Chapter 491 – Ok, Just A Five Minute Break (Patreon)

And we're back! Like I said, we're past the halfway mark, so while we won't be doing away with the slice-of-life goodness, it's still the central focus, I do want to keep the ball rolling on offering new plot progression and glimpses of what everyone else is doin. Enjoy!

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ORACULAR REPORT 

FOURTH RING, EAST-NORTHEAST-SOUTHEAST QUADRANTS

SYSTEM-WIDE ALERT. MAJOR REPORT INCOMING. 

THE SKEINS OF FATE ARE BROKEN. THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE IS LOST TO CHAOS. AN AVATAR OF THE GREAT CHANGE AND END STRIDES FORTH. 

AVATARS OF DIVISION ACTIVELY ENGAGING ON THE FIELD. DAEMONIC RESOURCES HAVE BEEN ACTIVATED. THE SKEINS OF FATE REMAIN CLOUDED. SUCCESS OF OPERATIONS UNCLEAR. 

STATUS OF IMPERIAL FORCES:

CATASTROPHIC LOSSES. QUARANTINE FAILED. ENEMY ADVANCE HALTED. ONTOLOGICAL SPREAD UNCONTAINED. 

RECOMMENDATION: REALLOCATION OF FORTRESS-CITIES 142 THROUGH 224 AND THE GREAT EASTERN BASTION TOWARDS THE BREACH. REALLOCATION OF SKYSHIP 2 TO ACTIVE ASSAULT AND FORWARD ADVANCE. ENGAGEMENT OF TEMPORAL CONTINGENCY 7-ALEPH. 

–Broadcasted transmission from the Division of Divination to the first ring, Central, the Feng Clan, and the headquarters of the Division of War, approximately six months prior to modern data. Oracular reports since then have been minimal relating to the eastern Breach.

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“Damn, but you have been busy.”

Rai Ka shrugs. “Yeah, well, can’t have Pillar doing all the work. It would if we let it, only problem is that it’s not really very good at some of it. Price of optimizing, you know?”

“I understand. Many of my compatriots are the same way, to their benefit and detriment.”

“Yeah! Tons of people are stupid! Especially if they have feathers!”

Rai Ka sighs, turning to look at the smaller woman cradling a cup of tea on the floor, sitting cross-legged and in blood-stained rags. 

“Sakihebi, I understand that you’re new to the whole ‘being people’ thing, but it’s usually frowned upon to discriminate based on superficial features.”

Aurick snorts, inhumanly horse-like. “No, Sakihebi’s right, most beasts with feathers are particularly stupid. It’s not racist if it’s true.”

“Ok so you do know what racism is?”

He stares at her, holding his own cup of tea in a single hand as he lounges on a nearby boulder, draped over soft moss. 

“Rai Ka, one third of the Pack literally spends their formative years eating the others. Beasts eat each other and steal food and harass and manipulate each other every moment of every day, all years round. It would be weirder if we didn’t have racism. Also, it’s not racism if it’s about species.”

“That’s… not how it works, I don’t think.”

“Sure it does,” says the greater beast, shrugging. “Those humans will pick on the dumbest things and make up a whole story about it. Beasts are different. It’s not culture, just the cruelties of nature and the Will of the Heavens. Life just picks the way that works for the moment, and that includes creating itself to eat other forms of life, and that carries over.”

“Yeah! And birds are stupid!”

Aurick sighs, rolling his eyes. “Birds that are not spirit beasts tend to have different priorities in their survival mechanisms and their lives, Sakihebi. And if they didn’t, you’d have much more trouble eating them, wouldn’t you!”

“Yeah! And– hey! Wait a second, you calling me stupid?”

She hisses, her lower body starting to branch out. One leg becomes two, then four, then many, the snake-like scales appearing on them occasionally multiplying to coat them and start turning them truly serpentine.

“I’m not stupid! It’s the birds that are dumb, I’m smart!” 

“Sakihebi. Remember what we talked about?” Rai Ka interrupts. 

She grumbles, but the legs retreat back into a more human-centric bipedal form, and the pressure from her starts to decrease. For a few hundred meters all around them the world has gotten flattened, as if massive serpentine flesh has slithered over it with enough weight to smush stone and dirt alike equally flat. What’s left of the plant-life all around, with the exception of the moss protected by Aurick’s own aura, has dissolved into a toxic slurry, a slime which bears no semblance to the life it came from and which emanates venomous fumes that flicker with the possibility of fire and lightning and ozone.

Rai Ka tugs on another part of herself, and Pillar responds. In an instant, the world is reshaped back to its prior form, pressure and energy and gravity and space and chemistry all blending together in a complex act of industrialized power. 

They’re back in an open field, surrounded by bright skies and tall grasses, and what’s left of Sakihebi’s toxic Qi is rapidly drained away into the soil and the flesh beneath it. 

“And what do we do when we make a mistake, Sakihebi?” Aurick asks, his finger-hooves clicking and clacking together to call her attention back. 

“I didn’t do anything dumb! It’s normal! It’s not my fault that this place is all skinny and weak!”

“But did you intend to kill all that grass and crush the hillsides?”

“...no.”

“So we say…?”

“...sorry.”

“Good.”

Rai Ka takes a sip of her tea, smiling at the play-by-play. In spite of Sakihebi’s nature as a Divine Beast, large and strong enough to make a whole land uninhabitable for millenia, to lead a war against a sect or two all on her own, she’s young to being a person. Most of the Pack are, down at their core. 

“Hey! I can feel you thinking about me over there!” Sakihebi grumbles at Rai Ka. Which might well be true, actually. Intent is funny like that, as are the truly enhanced senses of a cultivator or beast alike. “I told you, I’m not stupid!”

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Sakihebi,” Rai Ka admits honestly. “You’re very smart. I just think it’s interesting that you’ve lived long enough to have known my parent’s-parent’s-parent’s-parent’s-parents, at least, but there’s still to much to learn. Makes me think of all the different ways that people can be.”

“I don’t have to learn all that much! I’m a genius! I learned how to talk human all on my own!”

“You are a genius, and that is incredibly impressive.”

Sakihebi’s first instinct is to grumble and growl, to try and pick a fight or retreat, but Intent is funny like that. There’s nothing of dishonesty in Rai Ka’s speech, and the active Intent that she transmits is one of peace and genuine interest. And, as always, Intent is the language without lies. 

“You’re right it is! I’m right it is! Hmph!”

The “younger” beast, a few thousand years old at the least, sips at her tea triumphantly, gulping it down loudly and impolitely, just like a child. Because in many ways, relative to a human, she is a child. All of that learning has to be filtered through a mind completely and utterly alien to a human’s neurochemistry, without any socialization or guidance. It’s a miracle that any Beast ever makes it to the level of interacting “as a human”, so to speak, even the sapient ones. Maybe especially the sapient ones, in a funny way. 

Rai Ka sighs, taking a sip of her own tea. 

It’s disgusting. Terrible. Insufferably bad. It’s the nightmare of every tea drinker alive, over-steeped, put on too high, with a mix of old mold and fragrant fresh tea leaves at once. 

It’s also delicious. 

Damn her for figuring that out for herself. She’ll never hear the end of it. She still enjoys regular tea, made properly, and she makes this tea with all of the care and honor and attention that conventional tea demands. But compared to the nuances of bad tea? The complexities of the clashing ingredients, the nuances of flavors only she can enjoy? There’s no comparison. The her back in that little fishing village is just the worst. How dare she figure out things that they like and which profoundly appeal to herself?

“Buuuuut…” she says, leading Sakihebi forward.

“...But I made a mistake.” Sakihebi admits. There’s a grumbly quality to it, just like a child having to begrudgingly own up to their own foolishness, which of course didn’t feel foolish at the time. 

“Good. And where we’re going?”

“No mistakes.”

“Right.”

The snake-beast sighs, then holds out her empty tea cup. 

Rai Ka reaches out of herself with some good tea, at least relative to the snake beast. It involved brewing a lot of fur and then filtering it out very carefully, but apparently, she enjoys it, and that’s what matters. 

“I still think the plan’s not going to work in the slightest,” Aurick chimes in.

Rai Ka turns, her antlers tilting as she looks over at the elder beast. “And yet, you seem so very much alright with going along with it.”

“Well of course. It’s what the Pack needs. And what my Apexes demand. Ergo, it is where I shall go, and I shall endeavor to do so to the best of my ability.”

Again, a very human sort of philosophy, in a very inhuman sort of way. After all, Aurick’s instincts with being part of a herd blend with his Truths, and that, combined with the flesh and mind of something almost human, becomes a genuine idea, a genuine philosophy, a set of ideals which it lives by. The intersection of rationalization and transformation, where instinct turns to comprehension turns to choice. 

It’s all so fascinating. Every time. 

Not that she’s any different. 

Rai Ka takes another sip of the terrible tea that Raika figured out for her, and herself, and all of them. She lets out a contented sigh, a wave of energy emerging from her as she does. 

The wind that blows from her is flavored by sunlight made of Plasma and roiling magic. Beneath that, there is the ever-changing lore of Flesh, imbued within the legend of CHANGE, wrapped in woodlands and mud and ever-evolving biology and alien dreams. 

It flows from her, out into the world, directed by her careful hand, and transforms all that it touches. It mingles with the control of a being so old that it remembers when the stars were different, fusing with the flow of Qi in the air, turning world-spanning currents into something slightly different than before.

And deep beneath it all, the Pillar tracks it, and quantifies it, and uses it for their benefit. 

Many-Mouths, in the whispering of the wind and the shifting of gravity and the tilting of leaves and water in the clouds, sends a bit of appreciation through Intent. Rai Ka sends a burst of it back with her next breath, a constant back and forth of communication beyond language and words. 

It’s one of the many, many, many conversations she’s having. Covering almost half the world, through the filters of seven different self-identities, which are all parts of one identity, which each have tens or hundreds of thousands of brains worth of neurology working all together. 

And she’s busy. 

She takes a third and final sip of tea, wrapping up what’s left in the cup except for the dregs. Barely a few minutes worth of peace, and it’s almost sinful, finishing the tea so quickly, no matter how theoretically disgusting it is, but… as it must be. 

There’s ever so much to do before the war becomes the War. 

The War to end the world. The War to break existence and to leave its pieces ready to be remade. The War against and for the END.

Scary shit. Big shit. Heavy. And if it’s going to go any way other than absurdly badly, there’s some things she has to do first. 

Breaks are important. They’re crucial for a person’s health and well-being, no matter what form that person takes, no matter what their origin or shape or form or function. How that break looks differs, obviously, but it remains crucial nonetheless. 

She exhales again, letting her inner world saturate reality and giving its weight over to the Heart of the Divine Will, Many-Mouths, to manage. To transform things with.

To prepare with.

“Are you leaving again?” Sakihebi asks.

“Yep. I have to go back to work. Still lots to do.”

“Should I go too?”

“Not yet,” Rai Ka says, shaking her head. “You’re important. People need to see you present, here, at the front of the charge. Half the beasts here still see you as the avatar of the Apexes, at least of the ones that talk.”

“Yeah, but… everyone’s so busy.”

“You’ll be busy too. Soon. Just don’t be mean to the birds, all right? They’re just as much different from non-beast birds as you are from a non-beast serpent. Got it?”

“Mmmh. Fiiiiine.”

Rai Ka gets up, cracking her neck one way, then the other. Her antlers, glowing with the divine iridescence of Dao garden inside her, catch the light as she does, shifting one way, then another. She stands almost eight feet tall, her legs digitigrade and with sharp claws at their ends, her hands clawed to match. Her flesh is half-crimson, half-gold, half-rich dark brown, with hints of night and starlight in every part of her that’s not directly in the light, and her tail is a long, sinuous thing, half-scaled and half-furred and half-feathered, glowing with strange fire from little vents along it. 

That she was once human is noticeable. That she is not is far clearer. 

She is a titan. An alien thing, whose eyes glow with the transcendent light of CHANGE, whose antlers cradle the sky and are rooted of the earth. Whose teeth gnaw at the meat of the real, sharp and beautiful, and whose arms, all four of them, glow with the barely contained energy of something greater than reality. 

Her Heartbeat thrums, and it is music that reshapes the world. 

Beyond flesh. Beyond cultivation. Flesh of Concept and Soul, body of Dao and Truth. 

Her shadow moves too. 

It is not a shadow, really. It’s an absence. So vast and so profound, and made entirely of the inverse of a world’s worth of screaming, agonizing flesh. The shadow of the divine, made entirely of the inverse of magic and biology both. 

That’s most of what Akiar does. Sit, and watch, and, on occasion, absorb something new into herself. Demons are funky like that. 

“Right. Back at it, then.”

“Oh, surely you must have a few more moments,” Aurick says, waving his own ceramic tea-cup jestingly. “Come on, tell us another story about how the world is terrible and needs breaking and reforming. I’ll even stop pointing out the blatant biases you have this time!”

“Don’t you dare,” she retorts. “It would be insufferably boring to just listen to myself talk the whole time. Do you have any idea how much I do that every day? I crave outside perspectives.”

“All the more reason to stay!”

She sighs, genuinely tempted… and then shakes her head. “No, I need to go. I’m still putting the finishing touches on the Republic, and Kai Ra wants to switch places with me for a bit so I can poke at the Church some more. And someone needs to make sure that the Flame doesn’t cause any more trouble as it expands. We’re meeting more potential Pack members, sure, but the further south we go, the weirder things are getting. I’d rather have my full focus ready to swing that way when the time comes, and that means I need to get as much done beforehand as possible.”

Aurick snorts, the braying exhale of a horse mixed with the derision of an old man who has thoughts and opinions on just about everything. 

“Oh please. I’ve seen what you’ve done with that stone hand, and they’re not going to stop being a mess just because you took an extra few days on them. And Sakihebi and I have our hands full dealing with all these new beasts. You’re just too nutritious, dear. Take a few more moments, won’t you?”

She rolls her eyes, and pointedly ignores the way his Intent flavors ever so slightly with the same heat he always gets when she stretches in front of him. Lord Aurick has not been shy about the appeal of her demi-divine form, though she hasn’t been shy about her total lack of reciprocal interest either. 

“Some other time, and also never. The more I do, the better off we’ll be, the better off we are, the more other people can do, and then the more I can do. I like that cycle. I’m planning to keep it up. You two should keep it up as well.”

“Well, perhaps if we had some additional rations…”

“I’ll send Pillar a message to look back over its resource allocations. In the meantime–”

And then she groans, because now she has to stay for a little bit.

“Gods-damnit.”

“What?” Sakihebi asks, misreading Rai Ka’s tone. “Did something happen? Should I kill it? I can–”

“No, it’s just… one of my kids just did something so stupid and adorable, and now I have to sit here and think about it for a minute.”

Aurick nods sagely. “Breaks are good for the soul, dear.”

“Oh shut up, I taught you that.”

“Oh, you taught me how to say it. But my wisdom is ancient, as are my many skills. Now are you going to brag about your child to us for the next ten minutes, or is the world actively ending?”

Raika grumbles, growling and mumbling something under her breath.

No, the world isn’t ending. 

“I mean, he’s just… they’re good fucking kids, and they’re growing up, and it’s just so aaaaaaah!”

Damn her other self for having the slow-life credentials to offer perspective and safety and the opportunity to grow in dynamic and organic ways! Damn her!

Rai Ka’s forehead pulses with a single vein as Akiar has the fucking nerve to giggle at their shared suffering.

Truly, the burdens of sanity weigh heavy.