Chapter 495 – Unexplored Facets (Patreon)

Alright. I'm not exactly out of the sunken place, but I'm in the mud, fingers digging into the dirt, dragging my way back up and crawling like a worm through time. Enjoy flavor, we got a new chapter, we'll see if I can ride this quick little manic high to do two in one day again. Way to break the break, right?

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What is a spirit? What is a ghost? What is a concept? What is the Dao?

I don’t fucking know. It’s sort of a bunch of things at once. It’s kind of a nightmare to figure out, hard as hell to understand, and exponentially more difficult than either to actually fucking explain. I don’t fucking know what it is, and anyone who tells you they do and gives you a straight answer is an absolute liar or the kind of idiot that all other idiots can never aspire to reach in terms of sheer stupidity. I fucking hate explaining the Dao.

I am also a shitty fucking teacher, and I hate explaining shit in general. Fuck you for asking, you’ve caught me in a good mood, and if you ever ask me something like this again I’ll peel your skin off one strip at a time. It’ll take me seven hours and three minutes, four minutes if you squirm, and you’ll be awake the entire time, I guarantee it. 

Anyways. The Dao. And spirits. And ghosts and concepts. Right. What were–

Right! They’re the same thing. That’s the big secret. 

…

Yeah. Obviously. If that’s not enough for you to figure it out, then I’m wasting even more of my time than I thought, which means I will also happily debone you. Seriously, I am significantly more entertained by skinning and deboning you than I am explaining this. Why the fuck am I explaining this to you? Fuck it, whatever, we’re this far. 

Dao’s everything. Everything that exists, that can exist, that will and has and might exist, it’s all Dao. So what the fuck is the point of trying to explain it? I can’t explain to you everything. That’s stupid. Technically some stuff isn’t the Dao, like Truth, but that’s sort of superficial, Like sure, it didn’t exist before you made it, so it’s not technically included in the Will of Heaven and all that, but the Will of Heaven is a bunch of blind idiot tyrant children waving a hand at shit and saying “yeah that’s how it is and that’s how it should be so fuck you.” So yeah, it’s not the Will of Heaven, but it’s still Dao, even though it’s not Dao Dao, like–

Don’t look at me like that. I’ll peel all your muscles off of your veins. Then what’ll you do, huh? Bunch of organs and veins and nerves just screaming with no teeth. Alright. Fuck you. 

Spirits are Dao. Ghosts aren’t Dao, but they are if you squint, and concepts are more Dao than anything else, but they’re not all of it. And the difference between Dao and not-Dao is a stupid nothing, and I hate you for asking, and you should go kill yourself, because the minute I get up off this couch, I’m hunting you down and slurping your veins off of you like noodles. Seriously. There’s literally nowhere you can run fast enough. It’ll be fun to watch you try but you should really do your best to just murder the fuck out of yourself as thoroughly as you can, because I will find whatever’s left of you and bring you back. Hearts are fun like that, you give them a little biological framework to play with and they can rebuild your brain out of whatever hole you blasted in it. It’ll be great. You know what, I can’t really explain how great it’ll be, I’ll just have to show you. Soon as I finish my wine. 

–Kai, the Fourth Blade, speaking at a scheduled appearance to provide inspiration to the Empire’s youth and next generation. Organizer of the event was summarily executed for gross incompetence and active treason (and, unofficially, stupidity).

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Pillar Unit 6452-C stares up at perhaps the third largest snake it has seen. 

The Sky-Eater, that impossible serpent of infinite limbs and all-devouring shadow, still ranks the highest. Its form could have encircled half the Morae, and that republic is vast enough to sit on its own isolated tectonic plate and be seen from orbit. A close second was a long skeleton, long left to rot along the north-northwestern corner of the world, between ice and gold, also visible from orbit but without all the hands. 

This one beats out Sakihebi’s scale primarily through its girth. 

More like a salamander than a “snake” per se, its body is wide, its mouth a massive crevice one could fit a city within, its eyes each large enough for schools of fish to swim freely. 

It squats, regally, its presence transforming the world and altering the space its in with the weight of its power. 

Unit 6452-C looks down at the flickering cluster of embers beside its primary anchor-point (its legs). 

Query: Designated target for negotiation? It asks through the language of Intent and inter-Raika telepathy.

Big Snake, the little embers respond. 

Right. Pillar isn’t sure what else it expected. 

Big Snake stares down at the both of them.

All three of the strange beasts stare at each other, a bit awkwardly. 

Pillar landed in a sandy savana, with solid ground rather than dunes but showing marks of constant erosion. The surrounding space seems almost glass-like, and the wind picks up the dust and sharpened grains of sand and moves them at speeds comparable to a hurricane’s force. The few plants that exist are hardy things, all but the barest tips of their branches hidden deep underground, their leaves only barely visible as glowing, sandy organs seen in cracks in the earth. 

The land is perfectly flat in every direction, save where the mound of reptile stares in front of them. 

Unit 6452-C has not been idle in the microseconds since it arrived. It has, in fact, spent the entirety of that time actively engaging its sensors, allowing for all forms of passive sensory analysis to interpret the entity before it in its entirety. Without pushing its senses forward or imposing itself upon the world, the unit simply opens its receptors, allowing a dozen eyes (which are, themselves, compound structures, holding a few hundred more eyes), three different auditory systems tuned to different frequencies, an infrared, ultraviolet, spatial, and electromagnetic set of senses to interpret its surroundings. Alongside that, dozens upon dozens of brains, each encoded into spatially-warped chambers inside it and designed around the sort of logical, non-sentient thought processes that Pillar has pioneered, examine every data point, cross-referencing with each other, checking for cognitohazardous information, and verifying every bit of info that comes in. 

The entity is classifiable as a Divine Beast level existence, approaching the upper quarter-quadrant of the info that Pillar possesses on that particular form of being. It extends approximately seven hundred feet from one edge of its face to the other, with a mouth that curls slightly past that. Its body length approaches 2.7 miles long. Its scales shine and do interesting things in the light of the Sun above, inciting a series of memories to be crystallized into patterns within Pillar’s frame for later analysis. 

“Are you attempting to communicate?” Pillar asks through Unit 6452-C, first in Intent, to allow for perfect clarity. When no response immediately arrives, Pillar repeats the message verbally, through writing, through different languages it is aware of, and even through patterns of interpretive Qi transmissions.

The “Big Snake” makes a sound, which, upon analysis, seems to be something of a burp. A little bubble of gas, large enough to be a dangerous emission of methane and carbon dioxide, but so small compared to the beast that it’s less than a hiccup. Then it makes a wriggling sound, a single muscle group adjusting its posture on the ground, leaving a miles-long depression in the sand.

There is no Intent in the act. No real sign of sapience at all, actually. 

Cautiously, Pillar extends its awareness forward, pushing its more paranatural sensory suite rather than passively intaking data. 

Conceptual data at the superficial level: hunger, satiation, growth, peace, stability, comfort, scale, scope, simplicity. 

“Cultivation” analysis: approximating Warrior Realm tiers of strength, equivalent to the Divine Beast category of bestial cultivation. However, noted concerns relating to classification: lack of overall Qi density, lack of notable Soul, lack of profound / unique qualities often indicative of Divine Beast status.

Analysis of Dao: 

FLAME.

That last one seems particularly important, considering how it nearly screams against Pillar’s senses. It cross-references the depth its just experienced, how loud the Will of the Heavens just spoke, and takes note of the fact that this deeper layer seems almost separate from the “conceptual” data at a higher tier. 

Language is simplistic. Annoying, that. There is only so much that certain things can be quantified and labelled, when so much of existence and sapience is experiential and perspective-based. The creature before Pillar’s Unit has no real Intent, fairly decent cultivation, no real physique to speak of, no particular conceptual magics that it seems to have inside itself. 

But the world spirals inwards into itself around it, and at the center of the spiral where everything collapses inward and becomes existence around the beast is FLAME. Not the beast’s interpretation of it, not a Truth relating to Flame, not something sacrificed to Craft, but like the Concept itself is somehow more present around the serpent. 

It defies conventional classification, in a way that makes Pillar the closest it can be to “happy”. More new categories to invent, and even more new forms of crystal-lace patterning to try and capture that knowledge in. Experimentation is one of the joys that all Raikas share, after all. 

It is a big snake. The fact that it is a snake, that it is a beast, that it is a cultivator or a thing that could break down whole mountains with mass and force and Qi alone, are all irrelevant. In truth, there is a singular thing, infinite and divine, that is bound to the beast in a way that Pillar has never before identified. 

Incorrect, says something inside of it. 

Pillar turns inward for a moment, just long enough to feel the soft touch of too-sharp metal and broken, remolded industry scratch against it. 

The Effigy’s whispers sing a little song, and it is a form of informational containment of its own. Half-music, half-mechanical, an equation in motion in a way distinctive from Pillar’s own inhuman calculus. 

Blade.

A good note. A correct note.  In its central body, seventeen-thousand, three hundred and forty eight layers deep past the third fractal recursion of its central scaffolding, in the third chamber from the wider crystal-arrays, a crystal of keratin and pure thought lights up and integrates itself back into the whole. Referential information fills the whole, reconnecting to the whole in the exact same form as they were originally formed, without any of the nuances or vagueness of conventional memory. 

Some of its scout forms and other Raikas have memories that matter much here. Most notably, a sky, opened along the middle, that middle determined by an axis point of human shape. 

The Cut of a Blade. An incarnation of the sword and the deeper thing beneath it, that thing wielded by the Divisions of the Empire that is, in fact, DIVISION. 

The Blades have Truths, yes. They have concepts and techniques and sapience, sure. But the Fifth Blade, still within the reach of the Nascent Soul Realm, is not powerful because of those things. Perhaps because of her Truth, sure, but not primarily. They Cut. They CUT. Deeper than any other severance she has experienced otherwise, powerfully enough to sever things that most can neither perceive nor touch. 

There is a weight to the Blades, one that she / it had recorded but not understood at the time. This is not the same weight, nor the same form, but big snake here carries some of that same presence in how a concept of the world feels closer around it. 

A long, flat, wide tongue slips past the snake-thing’s dry lips, loudly flapping in the wind and smacking against the beast’s eyeball. The wetness it carries splashes into the orb, loud and sloppy, and the excess gets licked off as it retracts back into its dumb little face.

Interesting.

Pillar Unit 6452-C steps forward, one limb deploying a sequence of four sword-blades. Each is approximately six feet long, carving their tips into the sand and stone as it advances, and each one sings, ever so faintly, with a song of vibration and severance. 

Lowercase severance, for now. Work is being done on improvements, but there is only so much that can be done at once, and some formatting issues to work out. Each blade should, however, be dangerous enough on its own to cut through the flesh of lesser-tier Souls and mid-tier Beasts, well within the range of this snake. 

It doesn’t seem to react in any way whatsoever that Pillar can detect. 

The limb is raised, all four blades resonating with each other, biomechanical carbon steel and Radiant metals intermingling to make for a frequency shared and magnified. Each blade points towards the flesh of the beast, and Unit 6452-C pulls back, hypermaterial tendons flexing alongside pistons, internal gears, and liquid muscle, preparing a thrust. 

The beast stares, entirely stupidly, at nothing. 

At the last possible instant, Pillar floods the Unit with several hundred brains worth of Intent, designed and retrofitted to entirely and absolutely intend to stab their weapon into the beast. 

Still nothing. 

The snake has mastered the art of being a very big dumb thing that doesn’t do anything at all. 

The brains are deactivated, the disarming frequency transmitted to the blades, and all forms of malicious intent are retracted away. 

Big snake, says the floating embers that are also Raika floating behind her. 

Indeed. This is accurate. It is, in fact, big snake. 

Big snake with big fire, apparently. 

Pillar Unit 6452-C lowers its arm, standing close enough to touch the beast. 

Deep inside its chest, it raises up two of the rods inside its main core, removing the trace elements of Cold Sunstone, Blacksteel, and cold / entropy related natural treasures from within the screaming star at its center. Instantly, the reaction within starts to escalate, growing quadratically from merely strong enough to burn down through bedrock and poison the world for decades into something that would take genuine power to keep from causing a generational devastation. All Unit 6452-C would have to do to evaporate a few square miles of land is open its chest and undo some of the spatial warping containing its depths away from the surface. 

And big snake reacts. 

One eye lazily rolls in its head, turning to face Pillar through the Unit. 

“Behind” it, below it, deeper than the snake itself can go, something moves. The Will of Heaven, the divine madness that defines existence, is tugged along, as if orbiting that single lazy eye, now coming closer at long last. 

Fine-tuning some of its sensory suite, Pillar expands and melts away some of the unnecessary parts of its vision, sound, scent. More and more of the unit’s nervous system builds itself towards the esoteric, towards noticing the details of how reality responds to stranger, subtler things rather than the superficial parts of the world. 

Big Snake has a well beneath it, anchored to its existence in a way that Pillar does not yet understand. At the bottom of that well is something more fundamental, more real, than the things derived from it. 

And as its eye lazily turns towards the Unit, that anchor-point of awareness shifts, drawing itself into an orbit around the beast. 

And in that orbit, more can be extrapolated. 

Orbital bodies do not function naturally according to the laws of physiks, not in this world, not in the skies above. But the mathematical properties, the symmetries of it, continue to exist independently of the exception that is all of the world itself. An orbit is not something that exists in isolation– it exists in conjunction with all other orbits. 

The snake is an anchor to that higher thing, and the pathway to it is a spiraling void of collapsing all. 

By the nature of how math works, how the properties that it has observed in isolation act, and by making an educated guess, Pillar comes to a conclusion. 

There are multiple anchors. The spiraling, collapsing path from sapience to higher concept is not the only path.

The path leads to FLAME. 

It is not without interruption. 

If all things fall to to one, if all things return to unity, then just as Raika’s Dao garden’s trees are actually just branches of a higher and stranger root or trunk, this path to FLAME, and all the others, are simply smaller tunnels leading to the same place. And in that place, higher / deeper / further below than the big snake, there is something waiting. 

Out of that path of reality unburdened by realism, behind both big snake and the other anchors Pillar can sense, there is… something. A location, or stopping place, or… additional anchor, perhaps, but deeper than the others, allowing the others to tie themselves to it. 

Pillar’s awareness drifts, falling down, down, down, deeper into that high revelation. Thousands upon thousands of brains, the vast majority of them deeply alien to the human or bestial condition, all experience something at the same time, only those quarantined away kept from the trance-state. 

The flickering embers of Raika burning plasma-self float forward, dancing across the energy of the Unit’s reactor core and somehow moving sideways towards that deeper tunnel, that anchor above/below all. 

Together, the both / one / many of them descend, following towards the invitation Big Snake and the thing behind it has extended.