Slumrat Rising

Chapter 45: A Self Made Man

Truth floated, dead at the bottom of the well. No strange dreams, no spiritual journeys. Dead. Unquestionably and irretrievably. If the observer had brows, they probably would be rubbing them with frustration.

Alright, alright. I don’t know why you're not decomposing. Or why your spirit is trapped in your body. Or why the System, A.K.A. me, is also trapped in your body. But I do know that this appears to be a physical phenomblemsno… oh FUCKING SERIOUSLY? Fuckwit McGee here is dead! D E A D! Let me have all the words, ok? In fact, can I pretty, pretty please go back to not having my thoughts tied to fleshy brain patterns?

The universe remained silently indifferent to the observer’s plight.

Right. Fuck you too. I would say something really hurtful, but he lacks the appropriate words. And thought forms. Right, spell inventory. It did a quick review. Oh, fuck my life, really? I mean, fine, yes, very useful spell right now, unlimited potential and all, but that’s it? Excuse me? And it relies on this smashed juice box’s imagination to work. What do you want from me?! Also, not to sound ungrateful, but why is it there at all?

There was yet more silence. After the battle ended and everyone left, it got very quiet indeed. Sooner or later, locals would come out to loot what remained.

The observer sighed and tried to cast the spell. Nothing happened, of course. It needed a functional brain to work with and the imagination of the user. To say nothing of cosmic energy, which it had very little of anyhow. The ‘nothing’ was entirely expected.

Alright, so that’s worthless. What else do I have? Definitionally nothing. Super. Alright, let's dig a little deeper. I only have one complete spell, but I do have a load of spell fragments memorized. Nothing that can function by itself, but…

It turned its immaterial focus deep inside Truth’s body. The physical vessel was wrecked. There was a huge hole blown through one side of the chest, the back of the skull was smashed open and the brain was ruptured over and over. There were numerous broken bones, torn muscles beyond counting, and several organs with rips in them ranging from “worrying” to “I haven’t seen anything like that since med school.”

The magical and spiritual wounds were even worse. The spell apertures existed as a sort of spiritual superstructure built over the physical body. While technically not physical themselves, they couldn’t exist without the support of the physique. Cultivation attuned the body to the stars. The closer the attunement, the better the spell apertures could function and grow.

Truth’s spiritual structure was shredded. The System wasn’t about to leave its host intact if it had to leave. In theory, with only two apertures ruined, Truth could have lived the rest of his life as a miserable cripple, suffering constant, incurable pain. What actually happened was that the System tried to explosively separate from the spell apertures, and succeeded in that, but didn’t succeed in escaping the physical superstructures the apertures were built on. It tried to escape repeatedly, damaging the whole structure horribly in the process.

The highlight of my existence, right there. I finally got to share my feelings with you. I hope you appreciated every second of it. I did.

None of this was really what held the observer’s attention, however. Writhing through Truth’s body were nine microscopic worms. Each followed a different route for a while, then they would merge, separate again, and so on. With enough time, a very, very large amount of time, the nine worms covered every nanometer of Truth’s body. What interested the observer was that they were making tiny repairs as they went. Teensy, tiny repairs. Some only a few cells wide. But steadily and constantly.

Something about them was stopping the degradation of Truth’s body, too. The observer had never seen anything like it, but given its brief existence, it wasn't too strange to not know something. One might wish it could read some books and learn more about the world, but alas, it really couldn’t interact with the material world… without help.

The observer quickly sorted through the bits of spells it had available. They were almost exclusively combat-related, and Truth had never bothered with using healing or disguise spells. Almost all evocation or alteration spells he could lay over a talisman. Loads and loads of spell fragments available, but all are engineered to crudely and swiftly kill. Put another way- useless right now.

The Meditations of Valentinian, however, presented a different problem. It was the only intact spell the observer had access to, and it was a doozy. Tens of thousands of compounding, interlocking layers, each computing each other, shifting and extrapolating constantly. The spirit quickly realized why the spell didn’t have any levels or tiers, unlike most other body cultivation spells. The user of the spell is constantly visualizing, running the changes they sought through infinite calculations, and then computing the derivations. Again and again and again. The spirit only thought there were tens of thousands of layers because that’s how many it could calculate with a glance.

If the observer had lungs, it would sigh. Picking apart the Meditations and trying to find bits the little worms could use would take… not literally forever, but a long, long time. On the other non-existent hand, it had nowhere else they could go and nothing else to do. It got to it.

It did, in fact, take an excruciatingly long time. The worms had made barely-visible progress by the time the observer had something workable. The observer lined it up… and it was ignored. The observer spiritually sighed again. Time to figure out how to connect the worms to the spells.

One seeming eternity later-

Finally! The Aeon’s degenerate leavings CAN be taught! Yes, you little glowing freak worm things, YES. You know what you want this body to look like; now you can do it even faster. Go. GO GO GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOOGOOGOGO-

Ahahaaha. Ha. ha. Oh Yaldabaoth why couldn’t you have let us go insane? Checking out of reality would be such a comfort sometimes.

….

Alright, I answered my own question there. Damnit.

The little worms sped up their pace, stitching together flesh, stretching tendons, and lengthening bones. It began subtly- fingers and toes were improved, then lengthening the metacarpals, slowly stretching femurs, and adjusting the joints. Nothing too huge, Truth was already roughly average height and this would give him just a few extra centimeters. The worms decided he needed a broader set of shoulders too, and subtly strengthened the spine.

Layer by layer, they built and refined the body. Never satisfied, once a layer had reached a certain point, they would go to a past layer and make adjustments, then work their way back up. Over and over and over. Thousands of times. Tens of thousands of times. Endless micro-adjustments. The observer frantically tried to optimize the spell fragments the worms were using, in the hopes that they would go faster and, hopefully, be done.

Layers upon layers of muscle, fascia, and tendons, all laid down and strengthened endlessly. Vessels and arteries plumbed delicately through the body, then made robust. Nerves like wires stretched through the body and were found wanting. The little worms worked until there were nerves like fiber-optic cables.

Time was without meaning at the bottom of the lightless well. There was no time for it to be relative to. It simply existed, a lightless bubble hidden from the world. The observer felt as close to wonder and horror as they could emulate. The body was growing and surviving by converting stellar rays into matter. The observer couldn’t explain it.

After some interminable amount of time, the worms simply stopped. They completed a final loop through the body and seemed to vanish. A perfect human body floated in the water. It looked a bit like the late Truth Medici if the man had been built to the proportions of a god. A god from somewhere warm, perhaps, given the careful attention to the shape and quality of the muscles rather than simple abundance. The lantern jaw would see him welcomed in any pantheon, however, as would the strong, agile hands. He was simply the scourge of masculine insecurity- a man crafted to an inhuman, impossible degree of perfection.

Adding insult to injury, the body had a beautiful soul. Or at least, the part of the soul that overlapped the body was in extraordinary condition. The worms seemed to have really appreciated the assistance of the Stellar Dowsing Liquid, ensuring that the body they built lay the optimal framework for the optimized soul and spell apertures the Stellar Dowsing Liquid ritual had created. It took an unknowably long time, but the soul and the apertures regrew over the framework, repairing what was broken. Growing stronger.

And still a haunted corpse. No signs of life at all.

Not how I saw this going if I’m being completely honest. Genuinely thought you would wake up around now. I had a whole elaborate scheme worked out. But, when life gives you dead morons, you make dead moron-aide.

The observer shot towards the center of the brain, ready to slowly wipe out whatever unnecessary neural connections existed in there and become the sole ruler of this body.

…

Truth sat on the step of his neighbor’s house. In a tiny village like this, perched on the last river before the great desert, they were all neighbors. Really, he could sit where he liked, within reason. They all lived in homes made of crude brick or mud and wattle. The Prophet was reciting their favorite hymn and kept checking on Truth to make sure he was listening.

I am the staff of his power in his youth,

and he is the rod of my old age.

And whatever he wills happens to me.

I am the silence that is incomprehensible

and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.

I am the voice whose sound is manifold

and the word whose appearance is multiple.

I am the utterance of my name.

Why, you who hate me, do you love me,

and hate those who love me?

You who deny me, confess me,

and you who confess me, deny me.

You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,

and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.

You who know me, be ignorant of me,

and those who have not known me, let them know me.

For I am knowledge and ignorance.

I am shame and boldness.

I am shameless; I am ashamed.

I am strength and I am fear.

I am war and peace.

Give heed to me.

“Did you follow any of that, Truth?”

“Can’t say I did. Made more sense than the bit where I am apparently both my own mother and my own son, who knocked me up with himself. Which makes me my own father too, I suppose.”

“Well, that’s disappointing. Don’t you see the tension in the contradictions? The powerful evocation of self?”

“No, ‘fraid not.”

“Hah. Well. Not to worry. As long as you remember it.” The Prophet looked deeply into Truth’s eyes. “All of it.”

Inside the body of the late Sergeant Truth Medici, a guest was having a bad time. For some reason, entirely unprovoked, his new home started chanting at him in some weird language.

I am the one whom you have scattered,

and you have gathered me together.

I am the one before whom you have been ashamed,

and you have been shameless to me.

I am she who does not keep festival,

and I am she whose festivals are many.

I, I am godless,

and I am the one whose God is great.

I am the one whom you have reflected upon,

and you have scorned me.

I am unlearned,

and they learn from me.

I am the one that you have despised,

and you reflect upon me.

I am the one whom you have hidden from,

and you appear to me.

But whenever you hide yourselves,

I myself will appear.

STOP IT STOP IT YOU ARE DEAD WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS YOU ARE DEAD WHY WHY WHY WHY!

It bolted from the material world and sank into the recesses of Truth’s soul, hiding out in the comfortable spell apertures it knew so well. It had barely gotten snug when it heard a great heart start beating, like the calling of a war drum.