of the area instead of between the cells like if he used circles… and it looked really cool to have item honeycombs on the ceiling like an attic.

With his old possessions thoroughly organized, Sage started in on the new ones. He began with the most mundane and took them for appraisal. Every desk, cabinet, closet, and dresser was emptied out into a stack. He kept them separated by source in case anything was linked. With the furniture empty he brought them to a local carpentry shop. The Holy Flame Sect was massive, their main territory was the size of a whole province. Heaven Stone Valley was the size of a County, being a crater that was a thousand miles in diameter, and even it wasn’t exclusively occupied by Sect members. Holy Flame City was centered around the Central Plaza where all the Profession Halls sat along with the huge market for Cultivators. The main gate of the city was in the East and outside it was a sprawling town where the non-sect members lived. It had started as a place to house the families of the Elders and Inner Sect Disciples but gradually grew into a place for all sorts of other people.

They were collectively known as ‘Servants’ among the Sect Members as only a small number of people were allowed to leave Heaven Stone Valley. The vast majority would live their whole lives in the valley, but that wasn’t really a terrible thing given the Heaven Stone Valley had an area nearly three times that of Texas. Smaller cities and towns were spread out all over it to manage the huge amount of area growing crops, raising livestock, and working mines. If you needed something done that didn’t need a Cultivator it would fall to them. The dwelling outside of Holy Flame City could be purchased with gold rather than contribution points like inside the city.

Sage traveled out to the ‘Servant District’, a name chosen to keep their importance hidden from outsiders, and found his way to an antique shop. Appraisers were a support profession, but the Appraisal Hall inside Holy Flame City was merely a training location. Those who ran their own business would learn to appraise the goods they normally handled, since hiring an Appraiser on a daily basis would be prohibitively expensive. An antique shop was not something that requires a unique profession. All it needed was a very knowledgeable Appraiser, which is what relegated the building to be placed in the Servant District. Only the Profession Halls and Disciple run market stalls were allowed in the City. It was a strange rule, but it worked reasonably well. The actual city area was quite small given it was made up of only a couple dozen large buildings along with a few hundred homes and dormitories of varying size. The Chef’s Hall was actually split up into a number of smaller restaurants of different styles and spread around the city. Chef Disciples even ran food carts and stalls on street corners. The main inconveniences were for mundane supplies like clothing, toiletries or other sundries.

Sage walked up to a huge building and marvelled at it’s construction. The whole place looked like an exquisitely maintained antique itself. It wasn’t in perfect condition, the tall red lacquered columns outside were slightly faded, the surface paint left to wear down before another layer of lacquer was applied. The whole place wanted to show off that it was old, yet still in perfect condition. I wonder if this is an advertising tactic, or what they think all antiques should look like?