Chapter 506 – Morally Unambigious Evil For “Fun” And Profit (Patreon)

Sorry it's so late in the day! Headache fucked me up a bit but we still pulled it off

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Sometimes, we do things we disagree with. Ethically, I mean. We still do them, but we disagree. If someone else were doing what we’re doing, we would criticize them for it, maybe even punish them or attack them outright. But since we’re the ones doing it, it’s a little more complicated.

“The ends justify the means.”

A universally loathed statement, because it’s been used to justify most of the worst atrocities imaginable, and worse, it’s annoying. A hand-wave of a saying that just brushes things aside. It’s most annoying specifically because everybody kinda-sorta agrees with it. You think you don’t, but then someone asks “oh, so you’re saying punching someone to stop them from exploding a city is just as bad?” No. Obviously not. The means of punching someone in the face is in fact justified by the city not blowing up.

So comes the nuance, which most people fucking despise. Some ends justify some means. Not as concrete, not as easy, not as convenient, and brings the whole argument in a dumbass circle back onto its own head, because which ends justify which means is subjective, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. But because we all agree that it’s still sort of true, eventually, we all find an end that justifies a means, and we do something that, in a vacuum, we would never do, and in this scenario, we disagree with, but do anyways, because we determine that the outcome will be worth it. It’ll match to our ideals better than not doing the specific and horrible action, anyways. 

When that day comes, and it comes for everyone, try to pay attention to it. Keep focus on what you’re doing and why. Be aware of it, constantly. Understand it, deeply and completely, both before, during, and after you do it. Otherwise, you’re in bad danger of messing yourself up pretty badly, or worse, ignoring the whole thing and learning that it’s ok to do again, uncritically.

-”Path Of The Deathless”, primer on Cultivation of all forms, written by Sun “Murder The Heavens And Eat Their Thrones” Dailou, Burning Ambitions Made Flesh, The Screaming Sunlight Turned Sweet And Savory. Redacted by official Imperial Decree, held in perpetuity amongst the Divine Vaults.

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Technically speaking, Feng Gui isn’t really anywhere. Yes, there’s a room, and yes, he’s in it, but that room isn’t really tied to anything, not in the traditional ways, and getting to that room from where everything else is isn’t easy. 

The same way that Raika has taken to just telling reality that it is a certain way, or that some things mean other things, so too did she separate the room he’s in from conventional direction or space. She said it’s “outside”, so it’s “outside”. 

It’s hard to explain. She mostly built the “technique” from all of the different theories and experiments she’s done on the spectrum of ways people influence reality. A sort of unified theory, one might say, about how Qi and thought intersect.

Thought isn’t really the right word, though. Too… small. 

Anyways.

Just because the room is “outside” doesn’t mean she hasn’t fortified the fuck out of it, of course. There are multiple layers of exotic, paranatural materials surrounding it, metals and gases and liquids that she’s developed through the manipulation of probabilities, pressure millions of times higher than the atmospheric baseline, and the help of both a particular Soul and one of her ARTs. Each layer is subtly alive, imbued with a facsimile of a nervous system to supplement her Truth that already allows her to control and embody it, and each layer is a lock for the layer behind it. 

Then, of course, there’s the arrays. A modified version of the “Fuck Off And Leave Me Alone” Grand Array is implanted three-dimensionally into the layers, while several smaller arrays, such as the “Give Me Some Space” Array, “Bitch I See You” Array, and “If You Touch Me One Of Us Is Gonna Explode” Array, as she likes to call them, are built in alongside it. They all run on the layers themselves, each supermaterial empowered with enough Qi to run their magical circuitry, so that messing with the circuits or the materials is likely to activate the other. 

A thin film of END wraps around the whole of the structure, and it opens only for the occasional tendril of Daemonic un-tissue, void of space and realness, to weave a web on the outside of it. Every aspect, save the END and the Daemonic matter, all interlock with each other in a series of mechanisms so complex that Raika has no fucking clue how it works. She’d have to ask Pillar, or just trust her inbuilt instincts about it. 

All this for a square room made entirely of dirt, dug out of the ground, with one man in it. And he hasn’t even moved since he got there. 

Feng Gui is a thoroughly broken man. He has, by every metric Raika has scanned him with, given up completely. 

His cultivation is shredded, any Qi in it left fallow and basically only moving by sheer force of momentum rather than any will of his own. His Soul and Domain, what she can find of them, are pallid things, so bereft of depth or meaning that they are practically no better than illusions. Even his core is an anemic, broken shell of a spiritual organ, left leaking out of dozens of holes stabbed into it by his torturers. And his mind… what’s left of him are the parts that hid and isolated from the torture, and those parts aren’t the most functional. 

He makes for a terrible drinking buddy. He’s even worse as part of a smoke rotation. 

“So then I said ‘listen here you big stupid cat, if you try and kill me one more time, I’m going to tie you down and shave you, and we’ll see how you’ll like being called the Bald King Feline Beast instead of golden!’”

Feng Gui remains very quiet, as always. Unless directly prompted, he doesn’t ever really say anything at all.

She takes a hit of her pipe, letting the familiar taste relax her. “Anyways, then he tried to eat me, I made good on my promise, and now, would you believe it, I’ve got eighty different demi-Divine tiger Spirit Beasts all vying for command of his part of the Pack, so now I have to deal with all of that. You’d think, what with them not having written languages or bureaucracies, I’d have to deal with less political messes, but nooooo, turns out murdering people you fuck for power is a pretty universal experience. I don’t know if it’s flattering or insulting to them, that they’re basically as good at politics as the Empire, at least on the lower levels. Probably insulting.

“And then there’s the cultivators, I swear, they’re not much better, really. Annoying motherfuckers, all the same bullshit but dressed up in ten thousand flowerier ways, and everyone hates each other. I have to juggle a few thousand different points of view every day just to try and keep up. And the corpses! Oh, don’t get me started on them. You think ‘oh, ghosts have no body, no solidity to them’, but the fuckers are more stubborn than stone. I mean I can break stone, but still!”

She takes another hit of her cigarette, letting the smoke cool her down. Internal temperatures have been pretty high across all her bodies, even her mortal one, with all of the currently ongoing projects, and the smoke, already designed to be rather cool, is significantly colder than the air in her lungs. 

“But that ain’t nothing you don’t know already, right? Sorry, I know this is all pretty boring. I haven’t exactly said anything you haven’t heard. What’re your thoughts on the whole debacle going on?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know much at all, honored one,” Feng Gui replies in a monotone voice. 

“Well sure you do. Or if you don’t then your boss sure does. How’s Patriarch Feng doing? How’s the clan? You get any updates or insights while they were ripping you to pieces and… I don’t know, letting those pieces get fed to ants?”

“No, honored one,” Feng Gui replies. 

“That tracks. You weren’t the most insightful even back when you were a full person, were you? Do you ever wonder about that? The person you used to be?”

“I do not, honored one.”

“Yeah, that tracks. They really beat that out of you, didn’t they? Not much left in that head of yours. Listening to your neurons firing is like listening to a dried up riverbed during the year’s lightest rainfall. For most people it starts at a thunderstorm and only gets louder. If not for how you changed yourself I don’t think you’d even be alive right now. Not sure that brain of yours has enough activity in it to keep a heart beating, nevermind all the other automatic shit.”

As always, Feng Gui doesn’t talk, because he never talks, only responds. Like a lobotomized little automaton, only as reactive as his tormentors trained him to be. He’s insufferable.

“Either way, it makes this whole thing really annoying. I mean, they give you to me as a fucking torture doll or whatever, but I can’t torture you cause there’s not even anything to torture in there. Real disappointing.”

“I apologize for my lack, honored one.”

She sighs, taking another long pull of the cigarette. She keeps it to just her mortal set of lungs, denying herself the waste of drinking in a few rooms full of smoke out of the little bit of paper and leaves, savoring it slowly instead. She leans back in her “chair”, the dirt alcove she’s dug into the dirt room giving her a nice spot to splay out and lounge in. 

“Did they give you a speech?” she eventually asks. “For what to say to me? Or was it just the “no master, yes master bullshit?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean, honored one.”

Another drag of the cigarette. 

It’s hard, looking at him. Talking to him. He’s… wrong. Broken in a way she’s never seen before, not outside of the sort of flesh golems or artificial constructs of a particularly inept magic wielder. He’s not really much of a person anymore. 

Maybe she could fix him. Heal him. If anyone can do it in a timeframe of less than decades, it would be her. But she doesn’t want to. Not much point to it, after all. 

And she does still hate him. 

Even here, ruined thing that he is, crippled in identity and in ontology, he’s still Feng Gui. Or he was. It’s the shell of him, at least. 

A face that haunted her for years. A decade since he tore her apart, and still, sometimes, a stray brain of hers might see a glimpse of arrogant evergreen eyes during a rest-cycle. For all that she’s seen much worse, much scarier and grander than he in the time since, the intimacy of that initial encounter still haunts her. 

Before Shin Ren burned her alive (the first time), it was the worst pain she’d ever felt. Feeling herself beaten bloody, stuffed full of broken bones, lungs collapsing, and then feeling him reach inside her. Reach into her organs, find what made her her, and pulling. 

It was the last thing she experienced with true Qi senses until almost half a decade later. Like someone might see the same knife that blinded them, over and over, she saw, sees, his eyes and his Qi unmaking her own. 

But he’s not here. He’s not really anything at all, now. 

“Disappointing. Diiiiisappointing. If you ever see your bitchass family again, tell them that as far as gifts go, you’re a miserable fucking excuse.”

“I shall do so, honored one.”

And maybe he will, honestly.

He’s a distraction. A waste of time. A trick, to throw her off balance, to keep her away from her kids, to confuse her. At the very, very least, he’s a chink in her armor, a weakness dug into her flesh like a tick carrying an infection. 

The Fengs are as much a clan as she is, really. They’re all just parts of one organism. The Feng. It’s part of why she ignores most of their given names, because their given names don’t matter as much as the fact that they’re all just extensions of something greater. Branches on trees, and trees in a forest. An evergreen forest, that goes on forever and ever, amen. 

But that’s the thing about knowing your enemy knowing you have a weakness, You can use it to trick them. 

Raika’s pretty sure that everything she talks about here, the Feng Patriarch hears. Anything that this Feng experiences, the rest of the Feng experiences. So she’s spent time here. She’s made it seem like she’s wasting time with him. She’s been bitter and flippant and annoyed, arrogant and presumptuous. She’s dropped hints about all the different things happening past the Breach, all of the different tools that she’s putting into place. 

And she’s lying, of course. And the Feng Patriarch probably knows that. And “He” knows that she knows that he knows she’s lying. But that doesn’t mean that he won’t be listening anyway, because she might slip, or use some truth to make her lies stronger. Or she might even convince him, here and there, that this Raika, the mortal Raika, is the weak link, the one whose emotions are out of the control of the wider superpower she’s become, who can be exploited. 

So they’re dancing, back and forth. It only just looks like she’s talking at a lobotomized trauma-slave inside a random dirt-cave instead of healing the Lake or taking care of her kids or doing any one of a million other things. 

Cigarette is almost halfway gone now. She starts rolling another one. 

“And all the stuff out here… it’s a damn mess, isn’t it? Keeping everything organized around here is harder than it looks. Ugh. It’s such a shame. You’d think we’d have more luck with all the shit you’ve pulled over the last few centuries, but propaganda’s out here holding strong, huh? And Empire’s a big fucking place, ain’t it? Shitloads of people to deal with. I mean I could just eat them all, but even that would take time. How many billions do you eat a year? I mean do you keep a census?”

“I do not, honored one.”

“Hah. Yeah, you would say that.”

She pulls in the last of her cigarette in one long drag, swallowing the butt of it whole and smoldering and licking shut the new one. A quick flick of a match, a few puffs to encourage air flow, and she has a fresh smoke rolling through her lungs. 

“Alright. You ready?”

“I am uncertain what you are referring to, honored one.”

“Yeah, no you’re not.”

Mortal Raika exhales, letting out a bit of pressure she’s been holding onto this whole time, and slips out of the “outside” where the room is back to the “inside” of all the rest of reality. 

Inside the room, “outside” the world, a thing of blacksteel and Ruin sits. It is there, in the hole that the mortal dug for herself. Tendrils of neural tissue have colonized its frame, growing like fungal deposits. Circuits of magic and Craft have woven through it, like strings on a puppet’s frame, like colorful banners of ghosts and War. The broken core of it flickers with an internal flame beyond Flame, gifted to it by one that has seen the depths of her and who shares a symbiosis of Ontology. 

She is all symbiosis, now. A broken and shattered thing which has been filled and transformed. By Biology, by Flame, by Death, by Divinity.

The Effigy of Raika, monument to her own destruction and rebirth, sits still inside the room of dirt, outside the world. 

The ruined Feng sits there, as immobile and uncaring as he has been broken to be. 

Out from inside the effigy, things begin to emerge. Sharp, mechanical in nature, except where they very much are not. An amalgamation rather than a fusion, which embodies all of the weakness and devastation visited upon Raika, and they reach towards the severed, torn-up evergreen tree which pretends to be what’s left of a man.

What follows might well be considered torture, should there be anyone else that ever experienced it. What is visited upon the broken Feng is a manifestation of the very same violations he’s already survived, replicated one by one in tender detail, the Ruin of his ontology a map that the Effigy opens wide and revisits upon him.

The Effigy makes of this ruined thing a greater Ruin still, in a violent act which cannot go unnoticed or unfelt by those with eyes to see.

Beneath it, in the tiniest of ways and the tiniest of details, one Ruined thing makes a specific Ruin of another. 

CHANGE, after all, often comes from destruction. And of all of the pieces of the woman she’s become, the Effigy alone understands what it means to be not dead, not alive, but made into something alien by what has been done to you.

 It visits these revelations on another, shaping the broken evergreen by one infinitesmally small piece at a time while he suffers.

It’s an act, yeah. Brutish, violent, hateful, arrogant, stupid, that’s Raika all right, torturing the torture doll they gave her. Showing off her powers, so that the wider Feng can see, and knowing that he knows that she knows that he knows it’s a trick somehow.

But trying to trick him anyway. Play up the mask well enough and well, even the audience can forget that they’re watching a play, just for a moment. 

And if it tortures big Feng a little in the meantime? Well, Ur-Raika allows herself a little bit of evil. As a treat.