Artorian's Archives Omnibus

by Dennis Vanderkerken

  “So yes… elementals. We are endless and unbound. Our minds kiss the fabric of the universe, unshackled by flesh. I do not bend the infernal to my will. I am the infernal.”

  Artorian tapped his chin. Pleasant history lesson, but nothing about what was preventing this supposedly ‘mighty elemental’ from leaving in the first place. If he was truly all-reaching, remaining stuck under the rock you’d been cast down with seemed a nearly ironic choice. So the only conclusion was that the Blight had omitted important information: specifically on why it was stuck here.

  No, it had let slip a few things. A few… crucial details. “That’s quite a children’s tale. So your attempts to lure me into violating the land-law came about due to your friendship with a person that became the reason such laws are enforced in the first place? Devious.”

  If the Blight didn’t know his plan had been seen through before with certainty, it did now. Its entire speech had saddled it on a high horse, and it felt great. Superior. Atop the world and preparing to crush a mortal speck between its elemental foot. Then that got mentioned, and it was right back to feeling lemon-sour as the scrumptious crunch of a cookie being loudly chewed echoed in the darkness.

  Cataphron’s voice was flat. “I hate you.”

  The reply was a joyful *mmm* of a thoroughly enjoyed confection. The Blight considered just flattening him. Just ending it. The long game was going to be satisfying… but he could just quickly end it.

  It squinted as it noticed an anomaly. A suspicious flicker hung on the academic’s Aura. That brat was baiting him! His Aura held a counter attack, fueled and ready to burst. That weasel! “When I reach the tender groves of your precious friends again, I’m going to consume so many of their trees that the Wood Elf S-ranked elders will have to wake up just to contain the damage.”

  Artorian waited a moment before sassily regarding his next cookie. “More jesting. Wood Elves don’t have S-rankers.”

  Cataphron slid unpleasantly close to the edge of Artorian’s external Aura. “Of course the Old World has S-rankers, and not even their Soul-ranked dimensional shifts are effective against me. They are merely a deterrence at best. They’re all bound to the Nature Law, all three of them. That’s the limit with any given Node. One S, one double-S, and one triple-S. Their terrible naming convention that describes how many steps one has taken towards the heavenly ascension.”

  Remaining steady in the face of what was intended to be disheartening discomfort, the old man leered into the ghostly sockets of a man that used to be a peer. “Very well then. I take it you’re on the last step? Given you’ve had such vast lengths of time to develop your power, and all. The souls you must have eaten along the way likely mean you’re going to be meeting your friend soon, no?”

  The flickering phantom eyes looked away. Oh? Curious… the infernal cultivator's form followed soon after, and the body walked with the waltzing rhythm of a self-important noble. “I… oh, what's the harm? You won’t live to tell a soul. Speaking of, I consume and entrap minds. Not souls. That requires being tied to the gluttony node in the Tower of Ascension. Also called the devouring node, or the hunger node. No. I was Ascended, but such connections are lost when one transcends into an elemental.

  “Had I successfully made the first step into the S-ranks… maybe. Unlikely, but maybe. Had I turned during the portion of the S-rank where initial actualization occurs, then certainly! Unfortunately, becoming the full incarnation of an Essence doesn’t sit too well with stable concepts. I am able to do anything the infernal Law can. It doesn’t like not being needed and all its effects being freely available. So, it threw me out of my Ascension, and the ripped channel consumed me.”

  The Blight reflected on the moment like it had been yesterday, though time had long since ceased to hold meaning. The expression plastering his captive’s face enticed a smile. The Blight tasted the seasoning it had just poured over an impending meal.

  The old man was shook! Artorian pressed his hand to his heart. His body angled back and away, and his face was carefully contorted in an expression that conveyed shock, awe, disbelief, and appalled rejection. “A person can cease being a Mage? Surely that’s a one-way road with all the effort one goes through to get there!”

  Chapter Seven

  The Blight merrily laughed. This was causing destabilizations. It liked that. “Ha! Just what do you think nodes are? How they come to exist, refine, and function? In the day when the Tower was still building, this knowledge was so common that even children knew. Of course you can be rejected! Do you think the Law of Ice would let you retain your connection if you lost your water Essence channel? It does not! It strips you of your Ascension body and kicks you back out to the low mortal realm. Do you believe an Actualized, your S-rankers, to be any different? No!”

  The phantoms sneered in delight. The wounded whimpers from the old man were candy to its senses. More. It needed more. “It takes much longer for an Actualized to be punted to the curb, but it certainly happens. Waste away too long without benefit to the Law, and it may judge you unworthy. It will find more suitable candidates to replace the waste of space, and if you fail the challenge it sets forth… The Law siphons your power, breaks it into itty-bitty little pieces, and channels it to the worthy that did pass. It will fuel and fatten them up with Ascension energy until they reach the breaching point.

  “When they do, and the Actualized is nearly bottomed out, the judging concludes. Death or graduation. The Actualized return to being Ascended, and if they attempt to use power as they did before… they will destroy themselves from the exertion. So used are the powerful to their measure of ability, that they ofttimes forget how to function if they lose it.”

  Artorian held his face with both hands, mentally recording this information with rapt attention even if it was false. He had to know. He needed to know. The perfect opportunity for a sassy quip came and silently went, spent instead on the acquisition of knowledge while upholding the clever ruse of being in agony from the proffered lessons. Pretending made Cataphron keep talking. So pretend he did, with dramatic flair.

  “Affinity channels are everything. They determine everything from growth rate to potential. They are used by the Tower as first measure to check who you can even speak with. Not that the Nodes retain much personality once they become such, and I’ve found the prospect dull and wasteful. Just think… triple S-ranks. Centuries of work and toil, only to remove yourself entirely from all that progress and become a fresh node in the Tower as the first step of becoming ‘Heavenly’. An absolute waste.

  “For any concept that already has an existing node, or Essence combination you’d wish to occupy, an Actualized has to replace the entity in said node. Which can’t even be done forcefully! The node has to desire transference to the heavens, completing its journey into a full and proper Heavenly cultivator. Then poof! They’re gone! Never to be heard from again as they become incapable of interacting further with this realm. They become so intertwined with the functions of the universe that they no longer have eyes for the realm they came from. Never has a Heavenly been contacted that didn’t address the one who did so with disdainful dereliction and disinterest.”

  Artorian didn’t interrupt what had become a full-on rage-vent. The Blight didn’t appear to have noticed it was serenading the fumes of its agitations now that it had someone to listen. Like a toddler that spoke at length merely because someone was present in the room to hear it craft a calamitous cacophony. “The Heavenly have lost all care. All the wants of this realm are foreign to them. As an entity without body, and freed will, I… understand how they view such things now.

  “Time erodes connections and lack of communication burns all bridges, much as I care only to absorb ever more scrumptious minds. Those conceited things only care to uphold their function. Even their slight nudge towards this realm is appalling, releasing celestial Essence onto the land like a dumped sack of glitterdust!”

  Cataphron quirked a curious brow at his captive. The academic w
as sweating. Beautiful. Suffer you little twerp! “Something wrong?”

  Rubbing his chin, the lecture attendant *Hmmmm’d* to himself. “So, if there was an ‘error’ in the universe. A rip, a problem, an inconsistency. They would… fix it?”

  Undead groans sounded awfully guttural, and Cataphron lurched away excessively. “If those interest-devoid grown-up-nodes don’t, what’s above them will. If there was ever something truly egregious—such as a time loop or tear—they attend to it quickly. Resolving the issue as soon as the Essence reaction runs dry and stops being able to sustain itself.

  “It happened painfully often anytime celestial and infernal were used together in great quantities. Chaos is a Law that several Heavenlies angrily hold by the scruff of the neck. Chaos, Entropy, and Discord… there have been eons of discussion about why any time there’s a significant problem, it always comes down to those three.”

  Artorian wished he could write this down, but he’d have to settle for burning the knowledge into his memory. His sweaty outwards appearance wasn't a ruse; the bodily reaction happened in response to a great weight falling from his shoulders. “So… when in the scriptures it mentions the progression path, and ‘Godly’ is mentioned after ‘Heavenly’ there is really a…?”

  “A divine-tier cultivator?” The Blight was right back to superiority boasting. It was thoroughly enjoying grinding the scholar’s face into the ground. That type did poorly when their beliefs came into fundamental question.

  “Back when the Heavenlies could still be enticed to turn back enough to spare us a few graced words… that’s when the Golden Age truth delvers were told of the rank above theirs. Grasping the meaning was just utterly impossible. We already can’t grasp the full power of a Heavenly. There was something higher? Something more? Entire schools went mad trying to puzzle it out, and even made a Node for Madness simply to be able to cope. The fools.

  “They made the base layer of necessary potential thought intricately complex and equally impossible to understand. With so much group-mind unity and Essence behind it, that the Madness Law burst through the Tower and made a home for itself all the way up on the Seven hundred and twentieth floor! The top! What were they thinking?”

  Cataphron composed himself as he reached the answer to their own question. “Well… Madness. I suppose they weren’t thinking at all, if they were even able to at that point. At least it barred anyone who didn’t have all the Essence channels from tapping into that awful mistake of a node. Locations are precious! Don’t make nodes in the Tower unless it follows the pattern! Six per floor. It was six per floor!”

  The old man sassed, “Odd, I was told seven was the correct number to aim for.”

  Phantoms screeched at Artorian for that inane comment, not knowing he’d said it on the fly, lying through his teeth. How dare he assume he knew better with outdated and incorrect knowledge? The old man’s off-the-cuff statement made the ceiling-body roil.

  “How would you know? You weren’t there. You didn’t take the lessons, or attended the equation lectures, or scribe the reasoning for why having more than six nodes on any given floor would destabilize the inter-constra-pattern of the Tower-matrix itself! Oh, sure, you can put seven nodes on a floor, but at what cost? You can’t add a floor after that! When one of the nodes in the Tower loses their concept because it’s outdated entirely, it can lose its place if the Heavenly in it goes on to finish his cycle! Without anyone to replace it! That kills the Node and connections, and opens up a slot where it used to be, but it’s not like the Essence combination will be different!

  “This is the entire mess that led to nodes carrying multiple concepts for a single Essence mixture. Suddenly everything earth and air is in the same place! Lightning? Earth and air node. Easy. Simple. No problem. Mud, slime, clay, quicksand. All of that suddenly the same blasted node! If they were going to just let that slide, they could have at least made the growth additive and sequential. No! They threw Nodes at the Tower like monkeys throw feces!

  “As soon as the Prime Six were down, they went on a Heaven-cursed race to fill the slots! No thought was given early on to adding Nodes in a reasonable method so that climbing resulted in a pattern that could be expected. First floor: water. Second floor: water and air, for mist. Then do all the combinations of two’s, and once you’re done with them all, proceed adding the combination of threes in higher levels.

  “Reasonable, yes? Did they do that?” Cataphron punched a corpse so hard that the channeled might of the blow created a twenty-foot deep hole in a perfect cylinder. His voice was breaking, and the personality of Cataphron faltered as a mélange and mixture of several other voices all spoke and aired their grievances at the same time. It was like with the Wood Elves, but without the soothing quality, and a reverb that was more… doom-y. “No!

  “Second floor! What do those idiots slot? Infernal and earth, water and earth; air and water; water and celestial; fire and celestial; then water, earth and celestial. What? That’s a tri-combination! Then I turn the page for the next tier, and the first thing I read is an infernal, fire, and earth. What is another triple combination doing on the second and third tiers? Who thought that was a good idea?”

  A second cylindrical crater joined the first. Everything in the area disintegrated within the affected region. Artorian was watching this time. It was the goose effect! Goo wasn’t what was eating away at anything in the zone this time, so it must have been… infernal touching it directly? Not through a medium, but directly? This must be the prime benefit an elemental had over its cultivator counterparts. A cultivator gathered and then expended. A Mage channeled, based on Ember’s lectures. It seemed that an elemental generated. They were a source of their relevant energy.

  Wouldn’t that mean elementals were cultivation sources for a whole host of people? That was a very good reason to keep knowledge of them tightly shut in a box; an advantage people would not want to share. Did Artorian know anyone that could benefit from this?

  Why, yes. Yes, he did know of one.

  That knowledge was mentally shelved for later. He paused his musings and calmly unpacked his hookah, preparing it while the seething Blight worked to reclaim the hold over itself. Artorian could attack now, but it appeared there was… surprise company. He looked up to blow out the first smoke ring, and noticed a patch of cavern moss was brighter than its resident counterparts. His Essence sight was what picked it up, and the written message was a deviously intelligent ploy. Someone needed inside knowledge of the infernal to get that past a being made entirely from it.

  Astrea, you clever girl. Yet It wasn’t the right moment. Keeping a note of the message, he turned his attention back to the screaming phantoms now present in the large, empty cavern. Not counting the dead. Multiple see through wispy forms were arguing with one another. The multitudes of minds were having a row since they couldn’t reach a consensus. So, it did work similarly to Wood Elven unity? Interesting. He wondered if… “So what happened to your cultivation technique? Did you lose it when you transcended into a superior being? An Elemental?”

  The soothing brush of ego from a hated foe snapped away the shades. They all huffed into a nonexistent breeze as the collapsed and crumbled dead body of Cataphron refilled and wrested itself from the body pile. “That is not your concern… or did you mean to gauge the quality of techniques we had in the Golden Age? I bet you wish to ask if we used ‘Royal’ techniques.”

  *Phah*!

  The infernal body spat dissolving goo at the ground. “What a sullen naming convention. Everything of this era is just so… crude. Limited. The entire point of separating the core-cultivation techniques into their own tiers was so we could track how quickly that variable would affect someone’s time until Ascension. ‘Royal’ is at best a third tier understanding of the glorious compass counterparts we had at our fingertips.

  “A better core technique was something you received because you could handle it, when you could handle it. At least until that awful pearlescent curse.
That was a terrible thing during the decline of the golden age, it locked people into their technique and broke it entirely if they attempted to swap it. It ruined an entire cultural lineage.”

  A heavy cloud in the shape of a circle puffed out from Artorian’s carefully parted mouth. He wanted to know more about the pearlescent material. It had done… something to him. Asking directly was going to be suspicious. He needed a way around to broach that subject.

  Chapter Eight

  Artorian clapped his hands together. “I’m going to need you to slow down, you’re going to cause me to bleed from my ears if you keep telling me things that fast. So, if I’m following on that last topic, then the amount of Essence channels contributes to how quickly one becomes Ascended, and the core technique is just a part of that math.”

  Slow down? Had the Blight heard that correctly? How it loved the idea of watching his captive bleed just from being overburdened by mere words. Oh, there would be no stopping now. “Mortal bodies come with roughly the same limitations when it comes to cultivation. You’re trying to make yourself into ‘something else’. A person with one Essence channel will usually take around two hundred years before they can enter the Tower from sheer Essence requirement alone.”

  “The requirements drop by roughly three to five decades for every additional channel. Some variation is accounted for based on channel quality, but none in my Era had anything other than perfect channels, which cut the time down by an additional ten years per channel. Opening new channels you didn’t start with was… tightly regulated.”

  “On average, a three Essence-channel individual can knock on the Tower’s doors in a century if they do things ‘decently well’. Assuming that you have nothing special boosting you during that time frame. Average everything. So ‘a mostly-okay fractal spiral cultivation technique’ at the minimum, with a spiral quantity of ninety-four. Or your basic third-axis internal helix.”