There are a multitude of tasks to undertake before the wee hours of the morning.
While the sun still writhes across the horizon, an endless tide of undulating bodies burning brighter than can be seen with the naked eye, yet to reform and climb back across the sky, Ka Yarel makes sure to maintain a brisk pace as she stalks through the halls she has earned.
It is not often that a Scholar of her stature is given the tools and trust to manage the affairs of this particular building. It is even less often that they survive it. She is proud to have thrived under even the most adverse conditions. She survived the mail room at the bottom of the Idol’s tower, she’s survived the last three inter-tower wars in her district, she can survive this.
The walls around her are pristine, pure white, such that any that do not have the spatial awareness to track the hard angles of the surfaces around them may consider themselves lost in a void. She makes each turn perfectly, without needing the reference documents denoting number of steps between turns or the map easily located in her spatial storage, given to her almost six months prior on her first day on-site. No, she has this place memorized, has forced herself and her mind to accommodate the changes needed to move purely by reflex and spatial perception rather than sight. She passes a few others on her way, most of them just coming off-shift now, and gives slight acknowledgement to those whose numbers exceeded their quotas. Every ounce of prevention here is less a pound of cure later than it is a metric ton, and that should be acknowledged, even if it’s their job.
One of them bows as she walks by, sending an acknowledgement-pulse through her Halo and requesting permission to send over a data-package. She sends back an acknowledgement and agreement prompt, and quickly dissects the packet of spirit-matter transferred from his Halo to hers, its sharpened limbs making quick work of the data and absorbing it..
She pauses.
“Has anyone else checked these numbers?” she asks.
“No, Scholar Yarel,” replies the technician. Like all of them, he’s dressed in robes exactly as white as the walls around them, leaving them all looking like they’re floating, dismembered through the halls. “But they have been verified. Sent through the logic-oracles and checked over four separate times now. The data is correct.”
She nods.
“Your name. Ri Tanshin, yes? Come with me.”
He blinks, goes to stutter something before thinking better of it, but she’s already moved on. He will follow, or he’ll deal with the consequences. Even here, the cultivator’s mantra holds firm: forward or failure.
Especially here, where so much is precariously balanced.
“Technician rank Three, yes? Why was this report not at my desk an hour ago?”
“Precisely for me to verify its authenticity, ma’am. The discrepancy is minute, but-”
“The tools we use here are more capable than any beyond those whose cultivation and Dao focuses on the nature of machinery or interpretation of numbers. If they give you a result with a discrepancy, I expect it sent up the chain the very second you recognize it next time. Your diligence is noteworthy, but until you advance much higher than you have, fact-checking something like this is a waste of time. We have machines that do it better.”
He nods. Gulps once. “Yes ma’am. I’ll endeavor to pass along any results immediately next time.”
She does not look over her shoulder at him, but she doesn’t need to. For all that the Halos influence their souls and selves, cultivation is cultivation, and he can feel the pressure of her attention shift to focus more closely on him.
She makes a decision, taking a sharp left away from the direction they’d been heading.
“Ma’am?” he asks. “I thought we were-”
“We were, but a lesson is in order. I can consult with the logic-oracles myself. You, on the other hand, require some assistance in your training.”
“I’ve been out of training for-”
“You’re back in it now, because I said so.”
She takes another turn, and they find themselves before a door.
It is eight feet and seven inches tall exactly. On its front, invisible to the untrained, is a massive locking wheel, large enough that Ya Karel can’t even wrap her hand fully around its grip, and beside it stand two small indents. One holds a small needle, poised like a scorpion, while the other has a small hand-shaped imprint in soft white gelatin. She places a hand on the handprint first, watching as it folds over her and touches on her Qi signature, before switching to the needle and letting it draw a few drops of her blood, and then waits, hand on the wheel, for the door to let loose a pressurized “hiss” of escaping air and a lightly pleasant chime.
She spins the locking mechanism and a series of dense, painfully heavy “clunk” noises sound from within the doorframe, and it takes almost thirty seconds of spinning for them to stop. Finally, she pulls the door open.
Behind all three feet of altered metallurgic material lies a room that is not perfectly white.
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There is a soft red light glowing in the middle of the room, about ten feet high. On each side and the far end of the room there are only shadows, and the glow illuminates only a small, central space. She steps into it without a word, without so much as a radio blip from her Halo, and after a moment’s hesitation, Ri Tanshen follows her in.
Before he can ask a question, almost as soon as he’s crossed the threshold entirely, the door, weighing in excess of several tons, spins closed fast enough he can feel his lungs vibrate with the force. He might be only in the Foundational realm stage, classically, but his Halo attunement is already of the third tier, nevermind his augments or constructs. He can bend steel with less effort than it takes a mortal to bend the air around them, and yet the impact is enough to make him jolt and feel a tremble run through his feet and into his bones.
“Now, Technician rank Three,” Ya Karel says, “tell me where we are.”
He frowns, but goes to obey, running his Halo alongside his own mind and memory and pulling up-
Nothing.
“Um- Scholar, I think that-”
“That you don’t know where we are. That’s correct. This Room Is Unknown, as are all the important rooms in this building. You rely on your Halo to guide you, but when its rank is superseded by another, here you are, a simpleton. You should have the map memorized. You should have every step you need to take, memorized. But you do not, because your Halo feeds you and grows from you until you are both symbiotically dependent and incapable of your own thought.”
“Scholar Karel I did not mean to-”
“You have not offended, Technician Tanshin. But you also still think you’re worth more than the Halo on your head.”
She takes two steps to one side, into the dark, and another red light appears, glowing from no visible source and flooding another small circle of darkness with visibility.
Beneath it is a wonder.
It drips black, like shadow and paint and oil leaking from the joints of its hands and feet. If it stood upright it would nearly touch the ceiling, kept from doing so because it is horrifically hunched and kneeling in seeming meditation, a posture of fifteen feet or more reduced to twelve. Black obsidian reflects the light strangely, making its plates look glossy, the outer shell of it chitinous and semi-organic in appearance, a deep, dark blue juxtaposed against midnight black and soft hints of brass and copper peeking from beneath its exterior. Four arms hold each other in a conjoined lotus position, looking at times like some of the hands have too many fingers, at others like they meld together into a pool, and a dozen other variations on slight illusions of inhumanity. Its form has a certain grace to it, something alien and glorious and perfect, both precise and organic, graceful and brutal, highlighted by the gaping ribcage at the center of it and that which it holds.
At the core of the entity is a writhing, hopeless thing. Looking at it is like looking into a spiral that only goes sideways, like staring into a sinkhole that is only shifting when your attention drifts, like looking into ink and seeing faces, and tendrils from that central thing which he cannot name or perceive are bound, chained by fine silver and runes and forced into pathways made ready for it.
“Do you know what this is?” Ya Karel asks.
“I…” she can see the moment where he tries to connect to his Halo, grasps for its eidetic memory and looks for the pathways in which it has reshaped his mind, finding nothing.
“This is a mark 6 Inklotus Basilisk,” she says. “Constructed almost three centuries ago by the esteemed Yao Xin, a seventh tier Scholar whose designs for efficiency and desire to contain a specific form of the entities we deal with here led him to kill himself and draw the diagrams in his blood after the fact. It, like all its brethren stored here, runs on a mechanized core made of altered bone, possessing spiritual properties of a denizen of Below. You do at least know the more common name for such an entity?”
He gulps. “A Daemon, ma’am.”
“Correct. A Daemon. An entity of impossibility, something which defies reality as a whole and in its own driving way, bound to an engine of the Empire’s creation. And tell me, Technician Tanshin, what will happen if I speak its activation code?”
He just… looks at her. Without words. His skin begins to sweat, his body to shake very slightly.
Halo or not, every person that has ever walked into this building has seen some of the examples of things a Daemon, even one bound to a construct, can do. It is not the sort of thing one easily forgets.
“By Emperor’s Will, Stain The World Inverse Of Form and Black Of Pitch And Shadow,” she intones, savoring the words.
The machine twitches.
For a little while, the only sound is the breathing of Technician Tanshin, trying desperately to hold eye contact and not look about like a frightened animal.
Then its face rises.
It looks at the both of them with the face of a doll, delicate and faintly inhuman. It is there, in how wide the eyes are, how small the mouth, how flat the nose. It does not look like a person. It looks like it is pretending to be a person and does not know how.
It twitches again, and a set of cables not visible to the Technician before click, hiss, and detach from behind it as a shiver runs up and down its body. The whirlpool begins to drag, like sand falling endlessly and revealing black, oozing oil beneath it, until that too has stained the black sand and begun falling into itself.
“So tell me,” she asks. “Can you stop it?”
Ri Tanshin says nothing. He just trembles.
“Can you command it? Tell it to resume rest functions? Can you open the door, escape, anything at all?”
He says nothing, and she can vaguely smell the scent of piss. She sighs. Time to wrap this up, then, and send in the decontamination order to purge the air and ground in the room.
As the Daemon moves, shifts, breathes in a breath that goes out, then out, out, then out, she centers herself and uses her Dao.
The Dao of Control is not as rare as one might think. In the first ring, many of the more esoteric Dao become available and useful, and with it, she and those like her stand atop their lessers.
It takes a moment. It takes a genuine struggle. A Dao dedicated to controlling a machine, or vessel, that was built to be controlled, and still it fights. It quivers, it tightens, it holds to itself in all its sharp and strange and ever-flowing glory and horror, and then… the mechanisms kick in, locking onto her will and injecting the control rods into the central core, forcing quicksilver into the black.
Slowly, it kneels back down, and the pipes move under her will and reconnect to its charge, intake and upkeep ports.
“You are not an asset because you know better than the machine,” she tells Ri Tanshin. “You are passable with a Halo, but until you can do anything at all of what it can do without it, don’t believe that your analysis of data is more useful. You are to respond to results, not question them, not until you have proven your will, your mind, or your power. So the Emperor wills.”
“So the Emperor wills,” he whimpers.
She nods. “Good. I’ll mark you down for two days' vacation, by which point I expect you to be back to at least moderate goals for a while. Just remember; we must always take this seriously, and always trust in the holy tools we have been given, until by the Emperor’s grace and our own wills, we learn to match or be elevated by them. Now come along. I still have work to do. Hard enough as it is to keep these things fed.”