“Kehehahaha, come brothers…Drink deeply of the brewed materia of the cosmos….With its power, we can cast down those foolish false-gods and set this world to right…With the true-materia we can create a new world…A just world. A world where everyone knows their places, and acts according to their station!... A world where those of unclean blood can no longer pollute the natural laws and the rationality of the mortals!” said a man in a robe and mask.
A group of creatures that were made of bone that had been shrouded in shadow, then came around from out of view of the stage. Carrying a large cauldron filled with a glowing liquid. The color of the liquid was impossible to describe. As was the smell. The only thing that could be said for sure, was that the liquid’s mere presence was enough to alter the laws of physics. Causing particles to randomly poof out of existence, or discharge bolts of electrical energy, and messing with the laws of gravity making things oscillate wildly between being too heavy, and too light.
Beneath the stage, there was a collection of similarly masked, similarly robed individuals. They climbed onto the stage, one after another carrying small cups. They took those cups and dipped them into the strange elixir in the cauldron. Then they drank from those cups, draining every last drop, many of them with looks of zeal, and anticipation, as they did so.
The only robed and masked figures that didn’t climb onto that stage, Hong Mirae, and Hong Mirae, who were both running this sting operation. Me, who was present as backup, because there was intel that there’d be a heavy-hitter from one of the void-planes present. Then there were three young immortals, one a demi-god, and the other two a pair of transcendentals, that I’d basically confined within my shadow. Freezing them in place, because I saw something in them, worth saving.
“Our moment has arrived, brothers! All our hard work will soon be-*phtbbbbtttttt!*”
“Oh, my…As I was saying…All our hard work will soon be-phtbbbbbbbbbt!”
Sometimes, the worst punishment is getting exactly the thing you want. Let me roll back the clock for you a bit. The greatly expanded Empty-complex was relatively at piece, but still recovering from the war with the DSO. There were all sorts of small-time, and big-time, players. Renegade demon royals, exiled gods, fallen angels, evil dragons, dark spirits, and other eldritch monsters, that saw this period of instability as an opportunity.
Our Empty-Society had to do all it could to keep someone from pissing in the tea, and ruining the party for everyone, so to speak. Which meant increasing our patrols, and making upgrades and evolutions of both ourselves and the Empty-Network, so it’d be easier for us to A)keep an eye on everything, and B)slap down the miscreants before they cause the needless destruction of countless.
The Hidden Order of Merlot was one such criminal group. Headed by an old god of intoxication, like our good friend and partner, Dilshad of the Drowning Euphoria. A fellow by the name of Macario of the Joyful Weeping. Unlike our Dilshad, he was a serious pretty, but troublingly enough like our Dilshad, he had plenty of friends.
The guy had enough friends that the Empty-Society couldn’t just wipe them out directly, since the group was careful enough to leave very few traces of their wrong doing, or keep things beneath a threshold, that would make us coming down on them too hard, kosher. Since we didn’t want to spook the immortals that we were currently, peacefully conquering, until we had a complete and firm grip on the roughly 21 billion multiverses, that we now found ourselves being forced to manage as our final share of the DSO’s property. A massive territory that slightly out-matched our accompanying growth in power, and our status in the alliance with the Division, and the House of Antipodes. Thus, even though we could definitely crush him like a bug, there’d be a cost to it, that the Empty-Society as a whole didn’t really want to pay.
The Hidden Order of Merlot popped up in Yoshino Yuki and Hong Soomin’s neck of the woods first, and almost literally drown an entire solar system in wine. Thankfully, that was close enough to the core of the Empty-Society, where I’d already done a fair bit of work on the Empty-Network’s expanded features, that we could just soft reboot those worlds with no actual, permanent loss of life.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Hong Soomin kept an eye on them, and brought in her Aunt Hong Mirae for help, when the group started calling in demon’s of madness from some of the nastier hell-realms to act as their muscle. Long story short, our friend Macario was trying to use his wine-mixing powers to create an immortal beverage, a drink that would “create” materia, one of the most potent forms of anomalous energy in the entire cosmos.
Our Empty-Society was a bit alarmed at first, in fact, we almost threw caution to the wind and declared war, then I realized, after some research, what they were trying to do was one of the few things in the cosmos that could actually be called impossible. I mean few things in the cosmos could actually be called impossible, but Macacrio was thankfully no great master of the arcane, and he was basically trying to build a hot-air balloon out of solid uranium. A goal that was doomed to failure, spectacularly.
Materia, aether, mana, and all the other anomalous particles were actually all the same thing. It’s just the method of interaction, and the level of…weight, or metaphysical “real-ness” that each had that separated them. Macario’s hopes of mixing wine to create Materia, were a bit like a 2-D figure in a painting trying to brew a drop of 8-Dimensional blood. Reaching 3-Dimensions as a 2-D person might be possible if one really pushed. However, even that would require, exhausting all limits, and breaking all the barriers one could.
Even if a miracle happened to let Macario break the boundaries set in place by the material plane, reaching the 4-Dimension would require the cosmos itself going on the fritz, and reaching beyond that is something even I can’t imagine doing, even as a being that can already be said to have escaped the 3rd dimension.
Still, since the cosmos could be quite screwy, allowing seemingly impossible things to happen all the time, Hong Mirae, and Hong Soomin watched the group regardless. Besides wanting to avoid letting these clowns somehow stumble into success, the ladies also needed to keep thwarting the group's plans, because a lot of those plans involved massive losses in life. Ideally, the order would have flatly failed, but if they were that weak, and that incompetent, they wouldn’t be an issue for our Empty-Society at all.
Thus Macario was actually, eventually able to complete his brewed materia, after thousands of years of scheming. The dig being that based on our own research, and the samples we’ve stolen from Macario’s brew…What he’d created was basically “me”...Or rather, he’d made a material that was fundamentally similar enough to my true-form that he might as well have just summoned me. Macario's wine was close enough to being "me", that even without assimilating with the material, or using any magic on it, I could immediately control it with my self-possession. Which was why I was here right now. Hong Mirae could beat these clowns eyes closed, but that would have messy repercussions.
After extensive study and experimentation, we decided it was better to let these fools have what they’d been working so hard for, all this time.
*Phtbttttt!*
*Phbtttttt!*
*Phbbttttt!*
“What’s…What’s happening, Master Macario,” said a panicking fae follower of the Hidden Order.
“I…Per-, Perhaps, the brewed materia is purging us of our impurities,” said Macario.
Tragically, and hilariously, the man was right. The “Brew” which was basically, my essence being created, summoned, what have you, due to the exotic laws and materials Macario had used to create the wine, was indeed trying to purge an impurity. As my body would do, any time, it came into strange materials. Breaking them down into raw data, energy, and laws, for the Empty-Archive to sublimate and categorize.
The farting was just the beginning. That was followed by bouts of defecation, and urination. The best part was that the group had sealed “themselves” into this hidden dimension that lay in the shadow of a dwarf-planet, so the Empty-Society didn’t need to do anything to keep the group from escaping and saving themselves. At most, I just needed to make sure that the locks they set up stayed in place. Thus, in the end, I, Hong Mirae, and Hong Soomin, watched the gathering of trouble-making immortals literally shit, piss, and fart themselves out of existence.
As I watched this strange, macabre, slapstick take place, I idly wondered if there wasn’t a way for us to trick the rest of the troublesome elements in our greatly expanded territory, into destroying themselves in a similar manner. It wasn’t impossible, I had good intel that said that things like this happened every so often, with some group either tapping into the veins of an immortal monster, or doing something similar to the Merlot and summoning the monster’s dangerous essence to imbibe in an act of self-annihilation. There was almost no twist to the ending. Just the death of yet another cult. Good riddance, to bad rubbish, I guess.