Chapter 228: Existential Bullshit (Patreon)

Hah. It was certainly making sense to me now. Or at least, the shape of it was beginning to emerge from the fog. The Water Leviathan… Had she somehow found a way to escape the trial? What else would she need someone like us for, a trial participant from the current era, someone who belonged outside this construct? The objective here was supposed to be simple: collect all the Keys. I'd assumed there were six, corresponding to the five elemental Leviathans plus the Heavenly one who supposedly led them all. But the Heavenly Leviathan was proving far more mysterious and elusive than I'd anticipated, and she hadn't done anything antagonistic toward anyone.

Or maybe she wasn't part of the equation at all. Maybe the Keys numbered five, not six, and the Heavenly Leviathan was simply... separate. Maybe an observer? Something else entirely?

I still had too little information to reach any kind of conclusion about her. But the Water Leviathan was the immediate threat. And I could mostly confirm the fact that she was trying to leave the trial, and doppelganger's analysis seemed to be aligned with my own suspicions.

Could someone like the Water Leviathan "possess" one of us and complete the trial under that façade? She'd already demonstrated she was capable of full possession, wearing Avena like a coat. The earlier limitation had been that she could only possess or influence those with dragon blood inside them. First, the Drakkaris. Then the Depth Dwellers, who also carried dragon blood, just like every species in this trial. They'd all been created by the Divine Dragon, after all. Every creature here was descended from that original act of creation. Every creature here was a potential vessel thus.

Or could it be that she was deliberately revealing only fragments of her abilities, painting a false picture all along? Letting me believe her possession was limited when it wasn't, letting me build strategies around constraints that didn't actually exist?

Just thinking about it was annoying in itself, because I did the exact same thing. Whenever I fought someone, I always tried to feed them false information, to paint an incomplete picture of what I was truly capable of, to catch them off guard the moment they lunged in thinking they had the finished image. They never did. It was deeply irritating to find myself on the receiving end of my own favorite tactic.

What a vicious wench.

My doppelganger's mental affirmation came almost before I'd finished the thought. Well, you may very well be onto something. We cannot say for certain what abilities she might possess. It is wiser to err on the side of paranoia. A pause. But for a Water pathwalker, I can at least gauge the extent of her prowess at Gold Core. Water is a devious path in itself, a very cowardly one, if I'm being uncharitable, which I am. Its practitioners hide within the Dream Sea, rendering themselves immune to all damage unless struck precisely at their weakness. Her main body must be concealed somewhere, and if she is being this bold, with moving openly, abducting participants, revealing herself, then that hiding place must be exceptionally secure.

You could ask the Kovrath divinator to search for it, she continued, but I suspect it won't be that simple. This is a formidable opponent for you. Even my Authority is significantly weaker in this form. I can teach you a few Cryostasic spells to suppress the Dream Sea's influence around you, but without a natural affinity for Ice, it would be akin to blowing air at a tidal wave. It won't accomplish much, even if you empower them with divinity.

She paused, and when her voice returned, it was felt a bit ominous. It is entirely possible your hypothesis is correct, and she has discovered a means of escaping. This is no ordinary simulation, the stasis you were sealed into was not an illusion. It was real and very potent. It would have held you for a much more than just a month if we hadn't broken it. There is a very real chance that this trial is not a simulation at all. Not like the previous ones.

I figured that much. And couldn't help but laugh inwardly at the sheer, absurd irony of it all.

It's kind of similar, don't you think?

What... is similar? My doppelganger's voice was cautious now. Wary of where I was going.

This entire construct. The façade of it all. I let the thoughts unspool. You prepared an entire continent to fuel your ascension after rebirth. A feeding ground. Akin to a farm. And the Divine Dragon created this entire trial, if it's all real, all these people, all these creatures, to fuel what? Herself, in the end. Her coming incarnations. Us. The trial is a mechanism designed to funnel resources and power, into the hands of whoever completes it. And the participants and the denizens, the ones who die here, the ones who fight and struggle and claw their way through, they're just... fodder. Obstacles for the eventual winner to overcome.

Just like the people on the continent might have been aware of their fate— maybe not fully, but maybe they knew something cyclical was coming, that would devour them—  and one glimpse of my existence sent them into a frenzy of fear and hatred. Here, a Leviathan must have become aware of her own fate. She was created to be a stepping stone. A Key to be collected. A mighty monster to be defeated. And now she's seeking escape from that predetermined end.

I fail to see the problem. My doppelganger's voice was cool. She was created for this purpose. Her rebellion is simply disobedience thus, not a tragedy. The thread does not get to protest the weaver's design.

I shrugged mentally. As expected. Like I'd noted before, she saw no issue with any of it. And maybe the Divine Dragon was the same, why else would she create something so vivid, so sapient, so painfully beautiful, just for it to play the role of lamb to be sacrificed when the appointed hour arrived?

My doppelganger had been like that from the very beginning, from what I'd witnessed. The memory of her— when she was younger and bleeding— watching the human camp with cold, calculating eyes. Waiting for the moment the rift opened. Using four hundred screaming civilians as bait and killing the survivors without a flicker of remorse. That was who she had been.

Would I have turned out the same, if I hadn't been born broken?

Perhaps. I could still remember, faint as they were, those instincts I'd possessed as a child. The reflexive contempt toward the humans around me. The whispers that they were lesser, that they existed to be exploited, that their only meaningful value was what they could provide to me. The only thing that had restrained me was the absence of power. I'd been too weak to be a tyrant and too fragile to indulge the predator's instincts that came standard with my species. So I'd learned a different path.

Maybe Lotte had been right. Maybe the struggle, along with the humiliation of weakness, that desperate improvisation of a cripple in a world built for the able, had shaped me into something my previous selves would not recognize. Perhaps the curse was, in some convoluted sense, also a gift.

...

I hated nuanced thoughts. I hated them with a fervor that bordered on the visceral. Why couldn't the world be simple? Why couldn't the boundaries be clean and bright, with villains on one side, innocents on the other, and me in the middle with claws outstretched and conscience unclouded? Why couldn't I simply kill my enemies and defecate triumphantly upon their graves without this nagging awareness that their hatred might be earned and legitimate, that their monstrousness was a mirror of something coiled in my own chest?

Why did reality insist on being layered and complicated and full of perspectives that made perfect sense from their own angles even when they were utterly irreconcilable with mine?

…But this philosophy was a luxury, wasn’t it? And luxuries were not for people like me. The Water Leviathan had one of the participants. She had three Keys, possibly more now, and she had a plan, and whatever that plan was, it was progressing while I sat here philosophizing about morality and fate and the nature of creation.

I needed to find a way to stop her. Get the Keys back. Finish this so-called trial once and for all.

But first, I needed to understand how these six had come to be here in the first place. I'd agreed to find and protect their friend, but now they needed to hold up their end. They needed to tell me how the hell they'd all ended up in the deepest layer of the Fold, hidden in the lair of a being who was supposed to be the most elusive creature.

They exchanged nervous glances.

"We were kidnapped," Denis said finally.

My eyebrows rose. "Kidnapped."

"Yes. The moment we possessed these bodies, we were... whisked away from wherever we'd initially manifested. Most of us were in entirely different locations before it happened. I was in a temple-like structure, under attack by feral Drakkaris—" He paused. "In the middle of the battle, then this rainbow eyed women grinned at me and I was suddenly somewhere else. It happened with no warning. I was just picked and... relocated."

In a temple. Attacked by Drakkaris. Huh.

"How long ago were you brought here?" I asked.

"It's been over a month now. Though it's been difficult to track the days precisely. This place is so isolated, with no sun and no moon. Just the tree and the darkness."

It took me a moment to fully process this.

It hadn't even been two weeks for me. And this guy had been here for a full month? How was that even possible? Had I entered the trial late? Had there been some delay in my transition that I hadn't noticed?

The other participants confirmed it. Everyone else had arrived almost a month prior, though the exact timestamps varied slightly from person to person. For some, it had been three weeks. For others, closer to five. All of them had been in different situations when the rainbow eyed women had plucked them from wherever they'd manifested and deposited them here.

From their appearances alone, I could roughly gauge their original factions. Two of them had transformed into those feathered Flame-kin from the eastern territories, with their visages slightly draconic. Their feathers were rippling with patterns that looked almost like they were perpetually on the verge of igniting. One possessed a body with a more Elven cast to it, with green scales dusted across his cheekbones, silver horns curling back from his temples. One of them was a Kovrath. Only two of them resembled their original species at all. Denis was one; the other was a companion of his who had also won through the first phase. Both of them had probably been embedded with the Waryns, with the faction fighting against the followers of that tyrant dragon.

But the timeline mismatches were the truly baffling part. Different arrival times and durations spent in this trial. It was just another question atop a growing pile of more urgent ones, and right now it mattered far less than the central mystery.

That rainbow-eyed woman who had kidnapped them, that had to be the Heavenly Leviathan. She'd gathered them here deliberately. Brought them to her own sanctuary.

The more I learned about the Heavenly Leviathan's actions, the more I doubted my initial assumptions. What the hell was she actually up to?  Why had she done all this? What was her stake in any of this?

I tried to glean more from them. Seemed like they hadn't been brought directly here, the spot where we now stood was merely the endpoint of a much longer journey. Beneath our feet, threaded through the deeper roots of this colossal divinity tree, lay an entire labyrinth. It was a subterranean maze teeming with monsters of varying lethality and was riddled with traps. The Heavenly Leviathan had kept all of them together, and they'd all fought their way toward the surface.

I noticed their gear, too. There seemed to be new acquisitions. Denis was carrying a pitch-black sword that. Even Moru had been outfitted with a spiky new collar and a delicate jade bracelet fastened around his front paws. When I asked about it, Denis explained that the gear dropped with a low probability whenever they killed a monster in the labyrinth. Almost like the maze was rewarding them for their progress.

At first, they'd thought this was their initial trial. The moment they'd all materialized in the labyrinth, they'd assumed this was the challenge they'd been sent to overcome. When they started fighting together and surviving together despite knowing little about each other before, something akin to camaraderie had kindled between them. They'd celebrated when they reached the surface, when they saw the tree and realized they'd made it. They'd thought they'd won.

Then they'd seen how truly vast this chamber was, with no end in sight. Just darkness stretching upward and outward into infinity, and at the center of it all, watching them from above with eyes like rainbows, was a gigantic white leviathan, coiled around the upper branches of the tree, observing them in silence.

They'd hidden immediately. Pressed themselves into the deepest crevices between the roots, praying that the creature's massive size would prevent it from reaching them, trusting in the toughness of the tree itself, which was, they'd discovered, quite formidable. The bark resisted their strongest attacks without so much as a scratch. Whatever this tree was, it was built to endure.

To their overwhelming relief, the creature hadn't seemed interested in attacking. But they couldn't let their guard down.

A few hours ago, the white leviathan had finally departed, they'd decided to explore. To maybe find an exit and figure out where they were.

That was when the veiled woman had appeared.

They'd fought valiantly against her. But it had been no use. She was simply a monster. They weren't weak themselves; they'd survived the labyrinth, grown stronger while in there, earned new artefacts, learned to fight together. But against her, it was no use. They'd fought to stall thus, hoping desperately that the white leviathan would return, that these two apex predators would clash with each other instead of focusing on insignificant prey like them.

The white leviathan never came.

In the end, the veiled woman had taken Vanya and vanished with her into the darkness as abruptly as she'd arrived. The rest of them had been left behind, were waiting in the roots for something— anything— to happen next.

That was when I'd arrived.

I nodded slowly, absorbing all of it. It all formed a picture, even if I didn't fully understand the artist's intent yet.

"Well," I said, pushing myself up from the root I'd been leaning against, "this place might look odd— and believe me, it is odd, by any reasonable standard— but I happen to have the key out of it."

Even though some of them were still suspicious of me, they couldn't fully hide it in their gazes, no matter how hard they tried, I'd also surreptitiously deployed Observer's Mark and Suggestion on all of them while they'd been talking amongst themselves earlier. I wasn't a control freak. I was simply... verifying and cross-referencing and making absolutely certain that no one was lying to me, either through omission or misdirection. It was just good operational security!

Which they hadn't been. Lying, that is. Good. Smart of them.

I summoned Curious into the chamber with a pulse of intent, and called Serath back from where he'd been waiting near the entrance, giving us space. I didn't elaborate much, there wasn't time for a full briefing, and frankly, the less these participants knew about the situation in the Fold, the less they'd have to nervously overthink while I was gone. I simply asked Serath to take care of them until I returned. Give them access to food, healing, whatever they needed. They were under my protection now, and I expected them to be treated accordingly.

Serath bowed without hesitation. "It will be done, Benefactor."

Before leaving, though, I had one more favor to ask of him. "Try to divine the location of the Water Leviathan's main body. Anything that could give me a heading."

It seemed to be of no use again.

"I have already attempted this multiple times," he said, clearly frustrated. "When the brainwashed Depth Dwellers invaded, I searched for her. Every divination I cast returned empty. Her body was simply... beyond my reach."

It didn't mean I was out of options. Just that the easy ones were off the table.

It was time to visit Lotte again, and through her, Alice. If anyone had insight into the Dream Sea and the creatures that lurked within it, it might be her. Alice was the most knowledgeable person I had access to regarding the esoteric mechanics of the Dream Sea. If even she couldn't help me pinpoint the Water Leviathan's main body, then I would be left with no choice but the nuclear option: fuel everything I had with divinity and hurl it at the bodies Leviathan was inhabiting with as much force as I could muster and hope it achieved something.

'You didn't call her "water bitch" this time.'  

Shut up.