“Its name is the Great Chain of Being.”
The word “Chain” had that strange doubling effect as Abzu said it, that snag in my mental awareness that indicated a quirk of translation from Apophic. I realized that the word I’d been saying as “system” was exactly the word for “chain,” just with some honorific affix that denoted royalty or divinity. Apophic, it seemed, did not differentiate between the two categories.
Abzu continued speaking. His words still bore an aura of occult power, but they were no longer the transporting, sublime narration of a true mystery. “The Chain spans from the lowest crawling worm to the highest spheres of Heaven. Ten links on the Chain, ten levels to a link.” He crooked his fingers into crescents, pivoting his thumbs against each other by their tips in pantomime of a chain. “Zero to nine, ten to nineteen, twenty to twenty-nine, and so on. All the way up to level 99.”
“What about the Sun?” I asked. “Where does he fit in?”
Abzu shot me a warning glare. “At the top,” he said. “Or beyond it. Best not to speculate about such matters.”
Some tingling in my soul, maybe where my heresy was stored, hinted to me that he was probably right, so I didn’t ask any further.
“Mortal beings can climb the Chain, drawing closer to divinity,” Abzu said, continuing his explanation. “This was intended as a reward for excellence and for diligence in one’s Heaven-sent duties — that is to say, slaying the enemies of the gods, completing quests, and earning achievements. Each level requires more experience points than the one before, and each link is an order of magnitude greater than the one below it. You’ve already crossed the First Cataract, and brought your minions across it likewise: no doubt you’ve experienced this for yourself.”
“I did notice it, yeah,” I said. “Or I suspected it at least. It’s good to have that confirmed. What’s the First Cataract? Is that just a way of talking about hitting level 10?”
Abzu nodded. “They say that before the headwater of every river on which salmon run, there is a great waterfall. Any salmon that can leap up this waterfall will take flight as a dragon: all that fail will perish. That’s why the crossing from the tenth level of one link to the first level of another is sometimes called a Cataract.”
I was struck, momentarily, by the incongruity of what I’d just heard. Hearing a Chinese legend I was familiar with from my own world wasn’t actually the surprising part — I’d already concluded that this world was, despite initial appearances, a xiānxiá setting, and this was just another piece of evidence on the pile. No, what almost made me laugh out loud was the substitution of salmon, a North American fish, for the more usual carp. I guess this world didn’t have carp, or at least didn’t have them around here. Wild. “Wild,” I said. “How much experience is required for a level, exactly?”
“For levels zero through nine, it’s ten plus your current level to advance to the next level. From level ten to level nineteen, it’s ten times your current level. Twenty to twenty-nine, it’s one hundred times, and so on.”
I whistled. “So when you said it was an order of magnitude bigger, you were being literal.”
“Yep,” he said.
“Huh. If it takes you all at least a decade to hit level 1, and about the same for humans…” Even a cursory amount of mental math suggested that crossing the first Cataract would be as far as anyone could realistically go in a lifetime.
Unless I was missing something.
And I knew I was missing something. Of the part of goblin-slayers I’d dropped a cave-in on, their leader had been level 17 and his lieutenant level 15, if I recalled correctly. They would’ve had to have done a truly remarkable amount of violence in their short mortal lifetimes — they didn’t look like they were past their mid-30s, even. “How did those goblin-slayers from the other day make it to such high levels?” I asked.
“Humans are the gods’ favored children,” Abzu said, tone so dry it was practically mummified. “They enjoy many advantages.”
“So, what, that whole difference is made up by quests and achievements? Do they get better xp rates on kills or something?” I asked. “I mean, the number of corpses you’d have to stack up just to hit level 10 — I don’t care how skilled you are, nobody’s luck holds out over that many life-or-death battles.”
Abzu didn’t answer right away, a muscle in his jaw shifting. I couldn’t tell if he was angry, or just debating how to respond. “Don’t distract yourself with the problems of other peoples’ climbs,” he said eventually. “You have your own matters to worry about.”
That was true enough, I supposed. I made a note to circle back to this question later, though. If I was level-grinding suboptimally, that was… well, suboptimal. I was beset by enemies on all sides — I couldn’t afford to waste time. “Alright” I said. “Speaking of other matters, how’d you know there was a demesne in the southern woods?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “It was pure coincidence that I stumbled across those children out there. I was just following the forage, same as they were.”
Had he been a little too quick with that answer for it to be truthful? I couldn’t read his face or voice at all, not that that was unusual for me.
“But you did know how to lead them out of the demesne, once you were all caught in its orbit,” I said.
“Wood demesnes can maze and confuse intruders,” Abzu said. “You’ll wander around in circles until you starve to death or something eats you.”
“That isn’t actually an answer to my question,” I observed. “The opposite, if anything.”
“You didn’t ask a question, you made a statement,” Abzu said flatly. Man, it was like pulling teeth with this guy! I’d have rolled my eyes if I still had them.
“How did you know how to escape the demesne’s natural illusion formation?” I asked. “That’s what it was, right?”
Abzu raised an eyebrow fractionally at my leap of logic there. “That’s right,” he said. “I’ve been wandering around the woods for a few years now, saint. I don’t lose my way. As soon as I started getting turned around, I knew what was happening.”
“Knowing you’re caught in a trap and getting out of it aren’t the same thing,” I said. “That quest flag opened a way out of the maze, right? How’d you know it would do that? For that matter, how’d you know the quest would proc?”
“The Nine Coils keep the histories of our people — including their encounters with the demesnes of the deep woods, and what dwells in them,” he said. “As an initiate of the cult, I have learned many such histories. Why so many questions?”
“I’m a curious girl,” I said, unsubtly deflecting. “How’d you kill the tatzelwurm?”
“Luck,” he said.
“I was hoping for a little more of a blow-by-blow.”
“I’m not some young buck that needs to brag about his victories.” Abzu sneered. “I crept up on it while it had its head stuck in a hole and stabbed it in the back of the neck. Anyone could have done it.”
It might be true that anyone could have done it, and that luck had played a role, but I didn’t buy it. Abzu would have had to see Teekas’ group being chased, get within melee range of the tatzelwurm in what sounded like mere seconds, and stab it hard enough to punch through the fur, hide, and bone of a beast more than twice his level. He’d have needed to be quick-thinking and ice-cold under pressure, at minimum — and then there were his creaky old-man knees and bony old-man arms to factor in, which…
Hm.
You know, I don’t know that I’d ever really taken a good look at Abzu, before. I could have vaguely described him, of course, but that was all. As I looked at him now, though, several things leaped out at me where before they’d faded into the background.
The first thing was that he was dressed noticeably better than the other goblins. He wore the same kind of fur-lined mantle as the others did, but the fur on his was thick and uniformly black, taken from a single pelt rather than stitched together from several. The leather of the mantle was decorated with intricate beadwork in bone, shell, and ceramic. His moccasins were likewise adorned. At his waist sat a beaded belt of iridescent nacre. His long, pointed ears bore multiple piercings of bone, each capped with copper, and a hammered copper bangle encircled his right bicep. These last items were the most notable, because that was the most metal anyone in the group was wearing by a long shot. The goblins, I’d learned from talking with them, had very little metallurgy. They held copper as a paramount signifier of wealth, mined from surface deposits of native metal hundreds of miles distant and traded for at great expense. Abzu was, by goblin standards, wearing a small fortune — especially interesting given that he’d been on the run for his life only a few days ago.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The second thing I noticed, while looking at the copper bangle, was that the bicep it encircled showed little of the sagging or withering one might expect with age. Abzu’s arms were lean and muscled. In fact, so was the rest of him. He was still visibly old, age-spotted and wrinkled, long white hair gathered in a braid, but he looked almost as fit as Nar-shesh after his promotion to floor boss. Healthy outdoors living could allow for that, sure, so it wasn’t necessarily dispositive of anything, but it did stand out to me.
As I’d been doing this close inspection, of course, I’d been carrying on the conversation at the same time via [Walk and Talk]. “Had you ever seen a creature like that before?” I asked. “The siblings said they hadn’t.”
“They’re too young to remember,” he said. “The humans had already driven us out of the lowlands by the time they were born. Tatzelwurms avoid the mountains, and even aside from that this is as far north as I’ve ever seen one.”
“Huh. Why so?” I asked. “About the mountains, that is.”
“Competition,” he said. “Dire vultures eat most of the same stuff they do. Deer, smaller birds, goblins. And they don’t care for tatzelwurms.”
“Oh, cool,” I said. “I’d love to get my hands on one of those.” They’d probably have all sorts of neat features I could copy for Striga.
Abzu just grunted at that. As he did, I noticed a third thing — or rather, I remembered it.
“Hey,” I said. “You said you stabbed the tatzelwurm?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What with?” I asked, in what I hoped was a tone of studious innocence.
“With a knife,” he said, in a tone that suggested that had been a stupid question.
“Hm. That’s interesting. Enshunna and Immir-shesh said they thought you used some kind of spear. Looked like it was made of bone, they said.”
Abzu went very still. Jackpot. I’d caught him in a flat-out lie.
“I don’t see anything like that on you, though,” I said. “Or… nope, nothing like that laying around anywhere.” As I swept my awareness over Abzu and the dungeon to look for anything fitting that description, though, I noticed a fourth thing. There was a leather bag hanging from his belt, embroidered with geometric motifs. Okay, big deal, leather bag, so what.
I couldn’t see inside it, that was what. My awareness just stopped. In fact, when I tried to look through the bag, there was only an uncomfortable kind of twisting sensation. Holy shit, did this dude have a magic storage bag? How had I not noticed this until now? How had I not noticed any of these things until now?
A thought occurred to me, then, that doused my building excitement in ice water. Stories weren’t real life, sure, and I couldn’t just assume every genre norm would hold true, but — who usually had spatial bags, in all the webnovels?
Cultivators.
“They were mistaken,” Abzu said, pulling me from my thoughts. “Shaken up from what had happened, probably.” He stared upwards, as the goblins tended to when talking to me, stony expression challenging me to press the issue any further. As I looked into his unflinching eyes, though, I noticed a fifth thing. His status bar-
Flickered.
Just for a moment, it glitched out. I was sure I’d seen it, though. I hadn’t had time to read what it said, if it said anything, but… I was pretty sure that I’d seen two digits for his level. Not one.
A theory was beginning to take frightening shape for me. I had skills that enhanced my awareness. Logically, there would be skills that could baffle others’ senses or obscure the user. Skills that might, for example, make it hard to notice things about them. Make it hard to notice them, even if you were theoretically all-seeing within your domain. Maybe there were skills that let someone project a false level, even a false class — being a [Spy] wouldn’t do you much good if everyone could see it by looking at you, right? Those sorts of skills would come in very handy for someone who was hiding their true power, living incognito among ordinary people. Someone who was at least six levels higher than he said he was, and whose level might well exceed my own. Someone who, doubtless, did not want his cover blown, and had already demonstrated he was capable of lethal violence.
Someone who could, worst-case scenario, erase himself from my awareness and appear in my core chamber next to my fragile, defenseless heart-body before I even knew he was there.
It would probably not be a good idea to continue antagonizing someone like that, huh?
“Haha, yeah, I guess they must have been! You know how life-or-death situations are,” I said, hoping my cheerful tone didn’t sound as extremely forced as it was. “People think craaazy stuff in the heat of the moment when they’re stressed-out that doesn’t make any sense afterwards. Anyway, thanks for answering all my questions! I don’t get out much, what with the whole ‘being a dungeon core’ thing, so it’s like, y’know — I’m just curious about stuff. And thanks for teaching me about the mysteries!”
Abzu looked momentarily confused, but then his eyes narrowed. “The mysteries are not to be transmitted casually,” he said. “But it’s an elder’s job to guide the children. Think nothing of it.”
There was an awkward silence. What the hell should I say here? Was he suspicious of me now? He had to be suspicious of me now, right?
“Was that all?” Abzu asked, when it became apparent that I wasn’t going to say anything.
“Uh-huh! Yeah, that was all,” I said, hurriedly. “I didn’t have anything else.”
He didn’t say anything in response to that, just cocked an eyebrow in an expression that might have been bemusement, might have been disdain, and set about dismantling the small altar to the Sun that he’d built.
I watched him every step of the way. If I wasn’t being paranoid, if there was any chance I was right about this, I didn’t dare take my eyes off of him for a second.
----------------------------------------
Elsewhere
She could feel something tearing in her chest as she flew — flesh, and somewhere deeper. Even so, she didn’t stop. She didn’t dare stop, and that was an indignity that could not be borne. To be defeated like this, to be humbled by those she knew to be her lessers! To know, in her bones, that to stay and fight would have been to die. She! Fleeing!
The roaring wind of her passage tore streamers of molten blood from her wounds. Before the cold could steal their glowing heat, their light had already vanished into the distance behind her. Her rumbling cry of fury and pain echoed against the clouds. This was not who she was, not who she knew herself to be. Her foes had driven a crack through her very foundation, and it would kill her before her wounds did.
From far, far behind her, thunder rumbled. Her foes pursued her yet. She refused to let them kill her, and she refused to drop dead before they caught up. There was nothing else for it. As she flew, she closed her eyes and reached within herself. She could see it in her mind’s eye — her mythos. Her sovereign mantle, her legend writ in experience and azoth. She had built a temple of her soul, a monument to her own glory. That temple now teetered on the edge of collapse.
She saw the damage. It was impossible to miss. If her mythos was a temple, her defeat was a crack clear across the width of one of the greatest pillars. The pillar was a statement, a truth she’d held inviolate about herself. I am undefeatable.
Sick with fury, she set her hands against the pillar and pushed. The world had proven her a liar, so she discarded the lie. As it fell, a great swathe of her mythos collapsed with it. Experience sublimated directly into azoth and exploded from her, a blast that lit up the night for a hundred miles in every direction and knocked every tree in the forest below her flat.
Her level fell precipitously — by five, ten, more. She fell past the Sixth Cataract, then the Fifth. Centuries of progress, undone in minutes, and she had still further to fall. She set her will against the crumbling pillar of I do not retreat, and repudiated it. Another explosion of azoth, another chunk of levels lost. She abandoned the Fourth Cataract. She became less. She wept with anger and shame.
One more. This last pillar was not so damaged as the first two. Perhaps she could… no. No, it would not stand as it was. She tore into it with her claws, whittling a broken and impractical truth down into a workable one. It was easy, in the end. I will suffer no insult became I will have my revenge.
She felt her mythos stabilize. Its weight settled heavy upon this newest pillar, but she knew it would not crumble. With the collapse of her soul averted, though, she suddenly had nothing to distract her from the pain of her physical injuries.
Oh. Ow. She was hurt quite badly, wasn’t she?
She coughed, and blood came up with it, dripping magmatic through her fangs. “Gotta find somewhere to lay low,” she said. “Heal up. Just need a little breather. Woah!” One of her wings nearly gave out, sending her wobbling in the air. That wasn’t good. She suddenly felt very, very tired. Strength seemed to flee her limbs as she struggled to stay aloft, let alone maintain her speed. It was almost like she’d just dropped about thirty levels, or something, with corresponding decreases to her stats! And- “Aw, fuck,” she said. “I picked up all those flight skills in the forties, didn’t I?” A quick glance at her status window and those same flight skills, now greyed-out and inactive, told her that she had. “Fuck!” she said again.
She needed to find someplace to set down, and fast, before she fell out of the sky. There, in the distance ahead of her, she could see plumes of heat against the cool of the night — fires. Where there were fires, there were-
-people. Everything was spinning, all of a sudden. Why was-
-Oh. She’d just blacked out for a moment. Then she’d done it again. She was currently spinning out, in freefall, as she plummeted towards the ground. With a third, particularly emphatic “Fuck!” and a roar of effort, she snapped her wings open, wind resistance stretching their membranes and yanking at her shoulders painfully. It was enough to pull her out of the dive, but she was still falling. She’d probably survive the landing at this angle, though. Just needed to aim somewhere soft. That looked like a nice open field up ahead, pastureland maybe. That would be convenient, she could grab a snack once she’d landed. Wings feeling like they were made of lead, she did her best to steer for the landing zone she’d identified.
Her best was, under these circumstances, not great. As such, she plowed straight into the side of a barn.