Chapter 378 - The Tragedy Of Trauma

Hello! Very late, got distracted earlier with a little personal mess with a very close friend of mine and got hella delayed. Here we are, though! Apparently I won't be fixing my sleep schedule tonight, but I will be posting a little more very soon! See ya then!

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“It is dangerous to go alone. Take this.”

“It will keep me safe?”

“No. There is no safety to be found in a sword. A sword brings death. It does not give life. It is a responsibility. A burden. This is no gift; it is a curse. I hope one day you will forgive me.”

-Old story, told to young children of the tales of a reincarnating warrior seeking to defeat darkness, ever succeeding, ever ending, ever returning.

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A world away and one hour prior-

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The world screams in agony unending. 

Through corridors of black metal and caverns of too-straight spikes, jutting from every angle, the sound of Pain echoes back and forth. A noise like the carving of flesh from bone rings in any wall one might care to press an ear to, and faintly from far less points of contact than that- it can be felt through one’s feet as they walk, through a hand placed for balance. Thunder which sounds almost perfectly like breaking bones crackles up and down every beam and support, forcing the sands of ash and bone that leak in through the cracks to shimmer and wake, faster and faster. 

Every part of the underground hell they walk through feels active, no longer just reactive, and that activity comes in the form of tearing itself apart in the throes of agony. 

A tunnel collapses behind them, steel and the weight of the corpse-desert above collapsing down from above in a cascade. The right-angle of a corridor slams shut like a bent joint, severing a chunk of his robes. The ground beneath him spasms and unleashes a dozen spikes, each one like a malformed gunbarrel, each one misfiring and deafening him in the close confines they run through.

Shin Ren ducks one, leaps ahead of another, skirts on the barest edge and ignores the bleeding from his ears as he runs. Beside him, the black-clad corpse of a cultivator sprints forward, the guns they wear clattering against their acupuncture as they sprint, several of their tools and artifacts taking damage from the changing world around them- but never their main body.

They both desperately orbit the lone bubble of stability in the collapsing underground, all three of them sprinting madly. 

Shin Ren, Taran, and the priestess of the Changing God, Many-Grasping, all desperately try to keep ahead of what feels like the death throes of a mountain. 

“How much further?” Shin Ren roars, his voice still hopelessly muffled to his ears. 

A pulse of Intent echoes back to him, carried in every movement and act of the beastkin woman. Not Far, she sends back, notes of panic and concern and a desperate reverence echoing in the “words”. 

“Better be!” Taran yells, his voices overlapping each other as the colors in his eyes flicker wildly between a whole spectrum. “It’s getting louder!”

They don’t bother with any further words, each one caught up with running. Around Many-Grasping, the collapse slows, pockets of half-stable architecture holding for a few seconds longer than their neighbors. It’s nowhere near enough to stop the damage entirely, but it’s enough to allow them to run through it rather than try to blast their way through. Even still, Shin Ren is forced to grab her and leap over certain sections that open like industrial grinders, or manifest one of his Souls to hold up a piece of collapsing infrastructure just long enough for the others to get through.

He throws himself into the run, Movement Techniques pumping rocket fuel out from where he steps, and while he would outpace his companions with ease normally, they manage to keep up the pace to keep his hands free and all of them just ahead of the spasming of the hell they’re in.

It started moments ago. A scream like the sound of someone who knows they are dying, magnified through throats made of metal and bone, emanating from vocal cords of mechanism and scalpel-edges and gunfire. Then, the entire space around them began to fall apart, writhing and churning like a body in the throes of agony, trying desperately to find some relief even as it tears itself apart. 

Caution was thrown to the wind for the sake of expediency. Their plodding trek, deeper and deeper, spending hours circumventing danger zones and ambush sites, was abandoned in a heartbeat as their campsite was annihilated by imploding walls and sharp-edged weaponry spawning from out of every angle. 

It’s been well over a week since they came down here. Likely closer to two. Time is hard to track, especially with each of their wildly different constitutions and the ways that power reshapes mortal needs. Having little need or want of sleep in such a hellish place, and requiring food or drink only every few days, they’ve gone deep into the abyss of this section of the Wall, wandering ever-further down, always. Even without the priestesses’ connection to this place, or Taran’s attunement to it, Shin Ren could feel it- the way that Death and Blade and Gun got denser as they descended, the Qi emanating out from every part of the landscape getting thicker and carrying the concepts more intrinsically. He can’t even really cultivate here without getting unbalanced- the amount of time it would take to digest this place’s Qi away from its nature would be prohibitive at best, and likely get them killed at worst. 

Even without actively intaking Qi, though, the Corpse Aflame has been restless, his recently created Pantheon weighed heavily in favor of the most destructive of his aspects. 

Taran has benefitted similarly. What felt like a late Core Formation Realm or equivalent has bloomed into something sharper, more harshly defined, the medical alchemy scent that always follows him added to with gun-oil and the clicking, clacking, ever-shifting sensation of interconnected gears and chambers orbiting each other. Even Many-Grasping has grown here, though her growth has been more obvious- spikes of black keratin and organic armor plating have grown from her, the flesh she’s eaten from out of her seemingly limitless bag changing in hue as they’ve gone deeper. 

He feels, in some small part, matched to this place. He is not strong enough to overcome this hell wholesale, and thus has been forced to adapt, but more than that, it’s familiar. 

It tastes of war, and war has defined him of late. More than almost any other phase of his life, war has defined him, and he wears the horns of one of its devils almost too well. 

Of course, adaptation and resonance can only take one so far when the world is actively trying to stab you with its guts.

An ear-piercing screech of tearing metal comes from ahead, Many-Grasping letting out a snarl and pulse of warning Intent as the pathway shears inwards into sharp-edged fractals. Taran has a rifle unslung before the sound has finished reaching them, ready to fire- but Shin Ren can’t wait.

He wants this done. He wants out of this place. He wants to be more than a devil of another war, and he is tired of dealing with his own fucking issues. There’s therapy and there’s abuse, and he’s abused himself enough- he’s sick of the world helping with that. 

He flexes his cultivation, feeling the Warrior Realm rising out in front of him. 

He doesn’t pulse his core, doesn’t have to call forth his Souls unless he has to, doesn’t have to do an intricate technique. 

Through force of will, what is his and what is the world blurs together, and he simply moves forward.

Blacksteel glows strangely when it melts. A sort of paler fire, off-white, rather than natural orange and red. Still, melt it does. 

Without even turning he drags the heat back into himself, the warped metal locked into place and an opening melted through the sharp-edged trap ahead of them. A thousand-thousand tons of metal and desert seek to collapse on him, and he stands firm, and it Burns around him, creating a space where ground is liquid and air is aflame.

Taran and Many-Grasping sprint through, familiar with this by now, but he can still detect a moment of hesitation before they enter the space he commands. An understandable fear, but unnecessary- the heat does not touch them, their air supply is uninterrupted, and they pass through to the next section with not a drop of change in temperature. 

He lets the “technique” collapse, releasing his will and the negligible amount of his total Qi that it used and following them into a new pocket of relative stability. The space stabs itself with a few hundred spikes a moment later, out of which emerge mechanical insectoids, which fire inbuilt weaponry at each other until a larger blade grows from the ground and Cuts.

Another piece of his robes, glowing with struggling formations, is severed, even as he clears a few hundred meters past the perimeter of the space they were in.

They run deeper, always hearing the echoing scream, the agony of a dying thing, or a grieving thing perhaps. They dodge and cut and burn and blast their way through caverns of metal so morphic it seems fluid, through tunnels so claustrophobic that to breathe is to be cut or crushed, through places that no organic or artificial organism would choose to make or hope to understand, full of tearing and transforming, dying and reforming.

And always, always, they run down.

Until the air feels heavy with Death. Until Shin Ren’s skin prickles with a feeling like sandpaper, until his clothes start shredding into single threads from invisible cuts, until his throat feels like he’s breathing gunpowder. 

The reach of his will, his Truth, and his Dao all together hold back the worst of it- and even still, they suffer the effects. Without a proper defensive technique for a group, without the time to establish a true perimeter as they run, they all suffer- but Taran glows with gunsmoke of his own, and the shifting joining-unjoining of a hundred different guns and dozens of different voices, and Many-Grasping endures, biting at the air as if to threaten it away, armor plates glistening and her presence, bloody and strange, holding firm against the environment. 

The world screams loud enough to bring blood from his ears, screams for longer than he keeps track of, and they run the whole time.

And then- 

Many-Grasping’s head shoots up, eyes bright. An inhale- and then she turns, hard, into a crevice, a torn-open crack in the framework of the maze.

Her presence holds it open just long enough to be followed, and then it is collapsing.

The darkness presses in, its surface sharp, the atmosphere crackling on one’s breath, the abrasion of existence at this depth screaming at them-

A moment. A bubble of stability. 

Through a collapsing pathway no thicker than a crack, they erupt out into safety, the space half-molten and still pressing inwards to crush them. Feet land on solid ground, the keening at last muted, even as it continues to echo through the space. The floor feels like it’s tilting, as if there’s a roiling sea beneath the reflective onyx of the surface, unstable and unsteady- but still, the surface remains untouched.

Shin Ren lifts up his flame to illuminate the space, and Many-Grasping gasps at the sight of the full chamber. 

They stand in a domed space, halfway between a natural cavern and an industrial chamber. It has too many facets, too many right angles, like it was carved from obsidian and never smoothed, and the pattern of its surface is interrupted, again and again, by small patches of… not life. Nothing alive. 

But gardens nonetheless.

There, a tree, long-barreled rifles hanging from its branches of fractal metals. There, a patch of swords, growing with sharpened, spiked hilts out of the black glass. There, a small field of grass, where each blade is replaced by a different caliber of bullet, some no more than malformed musket balls, others fully-machined cartridges of intricate detail.

And there, sitting at its center on a hill of black sand, like a doll left off its strings, is a woman. 

Or the corpse of one.

Kneeling, leaning against a sculpture of a malformed tree, its branches like roots growing up and out, she is half-formed, or perhaps damaged. It’s hard to see the details, the way that the black of her metallic configuration is the same color as the rest of the space, but Shin Ren can still make out the way her torso is half-missing, the way that the visible machinery seen through seams and black armor-plating are mis-matched and still, the way that her face is… off, somehow. In the shape of her head, perhaps. 

Still, he knows her. He can’t not know her. 

Together beneath the Heavens, they carved their ways forward. Together beneath the disdain of an existence beyond existence, she was as an island, and he, a fisherman, casting forth and returning with truth beyond Truth. 

Long locks of caltrops drape from her head like hair, the spikes of the interlocking traps occasionally mutated into bullets rather than simple metal. Like barbed wire they fall, ammunition and trap in one, half-obscuring the sleek, metallic nature of the body, covered and armored in barrels without chambers, blades without hilts, pistons and engine-parts disconnected from anything around them.

Artwork in the form of woman, built from every tool of murder they have faced in their descent, yet ultimately, made of pieces powerless to fulfill their desired functions.

Before he thinks to stop her, Many-Grasping takes a step forward.

“Is that…”

Shin Ren nods, holding out a hand to advise caution. “It is. I could recognize her anywhere.”

Taran blinks, his eyes flicking over to Shin Ren. “What’s that-”

“Tribulation. Complex. Focus. And the hair. Hard to miss.”

Taran opens their mouth, then closes, their eyes flickering. They nod, just once, and start walking to one side, flanking around the central figure as Shin Ren approaches, supporting Many-Grasping.

She, in turn, barely seems to notice him. She steps forward on shaky legs, both oppressed by and seemingly indifferent to the weight of this place. Even in the Warrior Realm, Shin Ren feels himself pressured, an overwhelming aura of machine-murder and the presence of a landmark’s worth of Qi forcing him to actively defend himself. 

A trinity of Divine Council, of Ruin, Delusion, and Purity, make their presence known, holding back the miles above and the dark sun in front of him, and he approaches.

Many-Grasping falls to her knees before the figure at the chamber’s center, and Shin Ren recognizes the smell of the black dirt, even as it begins to smolder and change from his presence. The beastkin priestess kneels before a mound of gunpowder sand and the figure atop it.

It’s still hard for him to properly feel what she’s trying to say, but he has had a lot of practice, and the meaning slips through her movements, past his language center and into the back of his mind.

“Apex. Change-Maker. Born-Again. Not-Yet-DR***N. I Am Here. I Come To Help.”

The figure doesn’t move. For a time, it feels like she’s not even alive, not really present- just another manifestation, as meaningless as the strange creatures that scrabbled through the under-dark, or the stalactites of violent armaments all around. 

And then, a sound, like cracking metal, ringing as it is crushed beneath misaligned mechanisms.

Slowly, the effigy turns her face to the woman kneeling before her. 

Or at least, it turns what it has for a face.

There is a gun-barrel for an eye. There are armor pieces and plates of weapon-crafting in place of skin.  There are perfectly shaped blocks of steel in place of teeth, visible through the gaping crater where the right half of her face should be.

She looks sheared apart. The shadow of war looks on them, its eye empty of light or intellect, and shows them the line carved from the top of its head, down through half its ribcage and out its right hip. Almost half its upper body just gone, and most of its face and skull. 

Inside the black wound, there are hundreds, or thousands, of connector ports, pistons, engineering and architecture, malformed and shattered at the edge of the cut. 

It doesn’t take esoteric senses or moving past language to feel the moment of hurt that emanates from Many-Grasping. She sends it out loud, letting out with it a keening sound. It’s a profoundly inhuman sound, made to echo from an inhuman throat through vast forests or over great dunes, but the grief in it, even without the Intent it carries, hurts to hear. 

Shin Ren kneels, putting a hand on his travel-companion’s shoulder. 

“She’s not here,” he whispers.

The effigy creaks, and the gun-barrel it has for an eye spins, ever so slightly, a chamber behind it clicking in sequence.

And then it opens its mouth.

From out of an empty cavern, shaped artfully from gun-pieces, comes a hissing echo of clicking and moaning machinery, imbued with meaning beyond words.

“No. She Is Not.”