Five months later

Hogg could more or less run his illusions all day, but for something that needed extra attention, it was better if his regular body wasn't doing much. Brin, along with everyone else in town, was off with that merchant caravan that came in, so there really shouldn't be much for his normal body to do today. He made himself a glass of lemonade, and then leaned down on his reclining chair and went to work.

When people thought of an [Illusionist], they thought of a Class. They thought of entertaining but mostly useless magical light. Dangerous? No. Who would be afraid of an [Illusionist], when everyone had at least one Eveladis laying around the house? To that, Hogg would say “Why do you own an Eveladis if you aren’t afraid of [Illusionists]?” Well, he would say that, except nowadays he was sick of the entire conversation.

If [Illusionist] was just a Class to you, then you were doing it wrong. To him, [Illusionist] was a network.

Take Brin’s letter for example. First, it was scribbled on bark paper. Then, with one blink of his eye, he committed the entire thing to memory in his second brain, the one he’d created with his Class.

The letter traveled with his consciousness as an invisible eye through the forest, passing all his other invisible eyes. He’d never be able to use so many without his level thirty capstone Skill, Split Focus. Even his absurdly high Mental Control couldn’t have let him manage them all alone, but now it was barely an effort at all to keep them scanning the forests, hoping to run into the other invisible illusions and hopefully figure out where they came from. An entire one-man information war. There was a time where that effort alone would’ve absorbed all his attention, but now it was merely an inconvenience. A network, inside a network of networks.

The eye shot along like a bird, assuming birds didn’t need to eat, rest, or sleep, arriving in Oud’s Bog in a matter of hours.

Oud’s Bog was a nexus of civilization, where the forest ended and you could get on the road to any of Frenaria’s major cities with barely any threat of monster attack, though of course bandits were always a problem.

He turned his invisible eye into a mirror image and walked into town. He had a person in town, of course, just like he had someone in every major crossroads. A network.

His guy in Oud’s Bog was a [Printer], who’d been a [Scribe] before Hogg had invested in his growth. The man was more than happy to transcribe Brin’s letter and send it off with the fastest [Messenger].

Sure, he could send his invisible eye all the way to Steamshield, but it was better like this. Any kind of magical interference, no matter how slight, would disrupt his magical eye and he’d have to start all over. Instead, he traveled along with the messenger as an invisible stamp on the letter, where he didn’t have to devote any attention to it and where it would be protected by the [Messenger’s] enchanted tote bag.

The first time he’d sent a letter to Lumina it had been more complicated, but now they had a system down. The guards at the gate, the guards at the tower, the various bureaucrats and tax collectors, all of them knew that the letter was to be delivered directly to her, without any scans for threats or magical interference.

So many obstacles were eliminated, all because of one connection he’d made. And he had many such connections. A network. He’d built that network up over a lifetime, and now? He didn’t know how much longer it could last.

Somewhere, unconsciously, that old notification blinked. He didn’t need to pull up his notifications to know it was there. He had it memorized with his real brain, not the artificial memory he’d created. It was only one line after all.

Would you like to upgrade a Skill?

[Yes] [No]