Deep within a tower, standing tall and vibrant in steel, gold and jade, an alarm begins to ring. Flashing red lights and a series of runic formations circle each other, highlighting a node of flesh, its surface glistening and ever-shifting. Eyes swivel towards it, its crimson lighting fresh and bright amidst the half-dozen other alarms just like it screaming their little hearts out.

The room it’s in, a towering arena of a hundred Core-Formation cultivators dashing between a good fifteen different data-artifacts each. The glow of constantly updating words, flowing messages and orders lights up the room in a greenish glow of jade and Qi, illuminating the podium that stands above the rest, on which a lone individual overlooks the chamber. Garrison Commander Jun Jie, a Nascent Soul realm cultivator nearing the heights of his current cultivation, oversees the movements of every individual in the chamber and tracks the chaos of data and information perpetually. Those who have learned techniques to see through Qi, to see the shape of a soul, rarely look upon him, despite how many he’s fostered within his ranks- to look at him through truer sight is to see the thousands of glistening eyes of crystal and glass that orbit him like a halo, technique and growing Soul both ensuring that he holds total control of his operations.

He is the first to notice that something has gone wrong.

Subvocally, a strand of Qi imbued with his intent and instructions shoots into a cluster of his operators, infused by the Dao of Control.

Confirm danger-close report from interior digestion chamber 18.

They don’t even bother to resist the compulsion, scrambling towards the data-artifacts surrounding the crimson alert. One of them, a promising young technician whose name Jun Jie might decide to remember if she keeps up her growth, connects to the alarm-node directly, cutting open her palm and placing it against the crimson, rune-covered flesh.

She spasms, a steady flow of blood beginning to drip from her nose, but she holds herself up admirably. It is rare for one to connect to a Creation Engine and not experience some backlash, but she manages to actually turn and send a Qi-encoded message back to him. The rest of the group follows in turn as the additional data-streams of the local artifacts confirm the message.

Danger close report authenticated. Emergency Override from Creation Engine due to detected threat. Transcendent energy detected, type unknown, scale unknown. Disruption noted in digestion process. We have six confirmed deaths of connected Infantry, one confirmed death from an Auxiliary Officer- reconfirmed, ten confirmed Infantry losses.

Garrison Commander Jun Jie frowns, three more crystal-glass eyes flickering from their orbits to focus on the local alarm. While two of the other alarms have been resolved, bright crimson falling to a calmer yellow as talented technicians assign personnel to deal with them. Three of the others will remain on for, most likely, the rest of the day, as the ongoing assault continues, and the only other rogue element is already being handled by Jun Jie himself. For all the well-oiled machinery of the Division of War’s training, for all the Daos that its soldiers are made to acquire, there is never a moment where an unforeseen variable can’t throw everything into disorder.

Priority Beta-3, he sends down to them. His eyes are already swiveling back to the spatial array blueprints before him, identifying the crimson-coded risk areas and assigning manpower and the Creation Engine’s own resources to patch the failsafes. A pack of spirit beasts adept at spatial warfare is trying to burrow in, and he rearranges the structures before them to bleed them on the way. I want it resolved in the next thirty minutes. We still have three fronts to contend with and the secondary Quietus horde on approach is only going to increase pressure. Get it done.

The technician, now bleeding from her eyes as well, simply nods, her Qi cycling as the cultivation of a Core Formation realm soldier fights against the foreign influence of the Creation Engine. The overwhelming flow of data is enough to cause her brain to start hemorrhaging, though any lesser would be dead already. Order confirmed. Reassigning two Squadron Leaders into the breach, assigning quarantine protocols, level three.

Jun Jie nods. Good. By the book, as procedure demands on a digestion-pool breach. The issue will likely be resolved shortly, even if two full squadrons is a bit excessive.

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Li Shu was surprised when one of the medical aides approached her right away, before she even got a chance to be assigned to a unit or to volunteer duties. The sounds of the wounded and the smell of a charnel house, battling with a clean scent of healing and chemicals, battles in her senses as her Sacrificial needles begin to hover almost of their own accord.

The young man who interrupts her focus gives a polite half-bow, a little deeper than might be expected, and simply tells her what an honor it will be to work alongside a true hero, a volunteer healer of all things.

Quietly, with one hand on his hip, he flashes a small sign, his Qi briefly assuming an awkward recreation of a shape. A closed eye over a strange flame.

She blinks, then smiles, bowing back to him. Quietly, doing their best to go unnoticed, she trades off the letters she and Raika have been writing, making it seem like simply an ornate hand-shake as the carefully folded papers swap hands.

It’s impressive, seriously. Hao Nera’s only been working for, what, two or three months? And already, he’s managed to get ahold of a connection in the fortress part of the fortress city proper. The assistant seems clearly frazzled, but… well, she does need to send the letters. It’s a small thing, but still a good sign that her partners are doing well.

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She misses them. She can’t imagine how Raika feels about Maen, but the number of letters she’s written since it came out that Taurus knew about her location and arrangements gives some idea.

In the chaos and mess of the infirmary, there’s not much time to focus on it, though. It seems like there’s an almost frantic energy, dozens of soldiers running around, and she’s guided to the bed of one whose cultivation is wobbling, cuts along his stomach infused with enough power to cut into the surface layer of his dantian.

Almost immediately, she loses herself in the work of fixing things, of confronting new and interesting problems and solving them. Her Craft stirs, concepts of blood, healing, death and pain and swirling around the keratin needles as they begin their work, aided by her Qi and her focus.

She barely even notices as Jin flinches and turns to stare, wide-eyed, down through the floor towards somewhere far below.

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Infantryman Shan Ji has done this before. Of course he has. It’s business as usual. The Creation Engine, for all that its impossible powers can manifest when properly leashed, is a machine. An overlarge array or supreme formation, which can act as a sort of data artifact and be controlled in equal measure. When given proper instruction, and especially blueprints, it can do nearly anything, and so long as that remains true, the fortress cities remain unbreakable, each of them built from at least one such divine instrument.

But they’re just machines, really. Just an overly complicated bit of spellwork. They’re not creative, so you need to tell them what to do. Feed them directions.

The easiest directions to feed them is meat.

Feed them something, and if it’s useful, you’ll see it crawling back out of the Creation Engine not long after. A forever-army to stand against the fodder of the fourth ring and its wastelands and savages, leaving the real fighting to proper cultivators.

So a special physique, possibly unique in all the world, with no backing, no strength, no potential? Well. Best to make it into something useful.

He went to the Academies, like almost every soldier has. He studied the Dao of the Gun, the Dao of the Sword, the Dao of Command, gaining the minimal marks needed as prerequisite to work on the Emperor’s holy Wall against the outsider hordes and rebels. He has, with those Daos, cast other lives down into the digestion pits, usually as punishment duty, then later, once they found that he didn’t have that much of a problem with it, as consistent assignment.

He likes the job fine. Usually the people he works with aren’t too squeamish, and they get that tough things need to be done. No use in letting power and opportunity be wasted on those without talent or a proper work ethic. Even his auxiliary officer, who’s a bit uptight, ain’t too bad for somebody in charge of a good twenty-five odd people.

He’s done this before. It’s safe. It’s right. It’s not a bad job.

Infantryman Shan Ji paraphrases this train of thought three times before the lack of oxygen finally starts to shut down his brain.

Cultivator physiology really is something. He never cared much in class, not when cutting off a head is plenty lethal enough (ironic, that), but he knows that the more you cultivate, the less the laws of the Heavens matter. His head was torn from his neck almost ten seconds ago, but he can still think. Sort of. A little. Less, the longer it lasts. It’s hard to maintain proper bloodflow when someone’s fingers are holding the stump where your neck was.

They’re not really fingers, though. There’s not really a name for them.

Some of them have a lot of joints. Some only have one. Some are just large, sharp knives, made of obsidian and bone and such.

He’s being cradled, though. Something is looking at him.

He can see the mark where his bullet entered the skull. Isn’t that interesting? There it is, fading away, like a bad dream. The meat is all swirly and there’s a strange fire coming from it, a glow like radiation of mostly red and gold and white and purple, but with everything at least a little.

The face looking at him has too many eyes.

It doesn’t look like it, because of the pair of hands covering part of the face, like its crying. But if you look up, you see all the eyes. Peeking between the fingers and framing the hands and going all around the head, so many eyes with so many colors and shapes and styles and they’re all looking, all the time, and a lot of them see him.

And the face that’s covered by hands and is weeping neon blood and has too many eyes and is a mask opens, and beneath it there’s a place with too many teeth.

Cultivator physiology is a hell of a thing. Almost a full fifteen seconds after he got his head cut off, even as his mind is shutting down, Infantryman Shan Ji has just long enough to feel afraid one last time as he begins to be peeled.

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The Body moves poorly, because it does not remember how. Muscle memory is strung together into sequences that lead into movement that lead into instinct, but much of the structure is missing.

That’s ok. It has its orders.

First there was the adrenaline, much more than there used to be, so that means fight and flight. Then there’s the hunger, obviously, so that’s on the list to be addressed. Then there’s the pain, which really doesn’t matter much because it’s really very used to pain, but its still important.

But parts of the system are missing. The structure is askew.

That’s fine. It’s the Body. It’s ever so good at fixing things. It keeps moving, even when so much of the structure didn’t want to, and there’s so much more to be done.

It needs to see, so it makes eyes. It’s not sure what the eyes are saying, so it makes more, and they can argue it out to tell it stuff.

It opens more noses and more lungs, because that’s important, it needs more senses and it needs more oxygen. That’s fuel. That’s important.

Oh. Right. Fuel.

With a twitch of musculature and transhuman flesh, rods of Blacksteel are pulled from an ongoing reaction of life and death intertwined.

There’s something so right about that. Like a circle, or a balance. Some death in life, some life in death, and both always into the other. It’s like… perpetual motion, sort of. Or like a catalyst.

It makes for lovely fuel.

Some of its limbs are busy with the sharp pains and the squirming food, and that’s good. Its much bigger, which is harder to move quickly, but it can’t move very well anyways, and there’s so very much fuel that it can just grow. That part’s much easier.

It grows, and more pain starts as things pluck at it and squeal and bite and feed their own hungers, and that won’t do.

The Body’s Heart begins to beat and shift, sending out blood (no, not blood… water? Thoughts? Space?) through it, and it begins to touch things and fix little changes. That’s good. The Body is only so-so when it comes to growing right, after all.

Together, though, they can grow very fast.

Fear and pain and hunger are very, very deep inside what it means to be alive. It doesn’t need the whole system for that. The Body is presented with many age-old problems with only a few variables it can track.

But that’s ok. It’s very good at math, and it usually gets the right solutions if it tries enough. It’s not like they can kill it now anyways.

There’ s so much fuel.