Chapter 397 - A Great And Glorious CHANGE (Patreon)

I'll have a "happy new year" update post for folks soon, but in the meantime, here's a quickie.

You're loved. You matter. You're important and meaningful and can be as much as you can be, which is always more and different than you expect.

I'll see you again soon.

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Alterations to Causality are a tricky thing. I mean really tricky. It’s not just adding new properties or rules to something pre-existing, it’s actually undercutting the whole process directly to achieve a desired result. Qi is a gateway to something that seems Paracausal, but truly isn’t- you’re interacting with an additional layer to how the Will of Heaven, and thus Physiks, works, modifying pre-existing formulas with the addition of new variables. Paracausality, on the other hand, is the outright removal or side-stepping of those formulas. 

If you add fire Qi to a movement, then the movement has some aspect of fire and Qi to it. If you perform a movement and it makes fire, that’s friction and energy igniting chemical consequences in other aspects around you. If fire simply appears, independently of any and all other forms of causes and effects that might normally elicit it, that’s Paracausal. 

It’s almost impossible to accurately ascertain, obviously. There are so many variables, hidden and not, in literally every possible aspect of all of existence that it’s nearly guaranteed that there is some sort of more logical and prolonged chain of events occurring, even if it’s beyond one’s ability to perceive. Furthermore, I’d argue that true Paracausality is impossible to consciously create or experience, based on what little we know about the nature of the birth of existence and sapience. Even our current frame of reference for it is flawed: losing parts of the chain of cause and effect does not mean its total absence, and partial coherence is only partially Paracausal. True Paracausality could see events happening before the actions that brought them about, only for those actions to then never take place, could generate effects without rhyme or reason or even according to standard progressions of linearity as we understand, and would, by its definition, lead to a perfect collapse of what we know of as “real” and “logical”, removing both words from the realm of the possible.

However. Having said all of this. I have nevertheless experienced this phenomenon directly. 

True Paracausality is impossible so long as choice and existence as we know exist. Partial Paracausality can be born, taking willpower directly around whatever process is normally required for an effect to take place to reach that effect directly. Not through Qi, though its presence, I believe, allows for the possibility of Paracausality in the first place. Not through the Will of Heaven, which dreams existence into a specific shape and decries all that attempts to supersede or alter it. 

I do not know what allows one to be able to (rather ironically) cause such an effect. I only know that it occurred at the hands of beings whose existence is defined more by its own ontology than by surrounding contexts. 

I once saw a Titan wish someone away.

They were inept and spoke out of turn at a tea service. And then… they didn’t. They hadn’t. They simply were not. They had been, and now they hadn’t been. Their parents hadn’t been. Their siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, hadn’t been. 

They were. And then they weren’t.

I researched this event for almost three decades, in absolute and painstaking detail. I tried to track down the exact batch of cloth that was used to make their clothing, the history of the seamstress that brought it about, the slight bacterial imprints they left where they walked and breathed, peering through time itself to track atmospheric and temperature irregularities at points where they had been. 

They were remembered. Not much, and as if through a fog, but vaguely. The places where their family had been were found empty, but weren’t memetically contagious or dangerous to perceive, and evidence of people having lived in them until the exact instant that the Titan willed it not be so remained. 

But they just… weren’t. Not anymore. 

No chemical reaction, no transfer of energy, no fluctuations of Qi, nothing that three decades of study from the most well-funded and advanced scientific mind outside the first ring could detect. I retroactively calculated the movement of the air in the room the servant was in and couldn’t even find a point where a vacuum came into being from their disappearance. 

They were. And then they weren’t. And the world kept going without a single further effect from it. 

I have no words for how such an act came to be, save that it transcended existence as I understand it.

-Grandmaster Errath, Head Researcher of the Division of Altered Cultivation and the Division of Science. Excerpt found in a discarded set of private journals by a member of a bandit clan acting on the orders of the Missing Man (Hao Nera).

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A Cut Of Cultivated Undoing

Raika’s Echo starts to dissipate from existence as her Garden, which she has been draining, refilling, and draining to the point of collapse for weeks, shrinks at last to only a single flower, darker and sharper than all the others. 

An instant later, it blooms from out of the nothingness that is what’s left of her.

The pillar of divine and undead radiance is impaled by a knife which is designed to unmake it.

Her Death made real.

Bishop Anaya’s manifestation of Death was called Dead Shadows Etched In Stone, and it embodied everything she was and turned the world into something that reflected that state. It is, as far as Raika has experienced, the pinnacle of necromancy, equivalent to a blend of Domain and Soul from a high-level cultivator. One’s Death is made more real than whatever is currently going on in the world, and changes what is around it accordingly.

Raika’s Death came at the hands of a knife made of a Soul, designed specifically and ontologically to kill her.

A garden forms and vanishes, consumed of Qi and concept almost instantly by the cost of the technique, but the array picks up the slack, funneling Mortaria’s atmosphere of necromantic energy and the leftovers of the attack from the city into a battery. Out of the Echo of what remains after the death of Raika, the woman with eyes of black flowers and corpse-flesh of worms, existence itself becomes impaled and poisoned.

Every form of energy and matter around her are stabbed and made to come apart by invisible, impossible knives of perfect Black. Dao and concept intermingle as she enacts one of the pinnacles of Death-magic and turns reality itself into an Echo of how she was murdered.

This, of course, only makes the array break down faster. 

Several of the islands, including the church below her, begin to come apart, crumbling to pieces and falling to murdered finality by the manifestation of her Death. The runes and formations implanted into them equally come under fire, acting as a feedback loop: the more they degrade, the less energy is funneled to Raika’s Death, the more of the Tribulation breaks through and melts reality beneath an impossible gaze.

It’s a losing battle from the start.

But as the defences break down further, as what’s left of Raika continues to come apart, she points her Death up.

The pillar of divine and undead radiance is impaled by a knife designed to unmake it.

Reality stutters for a moment.

Existence flickers.

Raika can feel her cognition straining, what’s left of her held just on the edge of nonexistence by the rituals set up and her own Death. She’s vanishing, bit by bit, burning through reserves she doesn’t even have while facing something she’s not currently equipped to survive. 

The infinite colors of Dao briefly become unbalanced by the Black of her Death and the force of the ritual she directs at it, but it’s no more than a hiccup. 

She has no mind with which to think.

She has no corpse with which to move. 

Even as she destabilizes divine judgment for an instant, she destabilizes it closer to the Black of final death, only worsening its harm on reality. 

She has no soul with which to become. 

But she exists. Whatever she is, Raika or no, real or no, ghost or not, she exists.

The slightest mistake means that everything collapses. All hope rests on the functioning of a nearly nonexistent being with very little mind left to work with. 

But it hurts. So she has Pain.

Her understanding of the Dao of the Blade and of Pain both infuse into her Death.

It wavers.

Existence screams as an effectively indefinite source of Qi and Death-Concept roars into it, chanelled through the arrays from the pillar she’s trapped in. Her manifestation exists outside of her, externalized into the real, briefly acting as a source of disruption to the ongoing chaos.

Not enough to stop it, but enough to open just the tiniest window where the arrays stabilize and things fall into a slight lull.

From where her corpse used to be comes a small sound.

Months of rest and recuperation, of care and preparation, all come to fruition in a single act.

Dink.

Her closest and oldest companion, by her side through the worst parts of her life, rings out loud and clear and broken and whole.

The defensive arrays were never designed to hold. Just buy time. Time paid for by A Cut Of Cultivated Undoing as well, multiplied to be strong enough to leave things already disrupted. 

Dink is, if nothing else, very good at disruption. 

A frequency matched to the reality around it travels through it, into Raika’s lingering remnants, through her Echo and out through her Death.

Around where the pillar of Tribulation radiance is impaled, it flickers. 

Then cracks.

Dink.

A Dao that Raika doesn’t quite comprehend but can recognize as based on frequencies matches and counters the thunder all around with a moment of silence. 

And then part three of the plan kicks in.

Fully manifested, A Cut Of Cultivated Undoing exists alongside the DISGUST and ATTENTION of gods-beyond-gods. 

It exists. It is realer than real, as real, for a nanosecond, as the densest thing in all of reality for continents around. 

Reality is LOOKING.

And Raika lies.

As Above, So Below

A Cut Of Cultivated Undoing is her.

A Cut Of Cultivated Undoing is not her. 

My Death Above, My Soul Below

Approximately two seconds have passed since the ritual began. 

Raika feels Pain, and little else.

She has no brain, no nerves, no memories, nothing to anchor herself to.

Above, visible even through the Tribulation, a Cold Sun stares down at existence and LOOKS at her.

What is a ghost without its death?

Nothing.

Separate and existing without any context, A Cut Of Cultivated Undoing shines as the Tribulation is impaled and altered. 

What was Raika is no more. What anchored her to herself is no more. 

Three seconds have pased since the ritual began.

Raika Sacrificed her Death beneath the eyes of every color of Dao and every drop of divine attention she could find.

In the light of a kiloton-kaleidoscope, she stops being an Echo of a Death that was. She Sacrifices what defines her and what empowers her in a suicidal act against existence and that which stands beyond it.

She stops being. 

From behind and ahead of what she was, Raika takes a bite.

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Every time Raika has performed a [TRANSCENDANT ART], it feels the same. Every time she’s performed one she’s done before, following a kind of muscle memory beyond flesh or mind, it feels like a form of Déjà vu, a weird sense that it’s the same action as the last time, even when the result is dramatically different. 

The first one she ever performed happened when she still had her Heart and its connection to existence itself, plus enough Qi to bankrupt the reserves of several sects. The following times, it felt like the pattern was carved, or like the act was just… something she could do. It still had a cost, but it more felt like the cost that got her to the point of doing it, not the cost of the Art itself.

She’s still not sure what it is that she’s doing when the “art” takes place. She’s never seen anyone else do it. She hasn’t asked, either, but Bishop Anaya seemed damned surprised when it happened with her, and no one’s had a functional response to it since she first designed them, just a blind defense or overpowering offense against her to push through them.

But through two Tribulations, a connection to the Heavenly Will subverted by fucking swallowing her Heart, Truespeak, and just being a big bitch full of Qi generators, she managed it when she fundamentally altered parts of herself. 

And every time she’s repeated an art, it’s felt the same. 

Before and after always feels different, but the act itself? Identical.

She takes a bite out of a never-ending bomb, and consumes enough Death to transform herself.

She takes a bite out of a tribulation, fused with a pillar of all-consuming Oblivion, and transforms herself.

The name of the action exists as cause and effect of its existence.

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

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The ritual preparations were more or less straightforward.

Take the final Gu, designed from one of the corpse-worms that makes up her undead body, and crack it open where her physical form used to be. 

Tank the attack from Mortaria directly, then use all of that Death to manifest her Death in a way that doesn’t require her to be connected to it and powering it, all while using Godfall’s island-armies as the medium for the arrays to make it all work.

Sacrifice her Death, then rebuild herself from it and make a new anchor out of the Gu.

Nothing all that convoluted. Pretty simple stuff, all things told. Very manageable steps.

The Tribulation was… unfortunate.

Luckily, Raika always planned for shit to go terribly wrong. Felt irresponsible not to.

That’s where Dink came in.

The ultimate safeguard. The thing / person she trusts more than anyone, which has, over the course of a few years, a ludicrous amount of energy and several dangerous encounters, gained a skillset designed around countering powerful and esoteric effects. As part of a handicap to force herself to learn and to let it rest after it literally kept her heart beating long enough for her to become undead rather than just dead-dead, it’s rested and recharged for a few months.

Against a direct Tribulation, it wouldn’t have much success. But it’s experienced two alongside her already, the first in the beast tide outside of Paleblossom, the second at the Wall, and with her Death disrupting its full power…

Dink. 

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From a cathedral overlooking a world, eyes that cannot see stare out at the shattering of an eon of work. 

On a broken throne, the greatest of corpse-gods watches as the attention of greater horrors breaks through the fabric of the sky.

And rather than bathing and eroding or transcending what it touches, is matched.

A blade of Death breaks through the attention of divinities, and then… magic.

A ringing note. Language made into spellcraft made into translated power. A bold and dramatic declaration. A Sacrifice. 

Something new.

Something sharp.

Something of an [ART].

How long since such things were wielded so lightly? How many millenia since such weapons were wielded against time and possibility as flippantly as they have been?

It was inevitable, from the moment the Blessed Mortal arrived, that things would change. More inevitable still that, after that first [ART], its mother would be a problem. 

There was a very good chance she would have been disproven. The challenge set was an arrogant thing, one full of weaknesses. A gamble on her part, and a certain bet on behalf of the house. 

A mind that is not see through eyes that are not and does not think.

The echo of those thoughts that are not echo through a world made dead from time and magic, and force it to stir. 

Before the corpse was a corpse, the Fallen Kingdom had not fallen. Before it was a corpse, hundreds of millions of lives crawled over the land, and thought, and believed, and acted, and died. 

More have died since then.

The Fallen Kingdom begins to rise. 

Millenia of dead shift and echo back throughout time and consequence and existence.

Three billion deaths begin to wake.

Around the fulcrum of a reality-breaking, demi-divine labour, existence begins to bend. 

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At the height of the world, where cold is not lack of motion but something worse and more, crystalline shapes and ethereal silence turns to look to the south and the east, at a distant glow and a painful CHANGE. Around a world-sized pool where the sun comes to breed, across thousands of valleys carved by burning, screaming wyrms, things of dark and cold break and come back together and break again, existences defined by lack and by quiet beginning to come awake.

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In burning mesas and shifting mirages, where the sun goes to rest and the world burns beneath it, scaled and winged beasts rise from their rest, turning to gaze north. The sky begins to tremble under the weight of beating wings, matched by the renewed crackling and screaming of an ever-expanding blaze of Dao and Flame. Beneath and around the fanged destroyers and the spreading inferno, wandering nomads and clay brought to life begin to shift their patterns of movement, curved blades and fluttering hives of sharp-winged critters sharpened and fed to starvation. Fractals and recursions are honed and born anew, spiraling out into the barren heat, bending all that is along their many-angled frames, and the chaos and order of strange, molten possibilities begin to sprawl outwards once more. 

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A Pillar of flesh and obsidian shudders as something echoes back along its existence. Forests of flesh and a demigod of machinery both shake in sympathy at the resonance that suddenly sings through the world. A thousand-thousand instruments and tools and artifacts of power tremble and hum with power as a mansion of meat and dimensional form whispers of things to come.

Beyond the Wall, a mortal woman feels a sharp pain, like someone has walked over her grave.

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At the far edge of the world, deeper to the west than should be possible, architectural structures begin to turn to sand. Sand turns to steel. Steel turns to form. Form turns to function, and the Gilded City begins to enact long-buried protocols once more.

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Atop a pillar that shames the Heavens and anchors the world to impossible will, a person looks out from a throne room that doesn’t exist and can’t not exist. It frowns, and tilts its head to wonder at something.

Time skips backward by a few seconds and-

Time skips backward by a few seconds and-

TIme sKIpS baCkwARd bY a fEw sEConDS aNd-

It stops. Blinks. 

And smiles.

Even as the virtue and weight of an Empire is drained away slightly faster to compensate for the many, many new ways that it has to keep reversing time and causality from an ever-increasing number of world-ending little hiccups, it smiles. It stares at the pillar of divinity and the bite taken out of it, which exists and continues to exist and has existed, an [ART] enacted on causality itself.

Well, says the person. She got there a lot faster than I thought. 

I can’t wait for her to put herself back together for me.

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A Tribulation is faced. 

A Death is made manifest. 

A Sacrifice is enacted.

A bite is taken out of reality.

How, in what ways, with what mechanics, do not matter. Who eats it, for what reason, and how it’s possible don’t matter. A [TRANSCENDANT ART] has occurred, and the mechanics of how this can be are not nearly so real as the [ART] itself.

[EAT OF THE FRUIT, GOLDEN AND RIPE]

The fruit is eaten.

Raika comes to awareness.

A chunk of existence around her is gone. Part of the church below, her Gu, a chunk of the Tribulation and her Death and her Sacrifice, all consumed.

I Am Me, I Am Mine

I Can Change

We Are What We Eat

As Above, So Below

Clad in a haze of pitch darkness and impossible, alien colors, a sea of worms forms a body from which a garden of black flowers grows. 

A Halo shaped like a pair of jaws, lit by the iridescence of Dao, lights existence out from behind her.

Raika the Broken, the Burned, the Dead, dies her final death. Even her Echo lies empty and gone to the Nothing in the sky above.

Ka Rai, Devourer of Death, Breaker of Heavens, becomes real.

And she smiles.

And her teeth are many, and their shine so bright, and the world goes quiet at her coming.

The shadow and inversion and divinity of an echo, born of Sacrifice and of divine Tribulation, comes free of herself.

Existence trembles as she laughs and cries and laughs.