Chapter 429 - Hello World (Patreon)

Down to the wire but it's still wednesday!

Edit: nevermind, prepping the chapter took a literal minute. Smh.

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“Hello world”

Those were the only words we found. Deep under the ground in that sacred site, carved into a wall, alongside a bunch of other seemingly random squiggles. Like an attempt at imitating language, all the way until it actually came through. 

“Hello world”. A greeting. And it felt… it didn’t seem aggressive. Like it was… maybe like it was celebrating being able to say it. 

They burned the place to the ground. Almost with us in it. Then they sent in a squad of Imperial troops, wearing that golden armor that lets them fly and break mountains, and they went down into those tunnels. 

There was… a sound. Like a whistle, maybe. Like a scream. High pitched. Desperate. 

They came out carrying something. I didn’t get a good look at it, but it felt heavy somehow, even while they were lifting with that armor.

I don’t know why, but when I looked at it, I just felt… sad.

“Hello world”. 

Whatever was down there when we found those words is gone now. Just scorched stone and collapsed tunnels. The words were gone too, like they’d just erased that part of the wall. Not even a scorch mark, just a void where it was, like someone took the whole wall and vanished with it. 

I wish I’d never read those words. Wish that I didn’t still wonder about them. I think whatever wrote them regrets them almost as much as I do.

-Journal entry of Inner Disciple Qian Yazhu of the Formless Divine Scriptures sect

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“So. You can speak.”

Raika uses thousands of interlaced and interconnected cerebral nodes to very carefully decide not to say anything.

“Speak, spirit. To confront a Warrior Realm master, you used tactics. Technique. Intellect. You are aware, and you can hear us.”

Really takes a lot of thought to decide that probably the very best thing to do is to keep not fucking talking. Easiest way to get them to go back to just ignoring her, probably. Or at least not talking to her. She has other stuff to do.

“Your Intent is obvious, entity,” says one of the Peak of the Azure Serpent elders. “Do not play games with us.”

Nope. No games. Not a one.

It’s fine. If they attack her, then she can deal with them. Maybe. Probably. Thinking that far ahead is easier than thinking that far back, but not by all that much. She can circle back to them later, and if they’re so impatient as to try and force the conversation, then she can talk to them. 

Her awareness outside herself dissolves back into background noise as her focus shifts elsewhere.

The main priority is the captured Feng. Ironically easier to contain than to kill- outside of some really dramatic ideas that she’d rather not test inside her own body-world, she doesn’t really have the finishing power necessary to wipe him out. Trapped inside her territory, though, he’s at just as much of a disadvantage as she was inside his Domain, but worse, because he’s just one person and she is Raika.

The inverted pyramid sits deep inside her guts, a bit below the metaphysical “center” of her body. Full of as much or more Qi than she packed into her bombs, she’s worked to make it stable this time, creating feedback loops that output energy into the ideas of containment and restriction. She’s making it vibrate with screams designed to disrupt its prisoner, the bones and quartz crystal and biosteel she’s forged it from are each drenched in energy, drawing constantly from the rest of her system to brute force the containment.

Within it, there are shadows and leaves. There are sharp edges and strange symbols that crawl up and down the walls, through the air itself, moving impossibly and trying to force reality into a new shape.

But it’s inside of her. She is reality inside here, and her will is enough to shift every surface and every rune freely. 

The Feng seems to instinctively understand that summoning his Domain will only delay the inevitable. More forest for her to consume, varying the pace a bit but buying him very little in terms of time or space, and whatever his technique is, it seems to have minimal spatial ideas to it. It would only exist within the pyramid, unable to spread past the seas of Qi containing it.

A trump card, maybe, but not enough of a sure one for him to gamble with it. He seems slower, much more hesitant than before, and she wonders if breaking his Domain as she did has consequences. Maybe he’s suffering backlash as well as everything she’s doing to him.

All the better. Like licking at a piece of cold fruit, tasting every drop of juice and condensation, she wears him down bit by bit. Another battle of attrition, their positions inverted, his fate much more certain than hers.

But not dead yet. Important to remember.

She’ll have to operate at limited capacity until she’s done digesting him. More of her interior landscape will have to be modified towards Qi production rather than mutation or general projects. Anything less might mean she slips up and lets some of the barriers weaken, and she’s not so stupid as to think that the Feng doesn’t have some way out. 

Or at least it thinks it does. Even as she licks away the shadows and forests and sharp edges of the thing she’s contained, it continues to generate more arrays and formation-sigils, forcing her to constantly unmake them before they’re completed, forcing her to watch constantly. 

All this magic stuff is hard to handle. It requires more understanding and cleaner thinking than she has, and offers a lot more options than she currently has, but without a medium to exist upon and constantly disrupted by the screaming of the cage, she keeps ahead of it.

And for all that she’s annoyed by the amount of power and thinking she has to do here, there are advantages.

The Feng is delicious.

Simply by being inside of her, it’s making fresh greenery bloom inside of her, life Qi aspected towards flora blending with her greater stores to become something new. 

Mountains and open plains and rivers start to bloom with fresh growth, blending into a more complex habitat, even as more shadows appear in spite of the sourceless light of her inner body. 

It blends lovely with the water cultivator that’s currently orbiting in her “sky”, making the world just that little bit wetter, adding humidity and pools to it. 

The latter is contained much more thoroughly than the Feng is, but that’s fine. The Feng will break before she does, and even if it doesn’t, she’s good at coming back from being broken. 

It’s contained, stunned, and bleeding. That buys her time to prepare until it recovers enough to try to escape properly. 

There’s pressure at the fold in space and the growths outside of it. Mostly a mountain, pressing down on her, but the two water-things are pushing in as well. Each one of them would take at least similar effort to beat back as the Feng, and just that one Feng almost cost her everything. She really should check to see if her bluff is working.

Later. More to check on. 

She drifts away, leaving the chunk of herself dealing with the prison behind to check on the trial grounds. A few people were hurt or “killed” in the mess of a fight outside, but the Raikas in the labyrinth proper did their work well, and no one’s been lost. Most of the areas that were damaged have been repaired and restored, and the few who suffered unfair losses are actively being compensated for it.

The trial grounds are also, by far, the area least affected by the world-quakes she went through.

Some of the mountain range at her edge has crumbled, trapping one cultivator beneath a rockslide and killing two more outright, past the point of recovery. A few of the eye-pools have collapsed, the mass of wound-vines has migrated a few miles “north”, and a huge chunk of the plains of the flesh-savanna have broken open, cracking along fault-lines of muscle and bone to leave gaping chasms. 

Ironically, the damage has left her bleeding out into herself, dumping even more Qi into the space around her. Unable to grab hold of it directly, she’s forced to rearrange parts of the landscape to accumulate it passively, but the sheer amount has raised the ambient levels of Qi in the air by a lot. 

Most of her Qi gets absorbed directly by her body. The blood that gushes from her wounds, bright red and tinged purple, radiates uneaten Qi out into her empty cavities.

Some of the few disciples left outside the trial grounds have started to experience results from the new Qi levels. Only a few minutes have passed since the battle with the Feng, but already some of them are starting to show signs of cancer and minor mutations. She sweeps through them, unmaking and absorbing the worst changes, but lets them keep being affected by the levels as they wish. Considering their bodies and how “baseline” most of them are, this should be plenty useful to them. 

A river washes over some of her trees outside the fold. When its banks have shifted back out of existence, everything the waters covered is just gone.

She’ll be right there. Just a moment.

There are a little under a hundred cultivators still stable and mobile inside of her. There are double their number in stored biologies, kept alive and ready to be restored, and another three-hundred who died before she got woke back up to herself. 

For the most part, she’s been gifting weapons and biological changes. She doesn’t exactly have techniques for them, or knowledge she can share, but they haven’t been left destitute. She can guess by their behavior that pieces of her are incredibly valuable, especially when it’s shaped to some of her more unique “organs” (like flowers, rocks, and all the like). Even without those natural treasures, everyone inside her has likely gained a few more decades of life and considerable vitality, and that’s without factoring the unique rewards she’s handing out in the trial grounds.

Not bad. Not perfect, and there’s plenty of people whining, but she’s pretty happy with the gifts. She’s been more than generous.

Still, many of the cultivators seem drained. In spite of the ways their bodies are fueled by being flooded with so much life-aspected Qi and vital energies, all of them have been awake for a few days now, facing deadly dangers and an actively changing world around them. 

She probably should make some more safe areas. Places for people to rest. Maybe she might even have them leave soon, if she gets bored of this. 

There’s just so much to do. She’s already learned so much from them, and she’s barely had any time to integrate it into herself. 

At minimum, there are other cultivators she could make into obelisks.

She probably has time for just one more thing. Which, like all the other things, is technically a lot of things, but still- one category. 

Conscious, aware of the dangers, given time to work, she starts making more bombs.

Not nearly so unbalanced as the last generation, though. She has to be more careful and more frugal with her Qi supplies, tracking the details of what kinds of materials and the concepts they’re connected to that she can use, but she also has time to dedicate thought to it. The first generation of the bombs were simple things, made to destabilize immediately, but she has new ideas.

Larger yield, for one. She can make each bomb its own Qi generator, friction of Qi-rich materials gradually increasing its internal stores. Designs with more controls, more muscle and reactive tissues, will ensure that the bombs can build up for longer before exploding, even though they start off weaker than the last versions. More directional spasms, thicker materials to ensure they don’t detonate prematurely and wipe out whole chunks of herself, and long tubes they can grow in, like quivers for arrows, ready to be launched by spasming contractions.

The bombs were a good start.

Then she turns to the wound-vines.

A part of her, awake and aware, but not identifying with this part of her. They are both the same thing, which is not Her but which is what comes after, and she can control it. If it could properly self-identify, it could probably change her just as easily, but luckily, its mind is simple, focused on pain and hunger.

She starts feeding it more Qi. 

It’s a semi-contained system. Not quite a spirit beast, not quite a construct, the life-forms inside of her (which are her, and are not her) can grow just like the rest of her. Like feeding one of the bacteria inside of one’s stomach, she starts empowering the piece of Raika that’s crawling across her plains, guiding its mutations subtly.

She extends the same attention to the snake in the air, long, kelp-like tendrils festooned with mouths all chomping at nothing in their confusion. She repeats the process with a lumbering, shelled thing, deep within the mountains, and then again to a cluster of not-quite-fish that swim through “soil” as easily as “air”. 

She fought alone, as a singular. She doesn’t have to do that. Even if they only serve as distractions against the real enemies, more tools are more tools.

The part of her outside the fold sends a pulse of panic through the rest of the system, and she sinks into herself to emerge outside.

The mountain, Warrior realm elder of the Peak of the Iron Tortoise, stands poised to roll over her like a shadow over the sun’s light, blotting out the world.

She reviews memories at a near instantaneous speed, reviewing what was said, what was implied, what was asked. 

Not much, as it turns out. They decided to move to threats pretty quickly.

Taking one of the bundles of tissue she’s saved from death and kept ready for reconstruction, she rebuilds one of the brown-robed disciples and spits them out of one of the “trees” in the smoking crater the fold in space inhabits.

He falls to his knees, vomiting out amniotic fluid and gasping desperately. His cultivation flares blindly, the pattern so disorganized and chaotic that he approaches Qi deviation. 

Before his spiritual organs can collapse, the elder is beside him. A wave of his hand does something to space that has the disciple vanish, and she detects the piece of herself she left in him miles away with the others of his faction.

She rebuilds another fallen cultivator, spitting them out. One of the blue-faction folks this time. 

This time, the elders hesitate a bit longer than before. Confusion, looking for a trap, all good instincts. 

She spits out a third, and retracts a bit more of herself through the fold. 

But she also doesn’t move from where she is, or say a single word.

The rival elders all look at each other.

As one, they seem to come to some sort of conclusion.

“Call the flesh-tamers. Perhaps their more unorthodox methods might allow us the insight we need.”

Hmm.

Not the worst thing she’s heard. 

It’ll be fine.