NOVEL NEXT 58. Primal Fear
When the Empire tore open the veil between the worlds to vanquish the Third Calamity, it did not occur as intended or hoped. For one, the Third Calamity survived, diminished, shattered, more of a flicker of thought between images than an image but she remained. Secondly, and far more worryingly, it spilled forth the raw potentiality of an unborn and unformed universe into a realm that was very set in its form.
From the priesthood of the gods, we know that it is not merely energy that exists in the Unformed Chaos. Indeed, no world could have survived even a fragment of the roiling energies of the Unformed Chaos. The gods speak of what chaos is to their champions and those that touch. It is information, memories of power in one realm echoing across eternities in the form of pale echoes in others. The Godtouched speak of elvenoids in other realms, of dragons, of beasts that are stories to us but a reality to them. The gods speak of the grand structure of creation that chaos is a vital part of. The ones above the very gods, the mindless emanators of existence record, remember, and reflect these as they intermingle, mutate, divide, merge, and differentiate in the womb of chaos.
What we Catrians summoned on that fateful day was not the energy of a stillborn universe, but the possibilities it contained therein. All that were exposed to it changed, be it man, monster, or machine. Even the land was not spared. It was change, pure and simple. Some grew weaker, others stronger. No grand will, no divine patrons, only something that was not what it had been. The old that is replaced by the new.
Even then, it is the nature of all things to converge upon like and even now, uncountable years later, chaos worms its way into this realm every so often, to be beaten back by the great Red Wyrm on his eternal vigil.
The fools think of chaos as evil. Even greater fools attribute goodness to chaos. It is not either. It is simply what stands between a multiverse of evenly spaced out microscopic motes in an eternally static and dark existence and what we are. It is also what pushes us, as elvenoids of reason and logic in mind and body towards dissolution through endless transformation.
From chaos we come. And to chaos we return.
-A fragment of an unnamed pamphlet retrieved from the former capital city of Catria. Suspected to be penned by Abattar Heval, the only [CHAOTICIAN] in recorded history, himself, but no definite evidence has been found yet. Whatever had transpired in Catria on that fateful day occludes the truth from all divination.
With trepidation, I channeled a single point of mana into the crystal and the envelope fizzled and burst into flames. At the same time, a notification appeared before me.
"Seven days from now, at 6300. The Black Nettle Emporium. I have someone who desires to meet you.
I am, and they are, aware of your true nature.
Lady Ayn."
Crap. Well, nothing I could do about it until then. I knew Ayn wouldn't kill me, not directly but Medea was convinced that she had been trying to get me killed. I was personally less sure but I had a healthy amount of wariness for pher in any case.
It was becoming a pattern, wasn't it? "I can't do anything so let future Anya worry about it." It was, but it too was not something I could do anything about. Gods, dragons, Councillors, Guilders, so many entities that I couldn't do anything about.
Shaking myself out of my despair, I downed a much more intense poison and covered the windows. Stripping down to my underwear, I closed my eyes, sat cross-legged and began focusing on the burning in my gut. It was slow work, gross work but eventually it ceased to burn and I was covered in a layer of sweat. Two cycles later, my mana was nearly bottomed out.
That annoying ritual over, I switched over to Medea again. It was happily feasting on something that was unrecognizable to me but seemed to have a distinctly mammalian hide. Vespia on the other hand was struggling against a few weaker monsters. Individually too weak to worth shifting hosts from the reptile she was inhabiting but just numerous and quick enough to inflict damage. Every streak of black that had healed on the host was just a bit different than the original. Every injury Vespia's host healed, every new growth made them just a bit more different from what they had been and a bit closer to something else. Posture changed, legs elongated, skin hardened and more. I had never seen what the wasps tainted by the energies of an aborted universe were building beneath infested flesh as Vespia always changed hosts before the transformation progressed much but it was an arthropod. Just not one that resembled a wasp or a spider-scorpion. The snippets of information that I had managed to squeeze out of books hadn't helped much but Mitria told me that it was always something unique to each queen, or whatever was controlling the queen in any case. I possessed Vespia, cast a quick Hasten Swarm and evacuated before the sheer overstimulation left me incapacitated. Even with my Superego, the sheer amount of information that Vespia handled at once was beyond me. Honestly it was hard for me to accept how something with such a tiny brain handled all that without melting. Blinking to clear away the image of wasps darting in my vision and the mental sensation of countless different limbs, I stood up shakily; taking a moment to carefully watch (glare at) the leg that twinged in response. I knew it was still waiting for one single moment of negligence, a tiny lapse to start regressing again. I had my eye on it!
Selene flew in and settled on my shoulder. Having been clinically dead and then revived seemed to have fixed whatever mental block she had and so she was now often just flying in darkness to improve her skills. It turned to me and I grabbed a rat out of my collection and let her dig in.
I switched over to an independent wasp and watched as Vespia slaughtered the monsters, infesting and turning their flesh into breeding grounds for even more wasps. One particularly smart canid just turned tail and ran back into the wilderness.
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\\\\The skills Intimidation and Wild Terror have consolidated into the Passive Skill Swarm's Primal Fear
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
Even when all elvenoids were but covering beasts huddling in caves for safety, when the light of reason was yet to shine in eyes glancing furtively into the night, fear existed. Fear of what could be lurking in the dark, of shadowed eyes watching for a moment to pounce. Fear that transcends sapience, even sentience to strike at the bestial foundations of cognition itself. It is not the kind of fear that can be rationalized away, because it predates rationality.
And now you are akin to the beast stalking in the dark. You, and your minions, now passively exert an aura of fear that heightens certain emotions and affects reason. This aura is always on but it won't have a noticeable effect on anything but the most primitive of life or those that are exceptionally tuned into nature or emotions. That is, unless you desire them to be affected. This skill scales directly with the strength of your swarm, be it numbers, exceptionally powerful individual members or even your capability to regrow and empower them.
Each level increases your aura range by 0.5 meters and it starts with an additional 10 meters to range. Current bonuses: 35.5 meters.
How odd. Usually when I got skill fusions that lost functionality, I had the option of refusing then. Probably just a side effect of my hive related skills exerting their influence. At least now Medea had another empty slot.
Selene fluttered away to do her thing before the sun rose and I began my work for the day. My two Swarm-Generals were busy rewarding me experience and money while two boxes full of Medea's spawn produced as much venom as they could. I didn't like to admit it but I could probably live off just the skills I had already cultivated, Quiraion's quest notwithstanding. Not very comfortably but I could do it. And frankly, if I had a choice, between just having a peaceful but a mediocre life and being a Godtouched, I would choose mediocrity but I didn't have a choice.
Sending a command to both my Generals to stop fighting for a moment, I deactivated my scrambler crystal. That crystal was easily the most valuable thing I owned, not counting Vespia, and the reason why I still had a massive debt.
An Aetherite crystal that was modified for just one single function and nothing else. It would take all of the non-class activity experience that I gained and store it for later until it hit a storage limit. I could use it in an emergency to instantly master classes but that was not why it was so expensive. The reason was simply that it was the only reliable way to simulate starting over on a different path long-term. Just rushing through classes didn't get anyone good upgrades as everyone had repeatedly drilled into my head over months. It was not perfect, I still had better stats and skills than I would otherwise and those expedited everything but it was better than nothing. I had everything I wanted that I could get in a reasonable time frame without taking a loan that was in the millions.
Sedated rats, numbering half a dozen, sat in glass cages. I hated levelling the [CHIRURGEON] class track but it had to be done. Juvenile spider-scorpions were not sentient in the way a rat was but unfortunately it was impossible to work with exoskeletons when I was doing basic things like sewing wounds shut. Taking out a scalpel of reinforced biomancied bone, I began to work.
Eventually, my sedated subject died.
\\\\TRAINEE CHIRURGEON (8/10)
The simplest thing a surgeon can do is stitch a wound shut again. The most complex thing that the surgeon can do that can still be considered to be within the purview of surgery is creating chimeras that can, perhaps not overpower, but match even drakes. But is it not limits that define us? Perhaps, engineering plagues of infectious mutagens is not beyond you but beware that such things may attract the attention of things that you have no recourse against. Or maybe it is stitching together a vast network of lifeforms into an organic mana array the size of a castle is your grand ambition. In any case, all paths start here. Just as we form from just one cell, just as life branches out into a thousand shapes from one ancestor, your journey begins here.
So pick up that scalpel and carve away the secrets of life from those that hide it from your inquisitive mind.
MASTERY BONUSES:
+1 to ACUITY, PERCEPTION AND VITALITY
I opened up my status screen, I was pleased to see that I was almost done with the class. I was about to move on to the next one when a grumbling in my stomach told me that it was late. Late? I checked the time. I was very late.
Quickly throwing the dead rodent into my venom farm, deactivated and then put the crystal in my bag, used my skill to remove all the blood from my clothes and hands, and then left my new property. 5 seconds later, I was home again. Note to self, the smell still lingers when I skip out on cleaning myself. The noon sun shone merrily and I could have sworn it was hotter than usual.
The guild was emptier than I was used to, the bulk of guilders being mobilized to abet the monster tide, enforcing martial law, or trying to forcibly end the gang war so that the damn martial law could actually be enforced. I was happy working towards any of these goals as long as I was getting paid for it and the dragon died. But I wasn't here for any of those things today, no. It was something much more personal.
"You are late." Fahria noted tonelessly. Besides her, Agitjin looked uncharacteristically alert.
"Yeah, sorry. Did it start?"
"Not yet."
I fell silent. Fahria's tone was clipped, terse. Maybe she was mad at me for my tardiness but I didn't think so. I had been around Fahria for far too long. Well, more like that wasn't the entire reason for it.
"Arr you sure we can take it out?" It was Agitjin who asked. Fahria's grimace was answer enough.
"Ideally, it would be Terris who would handle it and he certainly could have."
"But he's dead so we have to do it." I interjected and she nodded, her face hardening. Terris was something of a personal servant slash bodyguard given to Fahria for the Crucible who died defending her from a particularly high tier monster. I had never met the guy but the way Fahria spoke about him made him seem devoted to a fault.
"Hey, we have got this. We survived a fucking dragon, didn't we?" I asked, not really feeling the confidence I was trying to project. Judging from her raised eyebrow and Agitjin's snort, it didn't work.
Today was special, not for me or the city but for whatever weird phoenix clan thing the Shakirns were. Every so often, with no rhyme or reason, the Great Ancestor of the Shakirns weakened the veil between the elemental plane of fire it inhabited and the physical world. It was kind of like Sitra Achra but much tamer and personal. There was no way to predict when it would happen except for a few days before it, when the blood within the Shakirns ignited and created a system timer. Anyways, if Fahria could capture a true elemental and bind it then she would be much stronger. The problem was that every other crucible contender was also going to do exactly that if they hadn't already or had some kind of class or skill forbidding it.
With the noon sun high in the sky, we left the guild for an already staked out spot near the river.