“Still…”
“No. If the automated security system is good enough to barge its way through these kinds of defences without setting off any alarms, we’ll be dead no matter what we do. We’d need millennia of constant cultivation in that case. If these are post-ascendancy containment systems, or maybe even protection against inhabitants of a layer above that one, we’ll never win anyway.”
“I guess… Anyway, it’s done. Should we start?” Looking resigned, she continues checking the perfectly spherical formation for faults.
“Let’s boot it up!” I happily tie the two most central threads together, connecting the mana collection formations to the qi-generation nodes. Power immediately flows through the faintly conductive wires. The formation works less on physical principle – as common plant fibres just aren’t that conductive – and more on the interpretation Rhea and I give it. My drones work through physical rules mostly, but because this entire shield won’t need to function when there is no-one near it to give its symbols meaning, we managed to cut a lot of costs.
I lower myself in the air, watching with a smile on my face as the thing starts spinning. The soft hum resulting from wind rushing past the threads turning into a higher pitch slowly. Then all its formations are suddenly powered fully, and it becomes a white blur as it reaches operational speeds.
“Should we get Bassik? I can’t sense the data streams coming from the moon.” Rhea is still on edge, a nervous cast to her entire stance.
“No need. I’m flexible in other ways,” I deadpan.
I could tell from the way Bassik, the first eyecore cultivator, reported his experiences that he could see individual threads of meaning even in the initial stage of that system. The details with which he can observe entropic differences is honestly rather baffling to me. This is not the first time the common sense of the Cultivation World is useless in the face of the absurd ways this planet’s inhabitants use qi, so I took it in stride. It took some experimentation and changes of perspective, but I can copy the way his eyeballs seem to function to a lesser extent through my braincore.
I close my eyes and imagine a single eyeball in the emptiness of my braincore. No, that’s not completely correct. I turn the emptiness of my brain core into a single eyeball. I scan both of my eyes with a small net of augur, picking and choosing features from both. I add blood vessels, the nerve cluster, a lens, and more, slowly adding detail. I carefully craft the various layers, making a symmetrical amalgamation of my own set of eyeballs.
I open my eyes and see a web of brightness woven across the heavens. Around me, I see thick beams of meaning flow through the air towards destinations around me, down below, shooting through the void of space high above. The moon – hanging low above the horizon – is a spider in a complex and ever moving web of automated conversation. Instead of the sharp and fibrous lines of communication described by all eyecores, I see faintly blurred connections. It’s like I need glasses. I hum silently as I take in the sight. The downside of a slightly blurry entropic vision is well worth the immense versatility that comes with a mutable braincore, I think.
“Yeah. It’s working, not a single bit of information is coming through. It’s not even scattering off of the shield, as Bassik described before. It just vanishes. One of the additional countermeasures we wove into it must be doing its job. I can’t see which one though.”
“Good,” is Rhea’s much-relieved reply. She hesitatingly takes off the wide-brimmed, straw sunhat. Her face is scrunched up in concentration. “And I can think of kicking Nexus’s ass and shitting on those fucking dungeon bricks all I want!” The genuine happiness on her face is only marred by the vicious and vitriolic glare she sends at the core below us.
She drops half a metre before I can stop her. I grab her by her arm, barely keeping her outside of the Dungeon core’s area of influence. “Look…”
“Oh, shut it,” she snaps at me. “I’m not letting you go in there on your own. You barely got out last time, merely having to die sixteen…” She falters, then resumes with fire in her eyes. “You only died sixteen times, right? And with me there, you might actually stand a chance. If there is one thing us dragons are good at, it’s not dying. I can’t remember reading or hearing about one of the Flight perishing, ever.”
Knowing when resistance is useless, I grab her hand instead of her arm and start descending.
“CCCEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
The air shakes our very bones. I spread my qi in a cloud around me and feel large volumes of air suddenly disappearing. The wind rushing into the violently appearing vacuums behind us kicks up quite a gust. I cover the entire empty sphere around the dungeon in a thin application of my spiritual sense. I feel parts of my qi wanting to flicker out of existence, but a simple application of my will prevents any of it slipping from my grasp.
“Listen here, you little shit,” I admonish the core while floating nearer to the hovering black monolith. “I’ll leave a small sphere behind us unobserved, so use that if you need to communicate. If you start shouting at me like that Mana Dungeon idiot did, before the moon re-took control, you can just shut up, okay? And I don’t see that big boy up there helping you out anytime soon.”
Rhea and I stop when we near half a metre from the black object. White lights flicker inside its blackness, giving us the illusion that the thing is an eternal void filled with stars.
“It’s pretty,” is her first reaction.
“TTHHAAAANKS,” I hear from behind.
I stifle a giggle.
“No problem. Now, please let us study your insides,” is her follow up.
“NNOO THAANKS.”
I can’t help but let a chuckle escape. I let the two converse some more as I observe the moon. I can barely see it above the forest of ice crystals now that we are hovering at ground level. It will lower beneath the horizon in a few hours, and I’m not keen on testing whether or not its way of beaming information down is powerful enough to go through the planet itself. I take out a large spool of thread and call up a miniaturized version of the massive shield rotating around us.
“Come on, let me in!” Rhea is trying to touch the rectangular solid. She flinches each time her hand comes close to its surface, and I see bits of her fingertips disappearing and reappearing in a high-frequency struggle.
“NOOOO.”
“It won’t hurt, I promise.”
“STILLL NOOO.”
“Aw, come on. Just a little bit?”
“NOOOO.”
As my girlfriend and an alien supercomputer argue about whether or not it should let her penetrate it, I crochet a half-spherical doily with a radius of a dozen metres. There are a lot of things wrong with this entire situation, and even more variables are unaccounted for, but maybe sometimes a bit of uncertainty isn’t so bad.
CHAPTER NINE
Affairs
Another one of the irritating women bows low, her legs and arms all held at precisely calculated angles. “Sage Ket, unmarried Second Sister will have her fifteenth name day tomorrow. It would honour our house greatly if you could attend during the banquet.” The dressed-up stick of a woman rises, looking at Ket’s chin instead of looking him in the eyes. “What answer should I give my mistress?”
Ket wants to scream. He is so sick and tired of all this bullshit. He internally roars in frustration, letting a mental process take care of his facial muscles as he rages inside his mind. Anger coursing through his veins, he gives up, deciding that he needs to go through the motions once more. In order to handle this latest political development, he sends the qi saturating his brain moving into an intricate pattern.
He had agreed with Tess that they would recultivate. Tess had found his externally clicking calculator core annoying, and Ket had despaired at the airheaded bimbo-ness Tess’ skincore was causing. They both had started over, Tess taking on a cultivation base that could shift an immense amount, while Ket decided to go with a modified version of a braincore. Instead of le
tting a core take care of most cultivation-related business, he had taken the proverbial haft into his own hands, manually creating many aspects of his power base.
Now Ket has a literal braincore. His entire brain is his repository of qi, using his whole mass of grey matter as a core instead of merely the base of his brain. This has a few up and downsides, but Ket is pretty sure he will keep this form of cultivation for many years, and probably centuries, to come.
Turning his entire brain into a core – a system he has been calling a full braincore – allows him less raw thinking capacity and time dilation in general. Ket thinks this is more than offset by the positives. He feels a lot more healthy on a mental level, he is a lot more flexible, and Tess can’t physically throw him around anymore. He’s not saying that the last reason is the main one for creating this system, but it very well might be.
His feeling of improved mental health can be attributed to the fact that his subconscious is no longer a mere task manager. He also no longer feels the need to calculate absolutely everything and every single aspect of his life. Ket had scoured Database for mental issues a long time ago, finding the spectrum of complex neurobehavioral conditions called autism. That day had been a good day, as he had experienced an immense amount of relief and support from the fact that he now could name what made him feel so disconnected from the world his entire youth. Of the various ticks, abilities, and especially inabilities described in the small section on Database, a lot struck true.
He had compensated for his inability to intuitively grasp social situations through sheer number crunching, forming models from previously observed behaviours. The obsessive way Ket had seen patterns in the most mundane of things had been remedied by mathematically analysing those patterns. His sheer inability to smoothly converse was helped through massive productive conversation trees, often pre-made.
But Ket had seen that this had not been healthy behaviour. Somehow or another, he had somehow caught the eye of a certain black-haired beauty that likes differences. Maybe that was what had attracted her to him, the contrast between the glib-tongued and sly self and his own socially retarded self. The relationship had taught Ket an immense scala of lessons, and he is still using the condensed data from those experiences every day.
Having made massive amounts of progress, Ket had built these lessons into his full braincore’s subconscious. Instead of thinking of how close to stand to someone, how long to maintain eye contact, and other subtle social faux pas, he now lets his lower mind handle that stuff.
That is, he could let his subconscious handle that stuff until the fucking cancerous asswipe calling himself Teach teleported him to this cold and forsaken hell.
One more downside to his new core is that the so-called combat mode - swirling qi through one’s brain to think faster, thus slowing time - is a lot harder to maintain. Randomly rotating power through his mind is a factor less effective. Instead, Ket guides the flow of power hanging like drops of water in his brain across each fold and crease of grey matter. He guides the streams of liquid qi through the bridge connecting both halves, flowing it through the near-infinite weave of synapses, neurons, and axons. The fact that his power feels different does make this easier than it would have been previously. Instead of the clear water that used to be his pool of power in his previous qi-condensing braincore stage, it now feels like a much finer form of energy. Gone is the slight viscosity and surface tension. Instead of clumping up and forming spheres, his current pool of liquid qi acts more like a zero-viscosity superfluid, letting it seep across his brain rather than flow and bounce against the inside of his skull.
And so, the infuriating woman bowing in front of Ket stands still, frozen in time, a perfect expression of muted subservience on her face.
Ket takes stock. From the various sigils and symbols presented on the woman’s jewellery, Ket notes that the servant hails from one of the prominent houses. Their names are not to be spoken in public, so Ket has started using nicknames to differentiate all the main families, sub-branches, and associated guilds that form the nest of vipers he is currently presiding over. This servant is from what he calls the BoneCarver clan, one of the larger houses whose main responsibility is, obviously, the carving of bone. The myriad of white adornments, buttons, and ornamentations she is decked out with is proof enough of that.
Sighing internally, Ket continues going through the motions. The servant invited him to celebrate the second heiress’ birthday. One day early means that the birthday itself will probably be an open affair, with food and drink provided for the common masses. Fifteen is seen as an auspicious number, so that explains why it’s not an ordinary celebration, which would be a closed party in their estate.
She only invited him for the banquet, though – a small slight, likely punishment for choosing to attend their rival’s social gathering yesterday. The maid also asked him what answer she should give her mistress instead of the usual ‘how late might we expect your noble presence’. This means refusal is a possibility. Ket goes through the list of events happening tonight and immediately sees why.
A major house friendly to the BoneCarvers, Ket calls them the MudGatherers, is having a small exposition tonight. They will likely present their new lineup of designer pots, urns, and other stoneware crockery. This is a rather prestigious event, and Ket will likely be invited by a maid later today. The Bonecarver woman is rather early in delivering her invitation.
The fact that she is early means that the BoneCarvers are giving him a large amount of face and honour. The maid’s pose is equally worshipful. There are only a few traces of lowered subservience in her stance, and a lot of hints of veneration. At the very least, Ket is relieved that there is not a single trace of expectation hoping for acceptance. One of the more subtle lessons he had learned is that a marriage proposal is not something to handle without care. Ket will have to tiptoe around the prominent FishCatching family for quite a few weeks more before they are likely to forgive him the slight of shunning their third daughters’ hand without a second glance.
So, what to do? Ket has been in this horrible town for a little less than a month now, and he has gathered enough data to understand how to play this stupid game. Then Ket’s attention falls on a single broach the woman is wearing. He understands the meaning of the other ones. One is a single tooth, a simple mark of identification. Another is a single carved fish, hinting that there is a bit of FishCatcher blood in her veins. Around her necklace is a single leaf, letting Ket know she is married to one of Explorer blood. The clasp woven into her shoelaces throws Ket for a loop, though. It has an image of a single drop of water above what seems to be an expanding ring of oval ripples.
Ket spends the next subjective hour pondering the meaning of this single broach.
Ket really would like not to do this, but unfortunately, he knows by now that spending some time on something seemingly inconsequential like this will save him a lot of time later.
As he trawls through his memories, analysing every single person he has seen during his stay in this place, he can’t help but think back to when he suddenly arrived here. One moment, he was taking a walk with Tess. The next, he was standing beside an ice-covered stone wall. He had immediately felt cold. It wasn’t just freezing out, he also was wearing very little, and his hand had been warmly held not seconds before. Ket wandered around a bit, confused as to what was going on, when the shield generated by the suddenly appeared crystal hanging above the town lit up.
A large herd of rather beautiful beasts had broken loose from their cages outside of town. The first thing the beasts had done when coming into contact with qi was take revenge on their captors. Ket hadn’t been able to do a lot for the animal handlers, who had been eaten without much ado. He had been able to fend off the tide clawing at the shield, immediately gaining him a lot of attention.
The few mana cannons on the walls had been largely ineffective against the empowered beasts, and Ket concluded that this area must have been hit with a bit of Te
ach’s qi-enriched intestines a couple days back at least. The crystal hanging above the town’s centre was already taking care of all the loose qi inside the residences, thus curing all the sick people who had been suffering from rampaging qi. Ket handled the defence with contemptuous ease, his combat prowess enough to cow the ornamentally bred mutants without effort.
And so Ket had been awarded the honorary yet useless title of Sage. He had talked to the masses for a bit, telling them the basics of cultivation and what was happening to the outside world. The common folk had flocked to his speech, drinking in his words with eager abandon. The town’s high society had swarmed him that evening, every single house, guild, branch family, and subgroup that wielded any influence whatsoever hankering for his attention.
Ket must have spent subjective years here already, so overwhelmed was he with having to think about social circumstances and unspoken rules of etiquette. He had made blunder after blunder at first, leaving him wondering why the stately grandmother or burly young man of that and that family suddenly stormed out, outrage on their faces. In hindsight, it had been all too obvious the inane comment about this or that demanded some form or response, and his unrelated answer had been a slap in the parties’ faces.
The town itself is rather nice, though. Walled by thick stone, the large town is set up in a circular fashion. Diverse styles of architecture are used in the ornate buildings, the outer districts slowly becoming less fancy and more utilitarian. Each family expresses their style and main area of profession, even their main philosophies, through architecture. Large tiered towers stand across the road from finely ornate castles. Thickly planted gardens are placed next to shining examples of minimalism.
But a well-developed high society requires a large population of working people. A deep-rooted feudal society is currently keeping everyone in line, but the higher tiers are scrambling to find ways to keep control of the common man, who are growing in strength day by day. Initially, the well-trained guards employed by the families had an edge, but this advantage is lessening with each breath of qi the town’s people take in.
The Dao of Magic: Book IV Page 8
