Book One, Chapter 15 - Another Day At The Office

Alright! First wholly original new chapter! It's not a deviation from the plot yet, just additions, and that'll likely remain more-or-less the case as we go along. It was really fun to write something a bit more experimental again though, and I'm glad I took a moment to do it! It's very fun to return to ideas that didn't get much room, or got underbaked as new concepts emerged, and make them a bit more up-to-par with the rest of the work. Enjoy, loves, and I'll see you all again soon with more edited chapters.

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Action Report:

Perimeter breach in Imperial City designation: Paleblossom

Subjects: Unidentified. Trace Elements of XXXXXX detected; Moonfall appropriation suspected. Weapon signature and physical structures indicate disorganization, single design philosophy. Intent unclear. Mortal casualty rates: 0.17% and climbing at a rate of 0.05% per minute. Local sect response time: adequate. 

Suggested course of Immediate action: N/A. Emergency measures not required. Expenditure of Palace resources not required. Active summoning of Imperial Guard not required. Casualty projections: within acceptable margins.

Suggested course of After-action: Activate local DoAC resources for acquisition of material. Harvest appropriately. Further action at the discretion of local DoAC resources. 

-Division Of Divination Report on the situation at Imperial City: Paleblossom

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The city of Paleblossom is torn apart, piece by piece. The slight glow that surrounds it to those sensitive in Qi and perception arts is ragged, torn open around multiple ragged points where things from the outside have cut their way in. The sounds of screaming and crying echo loudly against the snowy mountains and hillsides all around, juxtaposed against the crunching and crashing of wood, stone and metal being ripped apart and cast aside. Flares of bright purple-aspected fire spring to life throughout the city, particularly along its southern edges and amongst the richer districts. A dread silence born of soft snow and illusion weaves across the north-western edge, while there are martial cries and sharp-edged burst of sword energy echoing through the eastern districts. Each of the city’s three sects mount up in the city’s defense, either interrupting their own celebrations or already present in the mortal city for the parades, and dozens of cultivators tear into their surroundings against the invaders. 

At four distinct points in the city’s framework, towering plateaus stand above the rest, three of them showing their own ethereal illuminations worn ragged by violent invasion. The sounds of battle ring from all three of the surrounding sects, and while the sounds of screaming are much lesser at each, there are still those suffering, bleeding and dying amidst the chaos. Each of the three sect’s plateaus, massive geographical landmarks that raise them above the city on artificial mountains, flares with pulses of Qi, all distinct in their way, all incredibly loud nonetheless. The elders of the sects move against the invaders that invade the outer edges of their territories, and in seconds, the plateaus fall to silence, even as the city below continues to burn.

They move no more. Their lessers parade through the streets, fighting and dying in equal measure, casualties growing in fits and bursts, and the sects above consolidate their arrays and defenses. 

Above even them stands the tallest mountain of all. Districts of tall buildings and richly adorned houses surround it, clustering themselves around its base and the highways that grow in its surroundings, and the silence in comparison to the rest of the city is deafening. In spite of the damage to the defenses of the city’s outer perimeter, none of the intruders have managed to reach this point, and none seem to try to.

Perhaps their objective is otherwise. Perhaps they simply wouldn’t dare. 

The Imperial Palace stares down from atop an artificial mountain, festooned with complex lift systems and internal architecture, glowing white and gold against the backdrop of a night sky turned alien and wrong and back again. 

Something from inside that Palace watches. 

It isn’t real. 

There’s a shape to it, which could be described. There are qualities and traits it possesses, which can be used to adequately explain some aspect of its appearance. It might be said to exist, in a sense, even as one might understand money or time existing.

None of these factors make it real. It is, in fact, the very reality of its unreality which allows it to stand where it does, overlooking the city below from miles deep within a gilded palace. It sees past the machinery and glowing, inhuman language that runs through the buildings and towers which surround it. It sees through eyes that are no more real than the rest of itself, powered by a beating Heart below and beyond and outside of any place that can be reached. It watches, and it examines, and it does its best to understand. 

Understanding is a process intrinsically aided and defeated by the nature of the thing which watches. Most of reality exists because of perception, after all, and most of perception is shaped by biases and experiences. A thing which can be said to possess none of those, or perhaps only the intended parts of these, has some difficulty with understanding the meaning of things, and yet also possesses a rather unique capacity to view things “without bias”. 

It is not a human thing that stares out from the Palace towards a screaming city. It is not a mortal thing which experiences this moment, or any other that it has experienced.

It has not been mortal since it was born. It is no more capable of dying than an idea is capable of dying. The thing whose idea it is is rather too large to die easily either. 

The Imperial Scion, child of the Emperor, ruler of Paleblossom City and sole real resident of that city’s Imperial Palace, watches as blood runs through its streets, no expression on its no-face. 

Some of the runic arrays that make up the Palace’s framework shift, highlighting new information as it comes in. The Oracular Pools at the deepest edge of the second ring send in their reports, their pace unhurried and unbroken by the crisis at hand. The Scion takes in their proposed actions, confers with the part of itself that exists concretely and agrees with the conclusions they have offered. Veins of not-quite-organic matter thread through the city and return to it a constant flow of data, telling it who has died or is dying, where, which properties will thus be vacated, whose families will likely require some degree of funerary rites and how much it will cost, how long, estimated down to the second, it should take for repairs to remove traces of the damage.

Within sixty-seven minutes, the shield surrounding the city will be back up. Its primary purpose, alerting of foreign intrusion and deflecting more esoteric means of infiltration, remains uncompromised, despite damage to its structure, and the lack of damage to its foundations means that it will be done regenerating shortly. The Scion confers with itself, the idea that it was born as, and the Imperial Palace’s thinking engines to calculate the loss of produce, infrastructure, and work-hours from this event, and finds them disappointing, but not beyond the realm of acceptable setbacks.

It relishes that moment, pausing in it. It pauses again, experiencing the relishment. Disappointment and enjoyment- two emotions. Quite a day. 

It schedules preventative psycho-surgery and three days of conceptual infusion, as is mandated by the idea it is born from and is, lest it deviate too far from acceptable metrics.

Having accumulated the appropriate data and set in place tentative measures to compensate for any losses, it turns itself to the other part of the Division of Divination’s report, finding it, too, acceptable. Reaching into the Palace, it sends a series of impulses down towards its Heart, which then route back out through more secure methods of transit buried deep beneath the earth. An anchor-chamber activates, thousands of intricate and inter-connecting spell formulae manifesting and mutating in accordance to precise metrics, born of a well-trained and intentionally designed Palatial machinery.

Moments later, a scroll is made, filled with ink in the shape of the appropriate words, and ceases to be where it is, being instead where it is decided it should be.

The Scion wonders at the recipient, moving forward rather than spending time experiencing that curiosity. The thought continues along its track- this Scion has never met a member of the Division of Altered Cultivation. There is some connection there, as it understands that some of the entities most closely engaged with that organization were also involved with the idea that it is and exists as. Perhaps information will be exchanged and acquired. Perhaps not. 

It schedules a slightly more intensive sequence of psycho-therapeutic vivisections and readjustments, as it always does and always will and must, in accordance to the idea that it is. Anything less would make it something other than the idea that it is, which cannot be allowed, and isn’t, and won’t be.

The Palace shifts, the symbiotic vessels of the throne on which the Scion moving to expose the back of the idea of its head. From above, scalpel-edged implements, imbued with the multi-hued iridescence of Dao and dozens of carefully ingrained Concepts, begin to descend, their existence becoming more real as the Qi they require is routed to them from deeper circuits. As the scalpels and tweezers and other machinery begin to cut and pull apart and shift inside, the Scion continues to watch the unfolding situation.

It cannot sleep. It’s not in the idea of it. 

It cannot feel pain. It cannot feel fear. 

It experiences and understands, as the idea of it permits. It is being cut into and rearranged and excised and injected. It understands this.

It understands, without bias and thus with more and less concreteness than a person might, the city’s ongoing events. The strongest of the city’s local cultivators have managed to subdue their respective invaders, and many of them are in turn seeking other conflicts they might be of assistance in. Their sects will likely institute rewards for participation in the city’s cleansing, benefitting those strong enough to win their battles and contribute further while limiting the growth of those less immediately useful. Several promising cultivators have managed success in their encounters, but are too injured for immediate redeployment- they will be incentivized to try harder and succeed more entirely, lest they fall behind further.

Many have died, but none of particular note. Almost-living sensory devices that grow throughout the city record the leaking Qi from every corpse within its walls, finding no casualties above the Foundational realm of cultivation.

Core Formation cultivators act as the direct or inner disciples of local sects due to Qi density and Imperial policy, and are relatively non-present in the city proper. Even still, it is a rather minute showing. For an invasion of a city, the actions of the intruders make no sense.

The Palace attempts to draw further information on the things running rampant through the streets, blocked only by the efforts of those who are strong enough to stand in their way without dying. Several elements match a composition that triggers thought-purges, redacted information being inaccessible to the Palace’s internal architecture without proper authority. Those more recognizable indicate that all attackers are partially mortal, or at least encased in mortal frames. Corpses of individuals bearing the weight of Qi-Gathering realm individuals or true mortals, each one wrapped in complex seals and runic scripts that infuse them with necromantic properties. 

Palace systems, and the Scion in turn, do detect several elements that match previously recorded necromantic formulae, including a substantial portion that are classified for Imperial use only. The illegality of the runic formations is added to the list of quantifiable crimes for which the invaders shall be executed for. 

The vivisection tools retract from the back of the idea of the Scion, closing their pathway behind them. The Scion is not real, and while it may be described as having a head or blood or brain matter, none of these are particularly relevant to its existence, save as anchors for the idea that it is. Any change done to them is merely a reflection to what has been done on a deeper conceptual level, somewhat… sideways of reality. A higher frequency, perhaps. 

The fight continues to die down. Within an estimated seventeen minutes, the last of the invading constructs will be subdued and eliminated. 

Almost as if in response to the thought, an anchor-chamber deep beneath the Palace activates, quarantining the rest of the structure behind hundreds of complex locking mechanisms and magical defenses. Only when the chamber’s internal systems have fully analyzed, interpreted, and tested the contents of the chamber does it unlock, allowing the wider structure to understand what has been received.

A scroll has manifested within the chamber, glowing faintly with the heat and Qi of the examination process and teleportation process both. The contents within contain several of the passphrases and access codes granted to relevant parties of Imperial authority. Beyond these, and the official statements and pleasantries which must accompany any communication between major parties, lies a simple and straightforward response.

“Information acknowledged. Researcher and Experimental Subjects (3) en-route with Imperial Guard escort (one squadron). ETA: three days.”

A bit beyond the ideal timeframe, but it is a rather large Empire. When a mountain range that can fit a dozen cities the size of Paleblossom is a mere footnote in a geographical summary of a place, it stands to reason that non-instantaneous transportation takes time. The Scion will simply have to apply the proper incentives to the local sects to establish acquisition over annihilation of the remains of the invaders, and provide active encouragement to trade them to the Palace’s storage. Empire-produced alchemical reagents, pills, or significant enough investures of stored Qi should be enough. Additional allocation of martial tools, enchanted materials, or runic scriptures may be permitted if necessary. Perhaps a larger incentive for a larger collection? A candidacy for the Academies for the sect that delivers the most of them?

The Scion confers with the palace and itself and the idea that it is, and comes to a conclusion. Acceptable.

Some will be kept by the sects, but none of the information currently known to be contained in the invading constructs constitutes an excessive security breach. Additional measures can be taken at a later date if needed. 

The Scion watches as the dying and screaming and damaging of its city quiets, and feels a note of satisfaction at a job well done. It has fulfilled its purpose as expected / demanded / intrinsic of it, without flaw.

Noting the sensation of satisfaction, it activates the psycho-surgical capabilities of the palace once again.

That’s three emotions in one day. Truly such an active series of events. It will likely need some proper calibration to ensure that it doesn’t deviate too severely the next time some excitement occurs. It schedules a further procedure a few days hence, and continues to watch.