Blighted: A Plague Rat's Tale

Embracing Darkness

Obiah's instructions turned out to be a frustrating mix of simple and extremely unintuitive. Apparently (and perhaps rather unsurprisingly) I had skipped several steps more orthodox cultivators usually took; to be more accurate, I had done the equivalent of jumping straight off the deep end before learning to swim. My prior solution of surviving off sheer bloody minded refusal to fade away was enough to survive, but it didn't actually do much to help me integrate this new spiritual connection.

Normally, an established cultivator would slowly expose a prospect to greater and greater amounts of their element (usually diluted if it was something innately harmful, as most things worth cultivating were), with exposure to the untempered and pure power that flowed from a rune only well after they knew how to draw in and safely cycle their element through their body to integrate it properly. With time to adapt, they would build up tolerance to exposure to raw elemental energy such that they could safely begin to actually integrate and utilize it.

I had not done that, not remotely. Instead of safely adapting to manageable quantities, I had exposed myself to the full power of a rune drawn in my own blood without the slightest bit of preparation or safety measures. Unsurprisingly, I was remarkably fortunate to have survived such an experience at all.

Even more luckily, I hadn't actually fucked myself over irrecoverably with my little… over eager leap. Apparently, so long as you survive whatever fuck up you make, you still have a chance. I wasn't sure exactly how much I bought that, but I suppose it would only benefit me for it to be true… which is all the more reason to be suspicious! But suspicion alone isn't enough to prevent me from pursuing a viable source of power.

"Well my little protege, before you can get started on any of the fun parts of cultivation, you have to properly assimilate all that darkness flowing through you." The walking silhouette jabbed a long finger my way, wiggling it about to vaguely point at seemingly random places across my body. "Right now that sigil burned into your brain is dumping darkness out into you like a spigot hooked straight to the primordial. Which is great! It's what some would call the first and most important step in being a proper cultivator; some would even argue it's what separates a proper cultivator from a pretender elementalist. However, as you are now, all that shadow is just flowing about randomly, bumping into stuff and getting in its own way even as your core churns it into something useful. You need to learn how to get it to flow through your body properly, get it to reach your core more efficiently, and get the end result to settle into your cells."

I nodded slowly, keeping my eyes locked on his nose instead of properly meeting his eyes on the off-chance he had some sort of ocular power. "And… how exactly do I do that?"

Triangular red teeth glinted in the dimly lit training room, "You're already halfway there, well sorta. Right now, you're simply allowing the energy to flow as it pleases; fortunately for you, elemental energy, like most energies really, prefers the path of least resistance." His index finger traced a vague path around my body through the air, starting at the heart, extending to my extremities, and returning. "In this case, that would be the body's preexisting systems for transporting things; your veins, your esophagus, your nerves, and so on."

He clapped his hands once, "Which is good! Getting the energy to actually flow without pooling over-much or ripping into you is half of what an initiate learns! You skipped all the boring stuff about learning the ethos of your element and how best to attune yourself to it without being overcome and jumped right to the fun –and dangerous– part!" He shrugged his shoulders, "Normally skipping all that would make you either explode or fade into the primordial power never to return… but you lived, you lucky little pupae, so no worries there!"

His voice carried a note of genuine amusement, reinforced by the gleam in his incongruously bright eyes. He poked a boney finger into my gut, then slowly trailed in along to my head. "You see, your core, the part of you that cuts raw elemental energy with your mana and processes it into something your body can use, is rather far away from that sigil seared into your thoughts. That means all that darkness has to travel all the way down from your brain to your stomach for processing, then the resulting chor migrates over to your liver to seep into your veins to be distributed throughout your body, whereupon it seeps into every cell. That gap between your brain and core provides a whole lot of time and space for a few stray motes of unfiltered darkness to go off track and wind up bouncing about your body, getting into places it doesn't belong, and taking up space your processed energy thus can't easily fill."

He grinned, tapping his chin in mock-thought, "It sure would be a whole lot more convenient if you could move that sigil and processing core to your liver… or heart." He gave an exaggerated wave of a hand as if casting the thought physically aside, "Ah, but that's rather further down the line than we have time to cover now. For now, you need to focus on getting the raw energy down to your core faster! The quicker it reaches the core, the quicker you can process it into chor, the quicker you can get started on proper cultivation! …Oh, and the less waste that will spill out into your body and potentially cause catastrophic –or, far less likely, beneficial– mutations."

I hummed, raising a finger as I opened my mouth to ask him a question– only for him to cut me off with a snap of his fingers before I could ask. "Oh yeah, chor is the fancy term cultivators use for processed elemental energy; likely as much because calling it "refined elemental energy," gets old fast as it is to obfuscate their terminology from outsiders."

I had expected to hear references to qi or other pseudo-eastern philosophy based on the name, but no such things arose. While many concepts seemed similar to the principles I'd seen in western adaptations of xianxia, none of it perfectly lined up. Chor sounded vaguely like qi, but I'd heard no references to dantians or whatever so I could only withhold judgment for now.

"Okay, so how do I actually go about doing that?" I calmly pretended to meet his eyes, already trying to look within myself (both literally with my Paranoia and figuratively) to see if I could observe what he'd described. If I could see the problem, it would be significantly easier to solve it. Paranoia saw the flies crawling about their tunnels and… using some sort of hardened saliva to reinforce them? Okay, I'm remembering why I subconsciously filter out my view of inside myself… but I'm not seeing any particular clumps of shadow.

That could well be because my body was simply too suffused in shadow for my untrained metaphorical eyes to spot any particular pattern to it.

Obiah hummed, "Well, you're on the right track looking into yourself like that." I barely avoided visibly startling at that callout, though by the smirk on his lavender lips the cultivator caught it nonetheless. "The energy is physically within you, but it doesn't travel on purely physical, biological routes; remember, those shadows are pouring out of your mind, not just your brain. The rune resides in your thoughts, and thus your thoughts and will can influence the energy radiating off of it."

The perpetually shadowed man began pacing around me, "Right now, the energy flows into your thoughts, out into your brain, then radiates randomly through your body until it gets caught up in the flow of your veins and eventually gets close enough to get dragged in by your core." He tapped lightly on the top of my head with a single finger, "What you need to do is visualize that energy being gathered up and directed instead of just flowing out in all directions; you need to send it more directly down from your brain to your core, in other words. How you go about that is mostly up to you, each cultivator is a little different in terms of visualization; so long as you don't go particularly radically off base with your designs, it shouldn't make too much difference in the long run."

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A frown settled across my muzzle as I contemplated his words, my thoughts turning inexorably towards the rune branded into my mind. For a moment I simply observed it, watching darkness pour out of it like some omnidirectional fire hose to cast my very thoughts in shadow. Attempting to follow a random clump of darkness as it traveled quickly demonstrated the truth of Obiah's words; while much of it did eventually wind up making its way to my core, a good deal of it broke off and got stuck in random places.

My frown deepened as I focused in on the initial point where the shadows poured into me. I didn't even attempt to modify the rune itself, knowing that attempting to alter the function of something so primordial when I barely grasped the very surface of its nature was unwise. My first thought was to simply create some kind of encasement around the rune to funnel the energy erupting from it all into one direction, but the moment I started to picture it I couldn't help but envision the energy pushing against said redirecting bubble and bursting out. The next half dozen attempts went similarly, with whatever idea I came up with immediately running into a wall of my own nitpicking and falling apart.

This… this might be more difficult than I'd initially thought. It would seem my paranoia is playing against me, finding holes and flaws in every plan I come up with and then, by dint of the nature of a seemingly imagination based system, said flaws manifested and ruined the plan. This is why I could never hack it as a chaos champion, I'd wind up a molten hunk of twisting mutation the moment my imagination runs far too wild and I accidentally imagine my skin crawling off my flesh and strangling me or something.

I shook my head, casting such useless thoughts aside as my closed eyes clenched alongside my jaw. No! I refuse to accept my own mind's betrayal lying down! There has to be something I can't poke holes in, some strategy that won't fall apart under the weight of my disbelief! I could almost feel Obiah' faux-sympathy as my Paranoia showed him watching me with an amused smirk, but I won't give him the satisfaction of asking for advice when I can already guess he'll just say something about picking something you believe in or mastering your mind or…

Or maybe I'm going about this from the wrong angle? If I can't envision anything physically stopping the unending energy from flowing wherever it pleases, maybe I can dream up something to encourage it to flow the way I want instead? I'm not any more eager to start tinkering around with the dark fire of my apparent 'core' than I am the rune seared into my mind, but… I did think it far more plausible than trying to alter the nature of conceptual darkness.

I focused, shifting my mind's eye from the gaping wound bleeding darkness into my thoughts and down to the black flame churning raw shadows into what looked to my eyes like extremely tenebrous smoke. Instead of trying to contain anything, to build walls or rails or tubes, I imagined the very fabric of this imaginary plane being pulled towards my core like cloth around a rock… or space around a black hole.

I didn't want to "simply" turn the black flame in my belly into a blackhole, if not out of fear of devouring myself then for the more mundane concern of it not releasing any byproducts. Fire makes smoke (chor, in this case) but nothing escapes a black hole; which is great for attracting things, but not so great for letting other things out. However, I did borrow from the principle of what makes black holes so scary; every direction leads towards the singularity.

First, I had to add the concept of downward to the blank canvas of my… soul? Mind? Spiritual self? Whatever it was called, I added a reference for "down" and tied it to my core. Then, I envisioned the not-space within "me" twisting such that every path inevitably led downward… and watched in triumph as all the seemingly tangible darkness within me began to tumble down into my core and burned up into smoke.

Spiteful Darkness Breathing +1

Smoke that seeped out from my core unimpeded by the artificial pseudo-gravity within, using its pull to slip into my veins a little faster and suffusing my body cell by cell from there. I wasn't sure if the partial dream logic that held such dominion over the mentally generated elemental energy held less control over the far more real chor, or if some other mechanic was at play. I could only guess that mixing the raw semi-real darkness with my decidedly real mana pulled it from the realm of half-real thoughts into something more physical… and I honestly hope I'm wrong.

Because that was extremely concerning, given it implied things might be able to escape dreams or idle thoughts if mixed with mana. Are their mages literally conjuring their dreams into reality out there? People mixing their thoughts with mana to solidify them? Or worse, ambitious thoughts and ideas mixing themselves with mana and escaping the skull of their creator to inflict themselves upon the world? Could someone accidentally create some sort of malicious tulpa that could escape their minds to run rampant; hell could that be where at least some monsters come from!?

That could so very easily lead to tremendous disasters… but also seems like something people would be more vocally concerned about if it were true. In my (admittedly rather limited) social experiences thus far, no one's mentioned anything of the sort. Though, I suppose such things likely wouldn't exactly be common conversational pieces around the dinner table.

For now, in the absence of evidence, I could only assume it was a legitimate threat and take measures against such things; namely, not trying to infuse my thoughts with mana or bring my thoughts to my core. At worst, if I'm wrong I'll have wasted some effort on imaginary threats; if I'm right however, the worst case scenario is unleashing some lovecraftian horror upon the world via an embodied idea escaping the confines of my mind. Though, trying to actively keep your thoughts from straying to something is like telling someone not to think about pink elephants… which by itself, might disprove the theory, as my thoughts have been metaphorically straying right into escaping via my core without a single malicious thoughtform popping out to murder me.

At this point, I was almost feeling nostalgic over the more than a few times I'd had clear and present dangers to distract me from all the hypothetical terrors potentially lurking beneath the opaque surface of this world.

Blessedly, Obiah's voice tore me away from my rapidly spiralling thoughts. "Ah ha! Managed to figure something out then, have you? I can sense the shadows in you flowing to your core so much faster than before, leaving less behind. Good good, even if a few scraps do get left behind, your chor should build up quickly enough to assimilate it before it can mutate you too badly." The grin on his face told me he was joking about that last part, but the calculations going on in his eyes told me he very much wasn't.

"From here, the rest of the first stage is mostly automatic on your end. Just keep whatever you envisioned in place, don't let your core go out, and once your body has finished adapting to having chor flowing through it you'll be ready to move on to the next steps. None of that requires active intervention, nor can anything from higher stages do anything to assist –though do feel free to peruse that tome if you get curious, seeing what you'll be able to do in the future can be rather enthralling in my experience– so I do believe we're done here. Enjoying pupating into a proper cultivator, and come find me when you're ready for the next stages." He turned to walk towards the door before snapping his fingers and turning back to me, "Oh, and you'll probably be pissing black sludge for the next few weeks."

My expression must have said more than the words on my tongue ever could have because the man's silk-draped arms raised up in a mock-defensive pose before I could even voice them. "Freshly processed chor flows through your liver before it reaches your blood, and while your body is adjusting to this new energy source some of it gets filtered out as toxins. Add to that the fact your body is replacing some of the… unnecessary bits of your cells with your newly generated dark flavoured chor –pushing out the old gunk and filling the space with something far more useful– and the end result is a lot of foul black sludge you need to excrete. Fortunately, your body already has a method of expunging unwanted materials, so you won't be puking it up or having it build up inside you; the latter of which would be very bad, to say the least."

He shrugged his shoulders, "Your urine will probably be black for the rest of your live –side effect of having even processed elemental darkness flowing through your liver, I'm afraid– but the thick and pungent sludge should only last a month or two depending on how well your body takes to chor."

My flat stare only earned me a chorus of laughter as he walked away, the door swinging shut with a strangely sharp note.