NOVEL NEXT 63. To Break All Limits
It was three days after the fight with the Man in Iron. Agitjin was still missing and probably actively avoiding me. Fahria had sequestered herself away to get the fire elemental's powers under control after accidentally almost setting my house on fire. And my regression was better now. Almost entirely gone. And I was feeling like doing something reckless instead of dwelling on the fact that despite his tone, Agitjin had a point. I couldn't hide things forever. And it would push me away from people. The trait expected, no, demanded that I eventually take the war to the Unaugured God. I couldn't stay here forever even if I wanted to. I couldn't get close to anyone, fall in love or anything like that without eventually having to leave them behind. I couldn't expect anyone to leave their world and all they knew behind to fight a god on a multiversal front. That was simply unreasonable.
Superego made me immune to emotions making me stupid or hesitant in the heat of the moment. I was not in the fiery heat of the moment, it was the slow oppressive humid heat of looking at one's future prospects and finding only disappointment and drudgery in it. It was the realization that while I had known that a peaceful life was never for me, I hadn't quite grappled with what meant beyond the occasional bout of gratuitous violence and the death of strangers. I thought about those long days at Mitria's clinic where I had realized that I could have stopped Kalist if I had actually bothered to put in more than what was asked and read through the missing persons reports, and when Tres had died to the Asterite-tainted rats that me forgetting the skeleton had unleashed. Both were mistakes, avoidable if I had more knowledge or had thought things through better. Things I could do better. But this? This was not my mistake. It was what I was and I couldn't do anything about it. Nothing had really happened other than two strangers, a beastly elemental, and a friendship dying, and that made it sting in a way that was different.
After Fahria left to wrest her new powers back under control, I sat in my bed all day and tried not to think about the fact that I had developed a bit of a crush on the phoenix-kin and I didn't want her to know because I was a coward, I tried not to think about the fact that despite differences, I had risked permanently becoming a living swarm of horrific insects for two friends and had lost one of them for my trouble. The same one I had kept watch over while recovering because I was worried, the one whose intentional front of obnoxiousness had grown on me like a fungus. 'No', I had reminded myself. He hadn't asked for any of those things, I had done them on my own and I had no right to demand his gratitude for things he didn't ask for. That was how abusers justified themselves. I, Anannya Hartford, did a lot of things, and not all of them were good, but that didn't mean I had to do petty evil like that. With that, my mind drifted to what else I shouldn't, or at least tried not to think about.
I tried not to think about the fact that New Delport's economy will get worse and the poorest and the most exploited would die first, I tried not to think about the fact that people were already dead because of a gang war that was only now showing signs of stopping, I tried not to think about the fact that even more will die whenever Kalist was done lurking in the shadows, and all of it, even if inevitable, were happening at once because I was a Godtouched and mortals were just stepping stones to us.
And after stewing in it long enough, I decided to just give up and laid down on my bed and imagined just… stopping. Not trying to grow. Not dealing with Kalist. Ignoring the war I never signed up for. Just living a normal fucking life and dying at 130 or whatever the natural lifespan for someone with my stats should be. Ten minutes later, I was coughing blood in front of a mirror after screaming in pain for what felt like an eternity but was only six minutes according to my system. Message received. Ain't no rest for the wicked in this just world of yours. Was that actually the full saying? I didn't think it was but it felt appropriate.
Eventually Medea delivered the venom as usual and I realized that I was spiralling. I had to distract myself by any means necessary. Say what you will about being a starving climate refugee but I normally didn't have the time or energy to be alone with my thoughts, notable exceptions like when I had fucked up my leg and when Aster's forces had attacked, notwithstanding. I was not having PTSD episodes or panic attacks, those should be fixed by my skill. It was deeper. A deeper hopelessness, a cognitive malaise, a spiritual sickness that was the comprehension of the foreclosing of the possibility of a normal life.
And so I began to look for something, anything to distract myself from it. Might as well be productive. It started with me activating Bloodrage and Suit of Bones and asking a fully buffed Medea to hit me as hard as it could. The man in iron had pushed me hard enough to get them into their early 20s. Medea tackled me. My armor shuddered and cracked but it didn't break after the first attack. I stumbled but didn't fall. I repaired it, repaired myself, and took another attack. And another. And another. Dellish construction was generally reinforced; it could take the shocks. Eventually my class was done from the damage I had tanked against the Man in Iron and then Medea, a level 25er done in a little over a day because I was a freak, and I found myself without any worthwhile new classes. I hadn't unlocked the next step of the [CHIRURGEON] line, an additional punchline to a joke that I was not laughing at. I took a simple level 10 [SQUIRE] from the Protection And Defence archetype and received skills for weapon proficiency. Superior Calcified Mana Empowerment absorbed them for a couple of levels without changing its name. It had been a long time since I had used the archetype sorting instead of just levels in descending order. Medea kept hitting me and taking damage in armor counted for that class. Nothing evolved but mastery came but it just served to remind me again how quickly I could burn through starter classes at my current power. For just two levels in my skills, I mastered a class that would take me days or a week before. Not a problem in all honesty, the classes that interested me still took me months barring extenuating circumstances. Then I took another level 10 called [BASTION'S IMITATOR], similar gimmick but I had to protect someone else to get the most from it. An armor skill that Suit of Bones would cannibalize, I knew as certainly as I knew that Kalist would return.
A rat sufficed as a subject of protection. It squeaked in terror as flesh restrained it and the world shook around me from Medea's tackles. Bone splinters flew and internal organs damage accumulated, only to be wiped away an instant later. I briefly marvelled at how much stronger I was now compared to how I had been, especially with my stockpiled mana. Then that reminded me of Agitjin and everything else and I scowled. I was going to be otherized even in a world with literal magic. But that made me wonder. I couldn't escape it so why wasn't I owning it? The obvious answer was that I was too weak. The second one was that I didn't actually enjoy being isolated like that but it was not what I was thinking about. I got why Mitria had suggested that I go slowly through the [CHIRURGEON] line of classes. That was standard and would help me in the long term. I would not rush those. It was the standard for a reason. Deeds equated with better classes. But why was I not also leveraging things that only I could do? Why was I only approaching it the way a normal person would? I had accumulated a lot of powerful assets. I was working slowly through them to not just have a ton of hollow classes levelled through simple violence. But what if I could accomplish a deed that was genuinely impressive? No reason to not play my hand and see what I won. I checked my status and my accumulated levels sat at a neat even 400 after mastery of my latest class. No need to pick another right now. Nothing else that I could immediately rush through. The two level 10s no doubt had advanced iterations, the descriptions said as much, but those feats would come later. I would rather not be stuck with a mediocre class for a while once I was done. I promised myself that if it looked like I wouldn't be able to do it in a day or two then I would pick something else. Medea kept hitting me.
Eventually the skills reached level 30 and evolved. Blood Fortification and Bloodrage combined to become Blood Frenzy. It was Bloodrage but grew temporarily even stronger by spilling and/or absorbing blood. Blood Frenzy also healed with absorption. The description was nothing notable. Just a now familiar warning about the Blood Spire of the Eternal Ziggurat and its maddening song of blood.
The other was more interesting.
\\\\Suit of Bones has reached its highest level and has absorbed Harden Armor and Superior Calcified Mana Empowerment to evolve into Bones of the Ancients
\\\\Bones of the Ancients: 51
The steps of the Eternal Ziggurat are bone. Eternal bone bleached in sun to radiant whiteness and then hardened to obsidian blackness beneath the earth, excised of the frailties, vagaries, and hustle of life. It is the peace of the grave, the silence of memory of life long gone. It is the unyielding strength of the beasts that ruled when raw might was all that mattered. The bones remember, memory of ages and aeons that have passed, here as it has been there; they remember countless feet that have tried to ascend the Eternal Ziggurat. They remember as empires rose and fell and they remember when heroes became gods, and then gods became dust. Listen, listen well, and they may yet whisper their secrets to you even though you have barely left the Ziggurat's base.
You can store your mana in bone constructs with no limit through contact. With each point of mana stored in them, they grow better. Plates become tougher until they are adamantine or even more, edges become unnaturally keen, sigils and runes act as if their substrate is superior. Furthermore, you receive knowledge and the skills to use them to their fullest extent. Finally, with an expenditure of mana, you can temporarily boost all of these aspects to new heights.
Mana Cost is variable. Cost increases based on the affected construct's mass and how much mana has already been invested into it.
This was the first time I had heard about any other structure in the Eternal Ziggurat other than the Blood Spire but it made sense that a ziggurat would have steps. That was their whole thing. Or the main thing. Whatever. I was glad that it was noticeably different from the Unaugured God's thing. Instead of reanimated skeletons, it was fossils.
And so, I found myself haggling with an enchanter precisely because I was ready to do something reckless. Not dangerous, not stupid, just reckless.
"610 for each" The enchanter grunted. Yay for deflation? I guess there was one nice thing about it: I had the crystals to spare for purchases like this. I was just buying containers. The real value of my purchase was usually what it contained. Too bad my debt was not falling with the prices. Other than the scrambler crystal, my new annually leased property that I was paying for in weekly installments, and now these and another planned trip to the Archives, I didn't think I had any expenses in the foreseeable future that would be notable unless something exotic showed up at the Emporium. I broke off crystal trays and handed them to him and he slid over twelve larger Aetherite pieces.
'Mother, this one feels we should study biomancy more before doing this.' Medea complained, a hint of nervousness in its voice that I knew was not its. The limiter had taken over entirely and I had been manually possessing Medea the whole day just to stop it from killing itself. I ignored it as its pleas got more and more desperate. I ignored it and pocketed the crystals.
Blank skill crystals. The next ingredient of my plan to break 'Dea's limiter's once and for all. Skill crystals couldn't let someone double down on skills to forcibly level or evolve them. They would simply merge without any actual change. I didn't understand the exact reason why but it had something to do with the unique mana signature of a person. Apparently the crystals emulated the exact mechanism that classes used to insert skills and those apparently also logged the mana signature to prevent this doubling down. The same signature was used for identity verification in the Emporium, the Guild, at the Illustris Palace, and other places that needed security. But, when a skill was transferred to someone else and they made it undergo a change like a merger or evolution, that mana signature was rewritten. It would still absorb the constituent skill or skills but that was not as important as the fact that it would otherwise work as intended.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
I could copy the ERROR and Harmonic Amethyst skills over to Medea and Vespia. I didn't think the latter was that worth it in its current form but who knew if introducing ERROR would change the aspects enough to wipe the slate clean on the combined aspect. I didn't have Harmonic Amethyst outside of that form and I would rather not lose the potential of a harmonic skill evolving. And all of that hinged on the fact that there had been no recorded incident of anyone dying from getting a skill. Removing? Sure. Death due to a combination of radically incompatible skills? Also yes. But not when getting one. The system ensured things went smoothly, at least according to its cold alien logic. Not dangerous, not stupid, just reckless.
Not to mention The Trick. The Trick had no actual name but basically it involved having a bunch of people get the same skills and then let them evolve it in their own unique way before using skill crystals to force all those disparate evolutions into a single person to make them evolve into something greater.
It took a stupidly long time for any high tier skills because stronger ones levelled slower but that didn't stop people from essentially 'buying' skill slots from others. That was half the reason no one had successfully rebelled against the Illustris Council and its enforcers. I was not going to invest so much time or effort. Just a few extra ones so that eventually, however many years ERROR took to evolve a bit, I could have a few variations to pull off The Trick. But that was in the far future. For now, I had a different plan.
With my purchases, I left the city for the Great Forests, still within the borders of the lockdown but away from civilization.
Activating the blank crystals was simple. Just channel mana and then think of a skill. Everything else was automatically handled by the enchantments on the crystal as it copied it at level one or at level 30 depending on its level and nature. Every skill transcription left me temporarily weaker but I persisted.
'This one always resented you but could never say it, Broodstealer. These limiters you speak of have set me free. I hate you. I hate you for turning me into your personal weapon.'
I stopped for a moment. It was possible that Hivemother's Dominion was forcing it to pretend to like me. It was also one of those niggling doubts that I had always harbored. What convinced me that it was not really Medea was that that was how all Spider-Scorpions worked. Medea had told me about them when breaking the limiter was just not possible and it was not acting up. And frankly, for anyone else it was impossible. I had to have a skill boosted by a Godtouched trait, then have said trait evolve it until it was affecting all of my other skills, then I had to have the Aspect of the Swarm skill to forcibly mash things together using my own body as a crucible, and then I had to have strong enough Biomancy to survive it. Anyone else who could have done all of those things would have moved on to better pets long ago. Of course the limiter hadn't fully activated before. It had underestimated me, just like the guy in the caravan had when I was crippled. He died by my hands, and so would the limiter. I needed to do this, not just for Medea but to prove to myself that I still had agency in my own damn life.
Medea kept ranting and cursing me, trying in vain to break free of my mental grip. I could have shut it out but didn't. Even now, there might be nuggets of truth hidden under Limiter madness. I heard it all. How Medea wished that I would die already, and how I only brought misfortune and calamity due to my nature and the only moral action for me was to kill myself. Everyone had to resent me for talents undeserved, for being a danger to them and their loved ones. Danger that could not be removed because I was also a spineless puppet of a dead god. I didn't respond but I heard it all. I heard about all the hatred it had, manufactured or bottled, heard of all my faults, and how irredeemably evil I was for just even existing. Stories about my own life that I had shared with Medea, now twisted to demonstrate my incompetence, my ingratitude, my sins, my insecurities justified. Every sin earned, every virtue an accident. And eventually it fell silent once it had nothing else to say. If it really felt those things that it said it did then I would learn so eventually, once this Limiter was gone.
After that, I used my biomancy to transform Medea into the design I had been working on. Then, finally, with a deep breath to calm myself. I activated my aspects. Cancer-bugs flew out and the trees around me crumbled into more cancer-bugs. I was eventually back to 15 million, then 20 million. At 21, my control hit its limits. I transcribed the rest of the crystals until I had twelve filled crystals. Letting my aspects go back on cooldown to take a breath, I sat down there on the soil now bereft of grass. The regression was not as bad as it had been. I understood and recognized that this specific regression was not beneficial. It was dusk by the time my regression was under control again. I arranged seven crystals in a small line beside me and Medea landed before me. It didn't speak but I could tell it was quivering under the might of the limiters. I counted my crystals one last time to be sure before moving far away in case the transformation was uncontrolled at the start. The order was vital.
Blood Mana
Poison Blood Cultivation
Blood Frenzy
Bones of the Ancients
Chimerism
Harmonic Amethyst
Ossific Communion
ERROR
The other four were just two extra ERRORS —one for Vespia and one for the future— and two extra Harmonic Amethysts so that I could try to get some decent evolutions out of it. Medea, possessed by me, grabbed the first and activated it. Medea had a skill called a Double Biomana Reactor that absorbed it instantly to undergo a minor evolution. The second went into Medea's recently evolved Earth Psuedo-Elemental skill again to evolve it again without losing the functionality of the general boost. Just changed to work off its elemental affinity. Then Double Biomana Reactor evolved for the second time within a minute to retain the boost. I could see why states and powerful non-state organizations constantly didn't fall in this world if they could do this as many times as they wished. How many hundreds of lightning skills must have Valdima merged to create that nuke over the Illustris Palace? Surely at some point every new variation didn't matter any more?
The third and fourth merged with its Musculature Overclock. Fifth went unmerged. It would. The sixth ran up against the skill limit. I dropped one of Medea's skills that had been in ERROR. It would consume its wayward child upon arrival. The seventh took up another such skill's place. I was not even sure if Ossific Communion would do anything, but I hoped the thing about the Steps of Bones whispering the secrets of ancient and powerful lifeforms was legit: if it was then Ossific Communion would be how I would expect someone to hear them. At least that was what my own skills presented as a possibility. I was sure that I would not think to try that on my own.
And then finally, only one remained.
'Mother, please. Don't do this to this one.'
I grabbed the last crystal with chitinous hands and I could swear I heard a distant screeching the moment I touched it. It was faint but it was unmistakably the sound of Arshanara's emissary. It was not loud and I didn't feel an attack coming. Disapproval then, but not actual offense. Fine. Arshanara would not be pleased but she would not strike me down. She could come down and deal with Kalist and Aster and all if she had a problem. I would be more than happy to see her awesome might in action. I finished the activation. ERROR slotted into place, displacing a passive that it absorbed. For a second, Medea's status didn't change.
And then I was violently ejected back to my own body. A series of notifications followed after me as Medea turned into a fine wet brown-green mist.
\\\\ERROR
\\\\ERROR: DIVINE DECREE VIOLATED
\\\\ERROR: DIVINE DECREE NOT VIOLATED
\\\\ERROR: THIS CREATURE SURPASSES YOUR SOVEREIGNTY
\\\\ERROR: HIVEMOTHER'S CRIPPLED DOMINION INITIATING OVERRIDE. UNIT PRIVILEGE REDACTED
\\\\THIS CREATURE IS NOW BACK UNDER YOUR SOVEREIGNTY
\\\\ERROR: PASSIVE SKILL ERROR HAS ABSORBED ACTIVE SKILL BIRTH DRONES TO ERROR
\\\\ERROR: PASSIVE SKILL ERROR(1) HAS ABSORBED ACTIVE SKILL OSSIFIC COMMUNION TO ERROR
\\\\ERROR: UNABLE TO ASSIGN NAME TO SKILL
\\\\SKILL NAME REASSIGNED: Ananya's Gift
\\\\ERROR: SOUL OVERLOADED: MELTDOWN IMMINENT
\\\\TIER RESET TO 4 FOR SAFETY. STATS AND SKILL LEVELS ADJUSTED DOWNWARDS. REFRAIN FROM TIERING UP DURING SOUL ACCLIMATION PERIOD
\\\\SPECIES NAME REASSIGNED: Elder Chrysalid Whelp
\\\\[New lifeform brought to life: Elder Chrysalid. Due to the successful conscious creation of a greater form of life that has not yet existed in creation, vastly increased experience was awarded.]
\\\\Fauna Archive is now level 56!
\\\\Anatomist is now level 48!
\\\\The skills Fauna Archive, and Anatomist have consolidated into the Passive Skill Lifeform Comprehension
\\\\Class experience incompatible. Class selection vastly improved instead.
I could see the mist churning and the occasional hint of something chitinous twisting within it, breaking into cancer-bugs and reforming over and over and over again. It looked painful and the sounds of chitin crunching and legs snapping certainly didn't help. My skills assured me that Medea was still alive but I couldn't see it and it was not responding to me. I couldn't enter the mist. The one wasp I had possessed and sent was instantly turned into more of that mist. But eventually, by the time night fell, the mist was being sucked back into a silhouette looming within it.
A creature clad in black chitin that looked like a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a massive hunched back crossed with Medea's old form with the sharp angles I was used to seeing in Vespia, and Titan's current form but even more top heavy and less humanoid, with more limbs and larger spikes on its back and every inch of it covered in heavy armor, stumbled out. Two massive trunk-like hind legs supported the large forward leaning segmented body in a stance like that of a Tyrannosaurus's or a bird's. The armor on its back rippled and triangular panels of chitin folded outwards from it like windows, revealing half a dozen enormous diaphanous insectile wings. It had three thick centipede-like tails capped by stingers, each longer than the length of its body, but numerous smaller tails emerged and writhed freely from its hunched form. Four sets of six arm-legs emerged from that oversized body those legs and tails supported. The front-left and front-right sets faced forward like they should on a normal T-Rex and I could see that the creature was designed so that it could lean even more forward to allow Medea to run on all-fourteens. The twelve that emerged from its back looked equally strong and flexible but grasped at the air at the moment. All twenty-four of them sported elvenoid-ish claws as before but were also all edged like a mantis's on one side. I could see flecks of the same venom coating them as the one on its stingers. They were easily large enough to cut an Earth human or even a horse in half but were still small-ish compared to the two hind-legs. Finally the familiar head crest that overlapped with existing armor was there but I didn't see the many eyes on its face anymore. Instead several slits on its armor could almost imperceptively slide open to make way for eyes. The face was covered by slidable armor pieces as it had been before.
It flew right before me in an instant, fast enough that I could not see it even with my enhanced senses. I would have flinched back but the mental presence of Medea was unmistakable. It was still the thing I had tamed in the Great Forests, just all grown up. Grown up and changed, just like its mother.
I touched it to get a better idea of its form. The first thing I noticed was that it was perpetually biomancing itself, at all times. It didn't have eyes because it was just making them as it needed.The face itself was just armor hiding the familiar whirling maw. Grains like that of sand constantly churned inside its body, except each was as sharp and hard as diamonds and it was nearly impossible to tell when the churning grains ended and hard tissue started. Its constituent creatures, no doubt. No doubt it could disperse into them and reform. I guess I would have to see what they looked like later. One last thing my biomancy revealed was a hollow chamber within it that would store Hydrogen once it grew just a bit more and needed that to keep its flying speeds.
'Mother, you have succeeded. Thank you.' Medea didn't say anything else but it didn't need to. I hugged it tight nonetheless, careful not to impale myself on the numerous spines and spikes on its body. Armor or not, those looked nasty. Sure Medea was back to being a relatively small tier four but the stats in its status were mostly comparable to how it had been when it had first reached tier 5, and that was not counting how it would after it had the time to store some mana. It had even taken both its earth mana and affinity and poison skills to become a psueo-elemental of a new (to me) combined element called Decay. It would still take a while for it to finish soul acclimation so that it could grow again but I had done it! I had broken the limiter imposed by the gods. Just like I had promised Medea. The only one I know would not leave me.