Chapter 128: Voyage to the Bottom — 13
Judging it impossible to kill the thing by any material means, Yuanshi Tianzun chose another course: to bury the Outer God together with the very world it occupied.
Even if this world vanished, the original one would remain unharmed. They could simply begin again from there. Immortals and Daoists alike — all of them had once lived in that world.
He had expected it to come to this from the very beginning, and so he activated the celestial realm's final device, built to work in concert with the field of overwhelming gravity. Not to bear down upon some single region, but to draw in the whole of Kunlun.
The immense gravity compressed the heaven that bore Kunlun's name.
And yet, as every particle fell toward a single point, he witnessed a laugh of deep ill omen. Even so, there was nothing more he could do. He had already done all that lay in his power, and in a world being kneaded into one mass, nothing remained that could still be done.
The device had been prepared for the day several beings of Daegon's order might come invading at once. He had never imagined he would spend it on a single opponent — and with that thought, Yuanshi Tianzun waited for his own death.
Then a dread sensation swept over him. An omen, as if cold were climbing up out of his spine.
He looked quickly over the protective suit, already coming apart under the tidal pull of gravity sucking everything into one point. His vital signs were still sound. A number of windows were throwing errors, though most of them were only the warnings that follow a world's collapse — his body was in danger, and he ought to flee.
But one among them. A window that should not have appeared yet.
Values that cannot exist
Every reading, drowned in red.
Before he could understand what it was, his soul screamed, and his flesh twisted.
I never thought he would try to bury me along with the world called Kunlun.
Thanks to that, I reached him, and I licked the light. The light was small, so I had it quickly. There was so much memory that I wondered whether this immortal, too, would take as long as Daegon — but the memories came in all at once.
I had thought it took so long to envelop Daegon because of the sheer quantity of memory. It was only that Daegon's light had been too vast, and slow to digest.
The moment I took Yuanshi Tianzun's warmth, the light stained black and shriveled, and the flesh forgot its own shape and began to grow at random. It is the sight that always follows when I take the warmth of someone who attacked me. Being an immortal makes him no different.
I looked over the most precious thing I had gained in the second world. If I had to put a name to it, there was a great store of technique one might call dao-punk — arts that ask no special gift of the one who uses them.
Technique that general would help me from here on. Of all of it, I liked best the art of moving into other worlds.
And yet...
Memories, after all, are only memories.
To make use of this technique, I would need a clever Harvester. The small mercy was that, unlike Daegon's arts, which require some particular person, these could be handed down from one generation to the next. There was time enough.
And once I made them into Harvesters, they would grow clever, and then they could use it as freely as they liked. A great many worlds lay open before me now. I could cross to countless worlds without ever having to go down.
Hehe.
I was satisfied. The most important goal had been achieved.
Even so, there was something to regret. I had thought that with Yuanshi Tianzun's memories I could make use of every byproduct of him, but though the manual was in my hands, growing familiar with it would take time. If he meant for the thing to be used, he might have made it a little simpler.
As matters stood, Kunlun itself would vanish entirely before I could learn to use that object.
No.
If what I needed was time, then I only had to make more of it.
To stop this world from disappearing, I pictured a reality still whole, and I pressed it down by force.
Crash.
But instead of stopping, a great span of the glass bottle shattered, and pitch-black darkness showed through. A vast, empty void.
That was not all there was. As the broken places widened, light glittered in the darkness revealed outside, and when the light around me dwindled, what came into view was a scene like a night sky full of stars.
So there hadn't been a sea outside, after all.
No. Riding a victim's body like this, I am not down below. Yes.
I knew, dimly, that if I stepped out there with nothing but my own body, I would simply fall away down below.
Yuanshi Tianzun's light, blackened and withered dry, became dust and scattered off beyond. Like a space station falling to earth in a film, everything was breaking apart little by little, and the world gathered toward a single point even as it sank downward.
Hmm.
Now that I thought of it — the day the first world fell. When I watched from beneath the surface, living things dropped from above to below. Things like rocks were mixed in among them, so I had thought the ground split and they fell underground. But looking at the memories from just before the heat spoiled them, they weren't stones at all. They were creatures that only happened to look like stones.
Disguise is a common technique.
In other words, only the living — only those who carry light — fell to the place where I am. The living can go downward, then?
We were going down to the bottom.
Soon, down there. Back to a place where there is nothing to do but look up at the night sky. And yet at the same time a black point hung before my eyes, and beside me was Yuanshi Tianzun, turned into a lump of meat.
I reached out an arm and seized the lump of meat. My earlier attempt to stop the black point hadn't been wholly without effect — the shrinking had slowed a great deal. Space itself, though, was still being drawn in, and sooner or later it seemed it would become a single point.
Digging through Yuanshi Tianzun's memories, I found that this black point was no simple black hole. It was a trap made to kill immortals of Daegon's kind: the celestial realm itself drawn into one point, compressed, and extinguished from this world. The precious artifact called the Taiji Diagram was a thing that had come out partway through the making of this technique.
The Taiji Diagram had concerned itself only with physical force. What was being done to me now had been made so that not even an immortal's power could slip free of it. That must have been why I could not twist it easily.
The moment I took hold of the twisted meat, the soft lump of flesh burrowed into Choseol's body like a cancer. Which raised a question — if one is attacked by a lump of meat that has lost its soul, is there no way to resist?
I was still wondering what to do when a crackle of static rose from somewhere, and with it a voice calling for Yuanshi Tianzun.
Looking toward the sound, I could see clothing between the swollen masses of flesh. It had seemed a simple garment, but a search of Yuanshi Tianzun's memories showed it to be clothing with the most advanced artifice built into it. I reached for it.
The garment carried a window that displayed the condition of whoever wore it. Checking each figure against his memories, the numbers coming up were exceedingly strange — and yet a life response registered as present.
Aha. If Yuanshi Tianzun was still alive, might they cross from that side to this one? He was an immortal. They would come to save him.
What if, before this broken world fell to where I am, I could cross over to that side? Then I could move at once, without waiting for someone, somewhere, to haul me up.
It kept clinging to the body and burrowing in, which was a nuisance, but I put my strength to it, tore what could be torn, and drove the part bearing the sensor into my chest. It recognized the heartbeat properly.
And where was it, again? It was fixed to the garment. A beacon for sending a rescue signal.
I searched the ruined clothing with care and reached out an arm to pull the device that would send it. The cord touched my fingertips. The thing works when one draws a line at one side of the garment.
No. I tried to pull it.
My fingers wouldn't move.
It was made so that catching the line and pulling sent the signal on its own. I only needed to hook it on a finger — but the flesh of this lump of meat seemed to have burrowed in too far. There was no feeling in the hand.
Then I could bite it with my mouth, and pull.
If I went on into that world together with this flesh, I could get back. I would pretend to be a corpse for a while, and once I woke, I could go somewhere else. And there was already a place worth going.
The Imperial Palace.
Even if they had become half an enemy, once I arrived they would seal me, or torture me, and order me to make Harvesters. That would be enough. I am satisfied so long as the Harvesters multiply.
Heehee.
Thinking so, I leaned my face in — and a head that barely kept the traces of a face stretched long and barred the way before me. In one of the two sockets, something like a heart beat where an eye should have been. The eye on the other side, clouded to a dull white, could not hold an image at all.
I thought it might be chance, and lowered my head. That head followed just the same. Finding it strange, I looked, and a red eye that had grown from where the nose once was was staring straight at me.
A lump of meat that had shed its light and was becoming a monster. It ought to have been cold enough to drive a mind mad, with nothing left in that head but warmth. And yet there was consciousness. Plainly.
It was too ruined for me to read the feeling. I am not, however, so dull that I cannot read the will carried in a gaze.
"Cold, isn't it?"
There was no answer.
Thuck.
No. There was an answer.
A long arm the original body had never possessed — teeth, where the fingers should have been — severed the cord, so that no rescue signal could go out.
Kzzzt.
It must have smashed the place where the power unit sat. Not only the sound, but the windows floating about the garment, vanished completely.
I see.
Even having lost his light, even with his warmth taken, he still meant to resist. So that was how it was.
At this rate, this small world would either become a single point and be extinguished, or arrive at the place where I am meant to be.
I looked toward where the gate leading out of Kunlun had stood. Nothing remained there now but the vapor of stone, in place of a door.
Crack.
Then the cells that had burrowed into the body tore my arm clean off. It didn't particularly hurt. I only knew that Yuanshi Tianzun was resisting with everything he had. Yes. Resistance. Even brought to such a state, he would not give up. That was what this was.
Of course, Sima Baek was still grinding his teeth and preparing his revenge. My returning to the second world looked a long way off.
I looked at the world being driven down into the bottom. A world that seemed likely to vanish before it ever arrived there.
I didn't want to watch Yuanshi Tianzun alone die pleased, wearing the face of one who had accomplished everything. That irritating sneer was enough the once.
I extended my remaining arm toward the point that draws all things in. Then I pressed myself in with care, and took hold of reality.
And I twist.
Crrk.
The single point halted like an apple frozen solid, then shattered to pieces and was gone. At the same moment, the place where we stood went hard.
Slipping out like this was impossible, of course. Even so — even reduced to that — I wanted to show Yuanshi Tianzun, who told me by his actions that I was wrong, the world as I feel it.
Another word for it is sinking.
We would soon arrive at the place where I am. Of course, even going downward, in a world where people live it isn't a physical descent. That place simply becomes the bottom, all at once.
But in the world where there is a sea of light, and darkness, and me, there is an above and a below.
I am below.
You are above.
"Three."
"Two."
"One."
We broke the surface.
And in that same moment, I slipped free of the vessel called Choseol and returned beneath the water.
Something living is in this place again. But if I look to see whether it is Yuanshi Tianzun, who fell with me — it doesn't seem so. He simply isn't anywhere in this world. Whether he fled, or whether, having no light, he merely ceased to be.
I watch the something gnawing at me, crush it, erase it, and look up.
Far off.
Very high.
Where countless lights have gathered, and yet only a single light can be seen, the second world glitters in the distance.