Chapter 396 - Holy Fucking Shitballs Dude That’s A Goddamn Storm Alright (Patreon)

Aaaand we're back! I'm on a trip with family right now and it is... impacting me emotionally, lol. Waaaaaah! That's the suffering scream!

But... there's been a lot of good too. Even though it delayed the chapter by a bit. And also I got a bit carried away with the POVs. Oh well! Enjoy!

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NO I DON’T KNOW WHY IT CHANGED! IF I KNEW WHY IT CHANGED, DO YOU THINK IT WOULD HAVE CHANGED? I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING AND I SWEAR TO END IF YOU WALK IN HERE ONE MORE TIME WITHOUT SOME RELEVANT NEW INFORMATION I AM GOING TO BEAT YOU UNCONSCIOUS! GO DO YOUR FUCKING JOB BEFORE WE ALL EXPLODE OR GET EATEN BY GOD OR WHATEVER THAT IS!

IF ANYONE’S STILL READING THIS- STOP READING THIS AND FOCUS YOU MINDLESS MORONS! YOUR MOTHERS ARE WHORES AND YOUR FATHERS ARE DISEASED PLUCKED CHICKENS MISTAKEN FOR BIPEDS, AND I HAVE SPENT THE LAST THREE HUNDRED YEARS DOING THIS INSTEAD OF THE RESEARCH I ACTUALLY HAVE PASSION FOR, SO FUCK YOU ALL! I AM GOING TO MY FUCKING BUNKER!

GLORY BE

-Official documentation from the Department of Eschatology, Mortaria, Second District, Office of Bishop Ruk Citra

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

She Who Stills The Waters left her writings to Li Shu. In those writings, there came a description of the different steps of power progression for Witches. 

The first step: Apprenticeship. A learning step, very literally, undertaken as a sort of preliminary exploration. Both more and less fundamental than the Qi-Gathering realm, focused entirely on gaining new instincts and information relating to alkemy, physical properties, plants, biology, and more. As a cultivator tends to prepare for the first steps on their journey by improving their Qi channels and body, a Witch, or Craft wielder, prepares their mind.

The second step has a much fancier name.

“Crafting Of Self”. 

Here, part of one’s being is severed, unmade, rewritten from being a concept connected directly to a person to something connected indirectly, through will and Qi alone. A Sacrifice for power. 

Li Shu is rapidly approaching a further step, has been researching, in her own time, what it might entail. “Blessed Union”. The energies, saturating and infused into the Sacrifice over time, is more deeply embedded, a more foundational change. Like She Who Stills The Water’s hair, which grew out of shadows and could act as portals through them. Raika’s pretty sure she can guess what concepts Li Shu will be embracing, but frankly, it’s not really her business.

She’s been more focused on other shit anyways.

Crafting Of Self. A profound sacrifice, transforming a person forever. A Sacrifice of something intrinsic, forever alienated and made inhuman in turn, never again to be touched.

She considered a lot of options. Her remaining arm, the one that hasn’t been replaced by Blacksteel. Or her sight, maybe, removing even the possibility of conventional vision. Her ability to form arrays, even. 

But if there is one thing Raika has remained quite dedicated to, it’s a fairly simple ideal.

“Go big or go home”.

The closest thing she ever got to a home, a real home, was a little log cabin with people who trusted her. Who healed her. Who helped her learn to be. 

She found a way to take it with her, and even still, someone took it from her. Killed it from her. 

So. All that’s available is to go big.

The ritual does not perform a particularly specific phenomena. Interwoven with the arrays of the chamber she’s in, intermixed with that of the collapsing formation orbiting in the islands that remain, is a simple and broad form of magic. It does not create a specific effect.

It opens the door to almost any.

As the pillar of Obliteration burns the world, as a sky made of stabbing Death cuts apart reality, as a million guns annihilate everything they can perceive and fire upon, the magics that have been painstakingly carved into Godfall’s advancing army activate at last.

To gain power is to create reality. For cultivators, they craft a world and a demigod within and of themselves. For necromancers, they find the gaps left behind in existence and magnify them, altering all things to match the echo they resonate with. 

For a Craft user… they tell reality a Lie, and from it, a story. 

Reality turns to LOOK.

Infinity turns inward. A recursion of all that is, bright and loud and quiet and dark, the lowest atoms to the highest phenomena. Attention is drawn from things which are best avoided, and the world, briefly, fills with an impossible DISGUST. 

Existence looks upon itself, and finds it, and everything within, DISGUSTING. VILE. REPUGNANT. 

A dream turned rotten, because it is not enough, because it is not right, because it is not good. 

The Heavens and that which lies beyond them, in some infinitesimal fraction, turn their gaze upon the wretched world they have made. 

In that single instant of attention, Raika Lies.

As Above, So Below

My Death Above, My Soul Below

A technique made to kill an army, made of Death, transcends.

The world glows in colors beyond color.

A tribulation strikes the world- 

And starts to be eaten.

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Lu Karai feels it when the gold cracks. 

Lu Karai is dead. He cannot feel anything. Even the emotions, at this point, are distant things, echoed more than experienced. His love, his greed, his desires, all remain too anchored to be lost entirely, save to Stillness- and it has come closer than he would like to admit, more than once. But actual sensation? An alien thing. It has been centuries since he abandoned even the memory of flesh for bone, and longer still since he embraced the cold brilliance of gold.

He feels it when the gold cracks. 

A fine fragmentation, delicate and lustrous, running up through the gilding that is his bones, that is his being.

In theory, that shouldn’t be possible here. Not here in the heart of the Fallen Kingdom, where Death is universal and the power that he exists within and grows from is ubiquitous. In a place of perfect, absolute and cancerous growth, perhaps, in a seal designed perfectly by one of the false gods of what they call the Overgrowth, but not here.

For a moment, Death vanishes from the world.

He feels a pull from reserves untouched in… as long as he can remember, really, reinforcing his existence upon the world. Near-perfect efficiency drives his Death into Existence, and his Comprehension reinforces his place in reality. He remains, as he always will, until everything Ends. 

But for a moment… 

The foundations slipped. 

He turns to his wife, and feels his internal self roil in surprise.

She is standing.

Since he met her, a few millennia past, she has lain in repose, golden and gilded, within her sarcophagal phylactery. 

She rarely even moves- to rise from her magical hovering, to float upright alongside her pet Witch, is nearly unheard of. 

He transmits to her, through the Echoes they share, the post-mortal post-lungs equivalent of a sigh.

“Oh love of mine, what a mess you’ve made.”

She turns her head to look to him- another sign of just how out of sorts she is. 

“I hardly see us getting our hands on the little Blessed now, dear.”

She doesn’t say anything, even through the flow of Echoes which bind them. Instead, she turns, facing her skull at the all-consuming radiance blasting a pillar into the ground and sky. 

And the thing writhing within it.

To visual senses, it is already blinding. A million colors, and colors that exist beyond visible spectrums, flood the earth, turning the ashen wastelands of the Fallen Kingdom into a kaleidoscope. In several spots where the different forces shine brightest, the world actively changes, Qi forming and being consumed, strange new mineral formations and life spawning beneath the glow. In one spot, a plant made of something like crystals gives birth to a spasming spider of hooves, which vomits out a swarm of floating liquids and then collapses- and it’s only one of hundreds of such sights, all over the space around them.

To those who Comprehend the layers of real-versus-unreal, it’s the least interesting part. 

At the center of the pillar is a void. 

Striations and pulses of energy are thrown about, only to inevitably orbit back and collapse back towards the center of the mass. Like a sea, struggling and swarming away from a far-off shore, only to be forced back to the core over and over again, the process organic and mechanical at once. 

Some of the ways that the Death at the center of the radiance moves look like hands, desperately reaching to escape. 

Only to be unmade and returned, digested again and again.

It looks like it might collapse at any moment.

It looks like it might birth something out of that collapse.

Lu Karai’s wife slowly returns to her previous stillness, her phylactery returning to a gentler repose.

“We’ll have to move quickly,” she says.

“More foolishness, then.”

She sends no annoyance through the connection between them. In spite of his words, he knows that she knows that he is already putting his pieces in place.

Such is love.

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The undead giant laughs hard enough to rattle the air in Bishop Darus’ lungs, forcing a vague annoyance out of the scholar. 

“If you would please be quiet,” he hisses, one of many sets of eyes turning to glare at his fellow Bishop as the rest focus fervently on the Heavenly Tribulation striking the world. His hands, with multiple duplicates growing out of mold and mildew from inside his flesh, are writing fervently, calculating and processing alongside his cerebellum as fast as possible, and even still he is missing details.

“How can I not celebrate?” laughs the madman Seo En-Hyun. “When was the last time we saw such blatant defiance? Such profound stupidity writ into law? Careful not to let yourself get too Still, old man- just because we are dead does not mean our dead hearts should not be warmed by such sights!”

Darus’ paramour growls softly in the back of his throat, the crimson eyes of the Valdir line reflecting the glow that bathes the earth so very many miles away. “Warmed is not the word I would choose.”

“Perhaps not, Tarkis- but that’s your flaw, not mine!” 

Again, the ghost-behemoth laughs, summoning and raising a glowing cup of cold energies. “A toast! To something at last interesting around here!”

“Not all of us want to ruin what is for the sake of what will never be,”  snarls Tarkis again, his eyes flicking to Darus for confirmation. His lover is much too focused on the sight ahead of them to say anything, of course- but still, the instinct is there, to check in on him, ensure he hasn’t gotten lost or that Tarkis hasn’t stumbled somehow.

Even without a reply, however, the look is enough to strengthen him. “Your little pet project has gone out of control. Once that mess resolves, I’ll be joining in the effort to put her down permanently. She’s too much of a risk. Joining into a little bit of noise-making is one thing, but children shouldn’t play with explosives. Hell, I wouldn’t dare to play with that. We don’t need another Martyr.”

“Leave your whimpering for the bedroom,” says the woman to one side. Towering over the other two Bishops of Viviae by at least a foot, her voice remains quieter than Tarkis’, even if it seems to carry further. “I’m much too busy to listen to you whine. New Inquisum will End her, or it won’t. The world changes either way. Learn when to shut up and watch.”

He turns to her, fangs slipping past his lips, crimson murk starting to bubble up from the ground around him-

And is stopped by a slender hand, of mildew-mold, gently touching his shoulder.

He turns to look at his fellow Elder. A hundred sets of eyes and several brains made of fungal decay all stare out at the shining beacon on the horizon, but one set meets his gaze.

No words pass between them, but he steps down. His Death retracts back into his body, held quiet. 

A clinking sound comes from beside him, where he turns to look and sees a mug of cold Echo-matter sitting on the floor at his feet.

His eyes twitch as he very pointedly ignores Seo En-Hyun’s toast in his direction, and turns back to stare.

It hurts to look at. 

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From within a well-warded prison cell, surrounded by a few acres of territory inside a spatially-warped set of ashwood walls, the Bishop Anaya awakens enough to turn towards the oncoming Change.

Cold dread fills colder metal as awareness returns to the complex mechanism that is her being, the ticking of the bomb in her chest turning over ever-so-slightly faster it does. Not quite fear, but a sense of frustrated anxiety, running through matter that has no place for it and must translate it imperfectly. 

Even through the walls, deep beneath the grounds of the Cathedral she is oh-so-generously being hosted within, she feels the way reality itself changes. In her time in existence, she’s experienced one and seen two of the events she can now sense, and this one dwarfs them all in scale. The quality of a Tribulation is not intrinsically tied to its potency or power, of course, but it is not entirely separate either. This one makes the world tremble.

The forever-detonation ticking inside of her aches with familiarity.

A world-ender. A horizon-breaker. A paradigm shift in the form of a single, all-consuming instant. 

There is a bitter vindication in being proven right. 

Perhaps, if she’d faced the Blessed Mortal directly, this wouldn’t have happened. If she’d decided to risk herself and the value of the little one accurately against the dangers that the mother would present, this may not ever have come to pass.

Or she might not Be anymore.

It is not in a bomb’s nature to regret or reflect. Her Death is, and always has been, a cataclysmic instant, prolonged or delayed but never reversed. 

So she doesn’t regret. Not now. 

But she does wonder at why she stopped. 

Was it fear? Of that little child?

No. 

Perhaps, together with the mother, he might have destabilized her Death enough that she would have taken serious damage, serious enough to require centuries to repair. Perhaps a bit more, if he is truly as exceptional as it is believed. 

But still, that shouldn’t have done it. 

Why, then? Why did she stop?

Not a regret, just an examination of the trigger mechanism that makes up part of her being. 

Why? 

Bishop Anaya is an incarnation of the Death she has mantled. She is a corpse, a thing which was a person and now is more than an Echo but born from one. 

A bomb that unmade a mountain, and all that lived upon it. 

A forever-detonation, which can only be delayed or prolonged.

The Fallen Kingdom is overwhelmingly a place of subtlety and silence. Entrenched ideas and profound silences, writ into law by inertia as much as willpower. Tradition and religion, hand in hand, calcifying bit by bit in the hopes that this is the perfect and final shape in which the End must be met and mantled in turn. 

A place damned by Stillness in its very fabric, dancing along the knife-edge of failure by resisting its own flaws as best it can.

A forever-detonation, which can only be delayed or prolonged. 

And which has been delayed for a long, long time. 

Tick, tick, tick, goes the bomb that is a woman that is a Bishop that is a corpse. 

Why did she hesitate, even after she came to the conclusion that failing to halt that woman would lead beyond what should be allowed?

Why did she hesitate when faced by a child so loved by the dead?

She is not entirely sure.

But the horizon trembles with the force of Tribulation, and the forever-detonation goes tick, tick, tick, counting down the clock.

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Kai Valdir is not a particularly proud specimen.

It is not easy to tell by looking at him, because by the Church he knows how to dress, but he really, truly is not. He lounges, yes, and prefers finer vintages, it’s true, and prefers things a certain way, quite true. But proud? A silly idea. What a joke! A farcical comment to even make about such a figure as he!

No, Kai Valdir, a man of particularly common name and particularly bland talents, with little to his name except most of a city, a plot to overthrow a nation, and an eye for the most powerful upset on which to bet since the Corpse Martyr, is not particularly proud.

He is appropriately proud.

It is important, after all, to humbly and generously accept praise when it is properly earned.

Looking out at the massive orb of spasming, roiling impossibility in the distance, impaled on a stick-thin pillar of world-spanning scale, he thinks to himself- if anyone has earned praise for this turn of events, it is he. 

A thrall emerges from out of one of their little alcoves, summoned by the barest hint of a change on the current face of the Valdir clan. They’re all well-trained; if they guessed wrong, or hesitated in their guess, they’d find themselves on the more unfortunate end of their retirement plan. This one, a veteran of nearly ten years of service, who has yet to guess wrong, has once again proven their value in their current position, and brought him the pen and paper he desired.

Quickly enough that non-enchanted paper would catch flame, Kai Valdir pens a series of letters and announcements, the quill flying across the pages as fast as the thrall can keep up with. The moment they’re done, he lets the quill fall, trusting that the thrall will catch it or suffer the consequence.

“Take that to the other houses and to the worriers among the elders,” he says dismissively. His eyes have never left the window he is watching from. 

The thrall scurries off, and the rising star of Viviae smiles to himself, watching the world break.

Yes, this is very doable. Entirely and eminently useful, even. Sure, if things go badly enough he’ll be impaled and left out for the End, but if they go well, then they’ll go very well. All the other Bishops, an impediment to the coming age, or latecomers to the bandwagon he himself is driving. If he plays this right, then he’ll be the one to have crafted the path for Viviae’s ascension to the new order of things, and if he plays it wrong…

Well, what’s a little torture and death among immortals? Honestly, the possibility’s hung over his head long enough that it’s almost uncomfortable when it’s missing. 

Of the three hundred life-drinkers that came up with him a few scant centuries prior, barely ten still remain, and only three remain… “free”. The fungal farms need batteries, after all, and rot does nicely for feeding the food. Not the worst fate, but there are better destinies than to be buried, squirming and limbless, beneath the soil, just undead enough to be good fertilizer.

And now here he is, watching his civilization crack along a fault line he helped widen. That he got a taste of. 

The blood of the child remains hidden in him. Pearls of crimson, perfectly profound. Life that is loved by the dead. Death that lives. More than simple undeath- a religious symbiosis. 

It takes time to digest, and he luxuriates in every moment of it. He can feel it suffusing his rot, and taste the beating heart of what he was and might be in his throat.

It beats in time to the clashing birth (or death) that comes from the Tribulation.

The black skies of the Fallen Kingdom open wide and all reality bends inwards towards that point. Not from force or energy- there have been powers and attacks grander in scale than even this, though not all that many, who failed to alter the world in this way.

The importance of the event bends things towards it. As Qi responds to thought and Concepts, as Comprehension alters the self and the world around one, so does the attention of higher beings alter existence around itself.

Infinity beyond infinity turns its seven eyes to a single point for a single millisecond that lasts an eternity. 

Kai Valdir, who is not a proud man, smiles, and feels one of his thralls run off to fetch him a proper beverage. 

On days like this, one really must imbibe. The end of the world or the cause of one’s death both demand a good drink. 

He’ll come out on top… or he won’t. It makes things easy, when looked at that way. The clans will fall in line, or he’ll be first and foremost on the chopping block.

All on the line. Same as before.

“What a vision, Raika darling. What a show.”

—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Li Shu watches from inside a perfect shell of her own being how the world changes. 

She reaches out, even as her very being is eroded, even as the rules of reality shift and break… and sees that change shaped to her whim.

Ritual and Sacrifice, array and artistry, magic and Craft blend together, empowered by a pool of Qi deeper than any at her level can boast, and shift what is into what she and her sister have decided it to be. 

It changes her too.

But it is hers. 

As Above, So Below

As Within, So Without

The gods look upon a lie she has helped to craft, and works to guide. 

They see her.

She is seen.

And in that attention, she CHANGES.

—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jin stares up into the Heavens.

He has no eyes for them.

Insulated beneath a hundred layers of security, the attention of ALL cuts through his being entirely.

An atom is placed beneath a microscope and made to understand its being within that context.

The very concept of how vast existence is washes over him for a single moment.

He doesn’t particularly care right now. 

He’s paying attention to what’s happening in front of him.

Rai Jin is not a particularly complicated young man. He knows who he is, and who he is is who he wants to be. 

So he watches, as he promised, as his mom blows a bunch of shit up.

—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The world trembles as a technique designed to kill an army falls into a hungry throat. 

Raika Sacrifices her Death.

And as Tribulation and mountain-shaking Death meet with her in the center…

She takes a bite.

A Cut Of Cultivated Undoing, says her Death.

And behind it-

[TRANSCENDENT ART: EAT OF THE FRUIT, GOLDEN AND RIPE]