Chapter 63 - Put it Together
A chill wind whipped at my face as I leaned against the railing of the Spire’s open air observatory, while the dead city of Eclipse sprawled in gray patchwork down below.
I was at an altitude that seemed to turn all but the largest of the manmade structures into a flat sort of abstract shape, more discernible as a group than as individuals, and it was easy to tell how well different parts of the city fared before and after the scourge. The decaying grays and creaking, moldy skeletal structures of Riverside and Bogtown, funnily enough, seemed to have fared the best through the apocalypse. Hardly any of them were smoking ruins, maybe because of their proximity to the water. Maybe because I hadn’t gone to that part of the city yet.
Meanwhile the well-to-do browns and greens of the richer parts of the city still smoldered in places. I hadn’t started those, or, at least, I didn’t think I did. The fire I did start at the south gate was mostly out after the wind changed directions, but that part of the city was still partially obscured behind a hazy cloud of smoke.
Through that haze, I could just make out the dark greens of the glade, the crooked border to the swampland beyond and, above that, the mountains, under which I’d come to be in this part of Ralqir.
Below, the faint popcorn of automatic turret fire came in little spurts of violence, though from this height, I couldn’t pick out which little black dot the guns were trained upon. My log told me it was mostly the small stuff, undead and goblins with a few standouts that were mystery beasts. The experience notices were trickling in steadily, but I wasn’t getting much base XP from any of them. The bonuses weren’t great either, not with the crowd as thin as it was now. The targets were too sparse to keep the chain bonus going, and the System was counting them as small groups as opposed to a horde. The scourge-touched were in roam-and-scavenge mode now, so big pile-ups of bodies were rare.
I wasn’t out for experience tonight, though. Tonight was about preparation. Not mine. My little factory was doing the preparing for me right now. No, tonight, I needed to prepare everyone else for what I was about to do.
Finally, someone cleared their throat from somewhere near the stairwell. I turned, finding most of the people I’d invited to join me up here tonight: Samila, Sissa, Geddon, Trix, Tiba and her guards along with Jassin and Garret bringing up the rear. The church guards were all armed and armored again, Geddon’s and Samila’s kit still stained with black blood all the way up the sword arms. Either they hadn’t had a chance to clean them yet, or they must have been called to put down a breach somewhere.
Tiba carried her spear, and Trix wore his carbine across his back. Garret only wore a sword and some kind of loose, padded underclothes but somehow managed to look more ready for a fight than anyone else. Jassin simply looked like Jassin, his gaunt face pinched in a mask of calculated neutrality as he took in everything.
I leaned over slightly to see if anyone else was behind them all but saw no one. I gave Samila a questioning look, but she only gave a tiny shrug in response.
Well, this was as good as I was going to get then.
They all filed in and found a place to sit or stand. There wasn’t a whole lot of room other than along the scaffold-type railings where I’d been looking out over the city, since the middle of the observatory was taken up by a giant overdesigned telescope.
I say overdesigned, because it certainly didn’t look like a telescope in the way I understood them. The main housing was a cylinder as I thought it should be, ten feet across, pointed straight up at the moon. The material was tarnished gold in color with violet streaks folded into the alloy, and no part of it was visible under any sort of Detect ability I tried. Where it got weird, however, was the rings that rotated in inconsistent, uneven orbits around the whole thing, wobbling up and down slowly, eerily silent while some kind of shimmering, translucent liquid stretched in sheets between them. I would have felt better if the thing squeaked or creaked or something, but the only sound it caused was the displaced air the rings made when they wobbled on their different tracks.
Once everyone was in place and as comfortable as they were going to get, Garret receiving the honor of being the most comfortable laying down on a bench with his hands behind his head (the man could be at ease anywhere), I began.
“Well, I guess that’s everyone,” I sighed. “Thank you all for coming.”
Jassin was the first to speak, as I knew he would be. “Your message said it was urgent, so we came right away. It did take some time to ‘give my practitioners the night off’ however. I am sure they are not complaining, but I, for one, am quite curious as to why I did so.”
It took a level of trust to do something like that, I knew. Jassin had this place running on a set schedule so that people didn’t work too long and burn themselves out, while no one ate too much or slept too much or spent too much time alone. I’d probably thrown that careful schedule off by just plopping my turrets down at the gates and handing the guards spare magazines, but it needed to be done this way.
“I appreciate what this means, Lord Jassin. I just need a few minutes of everyone’s time, and then it will be up to all of us what we do after,” I replied.
Then, the distinct *bap* *bap* of wood on stone echoed up from the stairwell, and my gut clenched slightly. I’d invited our final guest, of course. He needed to be here. I couldn’t leave him out given how much pull he had, but I wasn’t quite comfortable with him being here either. Attempted murder, understandably, did that to a guy.
Slowly, Bishop Kolash dragged himself up the stairs and into the room, leaning heavily on his staff. He paused at the very top of the stairs, winded and sweaty, but his eyes bore a fierce determination as he surveyed the room, noting every face with his wide set eyes. I noticed his broken hand was bandaged but not healed. He had to have had the chance to heal it by now with his magic. Why leave it?
Everyone went still.
“Bishop Kolash,” I announced, gesturing to a seat that was in our general area. “Please, sit. Thanks for coming.”
“Your message mentioned cleansing our world of the foul presence of the enemy, and it would be a neglect of my duties to not attend such a meeting.”
The fact that he considered me one of ‘the enemy’ was not lost upon me. I wasn’t going to let him rattle me, though. I gave him a nod and a smile. “That’s the gist of it. Please, come sit,” I offered.
There was a long pause where he seemed to consider, his eyes not leaving mine while he lingered there, but, eventually, he stepped further into the room, choosing a seat to my right and a bit more distant than the one I offered him.
I fought not to let my smile slip. This situation required confidence. I’d need to channel my dad again, as unnatural as it felt.
“Samila says you think you have a way to end the plague,” Sissa said, helpfully prodding me to get on with it.
“Right,” I said, clearing my throat. “I know how to end this. The infection I mean. By that, I mean that I know where the infection is coming from, and I’m hoping that, in knowing where it comes from, we can fix it.”
“It comes from you, does it not?” Kolash asked. “Your presence here brings with it the evil with which we are afflicted.”
Trix came to my defense first, bless him. “Your holiness, with all due respect, that is not helping. Ryan did not ask-”
“It does not matter what he intended, Brother Yik’i’Trix. If only it did,” Kolash interrupted, rolling over Trix. “The results speak for themselves. The beginning of this plague coincides perfectly with his arrival on our metaphorical shores. Furthermore, it has historical precedent. Whether Ryan intended to or not, he has set in motion what will inevitably end in a second Purge.”
The others jumped in, speaking over one another to argue, but I raised my hand to cut off any more rejoinders. “Stop. The good Bishop is right,” I admitted, tamping the guilt down at giving voice to the sentiment. They all fell silent and looked over at me again.
“He’s right but not entirely. Yes, my presence is causing this, to a point,” I stated with a little deferential nod in the Bishop’s direction. “But I don’t think there will be another Purge.”
“Explain,” Jassin said, shooting a harsh look over at the Bishop as if to say ‘wait till the end of the lecture, or you’re getting detention.’
“Gladly,” I agreed. “I believed that was the case too, that I was the cause of all of this. I’d suspected, at the very least. And once you showed me the human you have captive in the basement, it helped confirm some of my preconceptions and form new hypotheses. I began to suspect we were carriers, and we were bringing the infection wherever we went.”
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Jassin nodded, gesturing me to go on.
“Wait. There is another human here on Ralqir?” Sissa gaped. “Now? Since when?”
Kolash made a burping sound. “You spread secrets too freely, human. We compartmentalize this information as a mercy to the world. The consequences of it spreading would mean untold strife.”
“On that, we are in agreement,” Jassin muttered, shooting me an annoyed look.
The Bishop’s sour frown deepened considerably. “It would appear that I will need to have ‘the talk’ with the lot of you once this is done.”
I felt the tendons in my neck tighten as my muscles tensed. My frustration at all the secret keeping was threatening to creep back in. I kept my tone mostly conciliatory, though. “For one, if I didn’t trust my friends implicitly, I would never have told them. Second, Lord Jassin, you look like you’re familiar with the carrier theory.”
“Yes,” Jassin affirmed, slipping back into academic mode. “The pathogen theory is an old one, but it fits. Ralqir has not seen one of your kind in many centuries, and as soon as you grace our shores once again, we are beset by another… uprising. An outbreak, you may call it. If your story is accurate, you are the epicenter for this outbreak.”
“Hold on,” I said, turning to Tiba and bringing her up to speed on the conversation in goblin before asking: “The Black Ones have been around for a long time, right? Before I came around?”
Tiba nodded gravely. “The stories say they come many years after the last human. A lost tribe who lose their minds and deal with demons.” I translated as she spoke.
“Perhaps they are carriers like you then, Ryan,” Jassin suggested. “A mutation of the pathogen where it may lie dormant until the time is right to spread.”
“Except whatever is wrong with them is far from dormant,” I countered. “I’d been in your universe all of twenty minutes before one of them showed up, and it was good and infected. The Black Ones were the first things I encountered after I awoke, and they were the first things that tried to kill me, almost like they were waiting for me. The spiders I fought, the Stone Hearts, the mockvine, none of them were similarly infected, even when I spent a lot of time among them. That’s a point against the pathogen theory, I think.”
“And what of the Returned? The plague spread through them like a wildfire,” Jassin asked.
I nodded, giving him that point. “True, but I don’t think it’s because of plague. While it might act like a plague in that case, it can’t be cured like one. The Bishop can attest to that. That’s because it’s not a virus or bacteria. It’s something my tutorial intelligence called void corruption. I didn’t know what to make of the term at the time when she said it to me, but I think I know now.”
“I know plague, young human, and this one acts very much as one would expect,” Kolash argued. “If it is corruption as you say, why do we not feel the effects as we stand here with you? Surely this corruption can get into other living things than the goblins. They are not fundamentally different than other sapient life in our world. This is why we must be vigilant, lest the sickness worm its way into other vulnerable populations.”
“Yes! Exactly!” I shouted, glad to finally get to this point. “Why just goblins but not the Stone Hearts? Why has no one else contracted a case of void corruption? That’s the big question. The Black Ones and their peculiarities were a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit. It had been bothering me for a long time. Then, Tiba informed me that the Black Ones make their home right next to my tutorial facility.”
Samila spoke up for the first time, arms crossed but paying rapt attention. “You believe that this tutorial place is the epicenter of the infection.”
I pointed at her and gave a thumbs up. I didn’t care if that wasn’t a thing on Ralqir, silly place that it was. “I do. Theoretically, the tutorial goes like this: When a new Animator is inducted into the System, our hypothetical new Exotic is whisked away and sent to Ralqir, gets some advice from Nali, Shapes a couple things, asks some questions, and levels up to one. Then they go back to where they came from the same way they entered this universe. They go back home with an understanding of their class, and Ralqir goes on none the wiser.”
“Obviously, this didn’t happen for you,” Samila said with a grin. “Lucky you.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “My tutorial went off the rails. I was attacked, and I had to run. It was only after I was a uh ‘guest’ of the Stone Hearts that I leveled up to one and the System updated my quest to return to my insertion point.” I fought not to look directly at Samila when I said the last sentence.
“This still does not explain these Black Ones and our supposed immunity from the plague,” Trix observed thoughtfully. Again, I asked Constance to bless the little guy. He kept my last statement from hanging in the air for too long.
“Sorry. I’m getting there. Assuming my tutorial quest is bog standard: Insert, shape, level, go home. Then it stands to reason that our friend downstairs went through the same thing.”
Realization sparked in Jassin’s eyes, and he leaned forward excitedly with fingers steepled in front of his chin. “Except, he did not. The Dark Lord captured him, leading to the first uprising and the Purge.”
“Correct!” I exclaimed, glad I was gaining traction. “The Dark Lord got a hold of Ephelir and brought him home to run his experiments. Exotics pretty much can live forever as long as you feed and water us, so the Dark Lord got to torture him for years and years, learning.”
“Indeed. This was before he realized the knowledge he gleaned from his pet was tainted and nearly ended the world.” Kolash said, bitterly. “The goblins, though. Us. If your new theory is to be believed, why are we immune? It does not make sense.”
“Ephelir’s insertion point-” I said, cutting off before choosing a better way of putting it. “The System’s tunnel between universes has been open and waiting for him to return for thousands of years. It was probably a clean process before the corruption took hold, but after… Everything the System touches now is tainted. Anything the System is currently spending power on is slowly being poisoned, like dumping radioactive material in a well. That particular well pretty much glows now, given how long it’s been poisoned..”
Jassin, grasping the concept quickly, continued for me. “I believe I follow. Your theory would go toward explaining how the plague can affect the dead. The energy has to come from somewhere, and it is not a spell the enemy is casting. I would know. You believe it is coming from the System bleeding corruption into our world. The captive human was probably a similarly bothersome source of corruption before the Dark Lord built his unique prison, but now, his corruption is essentially contained or at least burned away by the maelstrom whose light this ‘scourge’ cannot withstand.”
“But the insertion point is not similarly contained,” Sissa observed with an uncomfortable scowl. “The insertion point, where these Black Ones call their home. It could very well have slowly warped and mutated them for hundreds of years, generation after generation until they became as they are now. Other living things, the animals and beasts, have the sense to avoid the area or haven’t been exposed for long enough to have that level of corruption.”
“But what about now?” Trix asked. “Why are we suddenly getting a new wave of… corruption or infection? It is not just goblins and Returned either. Animals, probably even plants.”
“The beasts are susceptible to it but, very likely, only after being overwhelmed by other corrupted beings,” Jassin said. “If we assume Ryan’s theory is true, then it is a corruption of the spirit. A subversion of the will that drives the mind. Beasts do not have the required sense of self or ‘will’ to withstand its effects for long, and anyone who has met a Returned can see that they are a pliable, suggestible people. The Dark Lord made them so for his purposes, and it made them particularly easy prey for what Ryan is describing.”
I nodded. This was largely in line with my own thinking. “I think my tutorial intelligence was also susceptible. She was progressively going further and further afield as I spoke to her, even though she had failsafes that reset her memories every time she detected even a hint of void corruption. Back home, we’ve had laws against artificial intelligence for a long time. It’s illegal to code your own, and governments like the Colony only use it sparingly then destroy it after its task is done. I think this may be why.”
Jassin shared a meaningful look with Kolash. “We too, do not dabble in autonomous constructs such as golems. It is a lost art, illegal now,” he intoned ominously.
“Because they inevitably go insane. More than once, the church has had to put down some mad practitioner’s attempt at creating artificial life,” The Bishop finished for the Headmaster.
That confirmed it. You needed a spirit, a soul, to resist the scourge. AI and things like it were beings of pure intellect but nothing more. They had no will other than to do what was set before them. People, however, were something more, something the scourge couldn’t readily subvert, at least not quickly.
That took time, and, in my case, probably levels.
“It’s a fine theory, Ryan, but how do you believe we can end this?” Trix asked.
This was the part I’d been dreading. I took in a long, slow breath and prepared myself.
“Close the insertion points,” I answered.
Jassin looked like he’d just been struck. “You are not suggesting we let that creature in the basement free? Even if we had guarantees that it would go home as you suggest, I am unsure if I am willing to let a being of its level of power loose, even in another universe.”
“No,” I said. “We’re not going to let Ephelir free.”
“If you are about to suggest we kill it, believe me, we have tried. We cannot do enough damage to kill it, and it heals quickly. What’s more, if we do too much damage to its prison, it may free itself anyway. Even with your inventions, you will not be able to do more than what the top minds of our people have already tried. He nearly killed you with a look last time you saw him,” Jassin argued, becoming progressively more irritated.
Aw. He really did care.
I smiled with as much confidence as I could muster. “That’s the thing. That wasn’t just a look. It was a challenge. A System regulated challenge. A duel with stakes. I’d heard about them back home. What I plan to do is to use the System to do what we, as mortals, can’t.”
“You’re going to cheat. You’re going to challenge a god-like being to a duel and win on a technicality, and your System is going to do the killing for you.” It was Samila’s voice. I’d been avoiding her gaze up until now, but that time was up. When I turned to address her, her expression was neutral, but her eyes were blazing furnaces. I suspected that she’d put the rest of it together, and the hardest part of the night was about to take place.
“Essentially, yes,” I admitted quietly. I did not let my gaze waver or wander over to the rest of my friends, who I knew were giving me worried looks. “This world needs those insertion points closed, one way or another. One is getting closed tomorrow.”
“And in the unlikely scenario that you live, you’re going to go home,” Samila half-whispered, her voice catching slightly, wavering on the word ‘home.’
There it was. To save Ralqir, I had to leave it. I’d realized it back at the wedding, kept it to myself, held it close even though it pained me. I swallowed, seeing the hurt in Samila’s eyes.
“Yeah,” I croaked. “I have to leave.”