Chapter 466 – Conference (Patreon)

bleh! Ended up not expanding this text, might get some heftier edits someday but I think it works well enough for now! And hell, we get some payoff in this one.

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Conflict between beings of the higher tiers is… difficult to interpret. At its most fundamental, there is simply too much happening to track, much less understand. Action and counter-action occur in milliseconds, with most higher-realm beings also capable of acting in multiple ways simultaneously. To track every parry and riposte would be an exercise of hours, days, rather than seconds. 

So, one tracks the broad strokes. And yet, this too offers limitations, because the broad strokes are often misleading, hiding feints or drawing attention to themselves while subtler attacks occur simultaneously, some of them from within the grand gestures, others hidden entirely, Beyond this, big things are made of smaller things, and to discount one for the other intrinsically limits one’s perception of the battlefield. 

Finally, there is the conceptual layer of the conflict. Beneath the complexities of Intent, Dao, Truth, and Qi’s own impossible nuances, there is the fact that at higher realms, one operates as much as an idea as they do a person. As a Soul with no biological aspects can still recreate and thus resurrect the one that birthed it, so does battle require a broader view of what conflict can even appear to be. Two ideals, two unique, singular existences, clash on an existential level, seeking to wipe each other out at any cost, and flesh is secondary. Regeneration, even in those without techniques tied to it, is fairly ubiquitous, and death comes more often from extinguishing another’s presence in the world than it does by extinguishing their biology, though both are intrinsically tied. 

The examples are myriad, but it is unlikely that anyone below the level of the combatants can ever truly comprehend the intricacies of their struggle. One might have better luck describing the intimate movements and details of two countries waging war than two higher-realm entities’ nuances while seeking to kill and die. At least with the former, the researcher has the blessing of time, however slight, and the ability to interview other perspectives. 

Watching demigods war is like watching a natural disaster, war, and weapon of mass distraction at once, all moving a hundred to a thousand times faster than a baseline mortal can even perceive. 

I do not envy those who try to seek those heights.

I much prefer the depths below. Better to be slow and certain. What use is immortality if one must spend it in a million millisecond-wars?

-Restricted treatise on the challenges of higher-realm conflicts by Researcher Wei Xiong, post recruitment for the Division of Altered Cultivation, acting as joint instructor for the Division of War and Division of Exploration.

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“Bum-bum”

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“Did you really have to dress me like this?” she asks herself.

The other her snarls and weeps and aches, and wears her own faces as robes, rolled up to keep her hands free. “I didn’t. It’s what you are.”

Raika looks down at herself, decorated in fanciful, filigreed clothing, ornate and distinctive. There are under-layers to her robe, unlike her other self, each one decorated with distinctive colors- rose, crimson, yellow, gold, purple, black, and more. There are even hints of more distinctive shades, touches of blue and green decorating the edges of some of the designs. On her head is a tiara, fit for a ruler, save that it’s half-shattered, blood leaking out from where it’s been stabbed into her skull. 

Otherwise, she’s been a bit… reduced. Most of what’s beneath the robes is a formless chunk of half-working biology, bits of metal here and there keeping it intact. However, here, she’s limbless, trapped in the seat formed beneath her, half her face obscured by blood and the other glaring at the other two people in this space.

The other Raika is tall. Her limbs are long, her torso almost stretched, leaving her painfully skinny, her frame almost starved beneath the robes. Black and red and blue, mingling together to a muddy mess shaped like her own face, screaming, repeated over and over. She wears nothing beneath, and glares at Raika with something approaching real rage in her eyes. 

Across from both of them, standing as the third point of a triangle, is a man in green. 

Well. Partially in green. Truth be told, he’s not wearing very much at all. Unlike the two Raika’s, he’s clad in little more than a black shirt and pants, his feet bare and bleeding bright green onto the nowhere they’re in. 

His face is scrubbed almost clean away.

Both Raika’s take their first long look at the details of the man who wasn’t There. 

There aren’t many.

He’s worn down, like a stone trapped beneath a river’s currents. There’s shadows where eyes should be, indentations that indicate a nose and a mouth, but all the finer intricacies of a person have been eroded. The clearest thing about him is the green bleeding from his feet, sinking roots beneath him, and the set of his face, indicating absolute focus. 

“A bit embarrassing that this is the fucker who had us run.”

The taller Raika growls. “Mmh. Not much to him.”

The blood at his feet continues to pool, digging down and out to where the man comes from. 

“Do you think he has a name?”

“I am the hand of the Feng. What use is there in giving my name to those beneath the leaves, when they cannot understand the shape of the tree?”

Both Raikas’ turn to look at each other.

“He’s pretentious enough.”

“Annoying.”

“Don’t act like you’re not scared of him.”

“He can’t kill me enough. Not before I get my hands on him.”

Raika rolls her eye, the other blinking away blood. “Sure. Which is why he’s here and not, oh, I don’t know, dead.”

Raika glares down at her, folding her arms. “I don’t see your limbless ass doing anything about it.”

The faceless man, whose name would only be a veil over the empty, gaping thing inside him, takes a step forward. 

“Oh no you don’t,” Raika snarls, taking a step forward as well. Where she was standing, bits of flesh cling, as if the bottom of her foot has partially melted and been left behind. Still, she does step forward, though she struggles to take another. 

“You know better. That’s not winning.”

Raika turns to her other self, sitting on her stupid chair with all the nice grass growing around it. “What would you know about winning? Hmm? You gave up. Betrayed us. Took everything and then didn’t rejoin.”

“Because you’d repress me at best and kill me at worst.”

“But we would be Ours. We would be Mine. That’s where we’re strongest. That’s where we thrive.”

Raika snorts. “As if you know anything about thriving. We’ve been starving since the moment we woke up, no matter how much you eat.”

“You only exist because of me! Because I succeeded! Because I survived!”

Raika exhales, her face softening. “Yeah. That’s true. But we need to do more than that.”

“Obviously!” She yells, throwing her hands up in frustration. “But first, we need to win. Otherwise, we’ll just keep getting attacked, keep getting distracted. You–”

“Me? Distracted? That’s fucking rich, coming from you. When was the last time you went worked on that internal Qi situation we turned someone to stone for? What happened to all the weapons and artifacts in the Crimson Manse? What’s the name of, oh, I don’t know, anyone you’ve modified?”

“That– that doesn’t matter.”

Her robes scream a little louder. Here, they’re barely a whisper, but Raika sees Raika flinch as if they’re much louder for her. 

“We don’t survive if we don’t win. We can’t do anything if we don’t win. That’s what matters. We– I. I don’t…”

“You don’t want to die.”

Silence.

Wherever they are, this nowhere-everywhere, echoes with the weight of it. 

It echoes again when the faceless man takes another step forward. 

The roots of green are filling more of this place now. They bleed through him, freely. He gives of himself, blindly, eyeless and unable to see around himself, unable to do anything but step forward.

Raika takes another step forward to match him, bleeding herself into the space to match him.

But she can only bleed so much, and the screams are loud enough to whisper in the air now.

“We move forward. It’s what we are.”

As if taking strength from the words, she takes another step forward. More dark blood fills the everywhere-nowhere, staining the green, washing against the grass at the other Raika’s feet. 

“Why?”

Raika flinches as if struck. 

“That’s secondary. Not important. We move forward because–”

“Because what?”

“BECAUSE NOTHING.”

The words echo in the space, and Raika’s leg cracks, a bone breaking as she forces it forward through some sort of obstacle.

“We move forward. We push past it. It hurts, and it always hurts, and we keep hurting until we win. That’s what we are.”

“You keep saying ‘we’. Like you have to convince me.”

“I don’t– You’re the one who left! You get to sit there, useless, because you took everything and left nothing for us– me!”

The faceless man takes another step forward. 

“You sound like a child.”

“And who’s fault is that?”

The words come out as a howl, echoing in the space, so loud that they hurt. The green bleeding from the faceless man shivers, but keeps coming anyways, even as Raika’s own dark crimson flags, pushed back properly for the first time.

“She died. I– you. We. We failed. We died, and we lost everything, We lost everything. Years. Years! Of fighting! Of struggling! Of growing! All to just die! To just stop! I’m not Her! You’re not Her! I won’t be Her!”

The scream comes out ragged, Raika’s expression almost matching the faces she’s wearing as armor, and she forces another step forward, even as it breaks more of her apart. She pushes back the dark, the nothing, the everything, the green of the evergreen horror behind the faceless man. 

Outside this nowhere, inside this everywhere, enchanted flesh carves at reality. Inversion of existence eats all it touches, growing larger with every bite. Glowing metal and impossible forests and strange skies clash as an army against foes that outscale them, each of them fading away while caught between the two self-destructive horrors tearing into each other and everything else.

Inside this nowhere, outside this everywhere, Raika takes another bloody, broken, desperate step forward, even as the screaming gets louder and more of her breaks. 

The faceless man matches her. He makes sound too, but it is not screaming. It’s chanting. Orders, given tactically, echoing from someplace else. Commandments and prayers, intermingling to form a wall of sound that means barely anything at all, with one exception.

The sounds mean that the work is not finished. They mean that one must advance. 

Not for fear. Not for consequence. 

Because they have to. Because they are.

“We have to fight. We are this. I am this. This is how we survive! This is how we win! So just fucking die or join, because if you don’t I’ll fucking kill you and wear you and we’ll win either godsdamned way!”

The Raika sitting on the chair in the grass lets out a slow breath. 

Down the side of her face not coated in crimson, tears have tracked a trail through the grime. 

Her eye is crystal clear when it meets Raika’s desperation. 

“I love you.”

The green shatters the space, emerald veins criss-crossing across the nothing-everything, overtaking the crimson in that instant of hesitation.

Raika steps harder, grabs hold of herself, tears out another piece and gnaws her teeth and advances– one step. A shorter one, and her heel slides back as the pressure approaching pushes against her.

“He’s– that’s not–

“Jin loves you.”

She’s expecting it this time, so she doesn’t stumble, but she doesn’t advance, either. She holds together, her grip steel-tight her teeth grit. 

“Li Shu loves you. Qen Hou. Hao Nera. Maen. Kaena.”

“Stop it. I don’t know those names.”

 “Mom and dad. Rai Ma. Hisheng. Dink. JiaJia.”

“Stop it.”

“Jin.”

“STOP.”

“I love you.”

Raika screams. 

Beside her, Raika leans her head against her shoulder, the seat everywhere and nowhere, as is she. The grass burns, giving space to forest saplings and blood, losing territory moment by moment, but she doesn’t fight. 

“I know why we move forward.”

Raika sobs. 

Her face looks almost identical to the ones making up her robes. Torn apart by anguish. By fear. By pain.

“It hurts so much,” she whispers to herself. “It all hurts so much.”

Raika smiles softly. 

“It’s More Than Just Pain.”

Raika exhales. Shaky. The green snakes forward more, more aggressively, hungry, blind to the emotion before them, emotionless in their advance. 

A perfected plague. Never mindless, but always without the empathy or emotion to ever change that mind. A million million minds, worth only as much as they push the objective forward, manifesting as a faceless thing that does not even know why it is faceless, and does not care.

“You’ll keep going?” Raika asks.

“We will,” Raika promises.

A breath. 

The green has overtaken almost everything now. There is the dark, and the green, together in holy violence, and there is the rapidly transforming, vanishing, dying red.

“I’m sorry.”

“I love you.”

Raika takes broken hands to her face, tearing into the flesh.

“Be better than me.”

“You already are.”

A soft laugh.

“Fuck you too.”

She rips herself in half.

For a moment, there are a thousand of her, wrapped tight in chains made of suffering and desperation. 

Then there are robes fluttering in the nothing.

Then just fabric.

Then Raika picks up the fabric that was her with the hands that are her, and turns to the faceless man.

“It won’t be enough,” he says, his voice merely the shape of the thing actually speaking.

“Yeah, probably not,” Raika agrees. “But I think she will be.”

A moment of confusion.

Then the dark, that which the green spread through, that which crafted for it a path, roils.

Out of it, from behind the faceless man, a hand rises. 

It is holding his hand, like it was always there, large enough to encircle his entire torso, its many, many fingers all daggers of violent nothingness. 

For a milisecond, Raika sees a glimpse of the man he might have been. The shape of someone else, hidden by the paths not taken. 

He looks like a person. 

He looks surprised.

Then there is a faceless green thing, an extension of a horror so much further away, and it is turning to face the thing from the hand and it is furious–

A pair of jaws, full of needle sharp fangs, larger than a house, eats him in one bite.

The green vanishes, snuffed out like a light, devoured away into the same dark that they strode in on, that was so large a part of this everywhere and nowhere.

Raika looks into the dark.

The dark smiles back at her.